Questions make the impossible probable

It used to be we had a shortage of answers. We didn’t know anything. And so we spent centuries learning and testing and investigating the edges of the map.

Today, the internet gives us more answers to more queries than we have time in our lifetimes explore.

Nobody cares anymore if you have more answers than the next guy. Because you can find the answer in a second.

This highlights an important and often neglected truth: when trying to solve the big problems or create the next big thing, nobody has all the answers.

Which is why, when trying to find out what nobody knows, it’s best to start by asking questions.

If all you know is how to use Google or skim Wikipedia or regurgitate the present dogma, you’ll never find the answer you’re looking for because you’ll never know what questions to ask. 

In other words, you’ll never discover what you don’t know you don’t know unless you ask a question.

But if you build up the habit of asking, of learning the how and why of something, you’ll be in a much better position to ask much more engaging, contextually appropriate, and potentially worldview-shattering questions later.

Questions like:

Could there be something on our hands that’s causing our patients to die?

How do we get ahead of crazy if we don’t know how crazy thinks?

Is there a way to make a cellphone that people actually enjoy using? 

Is there a cheaper, more efficient, better way to make EV’s? Or build rockets? Or develop roads? Or transport people on land or by air?

Of course, the only way to get to the point where you ask questions no one has ever considered is to get better at asking questions we have all the answers to.

Which is why, despite what you might have picked up in school, there’s no such thing as a bad question.

Bad questions enable good questions by encouraging you to question everything*.

And that is the only way anybody has ever come up with an original idea.

*Here’s a useful habit: Take a notebook and write down a few questions**. Whatever peaks your interest. Something you want to know more about. It could be anything. Do this everyday and you’ll get better at asking questions. Someday, you might look back and realize that this simple practice was life-changing. That it got you to see how the world (really) works, how everything’s invented, and how you can find out almost everything you’ll ever need to know by incessantly asking “why?”

**If you’re like me and found at first this practice to be oddly difficult or peculiarly juvenile, take heed: this is a symptom of how far our society and schools discourage us from what they perceive to be a nettlesome and potentially recalcitrant practice: asking too many questions. It’s far easier to train kids to memorize what’s on a test (or comply with a teacher) than it is to encourage them to ask themselves why what’s on the test is worth remembering to begin with. And it’s far easier for teachers and parents and taxpayers to treat school like the 100 year old institution that it is than to ask themselves, “what is school for?“ So we’re left with a society that apparently values creativity, yet discourages curiosity, champions the search engine, yet disapproves of asking questions, and yet is merely capable of recapitulating what everyone already knows from class.