Look:
If there is something that people undervalue, it’s the value of asking the right questions.
Asking the right questions will not only give you increased clarity, peace and satisfaction, but better decision-making, and more awareness of yourself, others, and the world.
Why does it matter?
Asking the right questions is the skill that journalists use to get the best responses from their interviewees, and it’s how many innovators and problem solvers in the world are able to get to solutions to problems, that never would be solved otherwise.
Most great innovations, at their route, it’s often an absurd and stupid question.
Albert Einstein when asked what he would do if he only got 1 hour to solve a problem. he famously said:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”
The quality of your results comes from the quality of the questions you ask.
Questions are going extinct
When we are kids, we ask a lot of questions, there are studies that point out that kids ask around 300 questions per day.
But when we see high-school teenagers, we might see that number getting close to zero.
There seem to be a lot of reasons why we don’t ask questions, fear of looking stupid or asking a dumb question .
And most teachers, unfortunately, value more answers than asking great questions.
Here is the deal:
One thing we can be sure, all great inventions and solutions, came from human beings who had no shame or fear of asking the dumb or absurd questions, that other people simply aren’t willing to do.
We need to embrace asking questions and all sorts of stupid and absurd ones. In a world with so dynamic change, asking questions is one of the tools to help manage uncertainty and solve difficult problems.
I hope this made you consider the importance of asking questions.
Let’s see how you can actually benefit from it.
How can I ask better questions?
Journaling
There is something about journaling that makes people much more clear about themselves rather than when thinking.
When we just think it’s a lot more easy to fool ourselves and to avoid going deeper.
There is something magical about writing your thoughts on paper, when you write your thoughts on paper, you can literally see them and it’s much more hard to fool yourself. And when I say “fool” I mean answering the quick and easy answer that it’s not how you really feel, but it’s the more comforting one.
Journaling is how I am learning to ask better questions to myself, get more clarity in my life, and work better than any framework for asking questions.
Bottom Line?
It’s a practice that all great thinkers, philosophers, creatives, leaders, and CEOs all use to get better results, you should give it a try if you are not Journaling already.
I have been Journaling on and off for the last year, and on the days I Journal, I always appreciate taking the time for it.
How to start Journaling
If you want to start journaling just use pen and paper, the DayOne app, or any other diary or note-taking tool, there is absolutely no need to be fancy here.
There are different ways in which you can Journal, here are some of them and their benefits:
Brain dump all your thoughts and feelings, and you will feel greater clarity and peace after doing so.
Ask powerful questions and journaling prompts that will challenge your way of thinking, and will lead you to better decisions and outcomes in life.
And even contemplate death and your fears, there are studies that suggest that people who journal and question their fears and death, even when uncomfortable doing so, feel a greater peace, and clarity on their path afterward.
Just ask “ Why?”: Just by asking “Why?” 3 times to anything you will get much clearer on your real deep motivations and why something really matters to you.
To help you get to meaningful and actionable answers in your journaling, I will give you some of my 5 favorite questions or journaling prompts to ask yourself:
1. Half the Time
Question:
“Imagine how you want to be in 10 years. How and what would you do, to get there in just 5 years? And in 2 years?"
This question is extremely helpful, as hard it may be to answer sometimes it makes you think about what is really important to do, to prioritize the 20% inputs that will give you the 80% outputs (Pareto Principle), and helps you understand what the actions and steps you need to take to get there.
2. Odyssey Plans
Questions:
1. What would my life look like over the next 5 years I follow the same path I’m on now?
2. What would my life look like over the next 5 years if I couldn’t do what I’m doing now and had to choose the next thing that I would do instead?
3. What would my life look like over the next 5 years if money wasn’t an issue and I could do whatever I wanted?
If you don’t already know what to do with your life (like myself and most people).
Doing these questions will give you very valuable insights, and more importantly, will give you a sense that you are in control of your own life, and that you have different paths that you can choose.
3. Fear Setting Exercise from Tim Ferris
Questions:
1. What is the worst thing that will happen if I… [the thing that you fear doing]?
(Here, you want to catastrophize and make a list of 10-20 things that you think could go wrong.)
2. What can I do to prevent each of the worst things from happening?
3. If the worst case scenario happened, what can I do to repair it?
3. What are the benefits of an attempt or partial success?
4. If I don’t do the thing that scares me, what will my life look like in 6 months, 1 year, and 3 years?
This is a more time-consuming exercise but will give you more peace and clarity over your own fears. So they don’t control you and your life.
People don’t want to think about their fears, especially in the “positive thinking manifest” movement. But it’s actually questioning and facing our fears that will give us greater awareness of them so they don’t control our lives.
4. Follow your own advice
Questions:
“If a friend came to you with this problem, what advice would you give them?”
If we followed our own advice the way we are able to give advice to others, we would be 10x better than we currently are, the problem is that we often have blind spots when the person in matter is our own self.
This explains why it’s easy to give advice to a friend who is in that toxic relationship to leave, but he just can’t see it .
That’s why this question is of extreme value, you will be able to see past your own paradigm and your blind spots .
5. Ask people you admire
Questions:
“What advice would [insert someone you admire] give you in this situation?”
When you ask advice from someone that you admire, because he has values that you want to embody in yourself , the same way as question 4, you will escape your own blind spots, and get answers that are in touch with your real values and values that you admire.
Wrapping-up
A quick review.
We talked about the importance of asking great questions, why it matters, how you can ask better questions by journaling, and 5 powerful questions that you can use to give you clarity in your life.
I hope you got something valuable in this edition of Curiosity Fuel, and thank you for reading, it means the world.
It’s always an honor to be in your inbox, until next Sunday. 👋
— Idris Moura
