Questions
Importance of questions and questioning
We were headed on a boat to Rathlin Island, four of us, to celebrate two of us turning a year older. It’s a tiny island, north of Northern Ireland, great for birdwatching. I started off casually asking the group, what would be their dream travel destination, just as a conversation starter. But, 12 hours later, as we were settling back on our airbnb, we were continuing rounds of questions to each other - dream dinner guest, dream fictional dinner guest, what classic movie/book was personally overrated/underrated.. the questions kept going. And by the end of it, we not only got to know each of us much better, but we also had one of the best days, considering we spent the day on a sparsely populated tiny island.
In my day job, I am a Product Manager at a big bank. My team is responsible for an app used internally by hundreds of people. I have read enough Matt Levine to know that I shared as much as I can. One of the fun part of the role as a PM is a crafting a new feature, either to solve an existing problem faced by the users or introducing something innovative. How do we go about it? By asking questions—lots of them. We engage with users, brainstorm with designers and the engineering team, and ponder: What could be a six-star experience for our users? Asking questions and coming up with enough answers is how we start about building new features.
As we all adult into 30s and beyond, the choices we all thrust upon are hair loss, lower back pain, anxiety and sometimes even crazy cocktail mixes of those and more. I chanced upon anxiety in the cosmic roulette, and it has been, er.. fun. With ample insurance behind, I got a therapist along for the ride. It is my humble opinion at this moment that, she really does help me, by asking questions. Questions to break my negative cycles, and questions that lead me to think and approach situations differently.
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Quoting three different examples from my life (and from the title of this post) I wanted to focus on the importance of questions itself. We all know questions and questioning is really important, but sometime as I was living through the examples I quoted, it struck me - questions are just a passive part of the conversations. Sure, everyone prepares for the job interview questions or professional certification questions. But we could undoubtedly be more creative and curious with our questions.
Here is a hill I can rest on - (almost) everything in human progress happened because someone questioned something. Socrates obviously made a career out of it. Copernicus’s Sun, Newton’s gravity, Smith’s invisible hand or Fleming’s penicillin - these breakthroughs happened through questioning. The end of colonialism or the end of slavery happened by questioning, albeit in a different way. We could also try a negative case - think of anyone or any situation where questioning is prohibited. Kings and Religions of the past or dictatorial governments of the present.
Questioning is how we construct our world. This is (sort of) what ChatGPT does. This is also how my friend’s 3yo daughter builds her world, ground up. To question is to be curious, and to be curious is to question.
Now that we are convinced of the importance of questioning, it natural to question, what’s the next step? I could think of two - How to ask better questions & How to find the answers.
How to ask better questions? Not all questions are equal. Better the question, better the answer. This much is fairly obvious. Ever since the realisation (as above), I have been wondering about and looking to spot a good question from anywhere. For now, following some of best there are seems like a good strategy to get started. Conversations with Tyler, The Ezra Klein Show, Dwarkesh Patel, David Rubenstein, Baradwaj Rangan are some I find to be crafting great questions (and even obtaining great answers in some cases).
Now about how to find the answers? Isn’t that the point of life anyway!
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P.S: I want to make my own set of questions in 2024, like Alexey Guzey has done here