In this section of the blog, you will find series of questions, which I and other commentators, believe are important questions to gain important knowledge for life. At the very core these questions are supposed to help us be more happy, more successful, more fulfilled and satisfied and ultimately to grow and become the best versions of ourselves that we can be. For entrepreneurs this section aims to instill the skill of asking the right questions. See the questions in the comments to this post and feel free to raise your own questions. To subscribe, simply press on the ‘comment feed for this article’ button below.
Before we get to the questions, I’d like to discuss a bit about what is the art of asking questions and why is it important.
As I mentioned in my previous post about curiosity, asking questions is one of 2 basic ways to gain knowledge and understanding of the world around us. Moreover, questions are also what really inspires us to do things. That is, we are usually inspired to act because we are curious to find out how something will turn out. For example, you may have been inspired at some point in your life to cook something or to write a letter to a public official. In both cases, at the core of the inspiration is the question: ‘what would be the result?’ or ‘how will she/he react?’. Eventually you act because there is uncertainty, the clarifying of which will answer your question. Therefore, it is important for us to gain the right kind of inspiration, and I believe that knowing how to ask the right questions may facilitate that.
Furthermore, when someone is asking you a question, I believe that teaching that person how to ask the right question is like teaching him how to fish, whereas simply providing them with the answer would be synonymous to giving them a fish. Of course, it takes much more investment of time and energy to teach someone how to ask the right questions and I am not saying that you should always do it. I am just explaining why I believe it is important for me to explain it here.
In conducting a quick research online on the matter, I found that this topic is not really addressed properly and the only references to asking the right questions that I found were two methods: 1. from management theory – The 5 Why’s, and 2. from Sales and negotiation theory – Open ended and Closed ended questions. Both of these are useful in asking good questions, but I found that they don’t really tell the whole story and that is because both theories came about to tackle very specific problems in business. On the other hand, the bigger problem that I suggest to tackle is as follows: “How can we ask the right kind of questions to inspire us to seek out and learn about ourselves and the world around us in a meaningful way?”. I know that this may seem to be a very big question, but I think that together we can tackle it. So here I intend to discuss this matter further by posting questions to the comments section and hoping to see your comments and suggestions for more questions. To be a part of this discussion, please subscribe to the comments feed.
4 comments
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January 29, 2012 at 5:17 pm
Curiosity and the art of asking questions « Neil Goodwill
[…] Question bites […]
January 29, 2012 at 5:30 pm
NeilGoodwill
Starting with the fundamentals:
1. Who / what am I?
2. How can I express myself?
3. Why am I here? What is my purpose? what is the meaning of my life?
Pretty deep, I know. But I believe those are really tough questions for most of us and I struggle with them every day.
January 29, 2012 at 5:34 pm
NeilGoodwill
The next important couple of questions, I think are:
4. What is right and wrong?
5. How do I know what is right and wrong?
6. Why is this right? why is this wrong?
Again, tough questions, but very important in decision making.
January 29, 2012 at 5:40 pm
NeilGoodwill
And one more set for today. This is a question that I have been struggling with more recently:
7. What is the worth of my time (hour, day, week, month, etc’)? What (how much) would I like it to be?
8. How can I increase the value of my time?
9. Why is it important that I spend my time on one thing or another [and what (or how much) would it take to make me spend my time on something else, and why]?
I think these questions are important as they go to the very core of figuring out why we are here and what are we supposed to do with our time.
What do you think? What are your important questions? How do you find the answers? and why do you believe those questions to be important?