208. Are you asking the right questions?
“He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.” — Voltaire
I don’t quite remember who said that the primary purpose of education is to teach to ask the right questions; not so much to give the right answers. If at all, this becomes even more critical now because of the advent of Artificial Intelligence. AI, to the extent that I understand it, is Garbage-In-Garbage-Out machine. If you don’t provide the right context and ask the right questions, AI may throw up inappropriate, irrelevant or even misleading answers. Well, this blog is not about AI but about the power of asking the right questions.
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” — Eugene Ionesco
Asking the right questions may help you discover your most valuable priorities. Quickly jumping to answering questions may fritter away your time and energy on “good enough” priorities, at best. The right questions may lead you to discover your life’s purpose breaking away from the default script of “good enough” life.
I think, in general, asking the right questions takes up more mental effort than arriving at right answers. So, by default, cognitive load makes us more prone to jump into solution mode as opposed to staying in the questioning mode.
Defaulting quickly to common sense may come in the way of continuing with the questions. It is easy to default to established practices of going about things. There is merit in resorting to common wisdom — no doubt about it. Arriving at solutions surely helps in making progress. But beware that this progress may not always be in the right direction — we may add some net positive value at the expense of potentially path-breaking, life altering quantum value. Perhaps for routine activities, it is efficient to default to best practices. But for more important things, it is perhaps better to either abandon best practices altogether or use best practices as starting point to raise questions.
Even with right questions, the value does not accrue from answering them but from using them to discover right questions, further.
Here are examples of a few questions that affected my thinking deeply. Not to say these may be profound for everyone; just that they turned out personally very meaningful to me.
“What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.” — Jonas Salk
There has to be more to my life than working and working but what is it?
How do I build intuition for compounding growth?
How much money do I need to retire?
Can one really grow rich by thinking?
Are risk and uncertainty different?
What does P/E signify in stock investing?
What is really important — Return on capital or Profit Margin?
Can I be a growth investor and a value investor simultaneously?
Can I be politically “left” on one point and at the same time, “right” on another?
What does success mean?
Who pays your salary — your boss or your company?
How do I orient my activities along the long term?
Why isn’t power law more widely taught and studied?
Why such obsession for “normal” distribution?
What is space-time?
What does it mean by space curving?
Bottomline
“We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.” — Bono
It is not so much the ability to answer questions as much as raising the right questions that materially affects the trajectory of your life. By defaulting to perceived script of a good life, many may end up living a “supposedly” good life and not so much a “felt” good life. I think one of the main allures of a good life is a sense of adventure and discovery. Living a formulaic life does not lend itself to giving this sense. A questioning mindset may lead to you discovering the right questions — the ones that are most consequential to you. Interestingly, as it turns out, these right questions generally do not have universally right answers. I think you will live your best life by pursuing these “right” questions and discovering your “own” answers.
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