Every day, ask yourself some questions you don’t know the answer to

In Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy a supercomputer the size of a planet called Deep Thought ponders for many millions of years on ‘The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything’ – which famously turned out to be 42. Underwhelmed, the great-great-nth-great grandchildren of its creators realised they should have asked a better question. And Deep Thought predicted it would take a greater mind even than it possessed to figure that one out.

There’s innate value in curiosity. The questions we ask help us to understand who we are and what matters to us, even when actual answers might take a while longer to arrive. The seeking is the nourishment. There’s pleasure too, and playfulness. We’ve written elsewhere about ‘creative prevarications’: we could have been writing about curiosity there, too.

In life, at work, in motion and at rest, it’s valuable to ask questions that we don’t know the answers to. Here are some to get in the groove:

What’s today’s challenge?

What do I need, right now?

Assuming you haven’t just been hit by a bus, your bladder is empty and your stomach full, then a good way to approach this is to stay with the question for a while, rather than rush to a solution.

You might say to yourself – hmmm – do they mean a work challenge, a health challenge, a romantic challenge? Do they mean a challenge I could start to tackle today, or a challenge I could resolve within a day? Are they inferring I should worry about ‘the now’ and not pre-crastinate about the future?

The answer is, yes. Also yes. And again, yes. You find yourself – your mojo – in the question, to begin with. The right interpretation is the one that lands for you, in that moment.

Thinking about values…

Here’s another experiment. Probably we can agree that life is easier and more fulfilling when your actions align with your values. So that begs the question: What are my values? 

It’s not a trivial thing to consider. Values run deep. They are very personal. And they will evolve with age and experience too, so it’s not a question you ask yourself just the once.

‘What are my values?’ actually isn’t that helpful as a question. Really good questions set you on a course to find good answers, in the sense that they put a hand on each shoulder, and turn you towards the direction you ought to be looking. Whereas ‘What are my values?’ acts more like a prompt to produce a pre-considered response. It’s the sort of nice clean question that looks great juxtaposed against a nice neat answer. Like 42.

{ Tip: it’s often a bad sign if a question looks like a headline for a listicle }

If it’s values that interest you, here is a better place to start. How about:

If you want to get curious about those, right now, feel free.  The article will still be here when you get back…

Questions in business

Now that we’re on a bit of a roll, let’s take a glance at curiosity in our business lives. If you’re a sales person, you’re forever asking questions you don’t know the answer to. It’s part of the discovery process that helps a potential customer see their own blind spots. And helping is selling.

What you want to know is something like: ‘What can I offer that sets me apart from your existing suppliers and my current competitors?’

That’s what you need to know, but it’s not a question you can ask. So some better ones might be:

Even if your job title doesn’t include the word ‘sales’, most of us will find ourselves having to make a pitch, an offer, at least some of the time. That last list can be adapted to a few different situations, where it’s important that you understand how you can make your difference.

We could all take a leaf from the salesperson’s book, let ourselves be a little more vulnerable, ask others some questions we don’t know the answers to. And pay attention to what they say.