Maybe the best thing I learned in school was to ask better questions instead of launching myself into finding answers. The better the question you ask, the higher the chance that you will come up with a satisfying answer.
Of course, there are myriads of good questions to ask – over the years two particular questions stuck in my head. The first one I discovered not too long ago when I listened to Dean James Ryan’s commencement speech at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education – it is deceptively simple:
Wait, what?
Wait, what? forces you question what is in front of you. It also slows you down to allow you to find out more about something which has been said, written or was experienced by you. It indeed is the mother of all curiosity.
The second questions comes from Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s first evangelist back in the day when the Macintosh was mostly a dream and not yet reality:
Isn’t that interesting?
The question teaches you to explore the adjacent – the things you usually would brush off as not in your field of interest or even being useful to you. I found time and time that the insights I gleaned from this question helped me overcome roadblocks or opened the path to abundant, new opportunities.
As a founder, innovator, change agent or whatever other suits you don I found these two questions to be phenomenal door openers to asking better questions on my quest to find better answers.