alias: question

Its always about the questions and not about the answers. The questions create the path and the answers remove from it.

– Kapil Gupta

Questions are the quintessential "deliberate pointing back" tool.

– Mark Lippman

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

• Rainer Maria Rilke

Questions

• What must I believe is true about myself in order for me to want to experience the things I don’t like?
• Where do you still see value in your experiences that you don't enjoy?
• What am I looking for?
• Where do I feel stuck?
• Where do you need to change and what’s stopping you?
• Can there be a world with sin(error) but without evil?
• From
  1. What are the things that are wrong in your life, wrong in the sense: what don't you like about it?
  2. What things do you really want?
  3. If I don't know what I trully want, then what it is that I absolutely no longer want in my life?
  4. Why am I not already here?
  • Not what do I need to do to get there. These are fundamentally different questions.
• Do I need to do this right now?
• From
  • What is it is that I have not realized?
  • What is a chase that i am going on that I have not recognized is a fruitless chase?
  • Don't ask how do I get there?
• Can I help? All good? You need anything?
• How am I showing up for my life’s most important stakeholders? (Family, team, clients, community)
• What is the primary bottleneck currently consuming the bulk of my attention?
• What if I could only subtract to solve problems?
• What’s this for?
• what purpose is this serving you?
• When experience is vague or complex, ask “where…”
  • is that happening
• I keep making systematic errors, whats wrong with me
• Good questions to ask
  • What makes me happing in the next 10 years?
  • What makes me the most profit in the next 10 years?
  • What makes me happy in the case the project fails?
• from https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1476715635325513737
  • If you know what you want, why are you waiting?
• from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rORuqP8jDyc
  • What is the value of your agony?
• What would I gain by slowing down? How might slowing down benefit my day-to-day experience?
• What is something that you could create that you would’ve loved to have exist 5 years ago?
• What is at stake here?
• What is it about travel that you are looking at and and looking for?
• Steal these 21 questions to encourage rigorous thinking in your team (and yourself)
  1. What's the hard part?
  2. What would success look like?
  3. Is the juice worth the squeeze?
  4. What's the upside? Trade-offs?
  5. Who is this for? What is this for?
  6. What is our unfair advantage for doing this?
  7. What are our assets, levers, and constraints?
  8. Why is this likely to work and be a good investment?
  9. What evidence, data, and examples am I pulling from?
  10. Where might I be making leaps in logic that aren't grounded?
  11. How much personal conviction do I have about this and why?
  12. Who do we need buy-in from in order for this to move forward?
  13. What are reasons not to do this? What are the obvious counterpoints?
  14. How can we experiment with this in a way that requires even less overhead?
  15. How can we test this idea in the smallest, lowest-overhead way possible?
  16. What models did you look at? What are you using as your frame of reference?
  17. What are second order effects, and potential positive or negative externalities?
  18. If we decided to move forward today, what would you need to make it happen?
  19. Can we do this ourselves, or do we need to tap into resources from other teams?
  20. Why would your target audience be excited to do the thing you want them to do?
  21. Is this the most highly-leveraged strategy or tactic that will drive the business?

Notes

• a question is not an interiogation but an invitation of entering into a space of curious consideration
• its the only way to transformation
• questioning is a bodily posture of openess

Lookup

• How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
• Thread of great questions.
• What the Best In the World May Ask Themselves — Kapil Gupta MD ( 1 Min )
• How to Ask Useful Questions
• Creating a generative question
• You do no one any favours by giving them the answer. In fact, it doesn't work. An answer and experience is exponentially more impactful when an individual arrives at it by themselves. Instead, try Socratic Questioning — ask questions for the individuals to explore that lead them to the answer.
• The Flow Game: The Art of Crafting Powerful Questions w/ Toke Paludan Moeller
• The life-changin magic of asking good questions
• is it adaptive or maladaptive?
• the-heilmeier-catechism