11–20 of 22 posts
I have no problem asking questions, but if there are only a couple minutes left in a meeting, I'm probably not going to ask if it's ultimately not a big deal.
Related to this, meetings can also have "wrong" questions. If it's not pertinent to the majority of the audience, it might be the wrong time to ask the question, making it a wrong question.
Interesting. Albert Einstein famously said his child-like curiosity is what led him to theorise about space-time continuum [0]. He thought, a child-like inquisitiveness was key to what he did [1]. On asking questions, he said: " Most teachers waste their time by asking questions that are intended to discover what a pupil does not know, whereas the true art of questioning is to discover what the pupil does know or is…
Why not think about rays of light as if you were traveling next to them in a train? It seems so simple, but no one else had asked that question before.
The problem is we live in an "RTFM" culture, where people find it necessary to present all the things they've considered and tried prior to asking the question, so that they can be taken seriously and not just get an "RTFM" as the first response to their question. Yes, it would be easier if they could just ask their question without their motives being questioned, but that's not how our system works.
I tend to ask childlike questions, but I follow up with explanation of what I've tried, and RTFM evidence.
Interesting. Albert Einstein famously said his child-like curiosity is what led him to theorise about space-time continuum [0]. He thought, a child-like inquisitiveness was key to what he did [1]. On asking questions, he said: " Most teachers waste their time by asking questions that are intended to discover what a pupil does not know, whereas the true art of questioning is to discover what the pupil does know or is…
On the contrary, I do it to prevent people from wasting the first 5 minutes of their explanation with basics that I already know, or simplistic models that don't fully explain my observations.
My dad once told me "Education is the process of lying less and less". Kids are OK with a kid-level model because it explains everything they see. I need to preempt answers with 3 or 4 observations I have which aren't explained by the kid-level model.
"I noticed, as well, that conversations in which I ask simpler questions are more enjoyable and more interesting. These conversations lead to new ideas and better plans." :)
"The way I’m working on this is to stop myself each time I’m about to ask a question and figure out what I actually want to know, and then see if I can just ask that specific question in no more than a single simple sentence."= great technique!
The problem is we live in an "RTFM" culture, where people find it necessary to present all the things they've considered and tried prior to asking the question, so that they can be taken seriously and not just get an "RTFM" as the first response to their question. Yes, it would be easier if they could just ask their question without their motives being questioned, but that's not how our system works.
I moderate a community for a European capital. Without an RTFM policy, we'd spend our days retyping the same answers you could find with a Google search: what to do on a trip there, where to print documents, how to pay a public transit fine etc.
I've personally found it helpful to build a circle of friends/founders who I can ask those questions openly - truth is in most investors or even customers meeting asking the basic questions often does more harm than good.