Perhaps you've been "stuck" in your life. I know lately, I have been. So, how do you get unstuck? What can you do better? "A lot of things" is not an acceptable answer. For many people, myself included, we can ask more questions, and we can ask better questions. After all, the quality of your questions dictates the quality of your life.
I hypothesize that if you ask enough questions and keep improving your questions, sooner or later the correct answers will appear. Struggling to answer every question is just a waste of time because you only want the answers to the right questions anyway. And how are you suppose to decide what the right questions are? Other than to make some judgment based on the answer, there is no method of discovering a right question as opposed to a wrong question, but there is a way to develop better questions.
Start Making Lists
Every new endeavor should always start with some sort of list. If the answer to a problem was to just do one thing, you would have already done that one thing. Life problems are typically more complicated than can be solved by your proverbial one trick pony.
So to get a conceptual grasp of this concept, here are some of the items on my to do list from this morning:
- Follow up with career fair contacts from yesterday.
- Apply to companies for jobs.
- Show up onsite to X and Y job opportunities to apply.
- Send out new emails.
Now, we know these items can be improved by making them more specific, for example:
- Follow up with all 12 career fair contacts from yesterday.
- Apply to 5 long term career opportunities on company websites.
- Drive to X jobsite and Y jobsite based on X advertisement and Y advertisement.
- Start 10 new email conversations with contacts I haven't spoken to in 3 months or more.
How does this sort of list embellishment suit you? Personally, it eats at my gourd. I hate it. I've just touched all of my action items, which means I expended energy on everything and accomplished nothing. The list has changed from stuff that can be done in a lackadaisical and enjoyable manner to a work order. In short, I've done work to create more work and have nothing but an obnoxious list to show for it. What I want is a list that my brain will work on, even if I'm not paying attention to the list. Much like cloud computing that uses excess computer processing and storage, I want to use my brain's excess or "cloud" capacity. This will both give me better solutions to my problems and reduce my stress level. So, how do we do that?
Ask Questions
When confronted with a question, your brain will automatically want to find a solution. If the question is interesting enough, your brain will keep returning to the topic. It will notice things. For instance, you may not see a particular model of car on the highway much, until you buy it. Then you will see that car everywhere. This is Observational Selection Bias, and we can hack it and use it to our advantage by asking questions.
Take my item list from earlier. I can now accomplish my more specific list from earlier without really doing work.
- How many career contacts do I need to follow up with from yesterday?
- What jobs do I want to apply for?
- Where do I need to show up to apply for jobs?
- Who do I want to send new emails to?
As you can see the adjustments are simple enough, that I can make them as I'm originally writing the list. And, I will probably get better answers to these questions than the to do actions that my more specific list provided. For the first question, maybe I will realize that it doesn't matter how many contacts I made yesterday, because I have a stack of business cards and how many is just how many cards are in the stack. For the second question, perhaps I will go to Staples for a calendar, and I'll see a posting for a manager position, and I'll want to apply for that job. And you can come up with answers to the next two questions, if you wish.
The point is that we're not making these questions overly urgent and are patient enough to wait for the correct answers, rather than force solutions that may not be so effective. Plus, if you don't get an answer to a question, no answer is still an answer. Yet, do these types of questions really serve our ultimate purposes?
How? and Why?
There are two questions that tend to solve the majority of problems. What? When? and Where? are really just for specifics. The question work horses are How? and Why? and the two are not created equal. For every why there is a how but not every how has a why. At least 80% of the time, we're looking for a why, because why has emotional meaning, and we do things for emotional reasons.
So, let's just make that list of questions into whys.
- Why am I following up with contacts from yesterday's career fair?
- Why am I applying for jobs?
- Why am I dropping into offices to apply for positions?
- Why am I sending out new emails?
This list of questions has a different feel to it. I hope you get the sense from reading the questions that action is not going to take place, unless there is a reason behind that action. This is important because that is how we humans work in general. We tend to only do things when there is a reason, and now the list of questions reflects that. However, we can still make it better.
Your Why Doesn't Matter When You Need Others to Act
The truth is, if you need something in today's society you probably need to enter into some sort of transaction to acquire whatever you need. This means you need to motivate others, and they are not motivated by your why. They are motivated by their why. So the final step (or first step if you've perfected the art) of the Bajillion Why brainstorming process is to put your whys in the terms of how other people think.
- Why will new contacts from yesterday's career fair want me to follow up?
- Why will employers want to hire me?
- Why will people appreciate me stopping by their office to inquire about employment?
- Why will people read the emails that I'm sending out?
And now, you're brain will start to solve these problems and you can evaluate the answers accordingly. The more questions you create, the better your answers will be. Write pages of questions like this and see what happens over the next week.
