Name: A More Beautiful Question
Rating: 4.1 (83 reviews)
Author: Warren Berger

What’s in it for me? Discover how to ask beautiful questions that can transform your life.

When you were a child, you never stopped asking questions. “Why can’t I fly?” “How many people are there in the world?” “If the world is spinning, why don’t we fall off?”

As children, our hunger for knowledge is so strong that we are compelled to ask, ask and ask again.

Yet once at school, our native love of questioning is dampened by the need to cram facts and figures to pass a never-ending series of tests. Although night after night of memorizing might have helped you get good grades, losing our passion for questioning is actually a dangerous thing.

These blinks tell you why we all need to ask more questions. They show you how by asking the right questions, you can discover new opportunities in life and in business. You’ll learn the true power behind the “beautiful question,” a power that when harnessed can transform your world.

In the following blinks, you’ll also discover

why question-storming is superior to brainstorming;
what the “Right Question Institute” actually does; and
just how many questions a four-year-old child asks on a daily basis.

Questions drive creativity and stimulate new ideas; they also tell us what we don’t know.

We humans like to think we’re special, a class apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.

But what exactly makes us special? Opposable thumbs? Or our ability to create and use tools?

While these things are important, what really makes us unique is our innate desire to ask questions. As you’ll find out, the ability to ask questions has been vital to our success as a species.

For starters, asking questions ignites our creativity and stimulates new ideas.

Whenever you ask a question, you automatically highlight the things you don’t know. And once you know what you don’t know, you can then think about how to fill the gaps in your knowledge.

It’s precisely this process that has driven some of the greatest innovations in human history.

For instance, we only have to look back a few decades to see how a single question revolutionized the photography industry.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a young girl asked her photographer father why she had to wait to see the pictures he had just taken of her. Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t satisfied by his technical answer – but neither was he.

His daughter’s question continued to nag at him, so he set out to find a better answer. Eventually, after several years of experimentation, he finally came up with a solution: the Polaroid Instant Camera.

Moreover, our questions often turn out to be more important than answers.

In our digital world, facts are more easily accessible than ever before. Whether we need the date of a historical event, a chart of a stock’s performance or even a medical opinion, search engines can comb the internet and deliver the information within seconds.

These bits of information, however, are totally useless by themselves. The facts are only as good as the questions that you ask.

Rote learning in school dulls our innate desire to ask questions as we discover our world.

Kids can’t seem to ask enough questions, wondering why the sky is blue or why chocolate cookies are not an acceptable dinner. Their insatiable curiosity is both inspiring and frustrating for tired parents!

For children, the world is new – and to learn about it, they ask questions. In fact, research by Harvard University psychologist Paul Harris shows that children aged between two and five ask a total of some 40,000 questions!

Though direct, the question “why?” is child’s play. The question “why not?” creates solutions.

In regaining our ability to ask questions, our goal should be to formulate beautiful questions – questions with the potential to close the gaps in our knowledge through creativity and innovation.

First, we have to return to our childlike mind-set by asking “why?” Such questions are known as naive questions. Just as a child will ask why the sky is blue, you too should question the simple or seemingly obvious things that you otherwise take for granted.

Asking beautiful questions can help a company innovate to stay ahead of the competition.

Once you understand the power of beautiful questions, you’ll notice that such questions can be applied everywhere, including in business.

As business today is so fast-paced, asking the right questions is crucial. Today’s rapidly changing market pushes companies to constantly reinvent. This is where beautiful questions come into play.

Key ideas in A More Beautiful Question