A More Beautiful Question

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.