3/365 The important of Questions
Answers are important, don’t get me wrong. But we live in a time when questions have gained more significance. Finding answers or finding a better answer is also our journey.
Even if we have a question in front of us, reframing the question becomes an important activity.
The challenge with some of us (at least for me) is that I grew up in a world where knowing the correct answer was the aim.. the ultimate goal. There was a belief that there is that one correct answer that everyone should know. Everything was one way or other.
There was no grey but now everything is grey. We all have to navigate grey everyday.
I also think we discounted the importance of asking questions. We even thought that asking questions could make people feel we are ignorant. Yet no one has ever found answers without asking many questions.
We now say that “no question is stupid” and yet we fail to ask them. Not appearing stupid is like the aim we have. But who cares. Who defines ‘stupid’ in a world where one view point always thinks the other viewpoint is stupid.
There is one of my favorite teachers and philosophers from Kerala who said. “If a kid asks a question in a classroom and you send the kid out of the class for asking it, the question still remains there”
I remember a Malayalam movie by Siddharth called ‘101 questions’ where an economically challenged student tells his teacher that he needs 101 Rupees. The teacher asks the student to go and find a question and he will pay one rupee for each new question. That way he can make 101 Rupees.
The movie conveys that only by asking more questions can we observe what is happening around us. Asking questions is a way to learn what is happening around us. It is way more difficult to find questions than find answers. It is important to ask the right questions and reframing questions rather than accepting answers blindly.
And it is ok to not know the answer to a question people ask us. We are not “Know-it Alls” We just need to be “Learn in Alls”
If we acknowledge that we are imperfect and flawed and that we can also be wrong, we will never stop asking questions. Because we will know that asking questions is what will redefine the constraints of our knowledge.
Creating a culture of asking questions and acknowledging that our answer can be better if we have more information is key to building honest working agreements.
Answers can change like Einstein said when he put the same question paper for graduating students in two consecutive years. When asked he said “The questions are the same but answers have changed”
