A More Beautiful Question (29 page)

“You’d be amazed how many people I meet who don’t have the answer to the question,” Weiner said.

What is your sentence?
¹⁰

This is a favorite question of the author Daniel Pink, though he acknowledges in his book
Drive
that it can be traced back to the journalist and pioneering congresswoman Clare Booth Luce. While visiting John F. Kennedy early in his presidency, Luce expressed concern that Kennedy might be in danger of trying to do too much, thereby losing focus. She told him “a great man is a sentence”—meaning that a leader with a clear and strong purpose could be summed up in a single line (e.g., “Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and freed the slaves”). Pink believes this concept can be useful to anyone, not just presidents. Your sentence might be, “He raised four kids who became happy, healthy adults,” or “She invented a device that made people’s lives easier.” If your sentence is a goal not yet achieved, then you also must ask:
How might I live up to my own sentence?

This is not just about career planning, but extends to basic questions about identity or life goals. The filmmaker Roko Belic told me
⁸
that he meets many people in his travels, and one of his standard questions when getting to know someone is
What are you all about? What makes you tick?
“It’s incredible how few people can answer that,” Belic said. “I know people are complicated and all, but to me, that is a question that—if you can’t answer it in some way, then you’re not paying attention to some real basic things about what it means to be alive. To me it means they haven’t asked themselves some fundamental questions.”

If it’s true that people are too busy doing things to actually ask why they’re doing them, that habit seems to be forming early. The high school teacher David McCullough,
⁹
son of the Pulitzer-winning historian, was reacting to the overachieving culture of his students when he gave a graduation speech (which later went viral on the Internet) in which he advised them, “Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air, and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.”

McCullough’s advice about
how
to climb the mountain, and what to do while you’re climbing, is sound—but not everyone wants to climb the same way. Maybe you’re climbing because you actually
do
want to plant a flag. And maybe being seen at the top is more important to you than seeing. But one can’t make those judgments without first asking basic questions such as
Why am I climbing this mountain in the first place?

If you take the time to ask that question—and give it the consideration it clearly deserves, given its significance—you might conclude, as Jacqueline Novogratz did, that you’re climbing the wrong mountain. Or you might find yourself asking other questions, such as:

What is waiting for me at the top?

What am I going to do once I get there?

Am I enjoying the climb itself? Should I slow down, speed up?

What am I leaving behind, down below?

The mountain-climbing metaphor obviously applies well to career considerations, since advancing in a career is often about scaling the ranks and trying to get to a higher position. There’s little inclination to step back and question the career climb itself; to the extent we do ask career-related questions, they’re more likely to be practical ones aimed at figuring out ways to keep moving up.
How do I improve my standing in the company and enhance my job security? How can I angle for a promotion?
Nothing is wrong with angling for a promotion—as long as you ask the Whys and
What Ifs
before going straight to the
How. Too often, people get promoted out of doing what they actually like to do or are good at doing.

The tendency to follow a predetermined path without sufficiently questioning whether it’s the right path extends beyond career decisions. For instance,
Why do so many people long for a big house in the suburbs?
It’s a great choice for some, but not all; and the only way to know is to periodically ask whether, for instance, you might want to live in a walkable downtown instead.

Family relationships and dynamics also tend to go unquestioned; likewise with friendships. All of these human bonds are subject to change, and wear and tear, over time. That we’re not questioning them suggests we’re not paying attention, not trying to find ways to strengthen or improve them—that we may be taking them for granted.

So why then, do we tend to avoid taking the time to ask important and fundamental questions about our lives?
As we rush around, from task to task and from one distraction to the next, is it possible that “questioning” itself is the predator we’re trying to escape?

Why are you evading inquiry?

Among the reasons people tend to avoid fundamental questioning of much of what they do in their lives (especially the important things), four stand out:

•        
Questioning is seen as counterproductive; it’s the
answers
that most people are focused on finding, because the answers, it is believed, will provide ways to solve problems, move ahead, improve life.

•        
The right time for asking fundamental questions never seems to present itself; either it’s too soon or too late.

•        
Knowing the right questions to ask is difficult (so better not to ask at all).

•        
Perhaps most significant:
What if we find we have no good answers to the important questions we raise?
Fearing that, many figure it’s better not to invite that additional uncertainty and doubt into their lives.

Since most schools teach us to prize answers over questions, while also generally teaching that most problems have one “right” answer, small wonder that our habit is to think that the answers we need are out there—just waiting to be “found,” stumbled upon, looked up, acquired, purchased, or handed to us.

Whole industries are dedicated to providing off-the-shelf “answers” to people in the form of self-help books, seminars, life coaching, and so forth. It’s natural to want an “expert” to come along and tell us what to do. And sometimes that outside perspective can be helpful. But the best coaches, consultants, and therapists all emphasize there is no substitute for self-questioning—often the most important thing that an adviser can do is guide someone toward asking the right questions (as the business consultant Peter Drucker did when he coached the world’s top business executives). Anyone in a coaching/advising role who offers generic answers should be eyed warily because nobody can provide answers that will fit
your
life, your particular problems or challenges.

Even wise and trusted friends can’t provide the right answers for you. The start-up entrepreneur Kasper Hulthin discovered
¹¹
this when he was wrestling with tough questions about whether to take the plunge into a new business. “If you ask people for advice,” Hulthin says, “they’ll tell you what
they
would do.” But his friends’ situations and motivations were very different from his. In the end, Hulthin had to sit at the kitchen table, alone, and work through his own questions.

One of the volunteer researchers helping me on this book told me that part of the reason she had gotten involved in the “beautiful question” project was because she found that, as she was thinking about the next stage of her career, she was inundated with career-advice books full of “answers” that seemed to conflict with one another. “I’m finding that answers don’t cut it,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. “I need help with the process of figuring this out for myself.”

That word
process
is key. You don’t just “find” answers to complex life problems (or any type of complex problem, including business ones). You work your way, gradually, toward figuring out those answers, relying on questions each step of the way.

This illusion that an “answer” is out there if we can just find it extends to everything from the dream job to larger concepts such as “happiness” or “purpose.” Gretchen Rubin of the Happiness Project says the classic misconception people have about happiness is that it is a state of being you suddenly find or “arrive” at. But as Rubin and other experts on this subject tend to concur, creating happiness is ongoing. You don’t find it, you gradually figure it out for yourself—questioning and experimenting as you try to understand what makes you feel happy and how to bring more of that into your everyday life.

Much the same can be said about “meaning” and “purpose.” The author and creativity coach Eric Maisel
¹²
says that when people ask,
How can I find the meaning of life?
,
they’re asking “a completely useless question.” That classic query is based on the flawed notion that “meaning” is an objective truth to be found out there somewhere. Better to think of it this way, Maisel says: We have to construct meaning in our lives, based on everyday choices—and every one of those choices is a question.
Why should I do X? Is it worth my time and effort to do Y?

As you make those daily choices about what to spend your time on and which possibilities to pursue, the author and consultant John Hagel suggests you ask yourself
¹³
this question:
When I look back in five years, which of these options will make the better story?
As Hagel points out, “No one ever regrets taking the path that leads to a better story.”

Life coach Kelly Carlin is always
¹⁴
surprised when people she coaches come to her with a distinct sense that many of the choices in their lives were already determined; that they are on a given path or have developed a certain way of living and feel it is too late to alter that. “And then, when someone points out to them that you can, in fact, change a lot of these things, it’s a revelation,” Carlin says.

So many of the things supposedly “decided” years ago haven’t been fully decided by us. As in the case of the young Jacqueline Novogratz, perhaps an opportunity drops into your lap and suddenly you’re a banker though you never planned to be one. Those important early decisions may be influenced by what family or friends advise, or even be based on something you read in a book or saw in a commercial that hit you at a particularly impressionable stage. In a discussion of how common it is for people to follow paths determined by others, the author Seth Godin recommends considering this question:

Is there something else you might
¹⁵
want to want—besides what you’ve been told to want?

It’s never too late to ask such questions—nor too soon. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Randy Komisar talks about the “deferred-life plan”—wherein
¹⁶
ambitious young entrepreneurs devote themselves entirely to making money in the present, so that at some later point they’ll have the means to pursue what really matters to them (once they take the time to figure out what that is). The same attitude can be found anywhere people are focused on building financial security so they can be in a comfortable position when they get around to asking what they
really
want to do with their lives. This harkens back to “climbing the mountain”—with the assumption being that things will become much clearer once we’ve reached the top.

But what about all those many critical questions having to do with the climb itself? We ignore them at our own peril. Moreover, as Komisar notes, most of the best-laid deferred-life plans don’t go as planned. The world changes, the big idea fizzles, a radical midcourse adjustment is needed.
Sooner or later, like it or not, you’ll be faced with challenging questions—so why not get in the habit of asking them sooner?

If you fear not having answers to the questions you might ask yourself, remember that one of the hallmarks of innovative problem solvers is that they are willing to raise questions without having any idea of what the answer might be. Part of being able to tackle complex and difficult questions is accepting that there is nothing wrong with
not knowing
. People who are good at questioning are comfortable with uncertainty.

Many of us, however, are not comfortable with it. The author Jonathan Fields, who has
¹⁷
written extensively and eloquently about uncertainty, points out that it’s common to think about the unknown and get an unsettling feeling in the stomach. A questioner must come to terms with that sensation the way an actor handles performance anxiety—by forging ahead despite the butterflies. Eventually, as one does this, they become a welcome signal that you’re moving into interesting uncharted territory, and that you might be on your way to something exciting. Questioning is a classic case of
the more you do it, the easier it gets
. Innovators tend to get better, over time, at embracing the unknown and solving problems because they become confident, through experience, that they’ll eventually find their way through the darkness and into the light. Developing this level of comfort with uncertainty is worthwhile because, as Fields points out, life is filled with it.