A More Beautiful Question (34 page)

You may wonder,
Why would I want to limit myself to one? And if I did, how would I figure out the right one for me?
It can be worthwhile to zero in on a particularly significant question (or, at most, a couple of them) so that you can focus on it long enough to make some progress with it. The innovators I studied are full of great ideas; each has a hundred things he/she would like to achieve. But they tend to devote themselves to one question at a time.

Google’s Sebastian Thrun likens each of
⁵⁷
his projects to climbing a mountain. You must start by picking a mountain and be sure it’s a mountain you like, “not just one you want to be on top of”—because, with any luck, “you’re gonna be stuck with it for the next couple of years,” Thrun says.

As to which question to choose, to some degree the question chooses you. It’s the one that resonates with you for some reason only you understand. What will make it a beautiful question for you, and one worth staying with, is the passion you feel for it. Look for a question that is “ambitious yet actionable”—or, as the physicist Edward Witten puts it, a question that’s hard enough to be interesting, but realistic enough that you have some hope of answering it. (Not that you have to find an answer to all beautiful questions; the string theorist Witten, for instance, has never fully answered his biggest questions about the nature of the universe, but he told me that the pursuit of those questions has led him to many other interesting discoveries along the way.)

As some of the stories in this book have shown, people find meaningful questions in many ways and in various places. You can happen upon a great question by an unfortunate accident, as Van Phillips did. Or, as with Edwin Land, the question may be handed to you as an unexpected gift from an inquisitive child. Or the question can spring from trying to come to terms with a mundane problem: paying the rent, getting out of bed in the morning. An interesting thing about beautiful questions is that you may not have to search very far for them. They’re often right in front of you—in your local community, your company, or maybe in the palm of your hand. The trick is to be able to see them, which may require stepping back, shifting perspective, exercising your powers of vuja de.

You can also find beautiful questions outside of your familiar environs. Gary White’s ongoing effort to answer
⁵⁸
big questions about water, via his nonprofit group Water.org, all started when, as a student from the Midwest, he took a trip to Guatemala and saw that people in the slums lacked clean water. “It struck me that here I was, just a short plane ride from the U.S., with all we have—and here were these kids walking through sewage to collect contaminated water that could kill them. So I just couldn’t help asking,
Why do so many lack this really basic thing that the rest of us take for granted?
” Once that question formed in his head, White was hooked.

There’s no shortage in today’s world of wicked problems wrapped around beautiful questions—meaning that somewhere deep inside that thorny issue, embedded at the core, lies an undiscovered question of great value. If those questions can be brought to the surface, we may be able to see the essence of the problem more clearly.

Think of a complex social issue—questioners are likely hard at work reframing it. Health care, hunger, protecting the environment, providing better care for the aging—all of these issues and many more cry out for new and better approaches that may only come to light via better questioning. Then, too, there is education, which is at the center of the questioning conversation. Think of the fundamental questions that need asking, by teachers, students, by education innovators such as the Right Question Institute, but also by parents—because we know that parents who take the time and trouble to inquire,
How can I encourage questioning in my child?
,
are more likely to raise inquisitive kids who grow up to be resourceful, problem-solving adults. That makes it a beautiful question worth pursuing.

On the other hand, maybe your beautiful question will focus on creating a more fulfilled, more curious, more interesting
you
. When I asked Paul Bennett of IDEO to share his own, personal beautiful question, he responded, “The question I constantly ask myself is
How do I stay inspired?
”

Bennett feels it’s part of his job to do so: “As creative chief of six hundred people, you need to keep them inspired, but I can only do that if I keep myself inspired.” He has trained himself to constantly notice and appreciate the inspiration that’s all around. “You can’t do it all the time, but there are moments in my day when I’ll say, ‘Stop—take a snapshot of this moment with your mind, remember this.’ I think you need to be a good self-censor of the madness in the crowd and be able to pause and see something in the midst of all that—something interesting, something that matters, that you can share with others.” Bennett culls all of these bits
⁵⁹
and shares the best of them with the people at IDEO, or with a larger audience on his blog, The Curiosity Chronicles.

For many of us, the beautiful question that calls to us is some variation of what Bennett is talking about:
How do we continually find inspiration so that we can inspire others?

That question must be asked and answered fresh, over and over. There is no definitive answer, at least not for the creative individual who wants to keep growing, improving, innovating. To say,
I’ve figured it out—this is what I do and how I do it
, is to play it safe and thereby risk everything.

Keep yourself away from the answers,
⁶⁰
but alive in the middle of the question
—this is the warning scrawled on the wall in the room where the acclaimed Irish novelist Colum McCann does his writing. I asked McCann what he meant by that line, and he wrote back, “We must embrace the notion that answers are in fact quite boring. The Irish are especially good or infuriating in this respect. We answer questions with questions. But in my opinion that’s a good place to be. A little perplexed by the perplexity of life.”

It’s interesting that the beautiful questions about work—
Why do the work we do?
What if we could take it to a different place and another level?
How, exactly, might we do that?
—persist even for many of those who’ve “made it.” I was intrigued to see a 2012
New York Times
interview with the
⁶¹
film actor Jake Gyllenhaal in which he was asked about taking a detour from films to tackle a demanding role in a live-theater production. Gyllenhaal indicated that his previous run of star turns in big films—for all the success it had brought—had somehow failed to answer some deeper question for him. “I wasn’t really listening to myself about the project I wanted to do,” he said. “I had to figure out what kind of actor I wanted to be and feel confident going for that.” (He also said that it was hard for young film actors to do this kind of introspection because “asking questions isn’t always a welcome thing in Hollywood, where everyone seems like they know what they’re doing.”) The actor-turned-director Ben Affleck
⁶²
seems to have had a similar questioning moment as he was embarking on his award-winning film
Argo
. He’d already directed two films; he’d proven himself, up to a point. “After that,” Affleck told an interviewer, “the question became ‘Okay, you can do it. Now what do you want to say?’”

That, right there, is a beautiful question for the ages:
What do you want to say? Why does it need to be said? What if you could say it in a way that has never before been done?
How might you do that?

When you find your beautiful question, stay with it. If it’s a question worth pursuing, it will likely also be confounding, frustrating, exhausting. If you find yourself stuck, follow the advice of Acumen’s Novogratz—“just try to get to the next question.” Break your big question into smaller ones and work on those. Keep cycling through Whys, What Ifs,
and Hows, subjecting everything—even your being stuck—to a fresh set of queries.

Don’t be afraid to change your question—even to ratchet it down a notch. You may also wish to expand it, broaden it, or possibly add pieces onto it, turning it into a compound question (which can be a clunky yet beautiful thing). Be sure to take your question for walks, and to the museum. Create the time and space for inspiration, which, as Van Phillips observes, comes in unexpected waves. As an innovator, “you’re like a surfer waiting patiently for that wave to come in,” says Phillips (yes, he surfs, as well as runs, on that foot he made). You don’t know when the wave will come in—when those unpredictable connections in the nether regions of the brain will happen—but you must prepare and be ready for it. If you haven’t sufficiently thought about your question—if you haven’t even asked it—the connections are unlikely to happen and the wave will never materialize.

You may discover, as many questioners do when they begin to burrow into a problem, that there is much more to know than you could have imagined at the outset. Don’t be put off by learning how much you don’t know. That darkness was always out there, surrounding you; you just had no idea how vast it was until you began probing with your question flashlight. Questioners learn to love that great unknown—it’s the land of opportunity, in terms of creativity and innovation. The author Stuart Firestein thinks we should all learn to see it likewise and offers up this beautiful question:
What if we cultivated ignorance instead
⁶³
of fearing it?

If we did that, we would need some cultivating tools—including one, in particular, that could help us dig, uncover, plant, tend, and grow.

What if it turned out that tool had been right there in our back pocket, ever since childhood?

Acknowledgments

I’d first like to thank the editor of this book, Bloomsbury’s George Gibson. It seems to be increasingly rare these days (unfortunately) for book editors to really get involved in editing, beyond making a few general suggestions and flagging typos. George warned me at the outset that he is an “activist editor” and it’s true. He went through every line of the manuscript, tightening, clarifying, questioning—and the book is much better for it. Thanks also to my agent Jim Levine, who believed in the “question” idea and offered valuable input as I was shaping the book proposal. Jim also connected me with George, so I’m grateful for that, too.

This book started as a website, AMoreBeautifulQuestion.com, and on that site I asked for volunteers to help me work on the book. To my delight, many people responded and offered their help as members of my research team, including Harvey Richards, Philip Howell, Justin Hamilton, Larry Rubin, Katie Orthwein, Lana Rimboym, Chuck Appleby, Dinesh Balasubramaniam, and Sid Ramnarace. I want to especially thank a handful of people from that group who really went the extra mile in terms of tracking down stories and sharing ideas: Nikhil Goyal, Dave Baldwin, Daisy Azer, Theresa Garcia, Bill Welter, Damon Taylor, and Dan McDougall.

With regard to tracking down “question stories,” I got special help from the outstanding researcher Susan O’Brien.

I want to thank all the people who granted interviews. I’ve been a magazine/newspaper journalist and I’ve been a book author and there is an important difference that manifests itself during the research process: When you’re calling from the
New York Times
or
Wired
magazine, people tend to respond because they want the publicity. But when you call and say, “I’m writing a book”—well, then you are dependent on the kindness of strangers. There’s not much in it for the interviewee; they have no idea if the book will ever get written or if anyone will read it once it comes out. So I think they do the interview primarily because they have a genuine interest in the idea you’re pursuing, and they want to be of help.

With that in mind, I’m grateful to all who took the time to talk about questioning, including: Dr. Ken Heilman, Gretchen Rubin, Irene Au, John Bielenberg, Sebastian Thrun, Jack Andraka, Jonathan Fields, Chen Bo Zhong, Doug Rauch, Tiffany Shlain, David Cooperrider, John Seely Brown, Roko Belic, Chris Young, A. J. Jacobs, Stephen Tobolowsky, Water.org’s Gary White, and the Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline Novogratz.

Also Robert Burton, Srikanth Srinivas, Dominic Randolph, Josh Aronson, Stewart Mostofsky, Eric Maisel, Mick Ebeling, Michael Corning, Jon Bond, Steve Bercu, Edward Witten, Colum McCann, and Kelly Carlin.

At the MIT Media Lab, thank you to Tod Machover and Joichi Ito, as well as to the former director Frank Moss. From Harvard University, my thanks go to Tony Wagner, Paul Harris, Paul Bottino, and Clayton Christensen. Representing Yale, the brilliant writer William Deresiewicz was an immense help. Stanford University’s Bob Sutton provided inspiration with his ideas about vuja de.

There were a number of companies that helped greatly, starting with IDEO: thank you Tim Brown, Paul Bennett, and Fred Dust. I am also indebted to David Sherwin at Frog Design, and to the former Frog creative director Luke Williams. Also W. L. Gore’s Debra France, Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia, Steelcase’s Jim Hackett, Patagonia’s Casey Sheahan, Panera’s Ron Shaich, and IBM’s Eric Brown.

Special thanks to the outstanding business consultants and “master questioners” Keith Yamashita, Eric Ries, Dev Patnaik, Tim Ogilvie, Jack Bergstrand, and the Peter Drucker Institute.