For the better half of my life, I’ve searched and am still searching to be a better purveyor of questions. And in my journey to do so, in searching for the perfect question for each situation, I’ve made mistakes. I wanna say more so than the average person in the realm of asking questions, but of course I might be suffering from availability bias.
The lagging indicator of which is the number of times I’ve been asked: Could you repeat that question? Or I didn’t quite catch that. Or frankly, just a puzzled look from the person I am looking for answers from.
In those moments, and it never gets old, I had never felt so emasculated. Moments that will continue to play a theme in my life. But it is in those moments when refinement happens. When I sharpen the steel of each curiosity. A forcing function for improvement.
In this world there are so many “lazy” ways to ask a question. Some may get the answer you want. Most of the time, you will be leaving secrets untold on the table.
Albeit a short blogpost, but once again, I was reminded recently that the only way to improve is by making new mistakes. And even after all the mistakes I’ve made and will continue to make over the years, I don’t think it ever gets easier. But I am able to jump back from a depressive state faster.
Cheers to new mistakes!
Photo by Varvara Grabova on Unsplash
The DGQ series is a series dedicated to my process of question discovery and execution. When curiosity is the why, DGQ is the how. It’s an inside scoop of what goes on in my noggin’. My hope is that it offers some illumination to you, my readers, so you can tackle the world and build relationships with my best tools at your disposal. It also happens to stand for damn good questions, or dumb and garbled questions. I’ll let you decide which it falls under.
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