What is in a Question?
If you were to break it down like a question, what would it be composed of?
Questions are everywhere, yet most people only look for answers.
If you were to only focus on asking better questions, rather than finding answers, I can’t promise your life would improve (although it probably would), but something would change.
I leave that to as a question. What would change in your life if you started asking better questions?
For the past 10 years of my life, I’ve been focused on asking better questions. To me, there are only 2 categories of questions that really matter:
Existential questions, most of which boil down to “What/who am I?”
Technical questions, i.e. “how does something work”?
With those categories of questions, there is no knowledge on earth that is beyond your eventual grasp.
So what is in a question? What are the elements of a question?
Well you can’t have a question without having a person asking a question, a subject.
That subject needs some sort of curiosity. If they think they have found THE ANSWER, then there is no need for a question. It also implies a sort of humility (a good question for further research is “what is the relationship between humility and curiosity?”)
So far we have:
A subject + curiosity + humility + (?)
What’s left is the object of attention, what has captured the subject’s attention?
At a very broad level, its something in the world, which can include the subject’s mind, body, or external phenomena that interact with the subject’s mind or body.
Eureka! We have reached the stage at which we have the elements of a question:
A subject + curiosity + humility + object of attention (something out there) = a question
Dear readers, is there anything else? Any other elements of a question that need to be mentioned here?
This post is the first post with the explicit intention of writing “The Book of Questions”, my first book based on the last 10 years of my dark night of the soul and how asking better questions helped me emerge from it. As such, I humbly request that you now become my collaborators for this project!
To leave you with a question, what current struggle are you dealing with that you think you have the answer to, which may benefit from better questions?