Asking questions. It’s my new obsession.
Asking questions. It’s my new obsession. Every day I crave its rhetorical fix. When I ask a question, answers start to seep through my head, causing a steady dopamine drip. Some people say dopamine (the reward hormone) is literally like a drug, so I guess I’m like a question addict.
When we pose a question, our brains trigger a reflex called Instinctive Elaboration, hijacking our thoughts to seek solutions fast. If I bought into this 30 years ago, I’d be a very different person now.
When you’re designing your life to create a massive impact, learning to ask the right questions becomes the most important foundational habit and that can start now while you are an online high school student.
Skillfully designing questions to completely unlock creativity takes some practice. For example, the answer can’t be in the question. Great inventors didn’t ask how they could build a better buggy model, they asked for faster ways to get from here to there; they didn’t ask for a stronger dish soap, they asked for a completely different method to washing dishes. If you want to build a better box, the question has to be more than “how can I build a better box?” You must decide what problem does the box solve that you would like to improve upon. So try this out…think about a problem that you would like to solve or something that exists that you would like to improve upon and come up with that question? Maybe it has to do with taking online high school classes. Maybe it touches upon how or even what online high school students have to learn or how to make education more relevant to our unpredictable environment.
Because so many of us try to unearth our best potential with murky internal working models, our questions need to be diligently examined. Instinctive elaboration doesn’t discriminate between negative questions and positive ones. Such as: Why am I such a loser? Vs. How can I do this better next time?