Microsoft engineer Michael Corning uses the question, What are the odds I’m wrong?, to make sure he doesn’t become over-certain in his own views.

What if someone else is right about something we’re so certain about?

We can miss a lot of things when we’re certain.  I wonder what I’ll know in ten years time that I don’t know now because of being open to the perspective of others?

We can push this further to this question:

Is there a question others are asking which might help me to find my beautiful question?

“I think most of us find purpose when we engage with something bigger than ourselves.”*

If we embrace this idea then we’ll have to be open to others, and to views and questions which are different to our own.

I’m trying to get a handle on how many people are wandering through life without finding their beautiful question.  What if one percent, even half a percent, more of the world’s population were to find their beautiful question, how would things change?

When we begin to ask others about their questions, it’s amazing how many more questions begin to appear for us.

What is the question which propels you?

‘Articulating a personal challenge in the form of a question … allows you t0 be bold and adventurous because anyone can question anything.  You don’t have to be a recognised expert; you just have to be willing to say. I’m going to venture forth in the world with my question and see what I find.‘**

(*Retired Trader Joe CEO Doug Rausch, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)

What if you could not fail?*

A question made up of six short words.  Having a simple and beautiful form, it’s been used by many people.

It was made popular by church pastor Robert Schuller at the end of the twentieth century, ‘In the past few years, the question has had another surge in popularity’.*

I love the idea of a question, like a piece of art, having provenance, a documented history because it is so valuable.

It has spawned other questions:

What if I succeed?**

What’s truly worth doing whether you fail or succeed?^

Humans are at their best when they are asking questions.

Here are three linked questions which lead to really interesting adventures:

Who am I?
What do I have?
What should I do (in the light of my answers)?

Some think the first of these questions isn’t very helpful.  It’s the third one which is the most important.

Yuval Noah Harari opens his book Sapiens with an image of a handprint discovered in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave in southern France.  Believed to be 30,000 years old, Harari suggests, ‘Somebody tried to say, ‘I was here!”^^

Gripped by this image, I lay my hand down on the work-surface by my laptop is on roughly in the way I imagine this ancient artist must have done tens of thousands of years ago, and wonder if this was the result of a question forming in someone’s mind.  Perhaps, Why am I here?  (Or, maybe) an attempt to answer in the form of, I’m here for more than eating and procreating. 

Why am I here? is a question we still use to figure out what we ought to do today, which, as I write, happens to be Monday.

(*From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.) 
(**Author Jonathan Fields, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^Author Chris Guillebeau, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^^From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)

We can’t live someone else’s life.  (Many wish they could.)

We have something better.

We are able to experiment with our own lives.

The intensely curious AJ Jacobs has done this with his life in many ways, including living biblically for a year and outsourcing his life for others to live.  In The Rationality Project, Jacobs was questioning why he did the things he did – using Crest toothpaste because when he was twelve a friend told him it was cool – and he began to make changes in his life.

Fontainbleu professor Herminia Ibarra suggests trying out the question: What if I try this?*

Whilst the bad news is you can’t live someone else’s life, the really good news is there are many ways to live your life.

If you don’t, it would be like having the blessing of a new car but only going back and forth to the same place at the same speed for the same reasons at the same time of day.

Why not begin today:

Pick up a book you’d never have thought to read.
Change something around in your routine.
Try out AJ Jacob’s experiment of asking why you do the things you do, going as far back as you can.
Get to know someone new.
Encourage someone.
Figure out how to serve someone.

We think we have to have it together – like all the other people – before we can do something more, something different, but it’s the other way around.

‘But the main thing is to get testing and learning underway as soon as possible.’**

‘If people show low failure rates, be suspicious.  Maybe they are not taking enough risks, or maybe they are hiding their mistakes, rather than allowing others in the organisation to learn from them.’^

(*Quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**From Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect.)

‘This Japanese concept means have something worth living for, and ikigai is intimately related to the meaning element of flourishing … .’*

There it is again.  The thing I love.  My ikigai is to help others find their ikigai.

Seven Covey spoke about “finding our voices and helping others to find theirs” as the most important habit for life.**  Each of us has ikigai and is able to help others find theirs.

“It’s important to think about that time and place and activity where you shine, where you feel most alive.  I get all kinds of different answers – when I’m solving a problem, when I’m creating, when I’m connecting with someone, when I’m travelling.”^

For me, I love to read and write and doodle and meet people and hear their stories, and when people speak of not knowing what to do with their life, I want to help them find it, to help them listen to what their life is saying to them.

Whatever you hear and love, do it:

‘Obsessively specialise.  No niche is too small if it’s yours.^^

(*From Martin Seligman’s Flourish.)
(*From Steven Covey’s The 8th Habit.)
(^Quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)

‘Part of being able to tackle complex and difficult questions is accepting there is nothing wrong with not knowing.  People who are good at questioning are comfortable with uncertainty.’*

When we ask the questions no one else has asked we get to serve another, a Human community, the world and its species.

There’s no desire to take on the mantle of an expert, except that belonging to the art of unknowing, characterised by the need to ask questions.

Asking questions is a slow art, at odds with a fast world.

Have you noticed how there’s never a right time to ask fundamental questions; there’s always some urgency tearing people towards finding a fast solution.  I was in a meeting earlier this week which found itself exactly in this place.

This thinking around the way in which questions slow things down has helped to crystallise my own work: making slow-thinking time available to people so they can identify, explore, and create.

We need opportunities to slow down, step back, and to shift perspective, and see the better way.

Peter Senge’s** work offers valuable thinking in the form of his identifying reinforcing, balancing, and innovative loops within systems.  The reinforcing loop describes the need to keep doing what we do in a changing world (e.g.: fewer resources, escalating bills, damage to the planet).  To this is added a balancing loop, often ignored (e.g.: pressure on the fewer people to produce the same amount of goods in a competitive sector) which is destroying people’s wellbeing.  The innovative loop explores another way of going about business; a key word here is “delay” – things have to be slowed down to find better response (e.g., instead of a green label on a bottle to suggest being eco-friendly, why not use less water to produce what’s in the bottle?).

Questions, like fires, are the under appreciated servant to all of this, and, in the same way, they can transform:

‘It is everywhere in the margins; only rarely is fire itself the subject or theme.’^

(*From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**The Necessary Revolution.)
(^From Stephen Pyne’s Fire.)

Or:

For everything important to and about a person to be con/nected at the very centre of each element and dimension of their life, rather than their externalities.  

The con/centred person has the potential to bring together their beliefs, experiences, skills, passions, relationships, hopes, and dreams together in a seamless focus of possibility.

It may be, the most concentred person poses the most disruptive questions, including  those held within the beauty of their art:

‘GIFTS are the essence of art.  Art isn’t made as part of an even exchange, it is your chance to create imbalance, which leads to connection.  To share your art is a requirement of making it.’*

(*From Seth Godin’s V is for Vulnerable.  Art is used here to cover a person’s creative action or product.)

“What are you all about?  What makes you  tick?”*

Questions filmmaker Roko Belic likes to ask to get to know someone.

It’s a mighty big question for any of us against the backdrop of a universe estimated to be 587 sextillion miles across with a trillion galaxies!

We might conclude, what can any of us do to bring anything of significance into this huge universe.  Yet, one of the most significant things, if not the most significant thing we can do is to choose to live with goodness.  Goodness can’t materialise in the emptiness of space, but it can in the life of another person and the life of our planet.  It takes solid form and makes a difference.

There is general goodness – adding goodness to everything we do, and there is specific goodness – the thing Belic’s question got me thinking about this morning.

Here’s another question towards identifying your specific goodness: What’s your question?

(*Quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)

There is such a thing as learned helplessness.  This mindset sounds something like: “No matter what we do, nothing will change, so why bother?”  Life experiences have taught this.

There is also learned mastery.  This mindset sound more like: “Our being here matters and changes things for the better.  Okay, things might not have worked so far, but next time might be different.”

The important word in both  of these sentences is “learned.”

Whilst some are more pessimistic than others, helplessness is learned.  And so is mastery.

For some people, to be able to get to evens is good.  Many more can move beyond even, though, especially when they find and connect with each another.

I need you to open your eyes and understanding.  Three words which, surprisingly -because of how we usually think of them – provide us with an opportunity to move.  They are: humility, gratitude, and faithfulness might.  At first sight they suggest knowing our place, being grateful for small mercies, and doing the things we ought to do no matter what.

Obversely, what they do provide is a true and honest picture of ourselves, to possibility of seeing all we have as fuel for making fire, and being able to create the steps (habits and behaviours) to live these out in impactful ways.

There are ways of doing what you do more – and with a flourish: that flick of liberty and panache.

Who know where this might take you?

How deep does it go?

When we begin to follow our curiosity, develop our talents, and find a cause?

Or, to put it in Matrix terms, “What have we swallowed?”

We had no idea just what the pill, the decision, the itch, the question, the need, the idea would lead to.

We still don’t.

We only know, as we fall deeper into it, it falls deeper into us.  To the genetic level?  Maybe.

For me, it began ten years ago, when someone invited me to identify my talents.

I’m still falling.

(Today’s doodle connects a community of creatives in Edinburgh with a village in Nepal.  The people in Edinburgh raised funds for educating the children in community near the village of  Pokhara – now devastated by the earthquake.)

How do you keep your fire burning?  The one that’s about art and contributing and love.

‘Ancient city-states had a prytaneum, or public hearth, the lyric equivalent of a village well, to which citizens came to renew their household, sacred and workshop fires and which often came to symbolise the tribe itself.’*

Hopefully, we have access to a daily personal hearth.  Prytaneums, though, are public fires, shared hearths we need to denitrify and go to.

If you can’t find one, why not start one?

“I’m very sensitive to the fact that I have a finite amount of time on this earth. … I’d much rather create a fire hearth for other innovators to ignite their ideas than just heat up my own.”**

Some aim at a pass in life when there way more amazing.  When you can aim for more you’ll at least get a pass.

Better still, why not enable others to aim for more: ‘Never miss an opportunity to be fabulous.’^

(*From Stephen Pyne’s Fire.)
(**I’ve altered Jeff Hamerbacker’s words, which are: “I’m very sensitive to the fact that I have a finite amount of time on this earth. … I’d much rather create fertile soil for other innovators to plant their seeds than just water my own tree.” Quoted in James McQuivey’s Digital Disruption.)
(^From Tina Seelig’s What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20.)
(Doodle quote from Nancy Kline’s Time to Think.)