31 October 2022
Questions can be magic spells, mind tricks that shift our perspective.
Last week I stumbled upon a challenge:
In which ways can questions change the way we see the world?
That is a question about questions 🤷🏻♂️.
This is what I concluded:
First Principles Thinking
We live in a world full of high level abstractions (HLA).
Freedom
Equality
Fraternity
Feminism
Capitalism
Toxic Masculinity
Love
Enlightment
These are all concepts that encapsulate complex phenomenon, or a set of behaviours or… I actually have problems defining what HLAs are 😓,
and that’s at the core of the problem.
The higher up you move in the Abstraction Stack™, the more distanced you become from the Tangible Reality™. You run the risk of articulating thoughts based on broadly defined terms, leading to conclusions that are removed from the real world—or that can be landed in a thousand different ways.
Part of the Agile Adoption Drama™ is caused by the use of HLAs like: “collaboration”, “satisfy the customer”, “sustainable development”, “simplicity”… this narrative can lead to misinterpretation, confusion, frustration, drama and cynism. Sounds familiar? 😬
The wonderful book Nonviolent Communication stresses the need to use clear messages when requesting something from others. When requests stem from feelings, it’s very easy to fall into vague abstractions:
I want you to give me freedom to grow and be myself!
Rosenberg warns us: unless we use language that expresses tangible actions (something that can be seen with our eyes), any request will get lost in translation:
I guess what I want is for you to smile and say that anything I do is okay.
This is what First Principles Thinking is all about.
First Principles Thinking is questioning the assumptions implicit on any premise, digging down in the Abstraction Stack™, as close as possible to the Tangible Reality™.
It’s a hard thing to do. Acknowledging that you don’t really know what “Capitalism” really means and that you’d like to understand it in practical terms… that’s just embarrasing…
In a way, our society regards people fluent on high level abstractions as intellectual, educated and smart 🤓. WRONG! One thing is to be wise, another one is to be wordy. When I hear someone relying on HLAs too frequently, I become wary. From experience, the overuse of HLAs is a sign that someone doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
High Level Abstractions can be useful as long as they don’t lose the tether with the ground, otherwise terms fly into space… more specifically into the space of bullshit.
First Principles Thinking ensures you are always tethered to the ground.
And that tether is built on questions.
☑️ Always question yourself and others until you understand, in tangible terms, what is being said.
The one thing in your head
Have you ever found the solution to a problem in a sudden moment of illumination?
I believe Eureka moments are the result of the incessant background activity in our brains in relation to an open problem.
We don’t have a clear understanding of how it works, nor how to harness this superpower, but several clever guys have spoken about it.
I already mentioned Richard Feynman’s practice of keeping a number of open questions to cue his brain. This set of questions would steer his mind to interpret the world in terms of clues. Over time, they would lead to deep realizations perhaps unattainable just through conscious thinking.
Josh Waitzkin talks about it too in Tim Ferriss’ podcast. Josh is the chess prodigy portraied in the film Searching for Bobby Fischer. What fewer people know is that Josh moved on from being a chess master to becoming world champion of martial art Tai Chi Chuan! 🤯 The fact that a human being can master two so different disciplines led Josh to conclude that what he is really a master on is learning. He then distilled his learning process in the indispensable The Art of Learning. Josh has developed his Peak Performance Training to incorporate such ideas as background processing.
Finally, Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham writes about The Top Idea in Your Mind more elloquently than I can do. He claims that founders have one—and only one—top idea that lurks in their heads. Such obsession leads to effective problem solving, eureka moments and happy shower ideas. Paul worries in the article about founders that shift their top concern from building great products to raising capital; companies lose a great deal of value when that happens, he argues.
The top idea in our head lives in that wonderful space between awareness and unconsciousness, and surfaces in transitional moments like a shower or a commute trip—which is the very reason why I wrote about overhead time as an essential part of our lives.
Along the years, I’ve learned to recognize it and use it to my advantage, to the point that I rarely commit to any decision that has not gone through background processing. I trust it more than my own conscious thinking!
☑️ Always keep an open question in your head, and marvel at your unassumed capacity to solve even the most difficult ones (timing not guaranteed, though).
My current question: What the hell am I going to write about next week?
Not targets but questions
Grow sales by 15% next quarter.
is not the same as
How might we grow sales by 15% next quarter?
It’s the same but it’s not the same.
One is governed by the third law of Newton (reaction): “That’s not going to be possible.” Upon a target, our minds conspire to come up with reasons against it.
The other creates momentum. Upon a question, our minds conspire to come up with ways to resolve it.
A subtle but determinant difference…
A significant part of the literature about design and innovation is founded on the idea that answering questions is as important as building stuff, that one of the purposes of building stuff is actually to answer those questions.
Precisely because we are just trying to answer questions, building should be quick and dirty at first; then, as the number of unanswered questions decreases, you can indulge in building better products.
This idea is behind the validation of hypothesis in the Lean Startup methodology, it’s embedded in IDEO’s Design Thinking uber-popular approach to ideation and design, and I recently stumbled upon it again while reading the Sprint model proposed by Google Ventures to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days.
☑️ Frame targets as questions to trigger engagement. (Blog post titles should also be framed as questions… frame EVERYTHING as a question for God's sake!)
Questions cast powerful spells on our minds. They help us be more engaged with the world. I’d rather be actively answering a question than passively reacting to whatever life throws at me.
Just be careful, an inquiry on questions leads us into deep soil.
The more I aim to where that tether meets the ground, the further down the ground recedes.
The simple becomes elusive, and we enter in the realm of Zen koans:
Who am I?
What is this?
I dread the day in which I start a post titled:
How should I live?
Unsurprisingly, the simplest
become the most daunting
become the most urgent
questions that need an answer.
But perpahs no one did a better job in summarizing the big ones than Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason.
A living testimony of the beauty and the power of profound questions:
Afterword