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Don't be afraid to ask dumb questions
Monday, 23 October 2006
Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, was a great believer in asking dumb questions. In fact, his autobiography Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman, goes into great detail about his habit of asking the most basic of questions and the often surprising results.
Most people think being smart and wise is mainly about knowing lots of answers, but it's not. As Feynman, and countless other geniuses have shown, it's about being willing to ask lots of questions. Dumb questions, down to the most basic level, are where the most interesting answers are often to be found. By asking about what everybody already supposedly knows, you often uncover great truths that most people miss.
I've spent most of my working life in an area where the amount of new information you're exposed to is enormous. That is - information technology in big corporates. I've sat in plenty of meetings where people are talking about this complicated project and that new technology as if everybody knew exactly what they meant.
For example, someone might say something like: "What I propose for the Eledron system is that we use a Spring-wired POJO to transfer the data from MAST through the DMZ and into zone 6".
A lot of the time in these meeting, I'll look around and everyone will be nodding and listening carefully. But inevitably, most of the people there have no idea what the speaker is talking about. It's all going way over their heads, but they're afraid to admit it because they think it will make them seem dumb.
Well, not me.
I've been in this business long enough to realize that you can't possibly know everything about every technology and every project going on in the company. If someone starts talking about something that sounds important and I don't understand what they mean, I'll ask them to explain it.
Quite often, when I do so, I uncover some problem or opportunity that no-one's thought of before. Because most people are afraid to ask basic questions, the idea often isn't as robust as the proposer thought. No one's examined it, so it hasn't been thought out as well as it could be.
Many times, the complicated solutions proposed are just too complex. After asking to have them explained to me, I can come out with something much simpler off the top of my head.
The reason I can do that is because I'm willing to ask dumb questions. I'm not ready to gloss over the simple assumptions just so I can appear brilliant. If I don't understand something, I want to know what it is.
Nobody is born into this world knowing everything. Most of what's useful inside our heads is there because we've bothered to go out and acquire it. No one knows that "dog" is spelled "D-O-G" until somebody tells them it's so. We all go through a time in life when "1+1=2" is a mystery to us.
Many people think that the real geniuses spend their time thinking high thoughts about great things. But often, they're busy down in the basics of life, examining assumptions and looking where most others don't bother to.
Don't be afraid to ask dumb questions, it's probably the most intelligent thing you can do.
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