A more beautiful question - the art of asking good questions

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge. Thomas Berger

To grow in life and in career, we need to keep learning new things and how we can learn new things is by knowing what we don’t know. The answer of what we don’t will come from asking good questions. And once we start asking questions, our ignorance will be gone and our knowledge will increase.

Socrates, the Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Western philosophy, devised a method called Socratic Questioning on asking good questions.

Socratic questioning is disciplined questioning that can be used to pursue thought in many directions and for many purposes, including: to explore complex ideas, to get to the truth of things, to open up issues and problems, to uncover assumptions, to analyze concepts, to distinguish what we know from what we don’t know, to follow out logical implications of thought, or to control the discussion. The key to distinguishing Socratic questioning from questioning per se is that Socratic questioning is systematic, disciplined, and deep, and usually focuses on fundamental concepts, principles, theories, issues, or problems. (Source: Wikipedia)

Professor Bakshi, in his immensely educating post Playing Socratic Solitaire on A Gal Called NIMBY, writes –

Charlie Munger started using these Socratic devices in a variation he called Socratic Solitaire, because, instead of a dialogue with someone else, his method involves solitary play. Munger used to display Socratic Solitaire at shareholder meetings of Wesco Corporation. He would start by asking a series of questions. Then he would answer them himself. Back and forth. Question and Answer. He would do this for a while. And he would enthrall the audience by displaying the breadth and the depth of his multidisciplinary mind.

What warren buffet wrote on asking good questions in 2017 Birkshire hathaway annual letter:

our hope is that the analysts and journalists will ask questions that add to our owners’ understanding and knowledge of their investment. Neither Charlie nor I will get so much as a clue about the questions headed our way. Some will be tough, for sure, and that’s the way we like it.

We ask question, to know something that we don't know and via asking question, we learn the worldly wisdom. What Socrates said on wisdom:

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. -Socrates

An average four-year-old kid in Britain asks around 400 questions a day. But as we grow in age, we stop asking questions. Our reading and writing skills went up but our questioning skills went down a lot. In the book A More Beautiful Question – Warren Berger explains why questions are more important than answers and how to improve our questioning skills.

Let’s figure out why as we grow, we stop asking questions?

To ask a right question, we need to put pressure on our mind and we need to think and articulate a right question, so that we don’t look like a fool to others.

We are made in such a way that we try to avoid this mental pressure, so most of the time we avoid asking questions and accept whatever comes to our way or whatever presented to us.

To question, we need to first understand our ignorance that we know nothing. We need to be curious to ask questions, we should be having the fire within yourself to know the things out there.

To get the wisdom, we need to remove the garbage from out mind and fill it with right questions and wisdom. We can get the wisdom from books, great leaders, teachers, good blogs, good friends and by our own experience.

We must understand that the questions are more valuable than the answers.

Someone asked Albert Einstein for his phone number. Einstein looked up for his own number in the phone book. When asked why a genius like him cannot remember his own number, he replied – there’s no reason to fill his mind with information that can easily be looked up. This is very true In the current era of internet.

If I want to know something or about someone, why to remember, if I can get that from the internet easily.

Albert Einstein once said –

If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.

The same is said by Abraham Lincoln as well-

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. 

He(Albert Einstein) spends a lot of time to come up with the right question to ask. Finding out the right question to ask is very difficult. It is a skill one must develop by practicing. Warren Berger calls this right question as a most beautiful question.

A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something – and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.

To ask good questions that produces change he(Warren Berger) proposes a framework called as Why-What If-How:

Why – Person encounters a situation that is less than ideal and asks why.
What If – Person begins to come up with ideas for possible improvements and solutions – with such ideas usually surfacing in the form of what If possibilities.
How – Person takes one of those possibilities and tries to implement it or make it real; this mostly involves figuring out how.

To ask a good question, just adopt the following suggestions:

1. You should know the end purpose: Before asking the question, you should be aware about what you want to achieve by asking the question. You should be clear on your requirement.

2: Your question should be in a planned way: Once you know the end goal, and then plan all your questions in a systematic manner, so the answer should guide you towards your goal or requirement.

3: Your question should be in the form of an open conversation: Ask question in a way that will open the doors for an interesting conversation. Participate in the discus and understand the scenario to the depth.

4: Use simple language: Don't try to be over smart and don't use the tough words to ask the questions, use as simple as possible words to ask the question.

5: Ask one thing at a time:  Don't try to mingle all your questions in a single big sentence. Just break it in small and simple questions and ask one by one. Don't confuse yourself and the person, to whom you are asking the questions.

6: Ask only important questions: Don't waste your time as well as the person who is giving the answers. Ask only the questions that are important.

7: Don't interrupt, Listen first carefully: While the person is giving the answer of your question, don't interrupt in the middle, let him first complete the answer, then ask the next question.

8: Read good stuff, to understand the big picture: To enhance your persona, read good books and good stuff like this blog. Via reading, you learn new things and your quality of question asking will improve so the wisdom will improve. Everything is linked; it’s a butter-fly effect in play.

Let's see, how asking good questions help you:

1.     Asking good questions provide clarity to your knowledge and allow your mind to understand everything in a better and broad sense

2.     Asking good questions at work place benefits you to make better working relations. As an example of question - Instead of “Did you make your sales goal?” asks, “How have sales been going?”

3.     Asking good questions help you to thing in analytical and logical way. You think about the consequences of every action or inaction.

4.     They inspire people to reflect and see things in fresh, unpredictable ways: “Why did this work?” and "Why did this does not work?”

5.     They encourage out of the box thinking: for any situation you thing different ways for the solution - “Can that be done in any other way?”

6.     They challenge assumptions, they force you to think: “What do you think you will lose if you start sharing responsibility for the implementation process?”

7.     They create ownership of solutions, you started feeling that the work in hand is your responsibility and this will improve your work attitude: “Based on your experience, what do you suggest we do here?”

8.     You started feeling more responsible.

I will end the post with the beautiful suggestion by Mr. Charlie Munger : 

Disclosure: To write this post, i have taken the help from Safal Niveshak, Fundoo Professor and janav's writings. This are really wonderful people, please do read this blogs as well. Thanks Sanjay sir, Vishal and Jana for the wonderful blogs.

- Keep reading, Keep Learning

- Mahesh

The Perils of Overconfidence

Never be afraid to fail. Failure is only a stepping stone to improvement. Never be overconfident because that will block your improvement. - Tony Jaa

What is overconfidence?

As per the definition- the quality of being too confident; excessive confidence is called the overconfidence. The definition says it’s a quality but in real life this quality is dragging us from our own improvement and is lacking us from the real success.

Most of the time we are too much confident(Overconfident) that we are right in our decision, in our way of thinking or in our way of work. We don’t even think from other person point of view(Empathy).

Due to this kind of overconfident, we don’t get the wisdom of the world, we don’t expand our mental or thinking ability, we stop thinking in a broad way. We just behave like the frog who knows only till the periphery of the well. Out of the well, he thinks there is no world.

Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist and writer said:

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments. - Daniel Kahneman

Normally we are overconfident while giving opinions and making judgement, it is the default human behavior.

Maria Konnikova, the writer of the book Mastermind-how to think like Sherlock Holmes writes on overconfidence in the book-

how do we make sure we don’t fall victim to overly confident thinking, thinking that forgets to challenge itself on a regular basis? No method is foolproof. In fact, thinking it foolproof is the very thing that might trip us up. Because our habits have become invisible to us, because we are no longer learning actively and it doesn’t seem nearly as hard to think well as it once did, we tend to forget how difficult the process once was. We take for granted the very thing we should value. We think we’ve got it all under control, that our habits are still mindful, our brains still active, our minds still constantly learning and challenged—especially since we’ve worked so hard to get there—but we have instead replaced one, albeit far better, set of habits with another. In doing so we run the risk of falling prey to those two great layers of success: complacency and overconfidence. These are powerful enemies indeed.

Maria continues overconfidence as –

Confidence in ourselves and in our skills, allows us to push our limits and achieve more than we otherwise would, to try even those borderline cases where a less confident person would bow out. A bit of excess confidence doesn’t hurt; a little bit of above-average sensation can go a long way toward our psychological well-being and even our effectiveness at problem solving. When we’re more confident, we take on tougher problems than we otherwise might. We push ourselves beyond our comfort zone.

Confidence is good for our growth, it allows us to work hard and grow more but overconfidence affect us psychologically, it makes us to feel that we only do it and make us rude and arrogant.

But there can be such a thing as being too certain of yourself: overconfidence, when confidence trumps accuracy. We become more confident of our abilities, or of our abilities as compared with others’, than we should be, given the circumstances and the reality. The illusion of validity grows ever stronger, the temptation to do things as you do ever more tempting. This surplus of belief in ourselves can lead to unpleasant results—like being so incredibly wrong about a case when you are usually so incredibly right, thinking a daughter is a husband, or a loving mother, a blackmailed wife.

Studies have shown that with experience, overconfidence increases instead of decreases.

The more you know and the better you are in reality, the more likely you are to overestimate your own ability—and underestimate the force of events beyond your control.

In one study, CEOs were shown to become more overconfident as they gained mergers and acquisitions experience: their estimates of a deal’s value become overly optimistic (something not seen in earlier deals).

In another, in contributions to pension plans, overconfidence correlated with age and education, such that the most overconfident contributors were highly educated males nearing retirement. In research from the University of Vienna, individuals were found to be, in general, not overconfident in their risky asset trades in an experimental market—until, that is, they obtained considerable experience with the market in question. Then levels of overconfidence rose apace.

What’s more, analysts who have been more accurate at predicting earnings in the prior four quarters have been shown to be less accurate in subsequent earnings predictions, and professional traders tend to have a higher degree of overconfidence than students. In fact, one of the best predictors of overconfidence is power, which tends to come with time and experience.

Maria suggests in her book

Overconfidence causes blindness, and blindness in turn causes blunders. We become so enamored of our own skill that we discredit information that experience would otherwise tell us shouldn’t be discredited—even information as glaring as Watson telling us that our theories are “all surmise,” as he does in this case—and we proceed as before. We are blinded for a moment to everything we know about not theorizing before the facts, not getting ahead of ourselves, prying deeper and observing more carefully, and we get carried away by the simplicity of our intuition.

Overconfidence replaces dynamic, active investigation with passive assumptions about our ability or the seeming familiarity of our situation. It shifts our assessment of what leads to success from the conditional to the essential. I am skilled enough that I can beat the environment as easily as I have been doing. Everything is due to my ability, nothing due to the fact that the surroundings just so happened to provide a good background for my skill to shine. And so I will not adjust my behavior. Holmes

Overconfident traders have been shown to perform worse than their less confident peers. They trade more and suffer lower returns. Overconfident CEOs have been shown to overvalue their companies and delay IPOs, with negative effects. They are also more likely to conduct mergers in general, and unfavorable mergers in particular. Overconfident managers have been shown to hurt their firms’ returns. And overconfident detectives have been shown to blemish their otherwise pristine record through an excess of self-congratulation.

What Charlie Munger said on overconfidence:

Similarly, the hedge fund known as ‘Long-Term Capital Management’ recently collapsed, through overconfidence in its highly leveraged methods, despite I.Q.’s of its principals that must have averaged 160. Smart, hard-working people aren’t exempted from professional disasters from overconfidence. Often, they just go aground in the more difficult voyages they choose, relying on their self-appraisals that they have superior talents and methods.

How you can detect the overconfidence?

Maria suggests some solution points to identify the overconfidence, let’s explore:

The best remedy for overconfidence is knowing when it is most likely to strike.

Spotting overconfidence, or the elements that lead to it, in others is one thing; identifying it in ourselves is something else entirely, and far more difficult.

Four sets of circumstances tend to predominate.

1.    overconfidence is most common when facing difficulty:

For instance, when we must make a judgment on a case where there’s no way of knowing all the facts. This is called the hard-easy effect. We tend to be underconfident on easy problems and overconfident on difficult ones. That means that we underestimate our ability to do well when all signs point to success, and we overestimate it when the signs become much less favorable, failing to adjust enough for the change in external circumstances.

Repeatedly, researchers have found that as the difficulty of the judgment increases, the mismatch between confidence and accuracy (overconfidence) increases dramatically.

One domain where the hard-easy effect is prevalent is in the making of future predictions - Consider the stock market. It’s impossible to predict the movement of a stock. Sure, you might have experience and even expertise - but you are nevertheless trying to predict the future.

people who at times have outsized success also have outsized failures? The more successful you are, the more likely you are to attribute everything to your ability—and not to the luck of the draw, which, in all future predictions, is an essential part of the equation. (It’s true of all gambling and betting, really, but the stock market makes it somewhat easier to think you have an inside, experiential edge.)

2.    overconfidence increases with familiarity

If I’m doing something for the first time, I will likely be cautious. But if I do it many times over, I am increasingly likely to trust in my ability and become complacent, even if the landscape should change. And when we are dealing with familiar tasks, we feel somehow safer, thinking that we don’t have the same need for caution as we would when trying something new or that we haven’t seen before.

In a classic example, Ellen Langer found that people were more likely to succumb to the illusion of control (a side of overconfidence whereby you think you control the environment than you actually do) if they played a lottery that was familiar versus one that was unknown.

It’s like the habit formation that I have explained in this post.

Each time we repeat something, we become better acquainted with it and our actions become more and more automatic, so we are less likely to put adequate thought or consideration into what we’re doing.

3.    overconfidence increases with information

If I know more about something, I am more likely to think I can handle it, even if the additional information doesn’t actually add to my knowledge in a significant way.

This is the exact effect we observed with the clinicians who were making judgments on a case, the more information they had about the patient’s background, the more confident they were in the accuracy of the diagnosis, yet the less warranted was that confidence.

4.    overconfidence increases with action

As we actively engage, we become more confident in what we are doing.

In one classic study, Langer found that individuals who flipped a coin themselves, in contrast to watching someone else flip it, were more confident in being able to predict heads or tails accurately, even though, objectively, the probabilities remained unchanged.

Another instance found when, individuals who chose their own lottery ticket were more confident in a lucky outcome than they were if a lottery ticket was chosen for them.

Let’s take the case of traders once again. The more they trade, the more confident they tend to become in their ability to make good trades. As a result, they often overtrade, and in so doing undermine their prior performance.

You should always remind yourself about our fallibility and ability to deceive ourselves into a very confident blunder.

Let me end the post with the excellent quote by Charles Bukowski

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

Keep reading, Keep learning
-Mahesh

Learn From Your Failures Just as You Do from Your Successes

"One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen, can change the world." ― Malala Yousafzai

We never stop learning, we always learn in one way or in another, but we continue to learn. The education that we receive in our schooling is not only the learning we have. Our actual learning will start once we come out of the school or college and start working in the real world.

We learn at our work place, we learn from our collogues or from our friends. We learn from our enemies as well. We learn from our failures and from our experiences.

Most of the time, we learn from our experiences and from the people around us. But if someone want to improve his learning, then he have to learn from other's experiences as well.

How you can learn from other’s experience?

The answer lies in the reading of good books  and it is also important to learn how to read abook?

Read good books from great authors and learn from there experiences. By developing this small habit, will help you to take right decisions and help you to grow in your life.

By reading and writing, we learn from our experiences as well as from other’s experiences.

Maria konnikova, in the book Mastermind how to think like sherlock holmes writes that we never stop learning, we always learn. Let’s read what she write-

"In observing Watson’s fallacies in this particular instance, Holmes learns ever more about the pitfalls of the thought process, those moments when it is easy to go astray—and precisely in which direction the false path usually lies. From this encounter, he will take away the power of stereotype activation and the overwhelming influence an improper initial frame can have on the inferences that follow, as well as the error that is introduced when one fails to consider every observation and focuses instead on the most salient, recent, or otherwise accessible ones. Not that he doesn’t know both of these things already, but each time serves as a reminder, a reinforcement, a new manifestation in a different context that ensures that his knowledge never goes stale.”

Holmes always keep a keen eye on all the events, on how the other person behave and act, on the things around him and he observe very closely and learn from his observation. Maria Continues-

“Education is all well and good, but it needs to be taken from the level of theory to that of practice, over and over and over—lest it begin to gather dust and let out that stale, rank smell of the attic whose door has remained unopened for years."

Maria suggests that whatever we read or learn, we should bring the learning to the practice. Then only we can learn. While practicing we do mistakes and by mistakes, we open the new door for more learning and this is how the knowledge will expand.

“Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.” ― Ann Voskamp

Mahatma Ghandi suggests, how to live and learn:

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

Read the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, My experiments with truth, and you come to know that Mahatma Gandhi is a great learner from his experience as well as from other’s experience. He never stops learning.

There is another way to learn more and that is teaching to other person, whatever you learned. 

Charlie Munger sugegsts:

“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”  Charlie Munger

By teaching, you come to know, what you don’t know and knowing what you don’t know is the real wisdom and factual knowledge.

If you don’t believe, just start teaching a simple thing to a toddler that you just learn. You come to know that there are many questions that are still unanswered.

In Mr. Feynman words, you just know the name of the thing, not the thing. You must know difference between knowing the name of something and understanding the thing.

"See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way."

Once you start thinking in the direction of understanding something, your knowledge will expand exponentially and your learning will not have any limits.

Learn From Your Failures Just as You Do from Your Successes. Its true that we learn from our failures but we must learn from our successes as well. Once you get failed or get succeed, just analyse the events and try to figure out the causes of the failure or success and learn from the events. 

Think if the events not go in the way, the way it happens. What are the consequences? Think like a devil advocate. 

For any work, just do a pre mortem.

I will end the discussion with the quote by Einstein:

 Keep reading, keep learning

-Mahesh