Long Questions/Short Answers Long Questions/Short Answers
Each person’s mind is hungry for different things (different nutritious things, at least), and each person’s big question will be different.
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This is why it is so important to figure out the big question you’re trying to answer. Putting yourself in situations that feed your mind what it’s hungry for lets you outwork everyone else without even realizing you’re working. You’re just trying to answer your question!
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers Long Questions/Short Answers
It also helps to have the candidate you’re trying to see clearly ask you questions. Questions have very high signal value compared to most anything else you can get from a candidate… I write down each question and sometimes respond with “I’ll answer, but first I’m curious, why did you ask that?” I’m looking for the felt sense of a “hungry mind” bas
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Interview question, how to understand people, how to be magnetic,
“How do you see someone, including yourself, clearly?”
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Graham Duncan, Investor
Graham has made an art of understanding people – Patrick introduced him by saying that his “reputation was as the most discerning people picker on Wall Street” – and in his essay, he writes that one of the best ways to do that is to see what kinds of questions they ask:
It also helps to have the candidate you’re trying to see clearly ask you questions. Questions have very high signal value compared to most anything else you can get from a candidate… I write down each question and sometimes respond with “I’ll answer, but first I’m curious, why did you ask that?” I’m looking for the felt sense of a “hungry mind” based on the way their questions flow. That’s very hard to fake.
One of my great joys is that my son Dev wants to build worlds and approaches almost everything through the lens of “Will this help me build a world?” I can see the question opening up places in his mind. My job now is to protect that question-led curiosity at all costs.
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Embrace naivety
Take some time this weekend – better yet, play hooky, take a snow day or a sick day – and just think about the question you’d be happy spending a decade or six trying to answer. It’ll light up your world more than any answer could.
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How to focus
“How can we live a meaningful, non-bullshitty life in a world increasingly full of irony, entertainment, and distraction?”
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DFW, writer
His novels, like Infinite Jest and The Pale King, are long (long) explorations of the question; his profiles, like David Lynch Keeps His Headto Roger Federer as a Religious Experience, examine rare individuals, whose strangeness and mastery, respectively, suggest an answer.
“The sadness over Wallace’s death was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said.”
Caro asks: How does political power really work in America?
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Robert Caro, writer
How can words capture the full depth, structure, and texture of reality?"
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McPhee, writer
McPhee has published 34 books and written more than 100 articles for The New Yorker. That is the output of someone who is working on the craft itself. What’s more, McPhee has been teaching writing at Princeton University since 1975.