Long Questions/Short Answers Long Questions/Short Answers

Asking a question doesn’t just make information appear. It pushes you to seek out any information that might help you get closer (asymptotically, never really getting there, because that’s when the fun ends) to an answer.

We all think what we want is answers. We don’t, actually. Answers are dead things. Questions are animating. What we want is great questions.

How can words capture the full depth, structure, and texture of reality?"

Actually, fuck answers, the more I think about it. The best questions don’t have answers. The point of the question isn’t to find an answer. The best questions are organizing principles, magnets, ways of seeing.

Most of us spend most of our working lives trying to find specific answers to other peoples’ questions. No two ways about it: that skill is becoming commoditized.

There has never been a better time, however, to be someone with a burning question to answer.

Pinning down your question isn’t easy – I’m still wrestling with mine – but it’s worth every se

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.

As more knowledge workers spend their days prompting LLMs, it’s become popular to argue that asking good questions is becoming more valuable. What is less obvious but I think more interesting is that it will expose how little we actually care about answers, and in turn, what makes questions so valuable in the first place.

The questions we ask reshape our reality.

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!