questions are the guide to life
When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything... See more
James Somers • More People Should Write
“How do you see someone, including yourself, clearly?”
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers
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.
I got life changing advice last week.
He just sold his company and got invited for a talk. Was asked tons of audience questions on business strategies, getting acquired etc
His reply was “The best advice I can give you is to answer these two questions for yourself everyday and take action... See more
One of the things it is to be a human being is to pursue a question so Big that you could pursue it for a Bryan Johnson Lifetime and never get your answer.
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers
Caro’s question is: How does political power really work in America?
Once he asks it, it takes the wheel. Caro is willing to go broke to answer it.
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers
Buckets are little homes for the things you want to explore deeper.
Maybe you’ll write or draw or build about them one day, but that’s not really the point.
All you gotta do is make some buckets.
Because making buckets creates a magnetic force that draws related ideas towards you.
Alex Dobrenko` • The Bucket Theory of Creativity
Questions are the guide to life
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.
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers
Questions are places in your mind where answers fit . If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question — you have to want to know — in order to open up the space for the answer to fit. [1]
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers
Clayton Christensen speaking to Jason Fried
Our brains have evolved to detect patterns and attribute significance to events that are entirely random, imagining signal where there is mostly noise. This tendency is probably hypertrophied in writers, who are constantly seeing the world in terms of narrative. In fact, for a while, encountering this very sentiment in books became yet another
... See more