Episode Transcript

Hey what’s up everybody? What’s up? What’s up? What’s up? Welcome to THE a.m guys. Welcome to Five Minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. Hope life is treating you well, guys, it really is me. Anyways, everybody, I’m going to go ahead and jump straight into this. I want to talk about asking the right question.

I’m going to start off with a quote I heard years and years ago, and it’s held really true. The quote is this. The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is the one who asked the right question, and that’s by French philosopher Claude Levi Strauss. Okay. And I’m going to repeat that, quote, The scientist is not a person who gives the right answer. He is one who asked the right question, okay. In other words, this, you’re always gonna get the wrong answers to your problem when you ask the wrong question. And that is so true. Okay.

Most problems are not solved in life by us as people because we continue to ask the wrong question. We’re not looking for the right question. And if you think about it, Google has made this very, very apparent. If you don’t know how to ask questions, well, you don’t know how to use Google to help you find the information you need. You can google tons of things. But if it’s not about if What you’re Googling, and What you’re searching for, does not have the question, the right question to find the answer, you’re not going to find it. So for instance, you know, you could totally be looking for the answer to two plus two, but all you do is search two minus two, two times two, two divided by two, you will never arrive at the answer of four, you’ll never get the solution to that problem.

Another thing that this is, is this is also a lot about relationships and communication. Oftentimes, we we actually have poor relationships and poor communication simply because we do not ask the right questions. We don’t ask the right questions to find the information we need. Or we’re too scared to ask the question that we need in order to make decisions and judgment calls to move forward in a relationship or to work through a problem. This is so true in negotiation of deals. This is so true in project management. So many times we skip over the question that should be asked because we’re either afraid of it. Or we haven’t seriously sat and thought about What do I actually need the information? What actually do I need to ask to acquire the information I need. And so I think that this is really, really important. And it’s so simple, and most, most of the things that are really simple in life turn out to be the best ones and the most beneficial for you and for me.

The other thing to think about this as you will always get the wrong a different way to think about this, as you’ll always get the wrong answers. When you ask the wrong question. Every question is going to give you an answer. Okay. So when you ask the wrong questions, you’re always going to get the wrong answer. I mean, when you ask the wrong question, yeah, you’re gonna get the wrong answer. But it’s interesting, because the answer that you get is actually the right answer for the wrong question. You were asking, going back to that example that I gave about two plus two. I’m going to apply this practically now more so, like, I want to talk about the business side of this.

Oftentimes, when we do the discovery for project work for clients, we would avoid the questions that we need to ask, right? And let me give you a simple one. When you’re in negotiation, sometimes you don’t want to ask, Are you the decision maker because you don’t want to offend somebody, or you don’t want to talk about budget. But those are really things to know when you’re building something for somebody or when you’re creating something for somebody or when you’re doing work, What is the budget? And then those are the kinds of conversations you need to have around in the negotiation side of things. And in the creation side of things, hey, this is your budget. Cool, let’s actually this is What we can do for that. And this is how everything will work and where we go. And we actually don’t give the customer the right answer they’re looking for because we don’t ask the questions to help them see it to help us see where we’re going and how we’re going to get there, we can actually never provide the solution to the customer that they’re actually looking for, or to help set expectations with the solutions because we’re asking questions.

And this goes back to the art of listening. We do not like to listen, we tend to be very selfish. And we tend to be very self absorbed, where instead of listening, we’re actually waiting for our turn to respond or are trying to talk. And if you think about there’s been tons of moments in your life where you just said, Man, I get so excited because I want to say something, I have something to have the conversation. And it’s actually so important to pause. And really, really listen in that moment because you’re missing information that’s so vital for you. And every time you ask a question, guess What you gotta do? You gotta shut up and listen. And that’s really how a lot of things work in life. And if you keep Your mouth closed and really listen, you’ll learn more than when you talk.

Anyways guys, I’m out of time so I’ll catch y’all later. Peace