Let's talk about questions.

Why are questions important?

Questions are critically important because first and foremost, thinking, what goes on here, is largely asking yourself questions and answering them.

Secondly, if you want to get anything in life, chances are it's inside someone else's head, the knowledge, the skills, the blueprint, and the pickaxe for getting that gold is in the form of questions.

So there are a few things you can do to improve questions.

Number one is study questions.

Watch inside the actor's studio.

Listen to Terry Gross.

Listen to podcasts, whether mine or Joe Rogan's or others, so that you can borrow questions and test them on other people.

And there are a few things to consider when you're formulating questions.

Number one is, can it be answered relatively quickly?

So for instance, if you found someone you idolize, you're in an elevator, oh my god, it's Jimmy Fallon.

If you ask Jimmy a question, could he come up with a really concrete answer in five seconds or less?

If the answer's no, find a different question for you or for other people, because people have read hundreds or thousands of books in many cases.

But what book or books have you gifted the most to other people?

It's going to be a short list.

The search query is really refined.

It's fast.

Click.

All right?

Much like asking yourself, what makes me happy?

It's not really a great question.

It's too broad.

It takes too long to search.

But let's just say, what makes me feel most relieved after work when I get home?

Or what activities which people, all right, now we're more refined.

You can answer it much more quickly and it's more actionable.

Think also of the sequence of questions.

So if you want to ask someone, as I do very often, a question that could be kind of heavy or really involved, like what would you put on a billboard?

If you had a gigantic billboard, metaphorically speaking, to reach millions or billions of people, what would you put on it?

All right.

That's a fair amount of pressure.

And people, in my case, know they might get quoted.

So to get them warmed up and ready for that, I don't lead with that.

I'll ask them other questions that are much, much easier and less intimidating.

So what purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last, say, year or recent memory?

Or the books question.

And that gets them flowing.

It gets them engaged.

And then I can ask a question like that.

Another trick you can use when you ask what might be a difficult question is you can give an example.

So it could be a personal example or it could be something else.

So if I ask someone, what is something absurd that you love doing?

Because I want that little shred of personality.

I don't want to just have the actionable business stuff.

I want to get to know them as a human.

And I will then say, well, for instance, the number 555 is good luck to me for many reasons.

So when it appears on my phone, I take a screenshot and dot, dot, dot, elaborate a little bit.

Or Cheryl Strayed who wrote Wild likes to disassemble sandwiches and rearrange all the ingredients so each bite is uniform.

That gives them 30 seconds to think about their answer.

It gives them some examples.

All right.

A few things you should not do.

If you meet someone who is, say, just above your weight class in terms of professional development and you want to connect with them, don't ask them questions that you could answer on Google.

Number one.

All right.

Number two, don't ask them really broad questions.

They couldn't conceivably answer quickly.

What should I do?

What advice would you give me for succeeding?

These are not good terms.

If you can't define success in, say, 10 words or less, get rid of it.

Lose it from the question.

All right.

And I would encourage you to strive to be interested in the form of good questions.

If you seek to be perceived as interesting, stop talking, start thinking about questions and then stop and listen.

Hey guys, if you're enjoying the tips and tactics and how to on this channel or in the podcast, the Tim Ferriss show, I made this for you.

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