New Feature — Post Summary:
Better Questions: The Fastest Way to Improve Thinking, Results, and Conversations
Life, it has been said, is about the choices we make. Regret often follows a poor decision, one made when we metaphorically should have turned right instead of left. This leads me to conclude that those of us who carry regrets need to ask better questions.
To simplify that thought: perhaps we didn’t take enough time to consider the consequences, or perhaps we simply didn’t care enough in the moment. But I don’t truly believe we don’t care—we usually do. It’s just that decisions often affect us personally only after we’ve already damaged promising opportunities or relationships.
It all comes back, once again, to asking ourselves the right questions and seeking advice before committing to important decisions. In my opinion, some of us allow chemistry to cloud our judgment, while others are simply untrained in the discipline of wise decision-making.
I have spent a long time studying philosophy in search of answers that might give some sense of meaning to an otherwise ordinary life. I have read summaries of summaries written by people who studied Hegel, Kant, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Plato, and Socrates. I have also read biographies of Lincoln, Edison, Ford, Iacocca, and others. What I have learned from all of them is that the answer is not simply in what they say, but in the questions they ask, and in the way they discover their answers.
It is in the careful shaping of those questions—the angles they take, the way they can invert a sentence and extract deeper meaning where I might only see one—that true insight begins.
This creates a conundrum for people who were never trained in the moral grammar that was once so common. If you were never taught to question your own decisions, where do you begin? How do you acquire that knowledge? If you have no idea what moral grammar is, or if you find yourself asking, “How do I learn to question my own judgment and carefully consider the consequences before making a life-changing decision?” then you are in the right place.
In fact, you have already begun the process. The simple act of asking yourself a question before making a decision is the perfect starting point.
One of the first decisions you can make is this: Do I want to learn how to make better decisions? Or, more simply, do I want to keep reading this post, or is it just a waste of time?
On the surface, that may not seem like a life-altering choice. But if you often find yourself making poor decisions—getting it wrong—then this may be exactly the difference you need. And if you already tend to make good decisions, and want to make them even better, there may still be something here for you too.
I’ve taken the long way around the barn in explaining what moral grammar is, why it matters, and why it has all but disappeared from our education system. Page after page, I have tried to show why words matter and why we must learn to gain control of ourselves and become better decision-makers.
I used a long-form approach to make those points, but I now hope to sharpen my writing—making it shorter, more precise, and more focused on grammar and words, while saying more with less.
This is the new starting point for offering the answers I wish had been given to me some 60 years ago.
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