I’ve been growing and learning so much this month with the many projects and mini projects I am working on, but I think my favorite part of it is the actual interview process of talking to people for my podcast. I love connecting with people, and I love learning from real-life stories. However, I think that for a time in my life, I lost much of this drive.
So many kids in the first years of their life ask So. Many. Questions. So many that sometimes we just want to zip their curiosity in a bag and put it in the freezer. We like the idea of kids asking questions, but can often get overloaded when they actually do, and inadvertently discourage them from continuing to ask.
Looking back on my childhood, I must have been the most annoying kid ever. I was constantly asking questions. My gracious family put up with much of it, and due to my dad being a human encyclopedia, I usually got answers to most of my questions. However, as I got older, I started to become more self-conscious and prideful. I didn’t want other people to know that I didn’t know something, so I stayed quiet when someone was talking about something I couldn’t understand.
For a while, I would then go look things up in books at the library so that I could better understand. I couldn’t let people find out that I didn’t know, so I would go study the answer and impress them the next time we talked.
Eventually, though, even that died away. People would talk about things I didn’t understand, I would see a word I didn’t know, or there would be a problem I couldn’t figure out. Instead of seeking out answers, I became content in not knowing.
I think much of this came from my annoyance with school. I was homeschooled the whole way through, but I had a very untraditional schooling in that I basically only did math after 6th grade, and even that was just bits and pieces. Not a real curriculum. What I found was that my life didn’t change at all. I kept up with other kids just the same, and in some ways, I felt like I could understand things better than my friends in school because I was more used to how things worked in the real world.
Because of this, I got into the mindset that most things weren’t really worth learning about. Since I was living life just the same without school, then surely there was no use in learning about stuff.
This is a bit of an exaggeration. I, of course, was still curious about some things, and my drive for people and conversations with people never died. I simply just stopped asking questions about things. The bare minimum was great for me!
For the sake of length, fast-forward to my senior year of “high school.” Much of my drive for learning new things had come back. I still didn’t really see the purpose in all of the academic stuff, but my desire to go to the mission field drove me to want to learn a ton of new skills. I wanted to be an unstoppable value creator. In fact, that same drive is what inspired me to do Praxis and in turn create this blog.
So, I had rediscovered the love for learning. Great! But wait, there was still something missing.
What I discovered was that even though my desire and passion had shifted, my habits and day-to-day mindset were still stuck being stubborn and unteachable.
What I mean by this is basically that I couldn’t ask questions for the life of me. Not just verbally asking questions, but my mind stopped asking questions. Someone could talk for 30 minutes on a subject I didn’t know anything about and somehow, I still wouldn’t have any questions to ask them. This was so frustrating to me because I truly wanted to learn but I felt like I just couldn’t get past the surface level.
That brings us to this past month. One of my goals in Praxis is to learn how to ask purposeful questions, and I can honestly say that I have learned more about questions and how to ask them in the past month than I did in the last 10 years. With doing a podcast interviewing people, cold-calling friends to sign-up for my email list, having video calls with advisors, I have learned to truly go into everything with a questioning approach, and I highly suggest it!
In another post, I will explain some of the different techniques and ideas that I have learned while trying to ask purposeful questions, but for now, I will just leave you with this:
The next podcast, lecture, sermon, etc. that you listen to, take a pen and paper and write down every possible question that you can think of during the time listening. You may not even be able to ask the questions to the person speaking, but this little exercise gets your mind in the right place for truly having a questioning mind. The more you do this, the more questions will come naturally to you, and instead of asking about everything, you start to become aware of what might actually be interesting to dive into a little deeper.
Don’t be afraid if you’ve stopped asking questions. Just start now. Forget your pride. Forget being self-conscious. There’s learning to be done!