Why You Should Ask Dumb Questions

Recently my 8-year-old son came home from school and asked me if I knew how many uses for the peanut George Washington Carver had discovered.  After silently thanking his teachers for encouraging his love of random information, I admitted that all I knew was that it was a lot.  “More than 300,” he told me immediately, at which point I immediately thought he was exaggerating.  So we looked it up, and he was right (at which point he immediately chastised me for doubting him).

Several of those discoveries were food recipes, which is pretty obvious.  However, some of those food recipes included things like fake meat, which would have required a healthy stretch of the imagination.  Still, peanuts contain protein, so I can see how an enterprising person like George Washington Carver might experiment with ways to make peanuts taste like meat in order to provide a viable protein alternative to people without easy access to meat.

And then are things like using peanuts to make soap and shampoo, which Mr. Carver also discovered, and which is an entirely different class of discovery.  Because there is no getting around the fact that the question, “Do you think we could maybe wash our hair with peanuts?” is a stupid question.  It’s so stupid that there must have been people who told him so.  “Dude, good job with the fake meat thing, that was clever – but seriously, give it a rest.  Nobody will ever wash their hair with peanuts.”

Except it worked.  Not only that, but if you’ll take a look at some of the wilder ingredients in today’s soaps and shampoos, you can see a direct link to Mr. Carver’s work.  Every so often, a willingness to ask absolutely ridiculous questions leads to incredible breakthroughs.

Here’s another dumb question for you – “Do you think people might enjoy watching the weather on TV all day long?”  That is seriously one of the stupidest questions I’ve ever seen.  I mean, who wouldn’t prefer to actually look at the weather instead of hearing about it on TV?  “Want to know what the weather is, genius – try LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW!!!!!”  But it works!  The Weather Channel is a wildly popular thing.

Stupid questions are almost always rooted in ignorance.  But ignorance is really only a problem when we have no interest in improving our understanding of the thing we’re ignorant about.  All of us are ignorant about a huge number of things – particle physics, fancy cooking, HVAC repair, investment banking, cross-stitching, you name it – and if we never ask questions that experts in those fields have long known the answer to, then we’ll never get any smarter.  And if nobody ever asked questions that nobody knew the answer to, then we’d never push our capabilities to new heights.

Now think about the consequences of asking a stupid question.  Maybe someone who knows the answer and thinks it’s obvious will make fun of you – annoying, definitely, but not world-destroying.  Maybe you’ll try to make shampoo out of peanuts and find out that it doesn’t work, in which case you’ll probably lose some time and resources but still end up smarter than you were before.  And sometimes, every so often, your idiotic questions will lead to solutions, innovations, and breakthroughs that will change the course of an entire economy (in the case of Mr. Carver’s work with peanuts) or the way people prepare to leave their houses (in the case of The Weather Channel).

And just so you don’t think this is something only other people should do, here’s one of my own stupid questions:  “Do you think people might like laughing while they learn how to prevent sexual harassment or put out an electrical fire?”  Plenty of people told us those were dumb questions to ask – training should focus exclusively on how to learn a new skill, full stop.  But thankfully we decided to explore our silly little questions to see where they’d take us.  That was about 13 years ago, and I like to think that the millions of people who have taken our training are happy that we chose to ask those stupid questions.  That’s what they tell us, at least, so I’m going to take them at their word.

Now to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you only ask dumb questions.  Definitely throw a few smart ones in there please.  But every so often, a crazy question or two might be exactly what you need in order to take yourself, your relationships, or your business to the next level.