Clarity through Questions: Introducing My Journey to Create Quake Questions — Part 1
“Quake Book,” is likely a familiar term for you.
In case you haven’t yet heard about it, the idea comes from economist Tyler Cowen. He defines them as books that alter your core beliefs or world view.
One unfortunate experience many people who seek these books have is that even when reading widely these novels are a rare find.
A sad implication is that these revelatory moments may become less common as we devour a small library’s worth of novels.
I have certainly felt this at points myself. Usually, when I’m reading a commonly cited quake book, I’ll usually find a new insight; however, many of the books I layer in between don’t have that same “punch.”
Despite this experience, I don’t believe we have to accept few “revelatory moments” just because a common list of quality reads has been exhausted.
I believe we can continue to challenge our own beliefs by focusing on “quake questions” in tandem with quake books.
I think this approach has three main advantages:
- (Good) questions are more focused and can be applied more narrowly.
- Quality questions are infinite, while quality novels are finite.
- We can become experts in what we need to change in our given context for our goals — something hard for novels or even outside advice to do.
But where would we begin? Where would you start?
Following Tim Ferris’ Advice
I made a bold claim, but you may rightly be asking what is it based on — well, other than the hubris of a twenty-something?
Like many twenty-something men, in my quest to “improve” I stumbled upon the works of Tim Ferris.
A centerpiece of advice that resonated with me from Tim is around questions. I believe a useful paraphrase of his advice as follows:
To have a better life, you need to ask better questions. To ask better questions, you need to make them narrow and clear. Doing so provides room for a more insightful and easily retrievable answer.
One example he often gives is that “What is your favorite book?” is a bad question. It’s too broad, the possible list to filter is likely long, and this question is implicitly constructed of several sub-questions.
He suggests a better question would be “Which book have you gifted most often?” In this question, the scope is instantly narrowed and depending on the domain(s) that person tends to care about, is likely a good proxy for important things in that domain.
While this is a helpful starting point for me, I still felt a little lost.
I’m the type of guy that needs examples to “figure it out.” Where could I possibly get that type of repetition?
Thankfully he provides sage advice here too — steal like an artist.
Borrowing Other Quake Questions to Construct A Recipe
In each of the following parts, I’m going to walk you through how I’m thinking about deconstructing questions I think are quake worthy.
In doing so, I hope to uncover common mechanics these questions employ. In the end, I hope we’ll be able to discover a “cheat sheet” or recipe we can apply to create these on demand for our own needs.
The first question that has changed my life for the better and we’ll be exploring next time is “What would it take to do X?”
I’d love for you to join me on this journey and chime in with your set of quake questions that fundamentally altered your life so we can learn together!
