Questions Are More Important Than Answers

Being a tutor isn’t as much about answering questions as it is about helping people ask questions. Figuring out the question is usually more difficult than finding the answer. Answers permeate our world, online and offline, and you will rarely come across a question that hasn’t been answered and documented at least once in the history of the human race. But questions? Everyone views the world differently. Everyone’s understanding has holes in different areas. So while most answers are pretty consistent across the world, questions vary almost infinitely.

Knowing how to ask good questions is one of the most important life-skills you can acquire. If you don’t know how to ask questions, you’ll never get answers. And the more questions you ask, the more answers you get. The more answers you get, the more emboldened you are to ask even more questions. Questions lead to knowledge. Knowledge leads to wisdom. Wisdom leads to a good life.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your questions, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Asking yourself why you suck at giving presentations is much less helpful than asking, “What can I do to give better presentations?” To ask good questions is to figure out how to put into words what you don’t know. Then you have to be willing to ask it, either by going online, reading books, asking someone or doing some action that will give you the answer. (For example, if you ask, “What’s it like to skydive?” you might not get a satisfactory answer unless you go skydiving.)


Over the course of your education and career, you will encounter problems. But no one can help you if you don’t know how to put your problem into words. If you know how to ask a question, you might actually get an answer. Otherwise, you never will. As Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Your world is limited only by the limits of your ability to put into language the things you are most unsure of.

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