Can questions help us overcome fear?
- What would I try if I knew I could not fail? This favorite Silicon Valley question is designed to enable you to temporarily set aside fear of failure so you can identify the boldest possibilities.
- What’s the worst that could happen? An old favorite (and one your mom may have relied on long ago to encourage you to venture forth). The question may seem negative, but it forces you to confront hazy fears and consider them in a more specific way—which usually makes them less scary.
- If I did fail, what would be the likely causes? Do a “pre-mortem” on a possible failure, listing some of the potential causes; this tells you what pitfalls to avoid.
- … and how would I recover from that failure? Just thinking about how you would pick up the pieces if you did fail tends to lessen the fear of that possibility.
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Book Excerpt:
How to question your own decisions
Do you tend to “go with your gut” when making important decisions?
If so, you might be making a mistake. A growing body of research is finding that our instincts—our natural tendencies to think or react in certain ways when faced with a decision—aren’t as trustworthy as we might believe. We’re subject to inherent biases, false confidence, irrational risk-aversion, and any number of decision-making pitfalls.
So what can we do about that? When it comes to important decisions, we can put less trust in feelings and more in evidence. We can seek input from outside sources and differing perspectives—to try to see past our own biases and limited views. We can generate more options to choose from when making a decision (which experts say is a key factor in arriving at better decisions).
But we can’t do any of that unless we’re willing to think about—and ask certain questions about—the decisions we make, as we’re making them.
Learn more about this in an exclusive excerpt from the decision-making section of The Book of Beautiful Questions:
amorebeautifulquestion.com/excerpt-from-the-book-of-beautiful-questions-warren-berger
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Video:
What’s in The Book of Beautiful Questions?
Not surprisingly, I’m being asked the above question a lot in the run-up to the new book’s release next month. To answer it, here is a short book trailer, created by Laura E. Kelly. It breaks down the four main sections of the book (decision-making, creativity, connecting with others, and leadership) and provides a small taste of what’s in each of those sections.
View the video on Youtube
By the way, for those who may have missed Laura’s excellent videos for my last book, including “What Kills Questioning?," here’s the link to my YouTube channel.
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Bringing beautiful questions back to school
September is back-to-school month, and I wanted to point you to a couple of recent posts that may be of interest.
First, a post from me about some ways to elicit more questions from kids in the classroom—along with a few thoughts about what to ask kids when they come home from school.
“It's Back to School as Usual, But in Many Questioning Classrooms It’s Not School as Usual”
Second, here’s a link to a post about an interesting experience I had this month at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. I was invited there because the university had chosen A More Beautiful Question as the “First-Year Experience” book, to be read and shared by all of the school’s 7,000 incoming freshmen.
“Bringing Beautiful Questions to South Carolina”
As I explain in the post, going to the university was a fabulous experience—I was peppered with questions by students, and witnessed all the ways the book was being used in class discussions and campus activities. One particularly interesting activity: Students were challenged to design posters for the book.
When I visited, about 20 of the posters were displayed on the walls of the university library. I’ll close this newsletter by sharing three particularly brilliant student designs, including one (far right) that ended being used as a custom cover for student edition of book. It was fun seeing everyone carrying around that version of the book.
  
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