5 Questions That Will Change Your Life

Early days, as a student, when we studied statistics and mathematics, we had trouble corelating them with real problems in life, where we can solve them using what we learnt. Now, when we actually see those problems, mostly we are unable to use those solutions, they went very deep into our subconscious mind. There is a famous saying "Mathematics is the only place where people buy 60 watermelons and no one wonders why?”

There are few good statistical models that always helped me to apply some of these concepts in corporate life and personal growth throughout. Let’s talk about few of them in this this article. Personally, I prefer to start with 5 Whys as this is less complicated in terms mathematics or statics but closely relates to quality.

Many of us are aware of the what 5 why’s of are from LEAN Six Sigma or quality classes and practices. To set the context, if you wanted to do a Root Cause Analysis (RCA), you need to ask questions why, why, why, and so on until you reach to the root cause of the problem. Not necessarily, five times, you can go till 10 or even 2 but until you get to a point, when the “blame game” starts like ‘I didn’t do this because she did this’ etc.

Do you know this is a very useful tool in life too apart from quality? At times, when you are making a career choice or changing jobs, or even making a shift from the industry. We can use this concept by asking ourselves these 5 whys to get to the root of our ‘need’ and ‘want’. I have used it and seen many times, when joining a new job or life changing decisions, we can ascertain, if it is because of peer-pressure or because it makes you happy.

For example, say you would like to change your current job, ask yourselves,

1.    Why do I need to change?

Ans: I don’t like my current job.

2.    Why don’t I like the job?

Ans. I don’t like doing what I am doing over the time again and again

3.    What is the one thing that you like in your current job?

Ans. I like my manager/boss

Similarly, most people do it at middle age or when they reach their biological age of 40, it’s popularly known as midlife crisis (do not purely go by the physical age though), it’s like mid-year review or mid-year catchup as most of the corporate world call it as.

We look back, introspect, and ask ourselves, are we there, where we wanted to be? Are we happy or sad, if happy, then what made us happy? If sad then why? Did we meet our internal goal, if not they why?

As you move up through Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the answers to these why changes too and we rediscover a new ‘person’. The difference between finding out the new ‘person’ and just changing unknowingly is ‘choice’, are we living the life of our choice? Is it still our conscious choice? Are you forced by the social, peer pressure, money, or something else driving you? You may want to find out before it’s late.

These are the questions that you need to ask yourself for yourself and don’t need to answer anyone else.

In the beginning of my corporate life, I wanted to become a consultant, then I asked myself, why would someone come to me for consulting, if I have no real-life experience? Then, what do I need to do in order to reach the goal, I need to gather real-life experience. How do I gather the experience? I need to join an industry, where there is lot of different challenges? Which industry would that be? May be, where people deal with lots of different industries data, a multi-specialty consultant does not sound that bad after all! What is that industry? Could be financial services industry or data industry? They would have a lot of data about all other industries. So, I joined a data organization. Still, main goal was to become a consultant.

After few years of working in various divisions within the data industry, I learned about companies like Lehman Brothers to Lockheed Martin. I went back to my core goal; do I know all to become consultant? The answer was ‘No’, I still don’t a lot about people behind these success or failure stories, I still do not know what human resource management made Lehman Brothers sink but CITI Bank became too big to fail? What do I need to learn now? People Management or human resource management.

This was not an easy task, it took me many years to learn and excel upon this field and finally I learned how “Pay per Performance” and a bookish on email ethics policy create a big bubble and sink the Titanic out of the blue.

However, there were something else stuck my mind, what happens during recession, where does the money goes? It’s definitely not a vacuum cleaner that sucks the money out of the system. My scientific mind was told me, money is something like energy and as per laws of thermodynamics, ‘energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system’ so the money is not just evaporating from the system, its changing, hands, countries, and continents. So, what do I need to learn? Perhaps, how are shell companies formed and money moves. I started studying about recessions, sections and tax laws, and setting up offshore companies in tax shelters that told be over 50% percent of my Starbucks coffee goes to some offshore location.

By now, you must be wondering where would this end, specifically you want to become a consultant like, I wanted? My mind was asking the same question too? However, the world was changing, where I was learning these concepts, the world slowly entering ‘Second Machine Age’!

I still asked myself, do I still want to become a consultant? Surprisingly, this time my mind says ‘No’. So, what do I want to be? This time my mind said, what makes your happy in last 20 years? I replied ‘learning’ and helping people to become a better professional?  Maybe it’s too generic, I wanted to become an entrepreneur! Learning new technologies of ‘second machine age’ and applying them for creating a better society.

This is not an end of story but beginning of a new chapter. This is how a single 5 Way question model can change your life, set your goal, and change your life! Did you do the same? Give it a shot, who does not want to live a meaningful life?

If you want to watch a little funny video about the truth, please feel free to watch is here.