One Good Question...

If you have children & manage it right, then it makes you a better person.

Here’s what I mean.

The ultimate goal with kids is to make them more successful than you were, than you are. It's a simple process really. If you want your kids to make their bed, then first you have to make yours. If you want your kids to be healthy, then you encourage that behavior with the example of how you manage your own health. If you don’t want your kids to be a smoker, then don’t smoke. This list is as big as you want to make it. Implied is the understanding that you’re required to live up to the standard you expect in return, otherwise the trees of this endeavor have shallow roots in the soil of hypocrisy.

Part of the “Make them Better” mindset is how kids manage their education.

For some years now, before the kids left to for school, I would say: “Make your Brain Bigger!” It was a fun way to frame their mental approach for the day, but it never seemed completely right. We often don’t support our goals with the action that will achieve the objective. We just don't connect the dots well. In the instances where we do, that’s when you make things happen. “Make your Brain Bigger” is a goal, but you would be wrong to assume that kids know how to translate a goal like that into a productive action?

Isidor I. Rabi won the 1944 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work that ultimately led to Magnetic Resonance Imaging. I recently listened to a story of his that changed my perspective. Someone asked him, “Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer...?” His response was interesting:

My mother made me a scientist. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: "So? Did you learn anything today?" Not my mother. She always asked me a different question. " Did you ask a good question today?" That difference made me a scientist.

Think about that process. As a matter of necessity, before you can ask a good question you have to be paying attention. If you're paying attention, then you are engaged in the discussion. Once engaged you need collect & process the information well enough to formulate a good question. That’s a powerful process that bears the best kind of fruit.

Now, when I see my kids at the end of the day I ask a different question: “What was the best question you asked today?” Once this becomes your mindset,the benefits flow naturally from the process.

Question: Are you going thru the motions in your professional life, or are you asking the right questions to drive constructive change? The importance & significance of this process does not diminish with time.

Do yourself a favor: Ask one GOOD QUESTION every day...