When faced with difficult conversations or emotionally charged situations, it is always a challenge to pause to ask if you have all of the facts you need to draw fair conclusions. It is easy — too easy — simply to react, often passionately and often based on assumptions rather than facts. Reminding yourself to ask “Wait, what?” is a way to guard against jumping too quickly to conclusions.

Asking good questions is hard because it requires you to see past the easy answers and to focus instead on the difficult, the tricky, the mysterious, the awkward, and sometimes the painful. But

Asking good questions is hard because it requires you to see past the easy answers and to focus instead on the difficult, the tricky, the mysterious, the awkward, and sometimes the painful.

Hold still enough to grapple w/the simple questions, & the complexities become clear.

Asking “Wait, what?” is also a good way to avoid jumping to conclusions or making snap judgments. Too often we decide very early whether we agree or disagree with someone or with an idea, without making an effort to truly understand the person or the point.

It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.

But I think it’s crucial because it reminds you (and others) to slow down to make sure you truly understand. Too often we fail to pause for clarification, thinking that we understand something before we do. In doing so, we miss the opportunity to grasp the full significance of an idea, an assertion, or an event. Asking “Wait, what?” is a good way to capture, rather than miss, those opportunities

You can send yourself crazy wondering. But it all happened, and here I am. There’s really no point in asking what if? The only question worth asking is: what’s next?

Too often we fail to pause for clarification, thinking that we understand something before we do. In doing so, we miss the opportunity to grasp the full significance of an idea, an assertion, or an event. Asking “Wait, what?” is a good way to capture, rather than miss, those opportunities.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask. After all, conscious thinking is largely asking and answering questions in your own head. If you want confusion and heartache, ask vague questions. If you want uncommon clarity and results, ask uncommonly clear questions.

Sometimes if you have a difficult decisin to make, just stall until the answer presents itself.

Some questions should be dissolved rather than solved. That's what Wittgenstein said. (That's right, we're dragging Ludwig into this!) Sometimes the only way to answer a question is to realize you're asking the wrong question.

We are all too fond of naive answers to complex questions, because it relieves us of the necessity of thinking hard and it permits us to find a scapegoat for our own mistakes. The simple answer almost always places the blame on someone else. We need to pluralize our thinking, to recognize that if you ask the wrong question, you cannot get the right answers.