I don’t trust people who “know” things.

Let me be clear: I have greatly benefitted from the knowledge of others. There are many things to learn all around us. There is no degree, title, badge, or uniform that offers clear delineation of whom may be a teacher in the school of life. If you want to find out who has some bit of useful information, ask questions.

And that’s why I don’t trust people who place the emphasis on what they know above what it is they don’t. Because, you see, I ask questions. Lots of them. In fact, I never obtained a good answer from anything else but a question. In school, my really good teachers entertained, perhaps even humored, my questions ESPECIALLY when they may have thought the question was borne of simplicity or immaturity, knowing that the power existed in first not knowing and then seeking. Questions sometimes don’t bring about answers, but they often do bring about better questions focused on the answers that really matter. That’s where growth comes from. No one ever grew simply by knowing something, no matter how profound. We grow by reaching beyond what it is that we know.

In courtrooms, lawyers ask questions based upon what it is that they believe they already know. This creates a winner and a loser. Someone was right. Someone was wrong. In a mediation, a mediator asks questions to discover things relevant to a situation that have been lost upon people who are secure in their “knowledge” of being right. This allows new ways of “winning.” In your life, do you conduct trials, or do you conduct mediations? Do you limit acceptable answers to what you already believe, placing an all-in bet on your knowledge? Or, do you seek to find answers which you never imagined possible which lead to new paths and greater outcomes than just being able to say you were right when others were wrong?

Of course, there is right and there is wrong, and there are consequences to each. But unless you believe it is possible to always be right or to always be wrong, there is no benefit in closed-ended processes, whether personally, worldly, or spiritually, that decide winners and losers based upon fractional knowledge. THERE IS MORE TO KNOW THAN WHAT YOU KNOW TODAY. Even being right ONE time about ONE thing is pretty insignificant. If one only wanted to prove that one way was right, Columbus might have not tried to find a better shipping route to India, thereby opening the door to America. The people who said he couldn’t find a shorter way to India may have been right, but they did not grow. Einstein may have chosen not to question the laws of physics established by Isaac Newton. After all, what Newton discovered still proves out in practical application. Neither Einstein nor Columbus completely invalidated useful knowledge, but they did expand upon it by asking the right questions.

Let open, honest questions be your guide in communication, conflict, and life. One day you might discover that you know more in your questions than others knew in their answers.

Jared A. Chambers