Welcome to Darin Daily On Demand, your most trusted resource to help you become better

every day.

Here's your success mentor, Darin Hardy.

This morning, let's talk about solving problems.

When you have a problem, you have an unanswered question.

So then the question is, what's the question?

As Einstein put it, if I had an hour to solve a problem, one that my life depended on,

I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask.

For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.

A study done in 2007, in which a psychologist analyzed recordings of four children interacting

with caregivers for over 200 hours, found that on average, they asked between one and

three questions per minute.

Extrapolating from that data, those four kids were on pace to ask a total of 40,000 questions

between the ages of two and five.

But then we somehow, probably in our teen years, we think that we know it all and we

stop asking questions.

In the book Beyond the Obvious, Phil McKenney argues that crafting good questions is precisely

what allows people to make imaginative leaps.

The challenge is that as adults, we lose our curiosity over time.

We get into ruts.

We become experts in our fields or endeavors.

We become blinded by our existing knowledge.

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