There's a few things I'm itching to talk about.

THE ELEPHANT WHO LOST HIS IDENTITY

‍Captive elephants don’t know their own strength. When they’re young, their owner wraps a chain around their leg and connects it to a tree. The young elephant proceeds to try its hardest to detach from the chain, but fails over and over again. Eventually, they give up.

As the elephant grows older, larger, and stronger, they continue to believe the chain around their ankle is their limited physical boundary. The idea becomes so ingrained in their belief system that even when their owners chain them to a small plank of wood they don’t try to break free, even though they easily could.

The elephant is completely unaware of their own potential. They don’t know the power they truly hold. Just as the captive elephant operates on a foundation of lies, chances are, you are too.

‍RAISED IN CHAINS

‍Richard Wurman, the TED Talk founder, suggests, “In school, we’re rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question.” We don’t teach kids methods of how to think about the world around them. Instead, kids accept what they learn from their parents, environment, and emotional responses as factual learnings. As they grow older and life fills with complexity, they rely on these ‘factual’ learnings for understanding. This influences them to transform their learnings into permanent ideas, biases, prejudices, and practices. Unfortunately, most people go their whole lifetime without successfully escaping these frameworks. The key to unlocking these chains is learning how to ask the right questions.

‍SHOULD YOU TRUST MASS JUDGMENT?

‍Imagine this scenario: One hundred witnesses are asked to point out a robber from several suspects in a police lineup. Would you agree that the case is closed if all one hundred witnesses select the same suspect? If your answer is “Yes,” I’m sorry to break it to you, but you would most likely be wrong. Statistics prove there’s a higher chance that the selected person is innocent. As the group of unanimously-agreeing witnesses increases, the probability of them being correct decreases until it is no more valid than a random guess. This phenomenon is the paradox of unanimity.<sup>

‍</sup>The Bayesian analysis is the mathematical reasoning behind this paradox. To understand the Bayesian analysis, let’s look at flipping a coin. When you flip a coin, you know it has about a 50% chance to land on either heads or tails. But imagine if you flip the coin one hundred times, and it lands on heads every time. You’d instantly know that something is wrong. Similarly, getting a large group of witnesses to unanimously vote on one robber is so unlikely, according to the laws of probability, it’s more likely that something went wrong.

To understand how the paradox relates to your journey of questioning everything, let’s explore how it applies to society. Does it mean we should discredit every popular opinion? Not exactly. For simple, easy-to-understand questions, it makes sense for humans to unanimously choose the correct answer. For example, suppose the witnesses had to pick a strawberry out of a lineup of blueberries. In that case, the ease of this task makes the unanimous decision more reliable. But as the complexity of the question increases, the mass consensus becomes more unreliable.

The key here is understanding that the paradox doesn’t strictly apply to complete unanimity. A unanimous vote is rare, while a majority vote is common. This paradox applies to both cases because the effect increases as the group consensus increases. Widespread consensus touches a large part of society, including politics, entertainment, business, and religion. When asking yourself tough questions, don’t simply fall in line with the majority. Go out and seek answers for yourself first. The more complex the question, the more uncertain society is. The more uncertain a group of people are, the more varied their opinions should be. When faced with a mass-adopted view, research and question it yourself first. There’s a high probability the majority doesn’t even know they’re wrong.

‍WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE OPEN-MINDED?

‍The definition of reality is the state of things as they actually exist, instead of an idealistic view of them. On the other hand, perception is how we use our senses and mind to focus on, process, recall, explain, comprehend, make decisions about, and act on reality. Perceiving is something you do throughout your life. Eventually, your perceptions become the only baseline you have to define reality.

The problem is that the lens you used to craft your perception is warped. Genetics, experiences, prior knowledge, emotions, sensual limitations, geographical location, preconceived notions, social constructs, social groups, economic classes, cognitive distortions, and self-interest can cloud your perceptions. There’s a high chance that what you perceive is reality is merely a limited twisted perception of reality.

Open-mindedness means continuously acknowledging that your reality is your perception, and there is a possibility that your perception skews reality. Open-minded people do two things. First, they accept that other people’s perception-based reality is just as acceptable as their own. They respect all points of views because each view is just someone’s unique perception. Secondly, they embark on a life-long journey of breaking free from their own perceptions in pursuit of objective reality. This is the path creative geniuses take to ultimate freedom. They open their mind, shift their reality, and look at the world through multiple lenses.

‍THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE

‍Questioning reality from multiple perspectives is essential to fueling and fostering our creative impulse. One way of practicing this is by improving the quality of your conversations with yourself. Approach it like an internal debate. Pretend to be two people holding opposing beliefs. Engage in discussion with each version of yourself, hoping to learn rather than win. Naturally, this process only works when you avoid logical fallacies and personal attacks, and when the nature of the conversation is one of mutual respect. Master these conversations with yourself.

Do not be content exploring your ideas without considering the value of the opposing view. Arguing from both sides can give you more profound and honest insights.

Playing the Devil’s advocate is a way of thinking but also a way of doing. A whole new world opens up when you let go of possessing your creative ideas. Approach your creative endeavors in the spirit of the complete opposite. Black becomes white. Bass notes become treble notes. The protagonist becomes the antagonist. Practice using inversion to embrace a deeper sense of beauty and wonder.

‍WHO? WHAT? WHEN? WHERE? WHY?

‍When you question everything, you’re seeking a better understanding of everything. After you strip away all the fancy words and abstract insights, the core principle of philosophy is to question everything. My high school Language Arts teacher shared a joke that stuck within me: “Who is the greatest philosopher? A four-year-old—all they do all day is ask, ‘Why?’.”

Questions come in all shapes and sizes. We ask some questions even though we don’t have enough information to answer them yet. What is the cure for cancer? How do we reverse aging? There are abstract questions with an infinite number of abstract answers. What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? We may never know the answers to some questions, even though they once had answers. What colors were dinosaurs? We have many theories and guesses based on things we know, but we may never have enough proof to verify. Also, we ignorantly think we have answers to some questions when we don’t know we’re wrong. For example, society pushed the food pyramid as a science-backed guide to answer the foundational questions surrounding healthy eating. In recent years, more and more research revealed that the USDA pyramid was grossly flawed.^ Year after year, industries like physics, math, medicine, and psychology make ground-breaking discoveries that shatter what we once believed to be accurate.

Yes, there are things we know, but there’s an exponential amount more that we don’t know. The purpose of asking questions isn’t to always find answers. You often find yourself riddled with more questions after getting your original question answered. Answers beg for more questions. In an interview about government intelligence, Donald Rumsfeld once said, “There are things that we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there’s some things we do not know. But there’s also unknown unknowns. The ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

By fostering a habit of questioning everything—from your daily choices to the broader beliefs and norms imposed by society—you plant the seed of new possibilities. Through the lens of inquisitiveness and skepticism you move from a passive acceptance of life’s routines to an active engagement with the world.

The more questions you ask, the more you gain understanding. As the amount of questions you ask expands, your mind, your life, and the ideas you create will follow suit.