/sentences/attention
The Quiet Work of Rebuilding Questions
In a world of cheap answers, the value shifts to the quality of the question.
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For years, we have been trained to answer questions. School and business reward the person who has the solution. Now, answers are a commodity. You can generate a dozen in seconds.
The scarcity has shifted. The hard work is no longer finding the solution, but defining the problem. A vague question gets a vague, confident answer. A precise question gets a tool.
We must relearn the art of inquiry. We must spend more time shaping the frame of the problem than we do filling it with content. The machine can fill the frame, but it cannot build it.
What this changes in practice: Spend more time refining the question than reviewing the answer.