As a kid I asked questions incessantly.
My mom tells me that her friends used to tell her to stop constantly answering my inquiries. But she didn’t. She’d take the time to answer no matter what or how much I asked.
Kids tend to ask all sorts of questions. Why is the sky blue? Why does it get dark? They question everything. Even the most fundamental concepts have to be proven from scratch to satisfy a child’s curiosity.
Children also don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. Through the help of their parents and the society in which they live, they learn not to say certain things, not to act certain ways. They learn the obstacles that others place in our world, and soon enough they learn to create their very own.
As we grow up, we somehow stop asking questions. I’m not entirely sure if it’s because our curiosity is quenched or because we are taught that it’s bad form to ask too much.
At one point, we figure out possible outcomes and condition our lives around them. Instead of pushing the boundaries we learn to live within them. A simple no is enough to stop us from trying. We even makeup excuses to reassure our lack of persistence. ‘I didn’t really want that anyway.’ or ‘Who needs that?’ are statements most commonly used by people who didn’t get what they really wanted but aren’t willing to admit it to themselves.
Remember when you wanted to go away with your friends for the weekend and your parents wouldn’t let you? (or a sleepover, a concert, you can substitute just about anything) Did you give up after asking once? If you’re like most teenagers, I bet you came up with a million creative ways of asking. You tried begging, bartering, pleading, threatening. Some of you might have even sneaked out for the night, although you never got the green light to go. The answer no was simply unacceptable. Where did all that creative energy go?
How does that non-relenting teenager become the adult who can’t overcome a simple obstacle? Since when does a lack of degree stop you from achieving your dream job? Or lack of previous experience from trying something new?
Not only do we not try to overcome obstacles as strongly as we used to, we also stop questioning the fundamentals. When I was interviewing for a job during my senior year, my decision came down to two firms: the firm I work for now and a well-known consulting firm. There were many advantages and disadvantages to either, which I won’t go into here, but my decision was easy once I figured out how the consulting firm worked.
The firm had a few pieces of software that were built in-house. Genuine solutions built from client requirements. Most likely built by good coders/designers, but who knows? Since then, the firm had been tweaking and changing bits and pieces of the original code to make it work with any new client’s requirements. They never really took the time to figure out what the client truly wanted, they just listened with an ear towards how they could tweak the current software. I could never work in that firm.
A common occurrence, especially in the ever-evolving and expansive world of technology, is people trying to fit problems into their pre-prepared set of solutions. This consulting firm had an available set of solutions and somehow no client needed a different something new. Since when did we start fitting the problems into the solutions? Since when did we decide repeating what we knew to make us look good was better than expanding onto the unknown? Since when is taking the opportunity to learn something new and to truly listen to the client’s needs a bad idea? When did we become such copouts?
As adults we reach a state where we’ve done something a certain way for so long, that we never ask the original why again. We never go back to the fundamentals and try to see it from a different perspective. We never see it without all the preconceived notions we hold.
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we forget to ask all the important questions.
Previously? Multitasking.
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