“I’m neither especially clever nor especially gifted. I’m only very, very curious” - Albert Einstein
Asking the questions is probably one of the most useful professional habits I have built up over the last few years. It’s strange because in my 20’s I really and truly thought I either had to know it all, or had to pretend I knew it all. Any question bubbling up in my mind, before it could come out of my mouth, was met with an inner, insecure (LOUD) voice saying “what if you’re expected to already know the answer to that question” or “thats a stupid question you’ll look inexperienced”.
Something has switched. It could be age and experience or it could be that I’ve moved jobs and moved industries enough times to know that I’m not expected to know everything.
This hesitation to ask questions was further knocked out of me when throughout the course of my career, due to a series of circumstances, I found myself no longer in a role I had been hired for. The company needed someone to step in to a product role for a new product being rolled out in a department different to the one I was currently in. I took the role, no questions asked. I had never worked in a similar role, knew nothing about the product, knew nothing about the department, and nothing about the ways of working of agile project management (apart from a paper I read on it once that was basically just a run down of the method). It is possibly, to date, one of the single best career moves I have ever made. It was also one of the toughest. I felt like I was drowning and failing all. of. the. time. My ego not only left the room it flew out a nearby open window and off into the wind and didn’t return for the entirety of that nearly 2 year long project. It’s back now and I wrestle with it daily! All jokes aside - it was tough. How did I navigate it? I bombarded people with questions. Every single day.
“Why can’t it work that way?”, “Why are we doing it this way?”, “Why are you suggesting option a instead of option b” “Why will it take that long, explain the high level steps to me” why why why why why. Did I piss people off? Yes. Every single day. But you’d be surprised how little personal shame you feel when YOU are sitting in a key role in a project delivery, and the project is facing into problems. Arguably there are two approaches, you can sit back and say “meh this is not really my problem” and “what kind of difference can one person really make anyway it has to be a team effort”. Or, you can take responsibility for your corner of things. Roll up your sleeves and get real fucking curious and you will soon see that slowly, slowly, slowly your corner starts to line up edge to edge with other peoples corners. Soon enough, a solid enough foundation can be built, and leveraged, and you will get that project over the line.
This freedom all starts my friends, when you get real curious and you start asking questions and you keep asking questions until you understand something. When I was on that project for the first time in a long time I didn’t care if I pissed people off with questions or how they perceived me for asking these questions. I had one laser focussed goal. That was, within the best of my abilities and within my corner or sphere of influence, get this project over the line.
It’s also, in moments like these, that you should look at the contacts (mentors!) available to you. I reached out to a relative of mine with years of experience in the Product and Project Management space. You’d be surprised how helpful and supportive it can be to have the “am I going crazy” chat with someone who has no skin in the game but who has experience in the game, and can give you a steer, a course correct or some validation. Again, the message is the same here, ask the questions - reach out and ask the questions!
As Einstein much more eloquently put it, “I am neither especially clever nor especially gifted. I’m only very, very curious.”