Trained To Give the Right Answers To the Wrong Questions

Mountains of Arizona
Sunny 60 Degrees
2:17 p.m.

So what do you do?

When I started in business, I worked to get a good answer to that question. Every week at my good old BNI networking meeting, I’d stand up and tell everyone “what I did.”

I worked pretty hard to get the right answer to that. Too bad it was the wrong question!

It’s funny I focused so much on something no one ever wakes up in the morning caring about.

No one every said, “Jason, no one cares what you do, they only care about WHERE what you do can take them…maybe you should talk about that?”

Same thing with the “elevator speech” we’re all supposed to have. A short and succinct description of what you do with some background info, right?

No one ever said, “Why would you consider surrounding yourself with people who only had 20-30 seconds of attention to offer? Who would want to be around folks like that?”

I spent years pursuing the right answers to the wrong questions.

That led me to a lot of frustration. Even worse, it created this (false) belief that I actually sucked at a lot of this stuff in business.

I didn’t suck, I was just too blind to see that most of what we’re told to do is useless.

I also didn’t have the guts to realize this myself and stand up and say, “I’m outta here!”

This is just how we’re trained. If you don’t undo the training, it runs you forever.

Success in business doesn’t come from getting the right answers. It comes from discovering how to ask the right questions.

That’s a totally different journey.