For most of my adult life, I’ve been highly analytical and into self analysis. I would, reasonably often, ask myself questions such as
- What am I doing wrong?
- What should I change?
- Why am I not making any progress on this?
Not bad questions. Asking them generally led me to identify ways to improve. Not that I was always good at making the improvements, but at least “they were on my list.”
Then about 10 years or so ago, I read Dr. Phil’s first book, and he suggested that we ask ourselves:
- What’s not working?
I’ve since learned that this is a much better question than the ones I had asked, because it doesn’t assume that I know what the problem is (if you look at my earlier questions, they implicitly assumed I already knew what the key problem area was). Asking myself this question periodically has been very helpful.
Another good question I now ask myself is:
- Is it award winning?
I learned this question from Jason Fried, of 37signals, via his Twitter stream. I think it’s a marvelous question, in that it gets you to thinking about how to make drastic improvements in services and products, not just incremental ones. It is a difficult question to answer, but is a great one.
What questions do you like to ask yourself to spur improvement?
