Being successful often means asking the right questions. It doesn’t mean having the answers or even having answers at all.

Asking the right questions helps refine hypotheses, leads to new avenues of inquiry, and expands perspective. People have a tendency to get too caught up in having answers, and of course they believe their answers are correct. Human nature drives us to confirm our beliefs and makes us unconsciously avoid information that contradicts those beliefs. In my experience, it’s when I say “I don’t know” that I seem to learn the most.

If we all spent a greater proportion of our time studying the problem, conceptualizing the problem, investigating and questioning and manipulating the problem, then we’d be getting somewhere. As we acquire more answers, we stuff more knowledge into faulty, compartmentalized notions of understanding and we lead ourselves astray. If one takes a look at the financial crisis that began in 2008 and sent markets worldwide into varying states of recession, it is easy to see how, after the fact, systemic risk underpinned the unraveling of global markets and resulted in the expeditious retraction of credit.

Had risk analysts and economists and investment bankers and Wall Street quants been asking the right questions about risk, specifically system risk, the efficacy of financial models to disperse and innervate a society-wide confirmation bias on the trajectory of markets could have been attenuated. But even if the magnitude of the issue was known, with everyone making so much money I’m not sure if it would have made much of a difference.

Image courtesy http://www.getentrepreneurial.com

What is easy is rarely worth it, and what is worth it is never easy. I hear people my age complain about how someone else got a lucky break and is undeserving of their success or someone knew the right people or was born into prodigious circumstances and never had to work.

People underestimate the worth of failure. Experiencing failure – when what you take for granted and what you believe to always be there collapses upon itself – is what ultimately crafts our future. It hardens us and steadies us for the challenges that lie ahead.

The most successful athletes and performers never internalize their failure. They blame the refs or the venue – always an environmental factor – and never themselves. I think most of us would presume that they would blame themselves, thinking about how they needed to practice more or hadn’t studied their opponent well enough, but that’s not the case at all. I think many of us would also assume that this deference of blame is unhealthy egotism, but is it?

Not really. When it’s your job to perform at an elite level, where the difference between success and failure is so narrow and you’re expected to perform at that same level every single day, there is no time to question and no time to ponder. Put simply, neither elite level athletes nor the average person gain anything by dwelling on negative outcomes.

Shifting responsibility provides closure and the necessary clarity to focus on what’s important: the next step.

We will always encounter adversity. It’s how we handle that adversity that shapes our character. And what’s worth doing often incurs a great deal of risk that, while manageable, tends to arouse nervousness and anxiety and fear. It’s that anxiety and fear that tells us we are doing the right thing. I know some people who live by the motto “why try at anything that isn’t a guaranteed success?”

Because whatever that thing is will be a hollow substitute for truly living.