A Guide to Asking Better Questions - From the Archive

**Barshop** (0:19)
Hey, this is interim producer, Barshop, and I'm gonna be playing y'all an episode from The Archives. This one is one of my all-time favorites. It's Shaan's Guide to Asking Better Questions.
Just tons of gyms in this one, so I'll go ahead and play it, but just to note, I've included a worksheet in the show notes with all the questions Shaan lays out, so feel free to grab that below. All right, enjoy the episode.

**Shaan Puri** (0:46)
All right, I sat down to record this, and I asked myself, what would be amazing? What would be awesome if I was gonna share it with you? And I decided to pull something out of my secret stash. So, you know, if you go to someone's house, imagine you go to some billionaire's house, you walk through the front door, the gates open, the butler takes your coat, you walk through, you know, somebody walks by with an hors d'oeuvres platter, you grab it, you like the tuna, you keep walking forward, and he says, oh, would you like to see my collection? He said, my collection? You don't know what it's gonna be, shoes, watches, cars. He takes you down into the cellar, and he shows you the wine collection, he starts talking to you about it. That's what I'm gonna do right now, I'm gonna take you to my collection, but I don't collect wine, I don't collect watches or cars, I collect questions. And so this podcast is all about some of the great questions from my question stash. I have been keeping a notebook or a notepad of great questions because I have this phrase, which is, ask a better question, get a better answer. And it's really come true for me in my life. I've been able to connect with people or get to the heart of the issue or find out information that I needed to find out just by asking a slightly different question. It's kind of amazing. Just phrasing things differently will have a totally different result. So I'm gonna go through rapid fire.
I'll try to keep this short. So we'll go through rapid fire. If people are interested, we could always talk more about this later, but I'm gonna go through quickly of some great questions. So let's start with the lighthearted stuff, okay? These are slight improvements when you're talking to other people. So one of the worst questions, that's the most common question, is just, oh, hey, how's it going? Hey, how's your day? Right, and that results in fine, good, right? And that's it. Kind of a dead end question as far as I'm concerned. So I like to frame things a little differently. When I see somebody that I wanna talk to, you know, for a meeting or whatever it is, I'll say something, you know, just a little bit different. It doesn't even matter, like the words don't matter. It's just trying to get to something specific that will get beyond the trap of fine or good. So I might say, you got a little pep in your step today. You know, what'd you have for breakfast?
Or, you look happy. What were you doing right before this? Right, so somebody could just pop on a Zoom and I'll hit them with that. You look happy, what were you doing before this?
Oh, actually, I was on a call with blah, blah, blah, blah, or, oh, I was actually just cooking food. Doesn't matter what it is. I got them talking. It was a genuine question. And they start to open up a little bit more instead of just getting stuck in the cookie cutter, fine and good trap. Okay, what else? If you wanna get to know somebody, instead of saying, oh, what do you like to do? And then they'll start to think about like hobbies and just sort of say generic, I like to travel. Oh, I like the movies. Of course, everybody likes the movies.
Instead, what I'll do is I'll say, I only ever see you at the office. What's an ideal Friday night for you? What do you like to do? Take me through. I don't, you wake up or take me through. Ideal Sunday morning.
And then people will start to tell me what they actually do in their life.
So instead of thinking about vague, generic things that they like, they'll recall something specific that they do as a habit. And that'll actually tell you a lot about a person. They like to go hiking every Sunday with their friends or, you know, I always, you know, me and my daughter, we have this teeth brush routine and then we watch the cartoons and I make her pancakes. Whatever it is, you'll get something real out of it. Okay, so those are some quick, lighthearted ones. Let's go to work related. Okay, so here's some, and by the way, each one of these, I have a long list, but I'm just gonna hop between categories. Okay, so work related. I've said this one before on the pod, but one question many bosses and managers ask is they're asking about a timeline for something. I always did this. I worked with engineers. I don't know how long stuff takes to make.