Today is May 7 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is "How often do you ask questions?
Those who navigate the chaos understand the art, importance, and value of asking questions.
Asking questions can help us better understand ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
Learning how to ask questions takes a tremendous amount of time, effort, and practice. Unfortunately, schools seldom teach this important trait.
According to research published by the Right Question Institute, students typically hit their question-asking peak around four years of age.
Once they enter school, however, their question asking dramatically declines. As the adjacent chart illustrates, the percentage of children actively using the skill of asking questions goes on a serious downward trend from four years of age and continues until the late teens.
Actively using the skill of asking questions stimulates thinking, provokes conversation, and inspires action.
Three traits anyone, especially teens could benefit from on a regular basis.
One such example of how questions can stimulate thinking, provoke conversation, and inspire action comes from the 3-year-old daughter of Edwin H. Land in 1943 when she asked her father “why do we have to wait for the picture?” when he used his camera.
Land explained to his daughter that he needed time to process the film in order to produce the photograph. Such an explanation did little to answer his daughter’s question so Land went to work on finding an alternative to the way pictures were developed.
A few years later Land invented the Polaroid camera and revolutionized the history of photography.