Ask better questions to get better answers

A good example... Well, let me start with a bad example of a question. A bad example of a question is, what should I do with my career next? It's just such a poorly formed question because it's really vague, it's not specific. It puts a lot of cognitive load on other people, and the output that you're going to get from it is probably going to be similarly bad. Garbage in, garbage out.

Your brain is so accustomed to having a scarcity mindset as opposed to creating alternative options or seeing a different path. Effectively, there's this notion of, 'How might the opposite be true?' The moment I challenged myself and said, 'How might the opposite be true?' my shoulders dropped. I felt more relaxed. I was like, 'Oh, yeah, I can do both. It will be fine.'

The eigenquestion, the simplest definition of eigenquestion, it's the question that when answered also answers the most subsequent questions.

Ada Chen Rekhi is an executive coach and entrepreneur being interviewed on Lenny's Podcast, a popular product management show.

A curiosity loop is essentially going to a whole bunch of people. In this case, I sent out an email very quickly to about 10 or 11 people and asking them, 'Hey, here are nine topics for Lenny's Podcast. What are two or three of the topics that resonate with you and why?' And I got back such an incredible amount of information for about 20 minutes of work.

A "curiosity loop" is Ada's term for systematically asking multiple people structured questions to gather diverse perspectives on a decision.

One of the big reasons why I think curiosity loops are really useful is that it really fights the fact that there's a lot of bad advice out there. And it's not bad because it's not well-intentioned, but it's bad because it's not contextual.