Questions Are the Answer by Hal Gregersen

Author:Hal Gregersen
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

Quietly waiting for a boat on the Seine.

Quietly waiting for a rogue wave on Boston’s North Shore.9

7

How Do You Channel the Energy?

The people who are able to transform their questions and

ideas into actual accomplishments are the people

who really uplift society.

—MICHAEL HAWLEY

One day in 2002, Rose Marcario, at the time a financial executive working in a private equity firm, was sitting in a limousine, stuck in New York traffic. She had come to town to raise money for a new investment round, and as the limo slowed to a halt she sighed in frustration. Glancing out the window, she saw the problem: it was “this person crossing the street, who obviously had some kind of mental problem. . . . The person was kind of wavering in the street.” Marcario’s own mother had struggled with schizophrenia, so she recognized the signs well enough, but as seconds dragged by, she was losing patience. This person was “making me wait,” she later recalled, and “I had to get somewhere!” A moment later “I saw myself in the window of the car.” Barely recognizing her own tense, irritated face, she asked the driver to pull over and got out of the car. “I walked to Central Park to get near some nature, and I just reflected,” she says. “Is this what I’ve become? Is this what success is?”1

That’s the kind of question that could be catalytic. Everything could change from that moment. But others of us have had moments like it—times when we felt overwhelmed, or glimpsed the possibility of a better us—that didn’t end up changing anything. We got distracted, or realized that change would entail sacrifices and hard work. We let the mood pass. Marcario didn’t. She actually did quit her job. She then spent serious time figuring out what work would align with how she wanted to go through the world. She made a major change, eventually accepting an offer to join Patagonia, a firm committed to sustainability, as its chief financial officer. Within five years she was CEO, the job she still holds today.

What was different for Rose Marcario? The simple answer is that she managed to capitalize on that moment, find the motivation in it, and channel that energy into action. She followed through to the point that new insight was converted to new reality. And only by doing so was she able to realize the potential value of her question.

Asking the right question itself is always critical, whether we’re talking about transformation at a personal level or at the level of an entire society. Lisa Jardine, author of Ingenious Pursuits, a history of the scientific revolution, puts it this way: “Advance in any field has always been preceded by a sudden leap of the imagination, which is recognized for its brilliance by the participating group, and galvanizes them in their turn into further activity.”2 But as the quote implies, the question is only the beginning. It is the key that unlocks an answer, but it usually takes more effort to get to that answer—and still more effort to put the new solution into place.

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