The Auctioneer-the official blog of Auction.ph

One of the books I really struggled with was Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. About eight years ago, when my reading diet insisted mainly on pulp fiction, a colleague blurted the title during what had to be a profound discussion. Eight years ago I asked, “isn’t that the movie with Meryl Streep?”

I can only remember bits and pieces from the book but I remember jotting down notes, especially when I chance upon gems from noted philosophers. And one other thing I remember, albeit vaguely, is the bunny metaphor that guy in the silly hat said. It was something about how as children we live on the ends of the bunny fur with the wonder of the entire universe spread out before our eyes but as we grow older, we slide to the bottom and all we get to see is fur. With nothing much to see, our inquisitive drive gets dampened.

In this day and age, when information is stored, shared and exchanged in elephantine volumes and in lightning fast speeds, innate inquisitiveness becomes more valuable than ever before. Now more than ever, we have to scurry back up the bunny hairs and look at the digital cosmos with child-like wonder. What I’m really trying to say without waxing poetic is, we have got to keep asking questions.

When I was in college, I hated doing research because it only works when resources are available. Most of the time, resources were scant. That Dewey Decimal System is rendered useless when there are only two book cases in the library. I still tend to do a lot of research nowadays but the main difference is that now, I am actually enjoying it.

There’s an infinite amount of information floating around cyberspace I get aroused just thinking about it and it’s out there, just waiting to be tapped. All you have to do is ask. Just plug in the right search query and boundless knowledge will unravel right in front of you in seconds.

But yes, you do have to ask the right questions and the only way to get better at it is to keep asking. You keep asking until you get the results that you are searching for. In the information age, the ability to ask the right questions is knowing.

Asking questions, however, is only one third of the framework. In the Internet age, where mass collaboration propagates new information and new ideas, a flipside is also inevitable—mass mediocrity. The worldwide web’s extreme liberalism has allowed bad information to flourish with the good. So the second third of knowing is knowing how to filter the good from the mediocre. And how do you sort them out? You sort them out by asking more questions. You have to verify the source and research for background and testaments of credibility.

This third part is merely an extension but an important one nonetheless. The last part to knowing is knowing how to make connections. In the “World Is Flat”, Thomas Friedman pointed out that in a flat world when jobs are being outsourced to the most obscure edges of the flattened globe, individuals become “untouchable” (or indispensable to an organization) when they can hone their abilities to make connections. In the book, Thomas Friedman calls these people Great Synthesizers. They have the ability to synthesize seemingly disparate concepts to solve unique problems.

This type of synthesis is happening all around us. For instance, leaders of multi-level organizations can now seek wisdom and strategy by studying the behavior of worker ants. It’s not as far-fetched as one might assume. When you think about it, we have been making these types of connections for the longest time but because of the Internet, we now have more access to more data and it should allow us to zero-in on the concepts that have striking parallels to our various lines of experience.

Bottom line, there is no better time than now to start asking questions. So shoot.