Asking Questions At Work Quotes & Sayings

I admit it. I'd made some mistakes. Okay, some big mistakes. Loads of them. But you can't hide in your room forever feeling sorry for yourself. It's not practical. At some point, you've got to get back out there, face up to things, and confront your demons. Ever since I can remember, I'd wanted to be clever. Some people are born clever, same way some people are born beautiful. I'm not one of those people. I'm going to have to work at it, put in the effort, and if I mess it up, I'll learn from it. Besides, sometimes it's not about knowing the right answer. Sometimes it's about asking the right questions - Starter for 10 — David Nicholls

Two questions help us see why we are unlikely to get what we want by using punishment ... The first question is: What do I want this person to do that's different from what he or she is currently doing? If we ask only this first question, punishment may seem effective because the threat or exercise of punitive force may well influence the person's behavior. However, with the second question, it becomes evident that punishment isn't likely to work: What do I want this person's reasons to be for doing what I'm asking? — Marshall B. Rosenberg

You're not a Black man. You're a human being in God's eyes. So when you sit down to talk to someone and you talk to them in really intelligent terms, you ask difficult questions, there's a militancy that's assigned to you without you asking for it, because you are simply judged by what you look like. If you're a white person asking the same questions, you'd be one of these CNN guys and say how brilliant he is. That doesn't work for you, because this is the world we live in. — James McBride

When people seem angry, sometimes they are simply upset and hurting. Asking the right questions helps them to work through it. — Sam Owen

Nothing has been as instructive in exploring the notion of authenticity as relearning the work of the great philosophers Aristotle and Plato. We are struck by their applicability to our work as we help companies and people develop their brands. Why do these early philosophers have so much to say that is helpful to modern marketers? We believe it is because they were focused on the fundamental issues of authenticity that we all face: Who are we? Why are we? How should we behave? Asking these questions encourages us to deepen our self-awareness. In particular, this issue of "who are we?" is critical. Knowing who we are is the key to elevating our capacities and performance. — Tom Hayes

I think sometimes I get carried away, like I'm speaking to an imaginary audience rather than just trying to figure something out for myself. Ideally, I try to balance that - that I'm asking these questions of myself, how does this work, why does this happen, what's going on here. — David Byrne

Since 1970, I've been using text and ephemera as well as photographs in order to tell stories of one kind or another. There's a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness. The photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them. — Jim Goldberg

The chambermaid, who had been leaving the room, paused at the doorway. "Pardon but 'e's not abed, miss ... er, milady. Lord St. Vincent work Mr. Rohan at first light, and is dragging him to an' from, asking questions and giving 'im lists. Put Mr. Rohan in the devil's own mood, 'e 'as."
"Lord St. Vincent has that effect on people," Evie said dryly. — Lisa Kleypas

Most students have to do some work to resuscitate their childlike curiosity. The best way to do that is to start asking questions again - lots of them. — Hal B. Gregersen

It was a sly trick of God's to give a man work to do - it kept him from asking questions that God couldn't answer. — Martha Ostenso

The golden rule is work fast. As for framing, composition, focus-this is no time to start asking yourself questions: you just have to trust your intuition and the sharpness of your reflexes. — Jacques-Henri Lartigue

Griffin's mother loathed grading papers, too, of course. Who didn't? But she was meticulous about correcting errors, offering style and content suggestions in the margins, asking pointed, often insulting, questions (How long did you work on this?) and then answering them herself (Not long, one hopes, given the result). — Richard Russo

He had a taste for asking complicated questions, and for tracking the answers into whatever rabbit hole they might lead him. He had, in short, an obsessive streak. It wasn't until after he'd hired Schwall away from Bank of America to work for RBC that Brad noticed this side of Schwall. He should have seen it before, simply from Schwall's chosen role on Wall Street: product manager. A product manager, to be any good, had to be obsessive. — Michael Lewis

I won't call my work entertainment. It's exploring. It's asking questions of people, constantly. 'How much do you feel? How much do you know? Are you aware of this? Can you cope with this?' A good movie will ask you questions you don't already know the answers to. Why would I want to make a film about something I already understand? — John Cassavetes

A work of art doesn't need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other people's lives. — Christopher Bram

I turned to the audience and asked, "Have any of you ever been wounded by humanity?" They laughed with me; in that moment, we knew that we were all weird, all in this together, and that addressing our own suffering while learning not to inflict it on others is part of the work we're all here to do. So is love, which comes in so many forms and can be directed at so many things. There are many questions in life worth asking, but perhaps if we're wise we can understand that not every question needs an answer. — Rebecca Solnit

The idea of a government is to create an ordered, willing work force where there's no trouble. I think idlers are generally seen as potentially dangerous because they're asking questions. — Tom Hodgkinson

As I started getting older and started to learn about the world, my friends would tell me about video games and dirt bikes and stuff, and I'd be like, "Oh, I got none of that." I started asking questions, like, "Why we can't get this stuff?" And it was like, "Well, we work hard to make sure da da da ... " — Fetty Wap

Q What makes a question "beautiful"? A beautiful question reframes an issue and forces you to look at it in a different way. It challenges assumptions and is really ambitious. Often, these questions begin with the phrase "How might we..." They have a magnetic quality that makes people want to answer them, to talk about them, to work on them. They make the imagination race. The Polaroid camera came out of a 3-year-old girl's asking, "Why do we have to wait for the picture?" That's a beautiful question. — Anonymous

Artists want to sell their work, sure. But they aren't out there asking questions about what people want and what they don't want, now are they? — Michael Scott

Here are a few patterns you may have seen that indicate the person you're managing is avoiding their next step of growth: covering up or attempting to brush off the severity of a mistake; hoarding data; embedding themselves as a go-to person (aka: bottleneck) by creating a system or process that only they know how to use; resorting to quick fixes instead of asking questions and looking for root causes; asking for more time or resources beyond what was agreed on in order to complete a project, instead of coming to you to talk about what went wrong so you can work together to improve it; letting tension build with a teammate or between departments instead of coming to you for advice on how to handle it. When — Jonathan Raymond

Student-people are different from other people. They spend their entire life asking questions, and as soon as they have found out the answers, they start all over again with new, harder questions... when a student-person finds a good answer to a hard question, the other student-people will gasp, hug each other, and then throw a party. Those parties never last long, for student-people are in a hurry to go back to work and find new answers. — Roberto Trotta

What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal. — Werner Heisenberg

I see all these people talking about acting as a great spiritual thing. It's not. There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do, but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination. — Eddie Marsan

I remember coming on my first set and it being a playground of things I wanted to ask questions about: cameras and lenses and what the lenses do, what's the focus puller doing and how does that work? Why is there less margin for error when there's less light? I was always asking questions and watching directors closely. — Paul Bettany

Asking questions doesn't mean you don't know your job, asking questions means you want to improve the quality of your work. — Robert Allen

Except they kept asking me questions like 'What is your biggest source of conflict about the Pope?' Or 'Has the Pope ever tried to suppress your scientific work?' Completely out of left field!
"They didn't want to hear me tell them how much Pope Benedict supported the Vatican Observatory and its scientific work. So, finally, frustrated that they weren't getting the story they wanted out of me, one of them asked, 'Would you baptize an extraterrestrial?'
"What did you answer?"
"Only if she asks!"
"I love it! How did they react?"
"They all got a good laugh, which is what I intended. And then, the next day, they all ran my joke as if it were a straight story, as if I had made some sort of official Vatican pronouncement about aliens. — Guy Consolmagno

Is it really true... that our aim as historians is in some sense to recapture past reality, "to retrieve the truth about the past?" If so, what do "past reality" and "the truth about the past" mean? How does the historian's understanding of "reality" and "truth" differ - as most surely it does - from that of the direct participant? And what implications does this difference have for what we do as historians? It is not likely that questions of this sort will ever be finally answered. Yet clearly we must keep asking such questions if we are to maintain the highest levels of honesty and self-awareness concerning our work as historians. — Paul A. Cohen

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION How much work did you do today that you will be proud of tomorrow? I don't mean just how you handled the big things, but also how you addressed the little, seemingly insignificant ones. Did you make progress on what matters most to you, or did you allow the buzz, busyness, and expectations of others to squelch your passion and focus? I've been asking these questions of others and myself each day for more than a decade, and they are the main reason I originally felt compelled to write Die Empty. Through my work I've encountered many teams of brilliant, sharp, amazing, talented people who have at some point "settled in" or begun coasting on past success. Unfortunately, — Todd Henry

By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions. — Norman Ralph Augustine

People have to be secure in order to transfer their money to you. Never forget that. How you make them secure is to not come at them from above (action, yang) telling them how marvelous the product is and how marvelous you are. Instead, work on their comfort zone first, keeping silent for the most part, leading things along effortlessly by asking questions (nonaction, yin). When you do get to talk, be sure to tell them that everything is cozy, safe, and secure. People need to hear that. Work on their positive energy, and tell them about the good fortune that is about to descend upon them in these exciting and positive times. Then, and only then, mention the dumb screws. — Stuart Wilde