"Great minds ask great questions."

~ Michael Gelb from How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Everyday

Got a journal? If not, time to get one!

Da Vinci carried his everywhere. So should you.

Jot down your ideas, thoughts, questions, dreams, whatever. As you gain more clarity and creativity, you’ll be glad you did.

[Did you know: In 1994, Bill Gates bought 18 sheets (of the 7,000 existing) from da Vinci’s notes for 30.8 million bucks. Not bad, eh?]

Here’s an incredible exercise for that new journal of yours. It’s called "100 Questions" and goes like this:

Find a comfortable place. Sit down. Write. Make a list of 100 questions you find interesting. Write about whatever’s on your mind. Questions can range from “Why is the sky blue?” and “How can I optimize my health?” to "What are my greatest strengths?” and “What am I most passionate about?”

Odds are that the first few questions will flow and then it will be a little tougher. Fight through the desire to walk away and finish them all in one sitting. Then read through your list and note the themes that emerge. Consider these emerging themes without judging them. Are your questions about Business? Relationships? Self-Growth? Money? The Meaning of Life?

Top 10 Questions.

Once you’ve done that, review your list of 100 questions and choose the 10 that you find most significant. Then rank them in importance from 1 to 10.

The questions I came up with 6 years ago when I first did this exercise have guided my life since. Without exaggeration, this is probably the most powerful exercise I’ve ever done.

So what’re you waiting for?!? Go find some quiet time and start asking those questions! :)

(Extra: I highly recommend the book. In it (along with allllll kinds of other great ideas), Gelb provides a host of other exercises as well as a set of “power questions” including one of the most powerful questions I have ever pondered:

“What if I could find some way to get paid for doing what I love?”

This one simple question has shaped my life more than any other.)

…

[ My questions? On Saturday, June 8^th, 2001, I wrote these ten questions:

1. How do I master myself and control my will/how do I become a warrior? [I was into Way of the Peaceful Warrior at that stage.]

2. What is love? How do I live with agape, philos and eros?

3. What is the optimal life? How do I live this life?

4. What is health? How do I achieve optimal health/energy/power?

5. What is important to me?

6. How can I inspire others to reach their potential and to love life?

7. Who are the 10 greatest wisdom philosophers?

8. Who are the 10 greatest examples of this wisdom in action?

9. What is living in the moment? How do I do that?

10. Why is religion so widespread?

Wow. Just typing those out gave me goosebumps… seeing how much they have influenced my life…

I hope you do the exercise!!! ]

Hi Brian,
I am in the process of doing the exercise myself, and find myself fascinated by the question, what answers has Brian come up with to his question 10?
Most of the others I can see in the website, but not this one.
I have my own set of clues and hypotheses, and I want to know what you have found in the last 6 1/2 years.
Kia kaha
Ted

Oh my!! That’s a great question and one I’m going to have to pause on replying to in-depth till I’ve pushed thru this writing frenzy I’m on right now. (I’m creating 100 summaries of my favorite self-dev books and will be launching a membership club thru the site in April with my first 25!)

What do YOU think is the answer?!!?

-bri

How does Ted answer the question “why is religion so widespread?”?

Many levels to that answer.

Firstly we need to ask the question, what is a human being?

To that I answer:
We are three part beings, and each part has multiple levels.

At the base level, we are each a body, which is the result of roughly 4 billion years of genetic evolution. This body comes with all sorts of levels of response to the environment it finds itself in, and levels of habit formation in feedback with its environment.

Part of that body is the brain, which has two major attributes relevant to this discussion.
One is the ability to learn, to observe pattern, remember the pattern, and the context appropriate for the expression of the pattern, and to repeat that pattern in the appropriate context more or less reliably.
The second is the ability to intuit. The ability to distinguish pattern without actually being shown that distinction by another. (This ability is a side effect of the storage and retrieval of information as an interference pattern.)

What having a brain like that leads to is the next part of being human. We each have a culture. That culture is learned, and for the most part expressed, without any self awareness.
Each of us is born into a culture, and long before we are aware of anything to do with ourselves, we learn many patterns of behaviour, patterns of relationship and language.

Once we learn language, and we learn a distinction of a valuation – like right/wrong or good/bad, then the stage is set for the birth of the third part of being a human being – the self awareness.
Self awareness is a pattern in language. It is self declared, and starts as a result of a failure of being good enough according to the judgment of the brain. Once a brain has a concept like right/wrong, it is only a matter of time and circumstance until the brain finds itself on the wrong side of the equation – ie in some specific situation it declares itself to be bad/wrong.
Being a problem solving machine, to solve that problem (in language) it makes a declaration (in language) of the general form “being x isn’t good enough so I am going to be y”.

That declaration starts a new pattern, in language, in a brain, in a body – that is the birth of a unique self awareness.

But – and this is the kicker, that self-awareness is already in a culture, with a body and habits that it had nothing to with, yet it is now supposed to be responsible for.

That is a problem for a brain – one that it will seek a solution to.

Throughout human history people have sought to understand what they are.
How is it that we understand stuff?
Where does that understanding come from – certainly not from our self awareness, it is the beneficiary, not the creator?
Sometimes understanding comes in words, in what seems like strange voices in our heads, what are those voices?
How did all this amazing and complex life we see about us come to be?
How is it that I have feelings of love and compassion for some, and not others?

My current understanding of the answers to these questions requires many concepts:
Evolution by natural selection – first championed by Charles Darwin, and more recently by Richard Dawkins;
Chemistry, the periodic table, the evolution of elements in stellar nucleosynthesis, inheritance, molecular genetics as championed by Watson and Crick;
Mathematics, particularly Goedle’s Incompleteness theorem, and Games Theory, Theory of Moves, and the concept of Multiple Stable State Equilibria as championed by John Maynard Smith and many others;
Philosophy, with all the greats through the ages, from ancient Greeks and the writers of the old testament, through the intuitions of thinkers like Jesus and Mohamed to the likes of Kant, Bentham, Hume, Mill, through Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Russell, Rand and many more;
Geophysics with its understanding of the physical world around us, including Wegener’s plate tectonics;
Psychology, with its many fads and fallacies, yet with much experimental data to be interpreted.

In the absence of the concepts above, many of which have only been available for half a century, and all of which require much discipline and study, religions fill a range of basic human needs.

Rather than having to learn all the physics and maths above, they explain all that is by simply saying “God made it”.

As human beings, born out of a declaration of meaning, we search for meaning everywhere, even where it isn’t. Having an omnipotent god is a good way of putting meaning in places where it has no business being, but in which our minds want to find it.

We are social animals, and are happiest in groups of up to about 150.
Religions fill a human need for socialisation by bringing people together in groups and bonding them together.

At another level, religions simply evolve as mimetic complexes (associations of ideas, practices and rituals) that work in reality (for all the reasons outlined above, and a few more besides).

At yet another level, religions have been powerful tools for manipulating people, that have been used by ruling classes throughout the ages.

At still another level religions have developed self sustaining bureaucracies; where it is in the best interests of everyone involved to ensure it keeps on keeping on.

Each of the above notions plays some part why religions exists.

I find it highly improbable that there is a God, but that is a whole other discussion.

Just as throughout most of human history most people believed the earth to be flat, and a few have always been able to see the obvious to anyone who climbs a coastal mountain on a clear day (that it is round); so most people, even today, believe in religions.

That is, it seems to be, a brief overview of why religion is so widespread.

Wow. Cool. Heading offline but wanted to let you know I’ll be reading it and appreciate you sharing!