Don't Ask Stupid Questions vs. High Performer Learning & Humility - E448

· Podcast Episodes English,VC and Angels,Singapore,Mentorship

 

“The key realization here is that I wanted to be a top performer. I aimed to excel in the domains I am good at and consciously decided which areas I would not focus on. I realized that anyone who chooses to be a top performer is not born one. You don't see a baby wake up and say, "Wow, I'm fantastic at VLOOKUP, Excel modeling, and financial calculations." They start as a blank canvas, "tabula rasa," and through learning, they become great CFOs, salespeople, accountants, CEOs, and founders. It's a process where people learn and evolve into top performers over time.” - Jeremy Au

"We had overlooked people’s organic behavior and true journey over the years, which often remains outside of our vision and awareness. Their private story of growing from an amateur to an expert requires humility to understand that you don't know everything and courage to show vulnerability. Many people in the world will see you asking questions and think less of you, making it naturally scary. It’s understandable to be afraid because society does penalize question-askers in some way. That's why I find it crucial to be part of teams where asking questions is the cultural norm." - Jeremy Au

“It's important to set an explicit code of conduct in your team that encourages asking questions. When you join a new job or environment, there's usually a social relaxation period where asking questions is more permissible. Take advantage of this time. Ask as many questions as possible when you start a new job, join a new country, or begin a new project. Even as this social permission fades, continue asking questions of yourself and your team to ensure continuous learning and pushing boundaries.” - Jeremy Au

Jeremy Au reflects on the transformative power of asking questions by sharing his personal career experiences. He reveals how an early experience in the army working for a boss who discouraged questions shaped his initial approach to leadership and masculinity. He had to face a pivotal internship experience where not asking questions nearly derailed his career in order to learn the importance of transforming feedback into growth. Acknowledging what we don't know and being brave to confront social vulnerability is key to eventually reaching high performance.

 

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(01:49) Jeremy Au:

Today, I want to share about the importance of asking questions and how it can make or break your career. Back when I was an intern during my undergraduate years, I was this person that was really working hard to secure that returning offer. I was on a project, I was in a different country, I was working very hard.

And I remember that we had this check-in point, midway with my supervisor to see how I was doing. So there I was on a train, and the supervisor basically said, "Hey, what I've noticed is that you don't ask questions, right? So I realized that you're either a genius or you're dumb. I think I know which one you are."

That was the gist of what he said. I remember being very surprised and shocked because you could read between the lines and basically he was saying like, Hey, I'm not asking questions. Therefore, I'm ignorant and I'm not filling out my brain with knowledge. So they're saying I'm dumb, therefore, I'm not going to do well in this internship because I'm not modeling the behaviors that they want.

And then I'm going to not get this job offer, so my career is going to get derailed and I'm a horrible human being, blah, blah, blah, right? So all this stuff felt like a horrible moment at that point of time. I didn't know what to say. And as a guarded, cautious, conservative person, I told him that I would get back to him and think about his feedback.

When I got to my hotel room, I was thinking about what I was going to do, the memory that really popped up for me actually was a flashback to my experience in the army, which was about five years prior to this university experience.

In other words, I was 23 years old during this internship and I was remembering a memory of my army years. I was an 18-year-old, learning. It's a very tough environment. You're learning about guns and marching and navigation in the jungle and mortar systems and platoon stuff.

So I remember I was reporting to this commander who will remain anonymous. And basically, I would ask questions. And then the person will give this kind of like mildly crazy, but possibly believable answer. And then I would be like in that phase where I was like processing whether it's true or not, I'm not sure. Maybe I'll take it as truth.

Then at the moment of seeing my face when I'm kind of processing this answer, the commander would basically say, "Ah, stupid questions get stupid answers." What that meant was that he felt that my question was dumb, so he gave me a dumb answer that was quasi-believable and upon ingestion, he would reveal the magician's trick and I don't know, pull the, carpet over. So basically he saw my question. He felt like it was a dumb question that he obviously knew the better answer. He fed me a bad answer, and then upon the moment of Jeremy quasi-processing the answer, he would be like a magician and pull the curtains apart and say, "Aha! I gave you the wrong answer and you're a sucker for even trying to ask a question that everybody should know, or you shouldn't even bother asking because of your rank, and I'm basically a superior human being, and I'm educating you that you shouldn't be asking such questions in the future."

It was only at that moment I realized how much that training had kind of like encoded into myself, where basically there was a model of masculinity and leadership where I just didn't ask questions because a smart person who knows everything would know all the answers and therefore wouldn't ask questions. And therefore, your job is to sound smart all the time and therefore not ask questions. That really shook me.

(04:57) Jeremy Au:

And, the next day I had to go back to him and I shared about this experience with him at a high level. And I told him, "Hey, what I'm going to do differently from moving forward is that I'm going to learn how to ask more questions, one. And two, I will be structured." So I wouldn't ask questions in response to his task straight away which was his preferred approach, but that he would tell me what he needed to do. And then I would sit down and process it for 10, 20 minutes, and then I would reply to him with the questions that I had that he could later address and make sure.

And so the kind of questions, of course, that normally people would ask after work deliverables, kind of like, we know when do you need it by? What is the format that you have? Why are we trying to achieve it? When do you need it by? Is there any process of how you would go about doing it? Or any particular resources that you want to point me towards? Those are all the kind of like the standard questions, perhaps, about refining the work product. But of course, other questions are more systematic. Who's the client? What are they trying to achieve? What do we not understand? That was actually the start of a very important phase for me because I would eventually do much better for the second half of my internship. I will secure the returning offer. And this lesson kind of stuck with me for all of the jobs that I've ever been part of.

The key realization here is that first of all, I wanted to be a top performer, I wanted to choose the domains that I am good at, and I want to choose the domains that I'm choosing not to be good at effectively. The second thing I realized is that anybody who chooses to be a top performer is not born a top performer. You don't see a baby wake up in the morning and say, "Wow, I'm fantastic at VLOOKUP and Excel modeling and doing financial calculations." I mean, they don't have that capability because "tabula rasa", blank canvas, they start out that way and then people learn and then they become great CFOs, great salespeople, great accountants, great CEOs, great founders. So people have that process where they learn and become a top performer over time.

So learning is a key differentiator between somebody who starts from zero, who becomes an average performer, below average performer, or a top performer. In order to learn, you have to learn what you know you don't know. There are many things in life that I know that I don't know. For example, right now, I know that I don't know the population of Argentina off the top of my head. I know that I don't know how to bake a cake. I know that I don't know how to juggle. So there are many things in life that all of us know that we don't know, and so we either set it aside because there are other things to do, or as part of a learning journey. For example, when we join a new job, we know we don't know who the boss is. We know we don't know how the benefits work. We know that we don't know how the reimbursement cycle works. So there's that learning journey that's quite easy, relatively, that we acknowledge.

(07:29) Jeremy Au:

The corollary of that is that there's also stuff that we don't know that we don't know. Another way of saying this is that there are unknown unknowns, that things that people have not even have the mindshare to understand that they don't understand. So, everyday that moments where there are things that I never knew I didn't know. These often comes in moments of serendipity or someone who was educating me or meeting somebody interesting who tends to be an expert. And they open up my eyes to a new horizon, a new vertical knowledge that I personally never even knew existed.

Both of these things, learning what you know, you don't know, as well as learning what you don't know that you don't know, requires humility. It requires vulnerability. It requires showing that you don't know something.

The core of this is that we misidentify the form of a top performer versus the organic behavior of a top performer. The form of a top performer is somebody who is at the top of their knowledge domain, and therefore they know a lot. They seem to be teaching, they seem to be sharing their knowledge, and so they don't seem to be asking questions. In fact, they seem to be providing answers. So we want to model and emulate them because we want top performer, so therefore we want to be sharing answers rather than be somebody who asks questions.

However, we had overlooked their organic behavior, their true journey over the years before that happened outside of our vision, outside of awareness, that is in their private story, which is about how they grew from an amateur to an expert. So that requires the humility to understand that you don't understand everything, as well as the courage to show that you're vulnerable. Because there are so many people out there in the world that will see you asking questions and say, you suck. So it's naturally scary. And it's totally understandable to be scared of asking questions because the world does penalize you in some way, socially, for asking questions. That's why I find it personally very important to be part of teams where it is the cultural norm to ask questions. The culture has to actively promote continual learning because the default societal basis is, " I don't want to hear what you're asking. I don't have the energy or effort to answer your questions. Please don't ask questions. Go get stuff done based on my instruction."

So as a junior person, you always want to be part of teams and be reporting the managers that let you ask questions because that's the only way you can grow and therefore get better and more skilled and therefore get promoted over time. If you're not interested in asking questions at a fundamental level, then you're probably in the wrong job. As you rise up the career ladder, it becomes even more important that you choose to model asking questions because as a boss, you tend to know more, but you should still ask questions because it is a role model of behavior for the other members in your team to ask questions.

(09:55) Jeremy Au:

It's important to set explicit code of conduct in your team that is okay and encourage to ask questions. I remember that when I was at Bain, the associate consultants would be called AC1, Associate Consultant 1, for year 1, and AC2 for Associate Consultants in year 2. The joke was that, there was a time when you're an AC zero. In other words, you're a new joiner. That was the best time to ask as many questions that you have, because there was a social permission that during this time period, your job is to learn as much as you can. So when you join a new job, when you join a new environment, there's always that social relaxation where it becomes much more permissible to ask questions. So you should take advantage of it. You should ask as many questions as possible when you start a new job, when you join a new country when you're starting a new project, ask as many questions as you can up front, because that's really important, and even as the social permission starts to tear down in some ways, you should continue to ask questions, and ask those questions of yourself and the team so that you are continually learning and pushing the boundary.

One counterargument is that there is a cost of asking questions. In other words, when you ask questions, somebody out there is having to answer your question, and so they can be time-pressured, they don't want to do it, they get irritated. So again, do you want to bear that cost of asking questions? My answer to that, of course, is that you have to ask questions, but the answers may not necessarily come from a teammate. It could come from other colleagues. It could come from AI. It could come from Google. It could come from books, but it's important to always be asking questions and answering them yourself and not necessarily leveraging individual humans and asking them and nagging them, bugging them, but being socially aware enough that the core of it is that you continue to have the spirit of continually asking questions and continually getting answers from whoever or wherever is easiest and fastest to get it from.

(11:38) Jeremy Au:

In conclusion, asking questions is crucial for personal and professional growth. It's understandable to be afraid, to show your ignorance. Get in touch with your inner courage to step up and ask those questions. Model a spirit of continually asking questions for your team and for yourself. Never penalize somebody else for asking a question. Embrace the power of knowing that you don't know stuff.

On that note, thank you so much for joining today's sharing. Feel free to subscribe to Brave Southeast Asia Tech at www.bravesea.com. Follow us for more insights and discussions.