MFM Mini - A Guide to Asking Better Questions

Do you like these mini episodes? Tweet your feedback to Shaan (@ShaanVP) & get more short stories like this on his newsletter www.shaanpuri.com. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:16Shaan Puri?

  All right, I sat down to record this and I asked myself, "What would be amazing, what would be awesome if I was gonna share it with you?" And I decided to pull something out of my secret stash. So, you know, if you go to someone's house, imagine you go to some billionaire's house, you walk through the front door, the gate's open, the butler takes your coat. You walk through, you know, somebody walks by with an hors d'oeuvres platter, you grab it, you like the tuna. You keep walking forward and he says, "Oh, would you like to see my collection?" You say, "My collection?" You don't know what it's gonna be, shoes, watches, cars. He takes you down into the cellar and he shows you the wine collection and starts talking to you about it. "That's what I'm gonna do right now, I'm gonna take you to my collection."

• 0:57Shaan Puri?

  But I don't collect wine, I don't collect watches or cars, I collect questions. And so this podcast is all about some of the great questions from my question stash. I have been keeping a note, you know, a notebook or a notepad of great questions because I have this phrase which is, "Ask a better question, get a better answer." And it's really come true for me in my life. I've been able to connect with people or get to the heart of the issue or find out information that I needed to find out just by asking a slightly different question. It's kind of amazing, just phrasing things differently will have a totally different result. So, I'm gonna go through rapid fire. I'll try to keep this short, so we'll go through rapid fire. If people are interested, we could always talk more about this later.

• 1:42Shaan Puri?

  But I'm gonna go through quickly of some great questions. So let's start with the lighthearted stuff, okay? These are slight improvements when you're talking to other people. So one of the worst questions, that's the most common question, is just, "Oh, hey, how's it going? Hey, how's your day?" Right? And that results in "fine, good," right? And that's it, uh, kind of a dead end question as far as I'm concerned. So I like to frame things a little differently. When I see somebody that I wanna talk to, um, that, you know, we, for a meeting or whatever it is, I'll say something, you know, just a little bit different, it doesn't even matter, like the words don't matter. It's just trying to get to something specific that will get beyond the trap of fine or good. So I might say, "You got a little pep in your step today, you know, what'd you, what'd you have for breakfast?" Or-

• 2:28Shaan Puri?

  You look happy. What were you doing right before this? Right? So somebody could just pop on a zoom and I'll hit them with that. You look happy. What were you doing before this? Oh, actually, I was on a call with blah, blah, blah. Or, oh, I was actually just cooking food. Doesn't matter what it is. I got them talking. It was a genuine question. And they start to open up a little bit more instead of just getting stuck in the cookie cutter, fine and good trap. Okay, what else? If you want to get to know somebody, instead of saying, oh, what do you like to do? And then they'll start to think about like hobbies and just sort of say generically, I like to travel. Oh, I like the movies. Of course, everybody likes the movies. Instead, what I'll do is I'll say, I'll say,

• 3:08Shaan Puri?

  you know, I only ever see you at the office. What's an ideal Friday night for you? What do you like to do? Right? Take me through. I do. You wake up or take me through. Ideal Sunday morning. Right? And then people will start to tell me what they actually do in their life. So instead of thinking, thinking about vague, generic things that they like, they'll recall something specific that they do as a habit. And that'll actually tell you a lot about a person. They like to go hiking every Sunday with their friends or, you know, I always, you know, me and my daughter, we have this teeth brush routine and then we watch the cartoons and I make her pancakes, whatever it is, you'll get something real out of it. Okay, so those are some quick, lighthearted ones. Let's go to work related. Okay, so here's some,

• 3:51Shaan Puri?

  and by the way, each one of these, I have a long list, but I'm just gonna hop between categories. Okay, so work related. I've said this one before on the pod, but one question many bosses and managers ask is they're asking about a timeline for something. I always did this. I worked with engineers. I don't know how long stuff takes to make. Sometimes I thought things would be really complicated and they're like, oh, that's one line of code. And other times I thought things would be simple and they're like, that's six months of refactoring code if you want that. And so I used to always ask, when will we have this done? Right? When will that get done? And people hate getting timelines and there's just a generic like problem with this. Some people will always sandbag. So they'll always say a long time and try to like deliver faster than that. Some people want to make you happy. So they tell you an optimistic timeline, but it always ends up taking longer.

• 4:36Shaan Puri?

  And so these things were so inaccurate. So I heard a better question from Dan Clancy. He's this, he's the chief product officer at Twitch when I was there. And what he would say is, he goes, you know, I know we don't know the exact timeline, but When would you, uh, what, if, if I said that this was going to launch in August or September, what month would you be surprised, oh man, we didn't launch it by then? So he said, when would you be surprised if we didn't have this done? And that was just, that created kind of like the, first it got people's guard down. They weren't being asked for an estimate, um, in a traditional way. The second thing is that they would take that and they would start to, um, kind of like, like, uh, when you would be surprised by it not being out means that's sort of like the bottom bar.

• 5:21Shaan Puri?

  Like it's definitely going to be out by then. Um, and then he would, you know, follow up and say, okay, great. And, uh, you know, so best case scenario, what are you thinking? Right? And he would get a more accurate time range using that rather than just saying, when is this going to be done? So better question, you got a better answer. Uh, some other questions I like to ask in the work context. Sometimes I'll listen to people explain something and it's a really big, heavy plan. And I'll just say, man, all that sounds really hard. What would be easy? And this question annoys people because they're like, oh, if it was easy, I would have told you. But in reality, when you ask them and you ask them, what would be easy? They actually do come up with an answer that's pretty good. Uh, similarly, if somebody says a big plan, like a long, like, we're going to do this and then this, and then this. I'll say, um, oh, okay.

• 6:06Shaan Puri?

  Like, that sounds like a huge plan, like it, what, you know, my brain, I'm not as smart as you. So like, imagine we were all like that. Imagine we all had half the IQ we have today. What would be the dumb, simple plan we would do to make some progress? And I'm trying to get them to think outside the box, think differently because people get stuck in one track thinking and they have blinders on to all the other possibilities. So I'm trying to just break that pattern and get them to see some other possibilities. Uh, some other ones I will ask, um, you know, if I'm leading, if I'm, if I manage somebody and they manage people, I'll say, uh, hey, you don't have to tell me this answer, but it's a good question to ask yourself. Uh, what's a, what's a, what's a conversation you've been avoiding?

• 6:49Shaan Puri?

  We're all avoiding some conversations, whether it's personal or professional. Another one will be, I'll wake up in the morning and I'll think about work and I'll say, "Who needs my help today?" Oftentimes, there's people in the company that are struggling, either personally, professionally, and we kind of put off dealing with it because we don't have to. The fire's not burning yet, the house is not burning down. But you kind of want to address it when it's a little spark before the house burns down. So, "Who needs my help today?" Okay, let's go to self-talk, right? The most important dialogue happens in our head. And so, here's some of the ones that I ask myself on a daily basis. So, this one's work-related. I'll say, "If I could only work two hours today, but I still wanted today to be a huge success, what would I do in those two hours?"

• 7:35Shaan Puri?

  This is a way of cutting through all the BS, all the busy work, the small things that are easy to just eat up our time and just say, "Okay, if I really could only work for two hours today, what would I work on for those two hours?"

• 7:48Shaan Puri?

  Another one, I would say, I've asked this question out loud before. "What would Suli do?" I have a friend, Suli, who I think is just amazing at business. He just has a knack for just finding the fastest path solution for just being like kind of a PhD in common sense. And so, I just step back and say, "What would Suli do?" Or similarly, if I'm talking to somebody else, I'll say, "Sounds like you're stuck and you don't know what to do, but you've always given me great advice. So, what would you advise yourself in this situation? If you were giving advice to yourself, what would you say? If you weren't you?" Or I'll ask them, "Yeah, I know you don't know the answer, but if you did know, if you did know the answer, what would you say?" People, that really fucks people's minds. They don't know what to do with that one.

• 8:32Shaan Puri?

  But it is actually pretty useful as a way to, again, shake their pattern, get them to think differently.

• 8:39Shaan Puri?

  Questions I will ask myself, let's go back to this. "What are my anti-goals? I can often think about what I want, but sometimes it's very useful to think about what I don't want." I learned this from Andrew Wilkinson. He used to talk about anti-goals, meaning, instead of thinking about what's the perfect life and how do I want to make my life better? He thinks about, "What's misery? What do I hate? And let me just avoid misery, right? Invert. And just, instead of thinking about what's the dream, think about, you know, what's, instead of thinking about heaven, think about hell. And then just make sure you avoid that. You end up doing pretty well then.

• 9:12Shaan Puri?

  A question I ask myself, another one I like here, I like this one. Am I playing a stupid game? Naval has this phrase, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Right? If you're at a carnival and you go up to, you know, the little water squirt gun game where you gotta squirt the water in the little hole. And if you could do it the best out of everybody, you know, you win the giant stuffed animal. And then there you are 40 minutes later, you've put $85 into this game and you win and you win the $6 stuffed animal that you could have had to begin with. And it's just a reminder, there are many examples of this. I've done this many, many times. I've worked on dumb startups, worked on dumb ideas, right? I played a stupid game. And if you play a stupid game, you're gonna win a stupid prize. So I try to stop and ask myself, am I playing a stupid game?

• 9:55Shaan Puri?

  An example of a stupid game is trying to win an argument on Twitter or convince somebody to, you know, change their mind when it doesn't really matter. You know, convince people I'm right. That that sort of thing is an example of a stupid game that you can play. Another question to ask, is this the beginning or is this the end? This is great for relationships. You get into breakup, breakups are tough. Is this the beginning or the end? Feels like the end, but it's also the beginning. And you gotta ask yourself, if I treat this like the end, then yeah, I'm gonna feel a certain type of way, right? I'm gonna feel the way you feel at the end. But if I view this as the beginning, I'm gonna feel very differently. So I gotta ask myself, is this the beginning or the end? They happen at the same time.

• 10:38Shaan Puri?

  Similar one, that's a little bit kind of like self-helpy in that vein is, is that the thing or am I the thing? That's just a reminder of where is the power? When a situation is overwhelming you, you're saying, oh, man, I'm making that the thing. No, no, no. I'm the thing. So you make it about yourself. So if somebody else is acting in some way that you find stupid, are you making that? Are you making them the thing or are you the thing? It's about taking back control and being able to own parts that you control and control your own experience that way. Another one for work that I like is if I wasn't already doing this, would I do this? This goes back to my phrase inertia is a bitch.

• 11:21Shaan Puri?

  When you're a lot of times the things that we are doing, we're only doing because we were already doing them. And so it's worth having an honest question. If I wasn't already doing this, would I be doing this? If I wasn't already in this job, would I be in the, would I apply for this job? If I wasn't dating this person, would I ask them out on a date? All right. So, so you want to avoid doing things that you wouldn't do if you weren't already doing them. And I'll leave you with a couple more that I think are fun. I like to ask this for myself and for others, which is like, what's something you're happy to overspend on? Right? We all have things that we're really cost conscious about, really frugal, we penny pinch. We have other things that we're willing to splurge on. So what am I happy to overspend on? Right? I always picked this for me, this was books. I will always buy a book instantaneously, whether I plan to read it or not, whether

• 12:06Shaan Puri?

  I have money or not, I will always buy a book because that's sort of a potential knowledge, a potential life change that I could have for 10 bucks. And socks, socks is another one. I hate fussing with having mismatched socks or not enough socks. So I will overspend on socks. I will buy a hundred of my favorite pair of socks. And then when they're, those are done, I'll just buy a hundred more. I'm happy to overspend. It just gives me joy. And so similarly, it's a way to get to know somebody else. It's a good way to get to know yourself and to get to know somebody else. What are they willing to stupidly overspend on? Even though they know it's maybe not the, the best, most logical solution. Okay. Those were some rapid fire questions from my question stash. I don't know if this is entertaining to you. I don't know if that was helpful to you, but I will publish that on my, my newsletter.

• 12:50Shaan Puri?

  If you, if you subscribe, you'll get the written version of that because those are probably hard to remember. So go to, go to seanpurie.com, just pop your email in there and I'll put it in, I'll put it into the welcome sequence where I put it, just a list, a little question bank of some of my favorite questions. I don't give you all of them. These are precious. I've been hunting these for a long time, but I will give you, you know, whatever 20, 25 of these that I really like. Ask a better question, get a better answer. All right. That's all for me. Hope you enjoy this mini episode. Let me know what you think. Tweet at me or email me. I'm [email protected].

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Hey my first million listeners, this is Steph again from trends.co. Now, most of you probably know Trends as the idea newsletter because that's what we do. We send you business ideas weekly and then we show you how to capitalize on them. But anyone that's run a business before knows that ideas only get you so far. In fact, if you've ever heard of Derek Severs' framework, ideas are worth almost nothing and execution is everything. Great execution can take a brilliant idea from being worth $20 to $20 million. That's exactly why we're investing in making Trends a product for not just idea generators, but operators. And we've built a new feature called Trends Deals. Trends subscribers now get exclusive deals that make it easier and cheaper for them to run their businesses. We launched this month and already have around 100 deals in the pocket, so let me share a few highlights. We've got a Deal of the Month from Send Eats, which is actually a trend success story.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  They raised their Series A at a $17 million valuation and they do e-commerce fulfillment, so they're basically e-comm as a service. They're offering Trends members free storage fees for life, which means thousands of dollars a month saved. We also have one of Sean's very own unicorn's Deal, D-E-E-L. They have a Deal of the Month coming up, but for now, they're letting Trends subscribers manage contractors for three months free and then 20% off and 20% off full-time employee hires. We all know Sam loves a good cold email. One of the best tools I've used is hunter.io, allowing you to source professional email addresses and they're giving you 30% off. We also have Toucan, an investment of Sam's and my own. They are giving six months free of premium. We've got up to $50,000 in segment credits and of course, we have a great HubSpot deal on the way.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  So if you want in on these deals, all you gotta do is go to trends.co/mfm. Trends.co/mfm, we've got a special deal for you, 50 bucks off at trends.co/mfm. You can try all of this out for a buck. We'll see you on the inside.