Loyalty to a Question is the New Specialization
Rally your interests around a core question. Carry it with you everywhere you go.
Big questions pull people and ideas together—across time, space, and culture—like a gravitational field.
The bigger the question, the bigger the gravitational field. A big enough question can pull ideas from nearly every domain of human knowledge into the same conversation.
This gravitational property is what gives an inspiring question the power to reshape our perception over time. A big enough question pulls new parts of the world into your perception. Your perception shapes you.
Anchor Question: A question large enough to pull unrelated ideas toward it like a gravitational field. A question big enough to unite both people and ideas.
It’s not one answer that changes us, it’s the way the presence of the question itself in our mind calls out a million answers throughout our lives in everything we see.
Rilke talks about this idea in his famous Letters to a Young Poet:
“[B]e patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
For those of us who are generalists, lifelong learners, and multi-passionates, having an anchor question in the mind serves as a natural stabilizer for broad curiosity.
In this article, I want to
share how I found my anchor questions
show how anchor questions can improve your life and learning
The Questions are Obvious in Retrospect
If you want to find your anchor question, look for it in the shower.
What do you think about when there’s no pressure and nobody is looking? Can you find an anchor question associated with it?
If there’s a recipe for finding the questions that drive you, it might look like:
Move consciously through the world.
Pay attention to your own thoughts.
Find patterns in your thinking over time.
Attach those patterns consciously to an anchor question in retrospect.
Here are three of my personal anchor questions as examples:
My Anchor Question: How does one fill, invigorate, and rightly apply the mind?
My Work-Related Question: What is the true role of knowledge in decision making?
My Writing-Related Question: How can self-directed curiosity help us live a good life?
The way I came across the core question that drives me was unceremonious. I didn’t even realize it until many years later, in retrospect.
When I was 15, I picked up Descartés’ Discourse on the Method off of the shelf out of sheer boredom. This isn’t a humble brag. I had no business reading it, and I didn’t even finish it at the time.
I found a thought in the first few pages that I’ve carried with me ever since:
“For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it.”
The exact words have left my mind many times, but the general idea remained.
The meaning behind these words wasn’t concrete to 15-year-old me when I read it.
That’s not the point.
The point is that, despite having no business grappling with the ideas, I have vivid memories of reading this passage to adults in my life. I remember holding the book in my hand while talking emphatically about it. I walked around with the idea held loosely it in my mind like a rock tumbler.
This question has wandered with me for over 15 years. It shaped me. It’s changed my perception on countless parts of my lived experience.
I didn’t choose it based on an aptitude test, a strategy, a trend, or an obligation.
I share this as an example because there’s likely already a question sitting in you. It probably got there through a similarly innocuous event. There’s value identifying it and consciously holding it in your mind.
What You Hold In Your Mind Is What You See
If you want a controlled way to practice holding an idea in your mind and watching the world reconfigure around it, watch the movie Paterson with Adam Driver.
It’s a quiet movie about a bus driver who writes poetry in a little notebook as he goes about his day.
What’s fascinating about this movie is that the subject of whatever poem he happens to be quietly writing shows up in subtle and unrelated ways in the background of the movie. Everywhere. They’re so subtle that you might not even notice them if you aren’t holding the poem he’s writing in your mind as you’re watching it.
The subjects of the poems always seem random at first, like when he chooses to write about Ohio Blue Tip Matches after seeing the box during his breakfast. Throughout his day he begins seeing literal “matches”—like twins, or matching home decor. He hears a poem from a young girl called Water Falls and later sits by a waterfall and remembers the poem.
The point of the movie, if there is one, is that holding an idea in your mind highlights connections to that idea in the world around you.
Holding details or questions in your mind makes the world come alive around you.
Another example is found in the book On Looking by cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz. In the book, she takes 11 laps around the same city block with different people ranging from a physicist to a child.
She points out that we miss probably 80% of what’s going on around us, simply because we aren’t paying attention to something that would flag it as important to our brain.
Holding a question in your mind as you move through the world is a walking meditation. It brings certain aspects of the environment into focus.
A new question invites otherwise trivial details in our world into a tapestry of meaning.
Stop Planning. Let It Emerge.
The modern world is obsessed with syllabi. We’re told what to know, what not to know, which sections to read, and which books to skip.
The assembly-line of formal education makes wandering intellectually feel wrong at first.
Pull my string and I’ll talk for two hours about how this is ruining the joy of learning for the world.
But here’s the twist: you can put down that thinking without anyone’s permission.
Tear up the syllabus and let a path emerge beneath your feet.
Most won’t. There’s an abundance of pre-laid paths that are much less fuss (and much less fun).
If the anchor question is what draws ideas to your core, the next step is to walk with it in mind.
Identify interests and tie them to parts of myself.
Use proportional time investment to lay the path: an hour to test if it’s worth a day, a day to test if it’s worth a week.
Set constraints to steer the direction
Focus on a mode of operating rather than a fixed destination
Conclusion
We’re used to looking in prescribed places for answers.
Throw out the right places. Search quietly, lightly, softly, everywhere you go.
Be loyal to the question. Know that holding the big question will change you more than finding an answer.
What’s your anchor question? I’ll attempt to share a personal connection to a film, poem, book, or other resource for everyone who comments below.
Such a good thought experiment. I think for me the anchor question is: Is this loving and life giving? And maybe tangent to it for me as well is : Is this something that inspires me to be more loving in a lifegiving way? This has helped me to identify so many nuanced
moments that bring joy and foster the better parts of myself. This also helps me to remember that I get to choose how I spend my time and who I choose to be with, then the moments of being and doing become profoundly more joyful… even if it seems to be everyday ordinary things. Some of life’s most powerful moments happen for me in the ordinary spaces in between.