Everything starts with a question.

ask is my personal collection of questions worth carrying around. I started it in 2008, and it has grown into so much more than I could have imagined. An interview series, a dinner series, and a personal obsession with better understanding what I don't know, what I can't see, what I'm not asking. That led me to build the Question Genome Project. To dig deeper and try to better connect how questions lead to more questions.

It is not an answer engine, a productivity newsletter, or a social feed. It is a growing collection of questions that open up another question.

Throughout my life, a few questions I had never heard before changed everything that came after. They helped me see something I could not see, name something I was not ready to name, or find the question underneath the one I thought I was asking.

The purpose is not merely to ask “better” questions. It is to notice the hidden ones: the question underneath the question, the question we cannot yet see, or the one we are not yet ready to hear.

Underneath this collection, I’m beginning to map how questions work: what they touch, where they come from, what kind of movement they create, and which question they might lead to next. I think of it as the Question Genome Project—not an attempt to find the right answer, but a way to understand the deeper structure of a good question.

“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question, you have to want to know, in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.”

Clay Christensen

I’ve found that when I cannot find an answer, I need to change the question. Answers are actually easy if I’m asking the right question.

I hope these questions can help you the way they have helped me.

Everything starts with a question. Where should we begin?