You should all be asking way more questions

When someone is explaining something to me, I ask on average one question every thirty seconds. I’m sure this is frustrating to some people, but it’s actually a good habit and you should do it too. Trying to understand Most of the questions I ask are very short, and require very short answers. Typically I’m asking for confirmation: “so when you say X, you mean Y?”, or “this X is the thing you mentioned earlier when you were saying Z?“. The point of these questions is to make sure I understand. A small misunderstanding early on balloons into a big misunderstanding later, because all the things you misinterpret based on the first misunderstanding will become misunderstandings in their own right, and so on. That’s why you can’t just wait until someone’s finished talking and ask all your questions at once1. I think most people don’t ask questions because they’re not really trying to understand: they’re happy to just trust that the person they’re talking to knows what’s going on. This goes…