At work lately I’ve been asking lots of questions only to answer them myself after a few minutes of digging. I decided that if I have the urge to ask a question, before I ask someone else who might know the answer, I’ll do the digging to see if I can find it myself.
Even though it’s nice to have the answers quickly and to lean on others who might know them, I think searching for answers can help the information you find stick as well as lead to a deeper understanding of whatever it is you’re searching for.
Reminds me of when I used to ask my mom how so spell certain words and she would say “look it up.” Meaning, look it up in our Webster’s dictionary. It wasn’t just the physical act of getting up to get the dictionary off the shelf, and pawing through the pages to find what I was looking for. But, I would inevitably learn something about the word aside from the spelling. This would often lead to conversations with my mom about word origins and meanings and associations. We never would have had those conversations had she just given me the answer. She made me dig.
Speed and efficiency are important, but searching for answers and the knowledge and experience that comes with finding them on your own are equally so. Keep digging.
