I’ve spent enough time around kids to know one thing for certain – they never stop asking questions.

Why is the sky blue? Why do we have to sleep? Why can’t I eat ice cream for breakfast? They poke, prod, and test the world, not looking for final answers but for a way to understand what’s in front of them. And somewhere along the way, we train that instinct out of them.

School does it first. From the moment kids step into a classroom, the message is clear: answers matter more than questions. Tests don’t ask them to explore possibilities; they ask them to circle the right letter. Assignments don’t reward curiosity; they reward a well-structured conclusion. The system isn’t built to nurture the kind of thinking that changes the world – it’s built to measure how well kids can fit into the one that already exists.

And it’s not just schools. Workplaces do it too. So does society. We celebrate people who sound certain, who deliver confident opinions, who have polished, ready-made responses. We rarely pause to ask whether those answers are the right ones – or whether we’re even asking the right questions to begin with.

But life doesn’t operate on a multiple-choice system. The world isn’t waiting for the person with the best memorized response. It’s waiting for the one who sees the problem no one else has noticed yet.

The most interesting people I’ve met, the ones who build, lead, and create, aren’t obsessed with knowing all the answers. They’re obsessed with the right questions. They don’t ask, What’s the best decision? They ask, What are we missing? They don’t say, This is how it’s done. They ask, What if we tried something else? Some of the best moments in my own career haven’t come from confidently stating what I know, but from sitting in uncertainty long enough to see something others didn’t.

I think about this a lot when it comes to education. If we know that the ability to ask great questions is more valuable than the ability to memorize answers, why do we keep designing schools around the latter? Why do we treat curiosity as something that needs to be managed instead of something that should be amplified? What if tests didn’t measure how well students could recall facts, but how well they could frame meaningful problems? What if we rewarded intellectual humility – the ability to recognize when you don’t know and keep searching – instead of just rewarding certainty?

Of course, this isn’t easy. Answers fit neatly into report cards and performance reviews. Questions don’t. Schools need ways to measure progress, businesses need efficiency, and society prefers confidence over ambiguity. But if we want to raise a generation that can solve the problems we haven’t even thought of yet, we need to shift our priorities.

Because the world doesn’t need more people with perfect answers. It needs more people who know what to ask next.