Focus Your Life With 12 Powerful and Curious Questions

How to strategically change what you notice in the world and live a fuller life.

American Physicist Richard Feynman used to keep 12 of his favorite open-ended questions in the back pocket of his mind. He explains why:

“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

Those questions became his filters for interacting with the rest of the world, almost like an infinite background game that he played as he went through life.

I initially got the inspiration for tracking my 12 favorite problems in the writing course Write of Passage (which I’m taking for the third time).

The problems — phrased as open-ended questions — serve as filters for the otherwise overwhelming information that we consume. They make it easier for us to focus on what’s actually relevant to our creative endeavors in life — and that doesn’t matter if you’re a writer or not.

Here’s why: When we choose to track questions that generate excitement and aliveness for us, we start to see how any life experience might deepen our understanding of one of those questions.

The questions become a powerful tool for focusing our attention on what we truly care about. And as we bring ever-deepening clarity on those questions, we brings a new level of richness to the journey of life.

Use Your Selective Attention to Your Advantage

When we hold a curious question in our awareness, our experience of the world shifts. The question becomes a lens with which we view and interpret everything.

Many of us have heard of the invisible gorilla experiment. Psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conducted an experiment at Harvard University where they asked participants to watch a video and silently count the number of times that the players wearing white pass the basketball around.

At some point in the task, a gorilla strolls through the scene and thumps its chest, staying on screen for a total of nine seconds. But in focusing their attention on the basketball, half of the participants actually miss the gorilla.

Our attention selectively seeks out what we’re looking for and misses a lot of other information.

This is a limitation of human awareness, which we can train ourselves to expand. The upside to this limitation, however, is that we can also intentionally choose where our selective attention goes, so that it supports our quest for aliveness in life.

By investing energy into formulating what 12 questions we’re tracking in life, we can start subconsciously and consciously checking:

Does this current experience create more clarity for one of my questions?

If so, the new information lets us update our internal model of the world and live life differently.

My 12 Curious Questions

For inspiration, these are the 12 open-ended problems that I’m currently keeping in my back pocket, organized by theme. I revisit them around once every six months to make sure they’re still the ones that feel most alive.

Emotional Empowerment and Capacity

• How do I consistently deepen my body and my nervous system's capacity to be with intensity (e.g. tense moments, intense sensations, and intense emotions)?

• How do I expand my capacity to experience joy and pleasure in my body (in day-to-day moments in life as well as in sex)?

• What are the most powerful ways to somatically resolve emotions in the body? And how does our ability to resolve emotions effectively impact our decision-making, our self-acceptance, our enjoyment, our relationships, and other aspects of life?

• How do I tap into and trust my own intuition and own the fullness of my desires? And how do I break through any negative self-talk in the way?

Intimacy and Relationships

• What does it mean for my relationship with my wife to be my biggest spiritual journey in life? What are the implications?

• How do I effectively and lovingly navigate situations when I’m emotionally triggered? How do I accept triggers as opportunities for my own wounds to heal?

• How can we leverage the high levels of energy available in experiences like anger and sex to catalyze personal and relational transformation?

• How do I deepen my mastery of healthy, grounded, and embodied masculine leadership?

• What’s the role of tribe and brotherhood in my life? How do I want to invest in them?

If you’re curious about these relational topics specifically, you can join the Awakened Partnership newsletter where my wife and I focus on these topics.

Life Purpose and Business

• How do I help more people get in deep contact with their emotions and their bodies as a pathway to more fulfillment and aliveness?

• How do I create from joy and enjoy the process of creation increasingly more of the time? How do I write and publish consistently with ease? How do I reduce time and energy spent efforting and trying?

• How do I create a successful (high-impact and high-revenue) business on purposeful work while staying in my zone of genius and joy?

These questions help guide my creative energy, my reading, my reflections, and what I’m building maps and models of in the world.

Which of these questions resonate with you? What would you like to learn more about? Let me know in the comments.