The one act that differentiates the top 1% in any sphere of work from the rest and is the defining common trait that connects the best performers from nearly every walk of life is the singular ability to ask sharp, incisive and penetrating questions.

Mathematicians. Philosophers. Artists. Scientists. Journalists. If you or someone you know is working at the bleeding edge of a subject, one can reasonably surmise that the ability to ask better questions than others is moot to them being who they are.

To be sure, the very act of thinking gets triggered only when you ask a question of yourself, albeit sub-consciously. And, if the quality of your life is a direct function of the quality of your thinking, it follows that the quality of your thinking is a result of the quality of your questions.

The best questions function in much the same manner as the most refined search queries on Google. You get quick, to the point and devastatingly deep results.

Like most other things that are obvious, we don’t talk or think enough about questions, because well, what can be so game-changing about something we use dozens of times a day. Plus, it goes against everything we learn in school, at work and in life where the rewards and halo are reserved for the quality of our answers.

Several cultures foster a ‘solution’ mindset and the giver of answers invariably has a pedestal for the taking. The focus on finding and getting motherhood and apple pie answers obscures the importance of asking the right questions.

And yet, it is by the prosaic task of asking questions that you crack open a seemingly intractable issue, gain a newer insight about an inscrutable phenomenon, see a hitherto unseen dimension of a relationship and get to the heart of the matter in general.

The easiest way to be taken seriously is to ask a thoughtful question.

For instance, most people excessively self-promote during job interviews. Worse, many of us increasingly consider all conversations as job interviews and focus on selling themselves, their ideas and opinions. In the process, we forget to ask questions — about the interviewer, the organization, the nature of work — that would at once engage the interviewer, build rapport, signal competence and also help understand the role on offer.

Even socially, the surest way to befriend someone is not by volunteering all information about yourself but by soliciting inputs from others — by asking questions.

Questions routinely help clarify our own thinking, challenge assumptions in a non-confrontational manner, understand and account for all sides of the story, promote use of evidence in arguments and actively elicit alternate perspectives.

Most importantly, it is only by asking questions that we go from what we know to what we don’t know. The inner kaleidoscope gets activated. The acts of uncovering, unraveling and unpacking that which is yet unknown begins with the act of asking questions.

Elsewhere, a big part of succeeding at anything involves knowing what other people know and having first hand access to it. The knowledge that resides in people’s heads can be tapped and accessed only with asking the right questions.

We see this everyday. Good interviews are as much about the person being interviewed or the answers as they are about the quality of the questions being posed.

People who ask questions have more self-confidence. Where a nonthreatening environment for questions is a daily reality, people become ever more comfortable with themselves, expedite learnability, know their strengths better, and are more self-assured.

In my own experience of public speaking and facilitating, I see the magical power of questions nearly every day. The most effective leaders I know lead more by asking inspiring, higher order questions than having answers. Instead of answers that tell people what they ‘should’ do, the questions open up a wellspring of things that they ‘could’ do.

Through questions, leaders seek to learn not only what directly causes the problem or what solutions may work (which is single-loop learning), but also to seek to discover and learn what might be the underlying causes and solutions (double-loop learning) as well as the culture and mindset that create these causes and solutions (triple-loop learning).

In asking higher order questions, we learn that there is no such thing as the right answers; there is only perspective.

People have conversations to accomplish some combination of two major goals: information exchange (learning) and impression management (liking).

What we don’t grasp often enough is that the act of asking questions not only unlocks learning but also improves interpersonal bonding.

Great questions lead to deep conversations and increase the level of amity between the conversationalists. They expose — and help neutralize — our biases and surface our beliefs.

Sustained personal engagement and motivation — in our lives as well as our work — require that we are always mindful of the transformative joy of asking and answering questions.

Start ending more sentences with a question mark and fewer sentences with a full stop and you watch the magic flow.

No matter what you do, it is by asking questions that you differentiate an opportunity that needs to be seized from an urge or a temptation that must be resisted.

At a time when artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data is making the computer get exponentially better at answering questions, what we never more than ever before are human beings who can ask better questions.