Should the Middle Be Excluded?

I've been watching Seth Godin's Linchpin from pre-launch promotion in January till now, and at the same time watching the topic approvals forum.

One thing Mr. Godin did for the promotion of his book really stuck with me, it was a video in which a lot of odd questions were asked. You can view below if you like.

Riddles for linchpins from Seth Godin on Vimeo.

One thing that struck me (I hope nobody takes offense at this - you know, if anybody is actually reading) is that nobody really seemed to be asking questions. I'm not necessarily excluding myself, though my approval pitch had a couple of implied questions - I'm not sure that's really good enough. Of course, it was approved, and I'm very happy about that. I suspect that the beginning of a research paper is probably a very appropriate place to ask a lot of questions - and if they are either very good questions or profoundly dumb questions, you're doing it right.

I think that statements, including this one, are very seductive in an unhealthy way. They give us the impression we know far more than we actually do. Maybe even that we know everything. I suspect you can easily fall into the habit of skipping the awkward questioning phase, if you think you already know everything. What if your questions are wrong? What if you don't answer your questions correctly? Why is being wrong "bad"? What are the consequences of being wrong in this specific instance? What if someone thinks they're stupid? Is questioning your topic or project too big a risk? If you're questioning it, might someone else suspect that you aren't confident in your work? Would that matter? What if you were "too big to fail?" or this paper would result in an "A" no matter what you did? Would you do anything differently? How and why?

I wonder if we aren't heading towards the world portrayed in Jonathan Lethem's Gun with Occasional Music? In the book, asking questions is a crime. You can see how it progressed from being impolite, to the current state of affairs. Only people with in the state police (called "inquisitors") or those who have a private inquisitors license can ask questions.

I want to look at a couple of places where I could have done better on my pitch.

I will also attempt to interview some of the principals involved in the Craig Shergold incident - Atlanta postal officials, and officers of the Make-A-Wish foundation.

This is from bullet point two of my research methodology. These are the questions I should have provided some kind of answer to or at least acknowledged:

• Why are these interviews important?
• What do you expect they'll be able to tell you that you cannot source on the web or from print sources?

Also:

I believe the average transmitter is male, between thirty-five and fifty-five years of age, has a bachelors degree and is employed in an office environment.

I wonder why I believe that when my anecdotal experience is the opposite? Most of the pieces I've received were from female senders, younger than thirty-five (typically late twenties) and had a high school diploma, or very little college.

I think I know the answer to that last question, but I want to stew on all of them for a bit. So I'll be talking about this more in a future posting. One of my goals in future postings is to practice asking really good and really stupid questions - hopefully avoiding questions that are in the middle of those two goal posts.