Can Talent Alone Lead us to be Successful?
QFT utilization to boost our critical thinking skills.
We all dream of being successful, but what does it mean?
I realized that there's no right or wrong answer to the meaning of the word "successful" or "success."
We can define it based on our knowledge about success.
But it is still essential for us to understand what "successful" is. And what should we do to be "successful"? Is talent enough to achieve "success"? Or maybe it is just a matter of coincidences and good luck?
Armed with these questions, I began to use the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) that I recently learned at Generasi GIGIH 2.0 by Yayasan Anak Bangsa Bisa & GoTo. In this program, we are learning about hard skills and soft skills. The recent topic that I learned in this program is Critical Thinking.
Before we deep dive into the first topic, we need to break down the meaning of critical thinking first.
So, what is critical thinking?
According to a statement by Michael Scriven & Richard Paul presented at the 8th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking and Education Reform, Summer 1987. Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
And one of the techniques that can help us improve our ability to think critically is the Question Formulation Technique (QFT).
If you are not familiar with this technique, you might be questioning what the QFT– Question Formulation Technique means?
Developed by the Right Question Institute, the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) is a simple step-by-step, rigorous process that facilitates you to ask many questions. Basically, QFT builds you the skill of asking questions, and I believe the ability to ask questions is one of the core components to improve our critical thinking skills.
Before we do the QFT, we need to know some key components, including the process steps to build our QFT correctly.
1 | A Question Focus (QFocus)
QFocus is a clear and provokes topic, image, phrase, or situation that will serve as the "focus" that can stimulate us for generating questions.
QFocus shouldn't be a question, ya!
2 | The Rules for Producing Questions
There are four rules for producing questions, which are:
- Ask as many questions as you can.
- Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer the questions.
- Write down every stated question.
- Statements or sentence fragments and other cognitive snippets are fine– change any of these into questions at the end.
The rules can be challenging to follow at times, but the goal of these rules as we work on producing questions is to create awareness of the main "focus" we will analyze.
3 | Producing the Questions
In this part of the process, we will formulate many questions following the four rules above based on the QFocus– topic, image, phrase, or situation presented without worrying about the quality of your questions.
Being confident is the key!
4 | Improving the Questions
The next step is to categorize long-list questions into two different types: closed-ended questions– questions that can be answered with a "yes" or "no" or with one word — and open-ended questions– questions that require an explanation.
Besides categorizing the questions list, we also need to check the questions' clarity, precision, and relevance to the topic.
It will take time, but if it can help us improve our critical thinking skills, why not?
5 | Prioritizing The Top 3 Questions
You will now choose three questions based on the actions you want to take. For example, three most important questions, three questions you would like to address first, three questions you want to explore further, etc.
6 | Making a Plan Based on the Questions
After you have completed choosing your three prioritized questions, the next step is you need to make an action plan for your selected questions. For example, you may use the questions to research, develop a project, use questions as a guide, etc.
7 | Reflecting on the QFT Journey
Yay, for this last part of the process, you "just" need to reflect on the QFT you have done and analyze the new insight and value you get from those not-so-long processes.
Disclaimer: All the credits of these materials go to Generasi GIGIH 2.0 by YABB & GoTo team!
I hope you already understand what QFT is and have an urge to try that in your daily discussions with others! I would appreciate it a lot if you could share your experience with QFT in the comments below :D
Back to our main focus, we will apply the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) to discuss the understanding of the word "success."
To make our QFT clear and organized, I will use the same sequence I wrote above to make our QFT clear and organized. But, before we make our QFT, I will use one simple yet an interesting statement that can be our QFocus in this section, which is,
“Success is only for talented people.”
I got this statement from the Generasi GIGIH program. The reason I found this interesting is because we can break it down into many layers of questions that can stimulate us to think critically.
Being successful is the desire for all of us residing in this world of endless possibilities and fast changes. It does not matter whether the concerned person is a child, youth, or the old aged, at each stage of our wide life span. Our inbuilt desire is to be successful and consistently proceed towards more massive success.
But what is it? What is success?
Merriam-Webster defines success as a "favorable or desired outcome." It can also be the "attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence."
Success also can be defined as simple as a sense of satisfaction at the end of each day. There are multiple definitions these days, but there's no right or wrong answer to define success, as I said before.
Are some people born to be successful?
I can honestly say that I have never believed that success is given to us because we need to fight for it. There are several stories of successful people all over the world, and they mostly have previously faced severe failures in their life's struggles. Yet, they continued on their ways to success and finally achieved massive success in their fields of expertise.
So, what is the key to achieving success? Is passion, grit, talent one of the keys?
Believe it or not, although success may look different for everyone, there is a typical list of strategies or keys to achieving that success. And one of the keys that can lead us to achieve great success is belief. Depending on what we're doing, belief may be optional. But even then, belief makes life much easier because we can positively believe in our potential and endeavor.
Doesn't passion also a key to success?
This question might be one of the questions that popped out of your head when I stated belief is the key to success.
Yes, other than belief, a bounty of passion is also one of the keys to success. People with this "fire within" sustain an abundance of the initiative. The initiative does not come easily to most people, and we can say this trait is somewhat rare for most of us.
The initiative is the first step to achieving goals, opening doors that otherwise would remain closed, and often is the deciding factor between failure, mediocrity, and overwhelming success. So, improving our initiative can also be one of the keys to reaching a great achievement.
PS: There are still many kinds of keys to achieving your success.
Are some people simply born with talent?
Athletes, painters, potters, storytellers, and dancers are examples of talented people. But are they "naturally-born" with talent or "nurturing" through practice?
Personally, I consider the second option more logical than the first one because talented people are always making an extra effort to develop their talent through practice. We can say that they are always spending more than 80% of their time with practice.
Is talent enough for getting success?
I can say that talent is not enough to achieve success because there are millions of talented people around the world, but there are also millions of people who waste their talent. This fact means that talent does not always translate to success. Successful people have many other vital components that help them achieve their goals.
And much much more questions that we can produce on this topic, but I will stop with these questions so that we can jump to another step of QFT.
We need to categorize our questions into two categories for this part of the process. But before we do that, I will list the questions first so that we can see clearly what kind of questions they are.
As we can see above, all the questions are open-ended questions that require an explanation.
Even if you think that all the questions above are important enough to use as the main questions, we still need to prioritize the first three questions that we feel are most important.
I will take these three questions that we can see in the picture below.
I choose those three questions because I think these questions can cover all my curiosity that I want to explore further.
But, I am open to any suggestions from you guys for this part of the process, so don't hesitate to prioritize your own questions!
Based on those selected questions, I will use them as a guide to making my conclusion about the statement "Success is only for talented people."
All the information about those three questions is already mentioned in the first step of the process, so I hope you can scroll up a little bit to get further details on those three questions. Hopefully, that information can give you new insight and perspective about "success" and "talent."
After this long process, we are finally in the last stage of making our QFT.
Yas! It's time for us to reflect on what we have learned so far and the conclusions about our main statement.
I bet you are already excited because, after this, we are ready to tell everyone that we have finished our not-so-easy QFT!
So, what have we learned so far?
We have learned so much about QFT, which stands for Question Formulation Technique, with their five sequences of the process: producing, improving, prioritizing the questions, making a plan based on the questions, and reflecting on the QFT journey.
Honestly, I can say it is not easy to make QFT. Yet, I take this opportunity as another challenge to unlock a new set of skills in critical thinking. And I also can say that QFT stimulates me to think about even the tiniest details of the statement.
And how about the conclusion of the statement "Success is only for talented people"?
Few of you might have already noticed my final decision on that statement because I show it in the producing the questions step whether I agree or disagree with the statement.
I can say that I can't entirely agree with the statement "Success is only for talented people" because I am one of those people who believe that successful people have many other skills that help them achieve their goals. But to work on talents, we have to discover them first.
I can conclude this long blog with the conclusion above, and hopefully, you get a new insight into critical thinking, especially QFT.
Last but not least, thank you, Generasi GIGIH 2.0 by YABB & GoTo teams, for giving me this opportunity to learn more about critical thinking!
Cheers up for another journey as #SiGIGIH!
