How To Research Anything And Benefit By It

Let me preface this by saying you can stop deep diving into topics. In order to research more, you have to accept you’ll never be an expert, and most likely, you will never have anyone to pass on your knowledge to. This is because a lot of the things you want to know have no bearing on your lived experiences.

As an example, let’s take a look at the book Oranges by John McPhee. This book proves, once and for all, we don’t know the half of it on anything. If you think you know anything about oranges, think again and read this book. You will learn more about oranges than you thought possible. The history of oranges, the horticulture of oranges, oranges in culture, many uses of oranges, breeds and types of oranges, how pests are managed, how temperature is regulated, why oranges are orange, and on and on.

McPhee is great factual writer who pours one fact after another down your throat. Things you wouldn’t even think of wanting to know he tells you about, and then he tells you more. By the time I was done reading Oranges I realized I knew almost nothing about everything. Literally everything can have a library written about it if you know what questions to ask. Let’s take a look at how to write about anything after a little research.

Ask the Basic Questions First and Then Complicate Them.

Let’s pull an example at random from my desk in front of me: Hand Cream. What basic questions can I ask about hand cream? Let’s brainstorm a few:

When did hand cream get invented?

Where do the ingredients for hand cream come from?

What makes hands dry and how does a hand cream help?

What advances have been made regarding hand creams?

How many hand cream companies are there?

How much money is involved in the hand cream business?

Do different cultures have differing ways they deal with hand cream?

What did people do before hand cream was invented?

If someone invented hand cream, what made them do it? What methods did they use?

What makes one hand cream better than another?

As you may already guess, I could just keep asking questions about hand cream, and if I were to google answers I could make a long blog post about hand cream just by answering all of my own questions. So, how do you complicate your questions?

The first method is to attach a why to the question. Let’s take one of my questions and attach a why: “What advances have been made regarding hand creams, and why?”

Already we can see how the why deepens the initial question’s hole. By asking why we are trying to find out if old hand creams didn’t do the job well enough, or if there were any problems. Also, did new technology or competition bring about an arms race in the hand cream industry? Were more and more ingredients added to hand creams over the years? New processes that created a more effective hand cream? Maybe there haven’t been advances, why not?

Let’s take another question and add a why: “How many hand cream companies are there, and why?”

That’s a doozy. How do you find out why there are as many companies as there are? It seems like a pretty deep question that will unveil all the intricacies in the market economy of skincare. You can keep digging deeper and deeper by finding out who the major players are, what countries they operate in, are there subsidies, tariffs, trade agreements, supply and demand issues, protected industries, patents and intellectual property, regulations, and on and on we go. How complicated is it to start a hand cream business anyway?

How else do you complicate a question? Did you know there are books written about asking questions? It’s obviously a deep topic that could be researched endlessly. There are no bounds to human curiosity after all. So now we need to get more philosophical. I do this by asking the question, what if this thing didn’t exist, then what? What if hand cream was never made? How would that affect society? Would society be any different if people were suffering from dry hands? What if oranges didn’t exist? What if candy didn’t exist? What if tissue paper didn’t exist? What if coffee mugs didn’t exist?

There is no clear answer to a complicated question but it can open up a lot of new thoughts and questions.

All you need to do to research is start asking questions and then tweak your questions with why and what if. Start practicing asking more questions by questioning the things in your immediate surroundings. I have a shirt, it has a tag, on the tag it says how the shirt should be cleaned, how did they figure out different fabrics need to be cleaned differently? What if I don’t clean it the way they want, what would happen? Why? Why is there one right way to clean something, can there be more than one right way? By the end of this line of questioning I may become somewhat knowledgeable about doing my own laundry, and maybe I would start looking at tags on clothes I thought about buying. This could lead to asking about a fabric I notice someone wearing and I can open a conversation with anybody about this topic, leading to who knows what.

Not only can you research anything, and you should practice researching everything you can, no matter how mundane, in fact, the more mundane the better, but you can also take this power and transfer it to interpersonal relations. You can talk about many things and people will see you are interesting and inquisitive and you can open a new conversation with anyone by asking questions about your surroundings. You will get better at asking questions. There is no downside to improving this skill because you can learn how to improve any aspect of your life and work by asking questions and you will get better at researching topics and finding answers.