The Best Piece Of Advice My Father Gave Me At The Age Of 16 For My First Real Trip At Sea

Which I Pass On To My Kids More Than A Decade Earlier

“Don’t be scared to ask questions.”

-Patrick Vandenberghe (2003)-

This is the advice my father gave me the first time I went to sea.

It’s something I took very seriously without much thinking about why exactly and the effects it would have over my lifespan.

Back then I was a kid who wanted to be great among experienced sailors which I don’t want to call polymaths, but for sure many of them were multi-creators, the best in their craft, and later, always became my mentors.

Back then I had no intentions of writing, and although it crossed my mind once in a while, I was shy and afraid to express my true mind.

See it like this

To work at sea you’re required to perform more than one trick. It’s not about the requirement, but more about your self-esteem and performance, at sea, you’re just much better off when you can handle yourself in more than one field.

You’re performing a certain job productive-orientated, next to this you’re also living on that floating house, which we call the vessel.

To get acquainted with the job itself and the production process at sea, you need to give it a bit of time. As a youngster, it might take up to one year before you start to understand what’s going on.

On fishing vessels, for instance, the rhythm is irregular like extremely irregular. Nets are dragged over the ground to catch the fish for about (2–3 hours) and then they are hauled on deck. Once on deck, the nets are emptied and inspected for holes and other sorts of wearing. When the fish are on deck, they are transported on a conveyor belt, and from there the crew cleans them and stows them away in boxes in the ice-hold below decks.

As you might get, the job as a deckhand exists out of multiple sub-jobs, for example:

• The general deck works like operating a winch, rope, and wire handling
• Repairing torn nets and great understanding of how nets or fabricated
• Cleaning of the fish organs in a clean and decent way
• Knowing all kinds of fish and the allowable sizes
• Most efficient stowing methods (ship-specific)
• Anticipating situations (preps of material)

Additional skills that you needed to learn fast were:

Preparing food, cleaning, social skills, navigating and maritime radio communication, learning the different kinds of soil, a bit of physics, the effects of nature and seasons in particular, and projecting yourself in the mind of the fish…

As you understand, that’s quite a bit. Most sailors, before they become very good at what they do need about a decade when committed with curiosity.

Soon, I shifted to the “dredging vessels” and “Submarine Power Cable industry.” There the job demands were different, yet certain skills were taken due to the experience from earlier fishing, together with my ferocious questioning habit.

What I realize today after about 20 years working at sea, is that it got harder to keep my interest level extremely high (it’s hard to float my boat if that makes sense). A couple of years ago I came to the conclusion that my learning rate had dropped, and it didn’t feel good.

My learning rate dropped over the years and I concluded that I also was asking much fewer questions. (about the job that is)

It was time to step up my game again, and by reading the following I got triggered about the importance of that lesson I was given early on.

Some ancient wisdom I’ve just rediscovered by reading the book:

“The Socratic Way Of Questioning”

Sir John Abbott, the 3rd Prime Minister of Canada, is reputed to have told a story about a very wise man who was asked,

‘How do you know so much about everything?’

The wise man replied, ‘By never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions about anything of which I was ignorant.’

This story brings us closer to the real reasons for not asking questions, which are fear, and perhaps shame.

1. Fear and shame cause you to delay your learning process

As a youngster, there are multiple reasons why you might be afraid or ashamed to dare and ask questions.

Not everyone is mentor material, and some adults can be extremely radical or impulsive and unthoughtful in their responses to young workers. Once this happens once for some, or too frequently. Youngsters tend to back off.

Something foolish like this can inhibit years of personal growth in some (I’ve seen this happening).

“It’s important to get programmed with the code of never being scared to ask questions.”

And we all know at what time this programation works best, don’t we?

There are three ways of achieving this:

• Teach this to your kids, in both a verbal and expressive way (let them see it)
• When you know the person with whom you want to share the lesson well enough to know their personality to make it stick (like in my case, father — son, or Mother — daughter.)
• Through hypnosis or self-hypnosis

The latter could be one of the best methods to accelerate someone’s learning process.

2. Your volume of questioning approached with an open mindset enables growth

Most likely you’ve heard about the book: “Mindset” by Carol Dweck.

In this book, you’ll gain deeper insight into what I’m elaborating.

In short, you have people with a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. When you have an open mindset, it means you’re more likely to absorb from your environment in all kinds of ways.

For instance, by asking many questions.

Someone with a fixed mindset is more likely to stay true to their pre-programmed beliefs, from where and whatever source they might have been influenced, unwilling to reprogram themselves with updated beliefs. Good to know is that none of these mindsets are locked. Whenever you want, you can always shift your mindset. But most often you’ll find people with a fixed mindset not willing to do this so fast.

That said,

Questions lead to clarity and often to a wider worldview. A while back, I wrote a post about my hate/love relationship with traveling. There I mentioned briefly that one huge advantage of traveling is the ability to increase mental models, which leads to enhanced mental awareness of your reality. Yet, in a non-visual way, increasing your volume of questions leads to a similar outcome.

The thing is, all of us have a different perception of what reality means for us, the broader your spectrum of mental models the wider your playfield seems to be to rewire

“Any man could if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.”

-Santiago Ramón y Cajal-

Your subconscious mind doesn’t know the truth between what’s real and what isn’t, especially not if you can create an image attached with a great sense of feeling.

Therefore, the answers provided to your questions enable you to time travel into a situation as if it is happening right now.

If you were reading something from me in the past, you know that I’m a firm believer in time traveling. However, the way I see this might not be the first idea that pops up in your mind.

Before you take the joke on me, I don’t think our physical bodies can travel through space easily.

However, when you think more in terms of energy, then time traveling suddenly seems very real. Edgar Cayce said: “Mind is the builder,” Nikola Tesla said: “Think in terms of energy.” Imagination is the key to traveling through space instantly while time appears non-existent. In that sense, you could say that everything is always happening everywhere and now.

To come back, questions and the answers they provide, similar to reading an author’s writings (like you are teleporting in my mind while I write this from the vessel I’m working on.), listening to stories, dreaming,..

All of these aspects create more and more mental models.

In my opinion, the power of questioning is hugely overlooked. It opens a gateway allowing you to travel to places mentally which provides you with the same benefits as if you were traveling physically.

The big difference is that you can do it at a much higher velocity.

Look, your ability to ask decisive questions is extremely important for your learning process and the velocity of how you build experience. In combination with real practical knowledge in any given field, it’s immensely important.

Everything piece of knowledge I was given or that I discovered deriving from reliable sources, I used to the fullest.

Not being scared to ask questions became a deeply rooted habit of mine until some of my mentors had even become sick of me.

To this day, I’m extremely grateful to have been provided with such a valuable lesson from my father, which I only started to rediscover the importance of.

To conclude

Dare to ask questions has compounded throughout my life and I feel that it has contributed to much of the person I’ve become today.

I found that this habit also made me resilient against boredom, because once you increase the volume of asking questions you’ll know that there’s always much more to gain further down the road.

“The habit of questioning unlocks world models at high velocity. It’s an underestimated learning accelerator.”

Some other posts

Absorb, Read, Write, Sleep, Exercise, Thrive!

Thanks for reading this post!

I hope this provided you with something interesting and perhaps triggered your awareness about the importance of questioning too.

P.S.:

I’m a firm believer in building a prosilient mind. I like to inspire and energize my readers by writing.

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