👋 Hola dumdums,

Ever notice how the most disruptive question in human history is just three letters long?

"Why?"

It's the verbal equivalent of a skeleton key – tiny enough to fit in a toddler's vocabulary, powerful enough to unlock billion-dollar industries. Consider the evidence:

🏭 Toyota turned this one-syllable wrecking ball into a corporate philosophy with their "5 Whys" technique. When something went wrong on their production line, they'd ask "why?" five times to get to the root cause of the problem. This approach helped build their reputation for quality and contributed to making them one of the world's most valuable automakers.

🚀 SpaceX asked a deceptively simple question: "Why are rockets so expensive?" The answer led them to question the practice of treating rockets as disposable, eventually developing reusable rockets that dramatically reduced launch costs.

👶 And let's not forget the true masters of the craft: actual three-year-olds, who can dismantle your entire belief system with the precision of a philosophy professor on espresso. ("But why do you go to work?" can quickly escalate into an existential crisis over modern capitalism.)

The Art of Asking "Why?" Until Things Get Weird

Picture two people fixated on questions that sound ridiculous until they don’t: a chef wondering, "Why do we separate taste from sound?" and a designer puzzling over, "Why do users ignore perfectly good features?"

Take Heston Blumenthal, the chef who turned "why" into a science experiment. He partnered with Oxford University's Crossmodal Research Laboratory to investigate how sound influences taste. The result? His famous Sound of the Sea dish at The Fat Duck—a plate of seafood paired with a conch shell hiding an iPod playing ocean sounds. It’s not a gimmick. Research showed that maritime sounds enhance perceptions of saltiness and freshness. The dish is more than food; it’s science you can eat, a sensory breakthrough born from an absurd-sounding question.

Now contrast that with Margaret Gould Stewart, who asked "why" in a completely different way. As Facebook’s VP of Product Design, she noticed users bypassing carefully built features and inventing their own workarounds. Instead of accepting this as bad user behavior, she kept asking: "Why aren’t they using the tools we gave them?" Her insights were game-changing: users weren’t treating Facebook as just a website but as a space—a digital extension of the social environments they inhabit in real life. This realization helped her team rethink the platform, creating tools that felt intuitive within these unspoken "social rules."

These are two very different "whys": one asks why things haven't gone together before, the other asks why behavior doesn't match expectations. Yet both lead to breakthroughs. Blumenthal redefined fine dining by breaking down the boundaries between senses, while Stewart transformed digital interaction by understanding online spaces as human spaces.

The real lesson isn’t just to play the "why" game until you get an answer. It’s about cultivating the courage to keep asking "why" long after it feels silly or uncomfortable. Be the toddler in the room—the one who makes adults roll their eyes—because that’s the mindset that unlocks the deeper, unexpected truths.

🤔 Dumb Word of the Day: Zetetic (adj.) proceeding by inquiry and investigation; seeking knowledge through questioning

Look, I could tell you this is from the Greek "zētētikos," meaning "disposed to search or examine." But what's more fun is imagining a medieval philosopher who couldn't stop asking questions about everything until their friends had to invent a word for it just to describe what was happening at dinner parties.

"Oh no, Ted is being all zetectic again. He's been asking why spoons are shaped like tiny boats for THREE HOURS."

It's like being a detective, but instead of solving crimes, you're solving the mystery of why your brain thinks what it thinks. Heston Blumenthal and Margaret Gould Stewart? Total zetectic zealots. They're the kind of people who probably ask existential questions at fast food drive-throughs.

Use it in a sentence: "My toddler's zetectic phase is either going to drive me insane or lead to a breakthrough in quantum physics. Possibly both."

Think of it as the fancy academic word for "that person at the party who won't stop asking increasingly weird follow-up questions until they accidentally discover something amazing." Which, let's be honest, is exactly the kind of person we need more of.

For example:

"Why are our sales down?" "Because customers aren't buying." "Why aren't customers buying?" "Because they're choosing competitors." "Why are they choosing competitors?" "Because their website doesn't look like it was designed by a caffeinated raccoon." "Why does our website look like that?" "Because we let Steve's cousin design it." "Why did we... oh. Oh no."*

See what happened there? We started with "sales are down" and ended up discovering that Steve's cousin might be single-handedly responsible for our Q3 performance. (Sorry, Steve's cousin.)

Try this archaeological dig through your own business challenges. Whether it's:

• Customer complaints (Why do they keep mentioning our hold music? Why IS it still "The Girl from Ipanema"?)

• Team turnover (Why does everyone quit right after our monthly karaoke meetings?)

• Project delays (Why do we schedule everything as if we're operating in a parallel universe where days have 37 hours?)

Remember: Each "why" is like peeling an onion. You might cry a little, but you'll eventually get to the core of the matter. And maybe discover that Steve's cousin should stick to their day job.

Real examples of "Why?" victories:

• 🪑 IKEA: "Why is good furniture only for rich people?" led Ingvar Kamprad to question every furniture manufacturing assumption until he hit on a radical idea: let customers build it themselves. Flat-pack furniture was born, and living rooms would never be the same.

• 👓️ Warby Parker: "Why do glasses cost as much as a smartphone?" Led the founders through a maze of questions about manufacturing, distribution, and markup until they discovered they could make quality eyewear directly. Their vertical integration approach helped make stylish glasses accessible to millions.

• 🤑 Stripe: When the Collison brothers asked "Why does accepting online payments require an advanced degree in bureaucracy?" they kept digging until they discovered that most payment systems were built on banking code from the '70s. Their solution? Seven lines of code that turned the finance world upside down. (The fact that they were teenagers at the time just makes the rest of us look bad.)

Remember: Every industry has its "because that's how we do it" sacred cows. Your job is to be the toddler who asks why until someone has an enlightening breakthrough - or at least an entertaining identity crisis.

The Toddler Toolkit:

✓ Never accept "because that's how we do it"

✓ Keep asking until you hit resistance

✓ Listen for emotional responses

✓ Follow the discomfort

Thanks for embracing the power of toddler thinking with me today!

SHARE YOUR WHY STORY: Tell me about a time when asking “Why?” led to a breaktrhough. Best story wins our “Five Whys Worksheet” template used by top innovators AND a signed copy of "Dumbify"!

Stay curiously childlike, David

P.S. Know someone stuck accepting "that's just how it is"? Forward this email—sometimes the most sophisticated question is simply "Why?"