Framing the Question: How to Take Charge

Many people nowadays refer to their jobs as being “beasts of burden” (牛马), even highly educated, skilled, and well-paid individuals jokingly describe themselves this way. You’re clearly a programmer at a tech giant, an investment bank analyst, a doctor at a top-tier hospital, having won countless competitions to secure your current position. How did you end up as a “beast of burden”?

“Beasts of burden” and “small-town test-takers” are one and the same—both are from the perspective of a “responder.”

Beasts of burden are driven by others; test-takers await questions from others. A responder’s life is a series of test papers handed down, one after another: Gaokao, job offers, KPIs, blind dates. Whether you answer well, poorly, or even just ’lie flat’ (摆烂), you are always comparing yourself against a certain standard—essentially, you are driven by that standard.

Even your anger is expressed within the confines of the question.

“Where the questions come from” is not your concern.

It’s an open secret: this world systematically produces responders, yet never teaches you how to frame the questions.

Unofficial knowledge, including the uninhibited philistine philosophy of things like social etiquette, being savvy, and high emotional intelligence, all study how to answer questions in a way that pleases others. Official education teaches you how to answer questions correctly; not only do you have no right to question the questions, you aren’t even taught how to appreciate the questions themselves. Advanced academic knowledge might teach you to see through questions, to break free from them: critical thinking teaches you to deconstruct, financial freedom teaches you to exit, but that’s all.

Beyond that, the knowledge supply seems to run out.

Various “leadership” studies in business schools, if you look closely, are all about campaigning: traits, charisma, emotional intelligence, trust—they teach you how to gain leadership. As for how to exercise power once you have it, how to frame questions for others, usually only leaves behind grand-sounding but not-so-practical terms like “empowerment” and “vision.”

This is not surprising. Researchers are professors without power; those most skilled at using power have no motivation to write a book teaching you how. You can only observe them from the outside, but the better they use their power, the less obvious it is from the outside what’s happening.

Therefore, this lecture cannot provide a complete theoretical framework. I can only offer you some insights.

The “meta-representation” and “dwelling nowhere” we discussed earlier teach you to step out of others’ questions; what then, after stepping out? Perhaps you can try to establish your own.

The highest is framing the question, next is breaking the question, then answering the question, then escaping the question, and the lowest is flattering the question.

This lecture will discuss the highest rung: “Framing the Question.”

The Essence of Power: Framing the Question #

You might ask, how much power can framing a question hold? I say, in a certain sense, power is framing the question [1].

Imagine one day you are directly dragged to court, and the judge immediately asks you: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Think about how you would answer.

If you answer no, you haven’t stopped, then you are certainly guilty; but if you answer yes, you have stopped, that’s equivalent to admitting you used to beat your wife, just not anymore, isn’t that also being guilty?

In 1892, Gottlob Frege, the German mathematician and founder of modern logic, pointed out this oddity in his essay “On Sense and Reference”: The statement “Kepler died in poverty” presupposes that “Kepler” indeed existed—and its negative counterpart, “Kepler did not die in poverty,” presupposes the same thing [2].

In 1950, British philosopher P. F. Strawson turned this into a classic problem in analytic philosophy: with the statement “The present King of France is bald,” whether you agree or disagree, you are confirming that “France has a king” [3].

Linguists call this property “presupposition projection” [4]: every question has variables explicitly presented for debate, and presupposed invariants hidden within the question that are not up for debate—any answer you give, whether agreement or disagreement, as long as it remains within the question’s given answer domain, not only fails to touch the presupposition but actually reaffirms it.

For example, companies, families, and society all demand you answer this question: “How can I get promoted?”

As long as you answer, whether your answer is to work hard, change jobs, or “lie flat,” you have essentially admitted three presuppositions: promotion is worth pursuing; this ladder is legitimate; and your value is measured by your job rank.

But if people like Zhu Yuanzhang or Mao Zedong encountered such a question, they would simply tear up the paper and frame their own questions.

That’s why some say power is about “not fearing popular opposition, but fearing popular indifference”—even if you oppose a leader’s policy, you are still acknowledging their right to frame the question.

What do you do if someone provokes you for no reason? There’s a saying: “The weak retaliate, the strong forgive, the wise ignore”: retaliation and forgiveness both remain within the other party’s framework; as long as you engage with them, you are effectively signing off on their agenda. The correct approach is to ignore them entirely, fundamentally refusing to accept their agenda setting—if there is to be an agenda, it must be set by me.

One of the most significant instances of question-framing in Chinese political history is found in the very first sentence of the first essay, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” in the first volume of Selected Works of Mao Zedong: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This question is the primary question of the revolution.”

In fact, society has so many dimensions, why must people be categorized by class? Why must relations between classes be adversarial? Mao Zedong didn’t debate these questions with you; he directly presented you with a presupposition projection. Accepting this framing of the question means you must accept the subsequent logic of using class struggle to divide friends and foes, organize forces, and launch revolution, accepting “taking class struggle as the key link” and even “class struggle works wonders as soon as it is grasped.”

It wasn’t until 1981, when the CPC Central Committee put forward that “the principal contradiction to be resolved in our country is the contradiction between the ever-growing material and cultural needs of the people and backward social production,” that the question was officially reframed [5].

The power of framing questions transcends even politics. Kant, in the preface to the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason, stated that reason learns from nature not like a student who merely listens to whatever the teacher says, but like a judge who devises questions himself and compels witnesses to answer [6]. The entire scientific revolution, in Kant’s view, was a transfer of the right of interrogation: experiments are not observation; experiments are interrogation.

Later generations condensed this idea into a single phrase: “Man prescribes laws to nature.”

Framing the question is legislating.

Hierarchical Difference: Framing vs. Answering #

Therefore, those who frame questions and those who answer them do not differ in skill level, but in hierarchical level—their thinking does not occur on the same plane.

In 1962, American economists James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock published The Calculus of Consent, dividing human choices into two levels [7]—

“Choice within rules” involves strategizing, playing cards, and competing to win or lose under a given set of rules—in the language of this lecture, it is answering questions;

“Choice among rules” involves first choosing what rules to play by—it is framing the question.

Buchanan called the latter constitutional-level choice. He won the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for this work [8].

In Chinese terms, this is essentially the mindset of a long-term laborer versus that of a landlord/owner. The laborer thinks about how to do the work well and earn a bit more wages; the owner thinks about what to plant in this field next year, how many people to hire, and with whom to exchange land. A laborer might be smarter and more capable than the owner—but all their cleverness operates within the framework set by the owner.

Those who use their minds govern; those who use their brawn are governed. Isn’t this truly cause for reflection?

You can choose not to play the game others have set, but a more astute approach is to set the game for others.

Self-Framing Questions: Unlocking a Fat-Tailed Life #

First, you must set the game for yourself.

There’s a saying attributed to Einstein, “The question is more important than the answer”—and indeed, it was Einstein who said it, his original words being: “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution” [9].

This isn’t just platitude; I’ll give you two pieces of evidence.

Starting in 1964, two psychologists from the University of Chicago, Jacob Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—the latter later coined the term “flow”—continuously tracked a group of students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Initially, an experiment: 31 students were asked to select and arrange 27 still-life objects on a table and paint a still life [10]. Some students simply picked up their brushes and painted, treating it as a problem to be solved; others, however, repeatedly manipulated the objects, changed angles, started over, and delayed putting brush to canvas—they were finding their own question to address.

The scores from uninformed judges showed that the works from the latter group were significantly more original. But something even more interesting happened years later.

Seven years later, the researchers located 27 of them: about half had become professional artists, many with notable achievements—almost all of them were from the group who had framed their own questions. Conversely, among the 11 individuals who were least inclined to frame their own questions, 8 had completely left the art profession [11]. Eighteen years later, after another follow-up, this disparity still persisted [12].

What predicted an artist’s destiny was not their painting technique, but their framing of the question before they even put brush to canvas. The researchers at the time called this “problem finding.”

Scientific research operates similarly. In 2020, Yifang Ma and others at Northwestern University analyzed nearly 40,000 mentor-protégé pairs among scientists and millions of papers [13], discovering that while students of good mentors indeed achieve greater success, the most successful among them shared a common trait—they didn’t spend their entire careers answering their mentors’ questions, but rather established their own research agendas.

Answering your mentor’s questions well helps you get into the field; but if you spend your entire life answering your mentor’s questions, you won’t become a master.

Please note, these studies only demonstrate that those who become masters must frame their own questions, but they do not prove that framing questions guarantees becoming a master. Answering questions is a low-variance way of life, yielding stable returns regardless of circumstances; framing questions is a high-variance way of life, potentially leading to a decade of fruitless effort. The accurate conclusion is—

Answering questions raises the average; framing questions unlocks the fat tail.

The average represents stable days, the fat tail represents uncapped potential. Those who frame questions and those who answer them don’t look like the same kind of people, because they live in two different statistical distributions.

Framing Questions for Others: The Art of Management #

For research and creative work, you only need to frame questions for yourself; for management, you must frame questions for others. In fact, we’ve already touched upon some basic techniques for framing questions.

First, define boundaries, leave the interior empty. A good question only states what and why, not how. We discussed “commander’s intent”: clarify the purpose, critical tasks, and end state, leaving the “how-to” entirely blank for those on the ground. You must allow responders full scope to perform.

Second, cultivate their intrinsic motivation. That is, to make responders develop their own motivation, to make your question their question. When discussing “narrative power,” we mentioned “defining the self”: give them an identity, a protagonist’s role, so that when the question reaches them, it feels less like a command and more like destiny: “You’ve touched every screw on this production line; this question is uniquely yours.”

Third, do not prejudge. Don’t pre-empt the answer. Han Fei Zi said: “When the ruler reveals his desires, the minister will naturally adorn them.” If you reveal the answer you want, what you receive will be nothing but flattering agreement. If you truly want to get things done well, keep your own answer under wraps and let the evidence speak first.

In fact, you don’t need to provide the answer; your framing of the question itself largely determines the course of events. For troublesome issues like poverty or educational reform, which lack standard definitions and termination conditions, the planning community refers to them as “wicked problems” [14]. You’ll find that for wicked problems, their very formulation is part of the problem—

Whether you frame poverty as “laziness” or as a “systemic issue,” two entirely different narratives will unfold.

Fourth, you must evaluate, but you also need to heed “Goodhart’s Law”: scores are ultimately just scores; retain the final judgment.

These are techniques found in textbooks; next, let’s discuss one that isn’t.

The Core Principle of Framing Questions: Making Yourself Indispensable #

This core principle might be a bit Machiavellian, unspoken by most. I hadn’t even considered it myself until Claude told me—

A good question that benefits you must make you an indispensable condition.

Not “related to you,” not “you’re quite good at it,” but an indispensable condition: without you, the question cannot be posed, cannot be sustained, or cannot be answered. If you don’t want to fully let go, you must make the question dependent on you.

After the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962, Liu Shaoqi framed the core issue as “adjusting the national economy,” which meant Mao Zedong could only retreat to the second line [15][16]… it was only then that “never forget class struggle” emerged.

If a company’s defining question doesn’t embody the founder’s characteristics, what is the founder for? Aren’t professional managers much cheaper? The question Steve Jobs framed for Apple was never “make easy-to-use electronic products”—anyone could answer such a question—but rather “what can grow at the intersection of technology and liberal arts” [17]. The indispensable condition for this question was Jobs’s own taste.

A deeper insight is that this indispensable condition should often not be your strengths, but rather your “characteristics”—or even your weaknesses.

Strengths are universal and employable. If you use strengths as an indispensable condition, your question will sooner or later be taken over by more cost-effective strengths. What cannot be replicated are the things about you that others might judge as flaws on their exams: your stubbornness, your circumstances, your wounds.

For example, dyslexia is a congenital defect. You recognize individual words before you, but you struggle to connect them into meaning. A small-scale US survey in 2009 [18] showed that among corporate managers, only 1% had dyslexia—but among entrepreneurs, this proportion was 35%. Why?

Professor Julie Logan of City, University of London, explains that those who struggle with reading are forced from a young age to develop a different set of skills—delegation, verbal communication, judging people, intuition. They didn’t overcome their deficiencies; they framed a question where their deficiency was an indispensable condition.

Let’s look again at that parallel prose passage from Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An—

“When King Wen was confined, he composed the Book of Changes; Confucius faced adversity, and he authored the Spring and Autumn Annals; Qu Yuan was exiled, then he penned Li Sao; Zuo Qiuming lost his sight, and then came the Discourses of the States; Sun Wu had his feet amputated, and the Art of War was arranged.”

From childhood, we treat these as inspirational stories, saying these individuals achieved greatness despite these difficulties. However, Sima Qian’s true logic might be that these individuals achieved those accomplishments because of those difficulties [19].

The question Sima Qian framed for himself was: “to investigate the ways of Heaven and man, to comprehend the changes of past and present, and to establish my own school of thought”—why his “own school”? Because of his family’s scholarship, his official position, and the castration he had just endured.

Strengths help you answer others’ questions well; it is characteristics that enable you to frame your own.

The Boundaries and Significance of Framing Questions #

Framing questions isn’t a case of bigger being better. Take Zhang Zai’s Four Sayings of Hengqu: “to establish the mind for Heaven and Earth, to ordain life for the common people, to carry on the lost teachings of past sages, to secure peace for all generations.” While these sound grand and profound, they are in fact broad and empty rhetoric, utterly lacking specific objectives, action boundaries, or criteria for success or failure. The subtext is simply “I want to be an official.”

You don’t need to establish the mind for Heaven and Earth or ordain life for the common people; if you can take the initiative in the matters around you, that’s already incredibly powerful.

If you have more energy, and can frame a question for the people around you, or for the specific endeavor you’re engaged in, that’s truly excellent.

Shouting slogans that align with a recognized value is not framing a question.

Framing a question is about providing a direction, boundaries, and criteria for success or failure for an endeavor, inspiring people to invest their time and abilities into it.

【Epilogue Poem】

Raindrops hit the window, soon they dry. The canal’s water flows on, a hundred years it has run. The one who dug the canal left no name— The grasses on both banks are green, each in its own way, Each claiming it by its own accord. It is also said: A single scroll constricts Heaven and Earth, A thousand heads bow, each striving to be first. Why not carve out your own wilderness, For passersby in future to call it natural.

Notes #

[1] Bachrach, Peter, and Morton S. Baratz. “Two Faces of Power.” American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (1962): 947–952.

[2] Frege, Gottlob. “On Sense and Reference.” 原题“Über Sinn und Bedeutung”，Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892): 25–50.

[3] Strawson, P. F. “On Referring.” Mind 59, no. 235 (1950): 320–344.

[4] Karttunen, Lauri. “Presuppositions of Compound Sentences.” Linguistic Inquiry 4, no. 2 (1973): 169–193.

[5] 中共中央：《关于建国以来党的若干历史问题的决议》，1981 年 6 月 27 日。

[6] Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, B xiii–xiv.

[7] Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock. The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962.

[8] Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “The Prize in Economics 1986—Press Release.” October 16, 1986.

[9] Einstein, Albert, and Leopold Infeld. The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938, 92.

[10] Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and J. W. Getzels. “Discovery-Oriented Behavior and the Originality of Creative Products: A Study with Artists.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 19, no. 1 (1971): 47–52.

[11] Getzels, Jacob W., and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The Creative Vision: A Longitudinal Study of Problem Finding in Art. New York: Wiley, 1976.

[12] Getzels, Jacob W. “Problem Finding and the Enhancement of Creativity.” NASSP Bulletin 69, no. 482 (1985): 55–61.

[13] Ma, Yifang, Satyam Mukherjee, and Brian Uzzi. “Mentorship and Protégé Success in STEM Fields.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 25 (2020): 14077–14083.

[14] Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155–169.

[15] 中共中央党史研究室：《中国共产党大事记·1962 年》，中国共产党新闻网。

[16] 马云飞：《“中共第一代领导集体中的刘少奇”二题》，《党的文献》2011 年第 2 期。七千人大会以后，中央一线、二线分工趋于明显：刘少奇主持中央日常工作，毛泽东不再参加党的经常性会议。

[17] Jobs, Steve. “Apple Event, March 2011.” Apple Events, video, March 2, 2011.

[18] Logan, Julie. “Dyslexic Entrepreneurs: The Incidence, Their Coping Strategies and Their Business Skills.” Dyslexia 15, no. 4 (2009): 328–346.

[19]《精英日课》第四季，思考的乐趣2. 读书人与密室