I've hosted something like 800 interviews in my career, spanning a whole heck of a lot of jobs and projects: internships in PR and many more as a sportswriter, personal blog posts written to 12 people, company posts reaching millions, panels I've emceed on stages, webinars and web series and docuseries and of course, podcasts. Lots and lots of podcasts.

Throughout all of that, I've learned there are two types of questions: opening questions and follow-ups. It's easy to assume the right opening questions make or break an interview, but the gripping flow an audience feels, the powerful insights they get, and the memorable stories that take shape during an interview mostly emerge thanks to your follow-ups. I want to be clear: I believe that's how great interviews really unfold.

But sometimes, you happen upon an opening question so good, so capable of sparking deeper thought, it's worth keeping in your back pocket.

Today, I'm here to share one of mine with you. I think it can serve you in two ways: when you interview others to create any experience or content and when you're interrogating your own thinking to strengthen it and show up better publicly as a result. (Happily, this question is quite a powerful personal exercise to try. It will help you unlock precisely what you've been trying to say all along. In fact, I often start client engagements with this question when I can tell people have been trying to say something meaningful publicly for awhile but haven't quite found "it.")