Combine “What if” with any form of long ago past of your personal life and you get a terrible question. Like, “what if I had not overslept of the day of my accident? Would I be rich now because I didn’t wreck my first car?”. There is no certain answer to it. Such speculations about your life are futile.
“What if” questions are much more fun in other contexts. “What if Columbus had never received the money to sail westwards from Europe?”. While still speculative, it can be fun to ponder over the ripple effects of such a non-event.
And then there are questions you can ask yourself in certain situations that help you to change your perspective.
For example, when you don’t like a decision somebody made, you can ask yourself, “what is the alternative?”
So instead of being focused on what you don’t like about the decision, you are forced to think of better alternatives and either you can come up with a better solution that you can suggest or you realize you had done the same.
Other situations and questions are:
When assessing your life
Looking back one year until today, do you like the trend?
What feels right?
What bothers you most?
If you had unlimited resources what would you change?
When you are trying to solve a problem
If there were no rules what would your solution look like?
If you could do magic, what would you do to solve the problem? (Given you could not simply make the problem itself disappear?)
If you had unlimited resources what would you do?
When pondering solutions or changes
What option has the most impact?
What option is reversible, which one irreversible?
What is the upside, what the downside of each option?