I keep six honest serving-men. They taught me all I knew. Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.
Rudyard Kipling
The meaning of the quote
In his book Just So Stories, published in 1902, Rudyard Kipling tells the story of the Elephant’s Child, who drives his whole family mad by asking one question too many. Wanting to know what the crocodile eats for dinner, he walks to the riverbank to find out, and the crocodile grabs his nose and stretches it into the trunk every elephant carries today.
At the end of that story, after all the trouble his questions caused, Kipling adds the quote above. It reads less like a scolding and more like an admission that the same curiosity that got the Elephant’s Child in trouble also solved his problem.
What, why, when, how, where and who cover nearly every question worth asking. Memorizing the list matters less than reaching for it before you assume you already understand something.
A reporter double-checking a lead and a manager reading a project update that doesn’t add up are doing the same thing. They’re both running the same six questions, whether they realize it or not.
Kipling wrote these lines to close the story, but the bedtime version came first. He told the Just So Stories out loud, long before he wrote any of them down, which is part of why the poem still reads like something spoken rather than composed.
Journalists still use this exact checklist. A basic news story is supposed to answer who did what, when, where, why and how before the writer moves on to anything more elaborate, and a story missing one of those six usually feels incomplete even when nobody can say why.
The same checklist works outside a newsroom. Before you send an email explaining a delay to a client, run through what happened, why it happened, when it will be fixed, how you’re fixing it, where the breakdown occurred and who’s handling it. Skip one and the reader is left guessing, which is usually when they get annoyed.
Action steps
The six questions turn into a habit fastest when you apply them to something specific instead of memorizing them in the abstract. Try this the next time you’re stuck on a decision or a hard conversation.
- Write down what you already know. Answer what, when, where and who first, since those are usually the easy ones.
If you can’t answer them, that’s the gap to close before doing anything else. - Ask why and how last. These two take longer because they ask for reasons and methods, not facts.
Sit with them for a minute instead of grabbing the first answer that comes to mind.
About the author
In 1871, five-year-old Joseph Rudyard Kipling was dropped off at a boarding house in Southsea, England, and left there for six years while his parents stayed behind in Bombay. He later called it the House of Desolation and described the punishment there as “calculated torture.”
His one relief during those years was Christmas, when he got to visit his aunt Georgiana Burne-Jones, the aunt he later said saved him.
At 16, he returned to India and started working as a journalist in Lahore. Within six years he had published six books of stories, and by his late 20s he was one of the best-known writers in the English language.
He married Caroline Balestier in 1892 and settled for a few years in Vermont, where he wrote The Jungle Book. In 1907 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first English-language writer to receive it and, at 41, still its youngest literature laureate.
Kipling also holds a stranger claim. He appears to be the first person to use the word grinch in print, in an 1892 poem, more than 60 years before Dr. Seuss borrowed it for How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Two family tragedies later shaped his work. His daughter Josephine died of pneumonia in 1899 at 6, and his son John died at the Battle of Loos in 1915 at 18.
Josephine was the child Kipling had told the Just So Stories to before any of it was written down, and every story in the book is still addressed to a “Best Beloved” who never got to read it.
John got into the army despite eyesight bad enough to fail the standard medical exam, after Kipling pulled strings to secure him a commission.
Kipling later helped choose the inscriptions carved on Commonwealth war graves, including “Their Name Liveth For Evermore.”
He died in 1936 and is buried in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, alongside Chaucer and Dickens.
Resources
- Just So Stories (Book)
- The Elephant’s Child (Website)
- Five Ws (Wikipedia)
- On the personal tragedy behind Kipling’s Just So Stories (Article)
- Curiosity is the start (Article)
- Rudyard Kipling’s Nobel Prize biography (Article)
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