A great insight in one sentence seems obvious, no matter how much of history [or] how many people have spent [time] not coming up with it. The same insight alluded to and digressed from for hours on end seems like a fantastic mountain of understanding.This is from Meteuphoric.
Certainly many of the "great ideas" books I've read could be neatly summarised in a pamphlet, yet the author stretches the concept out to several hundred pages. There are certainly diminishing returns when expanding on an idea or investing time in reading one.
Let's take the following (reasonably well known) advice for idea generation:
1) Immerse yourself in all the background material
2) Forget about it for a while to let it digest
3) Wait for the solution to occur to you
I once read a book (link anyone?) that openly and unashamedly expanded this concept out to 30 pages. I guess just scrawling the points on a toilet wall (or, um, a blog post) wouldn't get the same audience or revenues as publishing a book.
This phenomenon is also apparent from many of the TED talks I see. Many of the talks are authors presenting a shortened version of their books. The key ideas of Dan Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness
are neatly summarised in his TED talks on happiness. I found Alain de Botton's book Status Anxiety
an unsatisfying read, while his TED talk on the philosophy of success is sensational.None of this will stop me from buying every second book that is implicitly plugged on TED. The value I find in reading those books is not so much in expanding on the idea, but giving by giving myself the concentrated time to absorb the idea more.
Thus, succinctly summarised ideas aren't necessarily more obvious. Rather they perhaps just require more effort to absorb. So I disagree with the statement "a great insight in one sentence seems obvious". My counterexample is the Meteuphoric blog itself. A main reason I subscribe is the surprisingly regularity of exactly those one-sentence great insights. A half-formed idea of mine recently crystallized from the description, almost in passing, of corporations as a form of super-human intelligence. Another great insight is the idea of vegetarianism as a form or martyrdom - the same concept is particularly revealing when examining the recent backlash against geo-engineering solutions to climate change.
