26th August 2025
Ideas start as a single point; a question or a sentence, but few stay that size. An idea needs to grow, it needs explanation and evidence. You need space to discuss the alternatives and why this idea is the right one. Some ideas are bumper-sticker-sized, some are tweet-sized. It takes a very big idea to fill a book. For a lot of ideas, something the size of a blog post, or a magazine article, is perfect.
All the posts I've written are in service of a point that can be boiled down to a sentence or two, but without the added context I can't communicate them. Maybe someone else could whittle them down to a tweet, but would the point still get made? To reduce something to the size of a tweet, without people missing the point, or not being convinced, you need to spend much longer sharpening the axe to cut to the core of what you're trying to say.
I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.
- Mark Twain
If you don't include enough information to convey the point you're trying to make, or include enough supporting evidence to convince someone of what you're trying to say, then the point is lost. If you overstate the point it loses its teeth, like explaining a joke.
"When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story," he said. "When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story."
- from Stephen King - On Writing
The best example I can give is Simon Sinek's Start With Why. I first came across it as an 18 minute TED talk, which I enjoyed. The concept boils down to a phrase he repeats numerous times; "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it". I made the false assumption that because I enjoyed the talk, I would enjoy the book, but it turned out to be a colossal waste of time. The TED talk had already explained the point well enough and given enough supporting evidence that I understood it. Anything else was unnecessary. The idea was the perfect size for a TED talk. That gave enough time to get explain the concept and give adequate supporting evidence. The idea wasn't big enough to fill a book.
Another example of an idea being forced into the wrong sized container are tweet threads. The idea is too big for a single tweet, so it gets spread across ten or twelve. People interject at various points and it all turns into a mess. What should have been a blog post got hammered into the wrong sized container.
That's probably enough to communicate this idea.