The best ideas are information dense. Not complicated, but filled with meaning.
One of my favorite essays is by Max Roser with this tagline:
The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
It’s amazing! This might be Roser’s core idea. But it still took years to distill this idea into such a crisp, clear tagline. Roser founded Our World in Data (OWID) in 2011. The essay was originally published in 2018 but with a different tagline and a narrower focus.
So, if it took so long for Roser to clearly communicate this core idea, what does this mean?
- Getting to information density is difficult. So distilling and communicating the best ideas is hard too.
- There is lots of room for better ideas. Even when you’ve been working on a topic for a decade+, there is still room to compress a good idea to a better idea.