Seek Insight Density

One of my personal standards for exceptional functional writing is insight density. How much value per word does the reader get? Or, what's the ratio of value to words?

This kind of density is what separates good brevity from bad brevity: Anyone can hack away 3/4 of a draft, but insight density happens when you can compress the essence of the full draft into that 1/4.

(Note: There's a similar idea for expressive writing, too. This is what makes masterpieces worth revisiting over and over. This is why narrative resists compression—as Flannery O'Connor said: “It takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.” But the goal there is to share meaning, not insight.)

When it comes to modern nonfiction, James Clear has generally been the gold standard of this, for me. Atomic Habits (and his other writing) is so efficient: Each page serves a purpose and clearly supports the rest of his points and arguments. One way I noticed this was in his end-of-chapter summaries: As I've shared before, I take very aggressive notes when reading and listening to things. But what I found was that James' summaries always captured the key points from each section. He knows what the key elements are, and each sentence and paragraph and page are layered up around those foundations.

How do you do it?

But... how do you actually do this? I've recently developed a theory.

Earlier this year, I had a delightful conversation with Josh Knox. Every week, he publishes his newsletter, which is packed to the brim with incredible quotes and excerpts, all curated around a particular theme. It's remarkable.

So, I asked him: “Dude. How the heck do you pull this off?”

It turns out, he doesn't collect the quotes on the week he's writing. He actually has an exhaustive annotation system of his own (part of the reason we get along so well!), where he's constantly clipping insightful quotes and compelling blocks of text. So, each week, as he digs into a particular theme, it's actually quite simple: he just searches for the keyword and then chooses the components that he's been curating for years.

Then, a couple months ago, I was talking with a new friend, Tom, who also has an epic newsletter. It turns out, he takes a remarkably similar approach: he collects observations, quotes, stats, images for months and months, until he has enough to share. Then, when he writes up a post, it's practically overflowing with insights. Many of his posts feel like a 5-for-the-price-of-1.

I don't know James Clear's writing process, but I'd guess that it starts from a similar place—extensive research and collection. I remember watching a video where Ryan Holiday shared his approach to writing 4 best-selling books in 3 years. The secret? Well, years of advanced research and reading, to pull all the ideas together ahead of time. (He also owns a bookstore, so he presumably has easy access to lots of material.)

The only way to get the insight density this high is to truly pack it in. Get so much perspective and wisdom and context and then compress and compress and compress. Both through personally digesting and reflecting on the material over the years, but also through relentless editing. These writers have distilled down dozens (if not hundreds) of hours of their own learning and exploration into something that only takes 5-10 minutes to read.

When the insights reach that level of density… that’s how you get a gravitational pull.

Empty calories

The alternative path has gotten more crowded over time.

Not that it was ever empty: Thousands of years ago, the author of Ecclesiastes complained that, “of making many books there is no end.”

But even at a technical level, the speed of typing vs. the speed of handwriting means that it's easier now to spit out words. And the further back you go, the harder it was to record and distribute things, so there were some limits on the time to publish.

More recently, I would have said the opposite of insight density was generic business books—the insight of a 250-word article stretched and scraped across 250 pages.

But with the arrival of the Post-Information Age, we're experiencing the true antithesis: AI slop. While the best writing is dense with insight, content generated by LLMs is fundamentally, inherently hollow.

The whole point is the filler: you take a simple, short prompt and inject the next-expected character until the word limit is reached. If you have a 3-bullet outline of something you want to say and hand it to an LLM to turn it into an article or essay, it's fabricating low-effort words to fill the space in between.

Before even considering how this affects your writing process, I'd encourage you to think about how it affects your reading process. Think about your information diet: What are you consuming?

And you know what they say: Ancient problems, ancient solutions, right?

As I've been trying to think through this, I read a letter that Seneca wrote to his friend, about 2000 years ago. In describing how our writing is affected by our reading, he compared collecting ideas from books to a bee collecting ideas from flowers:

“It is said that we should imitate the bees who roam far and wide, gathering the finest flowers to make their honey. After gathering the flowers, they distribute them throughout the combs and, as our Vergil writes, “compress them into the sweet, flowing honey that floods their cells. [...] We should imitate those bees and collect from our readings the best and most outstanding parts to keep for ourselves. Next, with careful application of our own knowledge and skill we combine our many offerings into a single, sweeter whole ...”

It's so fitting that this ancient source of wisdom is already quoting two previous sources (“It is said” and Vergil). And he observed the same thing I noticed in how Josh and Tom and others have approached creating valuable, insight-dense writing: It starts with collecting an abundant backlog of insights worth compressing, in the first place. The honey is only as good as the flowers the bee chooses.

If you're reading fluff (or even fluff-informed writing), that's what you're likely to perpetuate. It's a cycle that passes on increasingly thin value.

I loved how Sean Goedecke put it in his recent essay, “How to Keep Thinking”:

“The other thing I recommend is to read actual books. Books — particularly dense non-fiction books — are the antithesis of AI slop. The slower you can read them, the better. I’ve been reading more and more non-fiction in the last few years, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think my brain is naturally craving information-dense content, in the same way that sodium-deficient people start to crave salt.”

All of us are craving human connection and actual insight. I hope you'll seek them out by prioritizing what you're reading. That's the first step to creating insight-dense material, yourself.

If you are what you eat, you write what you read.

(For more on that, check out Part 2 of this series, coming soon.)