One Piece of Content — One Idea

Yeah, it might sound simple, but it’s not.

Whenever you’re consuming any type of information you need to focus on the main idea, the main thought, and the main reason why you’re doing that.

In other words, when you read a book, you focus only on one insight that it wants to convey to you.

Let’s take “The Black Swan” by Nicholas Taleb as an example. For the whole book, Nicholas tries to give you only one idea: "Unpredictable things are much more important than you think, and you shouldn’t underestimate them”

Or, “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. The core idea is about making tiny changes for massive results.

Throughout the whole book, throughout each section and each sentence, he just explains this idea in a more precise way by showing the same situation from different angles.

You can try it on your own. Whenever you sit to read again, spend 5 minutes to understand the main idea of this book. What does it even want to convey to you?

By understanding only one concept, it becomes much easier to understand it properly.

I’d also encourage you to try to write one piece of content on your own and use this concept as well. It might seem hard, but it’s not.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed that, but most of my recent articles use the same strategy.

Take this article as an example. I usually write a 1,000-word article where I put only the one concept that needs to be shared with the audience.

To do it, I need to find as many proofs, examples, and just my thoughts as possible to make it interesting and fulfilling.

So, one book — one idea, one article — one idea, one video — one idea, and so on.

So, by knowing how to expand your simple idea into a whole book, you’ll become a god of content creation. You’ll also be educated much faster and will be able to read between the lines, which is highly valuable in real life.

Never underestimate something simple, try to dive as deep as it’s physically possible and explore it from every angle.

Quality Over Quantity

I’m not a fan of this phrase. I think that in most spheres of life, it’s much better to just start out and try as many things as possible. But when we talk about the books, then I would consider reading only the literature that would really give me some useful insights, rather than a list of 'something' that is mostly not correlated to each other.

In other words, on Medium we always see — “123 Passive Incomes to Become a Millionaire in One Night”. I’m tired of this type of article.

While reading self-development literature, we see “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. Not that bad, but still doesn’t solve my problem.

Of course, I’m not saying that you should stop reading all the lists that you’ll ever see in your life. I’m only referring to the fact that the content that tries to share something ‘one’ is much more constructive, than going through the lists.

The main problem is that all these articles and books are trying to focus at everything at the same time.

What is more efficient? To go to the 20 directions with only 1 step in each of them, or 20 steps in only 1 direction.

When you have only one thing to concentrate on, then it’s much easier to do it.

Again, “The Black Swan” is probably the best example here. Only one idea for the whole book.

Yeah, while reading this book, you’ll make many, many notes. But all of them are still correlated to each other and to the main idea that I’ve mentioned earlier.

This brings us to the concept of depth over breadth in reading. It’s not about how many books you can get through; it’s about how deeply you can understand and apply the ideas within them.

This depth of understanding not only helps in retaining information but also in applying it effectively in real-life situations.