Unique Insights

A note on ideas that earn their keep.

Most people don't lack ideas. They lack ideas that survive reality.

A unique insight is a belief that lets you do something specific that other smart people wouldn't do. It cashes out in decisions.

If it doesn't change what you build, buy, hire, or ignore, it isn't an insight. It's taste.

This is why strong opinions are not enough. Opinions are cheap: you can manufacture them on demand. Insights are expensive: you pay for them in data, pain, or years.

Contrarianism is also not an insight. Being against the crowd is a posture; it has no burden. A real insight is a constraint. It narrows your choices.

Here are three tests that usually catch the fakes:

• Prediction. It implies something checkable that you're willing to be wrong about.
• Constraint. It rules out plausible alternatives. If you can believe it and act exactly the same, it's decoration.
• Stake. You'd bet real resources on it: a year, a reputation, an opportunity cost.

The world doesn't grade your arguments. It grades your predictions.

So where do unique insights come from? Usually from position, not IQ:

• Unusual data. You sit where the signal is: doing support, running infra, watching users trip on the same edge case.
• Depth. You go far enough into a narrow domain to see the real constraints.
• Combination. You can translate between two fields that rarely meet.
• Personal pain. You have to solve the problem, so you notice what others don't.

Reading helps you borrow vocabulary. It rarely gives you ground truth. It's hard to produce a unique insight from the same inputs everyone else has.

In startups, the insight is often the company. The product is the proof. If the insight were obvious, it would already be a feature inside a bigger company.

If you want more unique insights, stop optimizing for being convincing and start optimizing for being checkable. Make claims that can lose. Tighten your feedback loop with reality.