Pythagoras and the six-word test for truly original thinking
Original thinking doesn't mean writing a hundred-thousand-word book. A great example is Pythagoras saying 'the earth is round, not flat.' That's six words — fundamentally six words — that completely changed the course of humanity and that we still associate with that one person thousands of years later. And crucially, you only arrive at those six words after years and years of crystallizing your thinking in a single topic. That's the standard. That's what originality actually looks like. It's not volume; it's depth earned over time.
Go deeper with Greg Isenberg
Ask anything about this, and Greg Isenberg answers from everything they've shared.
More to learn
See everything in Learn
Writing about everything guarantees you'll never say anything original
There's a real irony when people say they want to write about everything. In doing that, you deprive yourself of ever going deep enough to arrive at something original. All you end up doing is typing and repeating commodity ideas all day lo
Writing words doesn't make your ideas original — here's why
There's a faulty belief that if you were the one who wrote something, you own it and created something original. But writing a sentence like 'I woke up today and made coffee' isn't original — that's just an open-source grouping of words. No
Writing something doesn't mean you own it — most sentences are open source
There's a faulty belief that if your fingers touched the keys and typed a grouping of words, those words are yours. That's simply not true. If you write the sentence 'I woke up today and made coffee,' that is not attributable to you. It's a