Ever notice how the business world is drowning in “insights”? They’re packaged in slick PDFs, scattered across premium newsletters, and delivered by consultants wearing suits that cost more than your first car. But here’s a meta-insight about insights that might save you both time and money.
The Insight Paradox
The moment you find yourself nodding vigorously at a published insight in your field of expertise, you’ve entered dangerous territory. Either you’re experiencing the warm glow of confirmation bias, or you’re reading something so painfully obvious that it shouldn’t qualify as an insight at all.
Consider what your insight consumption reveals about you:
-
If you’re consuming insights in your area of expertise: You might be trapped in an echo chamber, paying to hear your own thoughts repeated back with fancier graphics.
-
If you’re devouring insights outside your expertise: Congratulations on being a normal human with curiosity about areas where you lack deep knowledge. This is healthy and productive.
-
If you’re paying premium prices for insights in your core business area: Something has gone terribly wrong. It’s like a fish paying for a seminar on “Advanced Water: What You Don’t Know Could Sink You.”
A Different Approach to Insights
Take this very insight about insights you’re reading right now. It doesn’t present an industry statistic without context. It doesn’t promise a “revolutionary framework” that’s actually just common sense wearing a bowtie. Instead, it challenges how you think about the very content you’re consuming.
The most valuable insights don’t tell you what to think—they change how you think. They transport familiar problems to unfamiliar contexts, creating those delightful “aha” moments when dots connect across different domains of knowledge.
Cross-Pollination: Where Real Value Lives
The magic happens at the intersections. Financial techniques being applied to auto repair shops. Supply chain principles illuminating employee retention problems. Insurance risk assessment models improving restaurant inventory management.
These cross-domain insights aren’t just intellectually interesting—they’re practical precisely because they weren’t developed in your industry. They haven’t been worn smooth by repetition in your specific business context.
The Insight Litmus Test
Before consuming your next premium insight, ask yourself:
- Is this telling me something I genuinely didn’t know?
- Does it challenge my existing mental models?
- Is it drawing connections between seemingly unrelated areas?
- Does it give me a new lens through which to view familiar problems?
If you answered “no” to most of these questions, you might be paying for expensive confirmation rather than actual insight.
The Bottom Line
The best insights aren’t comfort food for your professional brain—they’re intellectual hot sauce that makes you see familiar problems through unfamiliar lenses. And sometimes, the most valuable thing an insight can do is help you recognize when you’re paying too much for insights you don’t actually need.
The fish doesn’t need a water consultant. But it might benefit tremendously from learning how birds navigate air currents.