On Long Ideas and Why You Should Collect Them
Some ideas are long. Tenacious as cockroaches in their survival, indisputable as oxygen in their relevance, and durable as diamonds, these long-lasting ideas tend to get buried and must be dug up again and again.
Though I can’t remember when I first starting thinking about long ideas as a category, my bottomless appetite for books and decades’ worth of underlines, highlights, and chicken scratch in the margins all point to a fascination with ideas that reappear across time. My notes contain phrases like “Reminds me of…” and “This is like what so-and-so said about such and such.” Without realizing it, I was collecting echoes.
Long ideas bounce around the canyons of time and human thought. They’re not old, as in worn-out and obsolete. They’re not new, as in novel or never seen before. Once or twice a generation, they recirculate after a scholar, artist, priest, entrepreneur, den leader, or average jane gets struck by one like a mental meteor and bends down metaphorically to examine it.
Take, for example, the Golden Rule. All major world religions have some expression of “Treat others the way you want to be treated.” The principle goes back as far back as human civilization. Yet, an author may still pen a book on the beauty and necessity of fairness and see it sell a million copies. Two esteemed professors may conduct research showing that 90% of participants dislike it when newcomers cut in line and conclude that most people live by and expect a basic ethic of fairness. A celebrated CEO gets paid $25,000 to delivers a keynote entitled “Fairness Is Better Business” and receives a standing ovation.
Long ideas are old ideas under new management.
Unfortunately, not all of them are benign. Wouldn’t it be nice if fascism died already, and many other -isms, too? The same defects in our psychology that cause one group of people to forget one long idea (say, frugality with its well-documented benefits) also make another group susceptible to a long idea that works as well for the common good as hydrochloric acid works for cleaning cotton.
The book of Ecclesiastes says, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” The more I read and observe, the more I believe in the truth of that.
However, that’s not to say that every long idea has the same stickiness in every era. Their acceptance or popularity varies. My maternal great-grandmother, Pearl, grew up during the Great Depression. No one had to teach Pearl about frugality. It was part of her air and soil. She once gave me a ragged book of tiny gray ration stamps that she’d saved during World War II. She reused aluminum foil long after that was strictly necessary. Frugality dissolved into and become inseparable from her environment, her thinking, and her behavior.
But what happened to frugality over the generations succeeding Pearl’s? It not longer seems necessary. Its ordinariness fades. Credit cards become a thing. Frugality loses its appeal until the zeitgeist shifts yet again. The cycle repeats when money pundits like Dave Ramsey unearth and popularize the long idea.
Nietzsche wrote about “eternal recurrence,” but that possibility of a cosmic version of Groundhog Day doesn’t interest me as much as the certainty that long ideas represent tools for better living and better results, no matter which era you happen to be born in. Long ideas give the people who use them a distinct, fair, and repeatable advantage.
One of the easiest ways to find a long idea is to think of a common failure and ask oneself, “What’s the opposite of common failures?” The famous investor and Warren Buffett’s business partner, Charlie Munger, was fond of saying, “Avoid common ways of failing.” He might as well have said, “The opposite of every common failure is an advantage.”
Of course, human beings acting the way we do, some long ideas you can only embrace like a life preserver after you’ve swallowed sufficient saltwater.
Long ideas have value precisely because they enable us to bypass future near-drownings, disappointments, and dead ends. They can’t save us from all our bad ideas, but they can leave room for fewer of them. Collecting long ideas is like eating salad first.
Like wise habits and honest friends, long ideas have only as much value as we give them space in our lives.
In a 1675 letter to Robert Hooke, Sir Isaac Newton wrote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." I’d like to see further by standing on a stack of long ideas. They haven’t disappeared yet, which means they’re more likely to keep existing. So says the Lindy Effect, a key concept in Nassim Taleb’s 2012 book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.
If this idea of long ideas (and the anti-fragility they offer) intrigues you, then stick around. Subscribe to my Long Ideas newsletter where I share my collection of long ideas for entrepreneurs. Each newsletter contains a single idea, polished and delivered with as much brevity as I had time for. The idea ends with a single question designed to plant the idea in your business where it can grow, yield fruit, and leave less room for weeds. I hope the long ideas benefit you as much as they have me.
