I noticed a recurring theme that I thought about: It’s the concept of “highly refined things”. A “thing” can be anything, I am mainly thinking about products, food items, software but also ideas. By “highly refined” I mean that the item was augmented upon from its basic form.

Think about inventing the croissant. That’s the basic form, and now you add chocolate, nuts or whatever or you add lye and make a pretzel croissant. That’s the highly refined thing. Another example is in software: You have a basic text editor and it is really useful, but then take Word, which adds layers and layers of features, enterprise features and so on. The core is still a text editor, but it was extended so much that other text editors are not even comparable.

In a way inventing the basic form is harder and more creative than the highly refined thing. It is good, because it inspired a lot of more innovation on top of it. But the basic form might not become the most popular thing or the most influential thing. The highly refined thing might also not be so intellectually interesting, for example you have a basic form that is really takes a lot of brainpower to create, and then you scale it up, but repeating the same thing over and over and glue it together.

In a way, highly refining something and improving the basic form so much is creating a new thing. The croissant is a refined bread roll. The difference between bread roll and croissant and croissant and chocolate croissant is the depth on which it was refined. So in a way sticking existing ideas on top of each other is a way to create a new thing.

To conclude, I think sometimes highly refined things can be boring, but then again there are also highly refined things that apply smarter ideas and thus are more interesting. It’s really the quality of the refinement that matters. Finding refinements that inspire more refinements on top are the most interesting. Sometimes you just gotta glue things together and make it work. But if each of the layers is not so smart, then the whole thing is not so interesting.