The majority believes that everything hard to comprehend must be very profound. This is incorrect. What is hard to understand is what is immature, unclear and often false. The highest wisdom is simple and passes through the brain directly into the heart.

Complexity isn't depth

We've all sat through something deliberately complicated—a lecture, a business presentation, a think piece—and felt somehow stupid for not getting it. But here's the thing: confusion often isn't a sign you're encountering genius. It might just mean someone hasn't figured out how to say what they mean. Real clarity is harder to achieve than complexity. Anyone can pile on jargon and nested clauses; it takes actual understanding to strip something down to its essence.

This matters because it flips how we judge ideas. We trust the complicated pitch, the academic-sounding explanation, the expert who uses words we don't recognize. But some of the most useful truths are almost embarrassingly simple—that sleep matters, that people need to be heard, that small consistent actions compound. These don't feel profound because they bypass all the mental gymnastics our brains love to do. Instead, they land somewhere deeper, where you just recognize them as true before you can fully explain why.

The trick is developing the confidence to question difficulty itself. When something important confuses you, it might not be you. It might be worth asking whether the person explaining it actually understands it themselves.