The Compound Interest of Small Ideas
Many Small Ideas Are Worth More Than One Big One
When it comes to thinking, we’ve been sold a high-risk investment strategy. Our cultural narratives around innovation celebrate the breakthrough, the paradigm shift, the disruptive, revolutionary * concept that changes everything overnight. We romanticize the lone genius with the world-altering epiphany — the risk-taker who bets everything on a single, volatile stock rather than building a diverse portfolio of ideas. There are few of those, because most of the time, risk-taking like that does not pay out.
But when risk-taking like this does pay out, it’s at a high enough margin to shape culture, both in terms of what it is and the stories we tell about it later. Those stories distort how we think.
What if the most reliable path to value creation isn’t the jackpot but the compound interest of many small, good ideas accumulated over time? What if consistent good thinking — applied daily, generating modest but regular returns — ultimately outperforms the high-risk, high-reward strategy of innovation hunting?
Despite the jackpot narratives, this kind of thinking is what creates progress in every field. The iPhone wasn’t just one big idea; it was thousands of small ideas about interface design, material science, battery technology, and user psychology converging at the right moment and then persisting in its pace. Remember, the first generation iPhone was exciting, but it took a few versions of enormous collective effort before it fully delivered on its promise. Even something as seemingly revolutionary as penicillin required countless incremental improvements in cultivation, production, and delivery before it could save lives at scale.
The mythology of the big idea is as harmful as it is inaccurate. It creates a distorted view of how meaningful work happens and how careers develop. It suggests that value creation is binary and sudden rather than cumulative and gradual. It implies that if you haven’t had your “big breakthrough” yet, you’re somehow failing or falling behind.
What history records as “big ideas” were usually the visible peaks of mountains built from countless smaller insights, most attributed to others or lost to history entirely. When we romanticize the peak, we terraform the mountain with impatience in defiance of reality.
This myth particularly undermines those whose contributions come through consistent, quality thinking rather than abrupt, visible change. The designer who improves a dozen user flows each year might never have a portfolio piece that makes the industry press, but their cumulative impact can transform a product used by millions. The researcher who methodically explores adjacent questions might never publish the headline-grabbing study, but their work builds the foundation upon which others’ insights depend.
I’ve seen this play out in my own career in design. My most successful work has not been built upon single breakthrough concepts but on a series of small, interconnected insights about user needs, technological constraints, and business goals. Nearly every useful idea I have had seems, on its own, quite minor — a tweak to a navigation pattern, a refinement of how information is presented, a subtle shift in terminology — but together, they have created experiences that worked meaningfully better than what came before. And, in my estimation, the greatest value I have created in my career has been by teaching others to think this way too.
The practice of generating many little ideas creates a resilience that big-idea hunting lacks. When your value comes from consistent good thinking rather than occasional brilliance, you’re not dependent on lightning striking. You’re building a renewable resource — your ability to notice problems and formulate potential solutions — rather than extracting a finite one.
The practice aspect of this is critical. The reality is that good ideas come from experience. The more you act on small insights — or just good thinking — the more you learn, which makes your next notions all the more potent. We tend to think of ideas as gems to be mined — rare, unique, coveted, priceless — but they are actually among our most renewable of resources. One begets another. You just have to do things — most of them routine — not wait for something entirely new to do. The desire for novelty robs us of repetition’s treasure.
This is particularly true in our rapidly changing technological landscape. A single big idea, even if genuinely novel, can quickly become irrelevant as the context around it shifts. But the ability to consistently produce relevant small ideas adapts alongside changing circumstances. The person who can generate ten thoughtful approaches to a problem will outlast the one still searching for the perfect solution.
Conceptual breakthroughs, are, of course, real. But for most of us, in most fields, our contribution will come through consistent, quality thinking applied over time — perhaps in pursuit of a breakthrough but not always. Often, in pursuit of maintenance, stability, or just getting something basic done well. That’s not settling for less; it’s recognizing where true value often lies.
Instead of asking ourselves “What’s my big idea?” we should be asking “What’s my next good idea?” And the one after that. And after that. The compound interest of regular, thoughtful contribution almost always outperforms the lottery ticket of the big breakthrough. Write every idea down. Most will be useless, late, mimics, and impossible. But some will be good and you never really know in advance when their time will come. When you do this, you’ll eventually realize that compound interest – the ideas will be all around you.
In a world obsessed with disruption and overnight success, there’s something radical about valuing consistency, incrementalism, and the patient accumulation of small improvements.
- Don’t get me started on how words like “disruption” and “revolutionary” are a form of semantic gaslighting. We used to call these things “theft,” “piracy,” and “racketeering.”
Written by Christopher Butler on
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