Great simple ideas have an elegance and a utility that make them function a lot like proverbs. Cervantes’s definition of “proverbs” echoes our definition of Simple ideas: short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core). We are right to be skeptical of sound bites, because lots of sound bites are empty or misleading—they’re compact without being core. But the Simple we’re chasing isn’t a sound bite, it’s a proverb: compact and core.
