I learned something simple yet profound from two authors I worked with on Ethics for the Real World (Harvard Business Press, 2008). The authors, Ron Howard and Clint Korver, are experts in decision making from Stanford University. Ron and Clint will tell you that clarity in thinking depends on making distinctions.

In an ethics course Ron created at Stanford, Ron and Clint ask students to make distinctions between ethical and unethical behavior. Drawing these distinctions is much harder than you think. One example: How do you decide if stealing is wrong? By reflex, you may decide it is always wrong. And you may feel strongly. But what if Ron and Clint were to ask you: Would you steal to save another’s life? And if so, whose life is worth stealing for?

To decide, you need to draw a distinction—or maybe several—that you never thought of before. For starters, do you believe in action- or consequence-based ethics? If you believe in action-based ethics, you believe actions like killing, lying, and stealing are wrong regardless of context. If you believe in consequence-based ethics, you believe an action is wrong depending on its expected consequences (it’s okay to steal a car if you need it to drive your mother to the hospital).

Point is, you can’t get clear on your thinking unless you create new divisions of thought. That is, you need to discriminate between one thing and another you hadn’t considered before. Otherwise, you’re probably glossing over hard—and interesting—questions.

And how does this relate to book development? In books, the key to delivering new insights is through drawing fresh distinctions. The ability to make a distinction and the birth of an insight—they go together.

Some distinctions set an entire book’s contents apart—and on fire. Think: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray, PhD. His Mars/Venus distinction allowed him to spin off an entire book’s worth of insights.

When you’re thinking through a book, remember the power of distinctions. Have you made enough of them to start a fire in your readers’ minds? How do your distinctions differ from those of other authors? What fresh insights come up as a result? Have you reached deeply enough into your experience to express the most useful divisions of thought for your readers?

No new distinctions, no new insight, no fresh appeal to your book.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published February 14, 2011]