In praise of doing the work

Insight is derived from studying, analysing, and thinking through the research material, experiment reports, so on and so forth. Insight is then enriched by putting it into action and seeing what the response is.

There is no insight, nor accountability, from feeding a black box with research papers and customer data and then asking it to summarise the key points. There is output, that is certainly true. The siren call of such black boxes is strong, which I prescribe to desire for shortcuts; minimising time to success.

The only shortcut towards insight is knowing what you need to learn, the gaps you need to fill, what will you do to achieve that, and then doing so. In other words, take action and do the work.