Daily Inspiration Quote by Iris Chang

Chang is smuggling a hard-earned warning into what sounds like simple process advice: breadth isn’t just bigger, it’s slipperier. A “broad subject” gives you the illusion of mastery because it invites summary, vibes, and familiar narratives. It’s the terrain where received wisdom thrives. A “specific” question, by contrast, behaves like a tool. It forces you to define terms, choose boundaries, commit to evidence, and accept that your argument can be disproven. That’s why specificity is “hard” in a productive way: it creates friction, and friction creates heat.

The subtext is almost moral. Chang isn’t praising narrowness as an aesthetic preference; she’s describing the discipline required to do honest history. “If you look hard enough … you will find it” is not naïve faith in archives so much as a bet on method: focused inquiry makes sources legible. Once you know what you’re hunting for, the world stops being an undifferentiated mass of facts and becomes a set of trails, absences, contradictions. The real payoff is the line about “discover[ing] things you wouldn’t have thought of before.” Specificity doesn’t reduce surprise; it manufactures it, because it corners you into encountering what your assumptions tried to skip.

In Chang’s context as a historian of atrocities, the stakes are implicit. Broad talk about “war” or “tragedy” can anesthetize. Specific names, dates, documents, testimonies - the granular record - resists denial and soft-focus mythmaking. Her sentence doubles as a credo: precision is how you honor complexity without turning it into fog.