Actual academic monographs and good novels are usually book length because their arguments and stories (and characters) require that book length to reach their full potential.
Which is funny because there's an argument that his skill isn't actually predicting economic effects of debt, but running a hedge fund.
And in the types of books you cited they are always Just So Stories that worked for that person. For instance, with "The hard thing about hard things", my takeaway was that I'll never be in exactly the same circumstances as the author with exactly the same context and thus their decisions aren't useful for me. Why bother? There was not a single nugget in there where I felt it was something I could add to my persona to make be a better person.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-pet...
> You may remember that Guns, Germs, and Steel is framed as a reply to a man named Yali, a “remarkable local politician” whom Diamond encountered while walking on the beach in New Guinea in July of 1972. > Yali asked a question that Diamond spends a couple of paragraphs boiling down to something like, “Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?” (Which is of course what Guns, Germs, and Steel tries to answer.) But that’s not actually the way Yali put it, and his real question — indeed, his whole story, which is fascinating in its own right — suggests a whole ‘nother set of answers > [Yali is] one of the true Player Characters of history. If we lived in a better world, he would be the subject of a prestige cable drama
1) Highlighting or underlining along with folding page corners to make it easy to find high impact passages when flipping through later.
2) Writing a short chapter summary in the blank space at the end of each chapter. Just a couple of minutes to reflect on what I just read and to summarize the core message of the chapter.