"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." -- Mark Twain.
The epistle is not very long -- just 104 verses in our English Bibles. It takes maybe 15 minutes to read. And its Greek is not all that challenging. It's possibly the simplest letter Paul wrote. But that's not to say it has no enduring message.
Since when have we separated profundity from simplicity? Why must the textbooks we write be confusing to be called profound? (A forthcoming "introduction" to New Testament Greek is rumored to be around 900 pages.) Philippians is a superb example of a simple letter with a profound message. It's meant to be understood. It's certainly meant to be read and studied. But it wasn't written to bore its readers. It was written to be savored and enjoyed, like a great meal or a morning cup of coffee or taking a walk in nature or savoring a good novel or baking cookies or watching the sunrise or snuggling under a warm blanket or taking a hot shower.
Don't get me wrong. I like big books. Like this one.
It's "only" 1,074 pages long. My longest book is The New Testament: Its Background and Message -- a mere 700 pages in length. But the fact is, you can write a shorter book that's just as powerful as a longer book. The sweet spot for me is between 100-200 pages. My feeling is if I can't convince you of my ideas in that amount of pages, I'm not going to get you there in 200-300 pages. Someone has said that the happiest people are rarely the richest or the most beautiful or the most talented. Happy people do not depend on the excitement produced by the external. They enjoy the fundamental, often very simple, things of life.
Shorter books like Philippians are awesome. They are lean. They are laser-focused. They are powerful. You write them faster, finish them sooner, and enjoy the process more. In fact, as Mark Twain said, writing something concise takes more effort that writing a 160K word magnum opus.
You might try it sometime.