TJ Walker argues that simple language makes you sound smarter, not dumber. Corporate jargon like "leverage the solution" confuses audiences and signals you don't fully understand what you're saying. In the AI era, sounding human and direct is the real competitive edge.
Ultimize. Winston Churchill understood something most communicators completely miss. The eye can process complicated language much more easily than the ear can. That's why Churchill constantly pushed speechwriters toward shorter words and simpler language, because listeners don't get to reread your sentence. They hear it once, and if your communication sounds overloaded, complicated, tangled, or stuffed with jargon, people stop processing your ideas. This is one of the biggest reasons highly educated people sometimes sound less intelligent than they actually are. They mistake complexity for sophistication. You hear this constantly in business. Nobody says, we should use this. Instead, they say, we should leverage the solution moving forward. Few people say we need to work together. Instead, they say we need greater cross-functional alignment when they're trying to sound smart. Don't do that. Half of corporate America sounds like malfunctioning airport announcement systems. And the irony is this: simple language usually sounds more intelligent because simple language signals confidence. When someone truly understands an idea, they can usually explain it clearly, not always perfectly, but clearly in the simplest way to make other people understand it. The people trying hardest to sound smart often overcomplicate things. They overtalk, overwrite, and overexplain because they're performing intelligence instead of communicating, and audiences feel that immediately. The smartest communicators I've worked with were often shockingly simple. Especially in media interviews, television appearances, podcasts, because spoken communication rewards clarity, rhythm, brevity, and emotional connection, not verbal gymnastics and big words. And this becomes even more important in the AI era because AI already produces endless polished generic language. The competitive advantage now is sounding human, clear, Conversational, direct, and useful, not sounding like a committee of management consultants trained by LinkedIn. So this is a hard thing to grasp because it's counterintuitive, but you will actually come across sounding smarter by using smaller, simpler words, but doing it with conviction and confidence.
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