I’m 37 and I used to think being articulate meant sounding impressive – now I think it mostly means saying the thing you actually mean

by Lachlan Brown | May 11, 2026, 2:32 pm

For most of my twenties, I thought being articulate meant being able to use the right vocabulary at the right moment.

I’d read a lot. I’d picked up the phrases. I knew when to say “nuanced” and “trajectory” and “tension between” and “the broader pattern.” In meetings I could string sentences together that sounded like I’d thought about something for a long time, even when I hadn’t. In writing I’d lean on a sophisticated structure to disguise the fact that I wasn’t entirely sure what I was saying.

I thought that was being good with words.

It wasn’t.

What I was actually doing was hiding inside language. The bigger sentence gave me cover. If someone disagreed, I could retreat into the qualifications. If I was wrong, I hadn’t quite committed to anything strong enough to be wrong about. The whole performance had a kind of evasive elegance to it, and at the time I thought it was sophistication.

The people I actually wanted to listen to

Somewhere in my late twenties I started noticing that the people I most wanted to hear from didn’t talk like that.

They were direct. They used short sentences. They said what they thought without the rhetorical scaffolding. When they didn’t know something, they said they didn’t know. When they thought you were wrong, they said so without dressing it up. There was a calmness to it that came partly from being older, but mostly from not needing to perform competence.

The writers I most admired wrote the same way.

The page never felt crowded with effort. They’d take a complicated idea and put it in language a fifteen-year-old could follow, and somehow the idea would land harder for it.

I started to suspect that what I’d been doing my whole life was the opposite of being articulate. I’d been good at sounding articulate. The two are not the same thing.

Why we reach for the impressive version

A lot of it, I think, is fear of sounding obvious.

If what you actually think is “I don’t agree with this plan,” there’s a worry that saying it that simply will make you look unsophisticated. So you reach for the longer version. “I have some reservations about the assumptions we’re working with here.” That sounds more thoughtful. It also says less. It gives the other person nothing concrete to engage with.

The impressive version is often a way of being seen as serious without having to be specific.

The same thing happens in personal conversations. You don’t say, “I’m hurt.” You say, “I think there’s something we should talk through more carefully.” You don’t say, “I’m scared.” You say, “I have some concerns about how things are tracking.” Each of those translations costs you something. The other person doesn’t get the real thing. They get the polished version that doesn’t quite land.

And the polished version, because it never quite lands, has to be repeated. So you go around the same conversation three more times, wondering why nothing is changing.

The simple sentence was the answer the first time.

What it actually takes

Saying the thing you actually mean turns out to be harder than it sounds.

You have to know what you actually mean, which is the first problem. A lot of the impressive-sounding language we use is a way of papering over the fact that we haven’t fully figured out our own position. The sophisticated phrasing buys us time. It lets us seem to be making a point while we work out what the point is.

To say the simple version, you have to pause. You have to ask yourself what you actually think, plainly, without dressing it up. Often that takes longer than you’d expect.

Then you have to be willing to say it.

That’s the second problem. The simple version exposes you. If you say, “I think we should kill this project,” there’s nowhere to retreat to. You’re committed. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong in a way everyone can see. The sophisticated version was so vague that being wrong barely registered. The simple version is loud about it.

So saying what you mean takes both clarity and a small amount of courage. Most days, especially in professional settings, we don’t bother. We default back to the cover.

What changed for me

The work I do for a living involves a lot of writing and a lot of editing, so I’ve had to learn this the practical way over the last decade or so.

Every piece of writing I edit, I cut. I take out the qualifier. I shorten the sentence. I replace the sophisticated verb with the obvious one. Every time, the writing gets stronger. Every time, the actual point comes through more clearly. After enough years of doing this to other people’s work, I started doing it to my own speech.

It changed how I talk to my wife.

For a long time I’d describe what I felt in the careful, somewhat over-considered language I’d picked up from books. She didn’t always respond the way I expected, partly, I now think, because what I was saying didn’t quite match what I was actually feeling. When I started saying simpler things, the conversations got better. “I’m tired and I don’t want to make a decision tonight” works much better than a paragraph about decision fatigue.

It changed how I work with my brothers.

In a family business, there’s no room for clever framing. If something isn’t working, you have to say so. Watching them say hard things plainly has been one of the best educations I’ve had in being a real adult.

And my daughter, who is just under a year old, has nothing else but the simple version yet. When she’s hungry, she lets you know. When she’s tired, she lets you know. There’s something instructive in that, even if it’s the kind of instruction you can only take so far.

The quiet trade-off

There’s a cost to it, and I should be honest about it.

When you say the thing you actually mean, you sometimes get pushback you wouldn’t have got if you’d hidden inside more elegant language. People can engage with what you said because it’s clear. They can disagree with it. They can be hurt by it. The whole point of the sophisticated version was that nothing it said was concrete enough to attract a real response.

I’ve decided I’d rather have the response.

Even when it’s harder. Even when I get it wrong sometimes. Even when I have to come back and say I was unfair, or I’d misunderstood, or I’d spoken too soon. The conversations that come out of saying the actual thing are real conversations. The other kind never quite are.

I’m 37 now, and I’ve stopped admiring the people who can talk for ten minutes without saying anything specific. I used to think they were impressive. I now mostly think they’re avoiding something, and that the avoidance is more obvious than they realise.

The most articulate person in most rooms is usually the one who can say, in five words, what everyone else is talking around. They almost never sound impressive doing it.

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, a digital publishing network reaching tens of millions of readers monthly. He holds a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies from Deakin University, though his real education came afterward: a warehouse job shifting TVs, a stretch of anxiety in his mid-twenties, and the slow discovery that studying the mind is not the same as learning how to live well. He started experimenting with Buddhist principles during breaks at the warehouse and eventually began writing about what he was learning. That writing became Hack Spirit, a widely read personal development site, and his book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism became a bestseller. His work breaks down complex ideas into frameworks people can apply immediately, whether they are navigating a career change, a difficult relationship, or the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Lachlan splits his time between Singapore and Saigon. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, digital innovation, and the intersection of Eastern philosophy with modern life. His perspective comes from having built things from scratch, failed at some of them, and learned that clarity comes from practice, not theory.