Your intelligence is cute, but can you actually get your point across?
Some of the smartest people I've ever met have also been some of the most inefficient communicators - and dare I say messy thinkers - I've ever met.
You've probably heard of the useful idiot.
We really don't talk enough about useless smart people.
Some of the smartest people I've ever met have also been some of the most inefficient communicators - and dare I say messy thinkers - I've ever met.
You might be wondering, as I often have, if someone is a messy thinker and an inefficient communicator, can they really be all that smart?
And that would be a fair question to prod.
What I mean by smart here is that these people have an ability to comprehend complex and difficult things and form interesting and intricate thoughts and ideas about those things.
Alas, it may take a painfully long time and an incredible amount of patience to get those thoughts and ideas out of their head and into the minds and hearts of people who may be able to actually make those thoughts and ideas useful (decision-makers, clients, key collaborators, etc.).
What you're left with is conversations about important things, with meaningful intentions, that take twice as long to only get half way as far (if that).
So if you're a smart person and/or consider yourself a technical or subject matter expert, I encourage you to regularly audit the efficiency of your communication and the elegance of your thinking.
The best way to do this is to ask people who speak with you on a regular basis, who may not want to hurt your feelings by providing unsolicited feedback, for direct and straightforward feedback.
Here are some specific questions you can ask:
How easy, simple and quick does it feel to listen to and speak with me?
Do I tend to overcomplicate things when I explain them?
Are there moments where you feel lost or confused when I’m speaking?
Do I give too much detail, not enough, or the right amount?
Do I make it easy for you to understand what I’m really trying to say?
Do you feel like I listen and respond clearly, or do I sometimes go off track?
Are my main points easy to remember after we finish a conversation?
Do I speak in a way that feels engaging or does it sometimes feel like hard work to follow?
Is there anything I could change in how I communicate that would make our conversations more productive?
Do I get to the point quickly enough, or do I circle around before landing?
How do you feel after a conversation with me - clear and energised, or drained and confused?
Besides doing an audit, here are some specific tips that will help you become a sharper thinker and communicator. They may also be a bit elusive obvious, in the sense that they sound obvious enough when we read or hear them, but we don’t actually think about them as obvious until we see them, and therefore it’s easy to take these for granted. Let me know if you want me to expand on any of these.
Prioritise good sleep.
Check in and assess if you have any food or environmental allergies that may be causing brain fog.
Write more. Especially write before you speak, even if it’s just a stream of consciousness version of an informal speech or presentation.
Stop using AI as a thinking partner; use it as a thinking assistant. Imagine if every single rep you did in the gym, your spotter was doing 40 to 60% of the lifting. Besides hitting plateaus without realising it, you might even suffer muscle atrophy and not notice.
Get recordings and transcripts of you speaking whenever and wherever possible. If it’s feasible in your workplace, record every single meeting you have, that you’re conveying something in, by default.
Identify your MOT limit. Mentally open tabs. This is a term I made up to represent how many different ideas or pieces of information (whether they’re interrelated or not) you have open in your mind like open tabs in an Internet browser. It’s next level Jedi to be able to close all your tabs and then have only 1 open at a time, but a lot of people have way too many, and those tabs have notifications popping up too! Close some damn MOTs!
Practice deep listening. This is not the same as ‘active listening’. Deep listening is when you’re listening to someone else, you’re also looking out for the disruptions that pop up in your head and swatting them away to go deeper with your focus on what the other person is saying. And then you go even deeper, trying to ‘listen’ to their body language, mannerisms, intentions, vibes. It does not require you to necessarily use acknowledging language or keyword backtracking. That’s all secondary. The priority is to listen, and listen deeper.
Hire a coach.
I’m sure there’s more. Let me know in the comments.
The bottom line is that being smart isn’t enough.
If your ideas can’t travel, they can’t transform anything. No one has time to dig through layers of cluttered thinking just to find the gold you meant to share.
If talking to you feels like untangling Christmas lights, don’t be surprised when people stop plugging in.
So don’t just obsess over knowing things. Or even knowing them well. Obsess over making them land. In fact, I’d prioritise that. Sharpen the edges of your thoughts, strip away what doesn’t matter, and learn to make clarity feel effortless.
Nobody wants to sit through a TED Talk when they only needed a tweet. And the smartest person in the room isn’t the one with the deepest thoughts or the most comprehensive understanding of a topic.
It’s the one who can make their understanding and those thoughts useful.
If you found this useful, read this next:
How to explain anything
If you can’t explain it clearly enough, you don’t understand it well enough.
I love the concept of the MOTs. That catches me out daily!
As a business coach helping people start their own businesses online, I see this show up all the time in their marketing. Messy thinking and messy communication almost always lead to messy messaging. Websites full of jargon. Offers that try to solve too many problems at once. Social posts that ramble instead of resonate.
And as you said here, if their ideas cannot travel clearly and quickly to the audience, they cannot create any impact. In business, that often means confused prospects, lost sales, and a lot of frustration.
The MOTs concept is such a powerful way to help clients pause, close some tabs, and strip their message down to what really matters. I tell them all the time, “If your audience cannot understand what you offer in one or two sentences, they will not buy it.”
It’s wild how often I meet brilliant people whose thinking is exhausting not because they lack rigour, but because they’re not having any fun.
Perfectionism is often the mind’s way of compensating for a lack of play. If you’re not allowed to have fun with your ideas, you start trying to make them bulletproof instead. And ironically, that’s when communication gets bloated, hesitant, and hard to follow.
Auditing your communication is vital. But sometimes the breakthrough isn’t more discipline...it’s more delight.