You would probably be annoyed if I started this post with a phrase like: The most important characteristic of thought-leaders is that they don’t use suprelatives This outright excludes me as a thought-leader (which is fine and correct) and it also instructs you that this thing I am pointing out is, in isolation, the one thing you should worry about if you wanted to be a thought-leader. Such phrase excludes many other important aspects of thought-leaders that only work well when put together.

Superlatives have become a tool to get the attention of the impatient on ideas that, while sometimes important, can’t be fact-checked most of the time. People are after quick results, they want to know the most important things to learn, the best things to have, the list of worst actions that they should avoid, etc. to the point that checking and thoroughly understanding the content they are consuming is not as important anymore. Give me the one-liner, they say. I don’t have time to read a whole book on this, they say.

To you, reader and consumer of content. It doesn’t matter what form the content comes in, don’t let the use of superlatives opaque your judgement or distract you from the important parts of the content you are reading, especially if such content is limited to 280 characters.

To you, (aspiring) thought-leader. There are better ways to express relevance than using superlatives. If you can’t bake your superlatives with facts, then avoid them. If you feel that you need to use superlatives to sound interesting, then revisit your ideas and think harder. Try to reduce (or even remove) the use of superlatives from the ideas you are expressing because, even though they make you sound more experienced to some people, they often make you come through as in need for attention.

It is not my intention to generalize and much less to provide the best advice for expressing ideas. Take this for what it is, a rant made advice that came from my own annoyance as I see new generations trying to stay relevant in a world that is moving faster than they are able to deal with. Parts of this generations are providing ideas, and the rest are following them to the letter.