Before you send the angry Slack message. Before you quit the project. Before you tell yourself your whole career is doomed. Stop. Run the four-letter test. HALT. Ask yourself: Am I Hungry? Am I Angry? Am I Lonely? Am I Tired? Simple. Almost stupidly simple. Which is exactly why most smart people skip it. I see this all the time in my work. A leader walks into a meeting with a clear point and walks out with a mess. A founder tries to sound brave and ends up sounding harsh. A t

Simple messaging is not a nice extra. It is the fight. It is the line between being heard and being thrown into the same grey pile as everyone else. And on Wall Street, it can become part of the valuation story. Look at Cerebras. Yes, the chip mattered. Yes, the market mattered. Yes, the AI wave mattered. But clarity helped make the story easy to grasp. And when billions are watching, easy to grasp matters. Last week, Cerebras walked onto Wall Street, and CEO Andrew Feldman f

Want to know who often sounds the dumbest? The person trying the hardest to sound smart. You can hear it right away. The long words. The stiff tone. The sentence that walks in wearing a suit three sizes too big. I see this with my clients all the time. They take a sharp idea and bury it under boardroom sludge. They stretch it into bloated paragraphs and use words nobody says out loud in real life. And then the room goes quiet. That is why I like looking at people who make har

If you run a team, steal this for every new hire. I wrote before about keeping a WTF list when you first join a company. A private record of everything that makes you stop and think, what in God’s name is this? The same move belongs on the leader’s side too. Give it a name and build it into onboarding. If WTF feels too spicy for HR, call it the Fresh Eyes Report. Same knife. Safer label. Hand the new person a blank doc on day one. Tell them they have fresh eyes and their firs

You’ve seen the word ‘remarkable’ everywhere. On websites. In decks. Across pitches that promise a lot and say very little. It once had bite. Then people sanded the edge off it until it could barely cut. Then Seth Godin gave it teeth again . PS. If you don’t know jewellery, know your jeweller. That’s Buffett’s rule. It’s the same with messaging. Smart ideas die in boring words. If you don’t know the game, find a partner who does, because your reputation is on the line. I hel

Dates. Definitions. Lists. In school , it’s all recall. Say it right, get the mark, keep the peace, and make teachers smile. Then you step into the real world and learn something fast. Nobody pays you for what you can recite. They pay you for what you see, what you judge, what you build, and whether you can make the call when things get messy and the room is watching. Because memorisation fills notebooks. But evaluation and creation move markets. Enter Bloom’s Taxonomy. It’s