Aim to be understood, not to look smart

For years, whenever someone asked what the USD 5bn investment firm I ran actually did, I had two answers ready, and I could usually tell from the person's face which one they were dreading.

The long answer went something like this. We ran a concentrated, high-conviction portfolio of listed companies across Asia and the emerging markets, selected from a universe of some thirty thousand businesses through a process of fundamental research, in-market due diligence and a fairly heroic quantity of patience. All of it true, every word accurate, and every word, I eventually realised, quietly useless, because by the time I had reached "high-conviction" the person in front of me had gone somewhere warmer in their mind, and honestly, who could blame them.

The short answer was five words. Eat, drink, wash, wear, shop.

That was the whole thing. We looked for the companies that sold people the things they did every single day: the bar of soap, the packet of noodles, the bottle of something cold, the school shoes, the small ordinary transaction repeated a billion times over across a rising middle class. Eat, drink, wash, wear, shop. You could carry it out of the room in your head. You could repeat it to your husband over dinner. And, this is the part that took me an embarrassingly long time to notice, you could actually understand it.

Because here is what I was slow to learn. The five-word version was not a dumbed-down cousin of the proper answer, offered to people who couldn't cope with the real one. It was the real one. Everything in the long version was there to impress; almost nothing in it was there to be understood, and those are not the same job, though our industry spends a great deal of money pretending they are.

It helps to think about what is actually happening on the other side of the conversation. The brain you are talking to is not a filing cabinet patiently waiting to receive your thirty thousand companies; it is a tired, thrifty organ that would very much like to spend as little energy as possible, and it is making a quiet, constant calculation about whether following you is worth the effort. Working memory holds only a handful of things at once, famously about seven, and probably fewer once someone has had a glass of wine, so the moment you exceed it, comprehension doesn't slow down politely. It stops. The listener nods, the eyes glaze, and the whole beautifully accurate paragraph slides off without leaving a mark.

This is where the behaviour gets interesting, and a little uncomfortable, because complexity flatters the person producing it. A long, clause-heavy, jargon-armoured explanation signals effort, seriousness, membership of the club, whilst simplicity signals none of that; it just works, which is precisely why we distrust it. We assume the clever thing must be the complicated thing, when more often the clever thing is the one someone has done the hard work of making small. Reducing thirty thousand companies to five verbs was not laziness. It was years of thinking, compressed until it could be carried.

So the discipline, whether you're explaining a portfolio or a pension or what on earth you did all day, is to keep asking a slightly deflating question: not "have I said everything true?" but "have I said the one thing they'll remember?" The first gets you a client letter nobody finishes. The second gets you five words that outlive the meeting.

Say the complicated thing if you must. But say the small thing first, and say it so it lands, because the point of talking was never to look smart. It was to be understood.