The Worst Things Experts Do When They Communicate Which Causes Their Words to Fail
The other day, my cousin shared a quick but scary story about a friend. It's become my favorite example of how experts so often want to help others but only end up hurting their cause.
This quote she shared with me has been bothering me in a really deep way, so naturally, I need to write about it to process it.
But first, the context.
May the odds be ever in your favor (Spoiler: they aren't)
My cousin lives in New York City, where their mayor, Zohran Mamdani, announced an initiative to provide free childcare to parents with kids of a certain age.
If you're unfamiliar, finding childcare for your kids before they're 5 or 6 is a total mess, bordering on disaster depending on your financial and familial situations. It's like competing in the Hunger Games. Underwater. In a weighted vest. While childless people in luxury submarines (which are things in this metaphor) cruise past, popping champagne and dancing and occasionally inviting you onto their submarine just so you have the pleasure of being able to say you can't go drinking on the luxury submarine because you have kids, and then you return to scrolling social media so people who don't have kids can tell you that if you chose to have kids you also can't ever complain about any of the hard things about having and/or raising kids.
Also there are diapers.
The system is wildly expensive ... despite every nanny and preschool teacher being woefully underpaid.
It's also bizarrely scarce ... despite every parent screaming to please take my money and watch my kid so I can continue to have a job.
It's a total market failure.
I realize there's no one right way to design a family (some people can support a family on one income; some people want to stay at home and not work; some have other loved ones helping out), but if you're like my family and many others, both parents work (or you're a solo parent who does) and the only option is to pursue the mess of finding care.
In speaking to my social circle about this, they all had a similar experience, and we each spent anywhere between $25k and $40k per year, per child, simply to ensure we could keep our jobs and give our kids a healthy place to be and to grow during the day.
It's gotten so bad, in 2025, 40% of American families said they were struggling to find affordable childcare, while the cost of childcare for one infant now costs more than rent in 17 states and more than in-state college tuition in 38 states. (Source.)
This entire process was stressful both financially and emotionally for me and my wife, and yet we are the ones who have won the life lottery. My family has TWO committed parents with TWO incomes. Our experience of finding childcare may have been painful, but it was always going to be survivable. What if a family only has one parent? What if a family isn't earning enough income to afford this? What if they have no other option but to work full-time AND somehow take care of their kids during the day? It breaks my heart. Even worse, it breaks a lot of families.
Naturally, countless experts are trying to solve this problem, working with private organizations and the government to do so.
Which brings me to the quote from my cousin.
How an expert shoots themselves in the foot
As we were talking, she slipped in the fact that her good friend works under Mayor Mamdani and is incredibly frustrated with him because (and I quote), "He keeps calling it 'childcare.' It's not childcare! It's early childhood education. Saying 'childcare' makes it sound trivial and makes us sound trivial."
"Oh my goodness, really?!" I replied to my cousin. "Guess what allllll of us parents who are out here struggling call it? CHILDCARE! It's childcare! We need CARE. For our CHILDS!"
(Turns out I make bad puns even when angry.)
The moment I heard that quote from my cousin's friend, I started gnawing on my fist. I've seen this countless times before. There are real problems to solve and real humans to serve, yet certain experts get so caught up in being smarter and more correct than everyone around them, they fail to actually make positive progress.
I feel like scribbling in Sharpie on that person's desk: Never bring facts to a story fight (and in smaller text below that) Every human interaction is a story fight.
I see this everywhere, not just in government.
I see this among speakers who scoff at a speaker with less experience getting booked for the keynote.
I see it among teachers who swear that kids just don't want to learn anymore.
I see it among consultants who push their pedigree at the expense of their perspective.
My friend, you and I are experts in Our Things, and that's wonderful. But that guarantees us nothing. Other humans think and operate and speak in ways that may be different from us, and if we want influence any change or action at all, we have to go out into their reality and meet them where they're at. We are sitting at letter Z, and they are at letter A. Too many times, we effectively say to the world, "X, Y, Z," and then wonder why our work doesn't connect.
Making matters even harder, we are up against the worst climate to be experts and be trusted as experts we've ever seen. It's bad enough that we have to compete with all the needless noise and vapid voices and hollow hucksters. (So puns and alliteration, apparently.) But now we have AI and everything being faked. People are passing off expertise as their own, when it's not. It's unearned and uninspired. They've ordered takeout for dinner and served it on their own plates, telling their guests they cooked it. When you have actual earned insight and actual integrity, what then?
We learn to resonate.
We stop pushing solely our smarts at the world and learn to package and communicate our expertise to be more memorable, through stories and frameworks and tone and a distinct, ownable, signature idea guiding it all. We stop shoving a wall of jargon at people, using technical terms nobody else uses, rushing through a talk to fit more inside it, or overwriting your essays to teach. (Pot, meet Kettle.)
My friend, you need to swallow some humble pie and realize the way you communicate is too dense, too confusing, too meandering, too strange. You have to consciously change how you communicate to be effective. Stop operating like everybody else must have the PhD in your thing or else they're wrong, but if you could just explain it to them and get more time and tell them, "Yes, it's that, but it's also this and also you need to know about that and ACTUALLY, we don't call it X, we call it Y" ... if you'd only stop that, you might start influencing positive change.
Because there is only one real goal when you write or speak with anyone about anything:
MAKE THEM CARE.
I really hate all the charlatans out there, all the business bros and the hype-filled communicators. But you have to give them credit for one thing at least. They know how to make others care. We shouldn't learn from them (definitely not). But we do have to compete with them. And conventional wisdom. And misinformation. And inertia.
We are up against every source of friction and alternative direction that our audiences could possibly encounter, and the more we insist on being sniveling, whiny, pompous pricks about exactly how "we" say it, the less others care and the more the other stuff wins out.
Cut it out, experts. The fact that you're right doesn't guarantee that you're also resonant. We need to be both if we're going to actually help others.
Being smart doesn't qualify you to be influential. Resonance requires alignment. It's the energy to act people feel when a message or moment aligns so closely with them, they feel amplified. We all want others to take action, but so often, we fail to impart the energy to act. The solution isn't to press harder or shout louder. The solution is to align more closely—so you can resonate deeper.
I hope and I pray to every deity ever named that my country will fix the childcare system. It's broken beyond description, and it hurts parents, kids, and even the economy everyone keeps babbling about. But that system won't get better if the experts and practitioners in it think and act like my cousin's friend.
When faced with a hard problem to solve or an audience to serve, too many experts retreat into the desire to feel right instead of the desire to resonate.
If we want expertise to win out, that has to end.
You've earned your expertise. That does not mean you've earned their trust.