When you don’t have an argument, you start selling vocabulary.
And the easiest way to spot this is your adjectives.

Words like “seamless,” “robust,” “strategic,” and “customer-centric.”
Words that sound like business.
And feel like you went to the right school.

But to me, they signal only one thing: You don’t have an argument. (Or at least: you don’t trust your argument yourself and so you have to artificially juice it up.)

I mean, I get it. You want your message to land. You want them to say, “Yes, that’s it.” But actually, every time you use one of those adjectives, you’re going into debt. Essentially, you ask the audience to trust you.

If you call the plan “robust,” I have to believe you.
If you say the timeline is “aggressive,” I have to trust your judgment.

Look for it in your next meeting. The more someone uses fancy or grandiose adjectives, the less likely they are to have a solid case.

It almost always signals they’re afraid to commit to a noun and a verb.

Jensen Huang, who runs the most valuable company on earth, uses adjectives very differently, much like a mechanic.

He doesn’t say: “We are leveraging a holistic hardware ecosystem to deliver premium AI capabilities.”

He says: “We connected 30,000 chips. It weighs 600,000 pounds. It runs the model in real-time.”

Do you see the difference?

The amateur tries to sell you the feeling (the adjective). Jensen sells you the reality (the noun and the verb) and lets you feel the feeling.

To be fair, Huang does use adjectives, but like this:

First, he stacks the wood:
Chips (a noun)
Connected (a verb)
Weighs (a verb)
Pounds (a noun)
Runs (a verb)
Model (a noun)
Real-time (a noun)

And only after he has built the fire does he drop the match. Only then does he say: “It is insane.”

And because he built the pile first, you believe him. He earned the adjective.

The trap is trying to say “insane,” “magical,” “strategic,” without building the argument. 

To put it bluntly:

The amateur tries to inject excitement with adjectives (“It’s magical!”).
The pro builds a machine that creates excitement (Nouns + Verbs), and then stands back.

Here’s a simple test:
Strip all the adjectives from your message. Does the argument fall apart?

More concretely:
Name the noun: customer, backlog, churn, renewal, outage, pipeline, margin.
Commit to the verb: ship, cut, remove, refund, automate, simplify, stop, choose.

And if you can’t do that, if you can’t describe what you’re doing without leaning on “innovative,” you don’t have a message. You have a vibe.

Communicators with a strong case don’t open with “exceptional.” They open with something you can picture, measure, or trip over.

They build the machine first:

• Here’s the thing.
• Here’s what it does.
• Here’s what it replaces.
• Here’s what it costs.
• Here’s what we stop doing.

And only then do they earn the right to say the adjective. The one that lands because it’s after the proof, not instead of it.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael