Stop talking

A few weeks ago I watched a kid build a bridge (I was deep in a YouTube rabbit hole).

A real bridge. Two chairs in the living room, a broom handle balanced across them, and a sofa cushion shoved underneath like a structural engineer had briefly possessed an eight-year-old.

He stood there with his tongue slightly out, eyes narrowed, narrating the whole thing like it mattered.

Which, to him, it did.

“Okay… so this goes here… no, that’s stupid… wait… if I put this under… hold on… YES.”

And while he was talking, his hands never stopped. He didn’t step back to “think it through” the way adults do. He didn’t stare at it for ten minutes "planning". He talked and moved and adjusted in one continuous flow, like the words weren’t commentary but part of the process.

The bridge sagged. He corrected it. The broom handle rolled. He corrected it. The cushion slipped. He shoved it back. A chair leg scraped across the floor. He didn’t interpret any of it as failure. It was just feedback. Reality speaking back.

Eventually, it held. And he had his bridge.

Kids don’t separate thinking from doing. They don’t treat language as something you do before action, like an email you send and then wait for the reply. Their speech and their movement are woven together.

Talking as thinking as action.

Adults talk and talk and talk. But we seemed to have forgotten how to do. We've stopped doing.

Somewhere between childhood and competence, we've learned to become fluent. And stuck.

When language stopped being magic

Kids talk out loud all the time. And if you have three of them in the house with you, then it's really fucking annoying.

They narrate life like it's a documentary. They rehearse arguments. They invent rules while they’re playing, and the rules change mid-sentence if the game demands it. It’s messy, unfinished, half-formed.

It’s also incredibly effective.

If you watch a child solve a problem, you can hear their mind working in public. They propose an idea, try it, watch it fail, revise, try again. They use language not just to label the world but to manipulate it in pursuit of a goal.

Language and creation are so interconnected that you can't have one without the other.

Then we grow up and we start treating speech like something that should sound competent.

We internalise our rough thinking. We tidy it up. We wait until the idea is coherent before we let it out. We learn that being wrong out loud carries a cost, and we become allergic to paying it.

We start speaking as if every sentence has a scorecard.

That shift looks like maturity. It looks like "professionalism". It also ruins something really important.

Because creativity needs the opposite of polish. It needs contact. It needs collision. It needs mistakes. It needs the broom handle to roll off the chair so you stop theorising and start adjusting.

Children do this instinctively. They move through the world with a kind of experimental faith: try, see what happens, try again. Their confidence doesn’t come from certainty. It comes from the knowledge that they can recover from a wobble.

Adults often replace that with something safer: language.

We describe the problem. We name the obstacles. We articulate the risks. We make sense of it. We become very good at understanding why we can’t move, and we mistake that understanding for actual movement.

Words as a substitute for action

School rewards the neat answer more than the messy experiment. Work rewards the person who can sound certain. Culture rewards the person who can package a thought into something shareable.

Adult life rewards performance.

So we learn to "perform" intelligence. We learn to narrate ourselves convincingly. We learn that the right words can create the appearance of progress.

Then we take that skill home and apply it to ourselves.

We hold internal meetings. We rehearse conversations that will never happen. We write mental essays about our feelings. We make elaborate plans that look beautiful in our heads and never meet reality.

We tell ourselves that once we find the right insight, then we'll take action.

But we don't.

Because the missing ingredient isn’t insight. It’s movement.

Reality doesn’t shift because you described it well. Reality shifts when you touch it. When you move something. When you risk the clumsy first attempt. When you allow yourself to look slightly foolish in the name of finding out what’s true.

Words are safe. Words don’t fall over. Words don’t embarrass you. Words don’t confront you with the gap between who you say you are, and what you do.

So we talk. We analyse. We plan. We explain. We become experts in the architecture of the problem.

And it feels like progress.

But a lot of it is just rearranging the deck chairs.

23 hours a week

Most senior executives spend an average of 23 hours a week in meetings. Yes, you read that right. Some of you may even think that's a bit low.

But that's insane!

23 hours of describing a problem without taking action. 23 hours of speculation and prediction, as if the future is a polite place that can be argued into cooperation.

And the truly depressing part isn’t the number of hours wasted. It’s what happens inside those hours.

Meetings are meant to be a bridge between thinking and doing. A place you go to decide, to commit, to move. But really they're a place where you talk about work, rather than actually doing any work.

You can spend an entire morning “making progress” without producing anything. And so much of that time gets spent on the one thing we cannot do: predict the future.

We debate what the market will do, what competitors will do, what customers will do. We speak in confident sentences about uncertainty. We seem to forget that the future doesn’t care how convincing we sound.

You can't control the future. Being too rigid about making things happen the way you planned, stops you from reacting to emerging problems, and causes you to miss unexpected opportunities.

So the week repeats. More meetings. More talking. More describing. More “alignment.” And action remains permanently scheduled for later, like a mythical creature everyone believes in but nobody has actually seen.

Talking is still the key. Just not like this.

I don’t want to blame language. Language is the whole point. It’s one of the most powerful tools we have.

But not because it makes us sound clever.

Because language shapes attention, and attention shapes behaviour.

When you name something, you make it visible. When you articulate a fear, you take it from a vague bodily sensation and turn it into something you can face. When you put words around a desire, you create a target.

Words don’t just describe the world. They organise it. They influence it. Which is why they’re dangerous when they become a substitute for action.

Children use words as a steering wheel. Adults use words as a stage.

Talking stops being part of the experiment and becomes the experiment itself. The aim becomes clarity, not movement. The reward becomes sounding right, not actually doing the right thing.

And the world doesn’t reward that for long.

Reality responds to what you actually do, not what you say you'll do.

I love words

I’m writing this as someone who loves language. I like sharp ideas. I like good sentences. I like the satisfying click of a thought that finally makes sense.

But I’ve used those things as a hiding place too.

I can intellectualise almost anything. I can turn confusion into analysis. I can turn fear into philosophy. I can turn avoidance into “reflection.” Sometimes that’s useful. Sometimes it’s just a refined way of staying the same.

So I’ve been trying to relearn how to be a kid again and let words lead directly into taking a small action. I try and make a small move that forces feedback.

When I feel myself disappearing into planning, I ask a slightly annoying question: what’s the smallest thing I can do to get the world to answer back?

Then I do it before my brain talks me out of it.

This is the part that always feels too simple to be true, but keeps proving itself anyway: the moment you engage with the world, the world responds. You get information you can’t think your way into. You get clarity you can’t journal your way into. You get momentum that doesn’t come from motivation but from contact.

That’s what the kid with the chair bridge understood.

So what?

If you’re stuck in your head right now, you don’t need a better explanation of the problem. You need one small collision with reality.

Pick one thing you’ve been thinking about for too long. A project, a habit, a conversation, a decision. Don’t pick the biggest issue in your life. Pick the one that keeps returning when you’re making tea.

Then ask: what’s the smallest action I can take that forces reality to respond?

Do that. Quickly. Imperfectly. Before your brain schedules another meeting about it.

And if you’re a leader, if your calendar is a wall of meetings, try one small act of rebellion this week: end one meeting with a decision that becomes an immediate test. Not “we’ll circle back.” Not “let’s align offline.” A real test. Something that you can do today, while the words are still warm.

Because I’ve got a suspicion that a lot of what we call overthinking isn’t actually thinking.

It’s fear wearing a clever outfit.

And the cure isn’t to become less intelligent.

It’s to become more physical.

More contact. More attempts. More awkward first drafts. More broom handles falling off chairs.

That’s when the world starts to move again.

Until next time,

Jon "Lego Engineer" Kaye

Choosing to live more deliberately