The New Rule: Don't Make Anyone Uncomfortable With How Much You Know

How a quiet wave of anti-intellectualism turned depth into a liability and curiosity into a threat.

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I was 20. A few months into my first real job. Sales and marketing role at a huge telecom company.

We had a meeting about a sales process change. Forty-five minutes of discussion. Some good points. Some unclear decisions. The usual.

I got back to my desk and spent twenty minutes writing an email to the team. Not long. Maybe four paragraphs. I summarized what I thought we’d decided, then asked three follow-up questions about things that still seemed unclear: How do we handle edge cases? What happens when prospects don’t fit the new qualification criteria? Who owns the timeline for implementing this?

Hit send. Felt good about it. Thought I was being helpful.

Ten minutes later, my manager called me into his office.

“Scott, I appreciate the enthusiasm. But we don’t need to turn every meeting into a research project. The team knows what to do. You’re overthinking it.”

I nodded. Said I understood. Went back to my desk feeling like I’d done something wrong.

Three weeks later, the process rollout was a mess. Different people had different understandings of what we’d decided. The edge cases I’d asked about? They came up immediately. Nobody knew who was supposed to handle them.

But I was the one who’d been overthinking it.