Striving Towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

Over-explaining doesn’t create clarity—it destroys it.

You know that moment when someone’s eyes glaze over while you’re talking? Your instinct is, “They don’t get it yet—I need to explain more.” So you add another analogy, some context, maybe a story.

And somehow, they look even more confused.

Think of working memory like a handful of sticky notes—you can only hold so many at once. When overloaded, your brain stops understanding and starts just trying to survive the conversation.

When researchers removed unnecessary information, understanding improved. People grasped ideas faster and made better decisions.

For example, Someone asks you how email works. You could say: “You write a message, it gets broken into packets, sent across the internet to the recipient’s server, and appears in their inbox.”

But if you start explaining SMTP protocols, DNS lookups, POP3 vs IMAP, spam filters, encryption methods, and the history of electronic communication… their eyes glaze over by sentence three. They asked a simple question; they didn’t sign up for a computer science lecture.

By the time you finish, people have forgotten your original suggestion. They’re just tired.

Long explanations don’t clarify—they blur. Good ideas lose their edge when we bury them under justification. Meetings drift even when everyone has good intentions because we keep adding “helpful context” that nobody actually needs.

Clarity doesn’t come from saying more. It comes from knowing what to leave out.

Before you explain something, pause and ask yourself: What’s the one thing that actually matters right now?

Say that. Then—and this is the hard part—stop talking.

Going forward, this is what you should be practicing going forward.

• When your kid asks why they have to do homework: “Because practicing helps you learn” is enough. You don’t need the speech about neuroplasticity and the education system.
• When your boss asks for a project update: “We’re on track for Friday” works. Save the blow-by-blow of every obstacle you overcame for the post-mortem (if ever).
• When a friend asks for directions: “Take the 405 South, exit at Jamboree, it’s the blue building on the left.” Don’t include the scenic route, the construction you heard about, or the better parking option three blocks away.

You don’t need to demonstrate everything you know. Your job is to protect the core message from drowning in all the other stuff you could say.

The person who explains less often communicates more.