Unlocking Potential: How Vocabulary Shapes Success

The Power of Constraints: Lessons from Oulipo’s Creativity

What do you get when a bunch of mathematicians come together and try to tackle avant-garde literature? Oulipo or “the workshop of potential literature,” a loose collection of mainly French-speaking writers who thought it was more important to come up with the structures and patterns with which to write literature than to actually write it.

Now they are primarily known as practitioners of “constraint-based writing,” which seeks out first to delineate the limits of what can be spoken of as a spur to creative activity.

Writing with a constraint solves the classic conundrum of the writer staring at a blank page, paralyzed by the infinite possibilities of writing.

Perhaps the most famous members of Oulipo now are Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, both having written works regarded as classics of 20th-century literature, Life: A User’s Manual and Invisible Cities.

A constraint is a definition.

It is defining what can be said and in what sense and what cannot.

And a definition, especially in the dictionary definition, is an attempt to give all possibilities of a term in common usage.

One of the things a definition can do is elucidate an idea of the world we may have never encountered before.

Overcoming Learning Disabilities: A Journey Through Words

I grew up with a severe learning disability.

I mean the type that gets you sent to the principal’s office for being so disruptive, the type that demands that you get seated away from the class with your desk right next to the teacher’s, the type that draws various tests to see if it can be managed.

Eventually, it was discovered that I was both dyslexic as well as ADHD.

Luckily, my elementary school had a reading specialist, so every day during a specific period, I was sent down to her room where I was taught to read with my dyslexia.

Yes, I did eventually “get” reading, but I also acquired a brutal sense of inferiority around language. I felt I had to make up for the time I lost, that I was somehow behind others when it came to reading.

So I would diligently keep a journal where I would write down the words I didn’t know and then look up the definitions.

I hadn’t thought of that in years, but as I was reading today, I came across a word I didn’t know and had to look it up.

What struck me was the difference in feeling I had looking up the word today—something along the lines of surprise that I came across a word I didn’t know and excitement about finding what it meant—versus the amount of shame and inferiority I used to feel looking it up.

I used to have to find out the meanings to almost everything on a page of text. I had to enlarge my vocabulary to make up for lost time.

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Why Vocabulary Matters: The Link to Influence and Wealth

It is often assumed that vocabulary is something set apart from the everyday, something confined to reading or writing, but vocabulary allows the thinking of new thoughts, of communicating new ways of doing or being.

There have been studies dating back to the early 1900s that demonstrate that the higher you go up in an organization, the more you see an expanded vocabulary.

It begs the question: aren’t people who are higher up—like a CEO or CFO—more likely to be better educated than the person on the factory floor?

Yes, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that study after study demonstrates that with an increased vocabulary, there is an increased earning power.

A large vocabulary is evidence of an ability to communicate across a broad spectrum of the population, rather than an isolated minority, and this ability to communicate is the ability to win people over to your way of doing things.

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The Language of Mastery: How Specialized Vocabulary Drives Growth

Beyond this is the idea that everything is language—or at least the skill sets required to do everything can be thought of as language.

To be able to become an electrician, one needs to learn a very specialized language, and as one advances in that profession, there is a broader understanding of that vocabulary.

The same is true for a lawyer or a doctor.

This is true across the board: the more highly paid you are, the more specialized you are, the higher your vocabulary is—whether that is in the broad definition of the dictionary or the more specialized understanding of a skill or profession.

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