Writer: Craig Meerkamper.

Now I'm not one to brag but I’ve recently been offered the opportunity to pursue my Master of Journalism at Carleton University which is widely recognized as the most prestigious journalism school in Canada. It’s incredibly difficult to get into this elite school and it might just be the most significant achievement of my life (or anyone's life for that matter). 

 

To be real, I feel myself cringing when I talk about my accomplishments in a self-congratulatory way. Even just while writing that opening sentence, I often find that when I'm talking about this accomplishment, it feels really arrogant to put the opportunity into those terms. And despite what I see and hear from influential figures daily, I doubt that I’m the only person that feels a sense of embarrassment to talk about myself this way.  

 

In the social media era, every accomplishment is expected to be recorded, posted, and promoted to help build your own identity ‘brand’ online, and this leads to an uncomfortable pressure to constantly compare my resume of experiences, achievements, and accomplishments to those of my peers. But to counter this practice, I feel like we all need to develop the confidence to allow our audience to ascribe their own level of importance to our achievements without a bunch of hyperbolic posturing.  

 

There’s a narrative concept usually found in action or sci-fi stories called ’power-creep’, where the protagonists need to keep beating bigger and badder villains at a rate that leaves little time for the narrative stakes to be appropriately raised. The latest Star Wars trilogy had to make everything a bit bigger for it to have an impact with audiences. The Death Star is no longer the size of a moon that can destroy planets, now it's called ‘Starkiller’ and it’s the size of an entire planet and can destroy solar systems. Marvel superhero movies suffered the same issue since defeating the decade-long threat of Thanos who sought to kill “half of all life in the universe”. After his defeat the next major villain is presumably going to be a threat because they plan to destroy... all of life in the universe? What happens after that? Where does it end? 

 

Protagonists run out of ‘tangible’ threats, so oftentimes they end up fighting ‘concepts’ like ‘Reality’ or ‘Alternate Universes’ or ‘The collective negative consciousness of all living things’ or ‘the darkness’ etc. Etc. I sense a similar power-creep problem has entered the professional world as well. 

 

The reason I bring this up is to highlight how excessive hyperbole causes companies (much like narrative writers) to quickly run up against a limiting wall of their own creation. Ever-greater problems, stakes, and metrics have to be manufactured to justify why the latest achievement is any more substantially remarkable than the previous. In short, people get tired and bored of the extremes because if every announcement is equally ‘world-changing’ and ‘unprecedented’ then they eventually become just as predictable as if nothing significant happened at all. 

 

To work around this, I often find myself strategically employing my favorite conversational tag-team of understatement and humor.  

 

When describing the admission offer to my dream program to friends and colleagues, I'll often say that it’s “pretty good” or how I was “glad my writing samples did the trick”. I’m intentionally leaving the (wrong) implication hanging in the open that I could have possibly been admitted to a better program, or that the carefully curated portfolio of my best work samples somehow ‘tricked’ the experienced admin team into offering me admission. Both of these implications are of course false, so why even make them? An effective understatement isn’t usually false itself, as much as the implication it leaves open is so obviously wrong that it becomes humorous. 

 

Understatements aren’t strictly inaccurate; rather they highlight the obvious by brazenly avoiding its direct acknowledgement. Getting a promotion becomes “moving offices and getting a better chair”. Having a child is “having a new roommate”. Officially launching a product after years of development is “looking for public feedback on a new prototype”. Simplifying situations intentionally draws attention to the thing being understated while avoiding getting caught up in extreme hyperbole. 

  

It might sound a bit self-deprecating to undersell massive achievements, but when using understatement, the point isn’t to deny yourself the ability to feel pride in what you’ve achieved, or to downplay a truly significant accomplishment, but to remain realistic in the scope of your accomplishments. In a professional context, when you have nowhere in your field or career to go but up it's a good idea to leave yourself a bit of space for perceivable growth. 

 

When it comes to professional communications with your coworkers or staff, I don’t advocate that you use understatements that come off as being dissatisfied or underappreciative of your/their successes, so this usually works best when talking with people that you’ve built background with and are already familiar your personality.  

 

Say we have a stern professor who delivers all of his lectures at an excruciatingly slow pace. Talking with someone after I might say “I wonder what the good news is, did you notice he had some energy today?” While this isn’t factually ‘wrong’ it’s subjective enough that it becomes funny to acknowledge that there even was a remark-worthy difference between two comparably dull lectures. I am intentionally drawing attention to how dull the lectures are without directly saying “well that was another slow one.” From my perspective a good understatement appears to “miss the most obvious” but in doing so actually draws attention to the obvious, which is often so unavoidable or integral that its acknowledgement is usually deemed unnecessary.  

 

I feel that there’s also a need to use understatements to counterbalance the prolific hyperbole we often hear in the professional world. When every achievement is announced as the biggest, the greatest, the most profitable, the first in history, they often become indistinguishable and exhausting. A company’s goals fail to stand out from each other when the bar can’t go any higher than where it’s been set. 

 

Say Company X has recently been purchased by Apple and they put out one of the two following statements. Think about which statement (over vs understated) engages you more and makes you interested in following the company's future developments.  

1. “Our company has just made start-up history by becoming the highest value asset Apple has ever paid to acquire.”  

   vs.  

2. “The team slept well last night. Apple offered to acquire us for only double our market value.” 

A good understatement has the miraculous power to engage people’s critical thinking faculties by forcing them to ‘read between the lines’ of a statement. There’s something satisfying about the feeling that you’ve been let in on a secret or picked up on a hidden message even if there’s nothing truly being withheld. I find that acknowledging an open-secret indirectly often causes a little ‘game’ to begin between me and my friends where we all know ‘what’ it is we’re talking around but continue feigning ignorance with a wink and a nudge. Forming in-jokes and understanding subtext is highly useful in the professional sphere where teams of coworkers can learn how to better understand each other's communication styles and subtleties. 

 

Mastering the use of understatement in your communications isn’t for everyone nor for every scenario since we do have to take formal professional communications seriously. But knowing when to relax on the hyperbole and leave your work the room to rise to new heights will make anyone that is interested hungry for the next big update. 

 

At least in my case understatements have opened a door or two, one just happens to be the doors into a major University.