The Words You Use Are Costing You More Than You Think

Years ago, our team changed four words on a Dell configurator page.

We swapped out “learn more” and replaced it with “help me choose.”

That’s it. Four words. The result? Millions of dollars in additional revenue that compounded over years. Not because we got smarter. Not because Dell changed its product. Because we finally said what the customer actually needed to hear.

Words are not decoration. They are signals. And signals that don’t match reality, signals that say one thing while meaning another, don’t just confuse people. They cost money. Real money. Measurable money.

I was reminded of this again this week when I sat down with Candyce Hunt, co-founder of Five Minute Career Hack and one of the sharpest career strategists I’ve had the pleasure of talking to on Rock Solid. If you follow this show, you know the conversations I love most are the ones where a single story from a guest’s life unlocks a principle that reaches far beyond the original example. This was one of those.

The Clearance Rack and What It Really Signals

Candyce’s entire framework is built around one image most people recognize immediately: the clearance rack. You know what it means the moment you hear it. Items on the clearance rack aren’t there because they’re bad. They’re there because someone didn’t price them right, or because the story around them faded, or because no one took the time to communicate their value clearly. The item has worth. The signal doesn’t match.

Her mission is helping professionals get off that rack. Stop accepting salary offers, titles, and roles that don’t reflect what you actually bring. Start building the language, the evidence, and the community support to communicate your real value and ask for it out loud.

The personal evidence she leads with is hard to forget. She was offered $85,000 for a role she was more than qualified for. Then she found out the person who’d held that same position before her was earning $175,000. Same job. A $90,000 gap. “It hurt my feelings,” she told me, “but the facts were the facts.” Her experience qualified her for more. Her results qualified her for more. The language of the offer, and her own inability at the time to push back with evidence, created a $90,000 incoherence that played out in real dollars.

That’s not a negotiation problem. That’s a coherence problem.

When Your Own Words Create the Gap

Here’s what I found most fascinating, and a little uncomfortable, because I’ve lived this too.

About halfway through our conversation, I stopped Candyce and asked her about the name of her business. Five Minute Career Hack. She’s built an entire platform around recognizing your value and demanding what you’re worth. And yet the word “hack,” when you really sit with it, signals exactly the opposite. Speed. Shortcuts. Low cost. Efficiency over excellence. Something you do in five minutes because it doesn’t require serious investment.

I wasn’t trying to be provocative. I was genuinely curious whether the tension was intentional.

She paused. “I didn’t think about it that way,” she said. “Or even connected the two.”

And then she did what smart people do when a sharp question lands: she worked through it honestly. The name made sense in 2020, when she and her co-founders Jamila Brown and Alicia Wade started the company. “Hack” was everywhere. Life hacks, home hacks, morning routine hacks. It fit the moment. And their actual intention was right: give people something bite-sized they could act on immediately, not another three-hour seminar that gets filed and forgotten.

But she acknowledged the tension. The word “hack” and the mission of helping people command their true market value are pulling against each other. That gap between what the name signals and what the brand delivers is real. And gaps like that show up in every interaction, every first impression, every moment when a potential client decides whether to trust you or keep scrolling.

My Own Naming Problem

I’ve made the same mistake. Publicly and at scale.

Almost 30 years ago, I coined the term “conversion rate optimization.” I wasn’t thinking about elegance or precision. I was thinking about search volume. “Conversion rate” had traffic. “Persuasion architecture” had none. So we went with what got clicks, and we accidentally launched an entire industry pointed at the wrong thing.

The problem with “conversion rate optimization” is what the words point the mind toward. Rates. Percentages. Columns of data. The metric instead of the person. And what I spent the next three decades trying to help clients understand is that conversion is not a number. It’s a human being making a decision. When you optimize for a rate, you forget there’s a real person on the other side of the screen trying to figure out whether to trust you.

The language created the incoherence. The incoherence shaped the direction of the entire industry. And correcting it required years of reframing, renaming, and re-educating everyone who’d learned the original wrong lesson.

Four words. “Help me choose.” That’s often all the gap costs to close.

The Coherence Tax

There’s a price you pay when your words don’t match your value. I call it the coherence tax.

It shows up in salary gaps when you can’t articulate why you deserve more. It shows up in brands that confuse customers because the name, the message, and the promise are all pointing in different directions. It shows up on product pages where the button says “learn more” but the customer is standing there thinking: just help me decide.

It shows up in careers where talented people land on the clearance rack, not because they lack ability, but because nobody helped them build the language to communicate their value clearly, including to themselves.

Images carry this tax too. A metaphor that mixes signals creates the same friction as a button label that doesn’t say what the customer needs to hear. The clearance rack image works precisely because it’s coherent. Everyone understands instantly what it means to be priced below your real value. That’s a metaphor doing its job. Compare it to a metaphor that pulls in two directions, where the image says one thing and the brand promise says another, and you’ve got a very different problem.

This is what Candyce helps professionals diagnose. Not just “what is my salary?” but “what does the language I use to describe myself signal to the people making decisions about my career?” Are your words putting you in a top-shelf conversation, or quietly placing a discount sticker on you?

Small Actions, Compounding Results

What I appreciate most about Candyce’s approach is that she isn’t selling overnight transformation. She referenced Darren Hardy’s book “The Compound Effect”: small consistent actions done over time yield desirable results. It’s the same principle I keep returning to, whether I’m working through the pillars of customer centricity with a client, or thinking about how my wife and I run our home care agency, A Place At Home – North Austin. You don’t close a coherence gap in one conversation. You close it word by word, interaction by interaction, until the signal finally matches the value.

“Learn more” to “help me choose” didn’t deliver millions in a single day. It delivered them over years of consistently clearer communication. One customer. One decision. One well-chosen word at a time.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Candyce’s work sits at the intersection of self-worth and market reality. The clearance rack isn’t where most people end up because they’re unqualified. It’s where they end up because the language around their value, the words they use to describe themselves and the signals their positioning sends, doesn’t match what they actually bring. Most people don’t examine that gap until the $90,000 difference shows up in their paycheck.

What words are you using to describe yourself, your work, or your business? Are those words creating coherence or confusion? Are they saying “top shelf” or quietly, unintentionally, putting a discount sticker on you?

That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a diagnostic. And it’s worth running on everything: your resume, your pricing page, your elevator pitch, the button on your website, the name of your company.

Listen to the full conversation with Candyce Hunt on the Rock Solid podcast below. And visit Five Minute Career Hack for courses, assessments, and tools to help you understand and communicate your real value.