Choose Your Words Carefully – Especially as a Leader | Anthony Scaramucci | Big Think

I find that words really do matter. Particularly in our society today, where we're getting a lot of our information electronically transferred, I think words do matter. And I also think that for whatever reason, due to political correctness, there's a heightened sensitivity to words. You say something, oh, you're a racist. You reference that person, or if you reference that person improperly, or there's different ways to describe people. And please, I'm probably going to be offensive now, but I'm going to say it anyway.

When I was a kid, you would say the word "oriental." If you said the word "oriental" today, you would be excoriated; it's Asian American. It was, forgive me, "negro" when I was a kid; now it's African American. I actually think the words do matter because at the end of the day, you want to be respectful to other people. And again, I hope I didn't offend anybody even by bringing those up. I'm just bringing up the illustration of the evolution of the words.

So for me, even when you're managing a company, you have to speak in the right way because if I say "me" and "my" and "I," I'm going to lose people around me. Our company is a pronoun usage place of "we" and "our" and "team" and a commitment to each other. Now, this is like a really silly cliché, but you should really think about it if you're running a company. When the word "team" is in your head, it's "together everyone achieves more." That was from my high school coach.

He had another great aphorism: "Help the other guy." Or, in the case of "help the other girl" for gal. His point was, don't focus on yourself, but subordinate yourself. I watched Derek Jeter, and I'm going to dish ARod for a second here because he does deserve to be dished a little. I watched Derek Jeter run from the shortstop position into the bleachers and break his cheek to catch a foul ball during a Red Sox-Yankee game, while the third baseman Alex Rodriguez is meandering.

There's a difference in the two personalities. One guy is all about the team, could care less about his own statistics, could care less about if he's going to get 3000 hits or not, he wants to win the World Series. The other guy is sitting there looking at his statistics all day. So one is very insular-focused and "me" and "I" focused, and the other one is "we." And I'm telling you right now, if you're out there listening to this thing, you're going to go away farther in your life if you can subordinate yourself to that "we" concept.

So yes, I'm a very big believer that you have to use the right words. By the way, I don't always use the right words. I'm from an Italian American family; we yell and scream at each other on Sundays. I got most of my media training passing plates of spaghetti as a kid. And I also grew up in an ethnic environment, so there were Irish, and Jews, and Italians, and Welsh, and we were fighting and sparring with each other.

And so I'm very, very far from perfect, but I think you can really see people's intentions by the way they talk to other people and their level of civility.