Everybody Says "Amazing." Nobody Means It.
The word "amazing" appears in 2,358 leadership interviews in our dataset. That's roughly one out of every thirteen conversations. It beats "successful" (1,789), "impact" (1,674), and "powerful" (1,295). It is, by a wide margin, the single most popular power word in the executive vocabulary.
It means nothing.
Not because the word is bad. Because when everyone uses the same word to describe everything, it stops carrying information. And that's what's happening across 31,000+ conversations with executives, founders, advisors, and operators. The language is converging into a narrow band of corporate optimism that says very little about what anyone actually thinks.
This is the April data dump nobody asked for. A forensic look at the words leaders reach for when they're on the record — and what those choices reveal about how poorly most people communicate when it counts.
Go deeper: Explore industry-specific intelligence profiles to see how language patterns differ across verticals.
The Power Word Hall of Shame
These are the most repeated "power words" across all industries, all roles, all time. Each one showed up in hundreds or thousands of separate conversations:
| Rank | Word | Appearances | The Problem |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Amazing | 2,358 | Describes everything. Means nothing. |
| 2 | Successful | 1,789 | Nobody calls themselves unsuccessful on a podcast. |
| 3 | Impact | 1,674 | The word you use when you can't name the specific outcome. |
| 4 | Accelerate | 1,604 | Fast is assumed. This is filler. |
| 5 | Powerful | 1,295 | Adjective of last resort. |
| 6 | Value | 1,248 | The word that replaced "ROI" when ROI got embarrassing. |
| 7 | Critical | 1,244 | If everything is critical, nothing is. |
| 8 | Opportunity | 1,221 | The polite word for "problem we haven't solved." |
| 9 | Innovation | 1,148 | Dead on arrival since 2019. Still showing up. |
| 10 | Passion | 973 | The tell that someone is about to say something generic. |
Notice the pattern. These aren't bad words in isolation. They're bad because they've become reflexive — the executive equivalent of "um." They fill space where a specific claim should be.
When a CEO says "we're passionate about creating amazing impact through innovation," they've used four of the top ten and communicated exactly zero information. That sentence appeared, in various forms, hundreds of times in our data.
The Jargon Arms Race
Jargon is different from power words. Jargon is supposed to be precise — a shortcut between people who share context. But precision breaks down at scale.
The most common jargon term across all interviews: "AI (Artificial Intelligence)" at 2,152 appearances. Which makes sense — except that it's often followed by an explanation of the acronym, which means the speaker is using jargon and then undermining the whole point of jargon in the same breath.
The jargon density leaderboard — average number of jargon terms per conversation — tells a different story:
| Industry | Jargon Terms Per Conversation |
|---|---|
| Health Tech | 22.2 |
| Cybersecurity | 21.5 |
| AI / SaaS | 21.5 |
| Venture Capital & PE | 21.5 |
| Marketing Agency | 21.1 |
| Tech / SaaS | 20.2 |
| Training & Education | 18.0 |
| Professional Services | 18.8 |
| Manufacturing | 16.0 |
| Consulting | 13.9 |
Health Tech wins. Every conversation averages 22 jargon terms. Consulting — an industry that literally sells advice — uses the least jargon of the major industries at 13.9. Make of that what you will.
The Negativity Index
Leaders don't like saying negative things on the record. But the ones that slip through are revealing.
"Struggling" (375 appearances) and "struggle" (346) dominate the negative vocabulary. Leaders are comfortable admitting to struggle — it frames difficulty as effort. What they avoid is specificity. "Doesn't work" (288) is the closest anyone gets to a concrete failure statement, and it's still vague enough to mean anything.
The real tell: "burnout" appears 178 times. "Overwhelmed" appears 173 times. These are the words people use when the polished language breaks down. They tend to cluster in HR & Staffing, Consulting, and Health Tech — industries where the human cost of operational pressure shows up in the vocabulary before it shows up in the metrics.
What Actually Communicates
Across all that noise, the conversations that stand out — the ones that generate engagement, that get referenced, that produce actionable intelligence — share a pattern. They use fewer power words, more specific claims, and they name the problem before the solution.
The worst communicators in our dataset average 8-10 power words per conversation. The best use 2-3. The gap isn't vocabulary. It's confidence. People who know what they're talking about don't need to dress it up.
So if you're heading into Q2 with a refreshed pitch deck full of "amazing" and "innovative" and "passionate about impact" — maybe don't. Your buyers have heard it 2,358 times already. They're not amazed.
They're just scrolling.