We’ve all been there. The meeting where the grandest visions are painted by the person who has never managed a project. The online forum where the most absolute, scathing critique comes from a profile with no tangible work to show. The social gathering where the loudest opinions on politics, business, or art are bellowed by someone whose expertise begins and ends with a scroll through a headline. It’s a peculiar, almost universal constant: often, those who have done the least, talk the most.
This isn’t about inexperience itself. We all start from zero, and thoughtful questions from newcomers are a sign of a curious mind. No, this is about a specific kind of noise—the confident, declarative, frequently critical chatter that fills the space where real accomplishment should be. It’s the sound of an empty room, echoing.
Why does this happen? The mechanics are surprisingly simple. Action is heavy. It carries the weight of responsibility, the risk of failure, the grind of execution, and the humility of constant learning. When you are in the arena, your vocabulary changes. You speak in terms of constraints, trade-offs, lessons learned, and “I don’t knows.” You understand that most things are more complex than they appear from the cheap seats. Talking, on the other hand, is weightless. It requires no investment, bears no consequence, and offers the immediate reward of sounding informed. Certainty is easy when you’ve never had your assumptions tested by reality.
There’s also a perverse economy of attention at play. Doing is largely a private, lonely endeavor. The hours of practice, study, and trial are invisible. Talking is a public performance. It can create the illusion of productivity and expertise without the underlying substance. In a world saturated with noise, volume can be mistaken for value, and frequency for familiarity. The person who speaks constantly about a subject can, through sheer repetition, start to be perceived as an authority on it, even if their contributions have never left the realm of words.
This creates a strange dissonance in our communities and workplaces. The most valuable voices—those tempered by experience, nuanced by failure, and softened by the knowledge of how much they still have to learn—often speak quietly, if they choose to speak at all. They are too busy doing. Meanwhile, the void left by inaction fills with unsolicited commentary and unbending opinion. It can be disorienting, making the landscape of genuine expertise harder to navigate.
So, what do we do? The first step is to recalibrate our own listening. Learn to distrust the easy certainty, the flawless plan, the critique that offers no constructive path. Start to listen for the quiet markers of real experience: the acknowledgment of complexity, the stories of unexpected obstacles, the focus on process over glory. Value the question over the decree.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, we must guard against this tendency in ourselves. It is a seductive trap to believe our opinions, however well-reasoned they seem in our own minds, carry the same weight as hard-won experience. The antidote is to step into the arena, however small. Start the project. Make the thing. Risk the failure. You’ll quickly find that doing mutes the need for talking. Your energy shifts from narrating the game to playing it, and your words, when you do offer them, will carry the gravity of someone who has touched the dirt.In the end, the universe has a quiet way of balancing the scales. Talk is a currency that inflates rapidly and devalues just as fast. Action, however, compounds. The doers are building something—a skill, a project, a legacy—brick by silent brick. While the chatter eventually fades into the background hum of the world, the things built by those who focused on the work rather than the commentary have a habit of enduring. They may not be the loudest, but in the end, they are the only voices that truly echo.