Your Vocabulary Influences Your Thinking
Having a good vocabulary is underrated. Not only for the external world, but also for the internal one. You can name what's going on inside your head. With clarity. With precision. And that naming itself brings clarity. A lot of anxious thoughts emerge from uncertainty, because we don't know what's happening to us, phenomenologically as well as emotionally.
But having a vocabulary doesn't mean going pompous with a thesaurus. People mistake vocabulary for memorising complex words. That's an error. You need to know the right names for the right things, the right feelings. Once you start distinguishing everything accurately, your articulation improves dramatically. You realise that conversation isn't such a difficult thing after all.
A person with good conversational skill is always, and I repeat, always well liked. Because knowing how to hold a good conversation also means knowing what to say, including but not limited to which words to use. When you listen to people narrating their problems, you can classify those problems more precisely, because you understand what's truly going on instead of lumping everything under a familiar, blunt term.
So having a good vocabulary also means widening your contextual knowledge. Without that, vocabulary is merely words. You also need to know the epistemology behind every word and the underlying knowledge it carries. Naturally, you would need to read a lot. Read everything under the sun. If not books, then read great essays from great minds.
To open up your mind you need to think from all dimensions. For that you need the ability to look beyond what's going on in your mind and dive deeper into why it's happening. If it's happening inside your mind, it could just as easily be happening in someone else's. All emotions, therefore, share a common structure. And if they share a common structure, they must each have a name of their own, because chances are someone in the past has experienced the same and written about it.
They say you need to write to attain clarity. But before you get to writing, you also need to think. And to think properly, you need to widen your horizon. Children, after every failure, think the world is going to end. They panic. They grow anxious. But you, as the adult in the room, know what's going on. So you assuage their fears by steadying them. It is precisely this knowing that expands our mind's horizon.
Knowing what to think, having the right label, the right terms, the right epistemology behind those words, all of this matters. Unless you can put your finger on the exact thing, you cannot study the problem properly. And if you cannot study the problem, you cannot improve upon it.