Four Words You Should Never Say

They are just four little words. We have all heard them and all said them.

“I told you so.”

In my 20s and 30s, I probably said them a lot, usually accompanied by a smug sense of having been right all along, while my pig-headed colleague, friend, or family member strode confidently yet ignorantly into failure. I said them expecting that they would give me a cathartic sense of vindication.

Now, a couple of decades later, I view “I told you so” not as vindication but as failure. Of course, it is biting and judgmental: I am right. You are wrong. But it also betrays something worse. “I told you so” says more about the shortcomings of the speaker than the target of the barb.

Think about what you are really saying

Imagine this interaction between two colleagues. Carol says to Tom, “We discussed this project before you started and you knew where I stood on it. Now, you have wasted a ton of time and money and have nothing to show for it. I told you so.”

Step back and think about what “I told you so” means here. Carol is really saying three things to Tom at once.

First, she is spotlighting Tom’s failure. The direction he chose was wrong, the approach he tried failed. And here comes Carol, just in time to rub his nose in it. How likely is it that Tom requires this information? Chances are, he is already painfully aware of his mistake. She is not telling him anything he doesn’t know. She is simply making him feel worse.

Second, Carol is gloating that Tom did not act on her advice. She is framing this as his failing and not hers. You should have listened to me. Not only did you screw up, but you had the answer – my answer! – right in front of you. But what does her inability to persuade Tom reveal about her? Maybe she could have been clearer, more persistent, or more emphatic. Maybe she could have created a stronger relationship with him so that he would have been more likely to heed her. Maybe she would already have that relationship if she wasn’t the sort of person who goes around saying “I told you so.”

Third, and this is the most important one to me, Carol is wrongly laying 100% of the blame on Tom instead of recognizing that they are on the same team. What is her own role in all this? Why isn’t she taking responsibility and taking action? She knew this was a bad idea, but let it happen anyway. Get in the game, Carol! A team player would jump in to help, not watch the train wreck from a distance while casting judgment from the sideline.

If Carol was smart enough to know the outcome, and yet incapable of either influencing Tom to the right answer or heading off the failure before it happened, what value has she provided? Indeed, what’s the point of having Carol around at all? No one needs negative, selfish critics who undermine others on the team while absolving themselves of responsibility.

 Stop throwing around blame

Why would anyone ever try to pull some sort of public victory out of a teammate’s error or misfortune? What is the “win” here? The impulse to assign blame and rub someone else’s face in their failure always comes from a place of insecurity. It is a deflection that allows someone to avoid considering their own role in the failure.

Instead of experiencing this as constructive criticism, your target will hear it for what it is – a selfish and pointed demonstration of superiority. When you say this to someone, you are reminding them, and anyone within earshot, that there is a score. They are losing; you are winning. This is toxic to the tenets of an effective team. It undermines the shared accountability and mutual support that are essential elements to any winning organization.

Rather than being a marker of intelligence, foresight, and rightness, I now understand that “I told you so,” is instead a marker of failure, ignorance, and impotence. I hope I never say (or hear) it again.