It is so hard to stop because it doesn't feel like a flaw. It feels like value. It feels like the reason they hired you. Every instinct that made me useful as a younger professional : see the gap, close it, sharpen the thinking; turns, somewhere around seniority, into the very thing that flattens the people I am meant to be growing. The expertise is real. That is what makes it dangerous. You are genuinely able to make the idea five per cent better, which is exactly why you cannot resist doing it.

The maths only works if ideas are the product. They are not. People are. A team that brings you ninety-per-cent ideas and ships them with full conviction will outrun a team that brings you ninety-five-per-cent ideas they no longer believe are theirs. I have run both. The first kind keeps bringing you things. The second kind learns, slowly and silently, to bring you nothing or worse, to bring you only what they think you already want.

There is a generational edge to this that I have come to watch for. When the person whose idea I "improved" is twenty-five and I am fifty, I am not just denting a proposal. I am teaching them, in real time, that their judgment is provisional and mine is final. A colleague my own age might shrug it off as the cost of doing business. Someone newer reads the small correction as a verdict on whether they belong in the conversation at all. The same two words : "Yes, but", land as collaboration in one ear and as dismissal in another. The cost is the same idea, paid for at very different rates.

So the discipline Goldsmith asks for is almost physical: the swallowed sentence. The improvement you can see clearly, and choose not to say. Not because you are wrong, but because being right is not always the point. I have started asking before telling, "what would make this stronger?" rather than "here's what would make this stronger", and the difference is not subtle. The first keeps the idea theirs. The second quietly makes it mine, and leaves them holding a thing they no longer recognise.

I won't pretend I have mastered it. I catch myself mid-sentence more often than I'd like, the helpful refinement already half-spoken. But I have stopped mistaking the urge for generosity. Most of the time, the most valuable thing a senior person can add to a good idea is nothing at all.

What got me here was the ability to make things better. What it took me far too long was when to keep that ability to myself.