The story is told of a vacuum cleaner salesman who had been given a remote rural area as his territory. He was going from farmhouse to farmhouse on his first day in the job, attempting to sell his product.

As he arrived at one farmhouse, he knocked on the door and was met by a farmer’s wife who asked him what he wanted. Without asking permission, he shoved right past her into the kitchen and said, ‘I’m selling vacuum cleaners’.

Shocked, she replied, ‘Wait a minute!’ But he demanded, ‘Madam, before you say anything, I want to show you something.’ Then he reached into his bag, pulled out a bucket full of dirt and threw it across her kitchen floor.

‘If my vacuum cleaner won’t pick up all that dirt,’ he bragged, ‘then I’ll eat it!’ She looked at him and said, ‘Then you better get busy, ’cause we ain’t got no electricity!’

We hear far too much of the independent planner who purports to act in the client’s best interest but is not whole of market at all

Simply put, speaking without thinking will often guarantee us getting into trouble. More subtly perhaps, if we speak without knowledge, or without intent or ability to follow through, or skirt around the hard facts in favour of the soft sales lines, or use words to frame expressed opinions that make us seem important or knowledgeable, then we are also spilling dirt someone will have to clean up in the end.

I first realised this as a young teenager in Rennes on a school French exchange. An inability to understand much of what was going on, let alone be able to piece together coherent sentences, meant most of the communication between myself and others on that trip was frustrating at best, misleading and a waste of time and goodwill at worst.

It also served as an inspiration to me to become much more proficient and able in the French language – something that propelled me all the way through university and into my first role in the wealth management sector, as a relationship manager in Barclays Bank’s Monte Carlo branch (there’s no dirt there!)

Gyles Brandreth came up with an estimate that, on average, 860,341,500 words are spoken in a lifetime

Words spoken well, with integrity and knowledge, and backed up by what is enacted because of them, are vital. Yet we hear far too much of the independent financial planner who purports to be acting in the client’s best interest but is in fact not whole of market at all.

Or of the business buyer who bends and shapes the facts such that what they say isn’t found to be quite correct until after the business owner has completed the sale. And perhaps even of the client who has been ‘guided’ to complain about what was good advice because there is an opportunity to make a compensation claim. All words, but often thrown around like dirt to make a personal sales pitch sound credible.

In 1984, British writer, actor, broadcaster and self-confessed wordsmith and Scrabble fanatic Gyles Brandreth came up with an estimate that, on average, 860,341,500 words are spoken in a lifetime. Brandreth was so confident of his calculation that he included it as the subtitle for his book, The Joy of Lex: How to Have Fun with 860,341,500 Words.

One of the joys of our profession is encountering advisers of great integrity and whose words convey wise and enduring advice

So how much is 860.3 million words? It is the equivalent of the entire text of the complete 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary spoken more than 14.5 times, or the entire 32 volume Encyclopaedia Britannica spoken 19.5 times, or of the whole King James Bible being spoken more than 1,110 times.

That is a lot of talking! But imagine if you are a politician or someone who spills the dirt instead of the whole truth. I wonder how often you have found yourself eating the words so recklessly tossed on the floor of everyday living?

One of the joys of our profession is encountering advisers and business owners of great integrity and whose words convey wise and enduring advice. These are like gold, not dirt, and are goals and standards for all of us to attain to. No one, least of all me, is perfect, but dishing the dirt just makes a mess and muddies the water.

Paul Morrish is a founder of Succession Wealth, and its group corporate director