Scott Galloway is a marketing professor at NYU, and the WeWork disaster is where yogababble came from. WeWork rented desks. That was the business.
Their 2019 IPO prospectus described a company that aimed to “elevate the world’s consciousness.” The document mentioned CEO Adam Neumann 169 times, often by first name only, as if he were a spiritual leader instead of a guy running an office-sharing startup. Phrases like “the power of We” and promises to transform global work culture papered over an unsustainable business model that was bleeding cash.
Galloway saw through it immediately. He created the Yogababble Index to measure the gap between what companies claim and what they do. He found an inverse correlation between the level of yogababble in a company’s S-1 filing and its stock performance one year after IPO. The more spiritual the language, the worse the returns.
WeWork is the most dramatic example, but it’s far from the only one. Yogababble has become a default setting in corporate communication, and it shows up in places you wouldn’t expect, including the books people hire me to write.
I can’t stand it in a book. A company can outlive a bad prospectus. When an author’s book claims experience they don’t have, the exact readers they wrote it to impress catch them, and their name stays on that cover for good.
What Does Yogababble Look Like?
Grand, vague language that inflates an ordinary business into a mission, like a coworking company claiming to elevate the world’s consciousness.
A book isn’t a LinkedIn bio where you can stretch a job title.Share on X
Galloway’s original examples came from tech and wellness companies. Peloton doesn’t sell exercise bikes. According to Peloton, it is “an innovation company transforming the lives of people around the world.” Galloway’s response was blunt: “No. You sell exercise equipment.”
SoulCycle uses phrases like “We aspire to inspire” and “We inhale intention and exhale expectation,” which sound deep until you realize they describe a spin class. For more, see books build trust, not just revenue.
The pattern is consistent. A company with a simple product or service wraps itself in language designed to make it sound like a movement, a mission, a force for human transformation. The language is vague enough to resist fact-checking and emotional enough to short-circuit critical thinking.
Galloway identified three characteristics that mark yogababble. First, spiritual jargon without substance: phrases like “elevating consciousness” or “creating a global movement” that aren’t backed by tangible actions. Second, overuse of vague feel-good words like “empowerment,” “transformation,” and “alignment” used without clear definitions. Third, misdirection: language that diverts attention from core business problems like financial instability or weak products by focusing on emotional narratives.
LinkedIn profiles and resumes are stuffed with the same kind of empty words, and they’re aggravating as hell. “Dynamic leader” is one of them. “Accomplished” is another. One profile described someone as an accomplished C-suite leader, and I want to know what accomplished means. “Excels at” gets the same reaction from me: oh, come on, tell me, go into detail. My pet peeve is “seasoned professional.” What does seasoned mean?
Those three moves do more damage in a book than in a press release, because a reader can’t stop the author mid-chapter and ask what any of it means. They either trust the page or put the book down, and vague uplift is one of the quickest ways I know to lose them.
How does yogababble show up in book projects?
I see yogababble constantly in my ghostwriting work, and it’s not always intentional. Sometimes clients believe their own elevated language. Other times they know exactly what they’re doing.
One client contracted me to write a memoir. Good project, real story, legitimate experiences worth putting on the page. Then partway through, he launched a coaching business and wanted the memoir rewritten to show extensive coaching experience he didn’t have. The book was supposed to become a credibility vehicle for a brand-new venture, retroactively creating a track record that didn’t exist.
That put me in a difficult position. The memoir was honest. Bolting on fabricated expertise would have turned it into yogababble in book form.
Fabricated credentials in a memoir are a trap the author sets for themselves. Every reader who hires the author afterward expects the record the book described, and the first real engagement shows there isn’t one.
Another client wanted a technical book about artificial intelligence. The problem was that he had no AI experience. None. He was depending on me to make it look like he did.
I told him we needed source materials and references, that you can’t write an authoritative book about a subject you haven’t worked in. A book isn’t a LinkedIn bio where you can stretch a job title. At 50,000 words it either shows expertise or exposes the lack of it.
Both of these situations are the book-world version of WeWork claiming to elevate consciousness while renting desks. The impulse is the same: use language to create a perception that reality doesn’t support.
Why Does Yogababble Fail?
When a company’s messaging becomes detached from its real-world offerings, the gap eventually becomes visible. The disappointment that arose when investors realized “elevate consciousness” meant “lose money on office subleases” accelerated WeWork’s downfall. Peloton’s positioning as a life-transforming innovation company made its product recall and safety issues feel like a betrayal instead of a normal business problem.
The same dynamic applies to books. The first reader or client who asks a follow-up question the author can’t answer will expose a memoir that claims coaching expertise the author doesn’t have. The first reviewer who works in the field will tear apart a technical book written without subject matter expertise. The book becomes a liability instead of an asset.
Think about what that means for the author. They paid for a book to build credibility, and a padded one spends that credibility in public, with their name on the cover, where every prospect can find it.
What is the opposite of yogababble?
The fix is simple, and Galloway has been saying it since the WeWork debacle: say what you do, and do it well enough that the truth is absorbing on its own. In ghostwriting, this means building the book around what the client has done and leaving out what they wish they’d done. Real experiences, specific details, verifiable claims.
If a client has built three companies, we write about building three companies. If they’ve coached two people, we don’t pretend they’ve coached two hundred. The best books I’ve worked on, the ones that generate business for the author and hold up over time, are the ones where the author’s real experience is strong enough to carry the narrative without inflation.
After 54+ ghostwritten books, the pattern is clear. Authenticity outperforms yogababble every time because it lasts. A book built on real expertise holds up in any room the author walks into, and a book built on yogababble falls apart at the first follow-up question.
If a client doesn’t have the experience yet, I’d tell them to go get it and then come back, because I’m not willing to dress up a gap with language and let them find out in public what that costs. Schedule a free consultation to discuss how to turn your real expertise into a book that holds up.
