Stop pitching. Stop walking into rooms with a slide deck, three polite options, and a voice trembling with “please like me.” That is what designers do when they are hoping for approval. But approval is the opposite of impact. Approval is what gets you forgotten.

The greats never pitch. They provoke. They do not show three directions, they show one. Not because they lack ideas, but because they know clarity is more powerful than consensus. They slam the vision on the table and say, “This is it. This is the way forward. Everything else is compromise.” That is not arrogance. That is conviction.

Pitching trains you to water down ideas. It trains you to create work that can survive the timid nods of executives who are more afraid of risk than irrelevance. Provoke, and you flip the dynamic. You stop asking for permission. You start demanding attention. The room will resist at first, but resistance is proof you are hitting the nerve that matters.

The point of design is not to be approved. It is to be remembered. A pitch is a PowerPoint. A provocation is a detonation. One gets you polite applause. The other gets you silence — the heavy silence of a room realizing it cannot go back to the way things were before you walked in.

If you are still pitching, you are in the business of decoration. If you are provoking, you are in the business of change. Choose wisely.