"This" Means Nothing
I recently wrote two posts: one called "Growth" Means Nothing and one called "Income" Means Nothing. If you haven't read them, the short version is that both words get used to mean four or five completely different things depending on who's talking, and that vagueness causes real confusion.
Now, I know how some people read those titles back to back. They assumed I was building toward a comparison. Growth on one side, income on the other, let's see who wins. That's not what I was doing. I was making the same point twice. Both words are too vague to carry the weight people put on them. That's it.
But the fact that people expected a showdown is kind of the point of this post.
The "growth vs. dividends" debate is one of the most persistent framings in personal finance content. Newer creators keep picking it up and running with it because it's easy to structure, easy to argue, and easy to generate engagement with. I get it. I just don't think it's useful.
Sorting your entire investing philosophy into "growth" or "income" is like sorting cars into "red ones" and "blue ones." You can do it. The categories are real. But they tell you almost nothing about what matters: the engine, the fuel efficiency, the safety rating, whether it actually fits your life. Two red cars can have nothing in common. Two "growth investors" can have nothing in common either.
The labels aren't wrong. They're just shallow. They work as training wheels when you're first learning, because they give you something to hold onto. But at some point you're supposed to take them off. A lot of investing discourse never does.
This is also why posts like "Why People Shouldn't Invest in Dividend Stocks" generate so much pushback. It's not necessarily because the argument is bad. It's because the label "dividend stocks" covers such a wide range of investors, motivations, and portfolio constructions that almost everyone reading it can find a reason to feel targeted. You're swinging at a category so broad that you're guaranteed to hit people who shouldn't have been in the blast radius.
I'm not saying labels are useless. They're a starting point. But they become a problem when they replace actual thinking. When someone says "I'm a growth investor" or "I'm an income investor," I've learned almost nothing about their portfolio, their goals, their timeline, or their risk tolerance. I've learned which team they think they're on.
And investing isn't a team sport.
If I believe in anything, it's that the more precisely you can describe what you're actually doing and why, the better your decisions will be. Not because precision is fun, but because vague language lets vague thinking hide behind it. That was the point of both posts, and it's the point of this one too.
