Do you remember being six years old?
Someone told you that you’d done something amazing, and the feeling was electric. Pure. Instantaneous. You stood a little taller. Smiled a little wider. Felt, for one shining moment, like you could do anything.

Here’s what nobody tells you: that feeling never goes away.

More than twenty, forty, sixty and eighty years on, a genuine compliment still hits the same way. The goosebumps are real. The glow is real. The feeling that you matter, that someone actually noticed, is as powerful at ninety as it was at six.
So why are we so stingy with them?

A few weeks ago, two things happened in the same week.

The first came after a podcast recording, when the mics were off and the guest, someone who has been interviewed dozens of times, leaned in and said: “You have an amazing ability to pull stuff out of me in ways I never thought before. You make it all feel easy and non-confrontational, and I also know you have deep opinions on the subject matter, too. I’ve never met a host like that before.”

The second came from a person regarded as one of the smartest minds. In. The. World. After I published my analysis of his work, he reached out to say not only had I brought out things he hadn’t seen that way before, he loved what I had done with it. His word. LOVED.

I did not see either of these coming.

And that’s the point.

Both arrived after the formal exchange was over. The mic was off. The article was live. No one was performing. These were people who had absolutely no obligation to say anything. And yet they were moved enough to take a minute and say something anyway.

That minute changed my week. Honestly, it changed more than my week. I felt I was six again. Walking on air. Walking on sunshine.

We are living in a compliment drought

At exactly the moment we can least afford one. The news is relentless. The uncertainty is structural. The ambient dread of watching institutions wobble and old certainties dissolve is exhausting in a way that’s hard to even articulate. Most of us are running on less solid ground than we’d like to admit.

Into that landscape, a genuine compliment lands differently than it used to. It’s not just nice. It’s grounding. It’s a human hand reaching across the noise to say, “I see you. What you’re doing matters.”

That’s not small. That’s load-bearing.

And here’s the thing most of us miss. The boomerang effect.

When you take that one minute to tell someone they’ve impressed you, something happens to you, too. Not praise, not reciprocity, but clarity. Noticing what moves you in others turns out to be a surprisingly accurate map of what you value most. The act of giving a real compliment is also an act of knowing yourself.

You don’t have to be effusive. You don’t have to write an essay. You just have to mean it. And do it in person, over Zoom, or in writing. NOT on social media.

Think about the last time someone genuinely impressed you.

Maybe it was a colleague who handled an impossible situation with grace. A friend who said exactly the right thing. Someone in your industry doing work that made you think, “I didn’t know you could do it like that.”

Did you tell them?

If you’re like most people, probably not. We assume they know. We assume someone else said it. We’re busy, we’re distracted, we’re slightly uncomfortable with the vulnerability of saying out loud that another person moved us. And so we say nothing. And they never know.

Here’s my challenge.

The next time someone impresses you, take one minute. Send the message. Make the call. Say the thing. Not a reflexive “great post” or ‘atta boy’. The real thing, specific and true, the way you’d want to receive it yourself.

It will not fix the world. It will not silence the noise, steady the wobbling institutions, or make the news less relentless. But it WILL change the mood of the person who receives it. AND it will change yours.

And change that starts with one person, then another, then another. That’s not nothing. That’s actually how every important shift in human culture has ever worked. Not top-down. Person to person. One genuine moment at a time.

A friend of mine likes to say we should spread kindness like grape jelly on a toddler. Messy, generous, absolutely everywhere, impossible to contain, and leaving everyone sticky with joy. Compliments work exactly the same way.

Start slathering.