Specific praise proves you actually noticed, which is the whole point. Generic praise proves only that you needed something to say.
— Not the Epilogue, 35. Appreciative Communication
The tension isn’t whether to praise people. It’s that most of us praise on autopilot, and the people we praise can feel the difference between a reflex and a real observation, even when they can’t name what’s off.
The difference is easy to hear. “Great job,” said the same way every time, works like a vending machine dispensing the same candy bar, and after a while people stop even looking up. The example Not the Epilogue gives in 35. Appreciative Communication sounds different: “Your presentation made the decision clear — we stopped going in circles.” That sentence tells the person you were there.
Praise is a report, not a reward
The habit worth breaking is treating praise as something you give, like a gold star. It’s more useful to treat it as something you report — a specific piece of information about what you saw. “Good job” contains no information. It tells the person nothing they didn’t already know, which is that you’re pleased or that you feel obligated to respond. Specific praise, by contrast, tells them something about their own work they might not have noticed themselves: which choice mattered, what changed because of it, what you’d have missed if you weren’t paying attention.
This distinction gets sharper with age, not softer, because by midlife most people have been on the receiving end of plenty of hollow compliments. They’ve built a fine detector for them. Vague praise now reads less as kindness and more as a signal that you weren’t really watching.
Try this: for one week, before you say anything encouraging to someone, silently name the one thing you saw them do. If you can’t name something concrete, don’t say the praise yet. Watch a little longer, or ask a question instead.
The cost of easy praise is trust, not effort
People sometimes worry that specific praise is more work, and it is, slightly. But the real cost of skipping it isn’t your time, it’s the other person’s trust in your attention. Every “good job” that isn’t backed by specifics is a small withdrawal from an account. Enough withdrawals and people stop believing your compliments at all, which means when you actually do notice something remarkable, it lands with no more weight than the empty ones did.
This matters especially in the relationships that carry the weight of a second half of life — long marriages, grown children, old friendships, colleagues you’ve worked beside for twenty years. In new relationships, generic warmth can still function as a kind of goodwill deposit. In old ones, it reads as absence. Your spouse of thirty years does not need to hear “nice dinner.” They need to hear “you remembered the sauce goes on the side, and you never make it a thing.” That sentence proves you’re still looking at them, not just living alongside them.
Try this: pick one person you praise reflexively — a partner, a coworker, an adult child — and go a full month without a single generic compliment to them. Replace each one with a sentence that could only apply to that specific moment, that specific person. If you can’t come up with the sentence, sit in that discomfort. It’s telling you something about how closely you’ve actually been watching.
Noticing is the skill, praise is just the output
The deeper issue is that specific praise can’t be manufactured on demand. It’s downstream of actually paying attention, which is a discipline, not a personality trait. People who give great specific praise aren’t smoother talkers, they’re better noticers. They watch how someone solves a problem, not just whether the problem got solved. They remember what a person was working on last time and check whether it moved.
That’s really the skill to build, if you want to build one: not a better vocabulary for compliments, but a habit of watching closely enough that specific things become available to say. The praise takes care of itself once you’re actually seeing the person in front of you.
Not the Epilogue goes into this more fully, in its chapter on appreciative communication. But the version above is enough to start with. Notice one true, specific thing today. Say it plainly. See what happens to the room.
Go deeper. Not the Epilogue takes this further. Start with the free Not the Epilogue starter: one page, no signup.