How to Encourage Others

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• At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind.  It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.

• Often, people have little insight into their gifts. It makes sense: when you’re good at something, it can be because difficulties that are visible to other people are transparent to you. Also, leaning into your gifts can feel like cheating, because it makes things easier, not harder.

• One thing worth remembering, here, is that people never receive feedback on their work.

• Typically, people will not mind if you say something like this: “hey, have you considered trying x thing? I think you’d be great at it.”

• This List of Questions Is Very Good This list, by Chana Messinger.

• Sometimes people need affirmation, even if they don’t like that they need affirmation.

• If there’s one self-improvement action you really believe in, like one thing you think people should commonly do, but don’t, there is nothing stopping you from just recommending it a lot, and this can be really effective.

• Advertisers take advantage of the fact that repetition creates familiarity—why don’t you, if you’re suggesting genuinely good things that you have some faith in?