Want to make the world better? Give more praise to the people in your life.

Ask 10 people if they want to make the world better and 10 will say yes, right?

That's all well and good, but how do you actually do that? And why aren't we doing it already?

Here's a fast and easy way that genuinely makes a difference and costs virtually nothing.

Give more praise to the people in your life.

It's low-hanging fruit, an untapped goldmine with no downside.

When it hit me

It hit me when I got a survey from my daughter's elementary school. They started sending parents pulse checks via SMS. [1] Seemed simple, until I noticed two twists that made it different from any survey I could recall.

The survey was quick, just three questions. The first two were ho-hum, resembling every other survey you've done in the last 5 years. Classic boilerplate "Do you agree that we're doing a good job?" type questions.

But they also held the first intriguing twist. (Warning: Certified Survey Nerd analysis ahead.) They only allow for three possible responses: YES, NO, or MOSTLY.

A Likert scale with only 3 points?! And one where the middle option is very clearly weighted toward the high end? (Example: Instead of [Yes / No / Maybe] or [Yes / No / Sort of] or [Yes / No / Somewhat] it's [Yes / No / Mostly]. "Mostly" is much closer to "Yes" than it is to "No" which biases the data they receive. If I am split right down the middle, I have no way of reflecting that. My only choice is "Mostly" which makes them think I feel better than I do.)

This was the first twist I hadn't seen before. And as someone who studied the science of surveys in school, I questioned the methodology. "You can't lead the audience that way!" I scoffed. "It's poison to your data! This simply is not The Right Way™ to administer a survey! You're stacking the deck, forcing people to pick something that aligns with what you already want."

It got wilder from there. The most remarkable part of the survey was the last question. And this question showed me the light. After a brief reflection, I understood what they were going for, and I was on board.

The last survey question

Even more than the 3-point Likert scale and the "Mostly" response option, the last question threw me. Here it is:

"What praise, ideas, or questions do you have?"

I had to read it twice I was so surprised.

They were actively soliciting praise!

As a good student of survey science, this seemed a bridge too far. As mentioned above, Rule #1 of survey writing is "Do not write leading questions." This was not The Right Way™! This was an affront to the very foundation of cold survey impartiality! Heresy, I cry. Heresy! Asking for praise?! A wanton immolation of the sacrosanct, and for what?

I sat back for a moment, processing the shock. I inhaled big, exhaled completely, and repeated. I let it marinate, as I do. (15 years of meditation are helpful for this.)

And then it hit me.

This is a beautiful service they are providing. Reaching into the darkness and pulling out little beacons of light. This wasn't heresy! We could put away the pitchforks. Firstly, it's not like they were demanding praise. They were only opening space for praise if the respondent already had some in their mind and heart. The question itself was totally optional; you didn't have to respond at all. They're just asking if there's any there. And if there is, they wanted you to know, it was invited.

Why this last question is so great

Firstly, it's a great way to fix one of the insidious issues afflicting the gazillion other surveys that constantly bombard us. Strictly based on their design, surveys generally dismiss anyone who thinks things are pretty good (which is most of us), and actively court only those with terrible things to say.

Consider how many times a survey has closed with the question: "What other comments or concerns do you have?"

They are actively courting concerns! Of course this isn't a bad thing per se. It makes sense. It gives them good data they can use to resolve people's issues. It helps them improve their service offering. (Whether they use that data effectively is... often a sad story. I'll leave that for a separate post.) But the fact is, they are actively asking for bad news - complaints, gripes, things that are just not right, darn it!

By asking for praise instead, they are erasing that issue.

Secondly, I suspected that receiving this praise would be highly motivating to the people giving the survey. In turn, it would help them feel more fulfilled and motivated. The people who gave the survey confirmed this when I followed up with them. They said it was highly energizing to ingest that feedback, and it helped inspire them to them take the actions needed to improve things for those who aren't as happy.

Thirdly, and most importantly: we don't give or get enough praise in life.

I'll say that again because it's the point of all this: We don't give or get enough praise in life.

The tragedy of our praise deficit

So many of us walk around every day with feelings of deep gratitude for so many people in our lives. We never succeed alone, and we never fail alone either. No matter how life is going, we have people in our lives who care. People who have invested in us. People who supported us when they didn't need to. People who went out of their way to help. We've all had teachers and coaches who made a difference. Hell, parents of young children will know how pleasant it can be when a grocery store employee gives our child a sticker and a smile when this was neither required nor expected.

If we actually stop and look, we are surrounded by people with good hearts who want to help. We're wired to notice and ruminate over the ones who don't, so we often mistakenly think they are more numerous than they actually are. But if you slow down and look closely, you'll see the vast majority of those around us are worthy of our gratitude and appreciation.

But our lizard brains and our social systems conspire to stifle these positive thoughts. With regards to the lizard brain, evolutionary biology has already said much about why we focus on the negative. Behavioral science has plumbed the depths of loss aversion; you probably know the beats by now so I won't retread them here.

Our modern social world picks up that negative baton and runs with it. Think about it: in your everyday life, when do you enter a space that intentionally invites you to share grateful thoughts with people? In between your groggy morning coffee, your day of meetings or labor, your exercise routine, your dinner, your exhausted sliver of free time at night, and your passing out to repeat it all the next day - how often in this space does the system tell you "stop and thank someone you love for something you appreciate about them"? If you're like most of us, the answer is close to never.

(Granted, if you follow a religious or spiritual practice you might sidestep this tragedy. Congratulations, and keep that lantern lit for the rest of us.)

So most of us keep these thoughts of praise bottled up. And if you never give these thoughts oxygen, you can eventually forget they even exist. This makes us feel sadder and lonelier than we actually are.

There's a cost to this suppression. These messages are gold to us. Think of how you've felt in the moment someone told you about a positive impact you've had on their lives. You light up like a Christmas tree. These messages are what keep us young, brighten our days, turn a gloomy Tuesday into a reaffirmation of our lives. They dance off our tongues, charging the receiver with effervescent fuzzies and verve. They connect us with others in a way a thousand so-called "normal" encounters couldn't approach.

And yet so often, we leave them on the shelf of our hearts gathering dust.

This is a tragedy! It's just hard to see because it never feels urgent. It works like the bank embezzler who becomes filthy rich just by stealing fractions of a penny from every transaction. It saps us tiny bit by tiny bit, over time, so we never even notice it's happening until it's too late.

Make the world better: Give more praise!

Why do people glow like a parched pothos plant getting watered when you honestly tell them something kind about themselves? Firstly, because as some wise person once said, life is suffering. [2] In more modern terms, life sucks a lot of the time. It's hard as hell, and it doesn't stop coming at you. In this environment, this support and validation is a glowing gift. Secondly, because as we covered above, people so rarely get it.

You know what people do get consistently throughout their everyday life?

• Cars honking at them on the road in traffic [3]

• A spouse who's upset with them about something

• A fridge that looks full but somehow has nothing that sounds good right now

• A bill in the mail, followed by another bill in the mail

• A notice that their upcoming flight was changed and they are utterly powerless to do anything about it

• The fourth spam call today from a robot trying to scam them out of their money

• A pang of guilt that they haven't called Mom in weeks, but they're still "too busy" to do it right now

• I'll stop there because you get it and our heart rates need to come down.

Do you see? Don't you realize? We're all starving for it! And life gets so much better when we give it to each other.

So give more praise. This is how we "make the world better" - not with the newest AI or app. But by making space for praise in our own little slice of the world. As for how to do that, pop it into your favorite search engine or AI tool and have at it.

Lastly, kudos to my daughter's elementary school for leading by example here. Lead with praise and ideas, rather than criticism. That can make all the difference to growing minds. And yes, that includes yours and mine.

Footnotes

[1] This is great because SMS is a convenient way to take a survey. How many times have you started a survey, seen a list of questions, and reflexively checked out? Well, those worries are gone with this format. They give it to you one question at a time, on your time.

It's refreshing.

Of course, like all methods, this one has its drawbacks. For those who want to share qualitative feedback, it's harder to text into your phone than to type on a keyboard. They asked what ideas I had to help with an issue. My 165WPM keyboard hands were ready to share. But they got antsy when confined to the phone's tiny 2D parameters. Alas, life is a tradeoff. There's no such thing as a free lunch. C'est la vie.

Still, kudos to her school for building this feedback loop. And for doing it in a technologically relevant way.

[2] Technically Buddha never exactly said "life is suffering." It's just kinda the best English can do with what Buddha actually said in Pali, the language he spoke. English doesn't have the words to truly capture what he said, which describe something bigger, broader, and less pointed than "suffering," but ever since those meddlers tried to build the Tower of Babel, them's be the breaks.

[3] I will wire my life savings to the person who can explain to me why a single person has ever honked while sitting in traffic.