Thank your coaches, teachers and mentors while they’re still around. Old gratitude is still gratitude, but it’s lonelier.

Thanks delivered late does a great deal for you and very little for anybody else. The person who helped rarely knows it worked, since results show up years after they lost track of you, and most of them go a whole career without hearing. Gratitude arriving while somebody is still there to receive it is a different thing entirely.

Write to one of them this month. Be specific about what they did, because the detail is what makes it believable and worth keeping. A few sentences is plenty, and they will probably keep it.