Encouragement costs nothing and is weirdly rare. That’s an advantage you can give away all day.

Encouragement is free, immediately effective and oddly scarce, mostly because people assume it has already been said or would sound strange coming from them. So a great deal of good work goes entirely unmentioned, and whoever did it slowly concludes that nobody noticed. You can simply decide to be the one who says it.

Say one specific true thing to three different people this week. Make it about something they did rather than what they are like. The scarcity is the opportunity, and it costs you nothing but the awkwardness of starting.