Compliments

Last week, I was in Kansas City for the AWP conference (Association of Writers and Writing Programs), and I sat down at my designated booth next to a 24-year-old representative from my school. After I introduced myself to her, she said:

“Nice hair!”

So I have been blessed in the hair department. When I was a teenager, I had Michael Hutchence hair down to my shoulders. There’s a picture of it far down my Instagram. I’ll be 50 in three weeks, and I still have all my hair. Second of all, it’s more than 60% gray at this point, and it looks rather striking, or so I’m told. I’m very fortunate. Bald guys pretty much have to grow beards, or else they look like babies. I can’t grow a beard, so if I didn’t have any hair, I’d look like Charlie Brown. My hair started going gray very rapidly about three years ago, and the process should be complete in 2026. Combined with a young-looking, unblemished tan face, it’s about the best thing I have going for me right now.

The next day I went back to the booth, and she said:

“Nice jacket!”

I was wearing a rather dastardly peak lapel corduroy jacket, sort of a combination rockstar/college professor look. I like the jacket, too. It’s comfortable, and you can wear it in about every situation. I don’t often get compliments on my appearance from 24-year-old women, so getting two in a row was pretty special. It cushioned the blow of what was otherwise a brutal conference. And the nice thing about compliments is that if one person says it, you know that other people are thinking it.

I like giving and getting compliments. When I first applied to that school, I got a recommendation letter from my literary agent. In the letter, he said—among other things—that I was one of the funniest people he has ever known. I am funny, but not in the sense that I could do a set of stand-up comedy. I have these witty asides and running sarcastic commentaries on life and this sort-of deadpan sense of humor, and yes, people do find it funny. He wrote that recommendation letter five years ago, and I remember that compliment to this day. A good compliment sticks with you for a while. Someone said something nice about me.

I get compliments all the time. Usually about my newsletter, from my readers. People will say that I said something particularly smart or insightful, and those compliments are always appreciated. I have gotten a lot of compliments about my books, No Worries in particular. I welcome those, too. It’s nice to get complimented for stuff—it keeps me going.  But the ones I remember are the ones that are from out of left field, like the compliments about my appearance—because I think of myself as a 6-foot, 245-pound ugly troll. I will say this: women do not understand what men want. At all. Men seek admiration, whether they are deserving of it or not. It’s a common misconception that men go to strip clubs because of the T&A—it’s not. It’s because someone will pay attention to them, even for five minutes, and tell them that they are handsome, and otherwise worthy of affection, which is not something they’re getting at home. Women are good at many things, but in America, they are not so good at admiration. The short way of saying this is that married couples take each other for granted. They stop giving those compliments after a while, and they’re absolutely crucial to a successful relationship. I was on the phone with my friend Buck the other day, and he asked me, what do you think of your wife? And I told him, I think she is absolutely the most beautiful woman in the world. I go out to dinner and I just stare at her. And then it occurred to me…that I have never told her that! We have our domestic duties at home, she cleans the house and I scoop the poop, and there’s things that we do together, as a team, but we don’t often give each other compliments. Life being what it is, we get busy with bullshit, and forget.

But there is something to be said for being worthy of compliments. If you are a pile of shit and wear cargo shorts and sit on the couch drinking beer on the weekends, that’s not very attractive behavior. Life is a competition, you know, and even in a marriage, you have to compete for the other person’s affection. You’re constantly in competition, otherwise the grass might look greener someplace else. Having to be asked fifteen times to put the dishes in the dishwasher instead of the sink does not really put your significant other in the mood to compliment you about your hair. Peeing all over the toilet seat does not put someone in the mood to compliment you about your jacket. I think that once people get married, and stay married for a while, they get comfortable, and complacent, and they think that they don’t have to do any more work on the relationship. You see, the thing about compliments is that they cost nothing. They’re free! They’re certainly a lot cheaper than that David Yurman necklace you were going to get your wife for her birthday.

The etiquette about compliments has changed in the last 10-15 years. These days, women don’t like it if you compliment them about their appearance. At least, they profess not to like it. And there is an order of magnitude difference between “You’ve got the sweetest ass I’ve ever seen” and “You look nice today.” You’re not even supposed to say the latter. There is a lot going on here. Somehow, today, everything is construed as a sexual advance. It’s not from me, because I have the sex drive of a fake plastic plant. I'm just being nice. But I conform to the new normal, and I don’t give compliments to women anymore—at least not about their appearance. So this is where we are. I think that would be a pretty lonely existence—you spend all this time and effort trying to look good, doing your hair, doing your makeup, doing your nails, and nobody notices or cares. Apparently, the origin of this is that some women get hit on all the time and they find it exhausting, so maybe I would feel differently if I were a woman and I were fending thirsty guys off with a cattle prod. The word is that Olivia Dunne only takes classes online at LSU, so as to avoid the swarming schools of piranhas on the way to class. And young girls are often told that they are pretty, but not smart. Anyway, this is a delicate subject these days, and I can only speak for myself: I want people to say nice things about me. And I want to say nice things about other people.

You know where compliments go a long way? On Twitter. On financial Twitter, you have a bunch of personalities and egos who spend a lot of time trying to look good. They’re so focused on making themselves look good, they don’t often compliment other people—publicly. Because business is zero-sum game, and someone else might get a subscriber that I don’t. It’s not a zero-sum game. We can all win. If you are generous with compliments online, people notice, and it reflects well on you.

The world is full of people who work hard and never get recognized for it. I will say that the military is very good at recognizing people—they give out medals and awards quite frequently. The private sector, not so much. Your reward is your pay. But people need psychic rewards, too. I enjoyed my time at Lehman Brothers, but the maddest I ever got was when I was passed over for promotion to Senior Vice President. Which is weird, right? The bonus pool is finite, but promotions cost nothing. In retrospect, I should have cared more about the money. In the academic world, awards and recognition are a big deal, because nobody gets paid. There was a management article written decades ago called, “It’s the Rewards System, Stupid!” which talked about which behaviors you were trying to incentivize in your organization. Really, complimenting people on their performance is simply one of the best things you can do.

I didn’t win Most Likely To Succeed in high school. I won Class Musician, instead. In the joke awards, I also won Nicest Legs. The idea of all the senior girls lusting after my heavily-muscled legs kept me going for a while. This guy didn’t need calf implants. It was from all those hours running up and down stairs in wrestling practice. 32 years later, I still tell people about the time I won Nicest Legs. Thanks, girls.