90 Compliments in 30 Days: Five Big Takeaways

ANDREW ELSASS

Five Big Takeaways

This post is part of a 30-day social experiment that focused on giving more compliments. Also check out the rules and guidelines, post-project recap and results, and related reddit post.

"I can live for two months on a good compliment."

For whatever reason, my takeaways here didn’t hit me over the head quite like they did during 90 Strangers.

That’s not to say I didn’t learn anything important or that the experiment was a waste of time—that couldn’t be further from the truth. The lessons learned and changes observed were just much more subtle ones, and took a little more introspection to realize:

1. The Ultimate Conversation Starter

If there were ever such a thing as a foolproof conversation starter, I think the compliment just might be it:

  • It gives some sort of direction to a new conversation—want to talk to someone nearby but can’t think of anything to say? Find something to compliment them on.
  • It lets the other person talk about themselves without the outright directness and pressure of the standard “interview questions” (e.g., Where are you from? What do you do?). As Dale Carnegie writes in How to Win Friends and Influence People, everyone’s favorite subject is themselves.
  • Encourages exiting the headspace and being much more observant of the world around you. Getting good at observing the features and behaviors of other people then extends on to everything else in your environment. This ensures that you’ll just about never run out of things to talk about.
  • They’re mutually beneficial. Compliments make people feel good. And people gravitate toward (and talk with more) those that make them feel good.

2. More Personal the Compliment=Stronger the Emotional Response

Merely by coincidence (remember, no one knew the details of the experiment as I was conducting it), while doing this experiment I received three compliments that impacted me in a big way for one reason or another. These re-lit my passion toward the project and served as a reminder of why I decided to do it in the first place:

  • One was merely about an article of clothing I had on, but it happened to be one of my favorite. That small gesture made me feel great for the remainder of the day.
  • Another was about the layout and design of this website from someone that hadn’t seen it before. That made me feel good for several days. Hell, revisiting that compliment in my head still makes me feel good.
  • The third was a text from a friend (that I have only known about a year) that I woke up to randomly one morning. It was detailed, reasonably long for a text, hit on several traits I value about myself (including some things I didn’t know I valued about myself at the time), and was extremely out of the blue. This was about a month ago now, and I still think about and look at it again and again.

The feeling that last one gave me made everything I had been complimenting people on seem trivial; this is why I said in the project recap that my biggest regret was not paying more of these deeper, more personal compliments. And considering how I still occassionally think about  compliments I have received about my writing even years prior, I should have already known that the staying power of a good compliment is limitless.


This would be a hard thing to measure (without having people fill out a kind of weird post-compliment survey) but it seems that the more personal the compliment (going off small, anectdotal evidence), the more positive the emotional response. I think it also holds true that the more personal the compliment, the harder it is to give.

I think everyone knows how powerful praise (and conversely, criticism) can be, yet it’s just so easy to forget. Once I got a few weeks into this project I feel that I may desensitized myself in a way, forgetting just how influential words can be.

3. Cashiers Are Money

I’ve always encouraged (though it’s not my original thought by any means) chatting up cashiers whenever possible, and 90 Compliments reaffirmed that they are the absolute best resource for someone wanting to improve their social skills:

  • They are a captive audience.
  • They can’t really be rude to you.
  • Most are going to appreciate having someone talk to them or do anything to break them out of their “How are you? Did you find everything you need? Paper or plastic?” routine.
  • Even if you “crash and burn”, it’s 100% guaranteed they have had more awkward interactions in the checkout line.

And typically the only time someone will say something other than debit or credit to a cashier is if they have a complaint. I know from my time working in food service that the smallest compliment can make someone’s day.

4. People Are Comfortable With Praise

When I was younger, giving a compliment made me feel like I was possibly putting some sort of unwanted attention or pressure on the other person. This probably stemmed from the fact that I felt weird receiving compliments (and still sometimes do).

Call it hyper-humility, but I genuinely didn’t know what to do in the focused light of attention when I was given a compliment, especially when others were around. And I certainly didn’t know how to accept one graciously—I either mumbled thanks and buried my eyes to the ground or I over-accepted and just generally looked like a douche by basking in the compliment and letting it go to my head.

So I had my preconceptions about what people’s response patterns would be like—and they were completely blown away. Maybe it’s just a standard thing that happens in adulthood, but I can’t think of one instance (discounting the children I complimented) where the person didn’t receive the compliment graciously or where it seismically inflated their ego (that I could tell, anyway). In hindsight it seems like a silly thing to have worried about.

5. It’s A Skill

I mentioned already that giving praise, for a variety of reasons, can be difficult for some. It’s incredibly easy to cruise through life on autopilot and assume everyone ‘knows’ everything that they could possibly be complimented on—but obviously that’s not the point.

Unless you are one of the lucky people that grew up with a very social disposition, getting comfortable with giving good compliments is something that requires conscious action and deliberate effort.

Good compliments are genuine and often spontaneous. These two aren’t mutually exclusive; the more comfortable one gets with spontaneously dishing a compliment, the more genuine it will feel to the receiver. And that comfort level grows simply from repetition, practice, and staying present. If there is a fear of having an awkward interaction as a result of giving a compliment, 99% of the time that only happens because the compliment didn’t feel genuine to the other person.

Finally, depending on where someone is in their development, getting good at giving compliments can require a complete mindset shift. For people that go about life with a critical and/or negative mindset (I used to be/still sometimes am one of them), this could be the hardest part. However, learning to focus on the good in others is well worth it, for reasons beyond completing a complement challenge.



That’s it for this experiment. If becoming more social is a challenge you are dealing with in your life, I think 90 Compliments in 30 Days (or even just 30 in 30 days) is a perfect starting point. If you take the challenge, let me know how it went!

90 Compliments in 30 Days: Recap and Results

Recap and Results

This post is part of a 30-day social experiment that focused on giving more compliments. Also check out the rules and guidelines, my five big takeaways, and the related reddit post.

Overall Thoughts

The first thing that became apparent about the experiment was that it just wasn’t that challenging…at first.

After realizing that complimenting three strangers a day for a month wasn’t that difficult a thing to do, I had admittedly written off my own project after the first week. As a result, I did not put in as much effort or creativity as I probably should have.

I knew I would finish the project, that I’d have some kind of takeaway, and plenty to write about. But I still had quickly chalked up 90 Compliments as only something that would be a great precursor or warm up for someone who found 90 Strangers extremely difficult.

That said, towards the end of the month I started to re-gain interest in my own project as I tried to push myself beyond the low-hanging compliment fruit of “I like your shirt”, “Great job with X”, and so on. I had failed to see in the beginning how much possibility there was with complimenting people and making them feel good. This upswing of optimism has made me consider about continuing or re-doing the experiment someday simply for the sake of doing so.

Like last time, I kept track of the data—the details of all 90 compliments, age, gender, demographic, location, relationship to me, and whether or not a conversation ensued—in a spreadsheet which is available here as a PDF:

The 90 Compliments in 30 Days Data Sheet

Data Breakdown

Below are some graphs and summaries of everything I kept track of, as well an examination of my predictions and some Q&As about the experiment.

Age

age

<13:
 2 (.02%)
Teens: 2 (.02%)
20s: 58 (64%)
30s: 19 (21%)
40s: 7 (.07%)
50s: 1 (.01%)
60s: 1 (.01%)

This surprised me slightly–I knew that for the most part I hung around and gravitated towards people my own age (like most I am sure).

However, if you had asked me beforehand to predict these numbers I feel I would have been way off; I think I would have expected myself to shy away somewhat from complimenting my peers as opposed to those that are older or younger.

In hindsight, I don’t think I had any real anxiety about complimenting any age group in particular—I  basically just spoke to whoever was around.

Funny enough, when people ask me what I don’t like about where I currently live, I usually say there aren’t enough my people my age—whoops.

Gender

Gender

Male: 37 (41%)
Female: 54 (59%)


*was one instance where I congratulated a newly-engaged couple which I gave a tally to each gender for, hence this not adding up to 90

 

About what I expected and not that surprising. Also to be fair, swing dancing and my place of work are very female-laden.

Demographic

Demo
F20s: 36 (39.5%)
M20s: 23 (25.2%)
F30s: 10 (10.9%)
M30s: 9 (.09%)
F40s: 5 (.05%)
M40s: 2 (.02%)
M<13: 2 (.02%)
F50s: 1 (.01%)
F60s: 1 (.01%)
FTeens: 1 (.01%)


Again, I’m a single straight male in my twenties; probably not that surprising. Beyond that, for the most part a trend continues in that the closer someone is to my age, the more I complimented them. Again, also reflective of who I surround myself with most.

*same footnote as above applies here

Location

Location

Gym: 18 (20%)
Grocery/Other Store: 14 (15.5%)
Work: 10 (11.1%)
Bar: 9 (10%)
Swing Dancing: 9 (10%)
Rec Sports (soccer, kickball, and paintball): 8 (8.8%)
Coffee Shop: 4 (4.4%)
Restaurant: 3 (3.3%)
Text: 3 (3.3%)
Apartment Complex: 2 (2.2%)
Concert: 2 (2.2%)
Phone: 2 (2.2%)
Airport/Shuttle: 2 (2.2%)
Car Rental Office: 1 (1.1%)
Accountant’s Office: 1 (1.1%)
Facebook Message: 1 (1.1%)
Friend’s House: 1 (1.1%)
Gas Station: 1 (1.1%)
Waterpark: 1 (1.1%)


*some categories were consolidated for the chart

 

A little bit of everything; a small correlation can probably be drawn between the number of compliments versus how social these locations are (my gym is a super social and supportive community).

On the contrary, I hardly complimented anyone at all in places like my apartment complex where it is less of a norm to talk to people in passing.

Relationship

relationship

Stranger: 45 (50%)
Friend: 35 (39%)
Coworker: 7 (7.5%)
Family: 2 (2.5%)


Friend here is defined as anyone that I have met or been introduced to prior to the “compliment interaction”–people at my gym, that I see at swing dancing regularly, etc.

I live 1,200 miles from my most of my family, so complimenting them wasn’t something I could do that regularly since we only communicate via text and phone.

I thought I would have complimented my coworkers more–I even printed out an extra staff roster to mark up and make sure I didn’t repeat anyone. And I figured the amount of strangers and friends I complimented would be close.

Did a conversation ensue?

convo

Yes: 64 (71%)
No: 26 (29%)


My favorite stat: Almost 3/4ths of the time I complimented someone, it led to a conversation.

Granted, I’ve had a fair amount of practice starting conversations with random people in general, but after seeing this I feel I have discovered/realized a conversation starter that is nearly foolproof. And many of the nos were simply because the compliment was in passing (like while changing sides in a kickball game) and I think once or twice I simply wasn’t heard (or just not acknowledged).

Were my predictions accurate?

1. That the first few days would be tough: I don’t know if tough is the right word, however in the beginning days (and days where I was just feeling “off”) I definitely would go for the easier compliment as opposed to looking at people beyond the surface. That said, and as I mention later on this post, complimenting people became a much less-conscious decision towards the end of the month.

2. That I will feel at my socially strongest by the end of the month: There are lots of factors at play with this, and I am not going to sit here and write that 90 Compliments is some sort of social-confidence-super-cocktail, but…yes.

Now, those other factors could all be responsible for perpetuating one another—in June I read The Ultramind Solution by Mark Hyman, which had me make some fine-tunings to my diet (specifically things that would supposedly boost my cognitive abilities), which in turn made me feel compelled to work out more than I usually do, which in turn made me feel better and less carefree socially, which helped re-establish a core group of friends I had gotten away from over the winter, which led me to many fun social and weekend ventures…and so on. It’s a giant cycle with no beginning, however I have no doubt that 90 Compliments played at least a small part in pulling me out of the funk I was in.

Even if I weren’t planning to push myself to do bigger and bolder experiments like this the rest of my life, I think 90 Compliments as a month-long exercise would be an extremely beneficial thing to do again if I ever needed to pull myself out of a rut, or maybe just as an annual ‘social reset’ kinda thing.

3. That I will be able to compliment everyone I come across: No. One of the original rules of the experiment was to only pay people genuine compliments that I could own and believe in, and occasionally I would come across or interact with someone that for whatever reason just didn’t present me with anything to compliment them on. And that’s ok. Perhaps they were having a bad day or we just weren’t compatible people.

4. That the experiment will be fun: Despite what I wrote earlier about having a small stretch where I wasn’t super into the project, I only had a few brief moments of “why I am doing this”. Unlike in 90 Strangers where being 0 for 3 for the day at 7PM meant having to drive out to Target to try and randomly chat with whoever was around, stringing together compliments in a short period of time was easier and much more feasible to do.

As I’ll mention in the breakdown post, something happened to me during the experiment that reinvigorated my fire for the project and reminded me exactly why I was doing it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was my general “strategy”–did I look for any particular opportunities or did I just wing it?

I don’t know if I really had one per se—there was no particular ‘trick’ with this. I simply tried to stay out of my own head and be extremely observant of other people. If there was any kind of ‘hack’ it was to just be sure and pay a compliment in any sort of “required interaction”—so a cashier at the grocer (meaning choosing to forego using an automatic checkout machine) or the bartender when getting a drink.

Did it get easier? What was the hardest part? 

In the first week I admittedly thought to myself on several occasions that I had ‘maxed out’ my complimenting skills and that I wasn’t going to witness any personal change over the rest of the month.

However, towards the third and fourth weeks I started to notice that complimenting was starting to become an automated response; there was less ‘mental prep’ of: “ok, I only have one compliment for the day, I really need to find something good about this cashier to compliment them on.” I just kind of did it.

It’s hard to explain, but even in the days after the experiment concluded, there was some sort of subconscious response I felt within myself to compliment people when they had a cool outfit or I saw them do something nice for someone. Probably a sign that a habit—or the beginning stages of a real habit—are in formation.

The hardest part was truly pushing myself to go beyond just complimenting people on their material goods and show appreciation for their smile, their posture, etc. This was probably my biggest regret with the project—not going beyond the easy targets enough.

Were there any awkward moments/did you make anyone feel uncomfortable?

It’s not always possible to tell, but I can only recall one instance where the person might have felt visibly awkward (compliment #65).

I was caught admiring the eyes of a girl (who I’d now consider a friend) on one my rec sports teams and meant to say something like “that headband really brings out your eyes” (but in a way that doesn’t sound like it came from a drug store dollar novel).

While trying to think of how to say this, said girl caught my gaze, in which case I decided to blurt out “your headband makes your eyes appear crazy blue.” I received thanks (that might have been half-hearted) and we kind of shifted over to separate conversations going on around us.

That all sounds weirder than the moment actually was. Well, I think—you’d have to ask her.

But 99% of the time the compliment was received with a thank you or just a conversation about the topic at hand. I swear.

If I did the project again, what I would do differently?

Try harder from the beginning and push myself to be more creative with every compliment. Maybe up the difficulty significantly and not allow myself to compliment articles of clothing or the same thing twice–e.g., I can only pay a compliment on a shirt once, meaning I can no longer compliment anyone else on their shirt the rest of the month.

Would I recommend this challenge to someone that wants to become more social?

Absolutely.

Definitely moreso than 90 Strangers, which I think can seem too ‘open-ended’ for someone new to this kind of thing. After the last experiment I received quite a few messages asking how I started conversations; as it shows in the data, just paying someone a compliment more often than not led a conversation. There is a much more defined objective with this one as opposed to “just go talk to strangers!”

Like 90S, 90C can be scaled an infinite number of ways—just one compliment a day to start out, or ramp up the difficulty by not allowing compliments to have anything to do with clothing or physical characteristics.

Experiment Revealed: 90 Compliments in 30 Days

Project Introduction

This post was part of a 30-day social experiment I did challenging myself to give more compliments.

Also check out the recap and results, my five big takeaways from the project, and the related reddit post.

As I mentioned in the teaser post, the format was extremely similar to 90 Strangers. However, this time around the experiment involved the unknowing “participation” of both strangers and people I already knew.

The experiment was a success, and over the next few days I will again do a breakdown of the data I kept, as well as a post containing my biggest takeaways.

But first, the guidelines I tried to follow.

Rules

1. I must pay a compliment to three different people each day. These can be to strangers, people I’ve known for years, and everyone in between.

2. A compliment will be considered as Webster’s does:

an expression of esteem, respect, affection, or admiration; an admiring remark


3.
Compliments can be issued in person, over the phone, or via text.

4. The compliment must be genuine (e.g., I can’t tell someone I like their hair if I don’t actually like it).

5. The compliment must be something that I wouldn’t normally say, and should be specific where possible. General “nice jobs” after a workout I will try not to count; e-mailing someone at work “Thanks, good job!” will definitely not count.

And to ramp up the difficulty:

6. I cannot compliment the same person twice (and count it towards the 90 for the month)

This is to ensure that I am still being outgoing with this, and am not just constantly showering my friends and co-workers in compliments.

Why?

February through April of this year I went through some ‘personal defeats’ (read: normal twenty-something year-old stuff). The details don’t matter, but the result was I started to obsess over my career, relationships, and goals in an unhealthy manner. I was wanted to have everything figured out NOW, and when things weren’t falling into place like I thought they should, it was adding a lot of stress to my life.

Despite knowing deep down that I am very fortunate to have all I do in life and that I need to just enjoy the ride, I felt extremely self-absorbed* and not at all like the person that went out and talked to 118 strangers in 30 days last year. In short, I was a little bit disgusted with my thought patterns and just generally “down”.

On top of that, over the past few months I’ve admittedly become comfortable—complacent, even—with myself socially. I haven’t been meeting as many new people, and the ones I have were in networking settings where a lot of the underlying motive is “how can this person help ME?”

I want to shift my focus and do something that will make others feel good as opposed to obsessing over how I can make my own life better. Something that will let me find the good in other for the sake of doing so, instead of simply critiquing and analyzing their value to my self-serving goals.

Also, 90 Strangers was one of the most fun and rewarding things I’ve ever done. People liked reading about it, I liked writing about it, which is as good of a sign as any that I should continue to do more with this kind of idea.

Predictions

Like 90 Strangers, I predict that the first few days will be the toughest as I gain a feel for things. Similar in the way it took my brain getting used to looking for opportunities to start talking to random people, I am sure an adjustment period will be needed as I start to learn to identify what to compliment others on, be it something they are wearing, how they carry themselves, or how they write their cursive Qs.

I also predict that by the time all is said and done, I will be feeling like I did at the end of the last experiment: at my socially strongest.

I’ve always liked the analogy that improving your social skills is like strengthening any other muscle. At the end of last summer I don’t know if I ever felt more free, in-state, and ‘effortless’ in social settings (that includes situations where I’ve been drunk). It was an amazing feeling, and while I don’t want to necessarily chase a specific outcome and risk being disappointed if that result isn’t produced, but a big part of me hopes I can get that feeling back.

Next, I am fairly confident that by the end the 30 days I will be able to find something to compliment just about everyone on, and do so naturally without hesitation.

Finally, I think the whole thing is going to be extremely fun, give me the social recharge I need, and hopefully inspire others to do a similar challenge or experiment with themselves.