Something true
A compliment worth giving - specific, sincere, and never about appearance.
Runs locally in your browser. Nothing you generate is ever sent to a server.
Press "Generate Compliment" to see a result here.
Kind
Press Generate and a compliment appears, ready to say to someone or to sit with yourself. They are written to be specific enough to mean something, which is the difference between a compliment that lands and one that gets brushed off.
Compliments about how someone looks are the easiest to give and the least useful to receive. They are about something the person mostly did not choose, they can land awkwardly depending on who is saying them, and they rarely change how anyone sees themselves. Compliments about what someone does - how they listen, how they handle being wrong, whether they finish things - are harder to write and worth far more.
Most people give far less praise at work than they intend to, usually because they cannot find a way to say it that does not feel forced. The Work category is written to solve exactly that: each line is specific, sayable out loud, and about the job rather than the person's personality, which is what makes it comfortable to give and to receive.
Drawing a compliment for yourself feels odd and works anyway. The reason is that the wording is not yours: you cannot dismiss it as something you told yourself. Notice which ones you want to argue with - that reaction usually points at something more interesting than the compliment did.
"You're great" costs nothing to say and is heard as politeness rather than information. "You explain things in a way that makes people feel clever, not stupid" cannot be said by accident - it proves you were watching. That is the whole difference, and it is why every line here names a particular behaviour rather than a general quality. The test is simple: if the compliment could be copied and pasted to anyone in the room, it is not doing any work.
Some people bat away praise automatically, and the usual response is to say it louder, which makes it worse. Two things help. Say it and move on rather than waiting for a reaction, so there is nothing to deflect. And make it about a decision they made rather than a talent they have - people who dismiss "you're so clever" will often accept "you asked the right question in that meeting", because the second one is a fact about what happened.
A compliment said out loud lasts about a day. The same words in a card, a message or a leaving note get reread for years - people genuinely keep them. If you are choosing where to spend the effort, writing it down multiplies the value at no extra cost, which is why several of these lines are phrased to work on a page as well as out loud.
The list is filtered to the category you chose, then a compliment is drawn using your browser's cryptographic random source with rejection sampling, so nothing is favoured. Batches without repeats use a Fisher-Yates shuffle driven by the same source.
Drawing a compliment to give someone, or to sit with yourself. Press Generate and one appears.
Yes. The filter covers character, work, friendship and effort, so you can match the compliment to the situation.
Because compliments about what someone does or chooses land better and last longer than compliments about how they look, and they are far easier to give sincerely.
Yes. The Work filter is written to be sayable to a colleague without being awkward, which is the main reason people skip praise at work.
Yes. Raise the quantity and copy the set - useful for writing cards, notes or end-of-year reviews.
Yes. Each compliment is drawn with your browser's cryptographic random source, so every one in the chosen category has an equal chance.
Because they are about something the person mostly did not choose, they can land awkwardly depending on who is saying them, and they rarely change how anyone sees themselves. A compliment about a choice or a habit does.
Say it and move on rather than waiting for a reaction. Making it about something they did, rather than something they are, also makes it much harder to deflect.