"I'll say it when it matters"

There's a kinder version of the drawer, which is that you're saving it up. You don't say the small things because you're going to say the big thing. At the wedding, in the speech. In the card at Christmas. At the retirement do, or the fortieth, or when there's a reason. The good thoughts aren't lost. They're being kept for an occasion that deserves them.

I'd ask two things about the occasion. The first is when it comes. For most of the people you think well of, it doesn't. There's no speech for the colleague with the slides. There's no card for your sister's handling of the shouting customer. The occasions come for a handful of people a handful of times, and for everyone else the backlog waits for an occasion that isn't on the calendar. Which is the funeral, and I'll come to that in chapter 23. The good things people say at funerals are, very often, the things nobody said before, and everyone in the room can feel it.

The second is what the occasion does to the thing said. A compliment at a wedding is a performance. It has an audience, a form, a slot in the running order. The person it's aimed at hears it through all of that, and hears the occasion as much as the words. A compliment on a Tuesday, in the kitchen, with no reason for it beyond the fact that you thought it, has nothing in the way. That's why the small said version outweighs the big saved one. It's a direct line, and the occasion is a bad one.

There's also a matter of exchange rate, and this is my reasoning rather than a finding. A good thought is worth most on the day it's true. "You handled that call well" on the night of the call is about that call. Six years later, in a speech, it's about your memory of them, which is nice but different. The detail goes stale. The verdict is all that's left, and verdicts are the part that gets brushed off.

None of this is against the speech. Give the speech. But the speech is where you say the things you've already said, in front of people, for the pleasure of saying them again. It isn't a savings account for the things you never said, because those don't keep. By the time the occasion comes they've lost the detail that made them true, and the person has spent years not knowing you thought them.