"I don't want to turn into one of those people"

Under a lot of the objections so far there's a quieter one, and it's about who you'd be. You know the kind of person who says everything's lovely. Who thanks the waiter three times and tells the team they're amazing and posts about gratitude. You find them slightly exhausting and you don't entirely trust them, and you'd rather be the dry one who says the true thing. The book seems to be asking you to cross over.

It isn't, and I'd like to be precise about the difference, because I share your view of those people.

What you distrust in them isn't that they notice the fine. It's that they don't seem to notice anything else, so the fine has no weight. If everything is amazing, amazing means nothing. The dry person's remarks carry weight because they're rationed. That's a real asset, and I'm not asking you to give it up. I'm asking you to spend some of it on the other column.

Think about what a thanks from you would be worth, given who you are. You're the person who notices the wrong total. Everyone knows it. When you say "the north region section is really clear", your colleague knows you read it the way you read everything, looking for what's wrong, and found this instead. That's not the same sentence as the same words from the person who says it about every section. It's worth more, precisely because of the scan. Your reputation for spotting faults is what makes your fine believable, and the people who most need to hear a fine from someone are the people who've only ever heard faults from them.

So the person you'd become isn't the one you're picturing. You'd be the same dry, accurate, slightly hard-to-please person you are now, who also, once or twice a day, says a specific true thing about what went right. Nobody will mistake that for the waiter-thanker. They'll notice that your standards haven't moved and that your account of them has got fairer, and I think most of them will like you more for it without being able to say why.

There's one more thing under this objection, and it's that saying the fine feels like a loss of position. The dry one is a little above the room. Thanks puts you level with the person you're thanking. I'd only say that being level with your partner and your daughter and your colleague is where you'd want to be, if you thought about it, and that the height was never doing much for you.