A friend of mine once told me this story.
He was playing golf with two other people. One was a proficient golfer (let’s call him Phil) , and the other wasn’t very good (we can call him Bob).
At the end of the round the bad golfer missed a very short putt that even the most novice golfer would make 50% of the time or more.
After the put was missed Phil said to Bob “Nice weight” (meaning Bob hit the ball the correct distance but failed to aim it correctly). And he said it simply because he hadn’t provided Bob with any complement on his game for the entire prior round. He didn’t even think that, given how short the putt was, his comment could easily been seen as an insult.
This makes me think about life. How often do we give someone an ingenuine complement in order to fill some void? Complements should be genuine, or avoided completely.
In my opinion, a better and constructive compliment would have been this:
‘Hey Bob, I noticed that you had a tough time out there today. Way to hang in there and finish off the round. Most people after a hard day would have picked up and given themselves a gimme’. Keep working at your game and you’ll see results.”