The Power of Specificity: How to Make a Meaningful Deposit
Recently, I read a social media post by actor and comedian Dan Aykroyd that I couldn’t stop thinking about:
“Happy Birthday weekend to my Wild and Crazy older brother Steve Martin. There would be no Blues Brothers without the patronage of this generous, brilliant, magnificently talented master musician, comedian, author, actor and eclecticist … He has my blood if he needs it.”
This post clearly took time to craft, and the words were carefully chosen for maximum impact.
It struck me as an incredibly thoughtful and vulnerable public statement for a highly successful person. Success, fame, and busy schedules typically bend people inward toward themselves rather than outward toward others.
It is also inherently risky to appear so deeply caring. When you express vulnerable appreciation, you expose yourself to the risk that the other person might not reciprocate your thoughtfulness, or that you might not look as strong and aggressively independent—values our culture traditionally celebrates.
Because of that risk, it would have been much more expedient, and far less vulnerable, to simply write: “Happy birthday to the amazing Steve Martin. I hope you have a great year ahead, my friend!”
That generic greeting is what’s called an Evaporating Interaction. It is polite, but it disappears instantly. Aykroyd’s post is an Accumulating Interaction. It acts as a massive deposit into their relationship capital account.
What makes the difference? Specificity.
Specificity takes time, and it forces you to pick certain words while intentionally excluding others. For example, Aykroyd chose to highlight “generous, brilliant,” and “magnificently talented,” intentionally leaving out true but generic terms like “funny, hard-working,” or “magnetic.”
This matters because specificity signals to the recipient that your words were chosen for a unique reason. Calling a comedian “generous” carries heavy weight precisely because it was selected over the more obvious choice, “funny.”
This rule applies far beyond celebrity birthdays. I once read a piece of advice suggesting we should stop saying a generic “thank you” and start attaching the specific reason for our gratitude. Saying “Thank you for your thoughtful, detailed response” builds significantly more trust than just saying “Thanks for responding” or just “Thanks.”
It also reminds me of a longstanding tradition in our office. It began when my teammate, Karen, started circulating a greeting card around the office with colored pens for someone’s birthday. Instead of having them just sign their names, each person was asked to write a specific, meaningful comment about the things they admired about that person—their character, their values, or their behavior. (This tradition has since broadened to include teammates across the region via text messages!)
So, why don’t we do this more often?
According to research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, people consistently undervalue the positive impact of giving meaningful appreciation while wildly overestimating the potential awkwardness of doing it. Yet the exact same research indicates that expressing gratitude measurably improves the well-being of both the recipient and the expresser.
If you want to accumulate relationship capital and practice an Others Orientation, take a page from Dan Aykroyd’s playbook: Intentionally risk the awkwardness to express specific, meaningful appreciation.
Who could you specifically appreciate today?
