Recently, I decided to add a small page to this blog.
A page for kind words.
Over the past ten years, people I worked with and people I helped have left reviews and recommendations. Most of them are on Upwork, from my freelance years. Some are on LinkedIn, from colleagues and clients. And a few are on WordPress.org, from people I helped through plugin support.
I knew they were there. I just had not read them in a long time.
So I went back and read all of them.
It was a strange feeling.
The Messages That Stay
In my first post here, I wrote about working in support and not taking things personally.
In support, the difficult messages are the ones that stay with you. The subject line. The exact words. The moment you open the ticket and feel your chest tighten a little.
Some of them, I can still remember years later.
But the kind ones?
I had forgotten most of them.
Not because they did not matter. They did. They arrived, made me smile for a moment, and then the next task came.
Why We Forget
A complaint feels like a problem to solve. Praise feels like a problem already solved. So we read it once and move on.
Over time, this creates an unfair picture.
We remember the mistakes.
We remember the angry replies.
We forget the hundreds of times things went well.
If you only keep the difficult messages, you start to believe they are the whole story.
They are not.
What I Found
Reading the reviews again, I noticed something.
Some people mentioned the technical work. But many of them wrote about something else.
That things worked on the first try.
That I stepped in when another developer had left a project unfinished.
That I did not give up when a problem was difficult.
That I was reliable.
One client I worked with for about five years wrote, “stop looking and hire Hendra.” Another wrote simply, “Very reliable guy. Hire him.” And someone I helped through support wrote that I “could not have been more patient.”
None of it was about being brilliant.
It was about showing up. Being honest. Finishing what I started.
That was a good reminder. The things people remember are often the things we think are too ordinary to mention.
Keeping Them
I did wonder whether a page like this would feel like bragging.
Maybe a little.
But I see it differently. It is a reminder for myself, for the days when a difficult message arrives and feels like the whole story.
On those days, I can open the page and remember the rest.
A Small Suggestion
If you work in support, or in any job where people mostly contact you when something is wrong, try this.
Keep the kind messages.
A folder in your inbox.
A note on your phone.
A screenshot.
You do not need to read them every day. But when a hard week comes, and it will, they are there.
The difficult words will always find you.
The kind ones need a little help to stay.
You can read mine on the Kind Words page.
