Cherishing is a Superpower

I’ve been getting emails lately that almost work on me.

They open with a sharp little comment about something I posted, or a line from my LinkedIn profile. They sound like the sender actually paid attention. Like they noticed me. For a second, there’s a flicker of, “oh, this person sees me, maybe I should write back.”

Then I catch it. They didn’t read my profile. They pointed an AI at it, asked for a hook, and pasted the result into a template. They have no idea who I am. They simulated cherishing me, because cherishing sells, and they wanted the sale without the work of actually caring.

It’s gross. It’s also revealing, because it shows what a lot of marketing has quietly become. A project to hack someone’s emotions. To find the words that perturb a person into feeling chosen, seen, attended to, without the sender ever having to be the kind of person who chooses, sees, or attends.

Bonus or Pizza Party?

Here’s the second story this reminded me of. A leadership team once asked me, “We want to do something nice for our people. Should we give them a bonus, or throw a pizza party?” The question itself was the tell. If you genuinely cared about your people, you would already know which one mattered to them. You wouldn’t be polling an outside consultant about what your own employees value. You’d know, because caring is the thing that produces knowing.

What they wanted was for their people to feel cared for. What they were skipping was caring for them.

The Shortcut That Corrodes

This is the move, over and over. People understand the marketing power of cherishing. They get that humans light up when someone holds their concerns as if those concerns mattered. So they try to manufacture the feeling, on the cheap, with a clever opener or a pizza party. They want the result without the practice. They want the customer or the employee to feel chosen, while not actually choosing them.

The shortcut does not work. Or rather, it works for a week, and then it corrodes the relationship from the inside, because the other person eventually clocks it. I clocked it on those emails. Your employees clock it on the pizza. Your customers clock it when your “personalized” follow-up has nothing to do with them.

Cherishing as a Superpower

Here is what I want you to really hear. In 2025 and 2026, the capacity to actually cherish another human being is a superpower in the marketplace. I think it might be the most profound one available right now. We are surrounded by people pretending to cherish us, and we feel it, and it is making us sicker. So when we run into someone who actually does, the response is almost involuntary. Wow. Where have you been. I want to do business with you. I want to work for you. I want to tell my friends about you.

That is the opening. Not because cherishing is a clever positioning move, but because the rarer it gets, the more it stands out, and the more it stands out, the more it compounds. And it can be developed. It is not a personality trait you either have or do not. It is a practice.

The Practice

If you want your employees to feel cared for, care about them. If you want your prospects to feel cherished, learn them. Sit with their concerns. Find out what they are actually trying to build. Notice what they are afraid of. That is slow, expensive, and inconvenient. It is also the thing.

Entrepreneurs who try to learn the trick of faking it are training themselves into the wrong instinct. They are building a business on a kind of cleverness that will, eventually, leave them surrounded by people who do not trust them. Including, by the way, themselves.

There is a different path. It is slower at the start and much faster after that. Pay attention to real people. Hold their concerns as if they were your own, then design your business so that their winning is also your winning. That is cherishing. The other thing is a costume.