<human>: Can you provide a brief rundown of the text in within 3 sentences?

My partner (late 20s) has always had awful self esteem, he genuinely seems to believe he's worthless, unattractive and useless.

In reality he's good looking, smart and a general pleasure to be around. 

I've always been pretty well motivated as a person, have a decent career and am starting to build up some side income too. As a result, I earn a fair bit more than he does.

He's not far off from depression because he'll "never be as good as me" and "may as well just give up trying". I've been encouraging him to do little side projects outside work so that he does feel more valuable and he does well at them but then gives up before seeing success. 

I've no idea how to help him here. I seem torn between:

1. Not pushing him to do anything outside work, just letting him relax and try to be happy with what he does have (he'd consider this to be him failing).
2. My current plan of gently prodding and encouraging him, which results in him not trying enough to see much success
3. Taking control and saying "look, you need to do X Y Z if you want plan X to succeed and I'll nag you until it happens". Which may lead to success with the downside of him hating me!
<bot>: Well-motivated people of Reddit, what have you done when your partner feels crap and needs motivating without causing a rift between you?