If you don't have 10 minutes right now, close this out and come back when you do. I'm serious. If you're not going to watch the entire video I'm about to link and actually pay attention to it, there's no point continuing to read this. If you can't focus for 10 minutes on this, you have TikTok brain and you're already being sorted into the permanent underclass. AI will eat your lunch. You have no moat. You are so fucked. You are not the Charlie Parker archetype. You're the guy who got laughed off stage and never came back.
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Jokinggg

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But seriously don't continue unless you have 10 min (video is 5 rest of writing will take you another 5)

​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6vTI5g198E​

Watch it. All of it.

If you didn't watch the video stop here.

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You have passed. GOOD JOB.
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Fletcher, the conductor, is explaining why he terrorized his students at Shaffer. He wasn't there to conduct. Any mediocre asshole can wave arms and keep tempo. He was there to push people beyond what's expected of them. To find the next Charlie Parker.

The story he tells is simple. Young Charlie Parker gets up at a cutting session, fucks it up completely, and Jo Jones throws a cymbal at his head. Parker gets laughed off stage. Cries himself to sleep. But the next morning he practices. And practices. And practices. With one goal. Never to be laughed at again. A year later he steps back on that stage and plays the best solo the world has ever heard.

Then Fletcher asks the question that exposes everything. What if Jones had just said "that's okay Charlie, that was all right, good job"? Parker would have thought he did fine. End of story. No Bird.

That's why "good job" are the two most harmful words in the English language.

False encouragement is murder. The acceptance of mediocrity is a sin. When you tell someone they did well when they didn't, when you praise mediocrity, when you hand out participation trophies for showing up, you're killing their potential. You're robbing them of the feedback that would force them to become exceptional. You're choosing their comfort over their greatness. You're committing a moral crime against their future self.

Most people will read that and think it's too harsh. Too intense. Too demanding. Those people have already accepted mediocrity for themselves and they need everyone else to accept it too so they don't have to face what they've given up.

I wrote before about full expression being the fundamental purpose of life. Not happiness. Not comfort. Not safety. Full expression. This is the thing people misunderstand completely when they talk about finding purpose or meaning or fulfillment. They think there's some external answer waiting for them. Some career or relationship or achievement that will make them feel complete.

Full expression means taking everything inside you and forcing it into reality. Every capability. Every bit of potential. Every ounce of energy. You were born with a specific constellation of talents, interests, obsessions, perspectives. That combination is unique. You're the only person in history with exactly that configuration. The question is what are you going to do with it.

Most people do absolutely nothing with it. They take this incredible raw material they were born with and they let it rot. They spend decades moving it around, rearranging it, theorizing about it, but never actually deploying it into the world. They die with everything still locked inside them. With the music unplayed. With the buildings unbuilt. With the ideas unexpressed. With the potential unrealized.

This is the real tragedy. Not that you failed. Not that you tried and it didn't work. The tragedy is that you never actually tried to squeeze everything out. You never pushed to see what was actually possible. You accepted the limitations before you even tested them. You said "good job" to yourself for partial effort and settled in to coast.

That's the sin. Not trying and failing. Never trying at all. Accepting less than your maximum. Letting someone else accept less than their maximum when you could have pushed them. These are moral failures. Crimes against potential itself.

Life itself is either expansion or contraction. You're either pushing the envelope, exploring your edges, testing your limits, or you're contracting. Dying slowly. There's no middle ground. The maintenance phase is a lie people tell themselves while they're in decline. You cannot stay still. The universe doesn't work that way. Every system is either growing or degrading. Every organism is either adapting or dying. Every person is either becoming more of what they're capable of or becoming less.

When you accept "good job" for mediocre output, you choose contraction. You choose the slow death. You choose to let your capabilities atrophy. And the insidious part is it feels fine at first. Comfortable even. You're doing okay. You're getting by. You're not failing in any obvious way. But you're also not growing. Not pushing. Not expressing the fullness of what you could be.

This is where the sin compounds. Every day you choose comfort over growth, you're not just staying neutral. You're actively killing potential. You're murdering the version of yourself that could have existed if you'd pushed harder. That version dies a little more each day you choose ease over excellence.

Five years pass like this. Then ten. Then twenty. Then you wake up and realize you built a whole life around not being challenged. Around not maximizing. Around accepting less than you're capable of producing. Around dying slowly enough that you didn't notice it was happening. You've committed the ultimate sin against yourself. You've wasted the gift.

When you give "good job" to others for mediocre output, you're not being kind. You're not being supportive. You're murdering their potential. You're participating in their slow death. You're watching someone capable of Bird level genius settle for Starbucks jazz and you're telling them that's fine, that's enough, good job. You're choosing their comfort over their potential. You're choosing to be liked over being useful. You're committing a sin against their future.

This is a disgrace. Not just to the person. To life itself.

We are all capable of exponentially more than we're producing. The distance between what you're actually doing and what you're capable of doing if you actually tried, if you actually pushed, if you actually demanded excellence from yourself, is massive. For most people it's a fucking chasm. And the only thing stopping you from crossing that chasm is the accumulated weight of all the times someone said "good job" when you didn't earn it, all the times you said it to yourself, all the times you chose comfort over growth.

Every one of those moments is a small murder. A small sin. They accumulate. They compound. They build into a life of unrealized potential. A life of comfort purchased at the price of greatness. A life of safety that cost you everything you could have become.

Full expression requires that you abandon comfort completely. You have to be willing to fail. To be laughed at. To have cymbals thrown at your head. To be wrong. To look stupid. To push past your current capabilities into territory where you don't know what you're doing. This is terrifying. Most people would rather die than feel that level of discomfort. So they do. They just do it slowly over forty years instead of all at once.

Once you've reached a certain level, once you've actually done the work and pushed through the resistance and built something exceptional, you have a responsibility. A moral obligation. You have to hold that same standard for others. You have to be willing to be the person who doesn't say "good job" when someone capable of greatness produces mediocrity. You have to care more about their potential than about being liked. You have to be willing to be Fletcher.

This doesn't mean being cruel. It doesn't mean being abusive. Fletcher was probably too far in certain ways. But the core principle is correct. The people who could become Charlie Parker need someone who refuses to let them settle for less. They need resistance. They need honest feedback. They need someone who sees what they're capable of and won't let them stop short of it. They need someone who understands that false praise is murder and refuses to commit that sin.

It's easier to be nice. It's easier to hand out praise. It's easier to make people feel good about themselves even when they haven't earned it. But easy has nothing to do with loving someone. Easy has nothing to do with serving their development. Easy has nothing to do with helping them achieve full expression.

Easy is just another word for complicit. When you choose easy over honest, when you choose comfortable over challenging, when you choose praise over truth, you're choosing to participate in someone's contraction. You're choosing to be an accomplice in the murder of their potential.

The world is full of people who could have been extraordinary but nobody demanded it of them. Nobody cared enough to hold the standard. Nobody was willing to be the asshole who said "that's not good enough, you can do better." So they settled. They convinced themselves that mediocre was fine. They built entire lives around not being challenged. Around not expressing their full capabilities. Around contracting slowly into comfortable irrelevance.

Excellence is viewed as toxic now. Demanding high standards is considered abusive. Pushing people is seen as harmful rather than necessary. Everyone gets a trophy and everyone's special and everyone did a good job. This is how civilizations decline. This is how you end up with Starbucks jazz. This is how you lose the next Charlie Parker. This is how entire generations commit collective suicide by comfort.

The acceptance of mediocrity is contagious. It spreads. One person accepts it, then another, then another. Soon you have entire cultures built around not demanding too much. Not expecting too much. Not being too much. Everyone settling for less than they're capable of and everyone praising each other for it. Everyone participating in the collective murder of human potential.

You either maximize your own potential or you waste it. You either push others toward their maximum or you facilitate their mediocrity. You either participate in the full expression of life's possibilities or you participate in its contraction. There's no middle ground. There's no comfortable compromise. There's no way to be nice and moral at the same time when someone is capable of greatness and producing mediocrity.