[50CNT]

I think trophies for trying shows that the self-esteem movement didn't go far enough.

Take a company with a completely and utterly broken sales process. Landing page copy is abjectly horrible, half the orders get dropped, no tracking or analytics, and one hand doesn't know what the other one is doing. Now fixing that entire system is a hard job, but a valuable one. So what do we do? We give people coupons. That's easy.

Now take the "self-esteem movement". The basic idea was that it'd be valuable to give people a sense of trust in their own abilities, acknowledge them as intrinsically valuable, and have them learn to appreciate their own accomplishments, because that better prepares them for any of the challenges that life may offer. But to put that to work up and down the stack is a hard problem. So we hand out coupons. That's easy.

And in that we accomplish the opposite from what we set out to do. Instead of feeling acknowledged, children feel conned. Instead of making them feel valued for what they are, we make them feel interchangeable. Instead of helping children celebrate their achievement we undermine the concept of achievement in their minds by treating it as "eh, you've tried".