"Parents and teachers alike obsess over the negative effects of a child losing any sort of competition, ignoring the critically valuable skills of teamwork, healthy sportsmanship and, most important, learning how to lose.
“It's as if, as a society, we are embarrassed to award excellence for fear it will offend someone who is less than excellent,” said Bruce Haynes, a media partner at the bipartisan Purple Strategies consulting firm in Washington. “Rather than a drive to the top, it creates a drive to the bottom.”
In other words, if you build a better mousetrap, you might have to apologize to other mousetrap manufacturers, then to the Humane Society, for your accomplishment.
We've told our extraordinary people it's OK to be ordinary — and they've obliged us.
It would be easy to say Washington encourages this behavior. But politics usually is a mirror of the culture that exists; D.C. more often reflects reality than shapes it.
So a lot of these characteristics more reflect the culture in which politicians came up, not them driving culture in that direction."
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