There are no two words in the English language more harmful than 'good job'

If you haven't seen Whiplash yet, you should. It's a movie about jazz drumming like Jaws is a movie about fishing. Something about this movie really speaks to me, and the titular line of this blog post lives in my head rent-free.

Both main characters in this film are flawed. Andrew, the student, is a bit arrogant and dismissive, but also very sympathetic. He is a talented jazz drummer who aspired to become 'one of the greats'. As the viewer, you feel allied with him against Fletcher, the other main character. A music teacher who would be fired by every HR department on the planet, he wants to drag someone so far beyond their breaking point that they become extraordinary. He does this through cruel means - humiliation, manipulation, and abuse - but he believes that this is the only way that greatness is born.

And in a slightly uncomfortable, fucked up, perverse way, I crave this so badly. I want to be yelled at into greatness. I want someone to tell me that I'm not good enough until I reach true greatness. Hurt me and tear me down until I underflow to the apex of my skill. Let me burn, and I will help pour the gasoline. I don't think it's about the abuse itself, really, but rather the craving is secretly just for the state of being recognised as having the potential to be great, and being pushed into getting there. Acknowledgement that there is something within me that is worth pushing to the limit, that I am not spent. That there are unreached peaks still to come for me. I need it. All the berating and the blood on the cymbals is symbolic of the path to get there. A physical sign of the grind, the effort, the proof that I was worth it. That this status quo isn't terminal, and I am not destined to marinate in mediocrity for the rest of my life. It doesn't even have to be greatness on a world scale. It can be greatness in one or two circles I spend my time in.

Why do I crave that? Is it the security that I have a place in society, reserved for me by my ability? Or perhaps I paradoxically want that 'good job' I revile, but only when I truly believe I have earned it? Some kind of messed up pairing of imposter syndrome and a god complex, battling each other until I know for sure that I have peaked. And why is it that some things hold this revered status as one of my private battlegrounds, while others are happily surrendered when the craving never manifests itself? Coding is an example of the former. I so desperately want to be good. I want to be perceived as someone who is competent, who others point at and go "wizard". I spend every day around these people, and want to walk amongst them, but I'm not convinced I have that power in me. Maybe I am destined to be a mediocre programmer, and the desire for something to make me great is just a manifestation of a hope that thinly veils the prospect of a lifetime of inadequacy, ready to flood me the moment the veil tears.

I wonder if part of the reason why Fletcher's philosophy speaks to me so much is that I was raised in an environment where effort meant fuck all. You delivered results or you didn't. "Good try" didn't exist. Nobody cared how hard you worked, only that you succeeded. So I understand Fletcher's disgust at empty praise. Maybe not at a surface, moral level, but certainly at a deeper, fully ingrained in the soul level. Excellence was the only language worth speaking, after all. And I think given this environment, I did pretty well for myself, in a very mediocre sense of the word. I do wonder: what if I had a Fletcher in my life? Would I have been pushed past that, or would I have quit as I fear I might have? As I did anyway when the lack of any acknowledgement that I was really fucking trying did get to me? Maybe deep down I know that I would never survive a Fletcher. The unconditional willingness, discipline, relentless drive, and ability to burn everything else away for this one thing. Maybe I'd just break. But this really scares me, because it feels like a damning admission that I am not good enough, so I keep craving it.

What if it doesn't work out and this one passion you've been relentlessly burning yourself to pursue catches fire itself and turns to ashes? The level of dedication Andrew needed to drumming meant that without it, he was a husk. He burnt too much of himself to have anything left beyond it. And yet the moment an opportunity to drum again arose, he leapt to it, starved for his passion. It might be a testament to how much he genuinely loves drumming, or it could be a sad testimony that when you let everything else in your life wither and die, there's just this one thing you have left, whether you like it or not.

Where Whiplash hits harder than many movies about greatness is that it doesn't let you look away from the cost. We glorify greatness culturally - the genius, the virtuoso, the visionary. "Never settle". "No pain no gain". But we ever-so-conveniently slap on the blinders when the time comes to look at what it really takes to get there. The burnout, the broken relationships, and the people who never make it and can't recover when greatness never arrives. An invisible graveyard of people who believe in Fletcher's seductive lie that the ends justify the means. You could spend your entire childhood and prime years grinding to be an Olympic athlete, putting your mind and body through hell, only to narrowly miss out on a spot. Your prematurely aged joints and pangs of long-recovered injuries will be there whether you make it or not. Whispering to you that maybe you never had it.

The final scene of Whiplash is the most complicated of all. Andrew smiles as he shreds on the drums; the cymbals illumated in red as symbols of bloodied hands gone by. It's a real smile. Joyful, perhaps. Is it triumph? Is he finally free? Has he claimed greatness on his own terms? Or has Fletcher finally won, moulding him into the creature which he sought to create all along, even if he destroyed Andrew in the process? We don't really know. I'd like to believe that Andrew is free and saying "fuck you" to Fletcher by being brilliant anyway. But then I'd also like to believe that I'm a good programmer deep down. Part of me suspects that if I were Andrew, my own "fuck you" would be to never pick up the sticks again. To let the fire die. And isn’t that a sad indictment of myself?

Something doesn't add up here. Why do I want to say "fuck you" to Fletcher? I crave a Fletcher, remember? Someone who sees it in me so clearly that they break me to release it. And yet the movie also spurs on some very human instincts that we all have: the part of us that values dignity, freedom, and self-preservation, which are against every molecule of Fletcher's being. Are these holding me back? Do I need to burn them too? Am I weak enough to dare to crave greatness without the cruelty that's needed to release it? Do we need this cruelty, or have I been peddled a lie all my life, echoed by a man with a baton and a grudge? Maybe it's easier to believe that we need cruelty to get to greatness, because it explains why so few of us ever achieve it.

Here's a crazy idea. What if "good job" can feed the fire instead of stamping it out? Rather than inciting laziness, it can be an acknowledgement that the grind is working, and one is heading in the right direction. After all, the lack of "good job"s growing up didn't make me great. Maybe it just meant I never learned to keep going when something didn’t immediately click. It's a really nice thought, that actually despite what the weird YouTube grindset bros say, it still counts if you aren't bleeding for it. But complacency is the death of greatness. Someone tells me I am doing a good job and then I blink and it's been ten years and I am still "pretty good" and nothing more, basically nothing at all. Chilling.

I want to burn for something so bad. So bad. But there is no fuel. No spark.

I fear the cold.