Participation Trophy Quotes

I used to fake orgasms to give them a boost of confidence, like a participation trophy. The older I get the less patience I have. You either play to win or get the fuck off my field.

What the hell’s wrong with this generation?” ​“Participation trophies,” Mercy said. “And Adderall.

Participation trophies are junk. If all you have to do is show up, how worthless are they? Unless you’re invisible and deaf, and then one of those trophies would be meaningful, because simply showing up is exactly what is hard for you to do.

Today's world is flooded with participation trophies. In an attempt to promote equality we have robbed our youth of the most growth-inducing aspect of competition, failing. If you want to be resurrected, you have to first be crucified. Everybody wants to be reborn, but no one is willing to die. Losing, in the context of whatever arena it may be, is a microcosmic death. When we learn from our failures and grow because of them, we are reborn.

The health sector continuously get’s pummeled by malicious actors and hackers because their cyber-kinetic security is being managed by “Participation Trophy” winning wimps!

Everybody gets a participation trophy when equality of outcome replaces equality of opportunity.

Bricks could be used like trophies. And if we give them to everyone, just for participating, then collectively we could build a big House of Emptiness.


That’s what happens with Millennials. They’re so used to getting participation ribbons and trophies for losing, they think everything is owed to them. They’re ungrateful.

we are the generation you gave participant trophies to.   we are the generation you made wear helmets, elbow pads, & kneepads.   we are the generation you gave censored CDs & PG movies to.   we are the generation you spent years overprotecting then threw to the wolves.   now we are the generation running on nothing but coffee & three hours of sleep.   we are the generation working minimum-wage jobs with college degrees.   we are the generation making just enough money to survive.   we are the generation you didn’t want to see fail then ensured that we did.   - millennials.

They suspected that children learned best through undirected free play—and that a child’s psyche was sensitive and fragile. During the 1980s and 1990s, American parents and teachers had been bombarded by claims that children’s self-esteem needed to be protected from competition (and reality) in order for them to succeed. Despite a lack of evidence, the self-esteem movement took hold in the United States in a way that it did not in most of the world. So, it was understandable that PTA parents focused their energies on the nonacademic side of their children’s school. They dutifully sold cupcakes at the bake sales and helped coach the soccer teams. They doled out praise and trophies at a rate unmatched in other countries. They were their kids’ boosters, their number-one fans. These were the parents that Kim’s principal in Oklahoma praised as highly involved. And PTA parents certainly contributed to the school’s culture, budget, and sense of community. However, there was not much evidence that PTA parents helped their children become critical thinkers. In most of the countries where parents took the PISA survey, parents who participated in a PTA had teenagers who performed worse in reading. Korean parenting, by contrast, were coaches. Coach parents cared deeply about their children, too. Yet they spent less time attending school events and more time training their children at home: reading to them, quizzing them on their multiplication tables while they were cooking dinner, and pushing them to try harder. They saw education as one of their jobs.

They were raised as part of a “trophy generation,” recognized for the act of participation rather than the level of performance, getting medals and lavish praise just for completing the race. The parenting philosophy that governed their early years—build self-esteem above all—conspires to deliver the same artificial feedback loops as most social networks: persuading the individual that the ordinary moments of their lives are actually of extraordinary value. Those who enter the workplace with this mindset often find that reality bites hard. And so do their bosses.

In life we have our trophy people. These are the ones we work hard for, we are proud of. We want to show them off to our family, our friends, we want them on our arm at company functions. We take pictures with them to let everyone know we feel like a winner and we are happy. Then you have your participation ribbons, the ribbons you get just for simply showing up. You didn't have to earn it, it was just given to you. These things usually end up in a drawer somewhere, maybe you pick them up again when you are bored and say "that was a fun night, I wonder if they are still handing out these things?" but you don't tell people about it, nothing to be proud of.

Poor child. Listen closely: Parent is no longer a noun—those days are done. Parent is now a verb, something you do ceaselessly. Think of the verb parent as synonymous with protect, shield, hover, deflect, fix, plan, and obsess. Parenting will require all of you; please parent with your mind, body, and soul. Parenting is your new religion, within which you will find salvation. This child is your savior. Convert or be damned. We will wait while you cancel all other life endeavors. Thank you. Now the goal of parenting is: Never allow anything difficult to happen to your child. To that end, she must win every competition she enters. (Here are your four hundred participation trophies, distribute accordingly.) She must feel that everyone likes and loves her and wants to be with her at all times. She must be constantly entertained and amused; every one of her days on Earth must be like Disneyland, but better. (If you go to actual Disneyland, get a fast pass because she should never be forced to wait. For anything, ever.) If other kids don’t want to play with her, call those kids’ parents, find out why, and insist they fix it. In public, walk in front of your child and shield her from any unhappy faces that might make her sad, and any happy faces that might make her feel left out. When she gets into trouble at school, call her teacher and explain loudly that your child does not make mistakes. Insist that the teacher apologize for her mistake. Do not ever, ever let a drop of rain fall upon your child’s fragile head. Raise this human without ever allowing her to feel a single uncomfortable human emotion. Give her a life without allowing life to happen to her. In short: Your life is over, and your new existence is about ensuring that her life never begins. Godspeed.

I suppose you want me to give certificates to all the contestants? Little plastic trophies to every single athlete or soldier for participation? Should we all line up and shake hands and tell each other, Good game? No!

I’m not here to hand them a diploma for showing up. This is an institution of higher education. Knowledge is something you work for. I don’t hand out trophies for participation

Goals are eschewed by our culture. There is a chance for failure! We hide failure and never want anyone to feel the pain or shame of failing. All of life is designed for comfort and avoidance of displeasure. This starts at birth. This is why some children's sports leagues do not keep score. Many people rail against the idea of participation trophies, yet they never think who the trophy is for. Is that trophy for the kid who knows he did not place or knows that he was last, or is it for the parent who does not want to think his or her child is bad at anything? This is society-wide and starts young. This only creates situations where entities cannot handle adversity and the first real brush with failure destroys a soul.

Fuck participation trophies, we go for the win.

To that end, she must win every competition she enters. (Here are your four hundred participation trophies, distribute accordingly.) She must feel that everyone likes and loves her and wants to be with her at all times. She must be constantly entertained and amused; every one of her days on Earth must be like Disneyland, but better. (If you go to actual Disneyland, get a fast pass because she should never be forced to wait. For anything, ever.) If other kids don’t want to play with her, call those kids’ parents, find out why, and insist they fix it. In public, walk in front of your child and shield her from any unhappy faces that might make her sad, and any happy faces that might make her feel left out. When she gets into trouble at school, call her teacher and explain loudly that your child does not make mistakes. Insist that the teacher apologize for her mistake. Do not ever, ever let a drop of rain fall upon your child’s fragile head. Raise this human without ever allowing her to feel a single uncomfortable human emotion. Give her a life without allowing life to happen to her. In short: Your life is over, and your new existence is about ensuring that her life never begins. Godspeed. We got a terrible memo. Our terrible memo is why we feel exhausted, neurotic, and guilty. Our terrible memo is also why our kids suck. They do, they just suck. Because people who do not suck are people who have failed, dusted themselves off, and tried again. People who do not suck are people who have been hurt, so they have empathy for others who are hurt. People who do not suck are those who have learned from their own mistakes by dealing with the consequences. People who do not suck are people who have learned how to win with humility and how to lose with dignity. Our memo has led us to steal from our children the one thing that will allow them to become strong people: struggle.

Pain was nothing to them. It’s everything to most people, who shy away when it crops up in their lives. But both he and King had made a career out of going directly toward the pain, toward the suffering, in hopes of a better result when it came time to perform. It was eerily similar to what elite athletes go through before competition, only with more dire physical consequences. If they didn’t perform in the field, they didn’t get a participation trophy. They died. That translated to a sickening work ethic, and a pain tolerance practically unrivalled anywhere else on the planet. It meant that when one of them badly sprained their ankle, they taped it back up and kept soldiering on, no matter what it did to them mentally. Because all pain comes to an end. It can’t last forever.

And he repaired the Bifröst,” Dean said from behind me, sounding proud. Like stern-father proud, not parks and rec participation trophy proud. It was a reserved pride rather than the overexuberant cheerleader.

After surviving two Hell Weeks and participating in three, I was a native speaker. Hell Week was home. It was the fairest place I’ve ever been in this world. There were no timed evolutions. There was nothing graded, and there were no trophies. It was an all-out war of me against me, and that’s exactly where I found myself again when I was reduced to my absolute lowest on Hospitality Point.

in crime, abuse, and divorce. We were raised “prespecialness,” which meant not only no participation trophies but also that we were shielded far less than children today from the uglier sides of life.

Not being shot by the police, having access to education, employment, healthcare, childcare, abortion, the ability to protest, journalism, marrying who you wish, housing, these aren’t participation trophies. They are basic human rights.

Let’s think more about the goal of building internal drive in our students, which is part of our fourth goal. You may know that there has been a recent backlash against the practice of rewarding children for every good turn, and for the now-pervasive practice of giving every child a participation trophy. Motivation researchers have long found that offering rewards for a job well done (or just a job done at all) often has the ironic effect of decreasing students’ internal motivation to perform that job (Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 2001). This is similar to what happens to professional athletes when they start making money to play, and they find that the passion and drive for the game that they felt in high school and college begin to melt away. When an individual gets rewarded for an action, that individual starts focusing more on the reward than on the natural pleasure that the action may bring them. Remove the reward, and they are actually less likely to perform the action than they would have been if they’d never been rewarded at all. In contrast, research (Ryan & Deci, 2000) has also found that there are three factors that foster sustained internal drive in us humans: competence (“I can do this”); autonomy (“I have control over what happens here”); and relatedness (“I am connected to people around me”). Plan A is not a particularly good recipe for fostering these factors, especially when Plan A comes in the form of sticker charts, points, and other systems of rewards and consequences that attempt to manipulate a student’s behavior through mechanisms of power and control—the opposite of building a sense of autonomy. Plan C doesn’t do a good job of this either, because while reducing expectations has advantages such as helping avoid challenging behavior, it does not leave the student with a sense of accomplishment and thus competence. We think you will come to find that Plan B provides a great recipe to foster internal drive, by helping students learn the skills (competence) to solve problems independently (autonomy) through an empathic interpersonal process (relatedness).

As an employer, the participation trophy generation drives me a little bananas.

we are the generation you gave participant trophies to. we are the generation you made wear helmets, elbow pads, & kneepads. we are the generation you gave censored CDs & PG movies to. we are the generation you spent years overprotecting then threw to the wolves. now we are the generation running on nothing but coffee & three hours of sleep. we are the generation working minimum-wage jobs with college degrees. we are the generation making just enough

Unfortunately, because everyone gets participation trophies now, trophies don’t mean anything any more. Spoils used to go to the victor. Now they go to everyone. Which causes two problems. First, it teaches the loser that there’s no reason to work harder to win because losing is just as good as winning. Second, it teaches the victor “screw it, why try?” because there’s no benefit to winning.

All the women, white or black or brown, who woke up like this, who came before me in this town. Think of them. Heads up, eyes on the target. Running. Full speed. Gravity be damned. Toward that thick layer of glass that is the ceiling. Running, full speed, and crashing. Crashing into that ceiling and falling back. Crashing into it and falling back. Into it and falling back. Woman after woman. Each one running and each one crashing. And everyone falling. How many women had to hit that glass before the first crack appeared? How many cuts did they get, how many bruises? How hard did they have to hit the ceiling? How many women had to hit that glass to ripple it, to send out a thousand hairline fractures? How many women had to hit that glass before the pressure of their effort caused it to evolve from a thick pane of glass into just a thin sheet of splintered ice? So that when it was my turn to run, it didn’t even look like a ceiling anymore. I mean, the wind was already whistling through—I could always feel it on my face. And there were all these holes giving me a perfect view to the other side. I didn’t even notice the gravity, I think it had already worn itself away. So I didn’t have to fight as hard. I had time to study the cracks. I had time to decide where the air felt the rarest, where the wind was the coolest, where the view was the most soaring. I picked my spot in the glass and I called it my target. And I ran. And when I finally hit that ceiling, it just exploded into dust. Like that. My sisters who went before me had already handled it. No cuts. No bruises. No bleeding. Making it through the glass ceiling to the other side was simply a matter of running on a path created by every other woman’s footprints. I just hit at exactly the right time in exactly the right spot. So I’m breaking my family’s rule today. This is a trophy for participation. And I am beyond honored and proud to receive it. Because this? Was a group effort. Thank you to all the women in this room. Thank you to all the women who never made it into this room. And thank you to all the women who will hopefully fill a room one hundred times this size when we are all gone. You are all an inspiration.

Activity pouch on airplanes Buttons and pins Crayons and coloring place mats from restaurants Disposable sample cup from the grocery store Erasers and pencils with eraser tops Fireman hat from a visit to the fire station Goodie bags from county fairs and festivals Hair comb from picture day at school Infant goods from the maternity ward Junior ranger badge from the ranger station and Smokey the Bear Kids’ meal toys Lollipops and candy from various locations, such as the bank Medals and trophies for simply participating in (versus winning) a sporting activity Noisemakers to celebrate New Year’s Eve OTC samples from the doctor’s office Party favors and balloons from birthday parties Queen’s Jubilee freebies (for overseas travelers) Reusable plastic “souvenir” cup and straw from a diner Stickers from the doctor’s office Toothbrushes and floss from the dentist’s office United States flags on national holidays Viewing glasses for a 3-D movie (why not keep one pair and reuse them instead?) Water bottles at sporting events XYZ, etc.: The big foam hand at a football or baseball game or Band-Aids after a vaccination or various newspapers, prospectuses, and booklets from school, museums, national parks . . .

I was greenly jealous of my peers’ moms with their bleach-blonde hair, tanning-bed arms, toothpick waists, and closets full of brand-new clothes: blouses and skirts and pants and designer jeans that some of the mothers let their daughters borrow. I didn’t know whether Mom’s lack of interest in all things fashionable came from being an immigrant from Scotland—where the media-saturated and commodity-rich beauty industry didn’t take over until the end of the twentieth century—or because she was a reader, a writer, and a teacher: mind over matter. All I knew was that, while she would buy me any book I asked for or take me to any play I might want to see, she couldn’t explain how to contour eye shadow or tell me whether my sweater complemented my complexion. She didn’t diet, she didn’t read women’s magazines, and she refused to buy me the enormous gold earrings or the pair of spiky red shoes I coveted, stilettos sharp enough to skewer fi sh. And even though her disinterest meant I didn’t have to participate in a daily beauty competition—one with a trophy mom sacrifi cing her body on the altar of loveliness—I also didn’t have a beauty mentor that I could trust. So I was left to try to copy the popular girls at school, tv and movie icons, or the breathtaking stars in magazines. Even the curling iron was a purchase I had to negotiate on my own.