Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

He is obviously not suggesting that and it's frankly gross to pull that move.

If people can be — and routinely are — kept from doing great things despite having exceptional abilities, "the truly capable can succeed anyway" cannot hold. What makes you confident that you know the point on the spectrum of disenfranchisement where success can just be assumed?

You still haven't clarified what specific discouragement mechanisms you're talking about, so it's difficult to fully engage with the argument, but I suspect that you are considerably underestimating how much discouraging messaging many bright people are fighting from the get-go.

Blanket you-can-do-it motivational poster talk isn't helpful, either, and that's not what I'm advocating. What I'm advocating is that when someone in one's circle announces some difficult thing they want to do, the default response be to try to figure out how to help enable them.

If you believe this person is incapable of doing what they want to do, that's fine, but unless you have field-specific knowledge that grants you specific concerns to (gently) raise, suggesting or connecting them with someone who does is far better than "knocking them down a peg."