Opinion

Taylor Swift and Malala Yousafzai are great role models. They've also set an impossible standard for success.

Taylor Swift is on the cover of TIME magazine this week as the new queen of the music industry. She’s been in the business for more than 11 years, but at 24, she’d still have trouble renting a car.

It should be inspiring for young people to see someone so young achieve such phenomenal success. “Other women who are killing it should motivate you, thrill you, challenge you and inspire you rather than threaten you and make you feel like you’re immediately being compared to them,” she told my colleague Jack Dickey. “The only thing I compare myself to is me, two years ago, or me one year ago.”

But despite her best efforts to set a positive example, Swift also represents a generation of super-youth to which normal young people are inevitably compared. “You see someone so young, your age or even younger, being so wildly successful, and you can think ‘they just have it, they have something I don’t have,’” says Dr. Carol Dweck, a professor of Psychology at Stanford University and author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. “You think, ‘I’m so young and already I’m doomed.’”

Forget Forbes’s 30-under-30 list: when it comes to “freshness,” 30 is the new 40. At her age, Taylor Swift isn’t even considered precociously successful– she’s just regular successful. In fact, it’s been a banner year for wunderkind, and not just in entertainment (which has always been fixated on the young and beautiful.) 18-year old Saira Blair just became the youngest American lawmaker when she was elected to the West Virginia Legislature. 18-year old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson took up a second career—as a Broadway star—as her magazine Rookie rakes in 3.5 million hits a month. 17-year old Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize.

As most millennials are moving sluggishly through their twenties, the hyper-visible hotshots are getting younger and younger, whittling away at the maximum age limit at which someone can get their “big break.”

For every young cultural force like Lena Dunham or genius app-creator like Evan Spiegel, there are thousands of other twenty-somethings sitting in their parents’ basements wondering why they haven’t invented an app or started a fashion line. According to a Pew survey, young people today have more debt and less income than their parents and grandparents did at their age, which means we’re the least financially stable generation in recent memory. We’re are making life decisions later than ever, delaying marriage and babies longer than previous generations did (partly because of the cash flow problems), and taking much longer to settle into a career. Yet, thanks to platforms like Youtube and Kickstarter that remove the traditional gatekeepers, there’s a pervasive expectation that young people should be achieving more, faster, younger.

“There’s a lot of attention paid to people who have success very young, like Taylor Swift and Mark Zuckerberg, but the average young person is not coming into their career until later these days,” says Dr. Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me. “Across the board, what you can see is much higher expectations among millennials compared to Boomers and Gen Xers, but a reality which is if anything more difficult than it was for those previous generations when they were young.”

Middle-aged sourpusses have long complained about America’s cultural fixation on youth and to be fair, the Beatles weren’t much older than Taylor Swift. Bill Maher even devoted a whole segment of last Friday’s “Real Time” to ageism, calling it “the last acceptable prejudice in America.” But today, the world is dominated by tech, and tech is dominated by young people. “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a speech to a Y Combinator startup at Stanford in 2007. “Younger people are just smarter.”

But even for those of us who happen to be young, a youth-obsessed culture is a pretty raw deal. Because the perception that young people are “smarter” implies they should be getting successful more quickly, and often, they’re not. “In the internet age, the idea that fame is just out of reach has become more common,” says Dr. Twenge, noting that technological advances like YouTube helped launch careers of stars like Justin Bieber. “I think there’s an impression that it’s easier to become famous now, or easier to be discovered… There’s a perception that it’s easier, but that may not be entirely true.”

That expectation that it’s easy to get rich and famous may also contribute to some of the negative stereotypes about millennials, especially the reputation for laziness or entitlement. In other words, next to Lorde, the rest of us look like schlubs.

“I don’t think they’re comparing themselves to those wunderkind necessarily, but maybe their elders are, who are so critical of them,” says Dr. Jeffrey Arnett, who coined the phrase “emerging adult” and says he’s found little evidence to support the claim that millennials are lazy. “I wonder if that’s partly related to the fact that you have these amazingly successful young people, and people are saying ‘well, if Mark Zuckerberg can do this, why can’t you?’”

Of course, none of these comparisons are Taylor Swift’s fault, and she does everything in her power to nix that competitive instinct, especially among other women. But the fact that young superstars seem to have been born fully formed implies that growth and learning aren’t part of the recipe for success. “It not only tells them they don’t have time to grow, it saps them of the motivation to grow,” Dr. Dweck says.

Even Taylor recognizes that her darling days are numbered. “I just struggle to find a woman in music who hasn’t been completely picked apart by the media, or scrutinized and criticized for aging, or criticized for fighting aging,” she said. “It just seems to be much more difficult to be a woman in music and to grow older.”

When politicians proclaim that “young people are the future,” they mean we’ll inherit mountains debt and a destroyed environment. But when young people think about our own futures, we should look at the way middle-aged and older people are treated—because like it or not, that’s going to be us one day. If young people were really so smart, we wouldn’t forget that.

Kim Kardashian has thrived in male-dominated businesses like television and gaming. Shouldn't she be celebrated as a successful businesswoman by us and our leatherette-wearing kids?

Kim Kardashian and daughter North West have certainly made their mark in the fashion world recently. On Monday, the reality TV star showed up to a meeting in Woodland Hills sporting a stylish Birkin Bag with a one of a kind design: the fingerpainting by daughter Nori. What else? And yes, this was obviously Kanye West’s idea.

Speaking of bold fashion moves, Kim and her sisterhood of the traveling pants (AKA Khloe and Kourtney) recently released a line of children’s clothes at Babies R Us, and it’s causing even more drama than Bruce Jenner’s mane of free-flowing hair. To put it simply, there are three types of people in this world: people who love the idea of dressing their infants in “leatherette skirts,” people who have no idea what a “leatherette skirt” is and people who fear a “leatherette skirt” will doom their innocent baby to a lifetime of sex tapes, 72 day marriages and questionable taste in floral print.

Professional Concerned Mother, Amie Logan of Roeland Park, Kansas, falls into the third category and tried to rally fellow moms in a petition to ban Kardashian Kids from Babies R Us. “I don’t want my child to grow up to be a sex tape star,” Logan’s Change.org petition initially read. “You pulled the Breaking Bad toys because they promoted drug use. You should pull this clothing line because it promotes bad behavior as well. The madness has to stop. If the toys are damaging so is the clothing.” Logan later withdrew the petition, saying that she had just wanted to start a conversation.

Considering that Babies R Us is a company that until recently felt totally comfortable selling action figures of meth dealers, it’s unlikely it will pull Kardashian Kids. (In fact, the store recently said as much to The Huffington Post.) But Logan’s concern–and that of the 2,941 moms who signed her petition–is just one more example of the shaming that’s been associated with Kim Kardashian’s name ever since she made her sex tape.

Many adults don’t see anything wrong with two people filming their consensual “love making,” but ever since Kim’s then-partner, Ray J, sold their x-rated tape to Vivid Entertainment, her public life’s been judged. For those of you who blocked out this harrowing time in early aughts pop culture, Kim filed a lawsuit against Vivid Entertainment and eventually settled for somewhere around $5 million. In other words, she turned exploit into profit, and made the first of many solid business decisions–including Kardashian Kids, which I’m guessing will do quite well considering the Kardashian reign of success.

The tabloid-reading denizens of middle America (myself included) have accepted most of Kim’s business pursuits as a natural by-product of her status as a sex star (of course she’d design lingerie–and more power to her.) But, her foray into children’s clothing crosses a line for parents like Amie Logan, who fear Kim has no place at the family dinner table—or, shall we say, changing table. “I would not choose to put my daughter in these clothes, and because the Kardashians are not people that have the family values that I uphold,” Logan’s petition now reads (having been updated since the initial post). “This whole petition, and the very negative responses I have received, has gotten larger than I ever expected when I started it last week. In the end it did get people discussing the issue…The original article seemed to leave out that this petition wasn’t a crusade, but a means to get people discussing who should be raising their children, and what things retailers have the right to sell.”

While I don’t want Kim Kardashian raising my children (though I would take Khloe as a sassy godmother and I wouldn’t mind an Hermes Birkin bag no matter whose drawing is on the front) I’m fine having my kids grow up with Kim and her sister-friends on the sidelines of their lives. With a net worth of $28 million, Kim has been at the center of a successful reality franchise, owns a chain of boutiques with her siblings, has lent her name to multiple clothing lines and even made a tanning lotion titled Kardashian Glamour Tan. Plus, let’s not forget the highly addictive waste of time that is the game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, which could earn a predicted $200 million in 2014. In an industry that’s still dominated by men, shouldn’t Kim be celebrated as a successful businesswoman by us and our leatherette-wearing kids?

Feminism is more on trend than ever with stars like Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Miley Cyrus self-identifying with The F-Word. While there’s been some backlash against calling Kim Kardashian a feminist (Jezebel accurately points out that she represents impossible beauty standards that play into “the patriarchy”), there’s no denying that she’s a model of female success among a sea of male entrepreneurs. So, what exactly is the problem with our kids growing up with her name plastered on their clothing?

No child will be fated to a life of sex tapes and loose morals simply by wearing Kardashian Kids at the tender age of two. And, to be honest, most of the clothes look like something you’d find at Baby Gap (only designed by whoever makes Kanye West’s pants). Toddlers would probably go through life blissfully ignorant of their leatherette skirt’s sinister plans if it weren’t for their parents teaching them that there’s something innately wrong with clothing designed by a former sex tape star.

There’s no denying that Kim Kardashian’s empire rests on a foundation of overt sexuality, but let’s admire the fact that she successfully built said empire on her own. Sure, some of Kim’s endorsements are less than inspired (Charmin Toilet Paper, for one), but she did what she had to do to succeed, and her business decisions are only getting more daring –– especially now that she’s a mom to burgeoning fashion icon North West. Just look at Kardashian Kids: instead of a bright pink palette, the line gives off a progressive, cutting-edge vibe with gender-neutral tones and the implied message that girls don’t have to be overtly “girly” to be feminine.

Kim once mused, “I have so much going on in my life. I never wanted anyone to think of me as Kim Kardashian, sex tape star.” There’s no doubt that it’s hard to shake this notion, but fans and haters alike should learn to look past Kim’s tape and start applauding her for being both a successful momtrepreneur and a potential business role model for our children. No, I don’t want my daughter building an empire based on her looks, but I do want her building an empire as successful as Kim Kardashian’s.

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Girls have quietly repurposed the photo-sharing app into a barometer for popularity, friendship status and self-worth. Here's how they're using it.

Secrecy is hardly new on Planet Girl: as many an eye-rolling boy will tell you, girls excel at eluding the prying questions of grown ups. And who can blame them? From an early age, young women learn that to be a “good girl” they must be nice, avoid conflict and make friends with everyone. It’s an impossible ask (and one I’ve studied for over a decade) – so girls respond by taking their true feelings underground.

Enter the Internet, and Instagram: a platform where emotions can run wild – and where insecurities run wilder. The photo-sharing app is social media’s current queen bee: In a survey released earlier this month, three quarters of teens said they were using Instagram as their go-to app.

Instagram lets users share their photos, and “like” and comment on their friends’. The competition for “likes” encourages creativity in young users, who can use filters and other devices to spruce up their images. And its simplicity – it’s just pictures, right? — comforts parents haunted by the cyberbullying they hear about on Facebook and Twitter.

But Instagram’s simplicity is also deceiving: look more closely, and you find the Rosetta Stone of girl angst: a way for tweens and teens to find out what their peers really think of them (Was that comment about my dress a joke or did she mean it?), who likes you (Why wasn’t I included in that picture?), even how many people like them (if you post and get too few likes, you might feel “Instashame,” as one young woman calls it). They can obsess over their friendships, monitoring social ups and downs in extreme detail. They can strategically post at high traffic hours when they know peers are killing time between homework assignments. “Likes,” after all, feel like a public, tangible, reassuring statement of a girl’s social status.

That’s not what the app creators intended, of course, but it does make psychological sense: as they become preteens, research shows that girls’ confidence takes a nosedive. Instagram, then, is a new way for girls to chase the feeling of being liked that eludes so many of them. Instagram becomes an popularity meter and teens learn to manipulate the levers of success.

Here are a few of the ways that girls are leveraging Instagram to do much more than just share photos:

To Know What Friends Really Think Of Them

In the spot where adults tag a photo’s location, girls will barter “likes” in exchange for other things peers desperately want: a “TBH” (or “to be honest”). Translation? If you like a girl’s photo, she’ll leave you a TBH comment. For example: “TBH, ILYSM,” meaning, “To be honest I love you so much.” Or, the more ambivalent: “TBH, We don’t hang out that much.

To Measure How Much a Friend Likes You

In this case, a girl may trade a “like” — meaning, a friend will like her photo — in exchange for another tidbit of honesty: a 1-10 rating, of how much she likes you, your best physical feature, and a numerical scale that answers the question of “are we friends?” and many others. Girls hope for a “BMS,” or break my scale, the ultimate show of affection.

As a Public Barometer of Popularity

Instagram lets you tag your friends to announce that you’ve posted a new photo of them. Girls do the app one better: they take photos of scenes where no person is present – say, a sunset — but still tag people they love and add gushing comments. It’s a kind of social media mating call for BFFs. But girls also do it because the number of tags you get is a public sign of your popularity. “How many photos you’re tagged in is important,” says Charlotte, 12. “No one can see the actual number but you can sort of just tell because you keep seeing their name pop up.”

To Show BFF PDA

That broken heart necklace you gave your bestie? It’s gone the way of dial up. Now, girls use Instagram biographies – a few lines at the top of their page — to trumpet their inner circle. It’s a thrill to be featured on the banner that any visitor to the page will see — but not unusual to get deleted after a fight or bad day, in plain, humiliating sight of all your friends.

A Way to Retaliate

Angry at someone? Don’t tag the girl who is obviously in a picture, crop her out of it entirely, refuse to follow back the one who just tried to follow you, or simply post a photo a girl is not in. These are cryptic messages adults miss but which girls hear loud and clear. A girl may post an image of a party a friend wasn’t invited to, an intimate sleepover or night out at a concert. She never even has to mention the absent girl’s name. She knows the other girl saw it. That’s the beauty of Instagram: it’s the homework you know girls always do.

A Personal Branding Machine

Girls face increasing pressure not only to be smart and accomplished, but girly, sexy and social. In a 2011 survey, 74% of teen girls told the Girl Scout Research Institute that girls were living quasi-double lives online, where they intentionally downplayed their intelligence, kindness and good influence – and played up qualities like fun, funny and social. On Instagram, girls can project a persona they may not have time, or permission, to show off in the classroom: popular, social, sexy. Cultivating a certain look is so important that it’s common for girls to stage ‘photo shoots’ with each other as photographers to produce shots that stand out visually. (Plus a joint photo shoot is more evidence of friendship.)

A Place For Elaborate Birthday Collages

Remember coming to school on your big day, excited to see what you’d find plastered to your locker? Now girls can see who’s celebrating them hours before they get off the bus. Birthday collages on Instagram are elaborate public tributes, filled with inside jokes, short videos, and pictures of memories you may not have been a part of. “There is definitely a ‘I love you the most. I’ve loved you the longest edge to these birthday posts,” one parent told me. Collages that document the intensity or length of a relationship are a chance to celebrate a friend – or prove just how close you are to the birthday girl. Although most girls know to expect something from their closest friends, not getting one is seen as a direct diss, a parent told me. And it can be competitive: another parent told me her daughter’s friend stayed up until midnight just so she could be the first to post.

While girls may seem addicted to their online social lives, it’s not all bad — and they still prefer the company of an offline friend to any love they have to click for. (In a survey that would surely surprise some parents, 92% of teen girls said they would give up all of their social media friends if it meant keeping their best friend.) And, of course, likes aren’t everything. As 13 year-old Leah told me, “Just because people don’t write me a paragraph on Instagram doesn’t mean they don’t like me.”

Rachel Simmons is the co-founder of Girls Leadership Institute and the author of the New York Times bestselling book, “Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls” and “The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls With Courage and Confidence.” Follow her on Twitter @racheljsimmons.

Read next: 5 iPhone Apps Your Teen Doesn’t Want You to Download

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The Nobel laureate's refusal to condemn documented atrocities suggests that political calculation has trumped human rights in her thinking

Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is not happy with the pace of democratic change in Burma, officially now known as Myanmar. On Wednesday, the Nobel Peace Prize winner gave a press conference to denounce the “stalling” reform process.

“The U.S. government has been too optimistic,” she said. “What significant reform steps have been taken in the last 24 months?”

This remark comes days before U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Rangoon, and after talks to reform the nation’s much maligned constitution broke down between Suu Kyi, Burma’s powerful military generals, the current military-backed government and various ethnic leaders.

The constitution bars Suu Kyi from becoming President in next year’s elections because she was married to a British man and has two sons who are foreign citizens. It also guarantees 25% of legislative seats to military appointees. Since more than 75% of lawmakers are required to enact any constitutional change, this gives the generals a de facto parliamentary veto.

Talks aimed at amending these provisions, which were shamelessly included with the sole purpose of barring Suu Kyi from the nation’s highest office, have gone nowhere, and the 69-year-old is attempting one last throw of the dice — appealing to Obama to put pressure on current President Thein Sein, himself a former junta general.

“Democratic reform would not be successful alone with the parliament,” Suu Kyi told assembled media.

Nobody would argue against Burma’s current constitution desperately needing revision, or pretend that reforms haven’t stalled. In fact, when Obama returns to Burma next week, he will find one of his few foreign policy successes in tatters.

“The hope and the optimism we had in 2012, when the country was opening up, has all been squandered,” Aung Zaw, managing editor of the Irrawaddy magazine, tells TIME, lamenting a “backsliding reform process” akin to watching “a train wreck in slow motion.”

Even so, Suu Kyi’s condemnation is curious.

It comes after her steadfast refusal to criticize the military or the government for myriad human-rights abuses. In Burma’s west, for example, more than 100,000 Rohingya Muslims languish in squalid displacement camps, but Suu Kyi repudiates evidence-based allegations of ethnic cleansing by Human Rights Watch and instead calls the crisis an “immigration issue.”

In northernmost Kachin state, civilians face “attacks against civilian populations, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, internal displacement, land confiscation, the recruitment of child soldiers, forced labor and portering.” That’s been documented by the U.N., but Suu Kyi has refused to condemn those atrocities. Her silence is so pointed that 23 local NGOs signed an open letter of protest.

Other causes of concern, like the 10 journalists jailed this year on the flimsiest of pretenses, are brushed aside with platitudinous references to the “rule of law.” Meanwhile, Suu Kyi’s own Rule of Law Parliamentary Committee has achieved “nothing at all,” says Aung Zaw.

“We would’ve liked to have seen Aung San Suu Kyi speak on human-rights issues in a more forthright way,” says Matthew Smith, executive director of the Fortify Rights advocacy group. “She’s issued equivocal statements on serious human-rights violations, in some cases amounting to crimes against humanity.”

In fact, when a high-level delegation from Human Rights Watch came to Burma earlier this year for landmark talks, they met with senior government officials including the President but were snubbed by Suu Kyi.

And that’s not all. Suu Kyi’s baffling behavior goes beyond the area of human rights.

In April 2013, peaceful protesters blockaded a Chinese-owned copper mine near Monywa, around 450 miles north of Rangoon. The police attacked them using white phosphorous, leaving dozens with horrific burns, including traditionally sacrosanct Buddhist monks.

Suu Kyi headed the investigation commission but found that the mine must continue operations or else risk “hurting Burma,” despite the fact that it is desecrating the environment, was set up without scrutiny by the junta, and provides no jobs for local people. In unprecedented scenes, the National League for Democracy (NLD) leader was harangued by furious locals.

Suu Kyi has certainly experienced enormous personal sacrifice. Since returning to her homeland in 1988, she has spent 15 years under house arrest, not even being able to see her beloved husband Michael Aris before he died.

But this is also why her current aloofness is so painful to behold.

“The NLD under her leadership has had big question marks,” says Aung Zaw, “and they misread the whole situation.”

In August 2011, Suu Kyi met Thein Sein for the first time, formally marking her belated return to mainstream politics. The following April, she and 42 NLD colleagues were elected to parliament in a landslide amid jubilant scenes.

The common perception among analysts is that some deal was struck to allow Suu Kyi to stand for election in exchange for muting her criticism of the generals. The presumption was that reforms would take baby steps forward. But, three years on, there has been no progress, and she is partly culpable.

When Suu Kyi finally gave her Nobel acceptance speech in June 2012 — the prize having been originally bestowed in 1991 during a period of house arrest — she said that “receiving the Nobel Peace Prize means personally extending my concerns for democracy and human rights beyond national borders.”

But her present recalcitrance suggests that her own political career may be more important, even if we accept the mitigation that it is for some vague greater good.

“There is no version of pragmatism that would make silence on human-rights atrocities defensible,” says Smith. “These are some of the most serious human-rights violations that can be committed.”

Admittedly, Suu Kyi has always said she is a politician, rather than a human-rights defender. But the truth today is that she is pretty awful at both.

The debate over revelations in Dunham's memoir is not just about the propriety of a child's sexual curiosity. It’s about women who make us uncomfortable.

Executives have gotten too comfortable offering less than a no-comment—a comment of negative value—by telling us what they're feeling

The quarterly call that executives hold to discuss earnings is, short of face-to-face meetings, the best chance for investors to get a sense of a company’s financial health. Over and over again, the analysts on these calls focus their questions on pressing for metrics or hard numbers to gauge that health.

It’s one thing for executives to be bashful about sharing too much data that could help their competitors. It’s another for them to try and replace cold hard numbers with a completely useless commodity: a confessional on how a CEO or CFO is feeling in the moment.

Yet this is an unwelcome trend in tech earnings, where over and over tech leaders who are smart enough to know better keep repeating how thrilled they are, how excited, how they couldn’t be happier about all the boring little incremental developments that apparently please them to no end. It’s unwelcome because these calls aren’t support groups. Investors tune in to decide whether they should buy, sell or hold a company’s stock.

Take Google. On a recent earnings call, Citigroup analyst Mark May asked a reasonable question about Compute Engine, Google’s cloud services platform. “What sort of impact is that having on revenue or expenses and capex for the business?” “We’re really thrilled by the momentum,” Google CFO Patrick Pichette replied.

A no comment would have sufficed here. But Pichette offered less than a no-comment, a comment of negative value, a subjective emotion as answer to a mathematical question. It’s like ordering food at a restaurant and being served a picture of someone who just had a yummy meal. It neither nourishes nor satisfies.

And yet Pichette and Chief Business Officer Omid Kordestani went on to mention how thrilled they were about this or that (we’re thrilled to be a platform!) six more times during the call. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a thrill as “an intense emotion or excitement” that causes “a subtle nervous tremor.” The word comes from the English “thirl,” meaning to pierce something with a sharp instrument–to bore it, which is what Pichette and Kordestani were doing to their audience.

Nor were they the only corporate thrillseekers. “Overall, I’m thrilled with the progress we made across all of our initiatives,” Groupon CEO Eric Lefkofsky said on Thursday. But at least Groupon’s stock rose 25% on the evidence of that progress. So even if Lefkofsky wasn’t exactly atremble with joy over the company’s progress, the surge in value Friday of his Groupon shares surely enlivened his mood.

Not so for Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook’s shares fell 10% on warnings of slower growth and heavier spending. The normally low-key Zuckerberg had no thrills to report but he does get excited pretty easily–nine times in last week’s earnings call. Most people in the Bay Area get excited when the Giants win the World Series, but for Zuckerberg it’s a new ad platform, deep linking or “partnering with credit card companies.”

This is fine, in a nerdy way. But the point is, on Wall Street nobody cares about excitement levels, even with an influential executive like Zuckerberg. The numbers Facebook delivered meant everything in the selloff. The emotional state over at Hacker Way meant nothing. So why do executives even bother?

Sometimes the hyperbole defies common sense, as when Greg Blatt, chairman of IAC’s Match Group, which owns OKCupid and Tinder, explained that Tinder isn’t being monetized right now but that he “couldn’t be happier.” But wouldn’t surging revenue and profits from the popular Tinder app make him happier? Because it would probably make investors in IAC feel better.

Perhaps the king of earnings hyperbole is Apple’s Tim Cook. Which seems strange because Cook gives off this constant Zen vibe. “It’s just absolutely stunning,” Cook said about Mac sales to a group of investors who were completely not stunned. Later, Cook added, “I could not be more excited about the road ahead in fiscal 2015.”

At one point in last week’s call, Cook said he “couldn’t be happier” about Apple’s ability to supply its new iPhone lines. Then, only a few seconds later, he said he “couldn’t be happier with the way demand looks.” Which is either a direct contradiction or a crazy business koan that, once cracked, will yield immediate enlightenment.

The effect of such relentless hyperbole is that, when companies do have good news to be excited about, investors just dismiss it as more hollow rhetoric. Instead, it’s the immediate, often knee-jerk reaction to the stock price that sets the consensus on how well or poorly a company is performing financially. The thicker the happy feelings are layered on, the more they are distrusted as more corporate spin.

Of course, such grandiose language is also to be found outside of the tech industry. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz on Friday said he was “beyond thrilled” to be announcing—not blowout profits or guidance surpassing Wall Street’s hopes—but a new roastery Starbucks is opening in December.

Maybe Schultz is on to something. Taking his words “beyond thrilled” at face value could be good advice for overexcited executives in general: Hurry up and get past your declarations thrills/excitements/pleasures. Because the rest of the market is already well beyond caring about them.

And while you’re at it, more numbers would be helpful.

The founder of the Partnership for Educational Justice responds to Time’s “Rotten Apples” cover.

This is one part of a series of readers’ responses to this week’s cover.

The label and imagery of “Rotten Apples” at the front of the magazine has driven much of the debate about the article. That is a shame, because it has overshadowed the substantive reality explored in the piece.

We know the vast majority of teachers are committed, caring and conscientious. They are not rotten; they are the core of our success stories in public schools.

The real issue is covered in the body of the story itself, and in the victorious Vergara case on which the Time piece is based: tenure, dismissal and seniority laws that work to keep grossly ineffective teachers in class. The most telling anecdote came from the superintendent whose singular request to improve his schools was not more public money or supplies but “control over my workforce.”

Why? Because states with flawed teacher laws are doing the unfathomable. They are working against their own stated mission of teaching all children well. In New York, the courts have found that access to at least a sound, basic education is guaranteed by the state constitution – and yet state laws actually undermine that.

It happens because tenure is granted to teachers long before school leaders have a reasonable chance to determine if those teachers are effective. It happens because dismissal laws make it nearly impossible for schools to fire teachers deemed grossly ineffective or even dangerous. It happens because teachers are laid off based solely on their level of seniority, without regard to their quality.

That fact that it happens in a minority of cases still amounts to hundreds or thousands of children in a large district. And if it happens at all and we know about it, is that not a problem we should fix? Otherwise, what is the message sent to students who are taught by teachers who brazenly fail to lead or control their class, let alone inspire their students? Sorry kids, better luck next year?

Parents are turning to the courts as a last resort, as a matter of inspiration out of desperation. Years of legislative inaction and inertia inside school systems have offered no other choice. If elected leaders will not lead, parents are justified to question whether these laws causing such problems are even constitutional.

The Time article mentions the New York case supported by my organization, but unfortunately describes the litigation in shorthand, calling it my lawsuit. It is not. I use my platform as a former TV journalist to draw attention to the cause. But the case belongs to the families who serve as plaintiffs, and they do not do it casually. It is not easy to take on the state government and the teachers’ unions.

These parents are fighting because they want more good teachers in our schools. Turns out that, they, too, are trying to fix this. And they deserve our support.

In search of more perspectives on TIME’s cover?

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, responds here.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), Senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, responds here.

Christopher Ciampa, a teacher from Los Angeles, responds here.

Lily Eskelsen García, President of the National Education Association, responds here.

Courtney Brousseau, a high school senior from Thousand Oaks, Calif., responds here.

Billy Easton, the Executive Director of the Alliance for Quality Education, responds here.

Gary Bloom, former Santa Cruz City Schools Superintendent, responds here.

Educators from the Badass Teachers Association respond here.

Stuart Chaifetz, a New Jersey parent, responds here.

The New Jersey father of a student with special needs responds to TIME's "Rotten Apples" cover.

This is one part of a series of posts of readers’ responses to TIME’s “Rotten Apples” cover.

When I saw TIME’s cover saying it was nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher, I whispered “thank you.”

This is a very personal issue for me. My son, Akian, who has Autism, was verbally tormented by his teaching staff. I know this because I placed an audio recorder in his pocket after seeing him suffer emotional pain when he was in school. When I heard what had been done to him, my life shattered.

I released a video telling Akian’s story which has been seen nearly 5,000,000 times. I received thousands of emails from victims of teacher bullying and desperate parents seeking help because their children were suffering in school just as Akian had. I realized then how pervasive this plague of teacher bullying was and the vast array of people who have been severely damaged by it. In the end, tenure protected the teacher and she got to keep her job.

Tenure has become a weapon that is used to protect bad teachers and hurt innocent children and families. For Akian, for all those who have been abused, for all those yet to be abused, we must fight against tenure that protects cruel teachers and we must win.

In search of more discussion about TIME’s cover?

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, responds here.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), Senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, responds here.

Christopher Ciampa, a teacher from Los Angeles, responds here.

Lily Eskelsen García, President of the National Education Association, responds here.

Courtney Brousseau, a high school senior from Thousand Oaks, Calif., responds here.

Billy Easton, the Executive Director of the Alliance for Quality Education, responds here.

Gary Bloom, former Santa Cruz City Schools Superintendent, responds here.

Educators from the Badass Teachers Association respond here.