IMHO, Telling someone "You Suck" is no way to generate pragmatic receptivity to critique.
I appreciate the point -that you should always consider your band as having room to improve. And I appreciate the shock value of saying "we suck" in order to pop people out of any delusional thinking patterns...but this strikes me as potentially unskillful communication.
I personally prefer to temper my speech with some tact, lest the point get lost in someone's defensiveness. When it comes to critique, I strive to be thick skinned when receiving, but mindful when giving.
See my reply above. Tact is for when you are talking to someone who you need something from. Like I said above, if you can't take it hard, blunt and true in this biz, you may as well not be in it.
I'm quite skilled at the queen's English and can be the consummate speaker and politician. However, especially with the new generation of kiddies out there, they have been coddled and protected so much that anything you say is either "too harsh" or "must not effect their self-esteem." You aren't born with self esteem. You gain and learn it through your successes after failure.
While I do appreciate your point and in many cases it is probably wiser, for this forum I'm not going to sugar coat it. The quicker we learn that we really do suck, and I mean understand that to its core, the quicker we will become better all around. We will be better players, as we will always seek to improve. We will be better band mates, as we will always seek to be a force to improve the band and be mindful that we are not any better then the guitard or drummer. We will become better people, because when we truly admit our flaws to ourselves we can be more compassionate, understanding and helpful to our fellow man.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is particularly driven by this prevailing attitude of "we all win, we are all great!" Hey, I think many of these super greedy, heartless bastards who want $200M instead of $199M for themselves are d-bags. However, the ones who think they shouldn't get all the money need to look at themselves and truly understand that you are where you have personally chosen to be. Did you go to college to get a degree in the anthropology of gamers? If you did, you chose that for a number of reasons, one of which is probably because you felt chemistry and physics were too hard and you didn't want to do anything hard. So when you graduated, well, you didn't think about the fact that no one hires a lot of guys with that degree, and if they do, normally don't pay much.
I lecture at a university near me a couple of times a year. While I haven't used the suck word, I have used the words stupid, lazy, entitled a lot. My lecture is in the reality of the working world and how your degree choice effects that. I am asked back every year, and I literally beat these kids into submission. I got a Christmas card the other day from a kid who had my lecture three years ago. She thanked me for my candid discussion, and then proceeded to tell me how she changed her major, much to her parent's dismay at the time.
She is now working full time as a chemist for a pharmaceutical company, making in the high 5 figures in only two years. Her previous major was art history. The cool thing is that she now realizes that she has plenty of money and ability to go to every museum when she wants, and also buy some art she loves. She ended the story in the card by telling me some of her friends who also took the lecture were up on OWS crying about how they don't have a good job.
I know, long.
Suffice it to say, for success in this biz, you have to understand you SUCK! That way, nothing can get under your skin or deter you from your goal.
