"Crab mentality" is a phrase you should all be familiar with. If you're not, it describes the way crabs behave when they're placed in an open container like a bushel basket or a 5-gallon bucket. If the crabs stood on one another, they could easily raise themselves up over the side of the bucket, and, using their long spindly legs, pull themselves over the side and out to freedom.
But that's not what happens. When you put the crabs together in a container, the ones on the bottom mercilessly pinch and pull the ones above them downward, not realizing that once the crabs on top of them climbed out, they could easily turn sideways and put their legs over the basket rim and get out too. They pull each other down because the short-term feeling of "being stepped on" is a little uncomfortable, and they're too stupid to see the big picture.
As a result:
They all get eaten.
Some forms of social media seem to exist exclusively as vectors for envy. It's not enough to have something to enjoy it anymore, other people need to be bitter or bereft for it to really count. The thirst for this kind of empty affirmation is so real that people go deep into debt or set up elaborate ruses to make it look, on Instagram or Snapchat, like their three-day cruise in Nassau is still going on and people should still be jealous 5 months later (this is basically why "TBT" was invented), and making it look like they live an impossible life that others cannot afford.
The reality is pretty different:
Of course, grades and GPA don't equate to success, but the thing about lazy slackers is that their laziness and slacking doesn't tend to be relegated to one area. Their tendency to give up on stuff that's "just too hard and boring" tends to be a lifelong pattern of justifying their inadequacy. If you think AP European History is boring, wait till you spend ten hours trying to resolve some gremlin with your site's automated cart system.
As soon as you start climbing out of the slow lane, the crabs start getting restless. Increase your income by 20%, they'll start to shuffle under you. Buy a bigger house, they'll start snapping. Get on target to retire 25 years early, and they'll bite you with every ounce of strength they've got.
Over and over again, I see promising launches and products destroyed by this. As soon as someone seems to be doing well, doing what others, for lack of imagination or laziness, cannot do, the crabs start yanking them down-Negative yelp reviews over nothing, grief on Facebook and twitter, suspicion and antagonism on Reddit. As soon as the book is self-published, concern trolling, "Not a real author, not a real publishing house, this is boring, did you find a job yet?"
I can't quantify it, but you can feel the envy underneath, that even friends and family, when they do this, aren't trying to help, but to pinch and pull back into the pail. Your best friends will do this, given time. Your husband will do it. Your sister. They will try to put you back in the bucket.
There's an antidote:
In the movie, The Watchmen, The character Ozymandias only tells the people fighting against his plan what he's doing when it has already taken place and is irreversible. Not, "it would take a lot of effort to stop [but a hero could defy expectation and do it]" actually done and unstoppable.
Crab mentality works the same way. You will never, ever see the same kind of trolling for a new social media launch done by a successful company, like Cards Against Humanity. Why? Because they've already "ascended" out of the bucket, in the minds of the crabs. There is no chance to pull them back down, in their view, so they let it go. Tai Lopez is another great example. When he started... whatever the hell he does, people made parodies that unintentionally made him famous. They poured shit on every one of his YouTube videos, and drowned them in downvotes.
Today? Not so much. Now he gets interviews with Mark Cuban and people rave about his books in the comments with hundreds of likes.
There is no value in posting your income or what you bought with it on social media. Absolutely, positively none. If you need validation from strangers to feel like a success, fix that shit before you try to go fast-lane, because that's the kind of ego-driven hectoring that's going to get you dragged around the proverbial walls of Troy.
If you disclose your success at all, don't do it until it is big enough to be absolutely, 100% unstoppable. If you feel you must flaunt your success, don't let the crabs know you're on your way to the ocean until you're out of the bucket and scuttling along the dock, and out of their reach.
This is going to be controversial, but it has absolutely been helpful to me:
It's best if you do not disclose anything about your business to your acquaintances on social media at all. Promote using forums and mediums and anonymous business pages where you can pitch to total strangers exclusively.
Run one of MJ's EV charts. Most of you have between 100 and 900 FB friends. Even if 5% (very high) were interested in whatever you're selling, that's 5-45 sales. Sales made by working personal connections never have the viral "blow up" effect of word of mouth from strangers either. Your cousin knows they're buying your moisturizer because you're family and not because it offers something superior to Ponds. Only someone who bought the product for its value and not because of relationship to the seller can become a true evangelist who converts other people.
People are driven by envy and will do anything to make sure that you don't "get ahead" of them, even if there is nothing about your success that will hinder or prevent them from doing the exact same thing. Know that, believe it, and use it to your advantage: Don't tell people you're planning to leave the slow-lane bucket. Let them find out when they hear you splash back into freedom in the big, green sea.
But that's not what happens. When you put the crabs together in a container, the ones on the bottom mercilessly pinch and pull the ones above them downward, not realizing that once the crabs on top of them climbed out, they could easily turn sideways and put their legs over the basket rim and get out too. They pull each other down because the short-term feeling of "being stepped on" is a little uncomfortable, and they're too stupid to see the big picture.
As a result:
They all get eaten.
Some forms of social media seem to exist exclusively as vectors for envy. It's not enough to have something to enjoy it anymore, other people need to be bitter or bereft for it to really count. The thirst for this kind of empty affirmation is so real that people go deep into debt or set up elaborate ruses to make it look, on Instagram or Snapchat, like their three-day cruise in Nassau is still going on and people should still be jealous 5 months later (this is basically why "TBT" was invented), and making it look like they live an impossible life that others cannot afford.
The reality is pretty different:
Of course, grades and GPA don't equate to success, but the thing about lazy slackers is that their laziness and slacking doesn't tend to be relegated to one area. Their tendency to give up on stuff that's "just too hard and boring" tends to be a lifelong pattern of justifying their inadequacy. If you think AP European History is boring, wait till you spend ten hours trying to resolve some gremlin with your site's automated cart system.
As soon as you start climbing out of the slow lane, the crabs start getting restless. Increase your income by 20%, they'll start to shuffle under you. Buy a bigger house, they'll start snapping. Get on target to retire 25 years early, and they'll bite you with every ounce of strength they've got.
Over and over again, I see promising launches and products destroyed by this. As soon as someone seems to be doing well, doing what others, for lack of imagination or laziness, cannot do, the crabs start yanking them down-Negative yelp reviews over nothing, grief on Facebook and twitter, suspicion and antagonism on Reddit. As soon as the book is self-published, concern trolling, "Not a real author, not a real publishing house, this is boring, did you find a job yet?"
I can't quantify it, but you can feel the envy underneath, that even friends and family, when they do this, aren't trying to help, but to pinch and pull back into the pail. Your best friends will do this, given time. Your husband will do it. Your sister. They will try to put you back in the bucket.
There's an antidote:
In the movie, The Watchmen, The character Ozymandias only tells the people fighting against his plan what he's doing when it has already taken place and is irreversible. Not, "it would take a lot of effort to stop [but a hero could defy expectation and do it]" actually done and unstoppable.
Crab mentality works the same way. You will never, ever see the same kind of trolling for a new social media launch done by a successful company, like Cards Against Humanity. Why? Because they've already "ascended" out of the bucket, in the minds of the crabs. There is no chance to pull them back down, in their view, so they let it go. Tai Lopez is another great example. When he started... whatever the hell he does, people made parodies that unintentionally made him famous. They poured shit on every one of his YouTube videos, and drowned them in downvotes.
Today? Not so much. Now he gets interviews with Mark Cuban and people rave about his books in the comments with hundreds of likes.
There is no value in posting your income or what you bought with it on social media. Absolutely, positively none. If you need validation from strangers to feel like a success, fix that shit before you try to go fast-lane, because that's the kind of ego-driven hectoring that's going to get you dragged around the proverbial walls of Troy.
If you disclose your success at all, don't do it until it is big enough to be absolutely, 100% unstoppable. If you feel you must flaunt your success, don't let the crabs know you're on your way to the ocean until you're out of the bucket and scuttling along the dock, and out of their reach.
This is going to be controversial, but it has absolutely been helpful to me:
It's best if you do not disclose anything about your business to your acquaintances on social media at all. Promote using forums and mediums and anonymous business pages where you can pitch to total strangers exclusively.
Run one of MJ's EV charts. Most of you have between 100 and 900 FB friends. Even if 5% (very high) were interested in whatever you're selling, that's 5-45 sales. Sales made by working personal connections never have the viral "blow up" effect of word of mouth from strangers either. Your cousin knows they're buying your moisturizer because you're family and not because it offers something superior to Ponds. Only someone who bought the product for its value and not because of relationship to the seller can become a true evangelist who converts other people.
People are driven by envy and will do anything to make sure that you don't "get ahead" of them, even if there is nothing about your success that will hinder or prevent them from doing the exact same thing. Know that, believe it, and use it to your advantage: Don't tell people you're planning to leave the slow-lane bucket. Let them find out when they hear you splash back into freedom in the big, green sea.
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