There is a story I like to tell from my own experience growing up in Oregon called the “crabs in a box” story. One of our weekend activities would be to go to the Oregon coastline and go crabbing for Dungeness crabs.
There are specially designed crab traps that you bait and throw into the ocean from the docks. The traps lure the crabs through a funnel-like opening that lets them in but doesn’t let them out. Meanwhile, you just wait on the dock, usually drinking coffee to keep warm against the cold Oregon rain. After a while, you pull up the crab trap to see your catch. You carefully pick up the crabs while watching out for those big front claws and, after measuring and checking the gender of the crabs, keep the legal ones. And this is where it gets interesting. As long as you have more than one crab, you can put them in a very shallow box. I’ve seen them kept in a box that is barely five inches high. You see, even though the crabs could easily climb out and escape back to the icy cold sea, they don’t. That is because as soon as one starts to explore the route of freedom, the other crabs in the box pull it back in.
Many of our friends and advisors are like those crabs. They know where they are and it’s familiar, even if it is just a box, and they’re all in it together. They pull others back into the box because they don’t want them to leave. Part of the desire to pull the others back is because they are afraid for them. And part of the desire is that they don’t want to see the other guy succeed, because it would mean that they would have to change themselves also—it would be a challenge to their own complacency.
This is a common viewpoint in the human race. In fact, Australians have a saying about the “tall poppy.” It is practically their moral responsibility to cut a friend down to size if the person starts rising above their present circumstances. In other words, they cut down the tall poppy.
