Ep 373 | The Crab Effect and Its Impact on Your Thinking

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Today I want to talk a little bit about the crab effect and how the crab effect shows up in, in our world, within our teams, even with us personally. I'm also going to share a story from about a week ago about an experience I had at this 29029 hiking event and how it relates to the crab effect. So, let's dive into this. So, the crab effect, what is going on? You may have heard about this before. I'm going to tell you, tell you the brief story around it, right? There was once a man, there was once a man who was sitting on a fishing dock and he observed a bunch of live crabs that were, that were in a bucket. He was observing how they were behaving. They all were squirming around at the bottom, but every now and again, there would be a crab that would crawl up the side of the bucket in an effort to reach the top and escape. But every single time the crab or a crab would crawl up the side of that bucket and try to escape, And as it's made— it made its way closer to the rim of the bucket, a crab from below would reach up and would pull it back down. Then another crab would climb upward and try to make it out. And again, a crab from the bottom would tug and pull it back down. A crab placed in a bucket by itself can actually figure out a way or even easily climb out and escape. But when you place a crab with a few of its peers, this interesting phenomenon occurs. One at a time, as crabs try to escape, other crabs will pull them back down to their collective demise. In psychology, this behavior, this is known as the crab effect or the crab mentality. And really what it's showcasing here, what it's illustrating is this harmful, this selfish, maybe even this jealous mindset of some members in a group. These members try to undermine progress, try to halt progress, especially of those perhaps better performing members in the group. Sometimes it's intentional, as with— as the crabs are specifically doing here, and sometimes it's even unintentional. So, the idea of this crab effect and why we talk about it, it has a lot to do with, of course, a subject that's favorite to us here at No Days Off. The No Days Off Nation's heard it many a time. It has to do with your environment. And really, the question of, is your environment holding you back? Do you have people in your life potentially holding you back? Do you ever feel like maybe you're the crab in the bucket trying to escape, but just when you see daylight, You're pulled back down by others around you. Are you maybe a victim of this crab effect, of this crab mentality? I think we've all probably had experiences like this. And by the way, it would only be fair to say we may have at times even been the crab pulling someone back down unintentionally. I think you may know what I'm talking about in different areas of your life. Just last weekend, I had an opportunity to do another 29029 hiking event. If you've been a fan of No Days Off for a bit, you probably have heard me talk about these events. Last year around the same time, I did an episode of the lessons learned from 29029. And this past weekend up in Whistler, I had the opportunity, along with 30 or so of my peers, many of which are from the No Days Off Nation, to go do this event. What you're essentially doing, real quick, is you are hiking up Whistler again and again and again until you reach or exceed the equivalent of 29,029 feet, which is the height of Everest. So, this particular mountain, you had to go up 8 times, gondola down. So, up once, gondola down. Up 2, gondola down. Up 3, until you reach, uh, just over 29,000 feet. As a matter of fact, I think the total ended up being about 31,000, and you have 36 hours to do it. Well, I mentioned hiking with a bunch of our peers, and I had the opportunity on a handful of my hikes to go up the mountain with a friend of ours. Many of you probably know her name, Spring Benson, out of Utah. And I'll tell you, Spring is probably one of the most determined, successful, driven people I know. She's got an amazing mentality. She's gritty as all hell. She perseveres, and that makes for an amazing hiking partner. Not to mention, she's faster than me too, to top it off. And so Spring and I were hiking a little bit together, and Spring's plan was to go 6 total ascents. And after she had done it 6 times, you know, by the time we did our 6th, it was about midnight or so. She was going to go to sleep for a little while, wake up the next day and finish the next couple because she was so ahead. She had plenty of time to do this and still make the cutoff by, by a tremendous amount. My plan, however, was to go straight through to 8. We just had a different plan. Nobody's right, nobody's wrong. My plan was just to go through With 8, that was the experience I wanted. Well, Spring and I are hiking up on number 6, and mind you, it's dark, it's cold, it's raining, it's freaking hard, but we're having a good time. We're having a good time. And as we're hiking up, I'm telling Spring, who again had a plan just to do 6 before she took a break, I'm trying to egg her on like, come do 7 with me, come do hike 7 with me. And by the time we get to the top, mind you, we just climbed 4,000 feet and it's probably 15 degrees cooler and we're soaking wet. We're both actually starting to shiver a bit. I say to Spring, let's do, you know, come join me with 7, and she said, on 7, and she said, okay, cool, let's do it. Now again, her plan was just to do 6, and she had decided in that moment, well, hell yeah, I'll just go do 7, because that's how she operates. And so we both get in gondolas to go down. We happen to get in separate gondolas, and I get on my gondola, and I have blankets on me, and it's, it's cold, and it— again, it sucks. But I was pretty dead set on going again, as was Spring. And then when Spring got down to the bottom and I got down to the bottom, we both get out. She's shivering pretty good. I'm definitely shivering a bit. And I go, uh, I go, okay, let's go. And she goes, you know, I, I changed my mind. I'm gonna, I'm gonna head in. And I said, well, wait, I thought you were gonna do 7 with me. She said, nah, I'm gonna stick to my original plan. And I said, well, okay, and, and so be it. And so I was off and she went and took a shower and maybe slept for half an hour. I think, I think she planned to sleep a little bit more, but she went back and did her thing. Well, the next day after I was finished and she had finished we had the opportunity to catch up. And she had said to me that her intention was to do Seven. She was, she was excited to do Seven. But then we got in those gondolas and we were separate. And Spring actually found herself going down the gondola with a couple other individuals. And these two individuals that were on the gondola with Spring were talking about how they were so happy to be done and going back to their room, how they couldn't wait to take a shower, how this mountain had really kind of kicked their ass and they'd come back tomorrow and have a better experience. And in general, I don't want to say we're negative, but certainly we're not of the mindset of let's go charge this mountain again. And in the 22 minutes that Spring was in that gondola, her mindset went from— now mind you, this is a very determined, driven individual— her mindset went from, I'm gonna do 7 with Brian, to, I'll stick to the original plan. Now, in asking Spring about this, she said to me, you know, I, I, I got in that gondola and it influenced how I was feeling. I was feeling great, like, like physically I wanted to go do it. The energy was great. I wanted to continue on. And then she would tell you she started talking to herself because those she was around were influencing the talk that she was having with herself. And her, you know, in her wisdom to me was that it's important to recognize you become who you hang out with. And if you want to go accomplish things, you got to be around people that push and inspire you. And what she learned in that moment and shared with me was that she did become who she was hanging out with unintentionally. She started seeing comfort in taking a break like she had originally planned versus charging the hill again. And the people she was around were not pushing and inspiring, they were doing quite the opposite. In other words, the crab effect was, was full go right there, and she experienced it firsthand. So my takeaway is, you know, here is somebody that has no problem persevering, has the mindset of a champion. And again, her original plan was 6, so she, she ran her normal plan, but she talked about doing 7. And I'm thinking to myself if I was in the gondola with her, you know, maybe I, maybe I would have kept the upbeat energy and we would have charged it together. In other words, hopefully I wouldn't have been the crab kind of clawing at her, pulling her back down. So it's an interesting takeaway, right? An interesting story, an interesting thought around the crab effect. I think the focusing question for you today: what's your environment looking like? Is it supportive of or standing in the way of where you want to go? How about the environment you're creating for others? Is that environment that you're creating conducive to, you know, helping them get to where they desire to go? Or is it actually not as consistent or maybe even blocking from in some points or on some days blocking or prohibiting them with respect to what they want to accomplish. I think we have to be super aware of this sort of thing because it's much better when you're the crab with the ability to get out of that bucket versus being dragged back down. That's all I have for you today. The No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.