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Showing posts from October, 2019

Escape the Crab Mentality

There is a well-known concept within psychology called Crab mentality, which is a way of thinking best described by "If I can't have it, neither can you". It is a mentality shared by millions around the world, everywhere from small teams to local communities and all the way up to large enterprises and countries. It is a way to survive when resources are scarce, as any single entity in the group who consumes too much must be forced to live under the same constraints as everyone else. However, the crab survivalist way of thinking can often transcend constraints on resources, and factors such as envy can exacerbate the mentality into a selfish ego-centric paradigm, which limits other people's potential to accelerate beyond their peers and become better. It is from this mentality we hear stories like, "I want to leave my local community to attend university, but our priest says I have to stay and help my parents". What we see here is that our protagonist is