One time a man was walking along the beach and he saw another man fishing in the surf with a bait bucket beside him. As he drew closer, he saw that the bait bucket had no lid and had live crabs inside. He said, “Well, why don’t you cover the bait bucket so the crabs won’t escape?” He said, “You don’t understand. You know, if there’s one crab inside the bucket, they would surely crawl out very quickly. However, when there are many crabs in the bucket, if one tries to crawl up the side, the other crabs hold it and pull it back down inside the bucket so that they can share the same fate as the rest of them.” No, that’s called the crab bucket mentality. How many times have you been a victim of this mentality where people are trying to hold you back? They’re trying to resist your dreams.
You know, look at as an entrepreneur and as going into being a business owner, I had many people tell me, “Oh, don’t do that. You know, that’s hard. 95% of businesses all fail in the first year.” Well, we’ve been in business for over 12 years, so I think we made it past that. But that being said, there was a lot of doubters out there, and if I’d have listened to those people along the way and had that crab mentality, people pull me down and pull me back. I wouldn’t be here sitting today sharing my life, journey with you, and helping transform lives just like we do every single day at MaxStrength Fitness. So look around in your life where maybe you’re somebody trying to pull you back or where are you maybe trying to hold somebody back. You know, maybe somebody has an ambition and they have a dream and you unbeknownstly just kind of are telling them to kind of hold back a little bit.
Don’t. Let them dream. Let them live. Let them do their passion. Let them do their thing and do it the best they can. Support them, love them, let them fail on their own. Look, I tried to teach my girls all the time. Failure is part of life and I love it. What if we taught our infants when they’re learning to walk, you know, after the five, 10th, 100th time, if we said, “Oh no, you can’t walk anymore, you’re failed, and we’re just going to get to crawl the rest of your life, right?” Let them fail, fail, fail over and over until they succeed. And maybe they’ll learn the life lesson on their own. So where maybe you holding somebody back, maybe where somebody holding you back, don’t be a victim of that crab mentality.