Have you ever been pressured into doing something that you didn’t want to do or you knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but you did it anyways because your friends wanted you to? Of course you have, that’s called peer pressure. I think all of us can think of at least one case of where we caved into peer pressure! But we always think of peer pressure as bad influence, but it’s not, it’s a influence by friends/peers good or bad! That’s can be hard to wrap your head around, having good peer pressure and that’s because it’s rare and hard to find.
There is a practice among crab fishing that is very interesting. When fishing for crabs there is a very shallow box without a lid top, it needs to be shallow so it’s easy for craps to crawl in. You might think well if it’s so shallow that they can easily crawl in why can’t they easily crawl out? Well as these fishermen know, if there is at least one crap already in the box and another crap crawls in, if that crab tries to crawl out the other crawl will pull him back in so he can’t escape. This is the reason there is no need for a top lid on the box to catch a crab. Many times in life we have friends that are just like these crabs. They pull you back down whenever you try to get up and get out from the situation your in. Sometimes it may seem attractive to enter the crab box because look there’s alot of people there and so we make the assumption that none of them are leaving so they must be liking it! But we all know what those crabs that stay in the box are in for, and it isn’t pleasant! Life is always best for the very few. The life of that one crab crawling around by himself somewhere else on the ocean floor, is immensely better than those of which stay in the ‘popular’ box. If you wanted to better your life in any way and you can remember your friends/peers discourage you in any way remember those are your crabby friends! Now don’t think that they purposely want you to stay a ‘failure’ because most likely it’s not, it’s because they’re ignorant! Those crabs don’t know what’s in their near future, if they did they would be too busy getting out themselves to even worry about anyone else. Regardless whether it’s ignorance or vengeance of your friends to discourage you, you need to lose them or just limit your time with them.
“You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.”~ Charlie “Tremendous” Jones
Think of your goals and what you eventually want to be. Once you have your goals in mind, find friends that have already arrived at your goals or are like-minded to your goals. Because what this will do is the opposite of what your bad friends will do, instead of pulling you in to failure. Your new like minded friends will pull you back to your goals if you seem to drift away. So go out and find good peer pressure!
