I'm learning that many of my best posts come out of a convergence of three moments in my life. This post is no different.
The first is a piece of my long lost past.
When I was a kid, the mother of a very good friend (who nearly committed suicide after his dad died), told me a story - about crawdads in a bucket. They just keep pulling each other back down. If there's only one in the bucket, it's really easy to escape, but when you add just a couple, they sabotage each other's success, in an effort to keep everyone at the same level of "existence."
The lesson I walked away with was the idea that it only takes one or two insidious crawdads to really impede your rise to the top. You have to be very careful about who you let into your bucket. (more…)