A few days ago, news in India published about a Mumbai Rickshaw driver who was making $10k a month.
He saw long queues outside the US consulate in India which has a no-bags and no-phone rule to get inside and he saw people struggling with keeping their bags safe when it was their turn to go into the embassy.
Instead of driving his rickshaw around, he started a bag holding service outside the consulate and charged people ₹1,000 (~$12) to hold their bags till they returned.
This guy went viral and his story was showing up on every news website and account on the internet. Everyone heard about it.
The moment I saw it, I knew he was fucked.
You see, the masses hate success. The last thing they want to see is someone who they consider at their level or below them rise far above them. It triggers their insecurity and envy.
Here is what happened a few days after the news went viral:
As the post went viral, Mumbai Police summoned the auto driver along with 12 others who were offering similar locker services to US consulate visitors. A senior officer from the BKC police station told Hindustan Times that “parking is strictly prohibited” in the area due to heightened security, and auto drivers are only allowed to “drop passengers off and leave.”
The police also noted that the drivers had no legal permission to run locker services or store items in nearby shops. Authorities flagged that “any misplaced items could lead to serious security risks.”
“The auto driver has a licence to transport passengers, not to run a locker service. Therefore, we inquired into the matter and he has now stopped providing lockers,” police told…
And now losers are emailing his information to the tax department and tweeting at them to audit him.
Basically, this rickshaw driver had a nice thing going for himself. He was making $10k a month.
Then the masses heard about it and shut his business down. He was not harming anyone or blocking footpaths like illegal food vendors.
He was simply charging money to hold people’s bags.
And the losers ended his business and got the taxman on his back.
Remember the masses don’t benefit at all by destroying him (since he’s not doing anything actually harmful to anybody). They want to destroy him because he was one of them who’s now doing much better than them.
It is pure jealousy and envy.
If you want to escape the crabs, you must do it in silence.
People behave like crabs in a bucket:
When you put a single crab in a bucket, that crab can easily crawl up and escape. When you put a lot of crabs in the same bucket, the crabs cannot escape anymore. Whenever one of them tries to escape, the others catch him and pull him down.
If I can’t have it, neither can you.
If you are succeeding, and they know you are succeeding, you can know for sure that most people around your level are:
- Jealous of your success
- Reminded of their own failure to succeed (via their own laziness)
- Going to try to sabotage you in some way or the other (physically or psychologically)
We’ve all known girls who were losing weight but then got fed cake and fries by their other female friends (“you’re not fat at all, don’t worry” – everyone knows she’s fat, but they don’t want her to improve to protect their position in the circle).
We’ve all known tattletales in high school. You got a question wrong in your exam but the teacher accidentally marks it correct. You tell some of your friends about it. One of your classmates tells the teacher.
We’ve all known co-workers who’ve tried to throw us under the bus in some way or the other to get an edge for the promotion.
There’s also other things that you might not have experienced:
- An anonymous tip about your business profits sent to the tax department (see this all the time in my tax/law consulting firm in search and seizure cases)
- Your “friend” telling your girlfriend about your side chick (never trust a simp)
- Telling the police that you are operating your restaurant without a COVID vaccination (happened to a friend)
This behaviour has always existed and will always exist. Especially among the masses. Crabs in a bucket behaviour is built into humans. You have to simply work around it.
This means you need to put in the work in silence. Since this website is primarily actionable advice, here are some simple situations where this applies:
1) Limiting Personal Information to Co-Workers
Do not tell your co-workers about your personal life. You have to remember that your co-workers are not your friends.
What is going to happen if you tell your co-workers that you are building a side-business? You are going to trigger their insecurity that should you succeed, they will feel inferior to you later.
You will be piled on with a bunch of extra work as a soft fuck you intending to sabotage you. When it comes time to give your bonus, you will get dinged and they will claim that you were “unfocused”. You might even get more checks by IT to make sure that you’re working on the company’s stuff.
Zero benefit from disclosing information to co-workers. You should always pretend that you are just like them with regards to your life outside of work.
Simply build the business in silence while you reduce effort put on the job little by little.
2) Beating Vices by Quitting Circles in Aggregate
Let’s say you smoke weed or drink alcohol and want to quit. You tell your smoker/drinker friends that you want to quit but still hang out with them.
What is going to happen? It will trigger their insecurity that you will manage to beat your vice and live a better life than them.
They will try to break you by getting you to drink “just one sip”. There will be massive social pressure put on you and you might even get mocked for not drinking/smoking with them. Very likely that attempts will be made to guilt trip you (“he thinks he’s too good for us”).
Quitting a vice is hard already, but almost impossible if you’re in circles that are built around that vice. Because the crabs will not let you escape.
The only solution is to silently quit these circles along with the vices.
3) Not Showing Anyone The “Insides” of Your Business
There are some businesses that have a lot of barriers to entry while others that are easy to copy.
Take something like this blog. While someone can easily copy the design of the blog, they cannot produce posts like this one because they cannot copy my life experiences.
There is only one Harsh Strongman and that is me. You can make a shitty counterfeit piss version of LMM with a different name, but no one reads shitty counterfeit blogs. Smart people are smart enough to recognize who speaks with experience and who doesn’t.
For this reason there are millions of failed blogs and few successful ones. Few people have the life experiences to be worth reading and learning from.
On the other hand, take something like a niche affiliate site. ANYBODY can copy them. If you show someone your affiliate niche sites, they can make a copy paste competitor in just a few days.
In fact there’s a small industry around finding successful affiliate sites and social spam operations and duplicating them.
You could show a friend your affiliate sites and 99% of the time, they will just copy it. They won’t take the business model and use it to make their own affiliate site in a different industry/product segment.
Most will just copy paste your affiliate product, your keywords, and your marketing strategy. While at the same time pestering you for “advice”.
If you are in a good business that is easy to copy, keep your mouth shut. NOTHING good will come by telling everyone about it.
Hope that helps.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman
