Several years ago a close friend of mine shared a story from her childhood that has managed to continuously resurface in my mind ever since. It goes like this,
When she was a little girl, my friend and her sisters had a collection of pet hermit crabs. The terrestrial variety with painted shells that you could buy at the mall back in the 90’s. Hermit crabs are not the most engaging pet, but they used to find entertainment in bringing the hermit crabs out to their sandbox in the backyard and letting them scuttle around the sand castles and channels they would make for them.
One day, while collecting their hermit crabs after one such play session, they realized one was missing! The girls ran to get their mom who helped them search the back yard in vain. It had wandered off and had managed to get itself lost in the nearby bushes or god knows where before they noticed it was missing. The hermit crab was gone :(
Months passed, almost a year in fact. The girls had forgotten all about the tragedy of the lost hermit crab and had moved on with their lives. One afternoon, while moving around some boxes in the basement, their father discovered a large and hideous bug! However, upon closer inspection he realized this was no bug at all. It was the lost hermit crab, missing its shell and dragging along clumps of old spider web! In its time in the wild the crab had found its way into the basement, and managed to survive well enough on whatever insects it could prey upon. It had not only managed to survive, it had apparently thrived well enough to outgrow its old painted shell. It had become an unrecognizable creature, like Buck in Call of the Wild. No longer a domesticated thing, no this crab had “been in the s**t “ so to speak. It was now a wild beast that had transcended the soft existence of an enclosed habitat..
The girls were excited about the discovery, and with a freshly cleared conscience, they went to the mall and found the lost crab, a new, appropriately sized shell. Once settled into the new shell they returned the crab to its old home alongside its former colleagues. They did not know that this crab had become a lion, and they were placing it amongst lambs. Within several days, it managed to devour all the other hermit crabs. Yes, it ate them… absolutely metal.
What is the moral of this story? I’m not sure there is one, but I think it makes a good anecdote. We are in the middle of a very challenging job market. Many wildly talented individuals have lost jobs by no fault of their own. In their job hunting they have done all the things that have guaranteed success in the past only to find that their environment has changed. It is a brand new landscape out there with new rules and no playbook. Folks who are unemployed right now and navigating this brave new world are becoming hardened and powerful in pursuit of their survival. They are adapting out of necessity. I want to be very careful with this metaphor, I am not saying that people who have spent months unemployed before returning to work are going to be wildly aggressive and eat their colleagues! What I am saying is that people who have struggled to find meaningful employment in the current job market have needed to develop an incredible level of grit, resilience and tenacity that can only emerge from a survival instinct kicking in. For me, navigating a challenging job market and facing constant rejection stripped every ounce of complacency from my soul and positioned me to do the best work of my career when I finally landed a new gig. So here’s a note for anyone hiring right now, do not view an employment gap as a red flag. Go on, hire a hermit crab today!