Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast. And today we’ve got a very interesting title for the episode, how do lobsters grow. So what has data science got to do with lobsters? Well, my brother Mark and I, a couple of months ago, we were watching this video on YouTube by Dr Abraham Twerski, and it’s actually titled the same, “How do Lobsters Grow”. And I wanted to share the main concepts from there with you here today.
What a lobster is, is it’s a soft animal inside a hard shell. And that shell doesn’t grow with time. The lobster grows, but the shell doesn’t. And so how does a lobster grow then? Well, whenever a lobster inside the shell grows and then it starts getting bigger than the shell, its capacity, it starts feeling pressure and it starts getting uncomfortable. So what it does is it runs for a rock, it hides somewhere so that no other predator can get it, and there it sheds its shell. It’s actually a pretty fascinating process. You can check it out on YouTube. It gets out of its shell and then it creates a new shell. And then, after some time, that shell also becomes too small, because the lobster’s grown bigger than that shell, and it has to do the same process again because it again is feeling under pressure, it’s feeling uncomfortable, it finds a rock, hides there, and sheds the shell again, and produces a new one.
And so what Dr Abraham Twerski here points out that the stimulus for the lobster to be able to grow is that it feels uncomfortable. And if you think about it, as humans, we are exactly the same. That the way we sometimes feel a pressure, or we feel uncomfortable, or we feel stress – so the key word here is stress – we feel stressed. It is an adversity. It’s a bad situation. But if we didn’t have these bad situations, if the lobster never felt uncomfortable, it would simply never grow. And same for us. So we can use these stressful situations to our advantage. We can use that as a signal that there’s an opportunity for growth and then grow through those situations.
And this can be anywhere. It could be in your career, it might be uncomfortable stress about a project, on a tool that you might not know how to use, or in a situation you might not know how to deal with interpersonally, or you might be under too much pressure in the sense of how much work you have to do, and that might be a signal for you to grow and learn how to manage your time better, or it might be a signal for you to grow and stand up to your manager and say that that’s too much work.
It could also be in your personal life. You might be having some differences with your significant other, and that might be a signal for both of you to grow and to better understand each other and better be able to communicate. You might be having some stress with your children, or with your parents, and that again might be a signal. It might be a stressful situation that you might want to avoid, but instead you could use it as a signal to learn something and to grow as an individual, as a person, and become better, and learn. As the lobster, it becomes bigger, and it grows, it develops, and the same for you here, for us, all of us, we all can develop through these situations and grow as people or as professionals.
So there you go, that’s something to ponder on this weekend. What stressful situations have you encountered, or might you come across in the next couple of days, and can you maybe treat them as signals for growth rather than simply adverse situations? And I wish you all the best. I wish you to be able to always find ways to grow through adversity. If something bad is happening, then let’s get the most out of it. Let’s at least grow through it so that next time it comes up, we know how to deal with it. And I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
