Eric Barker Quotes

We crave ease, but stimulation is what really makes us happy.

Mentoring a young person is four times more predictive of happiness than your health or how much money you make.

Research shows that you don’t actually need to know more to be seen as a leader. Merely by speaking first and speaking often—very extroverted behavior—people come to be seen as El Jefe.

We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great we must be different. And that doesn’t come from trying to follow society’s vision of what is best, because society doesn’t always know what it needs. More often being the best means just being the best version of you.

Without a plan, we do what’s passive and easy—not what is really fulfilling. Robert Epstein surveyed thirty thousand

As Henry David Thoreau said, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

In the famous commencement speech Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005 he said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

study of 403 people in the Journal of Happiness Studies showed that managing your free time is associated with higher quality of life.

Oh, the irony. Cognitive biases prevent us from understanding cognitive biases.

We got to the moon and built the pyramids without email and Facebook.

But as any mathematician knows, averages can be deceptive. Andrew Robinson, CEO of famed advertising agency BBDO, once said, “When your head is in a refrigerator and your feet on a burner, the average temperature is okay. I am always cautious about averages.” As

The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary.

Warren Buffett, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.

Here’s the problem: We love having choices. We hate making choices. Having choices means having possibilities. Making choices means losing possibilities. And having so many choices increases the chance of regret.

Fate is that thing we cannot avoid. It comes for us despite how we try to run from it. Destiny, on the other hand, is the thing we must chase, what we must bring to fruition.

a healthy mind tells itself flattering lies.

The same traits that make people a nightmare to deal with can also make them the people who change the world.

A study of over seven hundred American millionaires showed their average college GPA was 2.9.

What’s shocking is that when asked to make predictions, depressed people are more accurate than optimists. It’s called “depressive realism.” The world can be a harsh place. Optimists lie to themselves. But if we all stop believing anything can change, nothing ever will. We need a bit of fantasy to keep us going.

Fundamentally, your brain doesn’t like or want to believe in randomness. It always believes you have some control, even when you don’t. It may be delusional but we’re happier deluded. And delusion ironically makes us perform better on average.

Author Tony Schwartz says, “Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.

You need a personal definition of success. Looking around you to see if you’re succeeding is no longer a realistic option.

This leads us to the strengths of being less than confident. Confidence makes it very hard for us to learn and improve. When we think we know all the answers, we stop looking for them. Marshall Goldsmith says, “Although our self-confident delusions can help us achieve, they can make it difficult for us to change.” When

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place

The second reason is that schools reward being a generalist. There is little recognition of student passion or expertise. The real world, however, does the reverse.

it’s by dreaming and then doing something about those dreams that we can achieve success. In fact, it’s the only way we can.

Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the 21st century.

Warren Buffett sums that up: “I always worry about people who say, ‘I’m going to do this for ten years; I really don’t like it very well. And then I’ll do this . . .’ That’s a lot like saving sex up for your old age. Not a very good idea.

Barry Schwartz says we have to become “choosers” instead of “pickers.” A picker selects from the options available, leading us into false dichotomies created by the options we see in front of us. But a chooser “is thoughtful enough to conclude that perhaps none of the available alternatives are satisfactory, and that if he or she wants the right alternative, he or she may have to create it.

Empathy is when the line between you and another blurs. Closeness is when your vision of your “self” makes room for someone else to be in there too. And a true friend is “another self.” A part of you.

Success comes in many forms. Some success is incredibly impressive, some simple and quaint, others almost absurd. We get hung up on the heights of success we see in the media and forget that it’s our personal definition of success that matters. And you can achieve that.

So keep trying new things. It makes you luckier. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. When there’s no clear path to success, no relevant model for what you’re trying to achieve, trying crazy things may be the only way to solve the issue.

The truth is, we often underestimate by as much as 50 percent how much others are willing to help us when asked. As we talked about in chapter 2, being mistrustful or assuming others are selfish can be self-fulfilling prophecies.

Kristin Neff explains, “Who is the only person in your life who is available 24/7 to provide you with care and kindness? You.

When we make it win-or-lose, everyone loses.

As the old saying goes, “You can do anything once you stop trying to do everything.

Research has shown flattery is so powerful that it works even when the boss knows it’s insincere.

BELIEVING IN YOURSELF IS NICE. FORGIVING YOURSELF IS BETTER.

If you want to do well in school and you’re passionate about math, you need to stop working on it to make sure you get an A in history too. This generalist approach doesn’t lead to expertise. Yet eventually we almost all go on to careers in which one skill is highly rewarded and other skills aren’t that important. Ironically,

You’ve got to pick the environments that work for you . . . context is so important. The unfiltered leader who is an amazing success in one situation will be a catastrophic failure in the other, in almost all cases.

You want to keep in mind that 80/20 perspective Peter Drucker talked about

Feel free to email me if you want to say hi. I’m at ebarker@ucla.edu. I wish you great success.

School has clear rules. Life often doesn’t. When there’s no clear path to follow, academic high achievers break down.

David Foster Wallace once said, “If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

It all comes down to the stories you tell yourself.

Dan Ariely did a study in which people were given the opportunity to cheat on a test. (They didn’t know the researchers administering the test would be able to tell.) Of course, those who exploited this performed better, but here’s what’s interesting: when surveyed about how they thought they’d do on another test, the cheaters rated themselves higher than non-cheaters. In other words, despite having succeeded due to deception, they attributed their success to being smarter. In deceiving others they ended up deceiving themselves. That’s

The hard-charging Silicon Valley entrepreneur has become a respected, admired icon in the modern age. Do these descriptors match the stereotype? A ball of energy. Little need for sleep. A risk taker. Doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Confident and charismatic, bordering on hubristic. Boundlessly ambitious. Driven and restless. Absolutely. They’re also the traits associated with a clinical condition called hypomania. Johns Hopkins psychologist John Gartner has done work showing that’s not a coincidence. Full-blown mania renders people unable to function in normal society. But hypomania produces a relentless, euphoric, impulsive machine that explodes toward its goals while staying connected (even if only loosely) with reality. With

We spend so much time chasing the shallow things in life. But when tragedy strikes, or late at night when your brain asks too many questions, we know it’s the relationships that matter most. Whom can I trust? Does anyone really know me? Does anyone really care? If you think of your happiest moments, they will be about people. The most painful moments will too. Our relationships to others make or break our lives.

There are three categories: “right,” “wrong,” and “everybody does it.” Once we see others getting away with something, we assume it’s okay. Nobody wants to be the sucker who plays by the rules when no one else does.

We need optimism and confidence to keep going and convince others to join our cause, but negativity and pessimism help us see problems so we can make them better. Yes, the former feel much better, but both are necessary.

We always think we need more: more help, more motivation, more energy. But in our current world the answer is often the exact opposite: we need less. Fewer distractions, fewer goals, fewer responsibilities. Is that so we can watch more TV? No. We need less of those things so we can go all in on our priorities. The question is what are you going to do less of? What are you going to quit or say no to in order to make time for what matters most?

Why do jerks succeed? Sure, some of it’s duplicity and evil, but there’s something we can learn from them in good conscience: they’re assertive about what they want, and they’re not afraid to let others know about what they’ve achieved.

Fifty-eight members of the Forbes 400 either avoided college or ditched it partway through. These fifty-eight—almost 15 percent of the total—have an average net worth of $4.8 billion. This is 167 percent greater than the average net worth of the four hundred, which is $1.8 billion. It’s more than twice the average net worth of those four hundred members who attended Ivy League colleges.

You need a personal definition of success. Looking around you to see if you’re succeeding is no longer a realistic option. Trying to be a relative success compared to others is dangerous. This means your level of effort and investment is determined by theirs, which keeps you running full speed all the time to keep up.

That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

Barry Schwartz told me: “Good enough is almost always good enough.

We all spend a lot of time complaining about incompetence, but as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in a talk he gave at High Point University, overconfidence is the far bigger problem.

Most of the subjects in the study were classified as “careerists”: they saw their job as getting good grades, not really as learning.

Success is something you will confront constantly in business. You will always be interpreting it against something, and that something should be your own goals and purpose.

And as a paper in American Psychologist showed, “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.

As John Stuart Mill remarked, “That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of our time.

One of the primary things every couple has in common is not magic or je ne sais quoi; it’s proximity. It’s really hard to fall in love when you never encounter each other.

if that “monster” finds the right environment and succeeds, it might just end up changing the species for the better.

Our research inside companies revealed that the best way to motivate people, day in and day out, is by facilitating progress—even small wins.

Henry David Thoreau said, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

If dreaming is so bad, why do we do it? Because it’s the mental equivalent of getting drunk: it feels really good right now but doesn’t lead to good things later.

We got to the moon and built the pyramids without email and Facebook. You can go a couple of hours without checking them.

Stories are the invisible undercurrent that promotes success in a shocking number of the most important areas of life.

There is too much going on in the world for our little brains to process; we must distill it.

You can do anything once you stop trying to do everything.

Stop thinking about what you’re going to say next and focus on what they’re saying right now.

power have very negative effects on a person’s character. Power reduces empathy, makes us hypocritical, and causes us to dehumanize others.

Studies show people with attention deficit disorder (ADD) are more creative.

Researcher John Gottman realized that just hearing how the couple told the tale of their relationship together predicted with 94 percent accuracy whether or not they’d get divorced.

Psychologist Shelley Taylor says that “a healthy mind tells itself flattering lies.” The pessimists were more accurate and realistic, and they ended up depressed. The truth can hurt.

Research shows that “only 6 percent of people work in the profession they aspired to in childhood” and a third of people end up in a career that has nothing to do with their college major.

Influence guru Professor Robert Cialdini says that not only is reciprocity one of the key elements of being influential and winning favor with others but it’s also essential that you go first.

We’ll see that the fundamental core of relationships is the stories our brains weave to create identity, agency, and community—and how those stories not only bind us together but can tear us apart if we’re not careful.

Neuroscientist Diana Tamir found that your brain gets more pleasure from you talking about yourself than it does from food or money. This is why you should stop doing it and let others do it as much as possible around you.

people change only when they feel they don’t have to. There’s a healthy (and effective) way to help your partner move in the direction of positive change. But it starts with who they want to be, not who you want them to be.

You were successful because you happened to be in an environment where your biases and predispositions and talents and abilities all happened to align neatly with those things that would produce success in that environment.

The lesson from cases of people both keeping and losing their jobs is that as long as you keep your boss or bosses happy, performance really does not matter that much and, by contrast, if you upset them, performance won’t save you.

By engaging in cognitive reappraisal, and telling ourselves a different story about what is happening, we can subvert the entire willpower paradigm. Some research has shown that willpower is like a muscle, and it gets tired with overuse. But it only gets depleted if there’s a struggle. Games change the struggle to something else. They make the process fun, and as Mischel showed in his research, we are able to persist far longer and without the same level of teeth-gritting willpower depletion.

When you choose your pond wisely, you can best leverage your type, your signature strengths, and your context to create tremendous value. This is what makes for a great career, but such self-knowledge can create value wherever you choose to apply it.

When you take a job take a long look at the people you’re going to be working with—because the odds are you’re going to become like them; they are not going to become like you. You can’t change them. If it doesn’t fit who you are, it’s not going to work.

Anyone who knows baseball knows Ted Williams. He played professionally from 1939 to 1960 and is one of the undisputed greatest hitters of all time, right up there with Babe Ruth. But whether you’re familiar with him or not, I have news for you: Ted Williams never played baseball. Nope, he never did. The problem there is the verb: Williams wasn’t playing. To him, hitting a baseball wasn’t a game. He always took it very, very seriously. In a 1988 interview he said as a child he literally wished on a falling star that he would become the greatest hitter to ever live. But he didn’t sit around and wait for the dream to come true. His obsessive, perfectionist work ethic would bring him more success than any descending celestial body would. Williams said, “I . . . insist that regardless of physical assets, I would never have gained a headline for hitting if I [had not] kept everlastingly at it and thought of nothing else the year round . . . I only lived for my next time at bat.” Ten thousand hours to achieve expertise? Williams probably did that a few times over. He was obsessed. After school, he’d go to a local field and practice hitting until nine P.M., only stopping because that’s when they turned the lights out. Then he’d go home and practice in the backyard until his parents made him go to bed. He’d get to school early so he could fit in more swings before classes started. He’d bring his bat to class. He picked courses that had less homework, not because he was lazy but so he’d have more time for hitting.

Are you a nice guy or gal who is having trouble processing all this bad news? Maybe that’s because not having a high status position at the office contributes to a reduction in executive function. Want that in English? Feeling powerless actually makes you dumber.

We have grown smarter, but less wise. And that’s not just a warm platitude, it’s science. Wisdom isn’t just raw IQ; it involves understanding others. And when researchers surveyed two thousand Americans from different income levels, they found wealthier meant less wise. No,

Pfeffer says we need to stop thinking the world is fair. He puts it bluntly: The lesson from cases of people both keeping and losing their jobs is that as long as you keep your boss or bosses happy, performance really does not matter that much and, by contrast, if you upset them, performance won’t save you.

We can apply game mechanics to our lives and turn dull moments into fun ones. Can this make us grittier at work and lead to success in life? Oh yeah. Work doesn’t have to be a lousy game. So let’s learn why work sucks, why games are awesome, and how we can turn the former into the latter. C’mon, let’s “game the system.

Economist Henry Siu said, “People who switch jobs more frequently early in their careers tend to have higher wages and incomes in their prime-working years. Job-hopping is actually correlated with higher incomes, because people have found better matches—their true calling.” And changing roles is far more likely to get you to a leadership position:

So what is meaning? Meaning, for the human mind, comes in the form of the stories we tell ourselves about the world. This is why so many people believe in fate or say things were “meant to be.” Having a story about the meaning of life helps us to cope with hard times. Not only do we naturally see the world this way, but frankly we can’t not tell stories.

1.​HAPPINESS: having feelings of pleasure or contentment in and about your life 2.​ACHIEVEMENT: achieving accomplishments that compare favorably against similar goals others have strived for 3.​SIGNIFICANCE: having a positive impact on people you care about 4.​LEGACY: establishing your values or accomplishments in ways that help others find future success

Roughly four times out of five, gamers don’t complete the mission, run out of time, don’t solve the puzzle, lose the fight, fail to improve their score, crash and burn, or die. Which makes you wonder: do gamers actually enjoy failing? As it turns out, yes . . . When we’re playing a well-designed game, failure doesn’t disappoint us. It makes us happy in a very particular way: excited, interested, and most of all optimistic.

David Dobbs said in a piece for The Atlantic, “the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.” This

Following the rules doesn’t create success; it just eliminates extremes—both good and bad. While this is usually good and all but eliminates downside risk, it also frequently eliminates earthshaking accomplishments. It’s like putting a governor on your engine that stops the car from going over fifty-five; you’re far less likely to get into a lethal crash, but you won’t be setting any land speed records either. So if those who play by the rules don’t end up at the very top, who does?

Walker Smith of Yankelovich Partners told The Wall Street Journal, “Right now, there’s no aspiration to be middle class. Everyone wants to be at the top.” We probably have far more now than we ever had in the past, but we’re probably not much happier. And instinctively we think the problem can still be fixed by more. More money. More food. More things. Just more. We’re not even sure what we need more of, but whatever we have now sure as hell isn’t doing it, so turn it up to eleven, Bertha.

Success is not the result of any single quality; it’s about alignment between who you are and where you choose to be. The right skill in the right role. A good person surrounded by other good people. A story that connects you with the world in a way that keeps you going. A network that helps you, and a job that leverages your natural introversion or extroversion. A level of confidence that keeps you going while learning and forgiving yourself for the inevitable failures. A balance between the big four that creates a well-rounded life with no regrets.

Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed eighty-one high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs. They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives. But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero. Commenting