Eric Barker's Blog, page 10

My New Book “Plays Well With Others” Is Now Available!

It’s finally here!

My new book Plays Well With Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong is now available.

Grab it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books A Million, Indiebound or Bookshop. (No, you cannot borrow my copy.)

And, yes, there’s an audiobook. It’s read by Roger Wayne in such dulcet tones that your ears will weep.

After the massive multi-dimensional quantum dumpster fire that was 2020 and the ensuing existential obstacle course of...

The Lazy Way To An Awesome Life

The old maxim says that with others you should just “be yourself.”

But is that really true?

In researching my new book, Plays Well With Others, I went down the rabbit hole to see whether it’s accurate — and also what we can do to be our best selves. (Never be ashamed of who you are… that’s your parents’ job.)

In the excerpt below we’re going to learn a dead simple way to become more of the person you want to be.

This is part of the section I had to cut from the book. I wish I could have includ...

This Is How To Have A Long Awesome Life

There’s a lot of pseudoscience out there offering fake answers on how to be healthier and happier. They’re like cubic zirconia; they only look real — and typically have a Magic 8-Ball level of scientific effectiveness.

On this blog I typically attack those things with Occam’s Razor – heck, I use all of Occam’s toilet kit. (I firmly believe the only time crystals heal you is when you’re sodium deficient.)

But in researching my new book, Plays Well With Others, I came across plenty of evidence t...

This Is The Most Fun Way To Make Your Life Awesome

When you’re young, you gossip about the couples that are having sex. When you’re older, you gossip about the ones that aren’t.

Keeping love alive isn’t easy. And when I was researching my new book Plays Well With Others, well, I learned a lot of very harsh truths about the current state of marriage.

While I had no desire to write a “Romantic Necronomicon” that would drive readers mad (or just make them mad at me) I do cover a lot of difficult stuff that most relationship books wouldn’t touch w...

This Is How To Win With A Narcissist: 3 Secrets From Research

You know the type. Needlessly cruel and they think they’re better than everyone else. Always one-upping people. If you’ve been to Timbuktu, they’ve been to Timbukthree.

Some of them almost reach “Talented Mr. Ripley” proportions and exhibit such bad behavior it makes your eyes go wide like a silent movie actor. Calling them a “friend” requires substantial creativity but – sadly — they’re a part of your life. (No, you can’t kill them with your mind. It doesn’t work. I’ve tried).

That said, we g...

This Is How To Make Emotionally Intelligent Friendships: 2 Secrets From Research

Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People” was wrong.

Well, at least one of his principles was. But we’ll get to that in a second…

Like you, I spent the pandemic not seeing friends nearly as often – but I was actually writing about friendship at the time. Oh, irony.

The second section of my new book Plays Well With Others gives the Mythbusters treatment to the old maxim “Is a friend in need a friend indeed?” Post-pandemic, I want all our friendships to not only go back to normal...

New Neuroscience Reveals 2 Secrets That Will Make You Emotionally Intelligent

A big part of being emotionally intelligent is understanding what’s going on in the minds of others. But doing that is really difficult. (So difficult I’ve been worried I broke my mirror neurons – and that’s why I’ve had 7 years of bad luck.)

We’re not mind readers. But given the pandemic and its negative impact on our social lives, we need the facts more than ever. So I went all Hardy Boys on this one and dug for the scientific answers we need…

The first section of my upcoming book Plays Well...

Announcing My New Book — And The Free Bonuses You’ll Receive

Time to “officially” announce my new book: Plays Well With Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong. (*jazz hands*)

It’s coming out on May 10th – but I encourage you to preorder it now on either Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books A Million, Indiebound or Bookshop. If you do, you get supremely cool bonus goodies you don’t want to miss — as I shall detail below.

Nobody is more biased toward a book than its author but I 131% believe this is ...

My New Book Is Coming Out. And I Need Your Help.

Surprise!

The guy who lives in your device writing blog posts has a new book coming out on May 10th. Almost 5 years to the day since the last one. (It’s been quite a while but I’m still faster than George R. R. Martin.)

Plays Well With Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong will help you scientifically improve your relationships – not just love, but all your relationships including friendship and community.

Please do pre-order a copy...

This Is How To Be An Emotionally Intelligent Parent: 4 Secrets

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Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here.

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Your living room looks like a highlight reel from “Mad Max: Fury Road.” The little ones are screaming the hits from “Frozen” and the teenagers are teenaging all over the place. The whole house needs an exorcism. Keeping things under control seems like an endless game of whac-a-mole when you already have a sore elbow.

It come...