Eric Barker's Blog, page 4

This Is How To Make Your Baby Smarter: 4 Secrets From Research

Being a new parent isn’t easy. Babies are essentially tiny, drunk roommates. They stumble around, they’re loud at all the wrong hours, they throw up on you without a hint of remorse, and they don’t pay rent. You’ll find yourself considering the merits of just squirting puree directly onto the floor just to cut out the middleman.

And this is all made more difficult by the fact that they can barely communicate. Babies come equipped with a range of sounds that are designed to trigger every parent...

How To Be More Resilient: 6 Steps To Success When Life Gets Hard

Sometimes life doesn’t just hand you lemons — it pelts you with them like you’re in a citrus fruit dodgeball game. Yeah, we’re talking about when you have to deal with grief, like the death of a loved one or other serious tragedies.

You’re left with this bizarre, jagged-edged picture that sort of resembles your life, but not really. It’s a process that’s as confusing as trying to read a book where every other page is from a different novel. You cry so hard you dehydrate yourself. You feel your...

This Is How To Have A Long Awesome Life: 4 Secrets From Research

There’s no specific moment when you know you’re getting older. No ceremony where they hand you a cardigan and a book of crossword puzzles and say, “Welcome. You’re one of us now. The Wi-Fi password is getoffmylawn.”

But the wrinkles and gray hairs start accumulating. Your brain’s default setting has gone from “efficient” to “making that dial-up internet sound.” And you wake up with injuries from sleeping wrong. SLEEPING. You know, that passive activity where you’re unconscious and immobile. It...

This Is How To Be More Lucky: 4 Secrets From Research

At times, inexplicably bad stuff happens to all of us. The kind of thing that makes you want to stand in front of the universe with a sign reading, “Really? This is what we’re doing now?”

And sometimes we call it “bad luck.” Oh, magical thinking, my favorite kind of thinking when I want to avoid responsibility and logic, which, if I’m honest, is most of the time. We all have a friend who believes every retrograde Mercury heralds personal disaster. I never thought I’d have a friend who blames l...

This Is How To Be A Great Manager: 4 Powerful Secrets From Research

What makes companies great? Gallup did research to find out — real research. They surveyed 24 companies in 12 different industries measuring productivity, profitability, employee retention and customer satisfaction. They ended up looking at over 2500 business units and interviewed 105,000 employees.

And what was the thing that made all the difference? Good managers.

Now we’ve all had bad managers. Working for them is like being in a real-life version of “The Office,” but without the comfort of...

4 Rituals To Keep You Happy All The Time

Happiness. It’s the one characteristic everyone goes on about like it’s the golden ticket to the Wonka factory of life. And maintaining happiness, well, yeeeeesh. It’s a relentless pursuit in a world that constantly shifts the goalposts. You’re trying to maintain a sunny disposition in an era where the news cycle is less “informative briefing” and more “24/7 carnival of despair.” The world might feel like your oyster, but unfortunately, you’re allergic to shellfish.

Everybody thinks they have ...

New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Secrets That Will Improve Your Memory

Having a bad memory is like your brain is perpetually stuck in airplane mode — it’s technically functioning but not really connecting to anything useful. At times, our minds feel less like steel traps and more like sieves with personality. We’ve all dealt with forgotten passwords and end up answering security questions that might as well be riddles posed by a bridge troll. Isn’t adult life fun?

And then there’s aging: nature’s ultimate bait-and-switch. Sure doesn’t make your memory any better....

How To Get Wealthy – Slowly But Surely: 5 Secrets From Research

The grand human fantasy: making money with the least amount of sweat. It’s a dream as old as time, or at least as old as the invention of money and laziness, which I assume came about in the same brainstorming session.

We’re living in an age where people become millionaires by making videos about unboxing toys. But getting started on learning about personal finance can be both boring and confusing.

Investing? Oh boy. Bulls, bears, shorts, longs – it sounds like a weird zoo where the animals ar...

How To Know Who You Can Trust: 6 Secrets From Research

Trust — humanity’s favorite high-wire act.

What’s the reason most people cite for wanting to leave their job? Not trusting their employer. And what quality do you value in a friend more than any other? You guessed it: trustworthiness.

But a 2021 poll showed that 18 percent of American adults said they only have one or zero people they can trust for help in their personal lives. It’s a sad “I’ll laugh about this in therapy” kind of statistic. Makes you nostalgic for the days when the biggest ac...

This Is How To Deal With Negative Thoughts: 6 Secrets From Research

In the theater of the mind, unwanted thoughts are the hecklers in the back row, throwing popcorn at the screen of your consciousness. Your brain, that squishy blob sitting in its dark skull-room is like those old jukeboxes in dive bars that play the same three songs on a loop. Except instead of “Don’t Stop Believin’,” it’s “What if everyone’s secretly laughing at you?”

We’ve all had intrusive thoughts at one time or another: impostor syndrome, embarrassing memories, fears, anxieties, guilt, re...