Eric Barker's Blog, page 5

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...

This Is The Easiest Way To Make Your Life More Awesome

Our homes, our schedules, our digital lives – it’s all just an overflowing cornucopia of too muchness.

You’ve got back-to-back meetings, a deluge of emails, and a to-do list longer than a CVS receipt. If you had a dime for every meeting that could’ve been an email, you could retire and live on an island made entirely of dimes.

Our homes are now less like cozy havens and more like a game of Tetris where we’re perpetually losing. We don’t just have things; we have things to put our things in, an...

This Is The Newest, Biggest Thing That Will Make Your Life Easier

Up until very recently, most of our experiences with AI boiled down to shouting “ALEXA, STOP!”

AI means “artificial intelligence”? More like “Awkwardly Inept”, if you ask me. But things have changed…

Enter ChatGPT, strutting onto the scene like a rock star. Suddenly, AI wasn’t just a voice in a box that occasionally understood your mumblings; it was like having a chat with someone who’d actually read a book. Or, you know, all of them.

How well could a cold, heartless machine understand the pro...

4 Secrets Of High-Performing Teams

No doubt there’s a lot wrong with the modern workplace. Open-plan offices? It’s like trying to work in the middle of a daycare. The cubicle? A solitary confinement cell decorated in dismal shades of practicality. And the meetings. Oh, the meetings. Time bends and distorts, leaving us trapped in an eternal now. The clock ticks so loudly you can hear the sound of your youth escaping.

But this all pales in comparison to the challenge of work teams. Those glorious microcosms of corporate society, ...

This Is How To Spend Your Money To Maximize Happiness

Money can’t buy happiness? Please. We all know that’s just something rich people say to stop us from robbing them. Money might not buy lasting, profound joy, but it can undoubtedly rent some pretty good times.

We all fantasize about the kind of happiness that comes with six zeroes, a gated community and a butler to iron your money for you. Even if vast wealth doesn’t buy happiness, it’s better to have a Birkin bag to keep your sadness in.

But seriously — can money really buy happiness? The lat...