Eric Barker's Blog, page 5

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...

This Is How To Keep Your Brain Sharp As You Age: 5 Secrets From Research

Aging isn’t always so fun. Your body starts making sounds like a settling old house. One day you’re in your prime, and the next, you’re googling whether “senior moment” is a medically recognized condition.

The thing about aging is that it’s sneaky, like a ninja with joint pain. You try to recall a name, and your brain’s like, “We have names in here somewhere, but we’re going to need to file a request for that. Check back in two to five business days.”

And everybody is scared that this means Al...

New Research Reveals 8 Secrets That Will Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Succeed

A study by Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at University of Hertfordshire, found 88% of people fail to achieve their New Year’s Resolutions. Yeah, almost nine out of ten.

Cynically, you could see these resolutions as a yearly exercise in self-delusion. The tradition where we all collectively decide to lie to ourselves in a more structured format. Often, they’re like annual subscriptions we buy for a better version of ourselves… only to realize we’re more into the free trial.

Why do the...

This Is The Simple Way To Achieve Your Goals: 3 Secrets From Research

Strategy. It’s treated with a reverence usually reserved for sacred relics or the last slice of pizza.

I love reading corporate strategy because I’m a big fan of fiction. Typically, it’s a phrasebook of jargon that could make a dictionary weep. It says nothing, offends no one, has no clear actions, and makes no hard decisions. It’s all “blue sky” vision. Rarely are challenges mentioned or any insight provided. It’s all mission, values, and lots of vague goals.

And when we talk about “life stra...

This Is The Emotionally Intelligent Way To Communicate With Kids

Parenting can feel like an inescapable theme park of chaos. Truth is, you’re not simply a parent, but a negotiator, a janitor, a superhero, and the prime suspect in the mysterious case of the missing sanity. It’s a job as exhausting as it is exhilarating, as thankless as it is rewarding.

Little kids are certainly a challenge. They think mud is a food group and possess the lung capacity of a blue whale. To a small child, a closed bathroom door is an open invitation to barge in and begin an in-d...

This Is How To Make Emotionally Intelligent Friendships: 8 Secrets

Emotional intelligence. That elusive, ethereal quality that some people seem to have in spades, while the rest of us are left scrabbling around in the social dirt like confused, charmless mole people.

EI is complex, but one of the best ways to increase it is simple: learn how to be a good listener. Listening is the golden ticket, the unsung hero of the social Olympics.

Problem is, these days listening is about as popular as a landline. Everyone wants to be the podcast; nobody wants to be the a...

This Is How To Overcome Fear: 4 Secrets From Research

Ah, Halloween. The time of year when you can paint your face green, throw on some horns, and traipse around the neighborhood begging for candy without ending up in an intervention. The only thing scarier than the ghouls and goblins is the calorie count.

The emotion du jour? Fear. If fear were a person, I wouldn’t invite it to my birthday party. Outside of Halloween, we generally prefer not to be afraid in life. And that’s fear’s purpose: to keep us safe. It’s like the world’s most irritating b...