Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

by Eric Barker

The filtered leaders didn’t rock the boat. The unfiltered leaders couldn’t help but rock it. Often they broke things, but sometimes they broke things like slavery, as Abraham Lincoln did.

When I spoke to Mukunda, he said, “The difference between good leaders and great leaders is not an issue of ‘more.’ They’re fundamentally different people.”

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.

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

So under the right circumstances there can be big upsides to “negative” qualities. Your “bad” traits might be intensifiers. But how can you turn them into superpowers?

First, know thyself. This phrase has been uttered many times throughout history. It’s carved into stone at the Oracle at Delphi. The Gospel of Thomas says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

knowing yourself, in terms of achieving what you want in life, means being aware of your strengths.

Once you know what type of person you are and your signature strengths, how do you thrive? This leads to Mukunda’s second piece of advice: pick the right pond.

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.

Whether you’re a filtered doctor or a wild, unfiltered artist, research shows the pond you pick matters enormously. When Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg looked at top Wall Street analysts who jumped ship to work for a competitor, he noticed something interesting: they stopped being top analysts. Why? We tend to think experts are experts just because of their unique skills and we forget the power of context, of knowing one’s way around, of the teams who support them, and the shorthand they develop together over time. That’s one of the things Groysberg discovered: when the analysts switched firms but brought their team with them, they stayed awesome.

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.

You can do this too: know thyself and pick the right pond. Identify your strengths and pick the right place to apply them.

If you’re more of an unfiltered type, be ready to blaze your own path. It’s risky, but that’s what you were built for. Leverage the intensifiers that make you unique. You’re more likely to reach the heights of success—and happiness—if you embrace your “flaws.”

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.

Then I looked at the other end of the spectrum and said if Givers are at the bottom, who’s at the top? Actually, I was really surprised to discover, it’s the Givers again. The people who consistently are looking for ways to help others are overrepresented not only at the bottom but also at the top of most success metrics.

Adam Grant’s research proves this distinction as well. Givers often take it on the chin in the short term, but over the long term—when they can meet other Givers and gain the protection of Matchers—their reputation becomes known, and boom. They go from the bottom of success metrics to the top.

Again, most of life isn’t zero-sum. Just because someone else wins, that doesn’t mean you lose. Sometimes that person needs the fruit and you need the peel. And sometimes the strategy that makes you lose small on this round makes you win big on the next.

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. Matchers wait and miss too many opportunities. And Takers trade short-term gains for long-term losses. Remember, all the big winners were nice and all the big losers started off betraying.

You need to be able to teach the people you’re dealing with because you want the relationship to continue. You cooperate with me, I cooperate with you. You betray me, I betray you. It’s that simple.

RULE 1: PICK THE RIGHT POND

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.

RULE 2: COOPERATE FIRST

This doesn’t mean you need to give twenty-dollar bills to everyone you meet. Favors can be quite small. We also often forget that something quite easy for us (a thirty-second email introduction) can have enormous payoffs for others (a new job). Doing quick favors for new acquaintances tells other Givers you’re a Giver and can earn you the protection of Matchers. Go ahead and send that new inmate a gift basket. When the knives come out in the prison yard you’ll have a lot more people watching your back.

RULE 3: BEING SELFLESS ISN’T SAINTLY, IT’S SILLY

Trusting others works better in general, but like Don Johnson at the blackjack table, having the edge doesn’t mean you’ll win every hand. You can’t predict how successful cooperating will be for any specific interaction, but you’ll win more than you lose.

RULE 4: WORK HARD—BUT MAKE SURE IT GETS NOTICED

Hard work doesn’t pay off if your boss doesn’t know whom to reward for it. Would you expect a great product to sell with zero marketing? Probably not.

RULE 5: THINK LONG TERM AND MAKE OTHERS THINK LONG TERM

RULE 6: FORGIVE

Life is noisy and complex, and we don’t have perfect information about others and their motives. Writing people off can be due just to a lack of clarity. Face it: you can’t even always trust yourself. You say you’re on a diet, then someone brings donuts to work and you blow it. Does that mean you’re a bad person and you should never trust yourself again? Of course not.

So is grit merely the optimistic stories you tell yourself about the future? No, sometimes the stories go much deeper than that. They go way past just helping you succeed—they can keep you alive when you’re in the most hellish place on Earth . . .

What Viktor Frankl realized was that in the most awful place on Earth, the people who kept going despite the horrors were the ones who had meaning in their lives: A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

It’s the stories we tell ourselves that keep us going. They can be a higher truth. Or, in many cases, they don’t need to be true at all.

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work on cognitive biases. Those are little hardwired shortcuts in our brains that help speed up decision-making. They’re usually helpful but not always rational. One example is loss aversion. Rationally, gaining a dollar should be as pleasurable as losing a dollar is painful. But that’s not how our minds work. Losing a dollar bothers us a lot more than earning a dollar makes us feel good. It makes sense; losing too much can mean death but gaining a lot . . . well, it’s nice but quickly results in diminishing returns. So evolution has wired us to fear losses a lot more than we love gains.

Never Split the difference

Stories aren’t perfect pictures of the world, but they allow us to succeed for this very reason. They can keep us going and become prophecy. You weren’t “born” to do anything in particular, but when your story says you were “born” to do something you perform better and persist. After all, it’s your destiny.

Picture your funeral. The people who loved you have all gathered to pay their respects. They’re going to praise the qualities that made you so special, that they will miss the most. What do you want them to say?

Remember James Waters, the Navy SEAL? When I talked to him about getting through BUD/S, he said this: “Many people don’t recognize that what they’re doing at BUD/S is assessing your ability to handle a difficult circumstance and keep going. It’s a game. You’ve got to have fun with it and you’ve got to keep your eye on the bigger picture.”

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

As a corollary, you have control in a game. What you do is important. Your actions make a difference, so you know your time is well spent.

You can’t get what you want until you take the time to decide what you want. Goals can be intimidating. We don’t want to fail, so often we don’t set them. But if you make your game winnable, setting goals will be less scary. Failure is okay in a game. As Nicole Lazarro discovered, failure in a game just makes things more fun.

Games may seem childish and trivial, but when you take the time to look at how many games are already secretly hidden in the things you do so passionately, the power of this perspective seems far less immature. Do you walk a lot more because of your Fitbit? Does Fantasy Football become an enjoyable part-time job for you?

Kindle lol

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

Seconds later he was in a world of pain. He was being trounced. But he didn’t quit. He had come here to find his courage and, like Rocky, his only goal was to go the distance . . .

This was their system: prototype and test, prototype and test, prototype and test—until the time was up. When there is no set path, this system wins. It’s an old Silicon Valley mantra: Fail fast and fail cheap.

You need to quit some things to find out what to be gritty at. And you need to try stuff knowing you might quit some of it to open yourself up to the luck and opportunities that can make you successful.

When you dream, that grey matter feels you already have what you want and so it doesn’t marshal the resources you need to motivate yourself and achieve. Instead, it relaxes. And you do less, you accomplish less, and those dreams stay mere dreams. Positive thinking, by itself, doesn’t work.

More dreams now mean less achievement later.

After you dream, think, What’s getting in the way of my fantasy? And what will I do to overcome that?

WOOP—wish, outcome, obstacle, plan—is applicable to most any of your goals, from career to relationships to exercise and weight loss.

1. DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU NEED TO BE GRITTY AT?