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

by Eric Barker

Faking it is too hard and the price of failure is too high. The short-term benefits of impressing others aren’t worth being labeled untrustworthy and moving to Moldova. Even if you’re successful in tricking others, this all too often leads to tricking yourself, which is the most dangerous scenario of all.

As Richard Feynman famously said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

In Benjamin Bloom’s classic study of top athletes, scientists, and artists, he found that one of the critical elements of a great mentor wasn’t just secret knowledge and emotional support; it was pushing you harder. A great mentor’s “expectations and demands were constantly raised until they were at a point where the student was expected to do virtually all that was humanly possible.”

TRACK YOUR TIME

“To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.” Write down where each hour goes as it happens. Don’t rely on your fallible memory. Do this for a week.

TO-DO LISTS ARE EVIL. SCHEDULE EVERYTHING.

Georgetown University professor Cal Newport is the Genghis Khan of productivity. And Cal thinks to-do lists are the devil’s work. Because the lists don’t give any consideration to time. Ever wonder why you never seem to get to the bottom of that list? You can easily list twenty-eight hours worth of activities for a twenty-four-hour day. You need to be realistic about what you can get done in the time you have. The only way to do that is to schedule things on a calendar instead of making an endless list.

CONTROL YOUR CONTEXT

One of the big lessons from social science in the last forty years is that environment matters. If you go to a buffet and the buffet is organized in one way, you will eat one thing. If it’s organized in a different way, you’ll eat different things. We think that we make decisions on our own, but the environment influences us to a great degree.

END THE DAY RIGHT—AND ON TIME

You used “fixed schedule productivity,” right? You decided when you wanted to leave work and arranged your schedule around that. Good, because Leslie Perlow said the key to getting those work–life balance results is to impose a “strict time-off mechanism.”

Steven Jay Ross said, it’s by dreaming and then doing something about those dreams that we can achieve success. In fact, it’s the only way we can.

What’s the most important thing to remember when it comes to success? One word: alignment. Success is not the result of any single quality; it’s about alignment between who you are and where you choose to be.