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

by Eric Barker

just speaking first and often—very confident behavior—makes others perceive you as a leader.

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” Faking it can be a very bad strategy, because when you fool others you can end up fooling yourself.

Confidence can improve performance and success. It can make others believe in you. But confidence can also be extremely dangerous. It can lead to delusion and hubris. And when your overconfidence meets reality, just like Yanagi’s did, you too can get your ass kicked.

Want to know which CEOs will run their company into the ground? Count how many times they use the word “I” in their annual letter to shareholders. This is what financial analyst Laura Rittenhouse discovered when she evaluated leaders and how their companies performed. Me, me, me means death, death, death for corporations.

Even Machiavelli, who was not known for recommending sensitivity, warned that leaders need people who will be honest with them in private lest they end up surrounded by fearful sycophants.

We need optimism and confidence to keep going and convince others to join our cause, but negativity and pessimism help us see problems so we can make them better. Yes, the former feel much better, but both are necessary.

So how do you develop self-compassion? It starts with something you saw with Navy SEAL James Waters: talking to yourself. But instead of building yourself up with motivational stuff you may not believe and compliments that may not be true, just talk to yourself nicely, gently, like Grandmom would.

be self-compassionate. It’s got all the upsides of confidence without the downsides.

In all professional jobs you see a similar effect: “The top 10 percent of workers produce 80 percent more than the average, and 700 percent more than the bottom 10 percent.”

A Manhattan Project physicist IQ of 180 might be nice, but those 60 points don’t make the difference that more hours will.

As Michelangelo once said, “If people knew how hard I worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.”

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.”

“Those who stayed very involved in meaningful careers and worked the hardest, lived the longest.” Meaningful work means doing something that’s (a) important to you and (b) something you’re good at. Plenty of research shows that if you do those things you’re uniquely good at (psychologists call them “signature strengths”), they’re some of the biggest happiness-boosting activities of all. A Gallup study reported, “The more hours per day Americans get to use their strengths to do what they do best, the less likely they are to report experiencing worry, stress, anger, sadness, or physical pain.” Imagine what life would be like if your job entailed using your signature strengths all day, every day. Of course you’d work long hours. Who’d want to go home?

If a meaningful career boosts longevity, what kills you sooner? Unemployment. Eran Shor, a professor at McGill University, found that being jobless increases premature mortality by a whopping 63 percent. And preexisting health issues made no difference, implying that it’s not a correlation, it’s very likely causation. This was no small study. It covered forty years, twenty million people, and fifteen countries. That 63 percent figure held no matter where the person lived.

What about retirement? That’s the “good” unemployment, right? Wrong. Retiring is associated with cognitive decline, heart disease, and cancer. Those effects weren’t due to aging but because people stop being active and engaged.

We commonly refer to the problem as “burnout,” but what’s fascinating is that psychologists have realized that burnout isn’t just an acute overdose of stress; it’s pretty much plain ol’ clinical depression.

Why is it that companies that wouldn’t think twice about firing you for being drunk on the job don’t mind creating conditions that effectively make you drunk on the job? You’re not a computer that can run 24/7 without a hitch. You need rest. But you’ll be punished for sleeping on the job. Meanwhile, sleeping on the job turns out to be a really good idea. The evidence for naps improving performance is pretty overwhelming.

Those mirrored elevator lobbies? That’s not elegant design. Those mirrors are there because when we can stare at ourselves we pay less attention to how long the wait time is and complaints drop.

In the words of the great philosopher Tyler Durden, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

In the modern era, the standards of success have gotten absurd. They’re not difficult to reach; they’re impossible. TV shows you twenty-something Silicon Valley billionaires. Think you’re good at something? There’s someone on the Internet who is better, works less, and is happier. They have nice teeth too. For most of human existence when we looked around us there were one or two hundred people in our tribe and we could be the best at something. We could stand out and be special and valuable. Now our context is a global tribe of seven-plus billion. There’s always someone better to compare yourself to, and the media is always reporting on these people, which raises the standards just when you think you may be close to reaching them.

when the world doesn’t give you much choice and things don’t work out the way you want, it’s the world’s fault. What else could you have done? But when you have one hundred options and you don’t choose well, the burden shifts because you could have picked better. Here’s the problem: We love having choices. We hate making choices. Having choices means having possibilities. Making choices means losing possibilities. And having so many choices increases the chance of regret.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”

You have to make a decision. The world will not draw a line. You must. You need to ask What do I want? Otherwise you’re only going to get what they want. Sorry to have to break this to you but in today’s world “having it all” isn’t possible when others determine the limits in each category. We used to rely on the world to tell us when we were done, but now the balance must come from you. Otherwise you risk ending up with that number-one regret of the dying: not having had the courage to live the life you wanted and instead lived the life others prescribed.

Research shows we often don’t choose to do what really makes us happy; we choose what’s easy.

Researchers discovered that half of crimes happen in just 5 percent of the city. This is called “hot spot” policing. Giving those few areas twice the number of police patrols cut crime in half in the hot spots and reduced citywide emergency calls by 6 to 13 percent.

We got to the moon and built the pyramids without email and Facebook. You can go a couple of hours without checking them.

“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.”