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

by Eric Barker

The longer the time we anticipate we’ll be dealing with someone, the better the behavior we can expect.

isn’t TFT a lot like Adam Grant’s Matchers? There are two critical distinctions. TFT starts off with cooperation. Matchers don’t necessarily cooperate. Matchers tend to wait until others do something nice before they respond in kind. This passive attitude drastically reduces the number of interactions they have. Meanwhile, Givers run around handing out favors, losing a little to Takers, getting a fair share back from Matchers, and winning the lottery whenever they meet another Giver. Givers can be great networkers by merely being themselves, while the hesitant Matchers wait for an engraved invitation to the party.

DON’T BE ENVIOUS 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.

“Tit for tat won the tournament not by beating the other player but by eliciting behavior from the other player [that] allowed both to do well.” Don’t worry how well the other side is doing; worry about how well you’re doing.

DON’T BE THE FIRST TO DEFECT

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.

RECIPROCATE BOTH COOPERATION AND DEFECTION Never betray anyone initially. Why make someone question your motives? But if a person cheats you, don’t be a martyr.

DON’T BE TOO CLEVER Tester sounds like a rational strategy: see what you can get away with and go no further. But this strategy lacks the clarity of TFT’s, and while Tester edged out a gain here and there, it came at the cost of a good reputation.

in zero-sum games like chess you want your intentions to be unclear, but in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, it’s the exact opposite. You want the other player to see what you’re doing so they can join you. Life is more often like the latter.

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.

Kissing your boss’s ass isn’t immoral or unsavory if the boss is someone you actually respect.

your boss has a much larger effect on your happiness and success than the company at large.

RULE 2: COOPERATE FIRST

Givers outdo Matchers because they volunteer help without waiting to see what the other person will do.

Doing quick favors for new acquaintances tells other Givers you’re a Giver and can earn you the protection of Matchers.

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

the best way to punish Takers in the workplace is good old-fashioned gossip. Warning others about Takers will make you feel better and can help police bad behavior.

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

Every Friday send your boss an email summarizing your accomplishments for the week—nothing fancy, but quickly relating the good work you’re doing. You might think they know what you’re up to, but they’re busy. They have their own problems. They’ll appreciate it and begin to associate you with the good things they’re hearing (from you, of course).

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

bad behavior is strong in the short term but good behavior wins over in the long term. So to the best of your ability, make things longer term.

RULE 6: FORGIVE

Our culture beats us over the head with the idea that grit—sticking to something, working hard, and not quitting—is the secret to success. Often they’re right. Grit is one of the key reasons why we see such differing levels of achievement between people of the same intelligence and talent levels.

kids with grit are happier, physically healthier, and more popular with their peers. “The capacity to continue trying despite repeated setbacks was associated with a more optimistic outlook on life in 31 percent of people studied, and with greater life satisfaction in 42 percent of them.”

Why the heck don’t we do it? One reason is that we all think we know where grit comes from—and, as you’ll find out in this chapter, we’re wrong. The second reason is that while grit can produce success, there’s a whole other side to the story that no parent tells their children and no teacher tells their students: sometimes quitting is the smartest choice. And giving up, when done right, can make you a huge success too.

A Navy study revealed a number of things that people with grit do—often unknowingly—that keep them going when things get hard. One of them comes up in the psychological research again and again: “positive self-talk.” Yes, Navy SEALs need to be badass, but one of the keys to that is thinking like The Little Engine That Could. In your head, you say between three hundred and a thousand words every minute to yourself. Those words can be positive (I can do it) or negative (Oh god, I can’t take this anymore). It turns out that when these words are positive, they have a huge effect on your mental toughness, your ability to keep going. Subsequent studies of military personnel back this up. When the Navy started teaching BUD/S applicants to speak to themselves positively, combined with other mental tools, BUD/S passing rates increased nearly ten percent. Getting through BUD/S is a lot of physical hardship, but quitting is mental.

during the early rounds of training the researchers must have screwed up and not made the connection between the tone and shock clear enough. The shocks had felt random to the dogs. So instead of making the connection that this was a warning signal, they had learned they had no control. They were helpless. Maybe the pooches weren’t thinking between three hundred and one thousand words a minute like you and I, but they weren’t dumb either: These shocks are going to happen no matter what. Why keep trying? The dogs had learned the concept of futility.

We give up, rationalize, accept our fate . . . but then occasionally wonder why we didn’t do better or do more. But we’re not always right that we “can’t do it.” Sometimes there’s a way out that we didn’t see because we gave up.

one in three did not become helpless. They kept trying to figure out why the shocks were happening and what they could do. They thought every failure was an anomaly and they kept going. And it’s only reasonable that these people end up either (1) utterly delusional or (2) far more successful than you or I. It all comes down to the stories you tell yourself. Some of us say “I’m not cut out for this” or “I’ve never been any good at these things.” Others say “I just need to keep working at it” or “I just need better tips on form.”

Helplessness was the result of a pessimistic attitude. When you believe things will not get better, it’s irrational to keep trying. You just shrug and go home. In situations where you truly cannot win, this is the right choice. But in difficult but not impossible situations, when persistence is called for, pessimism kills grit.

“depression is pessimism writ large.” When you keep down the path of feeling helpless again and again, you end up clinically depressed.

Optimism is associated with better health and a longer life.

Expecting a positive outcome from negotiations makes groups more likely to close a deal and to be happy with it. Optimists are luckier. Studies show by thinking positive they persevere and end up creating more opportunities for themselves.

Optimists and pessimists shape their stories of the world very differently. Seligman called this “explanatory style,” and it comes down to three Ps: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization. Pessimists tell themselves that bad events will last a long time, or forever (I’ll never get this done); are universal (I can’t trust any of these people); and are their own fault (I’m terrible at this). Optimists tell themselves that bad events are temporary (That happens occasionally, but it’s not a big deal ); have a specific cause and aren’t universal (When the weather is better that won’t be a problem); and are not their fault (I’m good at this, but today wasn’t my lucky day). Seligman found that when you shift your explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic it makes you feel better and you become grittier.

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:

If life is all about pleasure, then when it ceases to be fun or immediately beneficial, we quit. When we step outside the wish for comfort, when we live for something greater than ourselves, we no longer have to fight the pain; we accept the pain as a sacrifice.

Our brains are wired to try to make sense of things. Meaning is part of our operating system. We need to think the world makes sense and that we have control. The brain doesn’t like randomness. So what is meaning? Meaning, for the human mind, comes in the form of the stories we tell ourselves about the world.

you have about two thousand daydreams every day, telling yourself little stories about this or that. For nearly every area of your life, like career or relationships, you have a story you tell yourself about it. But rarely are these consciously or deliberately constructed.

people who committed suicide often weren’t in the worst circumstances, but they had fallen short of the expectations they had of themselves. Their lives were not matching the stories in their heads.

life can be a mess. He says stories are a filter, imposing order on an often chaotic world. Stories remove information. They make recollections less accurate. They are deliberately constructed, but life often isn’t. He’s right. There are a zillion things going on every second. We cherry-pick certain elements (“That time I gave a homeless man a dollar”) and ignore others (“The time I pushed my cousin down a flight of stairs”) to arrive at a story about our lives (“I am a good person”). In economics, the term “bounded rationality” basically means that human beings aren’t perfectly rational because they always have limitations, such as how much information is available or the amount of time there is to think things through. There is too much going on in the world for our little brains to process; we must distill it.

Pessimists outperform optimists in law school. And this same quality makes them very unhappy. Law is the highest paid profession in the United States and yet, when surveyed, 52 percent of lawyers described themselves as dissatisfied with their jobs.

Fate is that thing we cannot avoid. It comes for us despite how we try to run from it. Destiny, on the other hand, is the thing we must chase, what we must bring to fruition.

Success doesn’t come from shrugging off the bad as unchangeable and saying things are already “meant to be”; it’s the result of chasing the good and writing our own future. Less fate, more destiny.

What if you have a story that isn’t working? You think you know who you are and what’s important, but you’re not happy or getting where you want to be. It might be time to play screenwriter and take another pass at the script that is your life.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” So instead of merely focusing on intentions, make sure that in your day-to-day actions you are being the main character in your perfect story.

“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.” When school classes and grading are structured like a game, students perform better.

We’ve all experienced something malfunctioning and we just get frustrated and angry. But occasionally we’re made curious by a problem and go down the rabbit hole of trying to solve it, and then this “inconvenience” becomes fun. It’s like a detective solving a mystery.

By engaging in cognitive reappraisal, and telling ourselves a different story about what is happening, we can subvert the entire willpower paradigm. Some research has shown that willpower is like a muscle, and it gets tired with overuse. But it only gets depleted if there’s a struggle. Games change the struggle to something else. They make the process fun, and as Mischel showed in his research, we are able to persist far longer and without the same level of teeth-gritting willpower depletion.

What if I put a big ol’ pile of cocaine in front of you? (I’ll assume, for the sake of argument, you are not a cocaine addict.) Cocaine is pleasurable. You know that. People do it for a reason, right? But you’d likely reply, “No, thanks.” Why? Because it doesn’t jibe with your story. You just don’t see yourself as the kind of person who does cocaine. You could come up with all kinds of reasons why. (What’s a reason? A story.) Would you have to close your eyes and clench your fists and beg me to take the cocaine away? Probably not. You’d exert no willpower on this one. But would the same be true with a juicy steak? Especially if you were hungry? Say you are the kind of person who indulges in steak. Now what happens? Struggle. Willpower depletion. Unless you are a vegetarian. Boom—another story. You’d say no and exert zero willpower. You’d have no trouble ignoring the steak.