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

by Eric Barker

Change the story and you change y...

We can apply game mechanics to our lives and turn dull moments into fun ones. Can this make us grittier at work and lead to success in life? Oh yeah.

let’s “game the system.”

all good games have in common: WNGF. They’re Winnable. They have Novel challenges and Goals, and provide Feedback.

“justifiable optimism” makes difficult things fun. Games are often harder than real life, but they are fun when they’re hard and boring when they’re easy.

When we’re playing a well-designed game, failure doesn’t disappoint us. It makes us happy in a very particular way: excited, interested, and most of all optimistic.

you have control in a game. What you do is important. Your actions make a difference, so you know your time is well spent. Research shows that a feeling of control kills stress. Even when you just feel you have control, stress plummets. On the other hand, the office often feels like a game that’s not winnable. You don’t feel you have control. You don’t feel like what you do makes much of a difference. Who wants to play that game?

You may not be able to overhaul how your company does things, but like Joe Simpson, you can define a game for yourself that is winnable. Is your game to learn as much as possible at the office so you’re ready for that promotion? Do you want to get better at giving presentations or acquire another skill set? All of these are winnable.

NOVEL CHALLENGES Good games continually have new levels, new enemies, new achievements. Our brains love novelty, and good games make sure we’re always stimulated by something just a little different, honing our attention.

“flow,” which is when we’re immersed in something enough to forget the passage of time. We’re never bored or overwhelmed because good games keep a perfect balance of hard but not too hard, easy but never too easy.

Csikszentmihályi’s research showed that flow was most reliably and most efficiently produced by the specific combination of self-chosen goals, personally optimized obstacles, and continuous feedback that make up the essential structure of gameplay.

think back to your first day at your job. That certainly wasn’t boring. There was so much to learn, so many new and different things to master. Slightly overwhelming perhaps, but it was novel and challenging. Six months later I’m guessing that all stopped. It’s now like playing the same level of a game ten hours a day, five days a week for years. That’s not a fun game.

We crave ease, but stimulation is what really makes us happy. We try to subtract at work, do less, check out. These are signs of burnout. We don’t need to subtract; we need to add novel challenges to create engagement.

to make work fun, add challenges. For something to have meaning, you ultimately have to make your mark, to be engaged. If your game is winnable, if you have control, if it challenges you—without being overwhelming—you’ll enjoy it more.

good games are very clear about what you need to do to win. They serve to focus you and guide decision-making.

In an office environment, there are definite goals—but are they your goals? When the company gets what it wants, do you always get what you want? Um, not so much. You can’t get what you want until you take the time to decide what you want.

FEEDBACK If you do something right, a game rewards you with points or abilities. If you do something wrong, you’re penalized.

you always know where you stand in a game, how you’re doing, and what you need to do to perform better.

the most motivating thing is progress in meaningful work.

the best way to motivate people, day in and day out, is by facilitating progress—even small wins.” In fact, the data shows that consistent small wins are even better at producing happiness than occasionally bagging an elephant:

“A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” The reward games provide is often nothing more than a cute badge or a simple animation, but those silly little things keep you playing.

So you need a better way to score your work game. Amabile recommends taking a moment at the end of every day to ask yourself, “What one thing can I do to make progress on important work tomorrow?”

Do you walk a lot more because of your Fitbit?

Games become addictive. If you craft your work into one, you can find success and happiness at the same time with a positive feedback loop.

You can use a game frame perspective to “level up” in other areas of your life as well. Being a spouse, parent, friend, and neighbor can all benefit from WNGF—doing what is winnable, has novel challenges and goals, and provides feedback. Plus, games are always more fun when played with other people.

Whether it’s optimism, meaning, or a simple game, the story in your head is always the answer to perseverance.

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

While grit is often about stories, quitting is often an issue of limits—pushing them, optimizing them, and most of all, knowing them.

an athlete as saying, “Everything is opportunity/cost. If I go out to a movie instead of going hiking as my leisure activity, what is the cost of that? If I go to the movies instead of a hike, does that help or hurt my paddling? I’ve got to judge that.”

Once you’ve found something you’re passionate about, quitting secondary things can be an advantage, because it frees up time to do that number-one thing. Whenever you wish you had more time, more money, etc., strategic quitting is the answer.

We fear missing opportunities, but the irony is by not quitting unproductive things ASAP we are missing the opportunity to do more of what matters or try more things that might.

“The executive who wants to be effective and who wants his organization to be effective polices all programs, all activities, all tasks. He always asks: ‘Is this still worth doing?’ And if it isn’t, he gets rid of it so as to be able to concentrate on the few tasks that, if done with excellence, will really make a difference in the results of his own job and in the performance of his organization.”

So what’s the first step? Know your number-one priority. Then start quitting stuff that isn’t as important and see what happens.

when we choose to quit pursuing unattainable goals, we’re happier, less stressed, and get sick less often. Which people are the most stressed out? Those who wouldn’t quit what wasn’t working.

We always think we need more: more help, more motivation, more energy. But in our current world the answer is often the exact opposite: we need less. Fewer distractions, fewer goals, fewer responsibilities. Is that so we can watch more TV? No. We need less of those things so we can go all in on our priorities.

lucky people maximize opportunities. The study showed they are more open to new experiences, more extroverted, and less neurotic.

people are twice as likely to regret a failure to act. Why? We rationalize our failures, but we can’t rationalize away the stuff we never tried at all. As we get older we also tend to remember the good things and forget the bad. So simply doing more means greater happiness when we’re older (and cooler stories for the grandkids).

“activating good-luck-related superstitions via a common saying or action (e.g., “break a leg,” keeping one’s fingers crossed) or a lucky charm improves subsequent performance in golfing, motor dexterity, memory, and anagram games.” But it’s not because of magic. These actions give people confidence, which helps them perform better.

So keep trying new things. It makes you luckier. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

Fail fast and fail cheap.

you’re not trying to be Batman. But all too often you and I act like we are. We think we always have to be perfect. One failure and it’s all over. But you’re not Batman. You can fail and quit and learn. In fact, that’s the only way you can learn.

So what happens if you fail at something? You won’t die like Batman, so you shouldn’t act like you’re Batman. Try being more like a comedian or a kindergartener. Try things. Quit what fails. Then apply grit.

If you don’t know what to be gritty at yet, you need to try lots of things—knowing you’ll quit most of them—to find the answer. Once you discover your focus, devote 5 to 10 percent of your time to little experiments to make sure you keep learning and growing. This gives you the best of both worlds. Use trying and quitting as a deliberate strategy to find out what is worth not quitting.

The things you should opportunity/cost quit, à la Spencer, are things you do every day or week that produce no value.

Giving something a shot. Taking a yoga class—but not signing up for a yearlong membership just yet. This is what spurs new opportunities and creates good luck.

“People who switch jobs more frequently early in their careers tend to have higher wages and incomes in their prime-working years. Job-hopping is actually correlated with higher incomes, because people have found better matches—their true calling.”

trying stuff outside your field of expertise is correlated with big achievements.

Facing different challenges in different contexts allowed them to look at things differently, to challenge assumptions, and to realize breakthroughs.

Spending 5 percent of your time trying new things, knowing you will quit most of them, can lead to great opportunities.

people who expect a fairy-tale relationship experience a lot more disappointment than those who don’t. What’s the problem here? We’re dreaming but we’re not taking reality into consideration. We’re not thinking about the obstacles that life presents so that we can assemble a solid plan for finding and staying with that special someone.