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

by Eric Barker

When it comes to the extremes of performance, averages don’t matter; what matters is variance, those deviations from the norm.

In the famous commencement speech Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005 he said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

It’s what math folks call an “optimal stopping problem.”

Want to be gritty like a Navy SEAL? You need to remember Seligman’s three Ps; don’t see bad things as permanent, pervasive, or personal.

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.

People who aren’t that experienced in a field don’t have the knowledge to properly evaluate how easy or hard something in that arena might be.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is this odd phenomenon of people with the least experience being the most confident because they don’t have the experience to judge just how challenging something is.

When we think we know all the answers, we stop looking for them.

When we’re less sure, we’re more open to new ideas and we’re actively and passively scanning the world for new ones. When we have that confident feeling of power, we don’t pay as much attention, because we feel we don’t need to. A study aptly titled “Power, Competitiveness, and Advice Taking: Why the Powerful Don’t Listen” showed that just making someone feel powerful was enough to make them ignore advice from not only novices but also experts in a field.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic said: Low self-confidence may turn you into a pessimist, but when pessimism teams-up with ambition it often produces outstanding performance. To be the very best at anything, you will need to be your harshest critic, and that is almost impossible when your starting point is high self-confidence.

Research shows increasing self-compassion has all the benefits of self-esteem—but without the downsides. You can feel good and perform well while not turning into a jerk or being unable to improve. Unlike self-confidence, self-compassion doesn’t lead to delusion. In fact, one study, “Self-Compassion and Reactions to Unpleasant Self-Relevant Events: The Implications of Treating Oneself Kindly,” showed that people high in the trait had increased clarity. They saw themselves and the world more accurately but didn’t judge themselves as harshly when they failed. Meanwhile, people focused on self-esteem often feel the need to delude themselves or to dismiss negative—but useful—feedback in order to still feel good about themselves. They cling to their self-validating theories instead of seeing the real world. This leads to hubris and narcissism. When you check the numbers, there is a solid correlation between self-esteem and narcissism, while the connection between self-compassion and narcissism is pretty much zero.

Elevator designers. Author James Gleick notes that every nine days or so the products of the Otis Elevator company lift the population of the Earth.

They’ve realized we can wait about fifteen seconds on average. At forty seconds, we start clenching our fists. When surveyed, people who had to wait two minutes report it as ten minutes. So they’ve tried tricking us. 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.

Of course, all those hours need to come from somewhere. When HBR talked to those top 6 percent of earners working sixty or more hours a week, they found “more than 69 percent believe they would be healthier if they worked less extremely; 58 percent think their work gets in the way of strong relationships with their children; 46 percent think it gets in the way of good relationships with their spouses; and 50 percent say their jobs make it impossible to have a satisfying sex life.”

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

There used to be twenty-six different types of Head and Shoulders shampoo. Procter & Gamble said “Enough” and cut it down to a slightly more reasonable fifteen, which produced a 10 percent bump in profits.

Without a plan, we do what’s passive and easy—not what is really fulfilling.

You cannot balance your time if you don’t know where it’s going. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove once said, “To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.”

1. HAPPINESS = ENJOYING 2. ACHIEVEMENT = WINNING 3. SIGNIFICANCE = COUNTING (TO OTHERS) 4. LEGACY = EXTENDING

So look for hot spots in your schedule. When do you waste the most time? When do you overdo one of the big four at the expense of another? You’ll get more bang for your buck changing your routines around these hot spots than by a vague notion of “working less” or “trying to spend more time with the family.” By the same token, look for trends that are working. When do you get disproportionate results? Early morning or late evening? At home or at the office? Try to make those moments more consistent.

Kevin Bolen, managing director of Strategic Investments and Growth Initiatives at KPMG, wanted more time with his wife and two sons. His main hot spot was traveling for work. So he focused on losing his platinum status on all his frequent-flier accounts. That became his goal. He got fewer free flights and perks, but it became a great barometer for how successful his work–life balance efforts were.

Cal thinks to-do lists are the devil’s work. Because the lists don’t give any consideration to time.

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.

Cal calls this “fixed schedule productivity.” You need boundaries if you want work–life balance. This forces you to be efficient. By setting a deadline of six P.M. and then scheduling tasks, you can get control over that hurricane of duties, and you can be realistic instead of shocked by what is never going to happen.

Research shows that two and a half to four hours after waking is when your brain is sharpest. Do you want to waste that on a conference call or a staff meeting?

Cal Newport recommends a “shutdown ritual” in which you take the time to close out the day’s business and prepare for tomorrow. Research shows that writing down the things you need to take care of tomorrow can settle your brain and help you relax. As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explains, when you’re concerned about something and your grey matter is afraid you may forget, it engages a cluster of brain regions referred to as the “rehearsal loop.” And you keep worrying and worrying. Writing your thoughts down and making a plan for tomorrow switches this off.

“In a study I performed on 1,600 Harvard students in 2007, I found that there was a 0.7 correlation between perceived social support and happiness. This is higher than the connection between smoking and cancer.” How much money would it take to increase your happiness as much as a good social life does? Data from the Journal of Socio-Economics says you’d have to earn an extra $121,000 a year.

If you want to learn more, visit my website: Bakadesuyo.com. I have additional materials for you there. Just like that problematic word “networking,” your lizard brain doesn’t really understand the concept of author or writer guy, so let’s stick to what it does know: I’m your friend. Feel free to email me if you want to say hi. I’m at ebarker@ucla.edu.