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

by Eric Barker

the great majority of former high school valedictorians do not appear headed for the very top of adult achievement arenas.” In another interview Arnold said, “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries . . . they typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.” Was it just that these eighty-one didn’t happen to reach the stratosphere? No. Research shows that what makes students likely to be impressive in the classroom is the same thing that makes them less likely to be home-run hitters outside the classroom.

Grades are, however, an excellent predictor of self-discipline, conscientiousness, and the ability to comply with rules.

So under the right circumstances there can be big upsides to “negative” qualities. Your “bad” traits might be intensifiers.

People high in conscientiousness do great in school and in many areas of life where there are clear answers and a clear path. But when there aren’t, life is really hard for them.

You were successful because you happened to be in an environment where your biases and predispositions and talents and abilities all happened to align neatly with those things that would produce success in that environment.

The lesson from cases of people both keeping and losing their jobs is that as long as you keep your boss or bosses happy, performance really does not matter that much and, by contrast, if you upset them, performance won’t save you. For

Why do jerks succeed? Sure, some of it’s duplicity and evil, but there’s something we can learn from them in good conscience: they’re assertive about what they want, and they’re not afraid to let others know about what they’ve achieved.

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.

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

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

So what’s a good balance? 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.

Optimists are luckier. Studies show by thinking positive they persevere and end up creating more opportunities for themselves.

this attitude isn’t genetic; it all comes from the stories you tell yourself about the world. And that’s something you can change.

when you shift your explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic it makes you feel better and you become grittier.

when you take a little time to think about death, you become more kind and generous to others. You put aside short-term goals for a moment and consider who you really want to be. It sounds morbid, but people who contemplate the end actually behave in healthier ways—and therefore may actually live longer. It also has been shown to increase self-esteem. You want to talk about “big picture” thinking? It doesn’t get bigger than this. We’re talking about stuff like fate and destiny.

Good games keep you going by giving frequent, immediate feedback. But what about your job? You get a review annually.

Henry David Thoreau said, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

But we act like there are no limits. When we choose an extra hour at work, we are, in effect, choosing one less hour with our kids. We can’t do it all and do it well. And there will not be more time later. Time does not equal money, because we can get more money.

The answer is simple: 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. You’re not being a total flake but someone who strategically tests the waters.

Economist Henry Siu said, “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.”

Among those with at least fifteen years of work experience, respondents who have had two or fewer roles had only a 2 percent chance of eventually becoming a C-level leader, while those who have held at least five positions had an 18% chance of reaching the top.

Fits with what i have seen

WOOP—wish, outcome, obstacle, plan—is applicable to most any of your goals, from career to relationships to exercise and weight loss.

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.

Harvard researcher Shawn Achor found that the workers least likely to develop workplace friendships were also the least likely to get promoted. (Feel free to read that sentence a few hundred more times so it sinks in.)

Think about the wisest people you’ve known. Were they full of bluster and hubris? Or utterly without confidence? They were probably calm and understanding, forgiving and less judgmental. We’d all like to achieve that level of wisdom one day. And self-compassion is a great first step.

Take an A student used to scoring in the top 10 percent of virtually anything she does. One study showed that if she gets just under seven hours of sleep on weekdays, and about forty minutes more on weekends, she will begin to score in the bottom 9 percent of non-sleep-deprived individuals. And you don’t fully recover that brainpower as fast as you might think. A 2008 study in Stockholm showed that even after a week of normal sleep people still weren’t 100 percent after just a few five-hour nights.

Hmmm

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.”

Mihály Csikszentmihályi found that watching TV made teenagers truly happy 13 percent of the time. Hobbies scored 34 percent and sports or games got 44 percent. But what did teens choose to do most often? They spent four times as many hours watching television. Without a plan, we do what’s passive and easy—not what is really fulfilling.

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. Remember, you cannot maximize two things that are both dependent on the same resource: time.

If you get rid of unnecessary activities, schedule everything, use protected time, and batch busy work but you can’t stop people from piling unimportant tasks on your desk, you’ll forever be mired in the shallows.

Success comes in many forms. Some success is incredibly impressive, some simple and quaint, others almost absurd. We get hung up on the heights of success we see in the media and forget that it’s our personal definition of success that matters. And you can achieve that.

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.