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

by Eric Barker

Much of what we’ve been told about the qualities that lead to achievement is logical, earnest—and downright wrong.

sometimes an ugly duckling can be a swan if it finds the right pond.

First, schools reward students who consistently do what they are told. Academic grades correlate only loosely with intelligence (standardized tests are better at measuring IQ). Grades are, however, an excellent predictor of self-discipline, conscientiousness, and the ability to comply with rules.

Most of the subjects in the study were classified as “careerists”: they saw their job as getting good grades, not really as learning.

School has clear rules. Life often doesn’t. When there’s no clear path to follow, academic high achievers break down.

To be great we must be different. And that doesn’t come from trying to follow society’s vision of what is best, because society doesn’t always know what it needs.

In the right environment, bad can be good and odd can be beautiful.

The same traits that make people a nightmare to deal with can also make them the people who change the world.

It’s carved into stone at the Oracle at Delphi. The Gospel of Thomas says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

And knowing yourself, in terms of achieving what you want in life, means being aware of your strengths.

Research by Gallup shows that the more hours per day you spend doing what you’re good at, the less stressed you feel and the more you laugh, smile, and feel you’re being treated with respect.

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.

Whether you’re a filtered doctor or a wild, unfiltered artist, research shows the pond you pick matters enormously.

When you choose your pond wisely, you can best leverage your type, your signature strengths, and your context to create tremendous value. This is what makes for a great career, but such self-knowledge can create value wherever you choose to apply it.

You can do this too: know thyself and pick the right pond. Identify your strengths and pick the right place to apply them.

Appearances seem to trump truth at the office. According to Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, managing what your boss thinks of you is far more important than actual hard work.

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.

they’re assertive about what they want, and they’re not afraid to let others know about what they’ve achieved.

Research agrees: bad behavior is infectious. It spreads. Soon you won’t be the only one scheming.

You’ve shown others that the way to succeed is by breaking the rules, so they’ll break them too, because bad behavior is infectious and people do what works. You’ll be creating other predators like yourself. Then the good people leave. That creates a ripple effect: you can quickly create a place where you don’t want to work anymore, like Moldova.

Economists call it the “discipline of continuous dealings.” When you know and trust someone, it makes a transaction smoother and faster.

We all know a martyr who goes out of their way to help others and yet fails to meet their own needs or ends up exploited by Takers. We also all know someone everyone loves because they are so helpful, and they succeed because everyone appreciates and feels indebted to them.

This is where the Moldovans have it all wrong. By not trusting, by not helping others, they miss out on a lot of what makes us happy.

Our fate rarely hangs on any one decision.

Adam Grant’s research proves this distinction as well. Givers often take it on the chin in the short term, but over the long term—when they can meet other Givers and gain the protection of Matchers—their reputation becomes known, and boom. They go from the bottom of success metrics to the top.

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.

Don’t worry how well the other side is doing; worry about how well you’re doing.

Matchers wait and miss too many opportunities. And Takers trade short-term gains for long-term losses. Remember, all the big winners were nice and all the big losers started off betraying.

Never betray anyone initially. Why make someone question your motives? But if a person cheats you, don’t be a martyr. In the tournament, picking fights resulted in low scores, but retaliating increased scores.

Now, 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.

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.

When you see your peers cheat, you’re more likely to cheat. And when your peers see each other cheat, everyone is more likely to bend the rules. That’s one step closer to Moldova.

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

When Harvard Business School’s Deepak Malhotra teaches negotiation, the first thing he says isn’t “Be tough” or “Show the other side you mean business.” His number-one recommendation to students is “They need to like you.”

You do need to be visible. Your boss does need to like you. This is not proof of a heartless world; it’s just human nature. Hard work doesn’t pay off if your boss doesn’t know whom to reward for it. Would you expect a great product to sell with zero marketing? Probably not.

“[People are] always trying to discern two things: whether a potential partner can be trusted and whether he or she is likely to be encountered again. Answers to those two questions, far beyond anything else, will determine what any of us will be motivated to do in the moment.”

The world can be a harsh place. Optimists lie to themselves. But if we all stop believing anything can change, nothing ever will. We need a bit of fantasy to keep us going.

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. Frankl said, “What is to give light must endure burning.”

Having a story about the meaning of life helps us to cope with hard times.

The pessimists were more accurate and realistic, and they ended up depressed. The truth can hurt.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

One is “cognitive reappraisal,” a fancy term for “telling yourself a different story about what is happening.” You know how the baby who doesn’t want to eat suddenly opens his or her mouth when the spoon is an airplane? Yeah, we adults really aren’t that much different from toddlers. (Sorry.)

The good news is that this is partly in our hands. Research shows we often don’t do what makes us happiest; we do what’s easy. Like if we don’t feel like going out with friends, we may make ourselves, and then we have fun. We think we want to rest, but what we really want is a different type of challenge.

Therefore, 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.

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

Know your number-one priority. Then start quitting stuff that isn’t as important and see what happens. You’ll learn really fast if something really is more essential than you thought.

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.

But the old saying is true: “You regret most the things you did not do.”

Fail fast and fail cheap.

This is what spurs new opportunities and creates good luck. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” In other words: Fail fast, fail cheap.