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

by Eric Barker

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

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

Meaningful doesn’t have to be saving orphans or curing the sick. As long as your story is meaningful to you, it has power.

Power reduces empathy, makes us hypocritical, and causes us to dehumanize others. To a degree, there’s a good reason for this: people in powerful positions need to make hard decisions that may be bad in the short term but good in the long term. Generals need to send soldiers into harm’s way to win a war. If they felt paralyzing guilt over every loss of life, there’d be no way they could do the right thing. But as we saw with denial, this same emotional distance can quickly spiral out of control.

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.

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.

As someone becomes an expert they deliberately seek out negative feedback so they know how to keep improving now that their mistakes are fewer and subtler.

Hours alone also aren’t enough. Those hours need to be hard. You need to be pushing yourself to be better,

longest.” Meaningful work means doing something that’s (a) important to you and (b) something you’re good at.

if you get up at 7 you’ll be most productive from around 8 to 10:30.” Don’t waste them being exhausted and cranky.

People handle having lots of choices in two ways: by “maximizing” or “satisficing.”

Maximizing is exploring all the options, weighing them, and trying to get the best. Satisficing is thinking about what you need and picking the first thing that fulfills those needs. Satisficing is living by “good enough.”

Your war is first and last with yourself. But that’s a battle you can definitely win with the right plan.

at least an hour a day, preferably in the morning, needs to be “protected time.” This is an hour every day when you get real work done without interruption.

We got to the moon and built the pyramids without email and Facebook. You can go a couple of hours without checking them.

“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.”

Success is not the result of any single quality; it’s about alignment between who you are and where you choose to be. The right skill in the right role. A good person surrounded by other good people.