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

by Eric Barker

When you keep down the path of feeling helpless again and again, you end up clinically depressed. You feel helpless at life. You give up in a much more holistic way and stop doing anything.

when asked to make predictions, depressed people are more accurate than optimists. It’s called “depressive realism.”

better health and a longer life.

more likely to close a deal and to be happy with it.

persevere and end up creating more opportunities for themselves.

“explanatory style,”

three Ps: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.

the people who kept going despite the horrors were the ones who had meaning in their lives:

He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

His stories were greater than his suffering. And that kept him going.

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.”

Studies show that when we relate to characters in fictional stories we are more likely to overcome obstacles to achieve our goals.

people who committed suicide often weren’t in the worst circumstances, but they had fallen short of the expectations they had of themselves.

we feel meaning in life when we think that we know ourselves.

Truly knowing oneself didn’t produce meaning but feeling one did created the results.

“a healthy mind tells itself flattering lies.”

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

Pessimists outperform optimists in law school.

They can keep us going and become prophecy.

Meaningful doesn’t have to be saving orphans or curing the sick.

just think about your death.

“résumé values” and “eulogy values.”

Résumé values are the things that bring external success,

Eulogy values are about ...

you’re ambitious (and since you’re reading a book about success, you probably are), you don’t need to worry too much about paying attention to the résumé values. You’re always thinking about them. But to serve your longer-term career and life, you need to be forward-thinking about eulogy values too.

“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.”

Fate is that thing we cannot avoid. It comes for us despite how we try to run from it. Destiny, on the other hand, is the thing we must chase, what we must bring to fruition.

When bad things happen, the idea of fate makes us feel better, whereas taking the time to consider eulogy values helps us think more about destiny.

Success doesn’t come from shrugging off the bad as unchangeable and saying things are already “meant to be”; it’s the result of chasing the good and writing our own future. Less fate, more destiny.

“story editing.”

instead of behavior following our beliefs, often our beliefs come from our behaviors.

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

So instead of merely focusing on intentions, make sure that in your day-to-day actions you are being the main character in your perfect story.

But which story are you telling yourself? And is it one that will get you where you want to go?

he made it a game.

You’ve got to have fun with it and you’ve got to keep your eye on the bigger picture.”

games are merely a framework superimposed over a set of activities.

“cognitive reappraisal,”

“When children transform marshmallows into puffy clouds floating in the air rather than thinking of them as delicious chewy treats, I have seen them sit in their chair with the treats and bell in front of them until my graduate students and I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

By engaging in cognitive reappraisal, and telling ourselves a different story about what is happening, we can subvert the entire willpower paradigm.

willpower is like a muscle, and it gets tired with overuse. But it only gets depleted if there’s a struggle. Games chan...

Change the story and you change your behavior. Games are another kind of story: a fun one.

efficiency entails removing game mechanics from the design of labor. In other words, we’re taking the fun out of it.

Whiny neutered goats fly.

Good games are winnable by design.

feeling of control kills stress. Even when you just feel you have control, stress plummets.

you can define a game for yourself that is winnable.

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.

“Games are an obvious source of flow,” he wrote, “and play is the flow experience par excellence.”

We crave ease, but stimulation is what really makes us happy.