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

by Eric Barker

The hard-charging Silicon Valley entrepreneur has become a respected, admired icon in the modern age. Do these descriptors match the stereotype? A ball of energy. Little need for sleep. A risk taker. Doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Confident and charismatic, bordering on hubristic. Boundlessly ambitious. Driven and restless. Absolutely. They’re also the traits associated with a clinical condition called hypomania.

Full-blown mania renders people unable to function in normal society. But hypomania produces a relentless, euphoric, impulsive machine that explodes toward its goals while staying connected (even if only loosely) with reality.

efforts to reduce aggressiveness and misbehavior in young boys did improve their grades but also reduced their lifetime earnings. Boys who acted out ended up working more hours, being more productive, and earning 3 percent more than boys who didn’t.

. . . the venture capital business is 100 percent a game of outliers, it is extreme outliers . . . We have this concept, invest in strength versus lack of weakness. And at first that is obvious, but it’s actually fairly subtle. Which is sort of the default way to do venture capital, is to check boxes. So “really good founder, really good idea, really good products, really good initial customers. Check, check, check, check. Okay this is reasonable, I’ll put money in it.” What you find with those sort of checkbox deals, and they get done all the time, but what you find is that they often don’t have something that really makes them really remarkable and special. They don’t have an extreme strength that makes them an outlier. On the other side of that, the companies that have the really extreme strengths often have serious flaws. So one of the cautionary lessons of venture capital is, if you don’t invest on the basis of serious flaws, you don’t invest in most of the big winners. And we can go through example after example after example of that. But that would have ruled out almost all the big winners over time. So what we aspire to do is to invest in the start-ups that have a really extreme strength. Along an important dimension, that we would be willing to tolerate certain weaknesses.

In some cases the greatest tragedies produce the greatest intensifiers. What do the following people all have in common? Abraham Lincoln Gandhi Michelangelo Mark Twain They all lost a parent before age sixteen. The list of orphans who became spectacular successes—or at least notoriously influential—is much longer and includes no fewer than fifteen British prime ministers.

such a tragedy instills in a child the feeling that the world is not safe and that an immense amount of energy and effort will be needed to survive. Due to their unique personality and circumstances, these orphans overcompensate and turn tragedy into fuel for greatness.

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.”

If you’re good at playing by the rules, if you related to those valedictorians, if you’re a filtered leader, then double down on that. Make sure you have a path that works for you. 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. Research shows that when they’re unemployed, their happiness drops 120 percent more than those who aren’t as conscientious. Without a path to follow they’re lost.

If you’re more of an outsider, an artist, an unfiltered leader, you’ll be climbing uphill if you try to succeed by complying with a rigid, formal structure. By dampening your intensifiers, you’ll be not only at od...

While improving yourself is noble and necessary, research shows that many of the more fundamental aspects of personality don’t change. Traits like verbal fluency, adaptability, impulsivity, and ...

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

Consider the people we’re all envious of who can confidently pick something, say they’re going to be awesome at it, and then calmly go and actually be awesome at it. This is their secret: they’re not good at everything, but they know their strengths and choose things that are a good fit.

[This] enables people to say to an opportunity, to an offer, to an assignment, “Yes, I’ll do that. But this is the way I should be doing it. This is the way it should be structured. This is the way my relationships should be. These are the kind of results you should expect from me, and in this time frame, because this is who I am.”

a system he calls “feedback analysis.” Quite simply, when you undertake a project, write down what you expect to happen, then later note the result. Over time you’ll see what you do well and what you don’t.

By figuring out whether you fall into the filtered or unfiltered camp and by knowing where your strengths are, you’re miles ahead of the average person in terms of achieving both success and happiness. Modern positive psychology research has shown again and again that one of the keys to happiness is emphasizing what are called “signature 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.

pick the right pond. You’ve got to pick the environments that work for you . . . context is so important. The unfiltered leader who is an amazing success in one situation will be a catastrophic failure in the other, in almost all cases. It’s way too easy to think, “I’ve always succeeded, I am a success, I am successful because I am a success, because it’s about me, and therefore I will succeed in this new environment.” Wrong. 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.

Which companies, institutions, and situations value what I do?

“People feel like valedictorians can take care of themselves, but just because they could get A’s doesn’t mean they can translate academic achievement into career achievement.”

When Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg looked at top Wall Street analysts who jumped ship to work for a competitor, he noticed something interesting: they stopped being top analysts. Why? We tend to think experts are experts just because of their unique skills and we forget the power of context, of knowing one’s way around, of the teams who support them, and the shorthand they develop together over time. That’s one of the things Groysberg discovered: when the analysts switched firms but brought their team with them, they stayed awesome.

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.

If you follow rules well, find an organization aligned with your signature strengths and go full steam ahead. Society clearly rewards those who can comply, and these people keep the world an orderly place. If you’re more of an unfiltered type, be ready to blaze your own path. It’s risky, but that’s what you were built for. Leverage the intensifiers that make you unique. You’re more likely to reach the heights of success—and happiness—if you embrace your “flaws.”

In the short term, sometimes being bad can be very good. “Work hard, play fair, and you’ll get ahead,” they say. Um, sorry but there’s actually a lot of evidence that shows this just isn’t the case. People surveyed say effort is the number-one predictor of success, but research shows it’s actually one of the worst. 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. A study shows that those who made a good impression got better performance reviews than those who worked harder but didn’t manage impressions as well.

Is flattering the boss effective? Research has shown flattery is so powerful that it works even when the boss knows it’s insincere.

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.

Do you approach salary negotiations with a win-win, mutual benefit attitude? Unfortunately people who push for more money out of self-interest do better. The Harvard Business Review reports that men low in the personality trait “agreeableness” make as much as ten thousand dollars a year more than men high in agreeableness. Rude people also have better credit scores.

As sad as it sounds, it seems we’re all inclined to mistake kindness for weakness.

Eighty percent of our evaluations of other people come down to two characteristics: warmth and competence. And a study from Teresa Amabile at Harvard called “Brilliant but Cruel” shows we assume the two are inversely related: if someone is too nice, we figure they must be less competent. In fact, being a jerk makes others see you as...

Research shows some negative traits can actually make you more likely to become a leader. The managers who moved up the ladder quickest—and were best at their jobs—weren’t the people who tried to be team players or who focused on accomplishing tasks. They were the ones most focused on gaining power.

ass kissing results in a reduction of workplace stress, improving happiness as well as physical health.

Feeling powerless actually makes you dumber.

in a shocking number of areas bad things are more impactful and longer lasting than good things: “Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good . . . Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena.” And I can’t help but mention that an informal study showed that ethics books are 25 percent more likely to be stolen than the average library book.

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.

Ruut Veenhoven, the Dutch sociologist known as the “godfather of happiness research,” maintains the World Database of Happiness. And when he looked at all the countries of the world in terms of happiness, Moldova came up dead last. What garnered this little-known former Soviet republic such a dubious distinction? The Moldovans simply don’t trust one another. It has reached epic proportions, so much so that it stifles cooperation in almost every area of Moldovan life. Writer Eric Weiner notes that so many students bribe teachers for passing grades that Moldovans won’t go to doctors who are younger than age thirty-five, assuming they purchased their medical degrees. Weiner sums up the Moldovan attitude with a single sentence: “Not my problem.” Getting people to act collectively for the benefit of the group seems impossible. Nobody wants to do anything that benefits others. Lack of trust has turned Moldova into a black hole of selfishness.

seeing others cheat and get away with it increases cheating across the board. We start to see cheating as an acceptable social norm. It’s a concept we can all relate to. After all, do you really drive under the speed limit all the time? Why not? Well, it’s like the old joke about ethics. There are three categories: “right,” “wrong,” and “everybody does it.” Once we see others getting away with something, we assume it’s okay. Nobody wants to be the sucker who plays by the rules when no one else does.

Studies show expecting others to be untrustworthy creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. You assume they’ll behave badly, so you stop trusting, which means you withhold effort and create a downward spiral. It’s not surprising that work teams with just one bad apple experience performance deficits of 30 to 40 percent. So, yes, individual shenanigans can pay off—but it’s only a matter of time before other people start cutting corners too.

“Not being nice may look promising at first, but in the long run it can destroy the very environment it needs for its own success.”

when you start being selfish and Machiavellian, others will eventually notice. If they retaliate before you rise to power, you’re in bad shape. Even if you succeed, you’ve still got a problem. 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.

To truly scale effort and succeed means going beyond selfishness to create trust and achieve cooperation. Ironically, even if you want to be successful at evil you need to do this.

prison gangs often act as welcoming committees to new inmates who are members of their gang, and it’s not unheard of for inmates from the same neighborhood to provide gifts to help new entrants get settled.

Gangs aren’t coalitions dedicated to chaos, led by a nefarious Bond villain. In fact, the data show that street gangs don’t create crime. It’s the exact opposite: crime creates street gangs. Similarly, the majority of successful prison gangs on record were created not as a way to further evil but as a way to provide protection to their members while incarcerated.

gang members’ criminal records or number of violent encounters in prison are nearly indistinguishable from those of non-gang members.

In many ways criminals are more aware of the value of trust and cooperation than you and I. Because within the world they live, trust cannot be taken for granted. You don’t go to the office every day and wonder if someone is going to stab you in the neck. So the stakes of trustworthiness are much higher for criminals, and they can’t call the cops when someone steals their heroin.

research into organized crime shows resorting to violence is actually highly overrated. What happens when you go total Tony Soprano and start whacking everyone who causes problems? Everyone will respect you and no one will want to work with you. Being a mob boss who is too violent has an inherent irony to it. Would you want to work for someone whose response to late expense reports is two bullets to the head? I didn’t think so.

Therefore smart criminals must find alternatives to violent enforcement. They need more order, not less, to reduce the increased options on their plate.

“Without order, we have anarchy, and when we have anarchy...

whites actually encourage blacks to join black gangs. With more anonymity and separation, violence increases behind bars. When everyone is a part of the system—even if that means joining a rival gang—life is more stable.

Economists call it the “discipline of continuous dealings.” When you know and trust someone, it makes a transaction smoother and faster. That means more transactions happen, producing a better market and more value for everyone involved.

Eventually this scaling of order, trust, and rules makes a prison gang look a lot more like a corporation. Gang leaders (“shot callers”) often send recently incarcerated members of their gang new-arrival questionnaires. It’s good to know what fresh employees have to offer. As crazy as it may sound, all this works. Corrupt countries with Mafia-style groups are more economically successful than countries with decentralized crime, showing higher rates of growth. They put the “organized” in organized crime. And while nefarious groups certainly have negative effects on society, the order they enforce has positive externalities as well. The presence of yakuza in Japanese cities is negatively correlated with civil lawsuits. Research shows prisons in the United States run smoother with gangs than without them.

Successful criminals know that selfishness, internally, doesn’t scale. Eventually this can even lead to criminals treating people—at least those inside the gang—quite well. (When was the last time your boss sent you a gift basket?)