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

by Eric Barker

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. It’s what we strive toward and make true. 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.

therapists helped underperforming students reinterpret their academic challenges from “I can’t do this” to “I just need to learn the ropes.” This helped them earn higher grades the next year and reduced dropout rates. Studies show this can work as well as antidepressant drugs and, in some cases, even better.

What do you do with this edited story once you have it? Play the part. A lot of psychological research shows that instead of behavior following our beliefs, often our beliefs come from our behaviors. As the old saw goes, “Actions speak louder than words.”

the “do good, be good” method. When people do volunteer work, their self-perception changes. They begin to see themselves as the kind of...

“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.

“If you want to be a knight, act like a knight.”

Meaning keeps us going when stark reality says “quit.” Very often our stories are stronger than we are, and if they’re meaningful ones, they can carry us through the tough times.

When school classes and grading are structured like a game, students perform better.

Why are games, which can be taxing, frustrating, and an awful lot like work, so much fun while our jobs, well . . . suck? Why do kids hate homework that’s repetitive and incredibly hard but they’ll gleefully run away from homework to play games . . . which are repetitive and incredibly hard? Why are puzzles fun but doing your taxes is awful? What is it that makes something a game and not just a frustrating pain in the ass?

games are merely a framework superimposed over a set of activities. With that structure, things that sound utterly boring on the surface can become incredibly fun and rewarding—even addictive.

So just a few elements can turn filling out your taxes into a fun-filled experience. One is “cognitive reappraisal,” a fancy term for “telling yourself a different story about what is happening.”

Walter Mischel’s marshmallow study but usually in terms of willpower. (Quick summary: kids were promised two marshmallows if they could resist eating one. The kids who resisted, demonstrating greater willpower, went on to be much more successful in life down the line.) But another interesting element of that study is how many of the resisters managed to avoid the temptation. Most didn’t just bear down, grit their teeth, and exhibit superhuman willpower. They actually engaged in cognitive reappraisal. They looked at their situation through another lens or made it a game.

willpower is like a muscle, and it gets tired with overuse. But it only gets depleted if there’s a struggle. Games change the struggle to something else. They make the process fun, and as Mischel showed in his research, we are able to persist far longer and without the same level of teeth-gritting willpower depletion.

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

work, as we know it today, is a really lousy game.

“If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

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

When you remove people’s emotional connection to their labor and treat them merely as machines that produce effort, it’s soul killing.

We can apply game mechanics to our lives and turn dull moments into fun ones.

Whiny neutered goats fly. Picture it in your mind. You’ve just learned what all good games have in common: WNGF. They’re Winnable. They have Novel challenges and Goals, and provide Feedback. Any time something feels frustrating, it’s probably lacking at least one of the four.

Good games are winnable by design. They don’t make games you can’t win. Each game has clear rules. We intuitively know that and it makes us very positive about our chances if we persist. We’ve got good reason to be optimistic.

This “justifiable optimism” makes difficult things fun. Games are often harder than real life, but they are fun when they’re hard and boring when they’re easy.

do gamers actually enjoy failing? As it turns out, yes . . . When we’re playing a well-designed game, failure doesn’t disappoint us. It makes us happy in a very particular way: excited, interested, and most of all optimistic.

you have control in a game. What you do is important. Your actions make a difference, so you know your time is well spent. Research shows that a feeling of control kills stress. Even when you just feel you have control, stress plummets.

On the other hand, the office often feels like a game that’s not winnable. You don’t feel you have control. You don’t feel like what you do makes much of a difference. Who wants to play that game?

when we feel like what we do is futile or pointless, motivation a...

Good games continually have new levels, new enemies, new achievements. Our brains love novelty, and good games make sure we’re always stimulated by something just a little different, honing our attention.

Games engage us with challenges. They are designed to create what researcher Mihály Csikszentmihályi calls “flow,” which is when we’re immersed in something enough to forget the passage of time. We’re never bored or overwhelmed because good games keep a perfect balance of hard but not too hard, easy but never too easy. And as we improve, games up the difficulty. We’re always stretching our abilities just enough to keep us hooked.

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.”

The workplace wants you to be good at your job, and that makes sense, but that’s like a game you’re too good at. It’s dull. Good games have that 80 percent failure rate to inspire you to keep working, but the office doesn’t like failure. Zero failure means zero fun. And there’s so much busy work that offers no challenge at all. How is that engaging?

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.

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

We try to subtract at work, do less, check out. These are signs of burnout. We don’t need to subtract; we need to add nov...

started making instant cake mix in the 1940s, but it didn’t sell very well, which didn’t make any sense. The mix made things easier. The company then realized that making a cake is not mere drudgery. Cakes hold meaning; they show love. So when Pillsbury made the cake mix less simple—you had to add the eggs yourself—sales soared. 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.

Duty, good games are very clear about what you need to do to win. They serve to focus you and guide decision-making.

it gave him a framework to evaluate success or failure in his game.

In an office environment, there are definite goals—but are they your goals? When the company gets what it wants, do you always get what you want? Um, not so much. You can’t get what you want until you take the time to decide what you want. Goals can be intimidating. We don’t want to fail, so often we don’t set them. But if you make your game winnable, setting goals will be less scary. Failure is okay in a game. As Nicole Lazarro discovered, failure in a game just makes things more fun.

If you do something right, a game rewards you with points or abilities. If you do something wrong, you’re penalized. And both of these happen quickly.

you always know where you stand in a game, how you’re doing, and what you need to do to perform better.

Research shows that the most motivating thing is progress ...

the best way to motivate people, day in and day out, is by facilitating progress—even small wins.”

consistent small wins are even better at producing happiness than occasionally bagging an elephant: “Life satisfaction is 22 percent more likely for those with a steady stream of minor accomplishments than those who express interest only in major accomplishments.”

Celebrating those “small wins” is something that gritty survivors all have in common.

“Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

many C-level executives play computer games at work. Why? “To feel more productive.” Oh, the irony.

taking a moment at the end of every day to ask yourself, “What one thing can I do to make progress on important work tomorrow?” It gives you a goal to shoot for. Give yourself a clear idea of how to measure or achieve that, like Joe Simpson’s twenty minutes, and you’re on your way to a motivating system.

If your goal is a raise or a promotion, seek feedback. Communicate with your boss on a consistent basis and see how you’re doing.

Making work a game is quite simple; you don’t have to change what you’re doing all that much, you just have to change your perspective. But therein lies the reason many of us don’t do it: it feels kinda silly.

If you craft your work into one, you can find success and happiness at the same time with a positive feedback loop.