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

by Eric Barker

But when we feel such intense pressure to succeed both at work and at home, when there are always choices and it feels like it’s our fault, we become desperate for a solution. Some of us set aside a facet of our lives so that other categories can thrive. Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson, the authors of Just Enough, and HBS professor Clay Christensen call this strategy “sequencing.” The attitude being First I’ll work a job I hate and make a lot of money and then I’ll have a family and then I’ll do what I want and be happy. This doesn’t work with relationships, though. Christensen rightly points out that “by the time serious problems arise in those relationships, it often is too late to repair them. This means, almost paradoxically, that the time when it is most important to invest in building strong families and close friendships is when it appears, at the surface, as if it’s not necessary.” The authors of Just Enough confirmed this was true in their research with top executives. Yes, the group was quite accomplished career-wise, but behind the veil things sounded a lot more like Ted Williams and Albert Einstein: “When we probed further, we found that many were not necessarily doing very well with their other targets: family, long-term business health, building a place to work that people actually value, developing a personal character that holds up when they got out of the public spotlight.” We can’t sequence relationships. They need regular, consistent attention. As Ralph ...