Eric Barker Quotes

Shawn Achor’s research at Harvard shows that college grades aren’t any more predictive of subsequent life success than rolling dice. A study of over seven hundred American millionaires showed their average college GPA was 2.9.

If you want to do well in school and you’re passionate about math, you need to stop working on it to make sure you get an A in history too. This generalist approach doesn’t lead to expertise. Yet eventually we almost all go on to careers in which one skill is highly rewarded and other skills aren’t that important. Ironically,

Are you a nice guy or gal who is having trouble processing all this bad news? Maybe that’s because not having a high status position at the office contributes to a reduction in executive function. Want that in English? Feeling powerless actually makes you dumber.

We all spend a lot of time complaining about incompetence, but as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in a talk he gave at High Point University, overconfidence is the far bigger problem.

it’s by dreaming and then doing something about those dreams that we can achieve success. In fact, it’s the only way we can.

Research shows that you don’t actually need to know more to be seen as a leader. Merely by speaking first and speaking often — very extroverted behavior — people come to be seen as El Jefe.

Success is something you will confront constantly in business. You will always be interpreting it against something, and that something should be your own goals and purpose.

Following the rules doesn’t create success; it just eliminates extremes

We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great we must be different

1.​HAPPINESS: having feelings of pleasure or contentment in and about your life 2.​ACHIEVEMENT: achieving accomplishments that compare favorably against similar goals others have strived for 3.​SIGNIFICANCE: having a positive impact on people you care about 4.​LEGACY: establishing your values or accomplishments in ways that help others find future success

If you want to do well in school and you’re passionate about math, you need to stop working on it to make sure you get an A in history too. This generalist approach doesn’t lead to expertise. Yet eventually we almost all go on to careers in which one skill is highly rewarded and other skills aren’t that important. Ironically, Arnold found that intellectual students

The study came up with four metrics that matter most: 1.​HAPPINESS: having feelings of pleasure or contentment in and about your life 2.​ACHIEVEMENT: achieving accomplishments that compare favorably against similar goals others have strived for 3.​SIGNIFICANCE: having a positive impact on people you care about 4.​LEGACY: establishing your values or accomplishments in ways that help others find future success

The groups you associate with often determine the type of person you become. For people who want improved health, association with other healthy people is usually the strongest and most direct path of change.

Pfeffer says we need to stop thinking the world is fair. He puts it bluntly: 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.

Barry Schwartz told me: “Good enough is almost always good enough.