Eric Barker Quotes

Like Churchill’s paranoid defense of the British state, these qualities were a poison that under just the right circumstances could be a performance-enhancing drug. Mukunda calls these “intensifiers.” And they hold the secret to how your biggest weakness might just be your greatest strength.

Warren Buffett, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.

Nobody wants to be the next karōshi statistic.

What’s shocking is that when asked to make predictions, depressed people are more accurate than optimists. It’s called “depressive realism.” The world can be a harsh place. Optimists lie to themselves. But if we all stop believing anything can change, nothing ever will. We need a bit of fantasy to keep us going.

A study of over seven hundred American millionaires showed their average college GPA was 2.9.

As James Gleick writes in his biography Isaac Newton, “He was born into a world of darkness, obscurity, and magic; led a strangely pure and obsessive life, lacking parents, lovers, and friends; quarreled bitterly with great men who crossed his path; veered at least once to the brink of madness; cloaked his work in secrecy; and yet discovered more of the essential core of human knowledge than anyone before or after.

Turn tragedy into fuel for greatness

We got to the moon and built the pyramids without email and Facebook.

"...the most wonderful form of crazy that love brings: idealization... A 1999 study showed that people in happy relationships spend five times as long talking about their sweetheart's good qualities as bad. As Robert Seidenberg said, "Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in."

...Realism may be accurate, but it's our illusions that foretell our happiness in love. And the more crazy, the better. People who idealized their partner the most felt no decline in relationship satisfaction over a study of the first three years in marriage.

...When researchers ask people in the throes of infatuation about their partner's downsides, they can recognize and identify the bad stuff... But they emotionally discount the negative: it's not a big deal. Or those flaws are even "charming." This attitude helps grease the wheels of a relationship"

Most of us use our calendars all wrong: we don’t schedule work; we schedule interruptions. Meetings get scheduled. Phone calls get scheduled. Doctor appointments get scheduled. You know what often doesn’t get scheduled? Real work.

an informal study showed that ethics books are 25 percent more likely to be stolen than the average library book.

Most couples wait too long to go (to marriage counseling). There's an average six-year delay between the first cracks in a marriage and actually getting help...

When entropy decays the happiness of a marriage over time, it's not just a linear downward progression for everyone. Often, there's a phase change (like water to ice)... In marriage this goes by the appropriately intimidating term negative sentiment override.

Idealization hasn't faded — it has flipped. If love is positive delusion, NSO is utter disillusionment. You are biased against, not toward, your partner. The facts haven't necessarily changed, just your interpretation of them. Rather than attributing problems to context, attributions now lie in someone's poor character traits.

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

Stop thinking about what you’re going to say next and focus on what they’re saying right now.

"We've all read a thousand articles that say marriage makes you healthier and happier. Umm, no. Many of these studies merely survey married people and single people, compare the happiness levels, find that the married people are doing better, and crow "See? Marriage makes you healthy and happy." But that's committing an error called "survivorship bias." If you want to determine if getting married makes you happier, you need to include separated, divorced, and widowed people in with the currently married, not with the unmarried...

A 2010 study from Australia even said previous research probably underestimated just how happy people in happy marriages are. But the flip side is even more damning than you may have guessed. A study of medical records of five thousand patients analyzed the most stressful life events people deal with. Divorce came in #2 (Death of a spouse was number one.) Divorce even beat going to prison."