Eric Barker Quotes

Spencer explained the downside of grit: “I know plenty of people for whom grit is a liability because it allows them to stick with something that makes them or others miserable and towards no long-term good aim. The alternative of which is the thing that you would most like to do that would bring you the most joy and might bring other people the most joy or be the most productive.

Stories are the invisible undercurrent that promotes success in a shocking number of the most important areas of life.

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

We used to rely on the world to tell us when we were done, but now the balance must come from you.

a healthy mind tells itself flattering lies.

It all comes down to the stories you tell yourself.

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

By engaging in cognitive reappraisal, and telling ourselves a different story about what is happening, we can subvert the entire willpower paradigm. Some research has shown that 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.

As W. C. Fields once said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again . . . then give up. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.

When you take a job take a long look at the people you’re going to be working with — because the odds are you’re going to become like them; they are not going to become like you. You can’t change them. If it doesn’t fit who you are, it’s not going to work.

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

David Foster Wallace once said, “If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Frankl said, “What is to give light must endure burning.

Mentoring a young person is four times more predictive of happiness than your health or how much money you make.

Edith Wharton in the 1800s? “There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not as a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self.”

… In psychology it’s called “self-expansion theory” — that we expand our notion of our self to include those we’re close to.

… When women heard the names of their close friends, their gray matter responded the same way it did when they heard their own name.