Eric Barker Quotes

Many people, when they hear about hostage negotiation, shake their heads and say, “Why don’t they just shoot the guy?” But those people don’t know the stats. When police launch an assault during a hostage situation, it’s the police who suffer the bulk of the casualties. Fighting may end things quickly, but the research shows it doesn’t end things well. You and I do the same thing in our personal relationships. Things go sideways and often our first response is to fight. Not physical violence, but yelling and arguing vs. discussing and negotiating. Why is this? Philosopher Daniel Dennett says it’s because a “war metaphor” is wired into our brains when it comes to disagreement. When there’s a war, someone is conquered. It’s not a discussion of facts and logic; it’s a fight to the death. No matter who is really right, if you win, I lose. In almost every conversation, status is on the line. Nobody wants to look stupid. So, as Dennett explains, we set up a situation where learning is equivalent to losing.

He’d watch Saturday Night Live, record the episodes on a video cassette recorder, transcribe the tapes by hand, and study the jokes. He scoured TV Guide every week to see which comedians were going to be on the talk shows. He wrote a thirty-page paper on the Marx brothers when he was in the fifth grade.

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.

To really be creative, you need to step out of that hyperfocused state of tension and let your mind wander.

managing what your boss thinks of you is far more important than actual hard work. A study shows that those who made a good impression got better performance reviews than those who worked harder but didn’t manage impressions as well.

You’ve got to pick the environments that work for you . . . context is so important. The unfiltered leader who is an amazing success in one situation will be a catastrophic failure in the other, in almost all cases.

The old saying is “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” But is it true? We all know someone who wasted

you cannot maximize two things that are both dependent on the same resource: time.

Research has shown flattery is so powerful that it works even when the boss knows it’s insincere.

John Stuart Mill remarked, “That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of our time.

You need a personal definition of success. Looking around you to see if you’re succeeding is no longer a realistic option. Trying to be a relative success compared to others is dangerous. This means your level of effort and investment is determined by theirs, which keeps you running full speed all the time to keep up.

Law enforcement is dealing with life and death. Regular people like you and me are not, but we act like it. Our “dinosaur brain” assumes every dispute is an existential threat: “This argument over who should take out the trash is a matter of life and death.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

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.

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.