Eric Barker Quotes

Spending 5 percent of your time trying new things, knowing you will quit most of them, can lead to great opportunities. (And not all of them need to involve concussions.)

School has clear rules. Life often doesn’t.

Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed eighty-one high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs. They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives. But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero.

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.

Ironically, even the most noted researcher in the field of grit, Angela Duckworth, agrees with this. In her paper “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” she says, “A strong desire for novelty and a low threshold for frustration may be adaptive earlier in life: Moving on from dead-end pursuits is essential to the discovery of more promising paths.

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.

To Aristotle, friends “are disposed toward each other as they are disposed to themselves: a friend is another self.”

… Your brain is like a clever lawyer, twisting the words in Darwin’s contract. Selfishness can actually be altruism — if I believe that you are me.

And as a paper in American Psychologist showed, “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.

The same traits that make people a nightmare to deal with can also make them the people who change the world.

study of 403 people in the Journal of Happiness Studies showed that managing your free time is associated with higher quality of life.

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

if that “monster” finds the right environment and succeeds, it might just end up changing the species for the better.

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

Warren Buffett sums that up: “I always worry about people who say, ‘I’m going to do this for ten years; I really don’t like it very well. And then I’ll do this . . .’ That’s a lot like saving sex up for your old age. Not a very good idea.

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.