Eric Barker Quotes

Sonja Lyubomirsky published in the Journal of Career Assessment, success does not lead to happiness as often as happiness leads to 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

Feel underpaid? That increases risk for a heart attack

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

Without a plan, we do what’s passive and easy — not what is really fulfilling. Robert Epstein surveyed thirty thousand

Modern positive psychology research has shown again and again that one of the keys to happiness is emphasizing what are called “signature strengths.

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.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized K. Anders Ericsson’s research showing that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of effort to become an expert at something. There is a natural reaction to so big a number: Why in the world would anyone do that? With the idea framed by the term “expertise,” we are quick to associate positive notions, like “dedication” and “passion,” but there’s little doubt that spending so much time and hard work on anything nonessential has an element of obsession to it. While the valedictorian treats school as a job, working hard to get A’s and follow the rules, the obsessed creative succeeds by bearing down on his or her passion projects with a religious zeal.

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.

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

You want to keep in mind that 80/20 perspective Peter Drucker talked about

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.

We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great we must be different. And that doesn’t come from trying to follow society’s vision of what is best, because society doesn’t always know what it needs. More often being the best means just being the best version of you. As John Stuart Mill remarked, “That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of our time.” In the right environment, bad can be good and odd can be beautiful.

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.

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.