Eric Barker Quotes

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman found that when you survey people in the moment, their happiness levels are highest while with friends...

To be fair, research by Beverley Fair shows that we're the absolute happiest when with both friends and spouses. But even within a marriage, friendship reigns. Work by Gallup found that 70 percent of marital satisfaction is due to the couple's friendship. Tom Rath says it's five times as critical to a good marriage as physical intimacy.

Teammate Jimmy Piersall once asked him why he was so mad all the time. Williams responded, “You know why? Because I’ve got to be good every day. You don’t have to be.

Cal Newport recommends a “shutdown ritual” in which you take the time to close out the day’s business and prepare for tomorrow. Research shows that writing down the things you need to take care of tomorrow can settle your brain and help you relax. As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explains, when you’re concerned about something and your grey matter is afraid you may forget, it engages a cluster of brain regions referred to as the “rehearsal loop.” And you keep worrying and worrying. Writing your thoughts down and making a plan for tomorrow switches this off.

We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great we must be different

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.

So there’s no shortage of evidence that stories rule our thinking and predict success in so many arenas. But how do stories work?

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

But Bernstein says this is a trap. Explaining is almost always veiled dominance. You’re not trying to educate; you’re still trying to win. The subtext is, “Here’s why I am right and you are wrong.

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

Overconfidence is usually the mistake of experts, and we do give them a lot of power and authority. Plain and simple, incompetence is frustrating, but the people guilty of it usually can’t screw things up that bad. The people guilty of overconfidence can do much more damage.

Two men have died trying to do this. Outside Magazine declared the Race Across America the toughest endurance event there is, bar none. Cyclists cover three thousand miles in less than twelve days, riding from San Diego to Atlantic City. Some might think Oh, that’s like the Tour de France. They would be wrong. The Tour has stages. Breaks. The Race Across America (RAAM) does not stop. Every minute riders take to sleep, to rest, to do anything other than pedal, is another minute their competitors can use to defeat them. Riders average three hours of sleep per night — reluctantly. Four days into the race and the top riders must debate when to rest. With the competition tightly clustered (within an hour of each other), it is a decision that weighs heavily on them, knowing they will be passed and need to regain their position. And as the race goes on they will grow weaker. There is no respite. The exhaustion, pain, and sleep deprivation only compound as they work their way across the entire United States. But in 2009 this does not affect the man in the number-one spot. He is literally half a day ahead of number two. Jure Robič seems unbeatable. He has won the RAAM five times, more than any other competitor ever, often crossing the finish line in under nine days. In 2004 he bested the number-two rider by eleven hours. Can you imagine watching an event during which after the winner claims victory you need to wait half a day in order to see the runner-up finish? It’s only natural to wonder what made Robič so dominant and successful in such a grueling event. Was he genetically gifted? No. When tested, he seemed physically typical for a top ultra-endurance athlete. Did he have the best trainer? Nope. His friend Uroč Velepec described Robič as “Completely uncoachable.” In a piece for the New York Times, Dan Coyle revealed the edge Robič had over his competition that rendered him the greatest rider ever in the Race Across America: His insanity.

"Jeff Hall's research found that it took as many as sixty hours to develop a light friendship, sometimes one hundred hours to get to full-fledged "friend" status, and two hundred or more hours to unlock the vaunted "best friend" achievement...

Hall also found that how people talked mattered. We've all hit that wall with a potential friend where the small talk starts to go in circles...

Want to make good friends without the dozens of hours?... Arthur Aron got strangers to feel like lifelong pals in just forty-five minutes. How? Well that leads us to our second costly signal: vulnerability."

Research shows that what makes students likely to be impressive in the classroom is the same thing that makes them less likely to be home-run hitters outside the classroom.

Whiny neutered goats fly. Picture it in your mind. You’ve just learned what all good games have in common: WNGF. They’re Winnable. They have Novel challenges and Goals, and provide Feedback.

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