Eric Barker || How to Be Awesome at Life

pleasure to have Eric Barker on the podcast. Barker is the creditor of the blog aptly titled Barking Up the Wrong Tree, which presents science backed answers and expert insight on how to be awesome at life. His work has been mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, Time magazine, The Week, and Business Insider. A former Hollywood screenwriter, having worked on projects for Walt

Disney Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, and Revolution Studios. He's a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Whoo and holds It holds an MBA from Boston College and a Master of Fine Arts from UCLA. His latest book is Barking Up the Wrong Tree, The Surprising Science behind why everything you know about success is mostly wrong. Hey, thanks so much for chatting with me today. Eric. Oh, it's great to be talking to you, Scott. Great to be talking to

you too. I feel like I've known you from Afar for a while, so it's nice to finally chat with you. Absolutely fascinating, fascinating book. I'm a scientist myself, but you know, I learned a lot, always learned a lot from your blogs and thought we could discuss a lot of the contents of it, maybe leave some of the goodies out so people will still buy the book. That's fantastic. That sounds like a great balance. Great, so we'll say I like about you review multiple sides of every story. There

are multiple sides to every story. That's the truth of the world, and you acknowledge that and then you I think we probably can bond over our mutual love of paradoxes. I could sense reading this book that you get excited by things that I get excited about too. You know, like the question like do nice people finish the last? Or you say nice guys, but you can be they could apply to the women as well, right, So do nice people finish last or first? And all you could

find depending on your dependent measure. You know, if your dependent measure is cheating, well, you know, it's almost like a tautology, like to win at cheating you have to be bad in a way. But if you want to have really satisfying intimate relationships at some point you have to be good. So just like how you go through all these nuances. So let's go through these various topics today and then yeah, we'll talk about these various sides

of the story. So one topic you can talk about is in terms of success, perhaps having flaws can be conducive, but not only having falls. I love the extreme you go through the ear. Your stories are very well crafted, by the way, I thought he did a brilliant job with this, really truly brilliant job with the stories and matching them up. Can you tell a story about this person who literally went crazy and how maybe that was

not detrimental to creativity? Yeah, Uriobicic. There's the Race across America, which is Outside magazine called it the most extreme performance event out there where basically and approximately around ten days or so, these people ride literally from Atlantic City on bicycles to San Diego that cross the entire United states, and once the clock starts, it does not stop. So anytime you stop to sleep, to eat, to go to the bathroom, anything you know that's counting against you, people

are passing you. And it's insane. These people like destroy themselves literally doing this. Two people have actually died doing this. And there's one guy he has now since passed away. But Uriobic who's one multiple times. And his secret isn't well, you know, oh he's got grit or you know, oh, he's an incredible super athlete. His secret is that he actually loses his mind. Dan Coyle wrote a fantastic piece for The New York Times describing it, and Uri Robitch's

superpower is he loses his mind. He actually goes crazy, He gets into fistfights with mailboxes, he sees things. But what this allows him to do is actually disassociate from the pain and not experience the problems that a lot of people do in this extremely grueling event. So something that most of us would consider a negative in this very weird scenario becomes a positive for sure. And then you kind of asked this question, is playing it safe

or doing what we're told the path to success? I think this relates to this, right, like, not necessarily always playing it safe is going to get you success, depending on how you define success. But yeah, so that's a super interesting example, and I I think it's a common theme throughout your whole book, right about various different kinds of quote falls. But you're saying they're not really necessarily

flaws in that context. You know, once we get to the extremes, you start to see that, you know, if what might be say, stubbornness in a lot of situations, if you're in an extremely difficult scenario where ninety nine point nine percent of people giving up, extreme stubbornness might be required, or any sane person would give up and quit.

So you have these kind of things that exist at the edge of the bell curve, you know, and they seem like they're in the left hand tail, but they're also in the right hand tail depending upon the context. And that's why when we attempt to limit, you know, and just get the people in the middle, we get rid of these extreme qualities, which sometimes are negatives but sometimes be positive depending upon the scenario specifically. I think it's a good point. I'm also noticing a trend in

writing about this topic. Various writers that almost seem these days in order to actually be successful in life, you almost have to be at those extremes. Like is there any hope anymore for people in the middle. I mean, I think there is, you know, in terms of you know, you can still get your kay Anders ericson ten thousand hours of expertise if you devote that amount of time to it, you know, but in extreme scenarios, sometimes extreme

qualities are necessary or they grant you an advantage. And also, let's not forget times change, contexts change, and you know, once again those negatives that became positives could become negatives again depending upon you know, helping shift in the future. Good point. It's always about the context, isn't it? So relate to this? What are intensifiers? That's the first time

I heard of that term. That's a term used by a Gutha Matunda at Harvard Business School who was talking about different kinds of leaders And I remember when back when I was reading the research on leadership, I found it confusing because there was some research that said leaders don't matter. Got a team of a players, they'll self organized, they'll do well. You don't need a figurehead. There's other research that said leaders are enormously impactful, that they energize people,

unite them, create morale, and it was completely contradictory. And what Gotham found in his research is that both of those things are true, that it's bimodal. There's two types of leaders. There's filtered leaders. So if you look at like the CEO of GE, they're going to be highly vetted, extremely vetted. I have have had a long career and the organization is going to be weeding out people, and so the men and women that are finally up for the top job have been so thoroughly filtered that has to

be indistinguishable. So if you hire one or the other, they're probably going to do the same things and make very similar decisions, and in that way there isn't a difference. On the other hand, you have unfiltered leaders, so entrepreneurs who go through no vetting process, or if a vice president steps to the presidency, you know, due to some crazy scenario, that person wasn't vetted for that role and they may not do what was expected. So what happens

is you get unfiltered leaders do wilder, crazier things. Sometimes those things are great. Abraham Lincoln ended slavery, and he won the election by a surprising, crazy confluence of events. So intensifiers are those unique categories like uri roach is losing his mind when he rides a bicycle. Those are those outlier qualities which in some situations can be a negative,

in some situations can be a positive. And so both them talked about how those often distinguish your unfiltered leaders, those intensifiers, because those people with those extreme qualities probably would have been vetted out by a filtering system had they gone through it like trying to be CEO G or something. Wow, that's really cool that you just discover that literature and then you wrote about it. That's awesome.

And I think that very much applies to an education as well well with students, right, and all of our filtering mechanisms we have so many, we have so many of their standardized right. Yeah. Absolutely, that's my own pet peeve. It's like that me crazy. Yeah, So it has a lot a lot of implications for that as well. So what can we learn from kung fu masters about being

a flaky quitter? Matt Polly was an undergrad student at Princeton and he had always been the schoolyard punching bag and he beat up as a kid, and he decided that he was going to drop out of Princeton, moved to the Shaolin temple and master kung fu, and of

course his parents were furious. This was, you know, back in the early nineties before the internet for yelp reviews of shoolin monasteries, and so he did this and it was this crazy little experiment, kind of like Peter Simms talks about little bets, and it was this experiment and it was a crazy, wild, exciting, exciting thing. It was a lot of fun, and most people would say, oh, that's just you know, youthful indulgence, being nuts, but it ended up ended up creating his career as a writer.

His first book, American Shao Linn, was about him dropping out of Princeton to go to China, and it created this whole career. So rather than following the normal you know, undergrad experience by doing something wild and crazy, by trying a little bet, he opened up a whole new door

for himself and created his career. So while you know, applying yourself for it, being consistent, playing by the rules has definite clear benefits trying things that you know you might quit can actually produce you know, great little benefits if you balance that out with your dedicated pursuits as well. Yeah, you know all these things are interconnected. There is a I was wondering, like, how's he going to put this all together? How's he going? Because you're like, well, well,

you're just integrating like maybe four hundred thousand studies. You know. It's like because in science we don't most scientists don't really try to take that much of a bird's eye view, right like they're you're busy doing it's hard to do just one study and you figured it out, like it's a big jigsaw puzzle. Do you think you put the pieces in a way that tells a coherent story about when is it good to be grit and when is

it good to quit? When is it good to be a nice person, When is it good to kind of not be exploited, when is it etcetera, etcetera. Do you think like you have made sense of this world? I mean that's something I would love to see a researcher like yourself do it. Do a thorough examination of and really get a control group and we'll see what happens.

But I definitely think that you can see, you know, when you look at like, you know, Angela duct Worth, who I know you work with, you know her research on grid and then you look at like Peter Simm's work on little Bets and you realize that, you know, while the first impulse might be to put them on opposite extremes, the truth is you can balance the two.

You can take a certain amount of your day and dedicate it to really hard work, deliver practice, and move the needle forward in terms of what's important to you. But that doesn't expl trying new things to always make sure that you're you're growing, you're learning, and you know, with little Bets you can use like a venture capital model where you try ten things, you know seven of them aren't going to work, two of them might be okay, and one's going to be the next Google or Facebook.

And to balance those two, you know, you don't have to go to either extreme. You can take you know, ninety percent of your time dedicated to what's to what you want to double down on, and then take ten percent and try new things to make sure that you're not kind of you know, just doing the same stuff and never learning and growing cool. Yeah, and also I get a message from your book a couple of things. One thing is that life is not fair. You know,

like we kind of we should just accept that. Like if we're going to adding that to the subtitle, I think that's matter that wouln't that big a good book title, though. It has to be like the surprising reason why your life is not fair. You can't like you're not You're not allowed these days in popular books, You're not allowed to just say something. It has to be you have to like explicitly say to the reader. It's going to

be surprising what I'm going to say. I love that you added your the surprising signs of why you're like, yeah, has to be. Personal lives are fair, but yours not so much. I'm sorry that's your kind of the exception here don't count exactly. I'm glad you picked up I'm

glad you picked up on that. You know. It's like myf and Robert Cursben wrote a book Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite, And the word else is in parentheses, and so it's kind of like that, you know what I mean, Like, like we all think that we're the only one whose life isn't fair. There's another psyche book what was called was it Mistakes were made? But not by me exactly. Yeah, that's by Aarons Elliot Aronson, who's actually going to be on the podcast later this year. Oh,

I recorded two part series with him already. I'm so excited to put that out. Very cool, You're very well read. I mean I gotta say, like maybe I could back up a second, we get to know you a little bit better. Is your full time job the blog? Yeah, the blog and for the for the past two years writing the book. And you know, the book is basically MythBusters for success. You know, I take the old maxims we all grew up with of nice guys finished last

it's not what you know, it's who you know. You know, quitters never win, winners never quit, and kind of look at the research, look what the experts say, and see if they're true, if they're not true, of when they're true. And because the issue for me was, you know, I came out of pen with a degree in philosophy, which did not prepare me for the typical work world, and I had a very unconventional career. I was a screenwriter in Hollywood for a decade, or for Disney or a

for Fox. I worked in video games, and it didn't seem to me like those rules always applied so well. And I didn't, you know, nice guy. Sometimes nice guys, you know, do terrible, sometimes they do great. I've got exceptions to all of these little maxims. And I wanted to know what are the real rules of success or at least what did the research say that really would have made a difference, because I was as curious as anybody else, and I wanted to see what is the

legitimate research experts have to say. Oh, absolutely, and there are no rules. I mean, there are very few rules in science. There are some, there are some and be able to genet experts the feel to be able to ex We're starting to actually figure out some rules that seem to hold. But a lot of these things you're talking about, really in this book, you're talking about correlations, and there's lots of variation and contexts that matter as well.

So putting that nuance in there was huge. So that's great, You're kind of living a dream in a lot of ways. It's great. It's one of those but I tend towards I tend towards workaholism. So when you don't have any restrictions on you, you tend to do too much, which is good in terms of output. But sometimes I have to sort of restrain myself because there's nobody else to do it. Yeah, but it's exciting to be able to kind of be on your own clock and have your

own autonomy is really wonderful. So he had the little intro alude to get to know more about you. Let's jump back into some more of these in terms of things, So how long could I be Batman? Yes, this actually has been researched, and you know, I think it relates to an issue some people deal with in terms of perfectionism, you know, in the issue of trying a little bit

so trying different things. Sometimes we're a little too focused on being perfect and that limits us because we don't want to try anything where we might want to fail. And so I think, as e Pol's er, I think did this research where he tried to look at comparable careers to Batman, and he looked at he looked at boxers, mixed martial arts athletes, and running backs, and what you saw was that how long? Because the thing about Batman

is Batman? You know, having a record of thirty and one doesn't work for Batman because he can never lose. He has to be perfect. The criminals of Gotham wouldn't kill him, so he has to have a perfect record. So basically, when you look at these other comparable athletes, how long can they go undefeated with a perfect record?

And the answer came down to three years. So when you think about the time that it would take to develop the skills to be Batman and then you would probably have a career of about three years, you realize that perfectionism may be a real hindrance. Oh yeah, it's okay, So three years is the answer there. That's cool. Yeah, it's like good knowledge's good information to know. There. Absolutely, So I'm kind of jumping around here a little bit because what I like about your book does kind of

jump around. Then you like tie it all together in a boat. It's like, it's really cool. Can grit be a game? Yeah? Does it always have to be so serious? No? I mean the truth is, it's like we I think that's a mistake that a lot of us make. I mean I know I make it too, where we say, oh God, it's so hard to stick to something. Oh god,

it's hard to stick to something. Yet you know, you never miss an episode of your favorite TV show, and you when you get hooked on a game on your iPhone or a video game on Xbox or something, you know, that's never a problem to stick with through to the end. It's it's great. So what's the difference there? And the difference is that games impose a structure on things, a structure that keeps you interested, keeps you hooked, you know.

And if we take that same structure where there's feedback, there's goals, you know, and impose that structure on our other activities which aren't immediately as pleasurable and fun, we can create a game in it that gives us the same kind of rewarding feeling and makes it much easier to persist. Awesome, man. I use this example of this rock climber, right, Yeah, I mean that's so traumatic that story. I was like on the edge of my seat. Yeah,

I mean, it's this, It's this phenomenal story. If you watch the documentary Touching the Void based on his book, and it's a true story of they were climbing in the Andes and they get all the way up to the top of the mountain. Nobody had ever climbed this club face before, and on the way down, which is actually where most accidents happen, shattered his leg and at

that height, you know you're dead. You're just dead, and not only shatters leg, but then to his partner because they're tied together to save to save his own life, had to cut the rope and he falls into a crevass with this shattered leg and he's you know, he's in horrible pain, and he has to go miles to get back to the campsite to save his life. He manages to do it, and the way he does it is by focusing everything on a game setting, giving himself

time limits to reach certain markers. And it's an incredibly powerful, inspiring, moving story, but it illustrates just that framing things in terms of a game can keep you going in situations that seem impossible. I mean, I love that. As someone who's preferred play a lot, I prefer not so good. I like intrinsically driven things that they are purely intrinsically driven. Yeah, I'm totally down with that. And and that was a really cool way of thinking you can almost gammify any

situation doesn't need to. We do have this dichotomy right between work and play, that we don't need to have that false dichotomy. No, it was interesting. I interviewed for the blog a Navy seal, an Army Ranger, special Forces officer, and what was funny is none of them knew each other, and they all when I was talking to them all about that and obviously the intense vetting process and training they go through, they all said the same thing. Every one of them said. How I got through it was

by making it a game. It wasn't personal, it wasn't life or death, even though it certainly seemed like it at times. They made it a game, and that perspective just puts a different lens over what you're doing and turns it into something that's, like you said, a little more playful, a little bit more fun, and you build in that your personal rewards system, and you can get through really grueling things, far more grueling and intense than most of us ever deal with. Yeah, but you have

dealt with a lot of it. You did your MFA. Does that mean you were an artist? I got a master's degree from UCLA Film School. Oh, film school, gotcha, gotcha? Yeah, so not a real artists. Yeah, I didn't mean to say that, that's obviously. So let's talk about this. You know, introversion, amber version, extroversion, and networking. Now, extroverts love networking, they just love it. They can't get enough of it. And introverts would prefer not to have to do that. Now,

is that okay? If you prefer not to do that, can you still succeed in life? What I found really fascinating was, you know, I have friends who are uber extroverts, and you know, they get on a plane for a few hours, they come off, they've made four or five friends, and that's amazing. And you look at the power of networks, and you know, networking is essential. I mean, it's really important and major. One of those studies I even site

shows that networking even benefits drug dealers. That the bigger, the larger their networks, the more successful their deals are, and the less likely they are to be incarcerated. You know, so when you look at the data. And then there's one study that shows when introverts pretend to be extroverts, they're happier, you know, and that in general, extroverts are happy and I'm an introvert myself, so it's this is not it was not pleasant reading all of this research.

But then you look, you know, it's like, what's the introvert superpower? And what was the I forget the specific I forget the specifics of the line, but basically it was that the higher level of extroversion is what inversely related to skill or blah blah blah. Where basically it was that the more it came down to the more extrovert you are, the worse you were at your job.

And basically, because introverts are spending less time with people, they have more time to gain skills knowledge accumulate it. And when you look at a range of studies, introverts are more successful in school, they are more likely even athletes, you know, across the board as skill acquisition because they have those extra hours where they're not spending with people

to get their Andrews ericson ten thousand hours, right. Does there need to be a trade off though, between having a positive enthusiasm and assertiveness and still put in the time for their practice so that you could still be an extrovert and still put in that time right, Oh, I mean absolutely, And most people, you know, like you were saying, you know, insurance extroversion and amber version. You know,

most people aren't. You know, people fall into the middle, and you know, so you can be you know, if extreme extroverts might have trouble, you know, sitting down for hours at a time every day and you know, doing deliberate practice or something, and extreme introverts might you know, have trouble you know, spending the time to network. But most people are going to just find a balance between

the two. And if you schedule the time and dedicate yourself to finding a balance that works for you, yeah, I mean, you can claim benefits on both sides. I did a study on this that I wanted to tell you about. I was very curious about this similar issue, and I did an analysis of introversion extraversion and items relating specifically to solitary time, spent time alone, as well

as enjoyment of solitary time. And I found that introversion extraversion just that one dimension without looking at other because personality dimensions interact with each other. If you're an introvert, you were more likely to be alone, but you were no more likely in extroverts to actually get anything positive out of that alone time, like to enjoy it or to I mean, you could just like be alone and just like eat bond bonds and watch and binge watch TV.

So in my analysis actually found it was this intellectual curiosity and openness to experience dimension of personality that interacted with introversion in predicting things like utilizing that time. More Like, the research I think suggests that if you just look at that one dimension without looking at interactions, introverts are no more likely to like spend more time in deliberate practice than extroverts. They are more likely to be alone, That is true. Yeah, So I just say that I

hope that I add some nuance for you. You know, Oh no, I would totally spec I'm totally speculating here, but I mean, I could totally see what you're saying. But do you think there could be a crowding out function where you know, if you are spending more time socializing, you simply don't have those hours to spend on skill acquisition or other things, Versus you can certainly waste time alone.

There's no doubt, Like, could there be a crowding out where Yeah, if you're tract collagen, you're going to every single party, You're simply not going to have as many hours to study. So I mean, this is great we're having this conversation because I mean, I don't know that I don't know, no one knows the absolute truth and anything.

But I think that what's interesting about this is that like extraversion is like gregariousness is just one small part of actually what you're doing is you're equating extraversion with one with maybe two items on the extraversion questionnaire, Like extra version is a hodgepodge of things that seems to be related to how much reward sensitivity do you have? Like how much do you get excited excited stimulated by

rewards in the environment. So maybe what you're saying is actually a good point that the more that you are like ooh sex, ooh food, networking opportunities, ooh money, the more that you are kind of distracted by getting reward value from all those things. So I think there probably is a very big grain of truth in what you're saying. I'm trying to just think through all of the studies I know and see how that could make sense, And yeah,

I think that could make sense. But I think that the extent to which you really, you know, utilize that time, well, I think is going to be moderated by other variables. You know, God forbid I use the word talent. I mean I feel like the word talent is like s it's a dirty word these days. Well, let's talk about talent. You know, you make a bold statement in the book, you say, effort he makes talent possible. Do you think it's one hundred percent through? Oh, I mean not totally.

I don't think there's any doubt. I mean, it depends on the area. I mean, you know, it's I think we're talking about being in the NBA. You know, the height is going to be a strongly limiting factor. So you know, merely more hours is I don't think is going to is going to make that possible. So you have those you also have you know, I know it's been debated, but because you've pursued a lot in the issue of IQ the threshold old effect, you know, in terms of that one twenty sort of I know Mahli

Chick Semihi talks about that. But again, we found no threshold in the arts. We only found that there was something in the sciences in the sense that probabilistically you find that my Q is related to scientific achievement, but

there's no like hard and fast threshold. Like it's not like literally there are exceptions too, they're always there are people who But yeah, we've actually found in this study we posted in the arts though, there was just literally no zero threshold and zero even probabilistic with IQ, and

we found that very interesting. I wasn't expecting that, but yeah, no, I mean I wouldn't have expected no, you know, no connection, but at least at least above a hundred or like if you don't have a brain, like if we take your brain out of years, maybe like you won't be able to those people are hard to come by and

even harder to study. But I mean, I think you have that issue where certain you know, limitations certainly and you know, like you're saying in the sciences or stuff like that, there may be you know, variable sorts of thresholds where there are just certain characteristics or I mean it could even go out to personality traits where you know those can affect kind of how much capacity you might have in an arena. Yeah, I think that's very true. So tell me about sm zero four six is a

zero or oh yeah. This was a story I originally heard on the podcast Invisibilia, which is fantastic. And this is the reason she does not have a name. This is a woman who basically feels no fear and her big due to a was a herback. It's a very rare brain disorder where basically the migdola calcifies and it basically dies, and so she can feel all the other emotions,

but she cannot feel fear. And again, it's one of those kind of things where you might think at first, oh my god, that'd be great, it'd be wonderful, I never feel afraid again, I'd go to the dent. And the truth is it's actually, in many ways a horrible curse because most of the things we do to protect ourselves are not deliberate, conscious thoughts. They are on a very emotional, instinctive level that we do to protect ourselves,

and so she does things that are very dangerous. They took her to a pet store and she tried to touch the lethal snakes. And you know, she lives in a really bad neighborhood and has put herself in situations where she's been assaulted and these because she doesn't have that instinctive Oh it is a bad idea kind of feeling that we all get, and that really affects, you know, her life. And it's a fascinating story. That is fascinating.

And when I was reading that, I was thinking to myself, Oh, she sounds like the similar to like psychopaths don't a fear. But then you said that she actually is a really really nice person. Yeah, and I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, I think that's a consistent quality through it. But yeah, she is, you know, very nice, very agreeable. But literally, the reason that she she's called sm you know, zero four six, is not because she's in a science ficture movie.

It's because if they release her name, she could totally be taken for granted, people could exploit her because she doesn't she doesn't feel fear and she really can't protect herself. Gosh, people could be so horrible, can't they. Oh, I mean that's totally terrible. I mean, what like you're saying in the issue of nice Guys finished last, I mean, you know, in short term exchanges and zero sum games, you know,

bad guys do quite well. I mean, and it's a sad fact, and there was kind of an optimal level there of nice where you don't want to be too nice, where you allow yourself to be exploited all the time. Is that right? Yeah? I mean what you see is when they did the prisoners the iterated Prisoner's dilemma. Was Robert Axelrod in the nineteen eighties did the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

They tried to create all these different holgorithms to come up with the most successful strategy for the prisoner's dilemma. And there were all kinds. There were nice ones that always cooperated, there were evil ones that you know, always defected. Then there were ones that were more nuanced, where there was one called tester that would see how much it

could get away with. And what they realized was the algorithm that did the best was a simple one from childhood we're all familiar with, which was Tit for Tat, which is all it did was it started out cooperating and then all it did was replicate the other person's last move. So if you cooperated, it cooperated, If you defected, it defected, and Tit for Tat was amazingly successful. And what they found was they could actually make it a little bit better if they included more forgiveness so that

it didn't create these death spirals of defection. But then there was another iteration they found, which was that they found that if somebody was being too nice and always cooperating, you could actually improve it by putting in a little bit of exploitation. And you know, that's a little sad being too nice because one of tip pro taxed strengths was it did retaliate, it didn't hold a grudge. But if you exploited it, it exploited you back, but then

immediately forgot and recent oh some caesar being a computer. Oh, I mean, it's those the power of algorithms. I thought that was really cool though. So it did add a lot of new And so you know, Adam granted Adam Grant's language, you know, not just being a matcher. It was different. You're kind of like a blend of things. You're adaptable in a way. No, I mean, well, you know it's matches miss out because you know, they're not proactive.

They're always kind of waiting for an invitation to the party because they're going to match, whereas takers are out exploiting givers are out doing favors getting exploited sometimes. And I mean, that's one of my favorite sections of Give and Take. You know, an amazing book is where he talks about, you know, how not to be marder, you know, how not to get exploited and still be able to do good. And I think that that's a really important lesson for a lot of people. It isn't a pro lesson.

And also I love that idea about forgiveness. I was so happy you included that. So let's talk a little bit about self esteem because that's you know, there can be pearls to self esteem, isn't that right? Well? Yeah, what's really funny is that California did this this big self esteem initiative where they thought, oh, we're going to take kids and we're going to give more confidence and they're going to feel better about themselves and they're going

to succeed. And what they found was it didn't work. That self esteem is largely a result, not a cause, and that what you usually end up doing is just increasing narcissism. And it's funny because I talk, like you're saying the book, I try to balance everything almost like a court case. You know, I give both sides of the story, and confidence is that you know, the other side of the story never gets told. Nobody runs around trying to be less confident. Nobody says, how can I

have less self esteem? You know, nobody does that. But what you see is there are strengths to having less self esteem and less confident. It makes us more open to learning, It makes us more open to growing. If we think we know all the answers, we don't look

for new answers. And what we find is when you look at all the research is that the paradigm in some ways can seriously be questioned just because you know, confidence can lead to certainly lead to narcissism, It can lead to actually a jerk, to loss of empathy, and to overconfidence, you know, I mean when you look at Daniel Connon and others have talked about this extensively, and obviously lack of confidence. Confidence is very powerful, even if it helps you learn and grow. You know, it's in

job interviews, you know, first dates. I mean, confidence has

a huge impact on on how others see you. And what's interesting is if you look at Kristin Neft's research at the University of Texas and self compassion, and there's also some other research at Stanford on it self compassion could be a far better paradigm to work off of because instead of you know, self esteem, where you feel like you constantly need to justify your level, which means either you're going to fail at some point and not justify your self esteem, in which case you'll crash, and

if you do, you just have to keep proving it, which keeps you on this treadmill, which is unpleasant. You need to slay a dragon every day to feel good about yourself. Self compassion is saying that I'm human, I'm flawed, I make mistakes, and forgiving yourself as opposed to running on this hamster wheel of trying to prove your self worth every day. Yeah, the positive psychology class I teach at Penn. I wish you were an undergrad here. You could be my TA. What do you say? I would

love to take it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you would. I would maybe come in and give a guest lecture, though the students would die if Eric Parker cave. I'm sure they're big fans of your blog. Their favorite lecture tends to be the self compassion lecture. There's something about students in college campuses today. I think that just don't allow the permission, but they don't give themselves permission. Professors don't tend to give them permission to have self compassion.

So it's huge, it's really huge. I'm really I'm really glad that you mentioned that in the book. So let's kind of wrap up talking about how to strike a good work life balance. Yeah, it's such a thing possible. It's really tricky because what we see in the modern era. You know, in the past, you know in many careers that the office stores closed at five pm. You didn't have email, you know, decades ago, where you could be reached at home. People didn't call you on your home phone.

You didn't have a cell phone in your pocket twenty four to seven giving you emails, text messages, and work phone calls. So the issue is that the world used to build boundaries for you. Now those boundaries have been lifted. We love the benefits. We love being able to order things from Amazon at three o'clock in the morning if we have to, that's fantastic, But it goes both ways.

And so the thing you need to do is create boundaries for yourself, which of course is much more difficult, and we can find work life balance, but it has to be by a personal definition of success. What are the limits that you have and that you're comfortable with in terms of the hours you want to devote to

different areas of your life. And some of the things you see that the mistakes people make in terms of work life balance is some people use what's called a collapsing strategy, where they have they only have one metric for success, like money, I'll just make the number go up, make the number go up, and they don't think about their health, they don't think about the relationships, you know, they don't think about it, and they just money, and

so they work too much. And hey, if you devote yourself, the money number will probably go up, but you're probably not going to end up very happy. Other people use what's called a sequencing strategy, which is another not good strategy where people will say, Okay, for the first ten years, I'm just going to focus on my career, and then for the next ten years, I'm just going to focus on my family. And of course that never works because life throws curveballs at us, and if you're for those

first ten years. If you do get married, have kids, you know, by the time you're into your family section, your kids don't know you. You know. So it's not that it's not that simple, but what you do see is was it. Stevenson and Nash at Harvard did some research where they found four categories for metrics that people can use to develop a decent work life balance, and those were happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy. And happiness is

are you enjoying what you're doing? Achievement is you know career goals are you getting ahead? Third with significance, which is are you making a positive impact and the people you love the people around you? And fourth was a legacy are you making the world a better place for

you having been there? And if you look at the hours where you spend your time and you make sure that you're depositing a little bit in each one of those four categories, then you can make sure that you aren't going too much on achievement, too little on happiness, you know, or too much on happiness and not enough on achievement. You can try and start to build a balance that works for you. That's great, And then you also talk about the importance of getting a plan. Yeah,

is that right? Getting a boy It's an issue there of again, building the system where you know, it's like, okay, I'm you know, I'm going to limit my email checking, I'm going to take for these hours, I'm not going to have the Facebook app on my phone, you know, building a structure whereby you know you in the same way that when you look at some of the research on you know, willpower and stuff like that, the most powerful way to build willpower is just not to have

to use willpower at all, is to is to build habits or to put yourself in a frame, in a system where you can't cheat, you can't do the wrong thing if you if you put hard limitations on yourself where you know, I turn off my Wi Fi at a PM, well then I'm not going to be surfing the internet at ENVA. And so building kind of a plan and a structure for yourself is a superior way than having to grit your teeth and trying to use willpower to limit yourself. Couldn't agree more And I think

real balmister would agree with you too. Absolutely podcast recently he was the two parter was fantastic. Oh you listened to my podcast. Oh yeah, no, that that one was was great. I mean hearing him time. He covers so many different awesome subject I mean willpower is only one of them. You guys covered a lot of territory. Yeah, I feel like all three of us would have a fun dinner or something. He's the greatest. So I couldn't be more proud of you, man. I think you should

be very proud of yourself. This is a really a meaningful accomplishment you've done with this book, putting together so many studies in a way that like it makes sense. Like I'm reading the literally the whole way through, I'm thinking, how's he going to? How's he gonna? How? And you

did it? You really did it, so huge congratulations. I want to ask a sort of like because you run the risk, I know, like the feeling you put your heart and soul into something right, and you kind of you almost like don't even want to like look at it again, like a certain topic, like like I bet there are some topics in here that you'd be happy like does not you know what? I get it. I get it, like nice guys, bad guys. I get it.

I don't even spend the rest of my life, you know, like reading those studies, I'm done with that subject no more. It's finished. I'm sure architects are just I never want to see that building again, am I right? Though? Like? What are some what's next for Eric after this? I mean, I want to see how everything goes with the book, because tipe it out yet as we speak. Yes, so I'm really curious to see how things go with that. But you know, I definitely want to keep trying little

bets and see what works. I mean, the book goes a little bet for me, and you know, hopefully it pays off. But I mean, I'm endlessly fascinated by so much of the social psychology research and making it accessible

and getting into people's hands. So I mean, I just like the format of a book where you can actually do a deep dive because I mean, my blog posts are pretty long, but they're certainly not as long as a book, so to be able to really, you know, go down the rabbit hole, you know, I think I'll I think I'll probably be writing more books in the future. Good,

it's a lot of fun to read you're writing. Thanks so much for chatting with me today, and I wish you all the best with this, Thanks so much, Scott. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought per booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com