Eric Barker takes lessons for success from pirates, inmates and serial killers

Welcome to Salon Talks. I’m Alli Joseph and today my guest is Eric Barker, author of the popular business success blog Bakadesuyo. I don’t know if I said that right. He said ignore the U and now I’m saying it "Bakadesuyo." There you go. And now author of the new book “Barking up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong.” Eric has been up in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and many more. Today, he will tell us why valedictorians rarely become millionaires and why pirates, serial killers and gang members can teach us lessons at work about cooperation and success. Can’t wait to hear that. Welcome.

It’s great to be here.

All right. Thanks for coming. This is such an interesting premise and I love when we can combine practical things we can apply at work and the geeky science stuff. Tell me how you came to write the book.

I mean, my career journey has been all the over place, and so you grow up with this maxims success, like nice guys finish last and it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, and nobody really questions these. I wanted to talk to the experts, look at the research, and actually see if these maxims that we’ve all been told produce success. Are they true? Are they not? So, basically myth busters on all the little sayings that we successfully grow up with.

What kind of experts do you talk to to discern in fact if these things are true or false?

Largely academics. But also I turn to people who are kind of indisputable experts in the field. For great resilience, I talk to a Navy SEAL platoon commander in terms of dealing with difficult social situations at work. I talk to an FBI hostage negotiator. Basically, talking to people who either have done the hard research in academia or people where, hey, these people are dealing with these challenges and often lives are on the line.

Tell me about the origin of the blog.

Yeah.

Bakadesuyo, I read in it and I’m sure it’s the story you tell many times. But first I thought it was Spanish. That was my Philistinism coming out. But it is in fact Japanese because you studied Japanese in college.

Yeah, I found out the first day of Japanese class that my last name means "moron" in Japanese and so Bakadesuyo is me introducing myself. It’s "my name is Barker," or "I am an idiot" is actually the same sentence. The blog usually goes by "Barking up the Wrong Tree." But the URL is Bakadesuyo. Now, it’s been a fun journey. For me, it was the issue of trying to get some of these answers in life. There’s this great quote I love from William Gibson where he said that, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” We have a lot of answers to the questions we ask about life. But they’re tied up in Ivory Tower and academic journals and just making this information accessible.
Going down the rabbit hole of looking at the research, talking to the experts, I realized a lot of answers to a lot of questions in terms of happiness-productivity, relationships, communication and just trying to get this information out there.

One of the central tenets of your book of information clearly defines characteristics that make someone successful versus unsuccessful in society and they’re not always what people think, right?

Yeah.

What are the key differences and how did you research this specifically?

I mean, the issue is in terms of success. What I found is that success in any field comes down to really knowing yourself and then aligning yourself with an environment that values those skills. If you look at the research by Martin Seligman at University of Pennsylvania, he talks about signature strengths, which are the things that you’re uniquely good at, skills you have. Obviously, that’s going to make you good at your job. But the more you exercise your signature strengths it's been shown that you’re happier and you’re more respected. You feel better about what you’re doing. Understanding your signature strengths, knowing yourself and then finding an environment that rewards and values those strengths, those are the two parts. Because very often you might be good at what you do, but the place that you’re at really doesn’t value those things. Or you’re at a fantastic company, but are you bringing the skills that they require so that you’re going to be moving up? That’s the definition success seems to map onto in a lot of different arenas from both work to also . . . a lot of personal areas as well.

You spoke about nice guys finish last, for example, as a traditional maxim of success that may not in fact be the case.

Yeah.

Are there some clear things that define success and a lack thereof?

In terms of nice guys finish last?

Yeah, or just like successful people do these five things and unsuccessful people try to do something different.

I break it down into the different qualities because a lot of the issues are relative to the environment rather than new ones. With the issue of nice guys finish last, environment is critical. But what we see across the board is the research from Adam Grant at Wharton where he talked about givers, takers and matchers. Givers give altruistically. Takers try to get as much as possible. Matchers try to keep an even balance. What you see across the board is that with givers, it’s a by-moral result. Givers do very well or very bad. That’s often because if they’re in an environment where they get exploited by takers or surrounded by takers, giving altruistically doesn’t help you. But if they keep an even balance of trying to do good things but also supporting themselves and they align with other givers, they have the protection, and matchers, they can thrive because we all know people who are martyrs. But then again we also know people who have done very well and who have the support and encouragement of those around them.
In the issue of nice guys finish last, it really is about how you balance your time, but it’s also the environment you’re in.

OK. Let’s get a little more granular.

Yeah.

You give some very entertaining examples in "Barking up the Wrong Tree," the book we’re talking about today by Eric Barker, about successful but atypical, and I would say downright villainous, people in society who can teach us something about business success and cooperation. Can you detail a few? You write about pirates, inmates, serial killers.

Yeah. What’s critical there, I think, is to look at the extremes. We’re looking at what rules even the rule breakers follow, when you have a group by definition of people who can’t be trusted and they have to have trust in order to work together as a team. David Scharbach did research on prison gangs. What he found was that the issue of trust is really critical, because we don’t worry about getting stabbed when we go to work every day, but these people do. What you actually see among prison gangs is they need order. They actually need more order than we have. Prison gangs will actually endeavor to have new inmates join a gang even if it’s a rival gang because they need a support structure; random people running around causing problems can cause a destabilization of the whole prison.

It is actually better for me to push someone toward my rival gang, my enemy whom I can negotiate with as a group, and keep an equilibrium, than to have random people running around doing things that aren’t OK. That actually increases long-term. Having an issue of we see stability, trust is so critical. With pirates what we see is they’re extremely democratic. A pirate captain could be taken down by the group. He had to be elected and maintain his position. It’s a really critical issue, the issue of a democratic group where everybody gets an equal vote, everybody gets a share in there. We can learn a lot about what works well when we look at the extremes and what works even in the worse places.

All right. But you left off serial killers. These are typically solitary folks, right?

Yeah.

Where do they figure into that?

Well, serial killers was one of the negative examples I use. Michael Swango was a serial killer where basically he was a doctor who was killing his patients. He managed to kill people for more than 15 years because the hospitals that he was involved with were very worried about their reputation; they’re worried about lawsuits. Rather than exposing this, they were concerned about it, but they pushed him along, pushed him along. What you saw was somebody who could keep going and doing terrible things and getting away with it because the institutions he was associated with were really afraid of their own reputation and this perpetuated something. That’s where I enter into the issue of do nice guys finish last, does evil pay off. Eventually, Michael Swango was incarcerated, but we see what can happen when things go wrong.

Is there or are there a top few common mistakes that you see people make in trying to get ahead and failing?

Absolutely. One of the biggest critical ones you hear so much about now is the issue of work-life balance where people might be very successful in their career but their lives fall apart. Nash and Stevenson did research in Harvard. They found a common mistake people make is what’s called a collapsing metric, where in other words they focus on one number. Of course, usually that number is money. What happens is they make the number go up, and that number goes up. But health, happiness, relationships all fall apart. What Nash and Stevenson found is that the people who’ve had work-life balance, who had a well-rounded life, had four metrics that they use: happiness, achievements, significance and legacy.

By looking at your schedule and seeing on a weekly or monthly basis, am I making deposits in all four of those buckets, you can see … and what the four are is happiness, it’s what you’re enjoying, what you’re doing; achievement, are you going ahead, are you making money. Significance, is what you’re doing benefiting the people you love, with the people who love you; and legacy is are you making the world a better place. If you’re contributing to all four of those on a weekly or monthly basis, then you start to have what can be considered a well-rounded life as opposed to thriving in one arena and utterly failing in another.

But it’s really hard to do that in everyday life.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Right? I mean if you are trying to be good at your job and you’re trying to do more than show up, we all want to be successful and sometimes this leads to overworking, long days, working on weekends, very stressful, right? How can we shift the notion of working hard for success? What is healthy and there is that balance?

In the end, what it comes down to is a personal definition of success because the problem we have ... if you look, I forgot the exact numbers, but in the issue of work-life balance, the phrase wasn’t even in common usage 30 years ago. Now, we see it everywhere. What you’re seeing is that basically hard work pays off. I mean, ceteris paribus. If you work 10 hours a day, you’re going to do better, which is a dangerous incentive. Beyond that, 30, 40, 50 years ago, the doors to the office closed at 5 p.m. It’s like, “Oh, I can get that for you at 9 a.m.” Now, you’ve got your phone in your pocket, you’re textable, you get email at home, the documents are in the cloud. If you choose to work 24/7, you can.

When you start to add up, “Hey, more work pays off. I can work 24/7,” and we have these incredible examples of extreme achievement that were constantly being fed by the media. You’re put in a really difficult situation. In the end, you have to say, “Where’s the line? Where’s the line that I’m going to be happy with?” Because if you say, “Well, I’m just going to get the information from the context around me," the answer is always going to be more, more, which is impossible, unsustainable. Again, like you’re saying, long-term unfulfilling.

At some point, people need to draw for themselves and say, “Here’s where I’m going to be happy. Here’s where I’m not. Here’s where I’m going to go home to my family. Here’s where I’m not,” because the math of the world right now is just always more and that’s not possible or sustainable.

Right. There’s an expectation that we all be connected all the time. For example, somebody is answering email overnight.

Yeah.

Even here, we’re looking for somebody to come in for booking and we’re like . . . they didn’t answer. Then somebody writes me, “I don’t answer email at night.” That’s good for them. But that’s a foreign thing to hear at this point. We do have a question from our Facebook audience. Mary is asking, why do we describe becoming a millionaire as “success”? It is not.

I wouldn’t say that it’s not. I would say you have the issue of financial success and you have the issue of life success, and I addressed both in the book. But I think it’s . . . what is happiness to you is happiness meaningfulness or happiness, we can get into semantics there. In terms of career success, financial success, “Hey, being a millionaire, I don’t think anyone else would deny that is an example of career or financial success.” Is it life success? No, life success incorporates a lot more than that.

In the work-life balance chapter, we talk about trying to balance achievement with happiness, significance and legacy so that life is more well-rounded and that you’re not getting into that collapsing metric area just valuing everything by money.

There is the metric that money is nice and it definitely facilitates it but it doesn’t make you happy. The more you have it I think that the more you realize from the outside that in fact that was incorrect.

No. Money is a great defense. Money can prevent a lot of problems you might otherwise encounter. But it doesn’t necessarily bring the happiness in terms of relationships and everything.

If you’re just joining us, this is Eric Barker, author of the popular business success blog… I’m going to get it right this time, Bakadesuyo. There I got it. Bakadesuyo. It’s Japanese for I am Eric Barker and also I’m a moron in Japanese, which is why he thought it was funny and it’s an icebreaker, of course, in Japan and perhaps . . .

I’ve never had a Japanese person forget my name.

There you go. Let’s talk a little bit about . . . oh, and the author of the new book, "Barking up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong." Sorry, I butchered that a little bit. I’ll get it right next time. Let’s talk about a generation that’s very prevalent now that seems to have an interesting approach to work-life balance. That is millennials, right?

Yeah.

Research shows that they are the least engaged generation in the workplace. A Gallup poll last year found that only 29 percent of millennials are engaged at work.

Yeah.

Why are we seeing this trend with these 20- and 30-somethings? Is loyalty to a company or career an indicator of success that they’re not interested in or . . . ?

I mean, specifically, I don’t know the research on millennials in the workplace. But I think that loyalty issue is a big thing going forward. Whereas before I think people would stay at the company their entire careers. Now, companies don’t seem quite as loyal to their employees and people aren’t as loyal to their companies. To look at millennials, I’d be speculating. But to say that this isn’t necessarily going to be a guarantee, then maybe I want to allocate my time elsewhere in terms of finding fulfillment. It might be part of the equation.

I would argue from the research that I’ve read that millennials in particular are more concerned about social good, and that their work has more meaning than previous generations. Perhaps a more granular study would involve drilling down to see, Hey, if we’re studying millennials working at companies where they feel they can make a difference, perhaps that engagement statistic is completely off.

We all have 24 hours in a day. I’d be curious to see if they’re not allocating that energy and time toward work. Where is it going? I might be going toward social good, toward nonprofit, toward activism where they might be finding more fulfillment in their lives than they would otherwise.

Now, you’re a funny guy. Not, like, haha funny. Like you use humor a lot as a device to draw in an audience, which personally always gets me. For people seeking change in their lives, how do you recommend that we follow this sometimes difficult life advice? Is there a rubric in small doses? How do you know what will work for you personally as you’re going along?

I mean, first and foremost is what problems are people dealing with. I think a lot of business books have one idea that they repeat for 250 pages, and I try to cover a lot of material and it can be overwhelming. But I think first and foremost is what challenges are you facing and then trying to implement those changes first and then seeing if there are bigger, broader things. But starting simple, that’s what’s in each chapter; I kind of spelled out like a handful of points that people can do to make small, effective changes in their lives like with networking. The easiest thing is to reconnect with old friends. You already know these people. It’s not slimy. It’s not sleazy. You have friends who you haven’t talked to who might be able to help you, assist you grow your career, reaching out to old friends. It’s documented in the research as a very good way to grow your network very quickly.

Did that help you in your business blog when you began?

I mean, believe me. There are so many people I’ve reconnected with through my blog and through the book that you wouldn’t necessarily assume in terms of relationships with these people who have known you when it’s great to hear that. Also, in terms of who knows how people might be able to help you when you’re working on a big project with the book.

You weren’t always a blogger and you weren’t always an author, but you were a writer, a screenwriter in Hollywood.

Yeah, yeah.

Were there lessons that you took from your years spent working in children’s films and things like that that you brought and why you make the transition to business analysis and entrepreneurship?

Because for me, it’s . . . Hollywood is such a strange ecosystem. It’s really odd. For me, a lot of the maxims of success I heard didn’t seem to apply. I reached a crossroads in my life where I was kind of like, “Does this stuff make sense?” and I wanted those answers. It was a natural transition for me in terms of . . . I’ve been a philosophy major undergrad to start asking these questions and saying what really works, what is the truth? That and definitely in Hollywood is a talent-based networking. I definitely was able to draw from my experience in Hollywood when I was talking about the effectiveness of networking in business.

What was the most important thing that you learn about yourself both in the sphere of work-life balance and also how to be successful?

I mean, for me for work-life balance, I found that I needed to take some of the advice that I’ve been reading, some of the research I’ve been reading because I had go on 110 percent into the book. By the time I was finishing the book, I wasn’t very well balanced till I was laughing as I was typing it. On a personal level, first chapter of the book I talked about how outsiders and the exceptions-of-the-rule people who do things a little bit differently can thrive. I always have taken my own unconventional route. It’s very nice to hear that and to know that it was verified. That was heartwarming.

There’s a lot of research that supports this notion of entrepreneurs being rule breakers and taking a non-traditional path, as I have as well, even as people are saying, “Well, this is route and end route.”

Yeah.

What impediments did you come against when you were different and how did you overcome them?

I mean, really . . . kind of the issue of knowing yourself is doubling down on the skills I have, the skills I knew I was good at, which was writing. For me, to sit there and say, “Oh, I’m going to completely reinvent myself,” I don’t think that would’ve worked out very well. Or it would’ve been extremely labor-intensive and not necessarily the easiest route or fulfilling. Me, I double down on what I did. But like a ship will tick-tock, I kind of said, “OK, screenwriting.” I went from fiction to nonfiction, which, trust me, there are a lot of times it would’ve been a lot easier if I could’ve made stuff up. But you can’t do that in nonfiction.

I just took a different tack on how I’m going to write, bringing the humor, bringing the accessibility, bringing the voice of everyman to academic research and hopefully making it more mainstream and more accessible.

Last question and we have to wrap up. This has been… "Barking up the Wrong Tree" and Eric Barker. Yeah.

Yeah, perfect. Perfect.

It works.

Yes.

Author of the popular blog . . . 

Barking Up The Wrong Tree. If you Google Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

You’ll find it. Bakadesuyo, which in Japanese means "I’m Eric Barker" and also "I’m a moron." I'd love to talk about Albert Einstein and I’m hoping you use some more Latin. You said there was one example of work-life balance that you could draw upon from Albert Einstein. Can you share that quickly?

Albert Einstein, we all remember him as cute kind of funny older guy. He really did not invest in his family at all and actually presented his wife with a pretty unconscionable contract of how she was supposed to behave in the relationship, and it’s not surprising that the marriage failed. He basically didn’t see his sons and he basically lived in his head. We know that his contribution to our modern society is amazing. We all know his name. But not a good sign of good relationships or a well-rounded life.

The answer as always is balance and moderation. Right? In a granular way.

Yeah.

This is Eric Barker. If you want to check out "Barking Up The Wrong Tree," you can find it anywhere books are sold.

Yeah.

If people want to find you or follow you on social, what’s your handle?

If they Google "Barking up the Tree," it’s a blog. You can find in my email list or if you Google my name, Eric Barker, it will lead you to the Facebook or Twitter account.

In Twitter, you’re at?

At Bakadesuyo. But probably search for Eric Barker. Easier to spell.