A Conversation with "Barking Up the Wrong Tree" Author Eric Barker

September 18, 2019 · 5 min read

You're not the only one tired of hearing career advice clichés Eric Barker Eric Barker

If you've ever applied for a job, you've probably been pummeled left and right with cliché career advice that sounds better on LinkedIn than it does in real life. 

When Eric Barker left his job as a Hollywood writer many years ago to strike a new path, he heard it all. So like any good writer, he started a blog...which turned into a book. Barking Up the Wrong Tree dives deep into the maxims for success we've been told time and again, and checks out whether research can actually hold them up (or tear them down). 

Eric recently sat down with the Brew to discuss.


Brew: What is your book book about?

Eric: We grow up learning all these maxims about success. Nice guys finish last; It's not what you know, it's who you know...we don't really know if they're true or outdated. Every chapter, I approach one and put it on trial. It's like MythBusters for success. 

The reason I wrote it was because I say some of these same maxims myself. I made a big career transition and you don't know how legitimate the information you're getting is. I wanted solid answers. I started my blog Barking Up The Wrong Tree, and after a number of years I was like, okay, let's put a book together.

What is the biggest misconception people have about their success? Is there a wrong definition of success? 

There is definitely a personal element to it. One thing that was interesting was two researchers looked at what produces a well-rounded, successful life, and the mistake that many people make is having one metric for success—like how many dollars do I make? Money is easy to measure, but the problem is you go all in on money, then your relationships can suffer, your health can suffer. 

They realized people who are most successful and happy had four metrics they were trying to do well: happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy. Happiness is are you enjoying what you're doing? Achievement is are you getting ahead, making money, getting promoted? Significance is, am I producing value for the people around me? And legacy is, in some small way, am I making the world a better place? 

People who looked at their calendar and said every week I am doing something to contribute to those categories, those were the people who had the most well-rounded, happy, successful lives. 

What's something a reader can learn from your book and apply in their own life today? 

One of the chapters is all about what you know versus who you know. Some people are naturally extroverted, some introverted. Both types have strengths, but networking is important for everybody.

Networking is really powerful if you reconnect, as opposed to talking to strangers. There's a lot of people on your LinkedIn, your Facebook who you are already friends with, but you haven't talked to in a long time. Reconnecting can be very valuable and you don't have to do this slimy element of talking to people you might not want to. So instead of connecting, reconnect. 

The second thing that's really powerful for networking is super-connectors. If you look at your list of contacts, you will find that a disproportionate number of people were introduced to you by a handful of people. Those are the people you want to focus on because those are the hubs of the network. 

Did anyone's research or experience factor heavily into the lessons you wrote about? 

One person who had a great story was Spencer Glendon, a former director of research at one of the biggest wealth management funds. He had a PhD in economics from Harvard, just an incredibly successful guy. And he warned about the dangers of grit, which has been having its moment in the sun. 

Spencer said he had been debilitatingly ill for most of his career. And he said that was actually a blessing because it forced him to think about what was important to prioritize. Instead sticking with things because hey, that's what I did yesterday, Spencer had to wake up every day and say, I only have an hour where I'm gonna feel decent. What do I want to do with that hour? And that made him ruthless about saying what is important and if something is not working, get rid of it. He became a master of priorities and his story was just incredibly inspiring in terms of overcoming health challenges and still managing to be incredibly successful by a number of metrics. 

Structures around us prioritize short-term thinking. How do you balance that with the groundwork you need to lay for longer-term success? 

What I learned looking at all the research is it's a personal definition of success. But what's critical in the end is alignment between your strengths and which context you put yourself in. 

I think most people usually only think about one element or the other—what are my strengths or I've got to work for a good company. If you're somebody who's super conscientious, anxious, and organized, and you're in a really loosey-goosey, flexible, artistic environment, you're probably not going to do that well. And if you picked an arena filled with short-term thinkers and questionable behavior, then those are the incentives that are going to be rewarded.

You have to think about that issue of alignment—who am I, what am I good at, what is the context, the company, and the institution that rewards and incentivizes the things that I excel at. 

What prompted you to write this book? 

I was a screenwriter in Hollywood for 10 years, and was lucky enough to write for Disney and Fox. I made a big career transition and all of a sudden I was put into the normal work world and I was asking questions like what does work? What is true? I was really questioning things and what I found was a lot of the answers were unconventional. It wasn't always simple. And these maxims make things sound like they're black and white.

I would not have written this before. I had to hit a point in my life where I really wanted to find answers. Readers are going on this journey with me. 

If you were writing it again today, would you add any new sections? 

With a lot of people, especially now, the big question has been work-life balance. One tip was from Cal Newport at Georgetown: Don't use to-do lists, use your calendar. The reason we never get to the bottom of to-do lists is they have no respect for time. You can make a list for today that has 28 hours worth of things to do; if you look at your calendar, you only have this many hours. I know these activities are going to take this long, now I can make a realistic prediction.

Another element is hotspots. Hotspots comes from policing and looking at metrics that a few areas have disproportionate amounts of crime. Evenly distributing police presence is really inefficient. The same thing is true in terms of productivity: Some people are morning people, some are night people. Doing your best to organize around that can produce outsized results. 


Ready to read? 

Pick up your copy of Barking Up the Wrong Tree today. If you want career and life advice delivered to you regularly, sign up for Eric's free weekly newsletter, then follow him on Twitter for more daily lessons and laughs.  


Meet the author

What did you work on at Disney? The Aladdin Franchise. And I wrote some really bad direct to video action movies you should never ever watch. 

What are you watching right now? Lots of documentaries. I was just watching A Good American, which is a documentary about an NSA whistleblower.

How do you drink your coffee? I usually get lattes. I definitely like a lot of milk in there and I like them hot.

Favorite place you've traveled in the last year? I did a talk at Centcom at the military facility where the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were headquartered out of. Every time I went into any of the buildings, I had to put my phone in a locker, and anytime I would walk into a room, my escort would say "red badge" and everybody would hit a button on their computer and bring up their screensaver because I wasn't allowed to see anything classified. 

Best purchase you've made under $20? Buying anything for a friend. Most things under under $20 don't make a big impact, but if I buy something for somebody else, it doesn't matter what it is, I feel like I'm doing something nice and that makes me feel good more than any than any objects would. 

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