Episode Highlights

• Eric Barker’s history tackling the concept of “success”
• Embracing a variety of paths towards and definitions for success
• Pursing academic information in a creative industry
• The cultural impact of High School Valedictorians
• The relationship between academic and personal success
• Separating perfectionism from fulfillment
• Environmental influences on creative burnout
• The importance of refining your specialties
• Strategic quitting and focusing on signature strengths
• “Happiness breeds success,” not the other way around
• Optimism’s role in the path to success
• The cultural stigma of depression

Useful Links

• www.bakadesuyo.com

About Guest

Eric Barker’s humorous, practical blog, “Barking Up the Wrong Tree”, presents science-based answers and expert insight on how to be awesome at life. Over 310,000 people subscribe to his weekly newsletter and his content is syndicated by Time Magazine, The Week, and Business Insider. He has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and the Financial Times. Eric is also a sought-after speaker and interview subject, and has given talks at MIT, Yale, Google, the University of Pennsylvania, NPR affiliates, and on morning television.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Eric Barker, who is the author of the brand new book, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything That You Know About Success Is Mostly Wrong. Eric, I’m super, super excited to have you here today.

Eric Barker: Oh, it’s great to be here, man.

Zack Arnold: And I think it’s crazy that you changed your last name just to match the title of your book.

Eric Barker: Well, it’s going to be difficult when I write subsequent books, just updating the credit cards and all the other documentation to match every title,

Zack Arnold: That is commitment, my friend, that is massive commitment, and I commend you for that.

Eric Barker: Well, it worked out pretty well. I mean, the last name is Barker, the blog sparking up their own tree, and the book sparking up their own tree. So we’re working a consistent theme here,

Zack Arnold: Exactly. So before going into the specifics of the book, I just wanted to learn a little bit more about you and your own personal journey with the book, with the blog, just so people understand the origin story, because I find that in the world of personal development and trying to learn how to be better, you don’t meet people that haven’t been through the own journey themselves, at least the ones that are authentic, and I only gravitate towards the authentic ones, so just kind of give us the origin story that kind of led you from point A to where we are now.

Eric Barker: Well, I’ve had a very unconventional career. My undergrad was in philosophy, and then I was a screenwriter in Hollywood for 10 years, or for Disney, or for Fox, and then I worked in video games. I did a bunch of different stuff, was a lot of fun, but I just found that, you know, I found myself looking for answers, and with the blog, basically I just started combing through these academic journals, something something very few people would do for fun, but just kind of looking through academic journals and trying to get some, some real answers, or some as close to real and the truth as possible, started posting them up, and luckily it caught on, largely due to Tyler Cowan helping get the word out, and that you know, just trying to look at what the research said about living a better life, everything from happiness to productivity to negotiation, and that kind of built up, and then I thought about the idea of a blog, because, like I said, I had a very unconventional career, and I realized a lot of the maxims that we grew up with around success, like nice guys finish last, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, quitters never win, winners never quit, all these maxims we hear, you know, they, they’re, they’ve never really been tested, they’ve never really been been given the kind of Mythbusters treatment, they’re pithy, and we, they get thrown around a lot, but you know, are they actually true? When are they true? When are they not? And after, you know, number of years, more than six years of doing the blog, I started on the book because I kind of wanted to put them to the test and see what what is true about success, as far as the research and the experts have to say, because that’s really my thing, is what are. Research say where the experts have to say, because you know we no longer have a shortage of information, we have too much information, but what we still lack is a lot of good information. So, always trying to source things, so, so long tree, the book is, is just each chapter is sort of testing those maxims of success, looking at the research and the experts, and seeing if they’re true, when they’re true, and basically not success merely in career or financial, but living a successful life, and it was, it was a lot of fun, so I tell, I tell some, some stories that relate to the various issues, and I make the research kind of fun and accessible, as opposed to esoteric and hard to understand.

Zack Arnold: Well, you and I are brothers from another mother, because if there was ever somebody that understood well, you might think it’s weird that you know I’m in Hollywood, but I’m reading academic journals, like that’s crazy that you’re basically regurgitating my story, and my audience would be like, yeah, that sounds pretty familiar, because I am obsessed with reading about the science and the research behind productivity and creativity, and how the mind works, and how we perceive things, like you. And it’s also funny that you saying, “Oh, you had such an unconventional path. Everybody listening to the show right now is saying, “Oh, that’s my path too, because we’re all in the same field. You were on the writing side, but most everybody that listens to this is in some creative job in Hollywood or in the filmmaking industry. Large amount of them film editors, because I am, but they’re all saying, yeah, well, that’s pretty much my path too. So, you know, if you were on some financial podcast, like, well, I don’t understand, you were in Hollywood and video games, and well, how did you fill your 401 k, and what did you do the other time that you were between jobs? Like this audience totally gets it. So, I think that it’s really, really going to resonate with them, especially with me, because I’ve been on that journey myself, trying to figure all these different things out, and I always seek out writers that are able to take this incredibly complex information, and break it down into simple bits, because, like you said, information is not the problem anymore, and I feel like the people that really have value now are not the ones that share information, it’s the ones that learn how to break it down and make it attainable and make it understandable in a very short period, which you have done very successfully.

Eric Barker: Cool. Thank you very much.

Zack Arnold: So now I want to talk a little bit about this fact that you’re telling me that I can’t just work hard and put my nose to the grindstone and live the American dream, that kind of freaks me out. What are you talking about? What does that mean?

Eric Barker: It’s interesting, because if you look at some of the work done by Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, in his book, Power. He looks at a lot of the research, and basically, you know, hard work is hard work by itself is pretty overrated. Basically, if you, if you, what it comes down to in terms of the studies, Sefer sums it up, I’m paraphrasing, by saying if you have a very good relationship with your boss, hard work doesn’t matter all that much, and if you have a terrible relationship with your boss, hard work won’t save you. So you know your relationship with your boss has far more to do with getting promoted and getting ahead, at least in your typical hierarchical corporate environment, than hard work does. And in terms of education, what you see is that Karen Arnold at Boston College did a lot of research on valedictorians, and what she found is that is that once they graduate high school valedictorians, they do well, but they don’t reach the heights of success, and that is because school basically is school has clear rules, life doesn’t, if you’re good at complying with rules, so if you’re high in the personality trait of conscientiousness and you’re good at checking the boxes and doing what you’re told, then you do very well, but you don’t do fantastic, because what happens is most high school valedictorians become part of the system, they don’t end up running the system, changing the system, they don’t generally become the movers and the shakers, because they are very good at following rules, doing what they’re told. Not only that, to be a valedictorian, you need to get, you need to get straight A’s. So people who are passionate about one particular subject and want to be specialists usually don’t become valedictorian. Valedictorians need to be generalists. They need to stop, you know, even if you’re very passionate about math, they need to stop studying math and go on to study history and English and their other classes to make sure they get A’s in all of them. However, while school rewards being a generalist, life rewards being a specialist. If you are fantastic at math and become a fantastic programmer, Google is going to be very happy to hire you and pay you a lot of money, and they’re really not going to care how much you know about history or English or your other classes. So, school hard work in school, you know, can certainly pay off. I mean, college, the research shows that college students certainly do better than people without a college degree, but. You’re talking about the heights of success, the standard advice of, you know, get straight A’s. Those people don’t reach the tippy top. If you look at, there was a, there was a study done of the Forbes 400 so the 400 richest people on the planet, and some of them had graduated from, you know, many had graduated from college, as many had graduated from Ivy League schools, and a significant number were dropouts or had never attended college. What’s interesting is that the dropouts are those who had never attended college. That subset was actually had a net worth of three to four times greater than the entire sample, and in fact the subset of dropouts or never attended college had a higher net worth than those who attended Ivy League schools, so again, you know, hard work in school can definitely get you to pretty good or very good, but it’s no guarantee, or might even be negative in terms of results when you’re talking about reaching the very heights of success.

Zack Arnold: Well, and this is where the show is going to get really depressing. I was my high school valedictorian, and it’s funny reading your book has kind of been like you’ve, you’ve become kind of a surrogate psychoanalyst, because I’ve been going through this process of thinking like, and I’m also a recovering perfectionist as well, and to this day, I mean, it’s been, God, I hate to say it, but it’s been 20 years since I graduated from high school, and I still think about the fact that I was two multiple choice questions away on one geometry test from having a perfect four zero to this day. That still bothers me, and I, you couldn’t get eight pluses and get above a four zero, so 4.0 was the best you could get, and I graduated with a 399 Still bothers me to this day, but I’ve been doing this transition for the last few years, trying to go more into the unknown, create a blog and a podcast on a learning site, and becoming an entrepreneur, and constantly hitting this wall of saying, what is this thing that’s stuck in my head that’s making this hard for me to make this work, and all of it, just like you know, in this kaleidoscope of light from a beautiful mind was like, oh, I get it now, like all the things you said in your book made a lot of sense, and I think there are a lot of people that I run into in my industry, and other people that I find on the site that work in creative industries that fight this as well, because nobody is saying when you’re growing up, oh, forget the rules and don’t do your homework, do what you’re passionate about. We’re conditioned, like you said, to work within a system, but then you look at the, you know, the Steve Jobs and the Elon Musks of the world, and Bill Gates, and I mean, half the most successful film directors, if we’re talking about this industry, most of them are college dropouts, so you know, there’s there’s that dichotomy that’s very hard to reconcile.

Eric Barker: No, there’s there’s no doubt. It’s funny, you know, elementary school, high school teachers are often quoted as saying how much they love creative students, but the research actually shows that they don’t, that they dislike creative students, that they’re rated less highly because they don’t follow the rules, and you know, and people teachers want kids who you know do what they’re told, and creative students don’t. They try different things, they experiment, and so they’re not. And by the same token, there’s other research that shows creative people are getting lower performance reviews, and they’re less likely to, in hierarchical corporations, they’re less likely to ascend to CEO. Now again you can be an entrepreneur and anoint yourself CEO, but in terms of an existing corporation, people who score highway in terms of creativity are less likely to become chief executive officer.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, you can look at the – there’s a documentary film that really documents this kind of failing forward mentality of the idea that your relationship with your boss means much more than your output. The documentary’s name is Office Space, realize this out perfectly. So, anybody that’s worked in the corporate world would relate to that. We could go down this rabbit hole forever, but I want to veer in a slightly different direction, and that is towards what is really my passion, which is understanding the way that the creative mind works, how it’s a little bit different than those that are within the system, and how people will often think that that’s either a tremendous strength or a tremendous weakness. And then, as we kind of go down that path, talk a little bit more about how that can lead to burnout and what burnout really is. But where I wanted to start talking about this, is this idea that you talk about, that is the differential susceptibility hypothesis. And let’s, let’s kind of go down that rabbit hole a little bit.

Eric Barker: So it’s funny, you can, you can look at two kinds of flowers. You can look at dandelions, which nobody plants, they’re they pretty much grow up outside of the road, they don’t need much attention, in fact, they’re usually gotten rid of, but they’re very resilient, you know. They’ll, they’ll just pop up anywhere, they don’t need much care taking. Then you have orchids. Orchids are extremely beautiful flowers, but they require an enormous amount of care, effort, and attention. Greenhouses, proper temperature, or they wilt and die, and and we’re not actually talking about. Flowers, we’re actually talking about cutting-edge genetics, because what you see is there’s actually a vein of research in Gen X now that talks about the orchid dandelion hypothesis, where some people are dandelions, they’re pretty resilient, they’ll do fine in any environment, and then there are some people who are orchids, and they, their genetics are very sensitive to their environment and very reactive to their environment, and if those people are raised in a difficult environment, they don’t do very well. They can end up in prison, they can end up with mental disorders. However, raised in a good environment, they do far, far better than the dandelions, because in the past we see many one-off studies that talk about a specific gene, and they often say, ‘Oh, this gene is associated with psychopathy, or ‘this gene is associated with attention deficit disorder, criminal behavior, and people are quick to go, ‘Oh, God, you know, thank God, I don’t have that gene, but actually, that perspective on genetics is looking like it’s going the way of the dinosaur, because what we’re finding is that the genes, genes aren’t, you know, just bad or good, it’s more of the orchid hypothesis, where basically those genes are just more sensitive, and if people are raised in abusive homes, in poverty, in deprivation, yes, then they can lead to bad, bad things and problematic situations. However, those same genes raised in good environments, those people actually do do better. There was one study where they had one of the genes in question, they found kids who, who had these, these genes, and basically they gave kids the opportunity to share this one. This was a gene that had been shown to cause problematic behavior, criminal behavior. They have kids with and without that that genetic sequence a chance to share candy. Now these kids were raised in good homes. Turns out the kids with those bad genes were actually more likely to share, they were more giving more kind. They had this quote unquote bad gene, but raised in good homes, it made them the better people in society. So, what we’re seeing is not this black and white attitude towards genes, but with people with these quote unquote orchid genes, they’re just very sensitive to their environment, and raised in bad homes, they turn into the problematic members of society, raised in good homes and good environments, they turn into the most beautiful flowers imaginable, and become some of the best and most creative, most most wonderful people we have around us.

Zack Arnold: One of the reasons I wanted to bring that up specifically is in the world of Hollywood, and it’s another reason why I was so excited to have you here, is you actually understand the world of Hollywood, very well. Boy, do you see the dandelion orchid hypothesis everywhere? Like, I know I’ll talk to people that will say, “Well, I don’t get it. Like, I show up on time every day, and I work really hard, and my work is good, and I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere. And then there’s this nut job of a director that can’t even tie his own shoes or order his lunch, and he’s making multiple millions of dollars. What am I doing wrong? And I think this helps make a lot of sense of that.

Eric Barker: Yeah, I mean, because Hollywood is a place that rewards, you know, very, very specific, very difficult skills. You know, it’s, you know, as the saying goes, there’s no accounting for taste, so you know, creating a good, you know, you’ll, you’ll happily go into, you know, Walmart and buy a pretty good hammer or an okay saw, because it’s cheap, and it’s, and it’s, and it’s available, but nobody goes looking for an okay movie, you know, when it comes to issues of taste, you know, people want the best, people want great, so, so the exceptional stuff, you see, that kind of, you know, almost Zips Law type thing, where, where the, you know, the number one is far, I believe, twice as much, or far greater than the number two, you know, we want the best, we’re not going to buy an okay desk, or an, oh, you’re gonna buy an okay desk, but you’re, you don’t want to go see an okay movie, you want to go see a great one, so anybody who can do that, anybody who has that, that ability, that skill, even if they can’t tie their own shoes, they have probably a monopoly or near monopoly over the scarcest resource. You know, just talent, creativity, the ability to make good movies is so scarce. We all see a lot of bad movies, so those people are generously rewarded. And hey, maybe if we stick them with a decent assistant, we can make sure to get their shoes tied, then we can have them do that one thing they’re good at, again, kind of tie, tying into the valedictorian research, where you don’t have to be good at every subject if you’re exceptional at the one subject that matters.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I’ve seen that in my office over and over, and as a screenwriter, I don’t know if you worked on the feature side or the TV side, and in the feature side, I know you don’t spend too much time in post production, and the TV side, you do, but I spent 15 years in a small dark room editing stuff together, and I’ll see these directors, these producers, these writers that, like I said, they literally cannot figure out how to pay their bills, how to order their lunch, or tie their shoes, but. Then all of a sudden you put something in front of them on the screen and the insights that come out of them are magical and you’re like Who are you, like you’re a mad scientist genius right now, but five minutes ago you could barely function, and I think that’s something that people really overlook, like you said, is that that crazy amount of specialty was one thing that they’re good at.

Eric Barker: Oh, it’s like when you look at Kay Anders Erickson’s research on expertise, you know, which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell and Outliers, you know, the quote unquote 10,000 hours rule, even though it’s not a strict number, you know, 10,000 hours to become an expert at something, and that’s 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, not 10,000 hours of randomly doing something. I’ve probably washed my hair for 10,000 hours, that doesn’t make me an expert at it, but if you’ve done 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, you know, in something, you know that says two things, generally. Number one, you’re probably pretty obsessive about this, because that’s 10,000 hours is a lot, especially deliberate practice to do in a reasonable amount of time, and number two, there’s probably a lot of other stuff you’re not doing, so, so, in order to free up enough time to hit 10,000 hours, you need to be neglecting other things, and that’s why we have this trope of the mad scientist, the professor who can’t find his pants, but can can do differential equations, you know, because they focus on what matters, and again, it’s that sort of, you know, if you’re the best at what you do, you will be generously rewarded. You don’t need to be well rounded, and if you can hire people to round out the skills you lack, then you can be a very effective leader. When I spoke to Bob Sutton, who teaches at Stanford GSB. He said that many leaders he has interviewed, including Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg. One of the things that they did very well was they knew what they were good at, and they knew what they weren’t good at, and they focused on doing what they were good at, and they focused on hiring people who compensated for their weaknesses in terms of their senior management team, and this is one of those secrets, and you see this across the research. If you go to Peter Drucker, you know, one of the great management gurus the 20th century, you know, he said, and a lot of other research backs that up, that focusing on your signature strengths, the things you’re good at, and then trying to compensate, you know, finding other people to take care of the things you’re not good at is a far better strategy than trying to improve your weaknesses. Improving your weaknesses is very difficult, and it takes a lot of time, and you’re going against the grain, as opposed to doubling down on what you’re good at. That’s the best investment of your time, will pay the biggest dividends. That’s really how you should, you should go about in terms of moving towards success.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s one thing that I talk about with people when I do any type of mentorship, where I speak on a panel and they say, I just kind of feel like I’m spinning my wheels and I’m not moving forwards, and I ask them, well, kind of give me an idea of your skill set. Well, you know, I do some editing, but I also do some music work, and I’m also learning visual effects right now, and of course I have to know color because they always ask me to do color, and I’m writing stuff on the side, and I’m like, are you seeing a pattern for perhaps why you’re not moving forwards, and you just kind of feel flat, and like, well, I don’t get it, I’m learning as much as I can, and I’ll say, but you’re not focusing on what you’re really, really passionate about, and more importantly, what is within your skill set, and I think that’s a huge thing, because for me, all the things that I either don’t enjoy or things that I just don’t feel like I’m that good at, I’ll deliberately not learn them, and I’ve gotten flack for that, but I’ll say I don’t want to learn this skill, because I know it’s going to take the time away from learning things that I’m really, really good at, and that’s part of the reason that I’ve been able to move further ahead in my career than many of my peers is this intense amount of specialization, and I’m very glad to hear that it’s backed by research.

Eric Barker: No, and that’s something I talk about in the chapter on grit, where you know people, there’s been an enormous emphasis on grit lately, and there’s again for good reason, because a lot of people do struggle with persistence and long-term goals. However, we seem to, we really denigrate quitting, and what people don’t usually take into consideration is that quitting is, is actually vital now, not random, flaky quitting necessarily, but you know where, where is the time going to come from to apply your grit to get to those 10,000 hours, and that is from quitting things that aren’t producing results that you aren’t good at, and don’t need to spend the time to get good at. So, strategic quitting is not the enemy of grit, it is actually a friends of grit. It’s complimentary, because by quitting other things, you free up more time, energy, resources to invest in to apply grip to the things that matter, and what, and kind of what you were saying, in terms of doing things well and being happy. The research clearly shows that when we look at our, if you look at the research, for like Martin Salaman and others, the University of Pennsylvania, in terms of signature. Strengths, those things that you are uniquely good at. There was some research that Gallup did, where the more people use their signature strengths, those things that are uniquely good at, the more successful they are, the happier they are, the more respected they feel. It’s really, really powerful. And you know, while many of us, you know, might pursue things that we’re passionate about, the truth is that the roles and careers that most people are very passionate about, like becoming a professional athlete or professional musician, there are very few roles there that are available, and those are very difficult to get. So, pursuing what you think makes you happy, if it’s one of those things, can be extremely difficult and very hard to be successful at, whereas the research is very clear in that if you pursue the things you are good at, the things which you do well, that actually does lead to happiness. By pursuing the things that you are good at, we come to love them, and once we come to love them, then you get the double hit. When you do the things you’re good at, and you do it in a place that rewards your signature strengths, you will be successful, and then more than that, by using your signature strengths regularly and often, you will also be happier.

Zack Arnold: Well, and that just brings me to one of the great maxims, which is basically everybody thinks that you know success is going to breed happiness, and it’s the opposite, it’s that happiness will ultimately breed success, and that paradigm shift was huge for me, and I know a lot of people are thinking, well, I just need to work more, work more, be more successful, that happiness is going to come, and you really have to rewire your brain to do just the opposite, which is think I just need to be okay with where I am now, the happiness comes, then the success follows.

Eric Barker: Yeah, I mean, that’s research by Sonia Luberski at University of California, Riverside, talked about that, where happiness is much more likely to follow success, and I’m sorry, success follows happiness more than happiness follows success, you know, you can, you can, you can work really hard at something, you can make a lot of money, and still not necessarily be be very happy, whereas happiness does often lead to a lot of qualities that that do produce success, and and a lot of people really do have that backwards, and it’s one of the reasons why we have such an issue with work-life balance, is you know, as people are going overboard in terms of working, you know, to try and reach happiness, and that’s they’ve really got that backwards.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and work-life balance is really where I wanted to go for the rest of the show. And I’m glad that you brought up the word grit. One of the great insights in your book was what the opposite of grit is, and it’s very different than a lot of people think. So, let’s start talking about what the opposite of grit is, and start to go down that rabbit hole.

Eric Barker: In terms of one of the things that produces produces grit, this is this is again research by Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the things that produces grit is optimism, which, which makes intuitive sense if you don’t believe that things are going to work out, they seem futile, and if they seem futile, you’re likely to quit. Whereas if you do think things are going to work out, then it makes sense to persist, and you work harder, and that you are therefore more often than not more likely to succeed. And when you look at burnout, there’s actually some research that shows burnout is as opposed to being this sort of unique beast, there’s one study that shows that burnout is indistinguishable from clinical depression, and basically what it, what it is, is Sullivan’s research on learned helplessness, where basically when people become pessimistic, and then that pessimism becomes universal, that things just aren’t going to work out when they start to see problems in their life across the board as personal, pervasive, and permanent. Then basically they give up, and like I said, once that becomes sort of a global mentality for someone, they become pessimistic, you become pessimistic, you, you give up, and so burnout, it looked like, was indistinguishable from this sort of pessimism-induced, induced depression, where basically it’s work-induced depression, you just feel like I’m not getting anywhere, I’m working hard, there’s nothing I can do to make things better, I’m not moving up, and so people become pessimistic, and then they become depressed, and then that is, that is what burnout is, is, is actually job-induced depression.

Zack Arnold: And I think that it’s really important that people understand that there is actually clinical research behind the fact that there is no discernible difference between these two, because there are so many people that reach out to me and send me their life stories and say I’m just I’m so burned out and I think the reason that that’s become such a popular term is people still aren’t okay with saying I’m depressed because it has such a negative connotation and such a stigma in our society but when you say I’m. Burned out, the immediate assumption is, oh, well, you’ve just been working so hard, you’re just exhausted, you just need a break. When it actually goes much deeper on a neurological level and a psychological level, but I think a lot of people just aren’t willing to admit that, so they use the word burnout instead of depression.

Eric Barker: Yeah, and I think you do have people conflating terms, where basically you know someone’s working very hard and not getting enough sleep, then you know then they will feel exhausted, they will feel tired, but tired, you know, you just get some more sleep and maybe work a reasonable amount of hours, and that will reverse itself, whereas that is not the case for true burnout. True burnout is where, like I said, you feel like you’re working hard, you’re not getting anywhere, and you don’t think that that’s likely to change. You’re pessimistic about hope, so getting more sleep is not going to resolve a pessimism about your job. Working fewer hours is not going to, I mean, it’s you’re probably going to see fewer results and become more pessimistic, so if somebody is just working really hard, you can scale back, get more sleep, whatever, and then address that problem, but it’s not going to address a feeling of futility in the office, which is what produces true burnout.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that’s really important for people to understand, especially if somebody listening is saying, you know, what? I feel like I’m burned out. Number one, ask yourself the question, are you just exhausted? Have you been working crazy hours for three weeks, and you just need five days off and sleep, and you need to eat better and feel better. There’s a big difference between that and burnout, which, like you said, just feels like this endless dark tunnel with no light at the end of it, where your work is futile and your efforts are futile and nobody’s listening to you and you have no control and control is something that you talk about a lot in your book that I think is very important, especially for creatives, because I have, for example, somebody right now I’m having an email discussion with them where they’re saying I just finally got promoted in my job but now I have somebody sitting behind me telling you what to do all day long, and I actually hate my job more because I don’t get to put my personal imprint on this, and I have no control, and I want to quit. So, let’s talk about control a little bit, and how that affects your psychology, and how that can lead to burnout and depression.

Eric Barker: Well, control actually is really important at the neurological level, because I’m not even control so much as merely the feeling of control, because you know you, you, you can’t immediately detect whether you actually have control, you just know I feel like I’m in control of the situation, and that feeling of control, when, when we experience stress, you know that typically you know fear, anger, and stress that usually originates in the amygdala, the brain, and when the brain experiences a lot of stress, that can very quickly take the prefrontal cortex offline, and the prefrontal, this is from when I interviewed Alex Korb, the general scientist at UCLA, the prefrontal cortex is the brain of the brain, that’s where your logical, rational thought happens. We get stressed out, and the prefrontal cortex basically comes offline. That’s when you’re just emotions get, you know, get take over. You almost can’t think straight, you’re scared, you’re worried. And what brings the prefrontal cortex back online is once you start to have a feeling of control, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been here before. I know how to handle this. That actually basically gets your head straight, and anything that provides a feeling of control reduces stress, helps you think more clearly. So you know a feeling of control is is really critical for any sort of stressful situation, and again, we’re not, we’re not talking about something that’s cultural or personal, we’re talking about something that’s actually operating at the neuroscience level.

Zack Arnold: Well, and it’s funny that you say cultural, because one of the things that I wanted you to bring up briefly was the idea of karoshi, which obviously is not a cultural thing in America, but goes along this idea of helplessness and lack of control and burnout. So, just talk a little bit about that concept.

Eric Barker: In Japan, you just.. you have Japan is known for just epic levels of overworking, and people actually dying from overwork, or indirectly from the results of overwork, so much so that there have been lawsuits, and lawsuits that have paid out regarding that the word is listed in the dictionary, you have now have some offices at a particular hour, will you know, will announce basically go home to the workers there, because this has become, you know, such an issue with people literally just being ground into the ground, overwork, just death by overwork, is has gotten to to ridiculous levels, and like I said, the fact that they’re paying out on lawsuits shows just how serious the problem is. It’s being recognized

Zack Arnold: Well. And one of the previous podcasts that I did a couple years ago was with Walter Murch, who was one of the. Did legends in my industry, and he told a story that I’ve told to so many people now, where he was working on a film in the 70s. I don’t remember if it was The Godfather or Conversations, it was some epic historical movie that’s on the AFI top 100 whatever it was, and he said that they’re working crazy hours, and he went to an executive and said, Listen, people are dropping like flies, and they said, Okay, we’ll get more flies. That’s that’s the mentality, like that’s just the way that it is in so many industries now, where it’s just about output and it’s about working these endless hours on the cycle, but not understanding how destructive that is to actual productivity and creativity.

Eric Barker: Yeah, I mean, what you see in a good amount of, there’s a good amount of research talk about this in the work-life balance section, is exactly what you’re saying, the issue of rating hours qualitatively versus quantitatively, where Dan Ariely of Duke did some research showing that our most productive hours are, I believe, like approximately two hours or so after waking, but you, but we act like all hours are created equal, we, you know, 40 hour week or 50 hour week, and that’s just not the case, because, like I said, Arie, always research showed that there are some prime hours in the morning when most people are optimally productive, and by the same token, there’s there’s research from the video game industry and some other industries that once you push past a certain line, you know, of I forget exactly what it is, you know, maybe it’s probably in the area of, you know, 6070, 80 hours a week. Productivity actually goes negative, you actually get less done, you know, it can actually backfire, but we don’t really think about that. We have this attitude of, you know, more is better, as if more hours is equivalent to more money, and it’s not, and also that you can, you can get that once you start getting lack of sleep, you start getting this sort of anti-productivity hangover, where it starts affecting the next day. So, in terms of, you know, all these things, we need to look at quality, not quantity, and in terms of creativity, there is other research, you know that deadlines and pressure really negatively affect creativity, and I believe that Theresa Mobley’s research at Harvard showed that when people feel, you know, a lack of progress or a lot of pressure, it becomes extremely problematic in terms of, you know, your muse basically leaves, leaves the building and doesn’t come back for a few days, that there’s this this pressure hangover that prevents people from really being creative when there’s there’s too much pressure on them, and also in another book by Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford, they talked about how people are far less creative when the boss is nearby, and that is when the boss is looking over your shoulder, people don’t want to screw up, they don’t want to make mistakes, they don’t want to look stupid, so they play by the rules very tightly. They don’t experiment, they don’t try new things, they don’t do stuff that’s risky, they become more risk averse, and so having the boss around is actually correlated with lower creativity.

Zack Arnold: Well, then what I need to do is make sure that every creative executive at the studio and all producers know that sitting on the couch behind us all day long is not necessarily going to create the best work.

Eric Barker: No, it’s not. You know, people need to have that license to it. If you look at Dan Pink’s excellent book, Drive, where he talks about the, he looks at the research behind motivation, the three key elements of motivation being feeling of autonomy, a drive towards mastery, and a feeling of purpose. And that first one is autonomy, where you know for people to really feel motivated, they need to have that again. As we were discussing that issue of control, and they, and they need to feel like they’re making, you know, they’re making their choices, they have autonomy, they’re doing their own thing, and you don’t feel like that when the boss is looking over your shoulder.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and there’s nothing that makes you feel less creative than when you have to be creative on demand, knowing that three seconds later somebody’s gonna say, well, that doesn’t work. Why would you do that? I don’t like that. It’s just there’s nothing like, can you imagine being a writer, and as soon as you type out a sentence, they’re like, well, that’s not great. Like, you need to change that dialog. You’re like, I was just experimenting, I was just writing stuff, like, chill. Like, at least as a writer, you get that period, you hand something in, then you get your horrible notes. But in a lot of creative fields, you don’t even have that buffer, you just have somebody watching you create on demand, and it is exhausting.

Eric Barker: Yeah, this is this is only an informal study with a sample size of one, but I can’t work like that.

Zack Arnold: None of us can, nobody can, and it drives us crazy. And I’m very clear, when I get hired on a project, it’s not just about, oh well, what’s the project, and yes, I have the skill set. I will ask the people that are going to be working with me, what is your process like? And if they say, well, I really like to be in the room all the time and work with you directly, I am out of there. Like, there’s basically a dust trail and a whole imprint of me in the door. I don’t even open it first. I am out, like Bugs Bunny,

Eric Barker: Wiley Coyote.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. But if they’re like, you know, listen, I trust your choices, like, obviously I’m going to want to work with you in the room. Them, but I’m going to just let you go for days at a time, do your thing, like I’m like, bam, like this is going to be a winner for me. And I think kind of going back to this idea of finding your strengths and finding a job where you’re going to have a little bit more of that creative control. These are things that you really need to seek out if you feel like your job just doesn’t fit and isn’t working and is leading to this burnout and this feeling of it’s, it’s just not what I want, and I’m not going anywhere.

Eric Barker: No, I mean, for leaders or managers, you know, I think it’s really critical to think about those very issues. You’re, you’re saying, I, it might have been Steven J. Ross, who’s one of the primary, primary people who, who helped bring the Time Warner Corporation up. He said, find the best people for the job and let them do it.

Zack Arnold: I love that. That should be the plaque on every single wall on every film ever made,

Eric Barker: And it’s, and it’s not merely something that you know employees can relish in from a, from a self-serving point of view. I think the other important factor there is, if you’re hiring somebody who you believe is very talented in their job, then why are you, who knows less than they do, you know, telling them how to do it? You’re wasting your money, you know. You might as well get an intern and tell them what to do. You’re not actually leveraging their skill sets, their talent, you know, their, their very honed judgment. If you’re going to stand over their shoulder and tell them what to do, if you, if you get the best people for the job, you know, certainly you need to provide them with some, some general direction of what it needs to be. But past that, once you found the best people for the job, let them do it.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, you just described every studio notes call ever made right there, but anyway, I digress. So, I want to go off on a tiny bit of a tangent, not too much, but I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into something that I am really obsessed about learning right now, which is the connection between creativity and mental illness, and this is something that you talked about through your research that was really, really eye-opening to me, and you talk about this thing called the Mad Genius Paradox, and because there are so many people in creative industries that deal with some form of mental illness, whether it’s depression or anxiety or ADD, I think it’s really important for them to understand a little bit about this paradox, because there’s a lot of positives that come from it. It’s not just negatives.

Eric Barker: Yeah, what’s really interesting. A lot of this research was done by Dean Keith Simonsen. He talked about, you know, the mad genius paradox, where what’s interesting is there is this, you know, association we all have where we think that people who are creative are more likely to be, for lack of a better term, crazy. The truth is, I can read the quote from my book. Here in his study, The Managing His Paradox, Dean Keith Simonson found that mildly creative people are mentally healthier than average, but extremely creative people have a far higher incident of mental disorders. So, you know, you see that with, you know, studies show people with attention deficit disorder are more creative. Paul Pearson found the connection between humor, neuroticism, and psychopathy. You see a lot of these sort of traits that are negative, you know, even including impulsivity, you know, is usually talked about with criminal behavior. It’s also as a link to creativity, so there’s there’s a lot of these negatives that can be positives, and the thrust of this issue I took from interviewing Gotham Mukunda, who is a professor at Harvard Business School, and he did some sort. He labeled some of these qualities intensifiers, and what he means by that are traits that, in general, at the mean are considered negative, but in the right context can actually be positives. So, for instance, you could talk about stubbornness. You could say, you know, stubbornness is a can mean that you keep pursuing things that aren’t working, you do things the wrong way that cause problems in relationships. However, stubbornness is is also in some context, that’s the same thing as persistence. You, you stick with things even though they’re not working out, and you know everybody knows if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, if you’re going to be creative, you know persisting is going to be nice, because entrepreneurial activities have generally have a low rate of success. You have to believe more than other people, you have to stick through when things get difficult, so that a trait of extreme stubbornness, you know, might be a negative in your average office, and you’re in your average corporation. However, as an entrepreneur, lacking stubbornness, you know, could be, you know, really problematic, you know, you might need that. So, there’s a lot of traits. I also, in the book, discuss Yuri Robits, who was an ultra endurance athlete, and when he was doing the race across America, he would utterly lose his mind, he would hallucinate, he’d break into tears, he would get into fist fights with mailboxes, he would go crazy, but he was the, I think, he won the race across. America, this is a bicycle race from Atlantic City to San Diego, where the clock does not stop. They cross the entire United States on bicycle in between nine and 12 days, and it is incredibly grueling. Outside magazine declared it the toughest ultra endurance race, bar none, and he would lose his mind. Yuri Robitu would lose his mind, but it actually ended up being a benefit, because it allowed him to disassociate from the pain, and it allowed him to not, you know, worry and drive himself, drive himself crazy in terms of thinking about it, or to over consider. And there is research showing that, you know, mental disorders can help athletes push past the human body’s naturally conservative limits. So I don’t think anybody would ever say I hope my kids get in fist fights with mailboxes or hallucinate or have serious mental problems like that, but again, in the right context it can provide devastating competitive advantage, so looking at those traits, you know, in terms of, you know, creativity is associated with many traits that at the mean are considered negative, but again, they can confer benefits if you’re in the right environment.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and the reason that I bring that up is my audience is very well aware of my background and my story and where all this started, but for those that may be new, I have the trifecta: I have ADD issues, I have depression issues, and I have anxiety issues all rolled into one, so I’m one of those. When you’re talking about the mad genius paradox, I belong in the extremely creative category, and I’m not saying that to be braggadocious, that’s just the way that my brain works, and it is a tremendous benefit to my career, and it is a tremendous curse to trying to live my life on a normal, quote unquote, basis, which kind of brings it back to this idea of being the valedictorian and checking all the right boxes and being a generalist and doing all the right things to succeed. It’s taken me a long time to really understand the way that my brain is wired, which leads me to I kind of wanted to go away from some of the science now, now that we’re wrapping it up a little, and start talking about, well, what are some of the solutions to avoid burnout and depression, and all of these things in a creative job. And the first one was this idea, and it’s not a productivity hack, it’s these two things that you mentioned about knowing thyself and picking the right pond. They’re much larger ideas that are going to help you find a place where burnout is going to be much less common, so can you talk about that a little bit?

Eric Barker: Yeah, I mean, to talk about success in a general sense, you know, obviously, you know, if you’re, if you’re in different roles, different qualities can produce success, but to look at something that’s consistent, almost across the board, we talked earlier about the issue of signature strengths, and knowing your signature strengths comes from knowing yourself, you know, knowing what, what you are good at, and once you know your signature strengths, the things you’re uniquely good at, then you need to pick the right pond, because if you have incredible skills in one area, but the company you’re working for doesn’t reward those, then you’re going to be frustrated, and you’re not going to, you’re not going to do as well. So, it’s a matter of first knowing yourself, figuring out your signature strengths, figuring out your intensifiers. What qualities do you maybe do you have that are negative at the mean, but if you go to the right company, the right role, those negatives can be positive. So, to think about your signature strengths, your intensifiers, getting to know yourself, and then picking the right pawn. What place is going to reward you for those signature strengths, for those intensifiers, finding alignment between, you know, what you learn and knowing about yourself, and in picking the right pond, that’s what can can really lead to success in almost any arena.

Zack Arnold: So, once we’ve done that, that’s very kind of in the clouds, and, oh, this is something I would really have to think about more at a deeper level. Once somebody’s kind of done that, let’s end the show on just a couple of really practical tactical things that they can do to start laying things out in where they can really understand, you know, is this the right place for me to be, and you know, am I doing the right thing with my time, and so on, and so forth. So I want people to walk away with a few really solid action steps.

Eric Barker: Well, overall, in terms of success, there’s a number of things that I think are really useful to keep in mind. In one of the chapters, you know, I talk about the whole issue of it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. There’s a whole big discussion there, but one thing that one point that’s a good takeaway is that there is no doubt that networking, have a good network, is really critical. I even look at the research on drug dealers, and drug dealers who have larger networks make more money and are far less likely to be incarcerated. So, so even if you’re even if you’re doing bad things, you know networking and networks matter. So that’s something that everybody needs to invest a little bit of time in, and there are some quick tips that people can use. First and foremost is to reconnect with old friends, that’s not difficult, that’s not sleazy. They’re people you already know, and the research, the much cited research by Granovetter, research on weak ties shows that the people who we’re closest to don’t. Usually provide us with that next job, that next opportunity, because we usually know most of the same things that they know. We’re in a tight loop with them, but once we go one degree out, we talk to people we haven’t talked to in a while, to acquaintances. That’s where new opportunities are much more likely to come from, because those people are moving in circles, getting information, talking to people that we aren’t. So reconnecting with old friends, reaching out to acquaintances. It’s very easy. It doesn’t have to be sleazy, it doesn’t have to be difficult. These are people you already know. It’s a great way to get started on networking. Reach out to those Facebook friends, those LinkedIn contacts you haven’t talked to in a while. Second thing that people can do, if you look at your iPhone contacts or your Android contacts, you’re going to notice that a disproportionate number of your friends were introduced to you by a handful of people. There are some people who just introduced you to a lot of people you know. Those people, according to Brian Uzi’s research, those people are your super connectors. So, if you’re going to try networking, you know, much like all hours are not created equal, all people are not created equal. If you can identify that maybe five or 10% of your contacts were introduced to you by one person. Well, if you’re going to send one email, send it to that person. That’s super connector. You can ask them who you should be talking to, what you’re interested in, who might be able to help you with your goals, because it’s kind of like card counting. That person, that’s got that’s going to be a much richer, richer deck if you’re talking to that person, another issue that I think is really issued in terms of productivity, something people can do is it actually comes from the research on policing is hot spots, basically track your time for a week each hour, write down what you’re doing and how productive you feel you’re being. What you’ll start to notice is that certain hours are very productive for you. Certain hours are very unproductive for you, and if you can start to to shift what you do around those hours to making sure that you’re using those very productive hours to get the important things done, and that you’re doing unimportant stuff, rote activities, busy work during the hours when you’re not super productive looking for those hot spots, and assigning your work to the right times can help you get a lot more done without spending any more hours at the office.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that that was one of the huge kind of revelations for me, is that I always used to just work, work, work, work, work, and I really wasn’t thinking about the hour of the day or what I was doing, it was just, how much am I working? And then I discovered the magical idea of contexts, and I realized, wait, if I were to organize the energy and the creativity that I use throughout the day more strategically, maybe I won’t be as exhausted. So I started to time block on my calendar, but I wasn’t time blocking tasks, I was time blocking contexts, so for example, I’ve now discovered that from roughly 9:30am until about 1pm my brain is on fire, so I don’t check email, I don’t get on social media, I try not to socialize, I try to keep my door closed, and that’s when I work the most, but I know in the afternoon I’m kind of a mess, that’s when I socialize, that’s when I catch up on email, that’s when I might jump on Facebook. So I’m still getting things done, but I’m assigning the context of my work to my energy level, and this is the difference between going home and still having the presence of mind to be with my kids, or just being a zombie when I walk in the door, but I’m not working more or less hours.

Eric Barker: No, I think that again, the issue of qualitative versus quantitative, looking at the hours that are really rich and powerful and productive, and those are unproductive, and assigning your tasks appropriately can help you get a lot more done in the same amount of time.

Zack Arnold: Well, the last kind of tip or tactic, or I guess you would say mindset that I wanted to share before we go, which has something to do with productivity. It’s a little bit loftier, but this idea of these little wins, these little bets that comes from the idea of the Navy Seals, or you know, perhaps people that get stranded during, you know, trying to scale a mountain and get stuck in the snow, and they survive, you know, days and days and days, crawling out. Did you talk about the story? I believe this was the same story that was in the documentary, Touching the Void, correct?

Eric Barker: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: One of my favorite.. it’s well, it’s a documentary, but it’s also kind of a reenactment documentary. If anybody hasn’t seen it, it is unbelievable. But talk to me a little bit about this idea of little wins, because everybody’s trying to get success in these giant chunks, and it just doesn’t work. So, let’s talk a little bit about this before we go.

Eric Barker: Yeah, there’s a lot of research in terms of, in terms of small wins, where, where rather than trying to achieve a big, huge, audacious goal that might take forever, by breaking things down into small chunks, so that you, but that they’re achievable, and that’s you’re getting regular rewards. This has really been shown to increase motivation and persistence, and some of the, some of this research again comes from Teresa Mobley at Harvard, where just showing that the single most motivating thing for people. A feeling of progress, so if you only have these huge, very few huge milestones, it’s going to be very hard to sustain motivation to get to them, whereas you know if you say I want to write a book and that the milestone is finishing the book, that’s going to be really hard, versus you know, be more realistically, if I finish a chapter, or if I finish five pages, or finish one page, those small wins are likely to keep you going. So, when I reference the story from Touching Avoid, is the issue of another thing that helps people persist is using a game frame, and what I mean by that is superimposing a game mechanics on whatever you’re doing, because you know very often we do things that are redundant, you know, they’re annoying, they just drive us crazy, that we screw them up a lot, and that’s really, that’s really frustrating. However, you know, if you look at video games or games on your phone, they can be redundant, you fail a lot, you have to repeat a level, and yet those are are positively addictive. So, you know, it’s this, these issues of these game mechanics that is, and the four game mechanics to keep in mind are number one, games are always winnable, they don’t make games you can’t win. When we feel that something’s futile, we don’t, we don’t persist with it. Then you look at games, have novel challenges, there’s always something new, something a little bit different. Next, games always have goals, you know what you have to do in a game, it’s not, it’s not blurry, you know what your next step is. And finally, it’s feedback, games are very good, they give you points, they take away points, they give you rewards and feedbacks very quick, and one of the reasons why work can be very difficult, and work isn’t a fun game, is because you only get feedback once a year. You get an annual performance review, whereas games give you feedback immediately, you know if you’re doing well, you know if you’re not doing well. By taking game mechanics and superimposing them on any difficult activity, you can make it more fun, you can make it more engaging, and that is likely to make you persist, and in that same way, when you’re talking about making something winnable, model challenges, goals, feedback, small wins, having those, I get one point, I got another point, oh, I lost a point, having those little wins is what keeps you going, and so by taking big projects and chopping them up into achievable chunks, where you can get regular feedback, regular positive reinforcement. The research shows clearly, and if you look at touching a void, this actually saved a man’s life.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and this is something that I have actually developed into a course, and in my, the my productivity strategy, I did an entire course on how to use Trello to become more productive, specifically in a filmmaking context, and one of the things I talk about is, as an editor, or somebody, whatever your expertise might be, where you have monumental amounts of information that you need to break down into much smaller story, I would gamify it using Trello, and that would kind of give me a purpose for the day. So, this it does kind of circle back to this idea of burnout and depression, where if you go to work thinking I have no control over this, I am buried in material, I’m never going to get out of it, this is never going to end. That’s going to lead to exhaustion, burnout, depression, and most likely you’re going to end up leaving and just leave the business, and you’re done. But what I found is that if I gamify certain processes, even on a project that I really don’t like, it makes the day winnable, because I’m like, oh well, it’s been four hours and I’ve gotten this much done, and I’m tracking this, and I’m doing that. It’s those little tiny things that can be the absolute difference between making it through another day successfully or feeling burned out,

Eric Barker: Totally. No, I think that’s.. I think that’s a great point.

Zack Arnold: Well, at this point, I want to make sure that I don’t burn you out, because I have taken you a few minutes over the time that I promised that I was going to have you off. So, I appreciate that you’re still with me. But before we go, I want to make absolutely sure that people know where to find your blog, where to find your book, and where they can learn more about you.

Eric Barker: Yeah, my book is Barking Up the Wrong Tree. You can find that on Amazon. My blog is also Barking Up the Wrong Tree. The URL is a little difficult to spell, so if you just Google Barking Up the Wrong Tree blog, you’ll be able to find it, or you can Google my name, Eric Barker, and the best way to keep up with the research I’m looking at, and the tips I’m providing, is to sign up for my weekly email.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and your weekly email has got a lot of great stuff, which is exactly the reason that I reached out, because I got the email about burnout in the new book. I’m like, oh, this guy has to be on the show, so I planned this whole like three month strategic plan to get your attention, and then you responded to my first email. So, so that was easy.

Eric Barker: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on the show, Zack.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Jakin Rintelman. Special thanks to Krystle Penhall and Sarah Furie for helping to spread the love!

The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).