Eric Barker: What If Everything You Knew About Success Was Wrong?
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2017
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if most of what we've been taught about success was wrong?
That's the question we're asking today's guest, Eric Barker. A former Hollywood screen-writer turned blogger, he shares science-based answers and expert insight on how to be awesome at life with his more than 300,000 subscribers. Barker's content is also syndicated by Time Magazine, The Week, and Business Insider and he has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and the Financial Times. His first book "Barking Up the Wrong Tree" is a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
Story: Eric dives deep into the psychology of how we act in the world, often focusing on the paradoxes. The weird things we do and bringing research to illuminate why we do, how we do it. and trying to give us good wisdom to how we live our lives.
Big idea: His deep fascination with human psychology grew a pretty giant global platform.
You’d never guess: He posted a Facebook ad in 2009 when he graduated school to get a job. He also has an undergrad in Philosophy, a degree Entertainment Production and an MBA in Marketing.
Current passion project: Reading up on The Dark Triad, the three personality characteristics that are nefarious, or evil: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
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I'm joining Honest Tea in celebrating the lighthearted ways we're less than perfect through the #RefreshinglyHonest Project. To hear my #RefreshinglyHonest moment, check out this week's episode. Are you #RefreshinglyHonest? Share the fun and funny ways you're less than perfect on social media and tag #RefreshinglyHonest. Want more honesty? You can learn more by visiting honesttea.com/podcast
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | One of the most proven repeatedly things in personality research is the connection between |
| 0:08.8 | extroversion and subjective well-being, which is a fancy way of saying extroverts are happier. |
| 0:14.0 | And in fact, there's one study that if you get introverts to act like extroverts, they're |
| 0:19.3 | happy. |
| 0:23.3 | My guest today is Eric Barker. |
| 0:24.9 | Now if you try and look up information about Eric online, you're not going to find a |
| 0:30.2 | whole lot except for one thing. |
| 0:32.7 | He writes a massively, massively popular blog called Barking Up the Wrong Tree. |
| 0:39.2 | And he has a book out now by the same name where he dives deep into the psychology of how |
| 0:44.1 | we act in the world, often focusing on a lot of paradoxes, the weird things that we do |
| 0:49.6 | and bringing research to illuminate why we do how we do it. |
| 0:52.8 | And trying to give us some good wisdom to how we live our lives. |
| 0:57.4 | When I was prepping for this conversation, I was fascinated by the fact that I could barely |
| 1:02.3 | find anything about Eric the man anywhere. |
| 1:06.8 | So we spent some time kind of deconstructing who he was and what got him to the place where |
| 1:12.9 | his de-fascination with human psychology grew a pretty giant global platform which led |
| 1:18.5 | to a book and some really interesting and unexpected stops along the way. |
| 1:24.4 | Excited to share this conversation with you. |
| 1:26.5 | I'm Jonathan Fields. |
| 1:28.2 | This is Good Life Project. |
| 1:36.0 | Tired of ads crashing your comedy podcast party? |
| 1:39.1 | Good news. |
... |
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