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Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Eric Barker
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eBook - ePub
Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Eric Barker
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About This Book
Wall Street Journal Bestseller
Much of the advice we've been told about achievement is logical, earnest…and downright wrong. In Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Eric Barker reveals the extraordinary science behind what actually determines success and most importantly, how anyone can achieve it. You'll learn:
• Why valedictorians rarely become millionaires, and how your biggest weakness might actually be your greatest strength
• Whether nice guys finish last and why the best lessons about cooperation come from gang members, pirates, and serial killers
• Why trying to increase confidence fails and how Buddhist philosophy holds a superior solution
• The secret ingredient to "grit" that Navy SEALs and disaster survivors leverage to keep going
• How to find work-life balance using the strategy of Genghis Khan, the errors of Albert Einstein, and a little lesson from Spider-Man
By looking at what separates the extremely successful from the rest of us, we learn what we can do to be more like them—and find out in some cases why it's good that we aren't. Barking Up the Wrong Tree draws on startling statistics and surprising anecdotes to help you understand what works and what doesn't so you can stop guessing at success and start living the life you want.
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Desarrollo personalSubtopic
Éxito personalCHAPTER 1
Should We Play It Safe and Do What We’re Told If We Want to Succeed?
Does Playing by the Rules Pay Off? Insight from Valedictorians, People Who Feel No Pain, and Piano Prodigies
Ashlyn Blocker does not feel pain.
In fact, she has never felt pain. To the naked eye she is a normal teenage girl, but due to a defect in the SCN9A gene, her nerves did not form the same way yours or mine did. Pain signals do not reach her brain.
Sound like a godsend? Hold on. The Wikipedia entry on “Congenital insensitivity to pain” puts it quite simply: “It is an extremely dangerous condition.” Dane Inouye writes, “Most children dream about being a superhero when they are young. CIPA patients can be considered Superman because they don’t feel physical pain but it is ironic that what gives them their ‘super powers’ also becomes their kryptonite.”
As recounted in a New York Times Magazine article by Justin Heckert, Ashlyn’s parents noticed she had broken her ankle before she did—and that was two days after it occurred. Karen Cann, another woman with the disorder, broke her pelvis giving birth to her first child but didn’t realize it for weeks until the stiffness in her hip made it almost impossible to walk.
People with the disorder tend to have shorter lives, often dying during childhood. Of babies with CIPA (Congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis), 50 percent do not live past age three. Swaddled by well-meaning parents, they do not cry out when they overheat. Those who do survive frequently bite off the tips of their tongue or cause serious damage to their corneas rubbing their eyes raw. Adults with the disorder are usually covered in scars and have repeatedly broken bones. Every day they must check their bodies for signs of damage. Seeing a bruise, cut, or burn may be the only way they know it has occurred. Appendicitis and other internal maladies are of particular concern—people with CIPA often feel no symptoms until the problem kills them.
But how many of us, at one time or another, have not wished we were like Ashlyn?
It’s easy to naively see only the benefits of such a condition. No more nagging injuries. No fear at the dentist’s office. A life free from the minor discomforts of illness and injury. Never another headache or the limitations of capricious lower back pain.
In terms of health care and lost productivity, pain costs the United States between $560 and $635 billion annually. Fifteen percent of Americans face chronic pain daily, and there’s little doubt many of them would happily trade places with Ashlyn.
One of the villains in the bestselling novel The Girl Who Played with Fire has CIPA, and the disorder is presented as a superpower. With the skills of a professional boxer and unable to feel pain, he is a seemingly unstoppable force and a terrifying foe.
This raises larger questions: When are our weaknesses actually strengths? Is it better to be an outlier with both handicaps and superpowers? Or do we live better lives at the middle of the bell curve? We’re generally encouraged to play it safe, but is doing the normally prescribed “right thing,” and not risking the ups and downs of extremes, the path to success—or to mediocrity?
To solve this puzzle, let’s first look at those who follow the rules and do everything right. What becomes of high school valedictorians? It’s what every parent wishes their teenager to be. Mom says study hard and you’ll do well. And very often Mom is right.
But not always.
*
Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed eighty-one high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs. They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives.
But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero.
Commenting on the success trajectories of her subjects, Karen Arnold said, “Even though most are strong occupational achievers, the great majority of former high school valedictorians do not appear headed for the very top of adult achievement arenas.” In another interview Arnold said, “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries . . . they typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”
Was it just that these eighty-one didn’t happen to reach the stratosphere? No. Research shows that what makes students likely to be impressive in the classroom is the same thing that makes them less likely to be home-run hitters outside the classroom.
So why are the number ones in high school so rarely the number ones in real life? There are two reasons. First, schools reward students who consistently do what they are told. Academic grades correlate only loosely with intelligence (standardized tests are better at measuring IQ). Grades are, however, an excellent predictor of self-discipline, conscientiousness, and the ability to comply with rules.
In an interview, Arnold said, “Essentially, we are rewarding conformity and the willingness to go along with the system.” Many of the valedictorians admitted to not being the smartest kid in class, just the hardest worker. Others said that it was more an issue of giving teachers what they wanted than actually knowing the material better. Most of the subjects in the study were classified as “careerists”: they saw their job as getting good grades, not really as learning.
The second reason is that schools reward being a generalist. There is little recognition of student passion or expertise. The real world, however, does the reverse. Arnold, talking about the valedictorians, said, “They’re extremely well rounded and successful, personally and professionally, but they’ve never been devoted to a single area in which they put all their passion. That is not usually a recipe for eminence.”
If you want to do well in school and you’re passionate about math, you need to stop working on it to make sure you get an A in history too. This generalist approach doesn’t lead to expertise. Yet eventually we almost all go on to careers in which one skill is highly rewarded and other skills aren’t that important.
Ironically, Arnold found that intellectual students who enjoy learning struggle in high school. They have passions they want to focus on, are more interested in achieving mastery, and find the structure of school stifling. Meanwhile, the valedictorians are intensely pragmatic. They follow the rules and prize A’s over skills and deep understanding.
School has clear rules. Life often doesn’t. When there’s no clear path to follow, academic high achievers break down.
Shawn Achor’s research at Harvard shows that college grades aren’t any more predictive of subsequent life success than rolling dice. A study of over seven hundred American millionaires showed their average college GPA was 2.9.
Following the rules doesn’t create success; it just eliminates extremes—both good and bad. While this is usually good and all but eliminates downside risk, it also frequently eliminates earthshaking accomplishments. It’s like putting a governor on your engine that stops the car from going over fifty-five; you’re far less likely to get into a lethal crash, but you won’t be setting any land speed records either.
So if those who play by the rules don’t end up at the very top, who does?
*
Winston Churchill should have never been prime minister of Great Britain. He wasn’t someone who “did everything right,” and it was shocking that he was elected. His contemporaries knew he was brilliant—but he was also a paranoid loose cannon who was impossible to deal with.
Initially rising up through the ranks of British politics at a steady clip (he was elected to Parliament at age twenty-six), Churchill was eventually found lacking and deemed unsuitable for the highest offices. By the 1930s his career was effectively over. In many ways he was a perfect foil to Neville Chamberlain, a leader who had done everything right and was the prototypical British prime minister.
Britain does not choose its leaders carelessly. A review of prime ministers shows they are generally older and more strongly vetted than their American counterparts. John Major rose to power more quickly than almost any British leader but was still objectively more prepared for the role than the majority of U.S. presidents.
Churchill was a maverick. He did not merely love his country; he displayed a clear paranoia toward any possible threat to the empire. He saw even Gandhi as a danger and was beyond outspoken in his opposition to what was a pacifist rebellion in India. He was the Chicken Little of Great Britain, passionately railing against all opposition to his country, great, small—or imagined. But this “bad” quality is the key to why he is one of the most revered leaders in world history.
This Chicken Little was the only one who saw Hitler for the threat he was. Chamberlain, on the other hand, regarded Hitler as “a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.” The entrenched British leadership was convinced appeasement was the way to quell the Nazis.
When it mattered the most, Churchill’s paranoia was prescient. He didn’t believe the schoolyard bully would leave them alone if they gave him their lunch money. He knew they needed to sock him in the nose.
Churchill’s zealotry—the thing that had nearly ruined his career early on—was exactly what Britain needed heading into World War II. And thankfully the British people realized this before it was too late.
To answer the big question of who makes it to the top, let’s come at it from another angle: What makes a great leader? For years, academic research didn’t seem able to make up its mind whether leaders even mattered. Some studies showed that great teams succeeded with or without a figurehead taking the credit. Others showed that sometimes a charismatic individual was the most important factor in whether a group succeeded or failed. It wasn’t clear at all—until one academic had a hunch.
Gautam Mukunda speculated that the reason for the inconsistency in the research was there are actually two fundamentally different types of leaders. The first kind rises up through formal channels, getting promoted, playing by the rules, and meeting expectations. These leaders, like Neville Chamberlain, are “filtered.” The second kind doesn’t rise up through the ranks; they come in through the window: entrepreneurs who don’t wait for someone to promote them; U.S. vice presidents who are unexpectedly handed the presidency; leaders who benefit from a perfect storm of unlikely events, like the kind that got Abraham Lincoln elected. This group is “unfiltered.”
By the time filtered candidates are in the running for the top spot, they have been so thoroughly vetted that they can be relied upon to make the standard, traditionally approved decisions. They are effectively indistinguishable from one another—and this is why much of the research showed little effect for leaders.
But the unfiltered candidates have not been vetted by the system and cannot be relied upon to make the “approved” decisions—many would not even know what the approved decisions are. They do unexpected things, have different backgrounds, and are often unpredictable. Yet they bring change and make a difference. Often that difference is a negative. Since they don’t play by the rules, they often break the institutions they are guiding. A minority of unfiltered leaders are transformative, though, shedding organizations of their misguided beliefs and foolish consistencies, and turning them toward better horizons. These are the leaders that the research said have enormous positive impact.
In his Ph.D. thesis, Mukunda applied his theory to all the U.S. presidents, evaluating which ones were filtered and which unfiltered, and whether or not they were great leaders. The results were overwhelming. His theory predicted presidential impact with an almost unheard of statistical confidence of 99 percent.
The filtered leaders didn’t rock the boat. The unfiltered leaders couldn’t help but rock it. Often they broke things, but sometimes they broke things like slavery, as Abraham Lincoln did.
Mukunda understood firsthand. His unconventional Ph.D. thesis made him an outlier in the academic job market. Despite a Harvard and MIT pedigree, he received only two job interviews after more than fifty applications. Schools wanted a conventional professor who could teach Political Science 101—they wanted a filtered academic. Mukunda’s outside-the-box approach made him an unlikely candidate for traditional professorships. Only schools looking for superstar outliers, with the resources to support a diverse and well-rounded faculty, were interested in someone like him. Harvard Business School made him an offer, and he accepted.
When I spoke to Mukunda, he said, “The difference between good leaders and great leaders is not an issue of ‘more.’ They’re fundamentally different people.” Had the British seen the failure of appeasement and said “Get us a better Neville Chamberlain,” they would have been screwed. They didn’t need a more filtered leader; they needed someone the system would have never let in the door. The old ways didn’t work, and doubling down on them would have been disastrous. To fight a menace like Hitler, they needed a maverick like Churchill.
When I asked Mukunda what made the unfiltered leaders so much more impactful, he said often they had unique qualities that differentiated them. Not the flattering descriptors you might expect, like “incredibly smart” or “politically astute.” These qualities were often negative at the mean—qualities you and I would consider “bad”—but due to the specific context, they became positives. Like Churchill’s paranoid defense of the British state, these qualities were a poison that under just the right circumstances could be a performance-enhancing drug.
Mukunda calls these “intensifiers.” And they hold the secret to how your biggest weakness might just be your greatest strength.
*
Glenn Gould was such a hypochondriac that if you sneezed while on a phone call with him, he’d immediately hang up.
The classical pianist routinely wore gloves, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to have on multiple pairs at the same time. Speaking about the portable pharmacy of medications he always ...