PNTV: Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker (#363)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes. TV Today, another great book, Barking up the wrong Tree by Eric Barker. Barking up the Wrong Tree Subtitle the surprising science behind why everything you know about success, Mostly wrong. Eric Barker is a former screenwriter with an MBA who is an extraordinary writer. And this book ranks up there in my top 10 favorite books ever. I read it and I was astonished by the parallels. I often reference the number of books that we've already featured that an author covers, and there was literally over 20 different titles that Eric talks about that we've integrated that are among my favorite books that we've ever discussed. So he does a great job of applying the science to making your life, as he says, awesome. And he challenges a lot of the myths out there in a really fun, compelling, very articulate and practical way. I highly recommend this book if that's your sort of thing. And I'm excited to share some of my favorite big ideas for for the record, the other three, my top three unequivocal top three favorite books include Deep Work, the Tools, and the Daily Stoic. For now, Philosopher's Note, Bunch of my favorite big ideas, five of them here. We'll start at the top at Kentros. So the book is about optimizing your life so you can actualize your potential, right? So if you want to do great things and enjoy the process and enjoy the true success, not just monetary or external measures of success, but to truly create a great life, what do you need to do? It's essentially what the book is all about. Well, one of the big ideas is ekantros, which is the Greek root for the word eccentric. You need to be willing to be. The literal definition is here's a circle, here's the center. You're out of center, perhaps even over here, right? Or you've got the center here, you're over here. Or maybe you're over here, right? You are out of center when you are eccentric, you are not trying to be like everybody else. Right? He says the sure way to mediocrity is to try to be like everyone else. Right? Too many of us spend too much of our energy trying to fit in. And he says you need to have just the right amount of weirdness, quoting one of the world's leading creativity experts. You want to be crazy brilliant, not crazy crazy, but you got to be willing to embrace a certain amount of the crazy and then express the most authentic version of you in an eccentric, out of center type of way. We're not so worried about conforming as we are about expressing the highest version of ourselves. Now, of course, I like to say, if you want to do that, then you probably want to focus on. You want to shine like that. Focus on your fundamentals, which we're going to talk about with energy in a moment. But you got to ground yourself in the basic nuts and bolts of eating, moving, sleeping optimally so that you can express yourself fully and not go like this. But to have the fully expressed, crazy, brilliant. Not crazy, crazy. So find your right amount of weirdness. Be willing to step out of that center point. Be eccentric. The second big idea here is on willpower and making our lives a game. So Eric walks through the science of game theory and how we can apply it to our lives in a really compelling way. He also busts the myth that willpower is limited. There's a paradox of willpower here, right? A lot of studies have shown that willpower is, in fact, limited. It's finite, kind of like your muscles, you use it and it exhausts itself or. Or a battery, a smartphone battery, it depletes itself over the course of a certain amount of time. But important. But there's also research that shows that whether or not your willpower depletes or gets kind of a boost, right? Energized as you use it is determined by how you perceive it. If you come into an experiment and you're told, hey, the more you exert yourself, the more your energy is going to build, that's exactly what will happen and the opposite will happen, right? So we want to realize that if we approach life with a certain attitude, we can find our challenges to be energizing rather than enervating. And he walks us through the four primary aspects of a good game. We want to make our life one big game. What is a game? And you think about it, right? You play a game, you get fired up about a game, right? It's really, really enjoyable. Well, why is that? He says that there are four elements to it. The number one thing about a game is it's winnable. A game is. We don't even need to put that up. Winnable, right? You can win a game. If a game is not winnable, you're not going to want to play it. So when you're setting goals for yourself, make sure that your game is winnable. The second facet of it is novel check challenges. A good game has novel challenges. You're not doing the exact same thing all the time. There are challenges that are stretching you not too far, but stretching you. And they're novel. So you want to create a level of novelty in your life that is challenging. The third aspect of a good game is goals. I want to clear that level, right? So what are the goals you have in your life for winnable, novel challenges? Goals is the third component. Then the fourth one is you get feedback. You know how you're doing when you're playing a good game. You don't need to wait months for it. You, you know, right. Then that's what makes it fun. It's kind of like what we talked about with the four disciplines of execution. When you bowl, you don't want to bowl into a curtain. If you can't see the pins you're knocking down, you don't have feedback. It's not that fun. Keeping score is what they recommend to make it more fun. So we want to have feedback as we're entering and playing our game. So think about that. Think about your life as one big game and then see that your willpower, first of all, you always want to use it wisely to install habits that run on autopilot. But you also want to have something bigger that you're playing so you're not gritting your teeth through it and depleting your energy through the process. Our life, one big game. One aspect of our life we definitely want to gamify is our energy. So Eric spends a lot of time talking about the fact that we want to optimize our energy. Obviously, we spend all kinds of time talking about this, and, and we want to remember that energy, not time, is the real measure of peak performance. We want to focus on that. And he makes the point that if you're tired and cranky, you're up all night watching whatever, got a bad night of sleep, alarm went off, and then you work for 10 hours, right in that state, you will get less done in those 10 hours than you could get done in three hours if your energy was optimized. So if we're focusing like a game on optimizing our eating, our moving, our sleeping, our focusing of our mind, our breathing, etc. And we're finding a way to make our energy just dialed in such that when we sit down to do our deep work, it turns out Cal Newport and Eric are good friends. I was telling Cal how much I loved this book in a recent conversation. He said, oh, yeah, Eric, you guys, yeah, that's awesome. He's fantastic, et cetera, et cetera. But if you Want to have really, really productive chunks of deep work. Bring the best energy you possibly can, make that a priority for yourself so that you can show up and you can do more and higher quality work in three hours than you'd have to grind through if your energy was depleted over 10. He also makes the point that for most people your best energy is in the first two hours of your day. And I think it was in here where he quotes Dan Ariely, if it wasn't here, it was another book who says that it's actually not the immediate two hours after you wake up. It takes about an hour for the cobwebs to get shaken off and then you crush it. So if you got up at 7:30, for example, 8:30 to like 10:30, 11 would be your hammer zone. And Ariely says the good IT departments at these companies should make email prohibited during this time. Then they'd see their creativity skyrocket because they'd use, we'd use our best energy to do the most important work and not dissipate it in reactive email time. So think about your energy, think about your masterpiece day and realize that as Cal says, Cal Newport, quality of work performed is always going to be a function of intensity, of focus times time, right? You can put energy on the front of that. You need great energy in order to be able to focus intensely. And then you don't need as much time in order to have incredibly high quality and high volume of work productivity. So fourth Big Idea. Eric talks a lot about relationships as well and how important relationships are to have a whole life. In fact, this is the greatest predictor. The quality of your relationships is really going to dictate the quality of your life, your longevity, et cetera. And he says one relationship is particularly important if you want to do great things and truly actualize your potential. He says you got to look at the research of Anders Ericsson. Of course, Anders wrote Peak, right? Malcolm Gladwell adapted his research for our 10,000 hour rule, which we know is a little more nuanced than just put in 10,000 hours. But you do need to put in a ton of effort. What else did Anders teach us? Because he also told us that the greatest performers get more sleep, 8 hours and 36 minutes on average, right. Per night, way more than the next level performers. And they also loved naps. And they all basically without exception had mentors, they had individuals. And these are the super elite performers. They had world class teachers who had a demonstrated ability to, to bring people up to a world class international standard. It was an absolutely necessary requirement for them to excel at their highest levels. So Eric says it's really important for us to create those relationships, to find people in our lives who have achieved a level of success and from a coaching perspective, ideally have also demonstrated their ability to bring someone up to a high level of success and to work with them. He says there are three things to consider. Actually, there's a number of things, but my three favorite things, he says, when you're looking for a mentor, number one, he says, be a worthy pupil, grasshopper. You need to be worthy if you want to work with a truly great teacher. They're busy. Who do they want to work with? They want to work with someone who they know is willing to do the work, has done the work to date, and they can see that, wow. If they worked with you, they might be able to help you get to a really high level. So the first step is always be a worthy pupil, right? The second step, he says, is study them. Study your coach. And he says, really, really, really study them. Know who they are, know what they're all about. Bring that to the relationship. Then the third aspect, he also says, never waste their time. Another little important variable. They're busy people. Don't waste their time. And then the third biggest thing that I love is make them proud. When you work with them, make it your conscious, deliberate intention to make them proud. They're investing time in you. Make them proud. Show them that their work is producing results. Right? Do the work. Make them proud. For me, this was super powerful. I've been blessed to have a number of different mentors in my life. Right now I'm working with Phil Stotts, which has been just absolutely amazing. The author of the Tools, and. And it's funny because I look at that relationship and I've worked hard, and Phil Stutts has worked with some extraordinary people and brought them to international levels. That's just what he does. He's known for that in Hollywood, right? I didn't really even know that. I just knew I loved his work when I read the Tools. And as it turns out, I've done a lot of work. I've become a worthy pupil for him, and I've really, really studied his work. When he watched this version of the video I did with him, he literally told me, you teach this stuff better than I do. And he laughed at me. And we joked about it, right? So I've really studied his work passionately, and I'm absolutely committed to making him proud. So some things to consider for you as you look out at your relationships and if you don't have a deep mentor relationship, think about who might be a mentor for you and what you can do to meet those few things we just talked about to step up. If you already have a mentor, celebrate them, thank them, dive in even deeper, commit even more to the dynamic. Then the fifth big idea here is just say no. So the big essence of the book, if you want to be eccentrically awesome, right, and be willing to go outside of the center and do great things, you got to be willing to not be normal, right? And you really need to figure out, as you're crazy brilliant, not crazy crazy, you got to figure out who you are and what you're here to do. Eric tells us a big part of this whole process is alignment, alignment with who you are and doing that more and more consistently in every facet of your life. And one of the stories he uses to bring that point home is our ability to just say no. And he shares the Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi study on creativity that we've talked about in different contexts, but it's just genius. So Mihaly Csiksmihy, he became one of the preeminent researchers in psychology, founded the positive psychology movement with Martin Seligman, came up with the whole concept of flow, right? From a scientific perspective. And he was doing a study on creativity. So he reached out to the world's luminaries, the best creative individuals out there. It was going to be a super well publicized research project, et cetera. He reaches out to these people and Eric tells us it's an honor just to be on the list of people that he's inviting. And what happens, he says something like over a third of them said no, and a ton more didn't even respond to him, right? And one of the people that didn't respond to him, the reason is because they're willing to be a bit eccentric. They know what they're here to do. They're saying no to all the distractions so they can focus on what they want to do. And Peter Drucker writes Mihaly a polite note, and he says, my dear Professor Csikszentmihalyi, I admire your work. I've benefited from it, but I reluctantly have to tell you no. I'm sorry, but I have a very large trash, waste paper basket for invitations like yours. Basically, I'm gonna throw your invitation straight into the trash. Because the only reason I've been able to create at the level I've been able to Create. And oh, by the way, I don't believe in creativity. I believe in productivity. I just plod along. People call it creative, but I just plod along. I just put one foot in front of the other and continue the process. And the only way I can do that is because I say no to imitations like this and yes to what matters to me. So that begs the question, what matters to you? What's really, really important to you? Are you barking up the wrong tree and chasing things that aren't important? Obvious distractions and overindulging entertainment and not doing your work? Or are you splitting up and diffusing your energy and not having the courage to create the clarity than to pursue what you really feel called to do? We want to get aligned with our deepest purpose. Say yes to that politely. Say no to the other things. Seek out and work with the mentors that can help us go to the next level as we optimize our energy. Remember, it's all about energy management and those first two hours in your day, we protect them. Be creative before you're reactive as you do your deep work. Make it all a game. A winnable, novel, challenging, goal oriented, feedback laden game. And see your willpower spiral up rather than be depleted as you step proudly yet groundedly out of that center. And do what you're here to do. Barking up the wrong tree. Like I said, one of my top 10 favorite books ever. I highly recommend it, Eric. Thank you for the great book. And there you go. Hope you enjoyed. Have another awesome day. See you.

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