MBA1453 Must Read: Barking Up The Wrong Tree by Eric Barker

Thy ticket, Lady Jennifer of Coolidge. Well, many thanks, good sir. Here is my Discover card. They accept Discover at Renaissance Fairs? Yeah, they do here. Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop. Get it with the times. With the times. You're playing the lute. Yeah, and it sounds pretty good, right?

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report.

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Foreign. Welcome to the $100 MBA show bringing you business knowledge every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and and Today's Episode is a must Read Episode on our Must Read Episodes I share with you a book that I've read that has influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its takeaways, its insights and why you should read it too. Today's must read is Barking up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker. This book took me by surprise. It studies standard success advice and turns it on its head. Do nice guys finish last? Does hard work really contribute to success? What about confidence? What about being an introvert versus an extrovert? What are really the deciding factors for us to win the game of life and how many of them do we really have control over? This book was a fantastic read and that's why I had to make it a must read here on the show. And in today's episode we're going to take a deep dive on some of the best tips in this book and the things I learned that have really changed my mindset about how to be successful or what makes success actually happen. We get into all that and more. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Barking up the Wrong Tree is a really cool read. It's just a fun read. It's humorous, it's self deprecating. There's some really good examples from history as well as modern day life and the world and a lot of questions in your head. They've always had get answered questions like scientifically people that are not so friendly that are short or crude, Are they respected more? Do they seem more confident? Do they get ahead in life or are the nice people who always getting trampled on? There are so many great points, great insights in this book that I want you to discover on your own. I want you to read this book, actually, I got it on Audible. Great narration. Love this book on Audible. But I want to cover three big points that he covers. Three big insights that really shook me in a little bit and made me think for hours about. And the first one deals with good grades. Remember school? Or maybe you have kids in school, getting good grades seemed like it is the most important thing in the world. You got to get good grades. Otherwise it looks like you're not smart, looks like you're not going to be successful. Good grades are a stepping stone to having a successful career, right? Well, he shares a lot of research in this area. He actually finds that people that had good grades in school actually end up being mediocre. They're not having a wildly successful career, nor are they having a disastrous career or life. They're just kind of doing okay. And it's because the structure of school requires you to follow a lot of rules, regulations, and not really innovate. You have to kind of live within those lines if you're going to get good grades or do well in school. People that can't help but innovate or think outside the lines, who tend to be very successful in the future, find school very restrictive and frustrating and don't do that well. Now, he's not saying that they fail out of school. They just don't do as well as others and pretty much do the bare minimum, do what they have to do just to get by. More like Bs and Cs rather than straight A's. They really don't see the point of getting straight A's and often struggle with the constraints of a school system. Now, he says a lot of people that do very well in school, in grade school especially, and really are very good in those types of systems, do very well as an employee, do very well as somebody who wants to move up the corporate ladder. They know how to play the game, they understand the rules and they play within the rule and therefore they can excel. They've done it all their life and they've done it as a kid. It's just second nature to them. Unfortunately for us as entrepreneurs, that is not what we do. We are always pushing the envelope. We're not working within the rules. In fact, the rules are made to be broken in a lot of ways. We're trying to innovate, we're trying to change, we're trying to differentiate, we're trying to do things differently. In fact, if you do things like everybody else, you're very ho hum and you're easily ignored in the marketplace. But if you look at the companies that have really taken off, they ask the question, why not? Why not do things differently? Why not use your finger to use a smartphone instead of a stylus? And that's what Apple did, right? Why not put video Games on CDs instead of cartridges and take on the giant of Nintendo? And that's what PlayStation did, right? Sony did that. It's breaking the rules, it's breaking the norms, it's the innovation that makes them successful. And this is what we're all about as entrepreneurs is really trying to take leaps in our journey. And you can't do that if you're confined in a space in a sort of rule box. And the chapter he gets deep on this is very interesting because he looks and follows the journey of people that had really good grades in school and they get really disappointed because he said, I did everything right. Why am I seeing so many other people that really sucked at school and they're not really good at school? My classmates just achieve, you know, 10x the success I am. So in this chapter he really goes deep and he actually follows the journey of a lot of the students that got great grades in school and they're frustrated because they're like, hey, I'm looking at my classmates that didn't do as well as school and they're like doing incredibly better than I am. They're much more successful in their life. How's that possible? And it all deals with mentality and training and what equals good work and good work for a good student that's getting good grades is don't break the rules, follow the structure, don't try to innovate. And that in the business world just does not work. The other point I loved about this book is the contrast between introverts and extroverts. And, you know, answering the question, do extroverts have more success? Do introverts have more success? What is it all about? Are we going to debunk something? Are we going to demystify it? So actually the data shows that extroverts tend to make more money, but introverts tend to be better experts, better specialists at what they do. And the reason is that introverts tend to spend a lot of time Thinking, processing information, focusing on what they do well, and therefore they can cultivate an expertise. While extroverts are very good at promoting themselves, very good at showing what they do and not just doing it. They there's a salesmanship to extroverts that introverts don't have, and therefore they're able to command more money because they actually show people, hey, this is what I'm worth. That's not very easy for an introvert, and therefore they just focus on their craft. You don't have to be one or the other. If you're more like an introvert, then try to tap into your extroverted side a little bit. When it matters most. Know that there are merits to that, even if it feels a little bit uncomfortable. And the same thing with being an extrovert. If you're an extrovert, you also need to allow time to think and to really process things and try to be an expert in something as well. Now, the third insight that I want to share with you that was really insightful, that really had me thinking, was the concept of working more hours, right? The idea, if you work more, then you'll have more success. Is this true? Some people say, no, you got to work smarter, work less, but, you know, more efficiently. Now he addresses the fact of efficiency. He says, of course efficiency matters, and you have to be not wasting time. But if all things are equal, the studies show that people that work more hours have more success. It's an undeniable fact. People that put in the time and hustle, like they say, right? And actually try to squeeze every minute and work as much as they can. They actually find more success in their careers, in their lives, in their relationships, in their health, on whatever they're working on. If you're working towards your health and you're putting in more hours, you're just going to have more success. It's just that simple. I was a little sensitive because I really believe in hard work. I really believe that you got to put in the hours, you got to want it bad, and you got to put in the time. But I'm also sensitive to the fact that, hey, there's something called burnout. You don't want to, like, completely burn out and find yourself in the hospital. So this is addressed. But the point is that people that make it their mission not to work a lot, they say, hey, I want to work 30 hours a week, and that's it. They're automatically putting a cap on their success, is what he's saying. Like, undeniably. If you work less, you're just going to have less success with all things being equal than somebody who's putting in more hours. And it made a lot of sense when he gives examples, and if I look at examples in the modern world, Elon Musk works 80 hours a week. He says he works 80 hours a week on average. 70, 80 hours. And people ask him, why do you do this? You're a multi billionaire, you have several successful companies. Why don't you kick it back a little bit? And he says, well, if I double the amount of time I work, I'll get there faster. I want to get there faster. I want to reach Mars faster. I want to, you know, reduce our dependency on fossil fuels with electric cars faster. And his line of thinking, according to Eric Barker, is correct. So if you're wondering if working hard and many hours pays off, it does.

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Thy Ticket Lady, Jennifer of Coolidge.

Well, many thanks, good sir. Here is my Discover card. They accept Discover at Renaissance fairs? Yeah, they do here. Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop. Get it with the times. With the times. You're playing the loot. Yeah, and it sounds pretty good, right?

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report.

What I love most about this book is that it's balanced. He shows you both perspectives of both arguments. It's well researched and it's well explained. You know, normally a book like this would be very dry, but he really makes an effort to keep it humorous, keep it relevant, and also break down complex ideas into small, digestible ideas. Plus, there's some shocking statistics in this book that I had to, like, go over again. I was like, wow, that's a crazy statistic. One statistic was about the topic of working hard people that work hard and really add value to the marketplace. And the statistic is that the top 10% of workers create eight times as much value as the bottom 10%. So there are people are able to really create incredible amount of value because they work harder, they want it bad. And therefore when you create value, you automatically command more value. Command more money, you make more money. And this is applicable even if you're in the corporate world. If you're working in a job, if you add more value to the company, to the organization, they're going to value more. They're going to say yes to those raises. They're going to move you up because they don't want to let you go. They value your contributions. But eight times more. Wow, that's pretty good. Again, what I love about this book and why I recommend you pick it up is that it's a fresh perspective on the concept of success. It's not black and white, but he gives gives you some really refreshing and sometimes shocking research on these different topics, what makes you successful. He also weighs the pros and cons of each, and he reaches a middle ground to allow you to really think, okay, this is a good way to approach being nice or working hard or trusting strangers, things like that. But I want to make sure that you do read this book. So I'm going to tease you with some other things that I learned, like why do nice guys finish first and last? Or how many words do you say to yourself every minute of the day? Or why too much confidence can be a bad thing? Or the true benefit of having a mentor grab Barking up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker. Great, great book. Recommended on Audible if you like listening to audiobooks. A great narrator as well. That wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. If you love this show, the biggest compliment you can give us is to hit that subscribe button. By hitting subscrib, you tell the world, hey, this show's awesome. And it automatically subscribes you to the next episode. Making sure that the next episode, once is available, is right on your device. It costs nothing to subscribe. It's absolutely free and it gives you access to over 1400 episodes, 1400 business lessons in our archives. That's the only way to get access. So go ahead and hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. What this book really does is that he displays the information, he shares it with you, and he actually allows you to make up your own decisions. He says, here, this is what the data says. This is what I've learned. This is what I think. But you make your own decision. And I don't see that that often in books. It's usually a book or an author is very opinionated and takes a stand. But this book kind of says, hey, this is what I learned, this is what I think, and allows you to make your own decision and ponder what's best for you. What do you feel comfortable with? And what this does. It makes you really question your own beliefs, your own thoughts about these topics. You know, why do you think this way? What happened in your life that makes you feel so strongly about something? And maybe you are holding on to an idea that simply isn't true. So I love the thought experiment within this book. All right, thank you so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care of Sam.