Top 70 Eric Barker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary.”

— Eric Barker

2. “Warren Buffett, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.”

— Eric Barker

3. “Author Tony Schwartz says, “Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.”

— Eric Barker

4. “In the famous commencement speech Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005 he said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

— Eric Barker

5. “Economist Henry Siu said, “People who switch jobs more frequently early in their careers tend to have higher wages and incomes in their prime-working years. Job-hopping is actually correlated with higher incomes, because people have found better matches – their true calling.” And changing roles is far more likely to get you to a leadership position:.”

— Eric Barker

6. “Success comes in many forms. Some success is incredibly impressive, some simple and quaint, others almost absurd. We get hung up on the heights of success we see in the media and forget that it’s our personal definition of success that matters. And you can achieve that.”

— Eric Barker

7. “You need a personal definition of success. Looking around you to see if you’re succeeding is no longer a realistic option. Trying to be a relative success compared to others is dangerous. This means your level of effort and investment is determined by theirs, which keeps you running full speed all the time to keep up.”

— Eric Barker

8. “But as any mathematician knows, averages can be deceptive. Andrew Robinson, CEO of famed advertising agency BBDO, once said, “When your head is in a refrigerator and your feet on a burner, the average temperature is okay. I am always cautious about averages.” As.”

— Eric Barker

9. “As the old saying goes, “You can do anything once you stop trying to do everything.”

— Eric Barker

10. “Why do jerks succeed? Sure, some of it’s duplicity and evil, but there’s something we can learn from them in good conscience: they’re assertive about what they want, and they’re not afraid to let others know about what they’ve achieved.”

— Eric Barker

11. “Fate is that thing we cannot avoid. It comes for us despite how we try to run from it. Destiny, on the other hand, is the thing we must chase, what we must bring to fruition.”

— Eric Barker

12. “Psychologist Shelley Taylor says that “a healthy mind tells itself flattering lies.” The pessimists were more accurate and realistic, and they ended up depressed. The truth can hurt.”

— Eric Barker

13. “Research has shown flattery is so powerful that it works even when the boss knows it’s insincere.”

— Eric Barker

14. “Influence guru Professor Robert Cialdini says that not only is reciprocity one of the key elements of being influential and winning favor with others but it’s also essential that you go first.”

— Eric Barker

15. “Empathy is when the line between you and another blurs. Closeness is when your vision of your “self” makes room for someone else to be in there too. And a true friend is “another self.” A part of you.”

— Eric Barker

16. “Most of us use our calendars all wrong: we don’t schedule work; we schedule interruptions. Meetings get scheduled. Phone calls get scheduled. Doctor appointments get scheduled. You know what often doesn’t get scheduled? Real work.”

— Eric Barker

17. “Neuroscientist Diana Tamir found that your brain gets more pleasure from you talking about yourself than it does from food or money. This is why you should stop doing it and let others do it as much as possible around you.”

— Eric Barker

18. “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.”

— Eric Barker

19. “School has clear rules. Life often doesn’t. When there’s no clear path to follow, academic high achievers break down.”

— Eric Barker

20. “We got to the moon and built the pyramids without email and Facebook.”

— Eric Barker

21. “Barry Schwartz says we have to become “choosers” instead of “pickers.” A picker selects from the options available, leading us into false dichotomies created by the options we see in front of us. But a chooser “is thoughtful enough to conclude that perhaps none of the available alternatives are satisfactory, and that if he or she wants the right alternative, he or she may have to create it.”

— Eric Barker

22. “As Henry David Thoreau said, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

— Eric Barker

23. “We got to the moon and built the pyramids without email and Facebook. You can go a couple of hours without checking them.”

— Eric Barker

24. “By engaging in cognitive reappraisal, and telling ourselves a different story about what is happening, we can subvert the entire willpower paradigm. Some research has shown that willpower is like a muscle, and it gets tired with overuse. But it only gets depleted if there’s a struggle. Games change the struggle to something else. They make the process fun, and as Mischel showed in his research, we are able to persist far longer and without the same level of teeth-gritting willpower depletion.”

— Eric Barker

25. “We can apply game mechanics to our lives and turn dull moments into fun ones. Can this make us grittier at work and lead to success in life? Oh yeah. Work doesn’t have to be a lousy game. So let’s learn why work sucks, why games are awesome, and how we can turn the former into the latter. C’mon, let’s “game the system.”

— Eric Barker

26. “We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great we must be different. And that doesn’t come from trying to follow society’s vision of what is best, because society doesn’t always know what it needs. More often being the best means just being the best version of you.”

— Eric Barker

27. “So keep trying new things. It makes you luckier. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. When there’s no clear path to success, no relevant model for what you’re trying to achieve, trying crazy things may be the only way to solve the issue.”

— Eric Barker

28. “So what is meaning? Meaning, for the human mind, comes in the form of the stories we tell ourselves about the world. This is why so many people believe in fate or say things were “meant to be.” Having a story about the meaning of life helps us to cope with hard times. Not only do we naturally see the world this way, but frankly we can’t not tell stories.”

— Eric Barker

29. “When you take a job take a long look at the people you’re going to be working with – because the odds are you’re going to become like them; they are not going to become like you. You can’t change them. If it doesn’t fit who you are, it’s not going to work.”

— Eric Barker

30. “When you choose your pond wisely, you can best leverage your type, your signature strengths, and your context to create tremendous value. This is what makes for a great career, but such self-knowledge can create value wherever you choose to apply it.”

— Eric Barker

31. “Oh, the irony. Cognitive biases prevent us from understanding cognitive biases.”

— Eric Barker

32. “There is too much going on in the world for our little brains to process; we must distill it.”

— Eric Barker

33. “We all spend a lot of time complaining about incompetence, but as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in a talk he gave at High Point University, overconfidence is the far bigger problem.”

— Eric Barker

34. “Mentoring a young person is four times more predictive of happiness than your health or how much money you make.”

— Eric Barker

35. “A study of over seven hundred American millionaires showed their average college GPA was 2.9.”

— Eric Barker

36. “Walker Smith of Yankelovich Partners told The Wall Street Journal, “Right now, there’s no aspiration to be middle class. Everyone wants to be at the top.” We probably have far more now than we ever had in the past, but we’re probably not much happier. And instinctively we think the problem can still be fixed by more. More money. More food. More things. Just more. We’re not even sure what we need more of, but whatever we have now sure as hell isn’t doing it, so turn it up to eleven, Bertha.”

— Eric Barker

37. “The same traits that make people a nightmare to deal with can also make them the people who change the world.”

— Eric Barker

38. “Here’s the problem: We love having choices. We hate making choices. Having choices means having possibilities. Making choices means losing possibilities. And having so many choices increases the chance of regret.”

— Eric Barker

39. “Stories are the invisible undercurrent that promotes success in a shocking number of the most important areas of life.”

— Eric Barker

40. “Our research inside companies revealed that the best way to motivate people, day in and day out, is by facilitating progress – even small wins.”

— Eric Barker

41. “What’s shocking is that when asked to make predictions, depressed people are more accurate than optimists. It’s called “depressive realism.” The world can be a harsh place. Optimists lie to themselves. But if we all stop believing anything can change, nothing ever will. We need a bit of fantasy to keep us going.”

— Eric Barker

42. “Success is something you will confront constantly in business. You will always be interpreting it against something, and that something should be your own goals and purpose.”

— Eric Barker

43. “As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”

— Eric Barker

44. “There are three categories: “right,” “wrong,” and “everybody does it.” Once we see others getting away with something, we assume it’s okay. Nobody wants to be the sucker who plays by the rules when no one else does.”

— Eric Barker

45. “We always think we need more: more help, more motivation, more energy. But in our current world the answer is often the exact opposite: we need less. Fewer distractions, fewer goals, fewer responsibilities. Is that so we can watch more TV? No. We need less of those things so we can go all in on our priorities. The question is what are you going to do less of? What are you going to quit or say no to in order to make time for what matters most?”

— Eric Barker

46. “Pfeffer says we need to stop thinking the world is fair. He puts it bluntly: The lesson from cases of people both keeping and losing their jobs is that as long as you keep your boss or bosses happy, performance really does not matter that much and, by contrast, if you upset them, performance won’t save you.”

— Eric Barker

47. “We spend so much time chasing the shallow things in life. But when tragedy strikes, or late at night when your brain asks too many questions, we know it’s the relationships that matter most. Whom can I trust? Does anyone really know me? Does anyone really care? If you think of your happiest moments, they will be about people. The most painful moments will too. Our relationships to others make or break our lives.”

— Eric Barker

48. “Most of the subjects in the study were classified as “careerists”: they saw their job as getting good grades, not really as learning.”

— Eric Barker

49. “This leads us to the strengths of being less than confident. Confidence makes it very hard for us to learn and improve. When we think we know all the answers, we stop looking for them. Marshall Goldsmith says, “Although our self-confident delusions can help us achieve, they can make it difficult for us to change.” When.”

— Eric Barker

50. “And as a paper in American Psychologist showed, “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

— Eric Barker