"Barking Up the Wrong Tree" by Eric Barker: Summary and Review

Most advice about success sounds reasonable, and Eric Barker argues that most of it is only half true. “Nice guys finish last.” “Winners never quit.” “Believe in yourself.” Each saying fits some people in some situations and fails badly in others.

Barker runs a popular blog about research on success, and in 2017 he turned it into this book. It became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Each of its six chapters takes one piece of common advice and tests it against studies and stories.

This review follows the book’s own order. It explains what Barker concludes in each chapter, then shows where his evidence is strong and where it is weak.

Following the rules wins at school, but rarely changes a field

The first chapter asks whether you should play it safe and do what you are told. Barker starts with a study by Karen Arnold, an education researcher at Boston College. She followed 81 high school valedictorians and salutatorians, the students with the best grades in their year, for about 14 years after graduation.

They did well. Almost all of them finished college, and about 40 percent reached top-tier jobs. But very few of them changed their field or did something truly new. Arnold herself said that these students usually fit into the system instead of shaking it up.

Barker’s explanation is that school rewards a particular mix of qualities. Barker writes that grades reflect “self-discipline, conscientiousness, and the ability to comply with rules” more than intelligence. School also rewards being good at everything. Working life, Barker argues, often rewards being excellent at one thing.

The chapter then turns to people who succeed because they do not fit in. The management researcher Gautam Mukunda calls certain traits intensifiers. These are qualities that are usually harmful but can be very valuable in the right situation. Barker’s example is Winston Churchill.

Churchill was an outsider in his party, stubborn and difficult. In the 1930s these same traits made him one of the few politicians who warned openly about Hitler. In calm times he would probably have been a poor prime minister. In a war he was what Britain needed.

The practical lesson is short. Know your strengths, including the strange ones, and look for the “pond” where they count.

Nice people finish both first and last

The second chapter asks whether nice guys finish last. Barker relies mainly on research by the organizational psychologist Adam Grant. Grant sorts people into givers, who help others without counting, takers, who try to get more than they give, and matchers, who trade favor for favor. Grant found givers at both ends of success measures. Many were at the bottom, because others exploited them. But many others were at the top.

The difference lies in how givers protect themselves. Successful givers help others, but they do not let takers drain them, and they look after their own goals too. Barker puts the time factor plainly. In the short term, he says, taking often wins. Over the long term, giving usually wins, because people remember who helped them.

He supports this with a famous computer tournament run by the political scientist Robert Axelrod in about 1980. Programs played a game many times in which each side could cooperate or cheat. The winner was a simple strategy called tit for tat. It cooperates first and then copies what the other side did in the last round. It is kind, but it does not let itself be used.

Barker also draws lessons from unusual groups, such as pirates and prison gangs. Even criminals need rules and trust to work together. His point is that cooperation is not a soft extra. It is how groups survive.

Grit grows from stories and games, and smart people quit

The third chapter tests the saying that winners never quit. Barker accepts that grit, the ability to keep working toward a long-term goal, matters. His question is where it comes from.

His first answer is meaning. People keep going when they have a story that explains why their effort matters. Barker uses survivors of extreme situations and the training of Navy SEALs, the special forces of the US Navy. Positive self-talk, the sentences you say to yourself under pressure, plays a large role in that training.

His second answer is games. Games keep people busy for hours because they are winnable, offer new challenges and give quick feedback. Barker suggests turning hard tasks into something similar, with small goals and visible progress.

Then he turns the saying around. Time is limited, so persisting with everything is impossible. Barker argues for strategic quitting: stop what does not work so that you have time for what does. He recommends trying many small things early, an idea the writer Peter Sims calls “little bets”. To choose which goals to pursue, Barker recommends WOOP, a method by the psychologist Gabriele Oettingen. You name a wish, imagine the best outcome, name the main obstacle and make a plan for it. Barker notes that pure positive daydreams can reduce effort, because the brain partly treats the imagined success as real.

Networks matter for almost everyone

The fourth chapter asks whether success depends on what you know or who you know. Barker’s answer is both, in different ways. Extroverts, people who gain energy from being with others, tend to do better on many measures of career success. Introverts, who gain energy from time alone, are more likely to become experts and tend to get better grades. Most people are somewhere in between and can switch modes when needed.

Barker reports research showing that larger networks help in very different fields. But he also takes the discomfort of networking seriously. Many people feel that meeting others only to gain something is unpleasant. His solution comes back to the givers from chapter two. Help other people first. Contact old friends and colleagues you have lost touch with, because these “dormant ties” are easy to renew and often bring new information. And look for superconnectors, people who know many others in different groups.

His model is the mathematician Paul Erdős, who wrote papers with more than 500 co-authors. Erdős lived out of a suitcase and travelled from colleague to colleague, working on problems together. He was a famous eccentric, and yet his success came from his network.

Confidence is less useful than self-compassion

The fifth chapter questions the advice to believe in yourself. Barker accepts that confidence helps people act. But too much confidence makes people ignore their mistakes, and confidence that depends on success collapses with every failure.

Barker therefore recommends self-compassion, a concept studied by the psychologist Kristin Neff. Self-compassion means treating yourself after a failure as you would treat a good friend. You admit the mistake, but you do not attack yourself for it. The publisher’s description links this idea to Buddhist philosophy. Barker argues that self-compassion gives the benefits of confidence without its main danger, because it does not depend on being better than other people.

Work-life balance means deciding what is enough

The last chapter asks whether you should work all the time or seek balance. Barker does not pretend that the choice is free. Research by the psychologist Dean Keith Simonton suggests that more hours of work generally produce more results. Many of the most famous achievers made what Barker calls a Faustian bargain. The term comes from the old legend of Faust, who sold his soul for knowledge and power. Here it means that these people gave up family and friendships for their work. Barker’s examples include Albert Einstein and the baseball player Ted Williams.

Barker’s answer is that you must draw the line yourself, because modern work no longer draws it for you. Phones and email make work available at every hour. To decide where to draw the line, he uses a model by Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson, two researchers at Harvard Business School. In their book Just Enough (2004), they describe four parts of a successful life:

1. Happiness, enjoying your life.
2. Achievement, reaching goals that compare well with what others have reached.
3. Significance, having a positive effect on people you care about.
4. Legacy, helping others to succeed after you.

Barker’s advice is to decide how much of each is enough for you, and then make sure your week includes time for all four.

The book’s real answer is alignment

Read together, the six chapters make one argument. A trait is not good or bad by itself. Rule-following, kindness, persistence, sociability, confidence and hard work all help in some places and hurt in others.

In the interview listed in the references, Barker describes the goal as “aligning yourself with environments that will allow you to thrive”. For a reader, this means three questions. What am I strong at? Where does that strength count? And how much success do I actually want?

How it differs from other books on success

Three neighbors help to place the book.

• Give and Take by Adam Grant (2013) is the source of chapter two. Grant gives far more detail and evidence on givers and takers. If cooperation at work interests you most, read Grant.
• Grit by Angela Duckworth (2016) argues for passion and persistence over the long term. Barker accepts much of this but adds a stronger case for quitting the wrong things.
• Mastery by Robert Greene (2012) also asks how people become successful, but through long biographies. Greene says you should find one calling. Barker says you should find the environment that fits the traits you already have. The review “Mastery” by Robert Greene: Summary and Review explains Greene’s six steps.

What Barker adds is range and a light tone. He covers in one book what usually takes five, and he writes with humor. The British Psychological Society’s magazine The Psychologist published a short, positive review by a 17-year-old student, who found it a realistic book about success. That is a fair sign of the book’s audience.

Where it falls short

The book has three main weaknesses.

The first is the strength of its evidence. The valedictorian argument is the best example. The cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham pointed out that Arnold’s study had no comparison group. Very few people of any kind become famous innovators, so a low rate among valedictorians is expected. Willingham also noted that the explanation, that school trains people to conform, was never measured directly. Barker presents a pattern and then a cause that the data cannot show.

The second is that the book moves fast. Each study gets a page or two. Barker rarely says how large an effect was, how many people took part, or whether a result has been repeated. Some of the research he summarizes, for example on grit, has since been debated, and readers do not learn this from the book.

The third is its idea of success. Barker defines it partly through money, rank and fame. The teacher and writer Nancy Flanagan objected in Education Week that this undervalues careers like teaching and nursing. The four-part model in the last chapter answers this criticism in part, but it comes late.

Which format to choose

The book works well as an audiobook. It is built from stories and short summaries, and there are no charts or tables. The Audible edition, read by Roger Wayne, runs about nine hours. Print or an ebook is better if you want to follow up on studies, because the notes at the back list Barker’s sources. Each chapter also ends with a summary of its main points, which makes rereading easy.

Read it as a map of the field, not as the last word. When a chapter matters to you, follow it up with the specialized book behind it.