Eric Barker wrote a master-class on evaluating your strengths and weaknesses and categories of happiness to attain the perfect equilibrium that can be utilized for each individual person; both in their personal and professional aspects of life.
I have made well over 300 hundred highlights in this book adding up to pretty much one on every page – thats a lot of golden nuggets! I am about five or so years late from its initial publish date but I am really glad that I came across this book… reading it in just a matter of days.
The book is littered with the best quotes from top leaders and researchers in every field of expertise you can drum up in your mind, from sports to finance to university research to the likes of Harvard and Stanford.
If you are struggling with the beaten to death term “Work Life Balance” or the elements you might be missing that attribute to an actual happy successful life and the difficult balance thereof, I highly recommend picking up Barking Up The Wrong Tree by Eric Barker and giving it a read.
One of my favorite approaches that I immediately applied in my life was the WOOP theory addressed in the book.
WOOP is a goal-setting strategy that stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan. It’s a mental contrasting strategy developed by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen to help people achieve their goals by addressing challenges and fostering positive thinking.
Here’s How You Use the WOOP Method:
- Wish: Choose a meaningful, challenging, and feasible goal
- Outcome: Imagine the best result or feeling from achieving your goal
- Obstacle: Identify what might prevent you from achieving your goal
- Plan: Create a plan to overcome the obstacle
WOOP can be used for personal, educational, and professional goals. It’s also been shown to help students improve their effort, attendance, homework completion, and GPA.
Barker includes so many real life stories of every sort of person, revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly of each persons version of “success” and how some examples are worth avoiding, some striving to attain, and others – when used correctly and in the “right pond” can be powerful or otherwise in the wrong arena can prove devastating.
Best Happiness Metrics and Mood Boosters:
“Counting your blessings” is not just good advice your grandmother gave you; it’s also one of the most scientifically proven ways to increase your happiness. Just writing down good things that happened to you before going to bed has repeatedly been shown to increase happiness.
People who are most successful and happy had four metrics they were trying to do well: happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy. Happiness is are you enjoying what you’re doing? Achievement is are you getting ahead, making money, getting promoted? Significance is, am I producing value for the people around me? And legacy is, in some small way, am I making the world a better place?
People who looked at their calendar and said every week I am doing something to contribute to those categories, those were the people who had the most well-rounded, happy, successful lives.
By the end of Eric Barker’s book ‘Barking Up the Wrong Tree’, you should have a good idea of the happiness dials that will affect you personally (everyone is created differently), how to balance them all in your life (the term balance is an easy word to say but a hard verb to act out consistently), and where and when to use your weaknesses and signature strengths; so you can truly know thyself and be effective!
Recommended YouTube Video Add On After Reading
Google Docs Link to View My Personal Highlights
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BYVPTk48wt3jVqxXG9YLVOXAK-YPAN7r4MIrBhfSGQw/edit?usp=sharing
