Barking Up the Wrong Tree Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Audio available

Brief Summary

Success is highly individual. To become successful, individuals should understand how their passions and strengths align with their goals, and not be afraid of failure, which is an important step to achieving this understanding. Realistic plans and hard work are more important to success than luck, timing, or even academic success. Achieving success requires innovation, risk-taking, long-term planning, and a strong social network. An optimistic internal narrative can also help individuals develop a framework to help them achieve their goals. Individuals who achieve success should be careful to avoid the trap of overconfidence, and remain self-aware, yet compassionate, in order to continue to grow and improve.

About the Author

Eric Barker is a blogger and creator of the popular science blog Barking Up the Wrong Tree. He is the author of The Wall Street Journal’s best-selling book of the same name. His work has previously been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Wired Magazine, and Business Insider. He holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from Boston College, and a Master of Fine Arts from UCLA.

Topics

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What You’ll Learn

Why self-awareness, hard work, and realistic planning are the keys to success
The importance of developing an internal narrative and maintaining a strong social network
How to avoid the trap of overconfidence

Who Is This For

High-achieving professionals who want to advance their careers
Academic leaders who want to translate their academic success to real-world success
Any individuals who want to achieve success in their personal and professional lives

Key Insights

Barker uses science-based cases to help explain the basic keys to achieving success. He shows how true success must first come from self-awareness, which helps people understand what success means in the context of their life. Passions, talents, and interests must align with career goals before an individual can become successful.

Successful people also have to be practical, create a realistic plan, and work hard to create opportunities for themselves. Success comes from hard work, not from luck. They must also embrace failure, and be open to understanding how their particular weakness and strengths can be nurtured and applied in ways that will yield positive outcomes. They should avoid the trap of overconfidence, but construct optimistic narratives that allow them to build a framework to best achieve their goals.

Success Is Defined By The Individual

There is no single definition of success. True success is relative and comes only when your life aligns with your own personal goals, not with others’ ideas of success. Therefore, true success can only be achieved after people understand what their personal goals are. In fact, one of the biggest barriers to success is when people do not understand themselves and do not know what personal success looks like for their life.

However, understanding your personal vision of success is only the first step towards achieving it. At first, people should be open to trying many different things, in order to discover what it is they are truly passionate about achieving. Once they have found their passion, they should then plan a course of action to achieve success.

It is also important to keep in mind that nobody achieves success right away. Failure is an important step in the process toward success because it can help you understand how your goals align with your strengths. For example, Oprah Winfrey, one of the world’s most celebrated television personalities, was fired from her first job working as a Baltimore news anchor, because she did not like upsetting people and thus was not able to ask the subjects of her stories the tough questions the job required. Her personal strengths were not well aligned with the strengths needed to be a great reporter. However, this failure helped her identify that her personal strengths lay, not in interrogative reporting, but in the compassion, empathy, and ability to connect with others that led her to become a successful television host.

Success Is Contextual

Few things are strictly good or bad but can be perceived as one way or the other depending on the context. People’s qualities need to be nurtured in order to make them grow and thrive into positive traits.

Some people...