The Tim Ferriss Show - #290: Gretchen Rubin — Experiments in Happiness and Creativity

Episode Date: January 10, 2018

Gretchen Rubin is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Four Tendencies, Better Than Before, The Happiness Project, and Happier at Home. She has an enormous readership, both in print and online, and her books have sold three million copies worldwide, in more than thirty languages.On her popular weekly podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, she discusses good habits and happiness with her sister Elizabeth Craft; they've been called the "Click and Clack of podcasters." Her podcast was named in iTunes's lists of "Best Podcasts of 2015" and was named in the Academy of Podcasters "Best Podcasts of 2016."Fast Company named Gretchen Rubin to its list of Most Creative People in Business, and she's a member of Oprah's SuperSoul 100.Enjoy!This episode is brought to you by Shure. Shure is the brand behind my favorite headphones -- the SE846. Shure has been trusted by musicians and sound experts for years, and I use Shure equipment to help record each episode of the podcast. The SE846 earphones feature a groundbreaking low-pass filter that delivers extended high-end clarity and unparalleled low-end performance of a true subwoofer without sacrificing clarity or detail of mids or highs.Go to shure.com/tim and use the coupon code "TIM" at checkout to save $100 on these phenomenal headphones through January 2018.This podcast is also brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the #1 cloud bookkeeping software, which is used by a ton of the start-ups I advise and many of the contractors I work with. It is the easiest way to send invoices, get paid, track your time, and track your clients.FreshBooks tells you when your clients have viewed your invoices, helps you customize your invoices, track your hours, automatically organize your receipts, have late payment reminders sent automatically and much more.Right now you can get a free month of complete and unrestricted use. You do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month and see how the brand new Freshbooks can change your business, go to FreshBooks.com/Tim and enter "Tim Ferriss" in the "how did you hear about us" section.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. You may also be listening to this on the usually shorter form Tribe of Mentors podcast. The guest this episode applies to both equally, Gretchen Rubin. She is in the book, Tribe of Mentors, and has lots of tactical, practical advice to offer, but we take it a little longer in format this time around, and we really do a deep dive into experiments in creativity, happiness, creative flow, daily routines, etc. Gretchen Rubin, maybe you've heard of her. Twitter, Facebook, at Gretchen Rubin, R-U-B-I-N, GretchenRubin.com. Who is Gretchen? She's the author of several books, including the New York Times bestsellers, Better Than Before, The Happiness Project, Happier at Home, and most recently, The Four Tendencies. Her books have sold nearly 3 million

copies worldwide. That's a lot of copies in more than 30 languages. On her popular podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, she discusses good habits and happiness with her sister, Elizabeth Kraft. They've been called the click and clack of podcasters. Her podcast was named one of iTunes' best podcasts of 2015 and the Academy of Podcasters' best podcast of 2016. Fast Company named Gretchen to its list of most creative people in business, and she's a member of Oprah's Super Soul 100. So without further ado, please enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with Gretchen Rubin. Gretchen, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to be talking to you.

I have been looking forward to this for some time. Many, many, many, many of my listeners and fans have been requesting that you come on the show, and here we are. So thank you for making the time. Oh, that's great to hear, and I'm so glad to get the chance to sit down and talk to you. So I thought we would begin actually with a question that's been on my mind related to a tweet of yours, which is not scandalous. I'm just hoping to hear you elaborate a bit on where it came from, which is a notebook with, I wish I could not wish, agree or disagree. And where does that come from? What is the origin of that? Well, I love Cohenans, you know, which are these statements that Zen Buddhist monks will meditate on in order to free themselves from the bounds of kind of rational thought. So this is what is the sound of one hand clapping and things like that.

And so I'm always looking for things like that are kind of paradoxical statements and, uh, that get you thinking. And that was one, I wish I could not wish was one that really, uh, was an idea that occurred to me. Then I was like, yeah, I do. Sometimes I wish that I could not wish. Um, and, uh, um, it's an interest. It's like one of these things that the more you think about it, your thoughts kind of twist and turn. And that's what I like about Cohen's. No. What prompted the desire to lose the ability to wish? Is it to the expectations minus reality equals happiness type of equation and not having that forward seeking expectation or desire?

Or was it something else? Like what was, what were the circumstances that surrounded you not, uh, or considering the, the desire to lose your ability to wish? Well, actually, you know, I'm sort of deeply within the romantic tradition. So I'm a big believer in desire and attachment as, um, as part of life. So I don't, I'm not a person who really wants to disengage from, from desire. Um, but certainly I have times where have times where I wish I couldn't wish. I wish I wasn't wishing. But for me, it was really more of a thought exercise than something that

passionately rang true for me personally. Sometimes I wish that I had more wishes, that I felt more strongly towards things, because I think there's a lot of power and beauty that comes from that. We're going to bounce around a lot since I'm strictly non-chronological. Yeah, let's be non-linear. Let's do it. How did the law end up entering your life? I mean, it seems like you had some family

with legal backgrounds, but was there a point where you decided you wanted to pursue that as a profession? Oh, I wish that there had been that moment. Yeah, you're right. My father's a lawyer, very happy lawyer. So I had a model in my life of someone who was very happy as a lawyer. But really, I just drifted into law. I was good at research and writing. I was good at taking tests. And, you know, I thought about law school. Well, you know, I'll just take the LSAT and see how I do. I'll just apply to law school and see where I get in. And I can always change my mind later. And it's a great preparation for a lot of different things. And, you know, I'll keep my options open. And I never really sat down and thought, you know,

I would really like to be a lawyer. And the fact is, law school is really great if you're a person who really wants to be a lawyer. And the people I know who are happy lawyers, and they wanted to be lawyers. But I went to law school just because I sort of didn't know what else to do with myself. And I had a great experience in law school. I'm glad that I went, but I certainly just drifted into it because of a lack of any other aim. And it just seemed like something safe to, like a safe thing to do that would maybe help me get more clarity. You were very successful in law, as far as I can tell. I'm no legal professional, but I mean, you were the editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. You won some very prestigious prizes. Why were you as good at navigating that system as you were if you were

not passionate about it? Well, it's interesting because, yeah, saying that I drifted into law school kind of sounds like it's the lazy, kind of easy going way. And one of the things I found about when people drift is it doesn't mean that it's easy or that you're not working hard. So I worked really hard. And like you said, I was editor in chief of the Law Journal. I went on to clerk for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. I worked really, really hard at it. But at a certain point, I, you know, I sort of did the obvious next thing, you know, like, oh, oh, I'm graduating from law school. I'll apply for a clerkship. Oh, I got one clerkship. I'll apply to the Supreme Court. And then I got to a point where it's like, well, now what are you going to do? And I thought, I don't really know. I don't,

I mean, I could, there's all these law jobs that I could try for. But none of them really appealed to me. And that's when I started thinking about the fact that maybe I needed to think about going in a different direction. What directions did you, can you place us in terms of your life as to where you were, what you were doing? Was there a particular evening or conversation or dinner or event that catalyzed you thinking, you know, I don't want to continue on this path. I want to consider other options. Was there a particular straw that broke the camel's back or moment? Yeah. Well, I'm really lucky because, and I think this is true for a lot of writers, but actually for many people in many different kinds of professions, something started pulling me very, very hard. And writing began to pull me. And what happened to me was I had the idea, this is probably the most critical thing that happened, I had the idea that eventually it did turn into the first book that I ever published. So I was taking

a walk under my lunch hour and I was looking up at the Capitol Dome, you know, all white against the blue sky. And I thought, well, and just sort of as a, as kind of a, you know, a mental, just kind of fun game to play with myself. I said, what am I interested in that everybody in the world is interested? And I thought, well, power, money, fame, sex. And all of a sudden, it was like power, money, fame, sex. And to me, this like locked into my mind as this kind of unified idea. And I became obsessed with trying to research and understand and analyze and write about power, money, fame, sex. And this is something that happens to me often, I will often become obsessed with subjects

and do tons of research. So that was not something unusual. That has happened to me my whole life. It's like my favorite thing about myself, actually. But this was like unstoppable. I was spending all my free time working on this. And at some point I was like, this is the kind of thing that a person would do

if they were writing a book. I'm just doing this in my free time. But this is the kind of thing somebody would do to write a book about it. And slowly, I began to think, well, maybe I should write a book about it. And I literally went to the bookstore and got a book called something like, How to Write and Sell Your Nonfiction Book Proposal. I got the book and just followed the directions. And part of my thinking was, you know, I've come to a point where I'd rather fail as a writer than succeed as a lawyer. And I need to try. I need to try and fail or try and succeed, but I need to do it. But I think I was lucky because I knew what I wanted. Not only did I want to be a writer,

I wanted to write this specific book. And so there was immense clarity about my purpose. Sometimes I think when people, and I bet you've seen this too, where people know they don't want what they have, but they don't know what they want. And so they're kind of in that what color is my parachute kind of thing. And that's hard. And for me, it was almost like I can't help but write this book. I feel the compulsion to write this book. So why don't I see if like, this is my next thing. And then and then that's, and then that was how I made the switch was from that book on.

Writing, it strikes me, at least for me, can be very difficult, even if you have a deep desire to write about a given subject, the actual process of writing is easier for some, certainly quite hard for many. I would say that I'm a very slow plotting writer. is when did you actually cut bait and quit your job? Was it, had you already sold the book? Were you, had you already sold it and you're partway through writing it? Or did you just kind of throw caution to the wind and quit before the proposal had been sold? At what point did you actually stop the salary, so to speak, from the legal profession?

Well, actually, it was like the catalyst was other changes in my life. So I married my husband, who I met in law school. That was one of the benefits of going to law school. And he was working as a lawyer, too. And we were living in Washington, D.C. And we were getting ready to move back to New York. And he took a class in financial accounting and he didn't apply for a law job. He applied for a job in finance and I didn't apply

for a law job. I was just like, now I'm at work full time. I'm trying to get an agent, trying to write this proposal. And so for us, it was like the move from D.C. was like, OK, we're leaving that behind. And I remember we got to New York. And at one point, we got a letter from the Bar Association of New York, because we were both members of the New York Bar, saying, you owe us bar fees, which are quite, quite, quite heavy. And I said, Jamie, you know, should we play? Should we pay our bar fees and just like, keep it up? And he's like, are you kidding? No. And I'm like, yeah, we're, we're cutting that out, you know. And so that was like, so it was really made easy for me because this physical move corresponded with like everything's different now.

We're switching total professions. My whole routine is different. My aim is different. My aim now really at that point was to get an agent, which is really harder probably than getting a book contract. And I had no idea what I was doing. But so that's when it was. It was like, I'm going to work up until this time, but when I'm in New York, I'm not going to look for a law job in New York. I'm not going to look for any other job.

This now is my full-time profession, is to try to get published. And when you published that first book, looking back at it now, what were some of the key lessons learned through the process of searching for the agent to publishing that first book? And I suppose going on the road and trying to promote that first book, were there any particular life lessons or lessons learned looking back that then informed later decisions for you? Well, you know, it's funny, I talked to several people before I ended up with my agent who is like, you know, one of the most important people in my life now, Christy Fletcher, who's like this huge influence on my career. And it's this complete love connection. But I

talked to other agents before I met her. And one agent said something at the time I thought was preposterous. But in hindsight, I've begun, I have learned that what she meant and why she was right. She said, you have too many ideas on each page. And I was like, there's no such thing as too many ideas on a page. Like what we want here is lots and lots of ideas. And I thought she was just like so wrong. But now I realized like one problem with my writing, and this is something that I fight all the time is density. It's like I want to just cut, cut, cut and only have dense. But you can't read a book like that. You have to have humor. You have to have connective tissue. You have to have pacing. You have to have high. You know, you have to have you. It has to have breath in it. And and so that's one thing that I wish that I could go back to her and say, I understand now the wisdom of what you said. And I think about it often and even now in my writing. And it's, you know, many, many years later as to the publishing process.

I mean, I would just say to anybody who's trying to get published traditionally, you know, obviously now a lot of people can self publish, which is a whole other route. Getting an agent is hard. That is really, really hard. Don't think that that's just like a quick, easy step. And that writing the book is the hardest part. I think, you know, getting an agent and that I think probably for many people is the most challenging stage of traditional publishing. I don't know. What do you think? What for many people is the most challenging stage of traditional publishing. I don't know. What do you think? What do you think is the most? That's a good question.

I mean, I was turned down by three or four agents before signing with my agent, Steve Hanselman, who's still my agent. And then I was subsequently turned down by 27 publishers. Yeah. You showed them. That's an indication. Yeah. You're like right up there with Madeline L'Engle, right? She had like 32, I think.

Oh, man. Or something. Yeah. And I think that there are – just because a book is rejected doesn't mean it's a good book. Certainly. I mean, I think there just because a book is rejected doesn't mean it's a good book. Certainly. I mean, I think there are bad ideas that get rejected. And, you know, there's also an argument to be made that perhaps for those publishers, this book was not a good fit.

Maybe, maybe not. But ultimately, for me, I think that the, I, given my past experiences and professional experience, entrepreneurial experience before the nonfiction book selling process. And I think one thing that's important for people to understand if they're listening to this and don't have any background in publishing, generally speaking in nonfiction, you're almost, you can almost treat it like raising money for a venture-backed startup. You go out with this idea and a business plan, i.e. a book proposal. You sell it and then you write it. If you write a nonfiction book and try to go out and sell it, it is incredibly difficult.

It is more difficult in most respects than going out with a proposal first. Conversely, in fiction, it's the other way around, right? If you're trying to sell an idea for a fiction book, especially if you're untested, it's not going to happen unless you have a completed manuscript. So the, the sales process for me was easier than the writing process because I had more experience.

Interesting. I had a lot of experience with long sales cycles because the job immediately, well, I should say prior to starting my company, before that, in which case I was dealing with large retailers and so on, which had extended sales cycles. I had been selling massive, or I should say mass data storage systems to organizations like the FBI, American Airlines, and so on, which also meant multiple month sales cycles. So I was comfortable in the realm of working with a proposal to sell a publisher.

I was less familiar with the process of actually writing a book. So the writing was the hardest process for me. And I was also accustomed to rejection, which I think is not something many people have inoculated themselves against. Whereas if you are in an external sales position, you're getting rejected all the time. So I didn't view that as a huge blow to my morale. It was just part of racking up enough no's that I would statistically get to a yes, effectively. But I'm curious to know for you, after this first book, and we're not going to spend the whole time focusing on the book stuff, although I'm fascinated by it. How did you decide on your next book? Because you mentioned, and I have this challenge as well. I mean, I do these deep dives on many different subjects. You could go a million different directions. How did you

narrow all the options down? Or if that's even how it came about to do your next book? How did you end up deciding? Well, you know, in retrospect, I didn't realize this at the time. It took me a while. Like, I was several books in before I realized kind of my own theme. But my theme is human nature. That's every book that I've written, everything that I'm interested in some way is an examination of human nature from a different perspective. And so Power, Money, Fame, Sex, which was actually excellent background for writing about happiness because, you know, it's sort of the opposite of happiness. And then so my next book was 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill. And I think I was, I know that I was drawn to Winston Churchill because he's such a gigantic character. Everything

in him is so huge. He's so studied. He was part of everything in the world for decades. I mean, and he was, you know, whether or not you you agree with his policies or his statements, he was, you know, it played an extraordinarily important role. And then he was also a brilliant writer. He's extraordinarily gifted writer. He painted I mean, he was just sort of a million things. And and so for me, I was very drawn to how do you tell the story in a like a succinct, interesting, accessible way. People have written eight volumes of his life. Could I do it in 250 pages in a way that would be honest and be interesting to people?

And so each one of my books has sort of led to the next one. So I wrote 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, then I wrote 40 Ways to Look at JFK because I wanted to try this with another character. I wrote this really weird little book called Profane Waste, which was about why owners destroy their own possessions, which is a subject, again, that had obsessed me since law school. Why did that obsess you since law school?

Well, you know, it's hard to explain why it so obsesses me. But if you think about the standard idea, and certainly in law school, we talked a lot about this, about like the idea of what it means to possess. What makes sense is that people who possess things, owners try to preserve things or control things. Why would someone want to burn their house to the ground? And is it legal to burn your own house to the ground? Or like there was a Japanese businessman, like mogul, who announced that he was going to bury his impressionist masterpieces with him. And there was huge public outcry. Why do we think that it's worse for him to bury it with him in his grave than to like keep it in a basement in a bank? Why, you know, why do people, if you've seen the movie Harold and Maude, there's that moment when Maude throws the ring into the lake and says, now I know, now I'll never, I'll always know where it is. And to me, like this incredibly powerful and kind of taboo thing to do. So I was just trying to understand it. So again, it was just like some weird preoccupation that I had. And it turns out,

this is like this whole rich, crazy examples of people doing this and why they do it and how you would explain it. And then I got into the whole like happiness and habits and sort of what I'm known for now. But it's all because it's all related to human nature. And so for me, they feel very connected and one led very logically to the next. I think from the outside, it doesn't always look like that, but that's definitely how it feels to me. Like I'm always, I always am thinking about, um, I always have things that I'm, I'm dying to get to, um, as soon as I can. When, when you do a deep dive on something, whether it's for a book or otherwise, how do you take notes? What is your note-taking system? Oh, I love taking notes. I'm so glad you asked about it because it's a huge part of what I do.

So I'll read books and I read, like, I always get my ideas, I do everything through reading. Like, I'm a very unwell-rounded person and I don't really do interviews with people or anything like that. Like, in terms of research, I do it all through reading. And I read the weirdest, craziest stuff. And so I will, whenever I read a book, I will take extensive notes. So anything that strikes my fancy, I will take a note of it. So I have a document that's just called Quotes 2006 Plus. And that's just anything that I think is particularly beautiful. Then I have subject notes that I take like on habits or color or happiness or if I have big subjects and then everything gets dumped into there. Are those separate Word documents or what are... Those are separate Word documents by topic.

And then there's no internal structure in these notes. I just will put like I might tag something. So if let's say it was about, let's say I was going to take a note about some habits research, I might tag it accountability, tracking health. So that so then what happens? So I have these giant documents of notes and then and then it eventually turns into a book because at a certain point I have enough notes on a subject that I have started to form my own ideas and started to have my own viewpoint, my own, you know, my own ideas about who I agree with, who I think it's, you know, what, what people are missing, what needs to be added or explained that isn't already added, isn't already, you know, kind of out there. And then I will start moving things from the notes into my own structure. And so I will use those tagging words to find things. Like if I'm writing a chapter about accountability, I'd go through and pull, put everything. I would dump it into

the accountability section. And from there, then I would begin to turn it into my own original writing. And the advantage of this is I never have a blank page because I'm always working from huge amounts of notes, but taking notes is a big part of my workday. It sounds like, oh, it's very perfunctory, but it actually, it's, there's a lot of thinking that goes into it. And then just like the sheer copying things out. Then that also helps me remember things because I need to remember a lot. And so I find that physically copying things helps me retain information. So I'll sometimes copy things just so that I, I can refer back to it

easily, but then it also makes it easier for me to remember, um, you know, like what that, what did that study say? Or what was, what was the definition of ostensive anyway, or whatever that helps me. And when you're copying things and pasting them, let's just say into your own format or, or, own format or structure. Thank you. From a software perspective, are you still using Word for that? And it's just a separate document? Or are you using a different approach?

Well, so with one of my books, I use Scrivener. And I really, really like Scrivener, but I'm super un-techie. And every once in a while, Scrivener would be like, now it's time to update. And that made me super scared because I felt like my document was sort of – I couldn't get to it. And it was so unnerving to me that I haven't used Scrivener since even though I had a great experience with it because I was just like I really didn't like that. Because I think if I were very technically savvy, then I would just do it and I wouldn't worry about it. But for me, it was always very anxiety-producing like am I going to do it right?

Is something going to happen? What if this whole thing goes away and I have to do some week long customer service nightmare thing to, you know, because this document is everything to me, you know, it's so precious. And so now I just keep it in Word. I'm like, it's like, it was a little bit better, but you know, it's just not worth the, the, the, the anxiety. And so now I do so now I just create a Word document. Yeah. So I have more anxiety associated with Word in and of itself. So I've actually used Scrivener file into Dropbox so that I

have multiple copies of the entire project backed up into zip files. But I'm always curious about the software. Of course, that's a tool and there are perhaps more higher level conceptual frameworks that are more important. When you are reading these books, are you reading a hard copy or are you reading say Kindle and then exporting highlights, uh, so that you can copy and paste things digitally? No, almost always I'm reading a hard copy. A lot of the things that I read are old and they don't exist in digital form. Um, cause they're like old random books that nobody cares enough to digitize, um, or to have, you know, available, um, commercially. But, um, but I also, I, again,

I, I find, and this is what the research shows is true for many people. It's certainly true for me that I retain things more when I read them in physical form. And then I also, I feel like if I could just cut and paste something, I would do, I would be tempted to do that. But I do think that the actual physical copying, even though I know people say handwriting is even better, but my handwriting is so bad, I would never be able to read it again. For me, typing does, again, it helps me retain information. Because so much of what I do is like taking a giant subject and then trying to crunch it down. And so I have to have a lot in my mind at one time. So for me, just, you know, having a lot of stuff in my working memory is very helpful.

I had asked you for Tribe of Mentors, the book that you were kind enough to contribute to, about books that had had a significant impact on you or that it affected your thinking or been gifted by you often. And the book you brought up was A Pattern Language. Could you please explain, because you've read so many books, why A Pattern Language? So A Pattern Language is a book by Christopher Alexander, who's kind of this wacky architect in California. And I love many books that he's written. But Pattern Language is interesting because it's nonlinear. So carrying on in our nonlinear theme, what he looks at is what makes – the part that's most interesting to me is like what makes spaces most interesting and comfortable for people.

And he's not saying things like, oh, you know, your dining room chandelier should be 30 inches off your dining room table. Or, you know, you should have a curved doorway, not a square doorway, things like that. It's much more poetic. He's looking, and he and his team looked all across cultures, all across the world in time to see what were the patterns, what's the pattern language of what draws people into feeling good in a space. So, for example, it's things like half wild garden, terrace overlooking life, child cave, secret place. Like he says, everybody's home should have a secret place that only the people who live there and the people they tell know about. And my, I'm like, when we moved, I'm like, we are definitely having a secret place in our apartment. And we do, we have a couple of secret places. Or like sleeping to the east. It's like people like to sleep to the east. Or like one thing is, here's one that really showed me why I like

certain kind of like restaurants better. Ceilings at different heights. Look around. When you're in a place that feels comfortable, you'll notice the ceilings are at different heights. And then if you're in a place where the ceiling is all at the same height, it doesn't feel as good. Or like cascade of roofs. If you look at roofs from Japanese temples to English manor houses, all across, you know, Norwegian farmhouses, they have a cascade of roofs, and that's very pleasing. And so it's just this, I'm not very visual at all,

I can only get, I can only see things through words. And so I felt like reading this book, all of a sudden, I was able to key into my visual environment in a whole new way and understand like why certain spaces felt so inviting and comfortable. And then other spaces just turned me off. Like, oh, like light on two sides. If you're in a room that has only light on one side, it's not comfortable. You're far more comfortable in a room that has light on two sides. Pay attention. Well, you may, living in New York, this is a huge thing. Where's your light coming from? How much light do you have? Huge difference between having light on one side and light on two sides and um so anyway so it's and it's it's a very it's organized it's non-linear it's just like organized in like bits and pieces so you could

just pick it up and flip through it it has illustrations and so you see the common um uh patterns in you know in like a multitude of different architectures architectural styles and so it's just it's very thought-provoking it makes you see the world in a whole new different architectural styles. And so it's very thought-provoking. It makes you see the world in a whole new way, which is my favorite thing. So that's why I love A Pattern Language. I have to pick it up. I thought I knew that book, and I do not.

I think that I was confusing it with a book called The Loom of Language, which is completely different, related to language acquisition and absurdly, absurdly dense. So I will have to check it. It has a lot of pictures. Perfect. Now, given all of that, I know, or at least based on my understanding, you do a lot of your work in a home office. What are some of the key ingredients that make your home office your home office? Well, the one thing that's missing that I desperately want, but my office

is too small, is a treadmill desk. I would love a treadmill desk. I gave my sister a treadmill desk. She has a treadmill desk, but my office is too small. One thing that I love that I have is three monitors. And I had for a long time thought, and I think a lot of people think, well, that's just going to be overwhelming. It's going to be too much information coming at me. It's going to be distracting. Like if I need to focus, I can't have three monitors. But then I read a study that said that knowledge workers, of which we are, like their productivity went up substantially when they went from one to two monitors. So I got a second monitor as an experiment. And like the next day, I bought a third monitor. And I think I would have a fourth

monitor if my desk were big enough, but my office is very small. But it just, you just can go so much faster. Like if I'm copying something from the internet into a document, it takes one second. I'm like looking up the definition of a word. I don't have to close out of my document. If I need to look up something in an email, like read an email and look up a map or something, you can just do it so seamlessly. So that's something I love. I have a headset, love a headset. Do you have a particular headset or monitors that you like? My monitors are just like Dell basic. They're all different sizes too, so it's not very sleek looking. And it's a Plantronics headset, all very basic.

One thing I got that I didn't even know, it was a pain point that I didn't even realize I experienced until there was a solution for it, was I got a, you know, like right now I'm speaking to you on a headset that is plugged into my hard drive. And for some reason, like the headset wire was just like always under the rolling wheels of my chair. And I couldn't figure out where to put my headset. So it didn't get my way. And then I found at the container store, it's like a hook that you just put on the side of a desk and then you hook your headset to it. I was like, this is exactly what I need. So I have that. I have a book weight. This is a very specific thing, but for people who do take a lot of notes, it's just a strip of leather that has weights on both ends so that if you have a book that's not staying open

enough that you can read to copy it you can put a book weight on it and it will hold it open um i got that as a present and i was like what am i going to do with this and now i'm like literally i use it every single day um it's so it's so it's a flexible strip of leather with weight on either end yes yeah so if you so if you need to trip a burglar getting away on horseback you could probably probably do that. Yeah, you can whap him on the head with that, too. It's like, don't break into my home office. Yeah, but I don't have that much in terms of technology support. It's just like the basics.

And my laptop, of course, which is like my puppy, practically. I'm so emotionally attached to my laptop. How do you know in a home office environment, one of the benefits is that you can work when you want to work. One of the potential downsides is that you can work at all times. What are the rules or systems or parameters, policies, whatever, uh, factors that you've set in place so that you are not in there at all hours or working during family time or fill in the blank. Like, how do you, how do you contain that and structure your days, uh, when you're, when you're, when you're doing well, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Um, one thing I do is I will say to myself, like, and it's a different time every day, but I will say like, now is quitting time.

And I'll sort of in my mind think, okay, it's quitting time. And so like, sure, I might check my email or I might like read a book that is research, not for fun, but just like a research book, um, after that time. But I'm basically not, I'm not working. And then, and I also at that time will sort of clean up my office. And that also is kind of a signal like, okay, this is, I'm done for the day. I'm sort of setting up for tomorrow. And so this is kind of, it's coming to an end. You'll clean up your office. Yeah. Like, you know, I'll carry my coffee mugs to the kitchen and I'll file anything that, you know, and throw away anything that needs to be thrown away.

Or if I get a book off the shelf, put the book back, put the caps on the pens, that sort of thing. That makes it a lot nicer to come in in the next morning. And also it's kind of a visual signal, like now I'm winding down for the day. I'm kind of lucky because I live in an apartment, but my office used to be a water tower. And the people who lived in our apartment before us turned it into a storage room, but a nice storage room with windows and an air conditioner and heat. And then when we moved, I was like, I could make that my office. So I'm sort of lucky because I have to go up a little flight of stairs to go to my office. And so it's not like – I think of your office as like next to your

kitchen. It's just right there all the time. Whereas for me, I like, I actually have to open up a door, go out into my service stairs and go upstairs. And so I think that also makes it a little bit easier because it's just, you know, one of the things about whenever we're trying to get ourselves to not do something, making it inconvenient, the slightest bit of inconvenience makes it harder to get, do something, which is, you know, which we can use to try to make our habits better. So I think for me, that's, that's a thing. Like once I'm down in my, once I'm like, okay, it's quitting time, I'm going down my little staircase. Um, that kind of creates a barrier, which is very helpful.

So you mentioned, you mentioned habits and, uh, or it's come up a few times. So since that door is open, let's step into it. Based on what I've read, one of the reliable small changes that people can make or claim that they've made that makes them predictably happier is making their bed or making their beds. Are there other small changes that you would also recommend for people who are hoping to increase their self-reported well-being slash happiness? Well, one thing that seems to work for a lot of people is the one minute rule. This is the rule that if there's anything you can do in less than a minute, you do it without delay. So if you can print out a document and delete the email and file it, do that. If you can scan a letter and throw it away, do that. If you can hang up your coat instead of jumping it on a chair, do that.

If you can put a book back on the shelf instead of just leaving it on the counter, do that. And what this does for a lot of people is just get rid of that kind of scum of stuff on the surface of life, you know, because sometimes it's not that there's any one thing that's so, you know, insurmountable to do, but you just feel like, oh my gosh, it just everywhere I look, I see everything's just kind of out of order. And I have to sift through everything to find what I'm looking for. And so for a lot of people, they say just doing this just makes them feel like, well, I've got the little things out of the way. And so now I'm more ready to tackle the big things. And getting enough sleep, of course, get enough sleep. That is like a huge one. If you have that, and here's some, if you're having trouble getting enough

sleep, shut an alarm. Most adults need seven hours of sleep. Most adults know what time they're going to get up in the morning. Do the math. Give yourself an alarm. Give yourself a bedtime. So it's not like, oh, I go to bed when I'm tired.

It's like my bedtime is 1030. And then you might even need a snooze alarm, just like if you have one in the morning, you might have one at night. And it's like, oh, my alarm went off. Now I have 15 minutes to get myself organized and get to bed. And then the alarm will go off again. And it's my bedtime. And another thing, another habit that can help with this is get ready before your bedtime. I realized that I was staying up late because I was too tired to get ready for bed. Like I was too

tired to like watch my face and take out my contacts and change my clothes. It's clearly very stupid approach. So now I get ready much earlier. And so once when I'm actually sleepy, it's easy to turn out the light because I'm already ready. So you do you do you in other words, you do your pre bed ritual well before you need to go to bed? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm right. I'm ready. But I'm a sleep zealot. I'm a sleep zealot. But if you're looking for like, what's a habit that will make you more energetic, more immune to illness, higher focus and function, better temper, and just feel better, getting more sleep, if you don't get enough sleep already is something that will surely benefit you. And one of the funny things, all this funny research that they've done,

because we really adjust to not getting enough sleep. And so people think that they're fine. They're like, oh, I've trained myself to get by on four hours of sleep. Like that's no problem for me. But when scientists study these people, they're quite impaired. Like we lose track of how good we feel when we have enough sleep. And so you might think that you're fine. Um, but actually if you had more sleep, you might feel a lot, lot better, have a lot more energy, have a lot more focus. Do you have any particular wind down routines or rituals at night? Well, one thing I have, I have my daughter before she goes to bed often. We will have like, we'll just sit together and just kind of like it's like time.

It's meant to be time for her, but it's actually time for me to to kind of unwind. And because she's old enough that we go to bed at more or less the same time because I am a sleep doll. And so that's one thing. But what do you guys what do you guys do when you sit down? She just pretty much talks to me about her day, you know, or like, we'll talk about, um, she's actually very interested in being a writer too. And so sometimes we'll talk about writerly things. I mean, it's funny. She was reading this book and we had this long discussion about pacing in a novel. Like this book was very, like, you know, the pace of it was like very fast. Did we like that?

Like a book that covered 10 years versus a book that covers a summer. And so we'll talk about stuff like that, which, of course, for me is tremendously fun. But mostly she just tells me about, like, what happened in her day. And, you know, she's in seventh grade, so there's a lot of drama to catch me up on. But it's just a really nice way to sit down and really connect at the end of the day. And it's very relaxing. It's very peaceful. But maybe because I am such a sleep zealot and really do guard it, I feel like I wind down pretty quickly.

And in the morning, if you look at the first, say, 60 to 90 minutes of your day, what does that look like? Is it fairly standard from day to day? The first hour is because I get up at 6 a.m. every day. I walk my dog. I get coffee. And then I sit down and do what all the experts tell you not to do, which is I spend the first hour of my day checking my email and social media, which everybody says if you're a morning person, you should do your most intense intellectual work then because that's when you're at your best. I definitely am a morning person. But I realized I can't focus on anything until I check my inbox and see what's going on,

check social media, see what's going on there. I'm just too distracted by that until I get it done. So I do that. And then it's time for my daughter to go to school. So often I'll walk her to school. She doesn't need me to walk her to school, but I do it just because it's fun. It's like a nice way to get out. And then I'll usually, I'll often exercise. So I will either go for a walk in Central Park or I'll go to the gym or I do high intensity strength training or I have a yoga class. And then,

and then, so then that's kind of the beginning of my day. And then I go into whatever, am I preparing for a podcast? Am I working on a book? Am I talking to a reporter? Am I writing an email? Am I planning? You know, then the rest of the day is much more unpredictable, or it changes day to day. Unfortunately, I wish I had the life of a Benedictine monk, because I would love to have every day be exactly the same. Um, but it's not. Well, you could, right? I mean, you, you ostensibly, no, I really couldn't. No, because it's like journalists, you know, they're like, well, I'm in, I'm in the UK. So I can't talk to you at five because for me, that's the middle of the night, or I have to record a podcast. So that has to happen at a certain time. I would have to work so hard to have that kind of...

I just don't think it's worth it. I might kind of enjoy it, but it's not worth fighting for. In my mind, for other people, they might want to really make that a priority. Well, I guess I've just realized for myself that there are certain categories of activities, media certainly being one, that make my schedule or make me create a schedule that is more reactive than it could be otherwise. So at least one of my fantasies, we're talking now for people who might be listening to this later, we're talking in December 2017. And one of the recurring thoughts that I've had is a three to six month sabbatical from both media and social media. So media meaning interviews and social media

just to see what happens when I remove those two categories of inputs that tend to jostle and move things around as much as they do. I don't know what the outcome would be. I don't know if it will happen, although I would certainly, planning on seeing Star Wars tonight or tomorrow. So if we're channeling inner Yoda, I should certainly commit or not commit.

But for yourself, I mean, you've written so much about happiness. If you were to look back over the last, could be five years, it doesn't have to be. I'm just arbitrarily pulling a number out. What are some of the changes that you've made that have had the greatest impact on your either levels of happiness or, and these may be the same thing, increased happiness or decreased anxiety and other negative emotions? Well, one thing that I did was like four years ago is I gave up sugar, quit sugar, and basically carbs. So I don't eat sugar, pasta, flour, starchy vegetables. I don't really eat much.

I eat almost no fruit. So like the most curvy things I eat are green vegetables and nuts. So I do eat a lot of nuts, which have like a fair amount of carbs. So and this for me was the greatest thing. I had always had a really terrible sweet tooth and I hated the feeling of like, can I have this or it's just a bite or it's for free or it's my birthday or that whole thing. And I write about this in Better Than Before that I realized I'm an abstainer. It's easier for me to have none than to have a little bit. And I just gave it up. I read this book, Why We Get Fat by

Gary Taubes. And I'm like, overnight, I'm like, I'm completely convinced I'm changing everything about the way that I eat. And for me, it was just the most freeing, energizing, positive change. And I also used to get super hungry, like shaking, sweating hungry, because I was eating like a very low fat diet and it was not even that much protein. And, and so, and now I don't have that super inconvenient. So for me, that was a huge thing. I'm not saying that would work for everybody, but that was for me. And it was a very dramatic change. My husband actually gave me a Christmas ornament in the shape of a strip of bacon to like, like memorialize this was the year of the beginning of bacon, because boy, we eat a lot of bacon.

And so that was a big thing for me. And in the last five years. It could be longer if that's helpful. Well, one thing that I did that added tremendously to my happiness. So I am like this crazy raving fan of children's literature and young adult literature. So I read it as a child and I read it now as an adult. And I realized when I was writing The Happiness Project that this was something that I loved, but I didn't really make much time for it in my life. It kind of didn't fit with my idea of myself,

that I was very sophisticated. I was a very kind of advanced reader who read very, you know, kind of like very adult things. And, um, but I realized, you know, I don't really have that many true, like passions and interests. And so I don't, I don't have enough that I can just ignore one of the big ones. And I started a group, um, for adults who read and love children's literature and young adult literature. And when I started it, I truly believe that there were no other adults in New York City who would want to join this group. And now there are three of these groups. I just actually had my annual Christmas party when I get all three groups together.

One day a year, they all three meet. And I'm a member of all three. But there were so many that there had to be three separate groups. And it's been amazing because I've met a bunch of bookish people who I love. So I have more relationships. And these are people who share something that I love. I have a way to talk about and learn about something that I truly love. And the fact is, it's like some people like mysteries.

Some people like sci-fi. It's like some people like children's literature and young adult literature. It's just a different taste that some people have and some people don't. As adults, there's nothing to do with children in these groups. But that was something where I'm like, wow. When I look back on changes that I made that gave me like huge spike in happiness, both kind of intellectually and also through relationships, because relationships are probably the key to happiness.

That was a big one, that was a big one, kind of acknowledging that and then like really bringing it into my like, really shining a light on it in my life, letting it really kind of take its place as a major occupation in my life. What is the rhythm of the groups look like in terms of meetings and so on? And do you do you communicate via Facebook groups, email? Could you just paint a picture of logistically how it actually works? We all communicate through email. So one of the groups, they're all a little bit different. One of the groups, well, they all meet every six weeks and we all take turns meeting at certain

people's apartments. People will take turns. Some people have apartments that are too small or too far away. And so it's not convenient. So those people just don't enter the rotation, which is fine. That's just like, whatever. Some people host, some people don't. One person never hosts. So she always brings dessert. That's like her contribution. She brings dessert every time. So fine. One of the groups we rotate among classic, modern, and contemporary. So we might read Peter Pan, and then Harriet the Spy, and then The Hate U Give. You know, we would do that. The other ones just pick books. We just pick whatever we feel like reading.

So like right now, reading Book of Dust by Philip Pullman, which is like the, you know. I was going to ask you about Philip Pullman. We're going to come back to this, so please continue. Let's get going about Philip Pullman. We're going to come back to this, so please continue. Let's get going on Philip Pullman. And then one of the groups had a tradition, but we've sort of fallen out of it, is that you would serve something related to the books, which was funny. We read Holes by Louis Sarkar, and the person served donut holes. Or one time, we read Little House in the Big Woods, and it was cornbread and apple pie and red gingham tablecloth. So that's just sort of like a little fun thing you could do if you felt like it.

Who decides on the books to read? We all work it out. Like every book groups – all book groups have different ways, and we just sort of talk about it, and everybody sort of says like, yeah, that one sounds good. So we don't really have a, we don't really have a particular, uh, methodology for picking. And sometimes, and you usually though, now we're trying to pick a book that at least everyone is talking about it. So it's like a book that's important to read, even if we don't like it, or it's a book that somebody has read and loves. And so they're like willing to say like, I really love this book because we don't want to read something that is like, no one's gonna like. But sometimes it's worth reading a book, just because it is it's sort of

of the moment. And so you want to know what is working right now? Or what's what are people responding to right now? That's always kind of interesting. And when you meet up, what does the meetup look like? Is it is there like, for 10 minutes, we're gonna do this for a half hour, we're gonna do this. The motto hour. We're going to do this. The motto of the kidlit groups is no guilt. So you are completely encouraged to come, even if you haven't read the book. Um, if you haven't been able to come for a year because you've been too busy and then you want to start coming again, we welcome you back at any time. No explanations necessary.

We talk about the book as much or as little as we want. Sometimes we talk about the book a lot because there's a lot to say. Sometimes it's like, oh, this, you know, um, you know, it's not that much. And we talk about other things that we're more interested in. Um, so it's very loose. It's not, it's not a highly, it's not a highly structured experience. I hear about some book groups and I'm like, oh my gosh, it sounds like a seminar. You know, like you have to prepare and like, you have to give like a a statement and they have an expert come talk. I'm like, no, this is just a bunch of people. We just love it. So it's like everybody's sitting around being like, what did you think?

And people who really know the books. So it's like if you want to talk about deep into the Louisa May Alcott canon, or, um, you know, the great schism in the books is twice in the groups is twilight. Um, some people like those books, some people don't like those books. And so that's like, you know, if I'm ever talking to somebody who's thinking, you know, about the group, I'm always like, well, how do you feel about it? Because you have to have an opinion. You don't have to agree with my opinion, but it's like anybody who's in this area, like

has a viewpoint. It's like on the twilight series, you can series. You can't be like, what's that? I've never heard of that. Or, oh, I thought those were just movies. It's like, no, you've got to have a view. That's how we know you're one of us. You don't have to like it, but you have to have a thought. So I'd love for you to clarify something for me because this is something that surprised me greatly and it may be a misconception, but I remember picking up the Golden Compass and, well, I actually bought all of, what is it, his dark materials? Am I getting that right?

The Philip Pullman series. And I bought it. I remember I bought a paperback initially, and it was in the young adult section. And in my mind, that meant easier reading for younger readers. And then I got into this book, and I had to constantly look up nautical terms and vocabulary. It was a very, very dense, isn't the right word, but intellectually demanding book. And I thought to myself, how in the hell could say an 11 year old read this without a good amount of assistance or a dictionary. And then a bookseller said to me, well, it's young adult because the protagonist is a young adult, not because the book is for young adults. And I was like, really?

I wasn't sure about that. So could you explain maybe your position on that? Like what qualifies something to be in the young adult genre? Because I loved the Philip Pullman books, but they are certainly more demanding intellectually than many of the so-called adult books that I've read. Yeah. No, and you raised a very interesting question and one that we talk about a lot and that nobody has a good answer to, which is what makes something YA? And sometimes it's just a feel. And a lot of times books are put in YA because the protagonists are young adult, like Jane Eyre has started drifting into YA. I will often see it in YA or like Catcher in the Rye. Catcher in the Rye was not written to be a young adult book. It's an adult book,

but it sort of drifted there because the protagonist is a teenager. And I think you're right. Sometimes it doesn't. But like then there's, I don't know if you've read Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. Like that is clearly an adult book, but the protagonist is a teenager. I'm like, someday somebody going to decide that's a YA book. So I think you're right. I think what makes something YA or not is very much in the eye of the beholder, and it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not sophisticated or demanding. And there's a lot of books, you know, now there's a lot of talk of crossover. Like, are there books that adults would read? And I kind of wish, as much as I love children's literature and young adult, I kind of wish that people didn't see this split because I think a lot of times adults don't read things that they might very much enjoy because they think, well, it's YA, so it's not for me. And it's like,

these are really, really great books on their own terms. So I'm with you. I don't think that that's what makes a YA book because there's many books that have teenage protagonists. I'm just thinking of like Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. There's two narrators. One of them is like a 15-year-old girl or something like that. That is not a YA book. Yeah. So it's hard to define what that is. One of them is like a 15 year old girl or something like that. That is not a YA book. Right. Yeah. So I, I,

it's very, it's very, it's hard to define what that is. Yeah. It's so good. Right. Aren't you glad you read it? So good.

Oh, it's incredible. Yeah. For people, I was so outraged when that movie came out and it's just terrible, terrible, terrible. Yeah.

Absolutely horrible. So for, yeah. Swing again, guys. That's such a good story. Yeah. Absolutely horrible. So for, for swing again, guys, that's such a good story. Yeah. Uh, especially the first book is so, so good. Well, for my, my group as a thank you present, somebody brought me a, um, a, uh, a Christmas ornament of a polar bear wearing like a banner, a Royal banner. And I'm like, I know I'm in the right group because everybody, I showed it to everybody. They're like, look, it's your Nick B Bearnison. And I'm like, of course it is.

This is not just some random polar bear. This is like the golden compass. Such a good, yeah, such a great book. So I'm going to switch gears yet again. And I want to ask you about accountability. You were interviewed by a friend of mine, Chase Jarvis, and I believe I'm getting this right. You can certainly fact check me, but I believe you said a lot of people who are frustrated with themselves just need accountability. And I was hoping you could expand on that and maybe give us some examples of how you or other people have used accountability. Well, that's going to require me to go into my four tendencies framework. So can I bring this on you at this point?

Yes. Oh, yeah. Totally. So the four tendencies is this personality framework that I stumbled on, basically, when I was writing Better Than Before, which is my book about habit change, because I kept noticing patterns in how people could and couldn't form habits that wasn't really explained by everything else that I was reading. I was like, I don't get like what's going on here. It seemed like there was some pattern there that hadn't been identified. And it almost melted my brain. Like figuring this out was definitely the most intellectually challenging thing that I've ever

done. The catalyst for it was a very ordinary conversation where a friend of mine said, the weird thing about me is I know I would be happier if I exercised. And when I was in high school, I was on the track team and I never missed track practice. So why can't I go running now? And I had heard many people say similar things like that throughout my life. But for some reason, when she said that, I was just electrified. I was like, I must understand what is going on. What's different? Because it's the same person, it's the same behavior. At one time, it was effortless for her. Now she can't do it. How do you explain that? And that's what led me to the four tendencies. So, and accountability is a huge, we will get to that. So, the four tendencies, it divides people into upholders, questioners,

obligers, and rebels, depending on how you respond to expectations. I know this sounds super boring, but it gets really juicy. So it has to do with how you deal with outer expectations, which are things like a work deadline or requests from a friend, and then also inner expectations, which is like your own desire to keep a New Year's resolution, your own desire to write a novel in your free time. So there are upholders, questioners, obligers, rebels. Upholders readily meet outer and inner expectations.

So they meet the work deadline without much fuss. They keep the New Year's resolution without much fuss. They want to know what other people expect from them, but their expectations for themselves are just as important. Then there are questioners. Questioners question all expectations. They'll do it if they think it makes sense. So they're turning everything into an inner expectation. If it meets their standard, they'll do it, no problem.

If it fails their standard, they will resist. And they typically argue against anything arbitrary, inefficient, irrational. Then there are obligers, and that's my friend on the track team. Obligers readily meet outer expectations, but they struggle to meet inner expectations. So they will meet the work deadline, but they're going to have a lot of trouble with the New Year's resolution And then there are rebels Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike They want to do what they want to do in their own way, in their own time

They can do anything they want to do They can do anything they choose to do But if you ask or tell them to do something, they're very likely to resist And there's a quiz on my site, GretchenRubin.com, a free quiz. And more than a million people now have taken that quiz. But most people don't even need to take the quiz. They just hear that little introduction, and they know what they are. And this ends up making a huge difference in how you most successfully go through life and deal with other people. Which are you?

I'm an upholder, which means that I readily meet outer and inner expectations. Now, not to interrupt, but I will. It seems like from the description you just gave that it is by far best to be an upholder. Are there downsides to being an upholder? Because it sounds great if you're able to both follow your inner and intrinsic motivators and extrinsic motivators. Well, there's a lot of great things about being an upholder, certainly. It's a small tendency. Rubble is the smallest tendency and upholder is only slightly larger. But all of the tendencies

have strengths and weaknesses. Usually the strengths and the weaknesses, it's like two sides of the same coin. And when you look at who's the happiest, the healthiest, the most productive, most creative, it's the people who have figured out how to harness the strengths of their tendency and offset the weaknesses and limitations of their tendency. And some of the weaknesses and limitations of upholders, one, upholders can, they can be rigid. Like they will lock into like a schedule or a priority list. And then it's like, they're like, what do you mean we have to do something different? Like they tend not to do well where there's a lot of emphasis on being flexible or where it's not clear what expectations are or where it's ambiguous what's

expected of them. Or when things change rapidly, they can be they can have tightening, which is when the rules get tighter, which is like a friend of mine who had a Fitbit, you know, I was trying to do 10,000 steps a day. He's like, my wife was asleep in bed, I was locked myself in the bathroom, and I'm jogging away next to the toilet at 1am. Because I'm going to get to my 10, you know, by midnight, because I'm gonna get to my 10,000 steps. That's tightening, like it could be good. But sometimes you can become kind of like the, kind of like the mindless bureaucrat of your own paperwork. It's something that really has to be watched out for. Or like I was doing physical therapy and my physical therapist told me to do it twice a day.

And then all of a sudden I found I was doing it four times a day. I'm like maybe that's good, but maybe that's not good. And then they can also seem very cold. It's funny. I, the other night I gave a talk and an upholder, somebody was like, Oh, I, she's an upholder like you. And I think it's so great to be an upholder. What's the downside? And I was like, cause they can seem cold. And this woman leans into me and she goes, Oh my gosh, I am so cold. Um, because upholders are like, you know, I know that we've got guests coming to stay with us at home this weekend, but I got to go on a 15 mile run because I'm training for the marathon. So you're going to be on your own because I got to go for my run.

Or like, you know, oh, you're my colleague and our reports are due tomorrow. And you've asked me if I can proofread your report, but I don't have time for that because I got to finish my report. My report's due tomorrow, too. To an upholder, that seems appropriate. I need to meet my inner expectations as well as, as well as my outer expectation of handing this in tomorrow. But to other people, that can seem cold because they're like, well, can't you give a little in order to meet other expectations? So those are some of the downsides, yeah. So for your friend who was able to run when she was part of a track team but now as, I guess, an obliger, doesn't have that external

force. What type of action or structure, what type of action could she take or structure could she create given that insight? Well, this goes back to your original question, which is about accountability. That is the answer for obligers. And I would say of everything related to the four tendencies, this is the most important idea that's helped the most people figure out kind of the hidden patterns of their nature, which is that if you're an obliger, by definition, you can meet, you can easily meet, you're meeting outer expectations, but struggling to meet inner expectations. The solution, the way to fix this, the very concrete and straightforward solution is outer accountability.

Outer accountability can work for other tendencies. It is essential for obligers. If you want to read more, join a book group. If you want to exercise more, join a class where they take attendance, work out with a trainer, work out with a friend who's going to be annoyed if you don't show up, take your dog for a run every morning, and he's going to be so disappointed if he doesn't go for a run, plus he's going to tear up the living room. Some obligers can use things like their future self, like, well, now Gretchen doesn't want to go for a run, but future Gretchen's going

to be so disappointed if I break the chain. I've been doing so well. I need to do it for future Gretchen. Obligers vary dramatically in what kind of accountability structures work for them, because for some obligers, paying for something makes them very likely to feel accountable. For other obligers, it's almost like it makes them feel like they're off the hook. Like, oh, I paid for it. So it's like the same as doing it. And you're like, no, it's really not. But so, but that is the thing. When you're an obliger, you want to feel like, figure out, well, how can I create a structure of outer accountability around inner expectations? This is true even for self-care. This is a word that's huge tip off. If somebody starts talking about self-care, I'm like, bing, bing, bing, you're an obliger. Or if

you're somebody who's like, well, you know, I, I don't have time to exercise because I give 110% to my clients. Like you're an obliger because you're saying I can't meet an inner expectation because I'm always meeting outer expectations. Now you might pride yourself on that and think, oh, I'm such a badass. Of course I, I'm always seeing patients. I'm always meeting outer expectations. Now, you might pride yourself on that and think, oh, I'm such a badass. Of course, I'm always seeing patients. I'm always at the hospital. I never have time to have a healthy meal because I'm always eating out of the vending machines because I work so hard at the hospital. I do everything for my patients. It's like, okay, well, you're an obliger. So given that, if you do decide that you want to exercise or eat healthfully or write a novel or practice meditation or whatever, how could you imagine systems of outer accountability that would

permit you to follow through with that inner aim that you have for yourself? And sometimes obligers don't like the fact that they're reliant on outer accountability. They feel like somehow it's weak. Like who cares? It's the biggest tendency. It's the one that most people belong to for both men and women. A lot of people are in the same boat. Who cares what you have to do to get there? Just figure out what works for you. Outer accountability works. Use it. Yeah, totally. It doesn't have to be depressing. It can just be useful. I mean, if you look at the psychology and the incentives involved, for instance, I've seen people who've used to great effect services or sites like dietbet.com where you're putting money into a betting pool or

stick, S-T-I-C-K-K.com or others where you're provided with a framework for holding yourself accountable, whether that results in financial loss, if you don't hit the goals, or if you have people who are effectively referees who hold you accountable. Like you mentioned, you mentioned New Year's resolution a few minutes ago. Do you set New Year's resolutions for yourself? Is that a practice that you have? Kind of my job is to have resolutions. I feel like I'm resolving constantly.

So I don't really make New year's resolutions in the same way on on the happier podcast elizabeth and i did this thing called 18 for 2018 and that wasn't really like resolutions it was more like 18 things you want to get done in 2018 so that was like a different you know there's all and then there's like the way i one one thing i do i've done many times is pick a one word theme for the year which again, a different take at the New Year's resolution where you're like – this year my word is delegation. And I've had it, in other words, be like there's repurposing where I'm setting a theme for the year. My sister's one year was Hot Wheels because she wanted to get a new car. But I don't really make traditional New Year's resolutions anymore, partly because I do make so many resolutions sort of as part of my ongoing experiment and happiness and good habits.

If something occurs to me, I usually like try it right away because just, you know, for the fun of it. So delegation is your, I like this idea of a one word theme for the year. So delegation is your theme for 2018? Yeah. Because, yeah, I realized I need to delegate more. So I was going to ask how, how does that then get translated into sort of actions, things with deadlines, next steps, and so on? What is your process from the point of identifying that and naming it to starting to implement it and make sure that it's translated into real life? What does that look like?

Well, for me, it's asking myself the question, what is it that I do that someone else can do? There are many things that I do that no one else could do. But there are some things that I do that other people could do. And I need to be more disciplined in identifying that and delegating it. Partly, it's just like, in any one moment, it's easier to just do it myself. It's faster to just do it myself than to sit down and figure out, well, who could do it instead? And how could I delegate it? Or maybe I shouldn't do it at all.

It's just easy. And that's part of being in a polder. It's easier for me to just execute than to step back and be like, well, why should I do this? And is there a better way? That's what questioners are good at. And so I want to do that. And then like last year, my theme was repurposing. But I realized, and I did a very bad job living up to that theme. And I'm like, that's because I need to delegate repurposing, which is I need to find someone who I can ask to go through. I have a tremendous archive of stuff, but I always want to just be creating a new thing. But I have all this stuff that I could make something cool out of and say to somebody, go through, look at all my stuff, and pull out everything related to self-knowledge. And put it in some kind of form.

And then I'll go through it and polish it and tinker with it and make it into something really cool. But if you would just go through and do that, then my work would take a fraction of the time. It would just be the fun part that only I can do. Because instead of me thinking, keep thinking, oh, I should go through and cut and paste. And that would sort of be fun. But somebody else can do that. Um, so I need, so I'm trying to figure that out. Um, how,

how exactly that's gonna, um, what form that will take. Um, it doesn't come naturally to me. So it's going to be, it's going to be a struggle. Are there any, any particular low hanging fruit or first candidates that you're that you're thinking of experimenting with delegating um well i that's see that's a very good question because i feel like i could do all these sort of little books and i need to sit down and decide well which one would be the most fun for me and for other and for readers like i have all these like one sentence uh aphorisms which-sentence aphorisms, and they're sort of sprinkled – and like secrets of adulthood, and they're sprinkled all over the place. But I have to sit down and think like, is this something that would be a good book? Is this a book?

Is this not a book? Is there something else it should be? You know, that's like – that's the work that only I can do. But then once I decide like, well, what's that priority, then I can start thinking about it. Yeah. So it's a whole, it's a big thing. It's not like something, it's not like pick up my clothes every night before I go to bed instead of leaving them in a giant pile on the end of the chair at the end of the bed, which is another one of my resolutions. But that's easy to execute. This one, there's lots of moving pieces that are very uncomfortable for me to ponder. Well, how will you go about making that process easier for yourself? I mean, I think that a lot of people listening certainly will feel a similar pain in terms of their historic lack of delegation. Are there any people or systems that you're going to rely on to help you

with the getting better at delegation? Well, I think it has to come from my own mind. So I think it's about examining my work process and thinking, well, what is it that I can do? What is it that I should do that no one else can do? And thinking about that. That's what I need to sit down and think about. Yeah. Yeah.

Everything from handling email to all that stuff. So I know we don't have too, too much time left, but I'd love to ask you some of my, I suppose, usual kind of rapid fire questions because I'm really curious how you'd answer some of them. And one is related to failure. Is there any particular failure of yours that you can think of that set the stage for a later success or a favorite or favorite failure

of yours, so to speak, that you learned a lot from or steered you in a different direction? Absolutely. Absolutely. So I wrote a book, which I love. I love all my books called 40 Ways to Look at JFK. And as they say in the industry, it did not find its audience. So nobody bought this book. Nobody was interested in this book and um but what it taught me that was so it was a very it was a failure um it didn't they didn't even make it into a paperback so that was a that was my only book that only exists in hardback form um and uh but what i learned was i had this incredible feeling of helplessness that here I was. I had poured my heart into a book.

I really thought it was good. And I was totally dependent on others to shine a spotlight on it. Like there was nothing I could do to try to let people know that the book was there. Now, maybe they weren't interested, but I couldn't even try to interest them in it. I had no tools. And it was just at this time that everything was become, all the tools that now exist online were just becoming accessible enough to people who are very untechnical like me, things like having a blog. And I had already started working on the happiness project. And one of the kind of, and the idea of the happiness project is I was test driving all these things that people tell

you about how you can be happier. And one of the things that the research keeps showing is that novelty and challenge make people happier. And I thought, well, that's not true for me. I like mastery and familiarity, but I have to do something because the whole point of the book is I'm going to do this experiment. So I'm like, well, I'll do something novel and challenging. I'll start a blog. Well, I quickly realized that the blog, which I started thinking that it would be like my gratitude journal and I would quickly abandon it because it wouldn't work, which I did with my gratitude journal. But I really enjoyed the blog. It did well. And I realized that it was solving this problem that I had felt before, which was I have no way to connect directly to readers. And so I feel like if I hadn't had that failure,

I don't think I would have had as much excitement and interest in the blog because I wouldn't have understood how valuable it is to connect with readers. It's one of the reasons I love having a podcast. It's one of the reasons that I love using social media. I love connecting with listeners and viewers and readers about the subjects that I'm interested in. I get immense value from it because I get all kinds of examples and questions and illustrations. And people are like my research assistants.

They'll send me links to research and anything they think connects to the things that I'm obsessed with. So it's enormously valuable to me. But I don't know if that book had done fine, I don't know that I would have realized the value of it. Because I would have been like, oh, I'll just write a good book, and people will just naturally know about it. And it's like, but now with like shrinking, you know, coverage in traditional media, you know, there's fewer now looks like indie bookstores are kind of coming back. But for a while, it was really scary for indie bookstores. Like I was – I thought I really do want to be able to connect with people myself just like with my own steam rather than depending on gatekeepers.

Oh, for sure. Like if I don't get a book review, then this book essentially doesn't exist in the public mind. Or once it's not in the front table, then no one will ever see it again, or it will never be heard from again. So that was a failure that had enormous consequences for me. It did not feel like a like a helpful failure at the time. But looking back, it was a lucky failure, for sure. What software platform do you use for your blog? WordPress. Yeah. Yeah. WordPress is interesting. I mean, for a host of reasons, right? Both email, podcasting, and platforms like

WordPress are really, I'm also on WordPress, and have been since day one, even before I became involved with Automatic later, the company that handles WordPress.com. But the benefit in, say, an open source platform or something that can be ported from one place, in the case of email, from one, say, email service provider to another, is that your audience travels with you, right? And this makes me think of a conversation that I had long ago with someone who had a multi-million dollar business based on Facebook. And I think Facebook is incredibly valuable for a lot of things. However, when your access and reach to your audience is dependent on an algorithm that is 100% outside of your control, I asked him what it was like to have a business based on Facebook.

And he said it's like owning the most profitable McDonald's in the world on top of an active volcano. Oh, yeah. Wow. And this is something certainly with books. I mean, the vast majority of this is changing, but many authors and certainly most publishers have no means of communication with their readers whatsoever. It's a really, really important.

So this then is a follow up question. And you might have to pick something else, I think what you just said could be an answer. But what is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you've ever made? Could be money, time, energy, anything at all. I mean, I just keep thinking laptop, but that's so basic. And so long ago, it doesn't even really count. What about skill development? Is there any particular learning like podcasts? I mean, that's a whole separate skill. Yeah, that was huge. Like entering into that world was huge, huge thing. Yeah. How did you, how did you learn? I mean, what, what,

because you have a, you have a popular podcast and certainly you were coming in with an advantage as I did with an audience for your books, but how did you think about learning to podcast? Well, I did something, which is like one of my favorite things to do, which is I was like, I'm going to have a manifesto. Like I'm really into sort of like taking ideas and trying to distill them. So I went around and talked to as many people I could find who either created a podcast or worked in podcasting or just loved podcasts. And I asked them like, what, like, how do you even think about it? And would hear what they talk. And then whenever they would say something that I was like, okay, it makes the manifesto, you know? And so like one of the,

like one thing that made the manifesto, which I think about all the time is to be consistent and also surprise. And I think about that all the time. Like there has to be consistency, but then you also have to break it up, you know, instead of you or like, and like, let the outside world into your podcast. You know, you don't want it to become too insular. You have new people in your podcast all the time, but for us, it to become too insular. You have new people in your podcast all the time, but for us, it's mostly me and my sister. So it's like, you don't want it to start feeling claustrophobic. So how do you get the outside world in? Just to hit pause for a second, how do you do that? Because it could quickly become just all inside baseball, right?

For long-term listeners. Well, one thing is we have interviews, but very sporadically. So not nearly, you know, it's like every maybe fifth episode, if even that often. So that's one way to get in. Sometimes our producer will come in and like, like, just like make a comment. So you're like, oh, yeah, they're in there. And, you know, there is like other people around. Often we try to have clips from like televisions or movies if those are if those are relevant or, you know, music, if there's something like that, or, you know,

even sound effects or just something so like, so that the sound is, is changing. So that's one thing. And so for me, that was, that's very helpful. It's sort of like, okay, I'm, I'm not just like having coffee with somebody and having them tell me about their podcast. I'm like, I'm not just having coffee with somebody and having them tell me about their podcast. I'm looking for those gems that are the takeaways. One thing is fans are great, but a community is better. So how do you change fans into a community? That's a question that we still are thinking about all the time. This is an aspirational manifesto. It's not what we do.

It's what we try to do. How have you thought about turning your listeners into a community? Well, one thing that we do a lot of is we have tons of listener content. So like, like for the holidays, for instance, we, we were like, okay, send us your best holiday hack. So like some quick, easy thing to make the holidays easier, whether that's about entertaining or your Christmas card list or, you know, buying gifts or dealing with your difficult relatives or like traveling, whatever it is. And then we would go through and have like, oh, here are all these things from our community.

Or like I did this thing, which worked out really well, where, um, uh, someone had emailed to ask if I had any, cause I love quotations so much. I have like a quotation newsletter where I send out a quotation every day, a happiness quotation, said, do you have any good ideas for funeral readings or memorial readings? Because I have to, like, I have to, like, there's, I have to go to a funeral and I need readings. And I was like, this is a great question for everyone. Like, and so it was like a whole community project. People would send in their favorites and then I made a pdf and then it's just something that people can ask for like do you want the funeral the readings from for funerals and when you need

that it's like it's really helpful to get like a 20 page document that's and it's from everybody or like we did a thing on spotify about you know how like when you're feeling blue most people have like a song that they there's like their go-to song to make themselves cheer up? Right. So we asked people to submit their songs, and now it's dozens and dozens and dozens of hours on Spotify. Everybody's like, this is my go-to song. So it's like the happiest, most energizing playlist, but everybody built it together. How did they make those submissions?

By email. I got it. or voicemail. Um, and then we had a meetup. We've only had one meetup. It was really, it was great, but it was like, um, it's, it's a thing to pull that off. Like, where do you do it? How do you organize it? How do you get people at RSVP? So we need to work on that. We've done a couple of live events. Those are super fun. Um, we want to do more of those because we do feel like that's like the great community thing because there's like everybody's there together. And my sister has another podcast of her own and they have a very active Facebook group, Happier in Hollywood. We have not done that with Happier, but I know that that's something that can be really, really effective

too. But again, it's like everybody would have a different answer depending on what they're interested in, what they're good at, what their audience is interested in, what their content is. But it's a good question, which is, how do you turn fans into a community? It's fun to talk about. Is the manifesto written out, sort of like

Jerry Maguire? How long is it? It's like 15 items, I think now. Oh, okay. So it's, it's really like the 15 commandments of sorts. Yeah.

A manifesto, I feel like a manifesto has to be one page. Yeah. It's like a resume. Yeah. You got it. Part of it is like to keep it, um,

succinct. Yeah. No, it's like 15 one liners. Have you shared it anywhere? We wear a banter. That's one of ours. Um,

uh, yeah, yeah, no, I gave a whole talk about it. Oh, you did? Okay, great. No, that's one of ours um uh yeah yeah no i gave a whole talk about it oh you did okay great you know it's public if anybody wants it just email me and i'll send you my podcasting my podcast manifesto i love a manifesto i have a habits manifesto i have a happiness manifesto i love these framework i like distilling things it's like it's like for me that's like so much it's like some people like to write haiku. I like to write manifestos. Now, I don't want to destroy your inbox, which is entirely possible.

Maybe you have some system for avoiding inbox deluge. But when you said people can email you, if they wanted to find or read the Habit Manifesto or the Podcasting Man manifesto, how would you suggest they find it? I mean, certainly they could search your name and then fill in the blank manifesto on Google or elsewhere, but right. Or on my website, they're there, they're there on my website and the resources if they wanted that.

Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. So you mentioned quotations. So if you could have a giant billboard anywhere, so metaphorically speaking, right? Getting a message out to millions or billions of people. So you can put a good question. Yeah. So it could be, it could be a few words. It could be a paragraph. It doesn't really matter.

It could be some saying of yours, or it could be another quote from someone else. What might you put on it? Well, I think of everything that I have ever, if it was going to be a quote for me, of everything that I have ever written, there's clearly one sentence that is the sentence that is the most meaningful to people. And that is, the days are long, but the years are short. That is, I feel like for many people, that is like the most helpful.

That's like the thing that's quoted back to me the most. I like that. And it's just like this idea that, that is, I feel like for many people that is like the most help. That's like the thing that's quoted back to me the most is this like this idea that, you know, getting sometimes getting from morning to night feels interminable. But then you're like, well, where did 2017 go? Like, do I even remember March 2017? Like what even happened? Like it just flashed by. So to remember that, to remember that. And if you, are there any quotes that you use as routinely? I have certain quotes that I revisit often or that I have in my home somewhere that I will see them often. Are there any quotes that you might put on a billboard for yourself? One is from Robert Louis Stevenson, there is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy, which I think is great. And then there's one from Thomas Merton, and I'm not sure I'm going to get it 100% accurate, but he said, essentially, I am finally coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. Oh, I like that. I like that a lot. I may not have that word perfect, but that's the gist. That's the gist of it. Yeah. an interest, and we only have, you know, we'll take a few more minutes, but in koans and these types of thought-provoking statements or questions, perhaps without an answer, right? That's kind of part of the exercise in some respects. But I mean, for instance, one of my favorite quotes,

which is certainly at times, or most of the time, quite a head-scratcher, which is Rumi, which is, that which you seek is seeking you. Yes, yes. Oh, well, that's very much like one of my favorite poems, which is Samuel Johnson quoting a Spanish proverb that said, he who would find the wealth of the Indies must bring the wealth of the Indies with him. Same idea. Right. Yes.

Yes, very powerful what which what itch do those scratch for you or how did you why the interest i guess i like this sort of escape from logic or like the way they're usually like the perfection of the idea or like the the elusiveness of of it. Like right now, one of my, one of my weird obsessions that I'm into is color. I'm like really, really obsessed with color. And I have a ton of color Coen's that are Coen's that are only about color. And, um, like, uh, uh, Oh, here's one that somebody actually said to me in real life. Um, wait, it? Okay, she said, I walked into a store and I said, I want to buy this blue chair. And the clerk said, oh, everybody says it's blue, but that chair is actually brown.

Is the chair blue or brown? Yeah. Right. What color do you use to paint an object that's transparent? Hmm. Why the interesting color? How did this come about? The way it came about was, on the Happier podcast, Alyssa and I, we always have a Try This at Home, which is a small concrete thing that you can do in your everyday life

to make yourself happier. We tried this at home one week to pick a signature color. Ironically, neither Alyssa nor I has ever been able to pick a signature color, but we put it out there anyway. You said sinister? Signature. Oh, signature. Sorry. Got it, got it. Yeah, not a sinister color. And I thought this was sort of a fun, playful thing. And again, it's a way to tap into the power of the moment and your environment. But we got so many impassioned, delighted responses from people and also like so many pictures. And I mean, there were crazy stories, like a woman who said that her mother had really been into the color red and also kind of the

Southwest look, that when she died, they got a red Southwest designed urn for her ashes. I mean, these are people really taking it all the way. And it just got me thinking about color. And, you know, as I said before, I'm not a visual person. I can only get to the visual through words. And so I started reading more and more about color. It turns out there's like this giant literature about color. There's a French historian of color who's slowly working his way. He had a book called Black. He's slowly working his way. He had a book called Black. He had a book called Green. He had a book called Blue. Red just came out this year. I'm eagerly awaiting yellow. And then all these kind of crazy, interesting philosophical

books about it. Anyway, once I got into it, it's just like I couldn't stop. And now I'm doing some like weird little thing, writing kind of like a weird little book called My Color Pilgrimage, which I have no idea what that's even going to be, but I couldn't help myself. I just had to do it. Um, felt that compulsion again to write it. And so part of it is, um, is these coins. Like, could a painting include a light yellow that's lighter than a dark white? Can light yellow be light? Can light yellow be lighter than dark white oh i like

that um uh oh here's a here's an interesting question now this is like color questions do you think dragons are green or red uh well i would probably go with green personally interesting that is historically the color of dragons i would always say red so but this is like what color are unicorns they can be any color we want because they don't really exist but it's interesting like i'm like to me it's like of course they're red like i'm like i didn't even know that was a question that anybody would have um do you believe in like how can a color be achromatic black white and gray are considered achromatic

colors they're non-color colors how can you have a non-color color is black a color i say yes black it's a color but a lot of people say no so anyway um so on the theme of black just since you're going down this rabbit hole i have a recommendation for a very short and exceptionally weird book that may that may have a few times that may have a few paragraphs you would fall in love with. But it's something you can read in an afternoon really easily. It's called In Praise of Shadows. Oh, okay. I'm writing this down right now.

It's an essay on Japanese aesthetics by Juno. Oh, I read that! Yeah, Tanizaki. It opens with his brilliant invocation of the outhouse. That's right, yeah. And talks about how Japanese aesthetics and also color, right? The use of gold were designed to reflect light in very dim environments. So in contemporary design, when you have traditional Japanese color

palettes in brightly lit rooms, it doesn't work. And it seems very gaudy, just as one point, right? Hence the title, In Praise of Shadows. I'm so glad that you mentioned it, because I read it and remembered thinking, there's a lot about that book that is very deeply weird. But I wasn't obsessed with color at the time, so I didn't read it through the lens of color. And so now I want to go back and reread it because it is a very it's a it's a controversial book in many ways. Super, super weird. Yeah, super weird.

And but but, you know, sometimes you read something and you're just not in the same place to like I bet now I would read it with a whole different eye. So I'm so glad that you mentioned it because I will be checking it out of the library tomorrow. I'm going to the library tomorrow. And, yes, I know exactly where it is because I checked it out before. I know they have a copy. So that's great. Yeah.

Japanese are interesting because they have four basic colors, black, white, and a particular blue and a particular red. That's like conversations that just made my mind sort of tilt its head like a confused Labrador was the fact that the, well, what we would consider the green go signal at a sidewalk, Japanese people call blue, even though they have a separate word for green. And I would ask them... Only recently. That's a very recent introduction into the vocabulary. That's part of why. I don't know when it was introduced, but they have a clear delineation. If you look at it on paper, you could say, this is green, this is blue, and then you'd

have agreement. And then you look at the crosswalk sign and you say it's green they say no you mean it's blue and it was really a trip for me uh just a mental trip to realize how socially conditioned even our perception of color is right what you would expect is sensory input converted by these rods and cones at the back of the eye into this objective fill-in-the-blank color. But it's just not the case, it doesn't seem. In Russia, they have a word, just like we have a word for light red, it's pink.

And we don't really say things are light red, we would call it pink. They have a word like that for light blue. They have a whole separate word for it. And it's interesting um and it's interesting and it actually when you look at the brain function of people who speak russian and their color identification it's different because when when you have a distinction like that built into your language um it does change the way at the speed particularly with which you could

perceive these things so it is it's very like and I just was reading today that the word orange, um, like didn't exist until literally oranges came into the marketplace, um, in Europe because they just said, they just said yellow, red. They didn't have like a special word for it because there just was, I guess there just wasn't enough need for it. And then when the oranges came, they were like, oh, we're going to have, and that's why it's called orange. Cause it's literally from oranges. Cause that's when they began to identify the color. Yeah. So there's all sorts of crazy color history thing. What I'm going to do with this? I don't know, but yeah. So that you're, um, that Japanese, uh, it's, it's a very different way of perceiving color. I'll give you one more recommendation that is going to make sense

to like a fraction of 1% of people out there, but that's okay. That's my favorite kind. Which is look into the experimentalists who are creating hardware devices for sensory substitution experiments. So if people want to hear colors or feel sight, there are hardware devices that have been created to help people experience this in various experimental designs. My friend Ed Cook, who's a memory champion and very fascinating guy, has done a lot of experimentation with this,

but that could feed into your rabbit hole of color exploration. So it's basically hardware synesthesia? That's right. Yeah, it's using computers and hardware to enable synesthesia in non-synesthetes, so to speak. I'm curious, though, on a completely separate note, what try this at home has had the strongest response to date of any that you've done with your audience? Oh, my gosh. So many. I don't know. I mean, we've been going more than two years.

Or any that come to mind that had huge responses from your audiences? Well, this 18 for 2018, people are really responding to. That has been super fun um what are some other um big ones um uh oh i'm just going blank that's okay um like uh we just there's just so many um you don't want you know one thing though it's we didn't do it as a try this at home but it's something that we keep hearing about over and over and over again. It's something that really people respond to. So Elizabeth and I, well, we're sisters and our parents live in Kansas City. And my mother made this suggestion. She was like, you know, you know how it is. And everybody has remarked on this, that like, if you see somebody every day, you have tons to talk about

with them. But if you see people like once every six months, it's like, how are you? Fine. How are you? Like, it's hard to make conversation. Right. So my mother said, let's just email each other with just like the boring details of everyday life. And we instantly realized that this was a genius idea. And so in our family, my nuclear, my, you know, my, my, my, my sister and my parents, the four of us, we will send these periodic updates, like say maybe every four or five days that just says update. That's the title. And it's just like the most boring thing. It's like, my mother will be like, I'm getting my hair colored later today. Or I'll be like, Eleanor's really annoyed because Barnaby tracks snow all over her bed. You know,

it's this like the most mundane things are like, Oh, I'm leaving tomorrow for London. It should be really fun. I'm seeing my friend Delia. Do you remember her? She was my roommate after college. And there's no, it's okay to be boring. That is the motto of update. But what we find is that it dramatically increases our feeling of connection with each other because when you know that mundane stuff, and then also it's good if there's like kids because my parents can say, oh, I heard that you had a Halloween party at school or like they know what's going on in a much more kind of day to day way. And so many people have said and some people do this as like a group text. I like that. That's cool.

People have set up private groups on Facebook. People do it all different ways. But the idea is it's better to have frequent, boring, mundane communications than to save it up for like when there's something big to report because that's not how relationships work. Relationships really thrive on really being in touch with people. And also nobody ever responds to update. So there's no guilt. There's no like, oh, now I have to like craft a witty response or like now I have to do one too. It's just like you just put it out there and usually nobody even responds. Because it's like let's keep this easy so we can do it.

I think sometimes people want to have like let's start some beautiful thing where we like write handwritten letters on parchment and mail it to each other. I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that. So that's something that's interesting because it worked really well for us. And we thought it was sort of our idiosyncratic family. But like over time, like that's the thing where people are like, tell me again, what was that thing with update? Because I want to do that. That's something that really did. I love it. Yeah.

So two more questions for you. This is, I suppose, pretty self-explanatory. When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused or feel like you've lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? Oh, I reread a children's book. Is there a go-to? Oh, I get a million go-tos. But like, in fact, like Harry Potter, I was like, I have to hold back Harry Potter. Do not let myself reread it, reread it, reread it.

I have to hold it for a moment of need. And so when I got the edits back from my editor for my book, Better Than Before, it was like, I'm like, and now I'm going to start rereading Harry Potter. I need it now. This is the time because I'm processing all of this stuff. But no, I have like a thousand books, you know, Edward Eager, Elizabeth Enright. I mean, Philip Pullman. I mean, I got a million. I got a huge library full, but I love rereading. I love rereading adult books too. I reread adult books all the time. But there's something very comforting about children's books, particularly C.S. Lewis. I mean, how many times have I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? I mean, easily could be 40, could be more. But yeah, because it's just

like, oh, I'm like, oh, yeah, I need. And in fact, it's almost a tell. It's funny that you ask that because it's almost like sometimes I know I'm feeling overwhelmed without really. I'm like, oh, I'm reading The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper again. I wonder if I'm feeling a little bit stressed out. It's sometimes like my reading choice. It tells me more about my emotional state than I'm even aware of. That's your divining rod. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like my psychiatrist. Do you read the entire book? For instance, you get your edits back on your own book. Do you just need a minimum effective dose, like a vein know, two chapters and you're good? Or do you end up reading the whole book? How does that typically run its course? It kind of depends. Sometimes, you know, some of these books are so short, you can practically read the whole thing. You know, if you've read it before, if you've read it 40 times before, you can whip through that thing pretty fast. It depends. You know, sometimes I'll just reread

like my favorite, a couple of favorite parts that are comforting, you know, or if it's a really good book or a book that I haven't read in a long time, I might read the whole thing. Um, some books are complicated, you know, and, um, but, uh, um, but I, I do try to be careful not to read them so often that I wear them out. Um, cause you can do that with a book and kind of lose the pleasure of it because it's too familiar. Um, I kind of, I,

I wore out Roald Dahl early. Um, so I don't read, I don't reread Roald Dahl very much now cause I'm like, I just know his books so well that they kind of don't have any pleasure for me anymore. What is a short children's or young adult book that you would recommend almost everybody give a shot something

that can be read in a day or a weekend i would say the midnight fox by betz fires that's like a middle grade book are you talking about like a middle grade book or more like a ya book but it is a masterpiece that anybody anybody male or female, adult or child, it's just a perfect book. Great. It's funny. It's thoughtful. It's got great characters. It's a great book.

So The Midnight Fox. And then for YA, for young adult, what would your nomination be? YA gets trickier. What is a YA? One Day This Pain Will Be Useful To You is an amazing character in a beautifully written book. I would highly recommend that. Let's see. What is another one?

I mean, then there are ones that everybody knows about, like Wonder. That is an amazing book. But maybe that's even middle grade i don't know what they consider that um um i would say the golden compass for sure it's such a good book it's so unbelievably good and the characters are so unbelievably compelling and the world is so unbelievably interesting and it's like nothing you've ever read before. And it's like connected to the deepest core of thinking and philosophy. That is a towering masterpiece. Yeah. So I would say The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. But it's scary, and it's challenging. It's not for you to read

out loud to your six-year-old for sure especially yeah especially the later volumes but uh yeah what adult books book or books have you reread the most or reread or reread a lot because you mentioned there are some adult books that you've reread a lot like you know probably like um i've reread a lot of nonfiction. Like a book that I love that I have read so many times is Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung. Into the Wild by John Krakauer. Selected Essays by George Orwell. Or there's, I have my favorite essays that I will go read. Some of them are in like the short collection, some aren't.

Samuel Johnson essays I read and reread a lot I love Samuel Johnson um I read it I love Virginia Woolf she kind of blows my head open so I it's hard for me to reread it I'll often reread her non-fiction same thing with Flannery O'Connor Flannery O'Connor's fiction is so kind of um it really is so mind-blowing that I almost can't take it. I have to be in a very particular emotional mood. I can reread something like Wise Blood, but I reread her nonfiction a lot because I love her nonfiction. I love her voice, and it's a lot easier to take. So for rereading, I probably reread nonfiction a lot.

And then I love like Robertson Davies, Jane Austen. Sometimes if I want to reread a novel, I'll read something like that. Wow. So you have a very, very impressive level of output in terms of creation in the world. How many hours a week or day or month, however you want to slice it, do you spend reading? You know, I don't know. And that is a great question because every week on Facebook, I post a picture of the books that I've read that week. And I don't have any kind of, I don't do any editorializing or any explanation, but if I've read it, I put a picture of it. And

if I don't like a book, I don't finish it. So if I finished it, it means I liked it well enough to finish it. And every week I have read books, but I feel like I spend no time reading. And I'm constantly thinking to myself, how can I find more time to read? How can I find more time to go to the library? How can I find more time to like, you know, have 457 books on my library list in my phone? How I just need to make more time to read. And yet I must have reading. And then I do a lot of research. I'm always taking notes off things I've read. So to me, it is a mystery. And I know I should do time logging, like Laura Vanderkam says, and like really write it down like a lawyer and figure out where is my time? When am I reading?

Sounds stressful to me. Yeah. It's like, I don't know. I really, I don't know how much time I read. It probably varies tremendously. Oh, but here's a great tip that somebody told me, and this has really changed my reading. She said to me that if you're a person who travels a lot for work, as Tim, you and I both do, her rule is she only reads for pleasure when she's traveling for work. So from the minute that she gets to the airport to the minute, but she'll work in the hotel room to the minute that she gets to the hotel, she will only read for fun on the plane, in the airport. There's no expectation that she's going to work. And to me, this has dramatically improved, um, my experience of travel. And I've

gotten an amazing amount of reading done because it wasn't even like I was getting that much work done, but I felt like I should be working. So now sure. Now I'm just like, you know what? Like I read, um, Manhattan beach, Jennifer Egan. Like I had a flight, um, like a flight from London. Um, plus I had all the time in Heathrow. I'm like, I read the whole book from the time that I left to the time that I landed. I think I only had a few chapters left by the time. Cause I just read the whole time. It's so satisfying. Um, and like traveling so much better because I really look forward to having that really concentrated reading time. And I wasn't getting much work done anyway. I mean, honestly, I just wasn't.

I think some people can really, really work on airplanes. And if you do, then maybe you want to do that because it's a really good place for you to work. But I was not getting quality work done on airplane well we could talk for hours and hours and hours i uh but we'll save that for round two uh is there anything that you would like to well first and foremost where can people learn more about you what you're up to where would you like them to say hi, and so on? If you go to GretchenRubin.com, that's R-U-B-I-N.com, there's all sorts of information, resources, videos, contact info. If you contact me through my blog, it really does come straight through to me. You can see my podcast, learn more about my books. There's way more there than you would ever want to know read about color

go to GretchenRubin.com or the podcast is called Happier with Gretchen Rubin if you're looking for a podcast perfect and is there anything you would like to close with any parting comments, suggestions next steps

try this at home anything that people can do to change their behavior, change their thoughts, whatever you want to wrap up with. Any final thoughts? Can I just instead, can I ask you a question? Yes, of course. What is your, do you know what your tendency is? What do you think your tendency is? Okay. I was told that you would mention it and we moved on before you.

Yeah, well, I didn't want to make it, you know, I feel like this entire podcast is pretty self-indulgent. And so I was hoping I wasn't going to take it there, but I will say. I think everybody's going to want to hear what you have to say. Yeah. So I definitely, it was questioner, right? Or questioning. Was that the, was that one of them? Questioner is the ones that they'll meet inner expectations, but if they think they make sense,

they'll meet an expectation. But if they think it doesn't make sense, if it's arbitrary or inefficient, they push back. I think that's me. And what is the, now I'm curious to know, what are the downsides of that and how can one mitigate against the downsides? The downsides for questioners is sometimes they can drain and overwhelm people with their questioning. Like everybody else is like, why are we still talking about this? And you're like, but what about this? And what about this?

And what about this? So to the questioner, this is like, of course, we can't move forward until all these questions are answered. Because why would we waste our time and our energy if we don't think it's the right thing to do? But to other people, like if you're in a team or something, sometimes people, you know, start getting exasperated and exhausted because they feel like it's too many questions. Some questioners experience analysis paralysis, which is when they want perfect information. And so it's hard to make a decision or move forward because they're like, it's like, you know, what's the best, you, you know, uh, email service provider. You don't,

how I could do more and more and more research on that. And like, Oh, maybe I should do this. Maybe I should do that. Or, you know, I want to buy a bike. What's the best bike. And so it's, it can be hard. Um, some, some questions, my husband's a questioner. He never really experiences this as far as I can tell. But for some questioners, it's something where they need to figure out how to contain that so that they can move forward. And funnily enough, often analysis paralysis seems to be about little things, not big things. It's like a person might not have any trouble deciding to switch careers, but if they were trying to decide what kind of tent to buy, that could really hold them up. It seems to be like something like those kinds of things seem to be the things that become the stumbling block. And then also for questioners, and this is something really about a problem that questioners have with others, is that if you're a questioner,

they can sometimes be perceived by others as being disrespectful, insubordinate, undermining of authority, questioning someone's judgment um not a team player so if you're a questioner child and you say to your teacher why should i have to memorize the multiplication tables if i can just look it up on my phone just as quickly and more accurately and the teacher's like because i say so or because all 10 year olds have to do it or because that's what you do in fourth grade the question is going to be like well that's ridiculous and that's no answer and i'm not going to do it and so they're perceived by the child but the teacher is being disrespectful or uncooperative but to the questioner this makes perfect sense or you get a thin-skinned boss and the boss is like

your questions make me feel like you're rejecting my authority you're undermining my judgment you're not a team player i don't want to work with you and it's like but to the questioner they're like well this is how i add value to the team i'm can I be a better team player? But then to say to everybody, this is a crazy idea. Why would we ever do this? It's a big waste of our time. But to the boss, they're like, I don't like that. And so partly it's for questioners to realize how they can ask questions in a way that seemed constructive rather than making other people feel sort of defensive or exhausted because there's huge value to the questioner's questioning. And in some places, some work environments or whatever,

it's very rewarded and praised. But then some places it's like, hey, listen, we're here to do what corporate says. And it's not interesting for us to hear you complain about why you don't think it's a good idea. Like get with the program, stop interrupting the meetings. Like you're keeping every, you know, so if you're a questioner, you maybe want to know, well, what kind of environment are you getting into? Because one might suit you better than another. I don't know, does this resonate with you? Is this a striking word? Oh yeah, totally. No, I mean, I got in so much trouble in school consistently. I was actually put at the bad table in kindergarten, which my teacher then forgot.

Was it called the bad table? It was called the bad table. Well, you can't do that today. Holy cow. Oh, well, she did a lot of things you couldn't do today. I mean, she made me eat soap in front of the class because I refused to learn the alphabet because she never explained why I had to memorize these arbitrary shapes until Mrs. Vinsky in first grade then redeemed me and she was amazing and told me I could actually read books if I learned the alphabet and that's all I needed to know. But

yeah, Mrs. Bevan was a tough old bitch who was very, very rough on the class. Can I say that is what's so poignant to me about questioners is like I heard story after story exactly like the one you told where if somebody had literally taken 10 minutes and sat down with a child and spoken to them in a reasonable way and been like, this is why we're asking you to do this, the child would have been like, cool, I get it. Oh, 10 seconds is for somebody to just like explain why this isn't just a big waste of my time. And it's like all it would take is such – like instead of you having this whole kindergarten experience, which is just – I mean the simplest response, respectful response to your question would have solved this. It's just to me so poignant and such a waste. Oh, yeah, 10 seconds.

I mean literally like, Tim, you realize this is what Mrs. Vinsky said to me. Because by that point, I was really digging in my heels because I was so embittered by the experience with Mrs. Bevan. And Mrs. Vinsky just very calmly said, Tim, do you realize if you learn the alphabet, you can read any book that you want to read? And it's just like my head exploded because I was like, what? Why didn't anybody tell me this? And then I was off to the races.

But yeah, I've also as like an entrepreneurial type, a lot of people I know who are questioners, they're like, I don't want to work for anyone else. Because I don't I don't trust anybody's judgment the way I trust my own. If I'm telling myself what to do, I know there's a good reason. If other people are like involved in this, it's hard for me, like, maybe there's a few trusted people that I could rely on. But I don't want to be part of a big system where I'm like, I don't know why people are making these decisions. Like I want to be the one making the decisions. Yeah. I don't, I can follow decisions as long as I have the latitude to ask questions in such a way that I understand the rationale, but not everyone responds well to that. So that's another thing. But to offset the highly logic-oriented framework, I've had to, or I haven't had to, but I've chosen to counterbalance that with other things, right? So for instance, one would be, you mentioned the koans as a way to, I'm my words not yours but get a reprieve from logic

almost right so there's there's a quote from i think it's novelis i'm not sure if you pronounce it that way but poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason so i've taken time to try to embrace art forms or entertainment that is not driven by logic as a way to medicate myself so that I'm not purely overweighted in the reasoning faculty. And I'll give you another example of that. For instance, I interviewed Bozma St. John recently, who's the chief brand officer at Uber. She was at Apple Music and Beats and worked with Spike Lee prior to that. Really incredible woman. And she said when I was chatting with her that her advice to her younger self would be do away with pro and con lists by and large. And I asked her why.

And she said it's because usually if you're creating a pro and con list, you're either trying to talk yourself out of a bad idea or talk, I'm sorry, talk yourself out of a good idea or talk yourself into a bad idea. Wait, did I get that right? Yeah. Out of a good idea or into a bad idea. And it made so much sense to me. And I realized that I've spent a lot of my, I've used my power of questioning in many cases to try to impose an analytical framework on things that are actually best answered with a gut reaction. It's like if I meet somebody and I just get the heebie-jeebies and I really don't like them for an unclear reason. This is important, right?

If it's like, ah, they have this weird tick and it bothers me, so what? It's very explicit. But if I get the spider sense going off and I can't pinpoint why, that's a hundred times out of a hundred something that I should have paid attention to. as a way to offset maybe the blunt force use of the analytical questioning mind for all situations, which I think has been my default. So that's, yeah. But you know, what's interesting is that both you and I have talked and I had not put my finger on this until you, until I heard what you just said, which is like, we've both kind of done things to try to explicitly offset very like pronounced parts of our personality. Like you've been trying to use this to offset your questioning side. And I've been trying to use color to bring me into the visual world, which is like hard for me because I'm so verbal. And so I've been trying to counter that with by making a study of color.

So maybe it is kind of this like, you know, the opposite of a profound truth is also true and that you need to kind of figure out, well, if you're too yin, how do you achieve your yang? And maybe both of us are trying to get some kind of balance. And I hadn't thought about that as kind of a pattern, but now I'm thinking maybe there's a big lesson here. I want to study how do people do it? It's, it's a pretty, it's a pretty subtle thing. I don't, I didn't even realize I was doing it until you said that. Um, but I wonder how other people like how you offset that.

Like if you're too physical, how do you tap into spiritual? Or if you're too, um, now focused, how do you, I don't know. Like there's a lot of things people could try to. Well, I think, I think that in, uh, you know, we're, we're going to go squirrely and all over the place here, but from what I've observed is that if someone has the luxury of having achieved some degree of success, and it doesn't mean, that doesn't mean a lot of success, but they have enough of a toehold in professional success that they don't have to worry about, say, where the rent check is coming from or where the mortgage payment is coming from, and they can put food on the table. superpower or the strength that enabled them to get there when used in excess creates other problems right so like everything in excess becomes its opposite to an extent right

every medicine becomes poison right it's like the dose makes the poison so it's like okay great this this hyper analytical ocd focus on whatever has helped you to achieve a certain degree of financial success and this, that, and the other thing, but almost metastasized tendency to apply this one tool to everything and so I've certainly seen that I mean that would be kind of I'll let you I will I will let you unleash your own deep dive on this, but it's certainly something that I've seen a lot of people trying to figure out how can I take what comes unnaturally to me that I recognize as necessary and create a practice of some type. So for me, the last thing, if you had told the Tim of 20 years ago that I would be reading poetry before bed, I mean, he would have like vomited on himself. And nonetheless, like here I am, and I find it incredibly relaxing for whatever reason. And part of me is totally okay with not understanding the how of it or the why,

but reading something like the Tao Te Ching, which is not necessarily designated as poetry, or Hafez or Rumi in the beginning of the day and at the end of the day to bookend, right before I turn on my hyper-analytical mind, and then when I want to turn off my hyper-analytical mind, which has historically caused quite a bit of insomnia, dosing myself with something I never would have used in the past, I find really, really helpful. Well, it's interesting because I have this, like I said, I have this, it's called

Moment of Happiness newsletter, where every day I send out like a quotation about happiness or human nature. And a lot of people say they like it because it's, I think for you, like you're seeking out poetry, but for some people, and you can even go with like the Poetry Foundation, I think, like we'll send you an email with a poem every day if you want that. But this is like, people like to have that practice of some kind of transcendent reading first thing in the morning or right before bed where it's like, it's curated, it's something that's like more beautifully expressed or a more interesting idea than you're going to read in the newspaper or whatever. It's something that's like more beautifully expressed or a more interesting idea than you're going to read in the newspaper or whatever. It's some kind of timeless thing that for whatever reason is going to put your brain in a different place as you start your day or end your day.

And I think it's a small thing that you can take in and kind of let fill your mind, um, in, in a bite-sized piece rather than thinking, okay, I got to sit down and read odes to, you know, um, or wait intimations of immortality and get this thing done. Or I'm working my way through paradise lost. And, you know, you're like, okay, that's okay. One page a day, just do one page a day. And then that'll be enough to kind of reset your brain in a positive way. Developing habits that I have somehow failed to develop in the past. Do less than you think you can, I think is the biggest takeaway for me. It's like, oh, you think you can go to the gym for an hour a day and that's your resolution to go for five days a week? Try like 10 minutes a session, three days a week. And that so that your pass fail mark is low enough that you don't abandon ship because you feel like you've failed, especially if you're a competitive person as I am,

or with poetry, it's like, okay, don't choose a poet that has 10 page poems, like go with someone like Robert Frost, or Hafez, or Hafez, depending on how you want to say it, and The Gift, right? These are one page or 50 word poems that happen to very often be hilarious. Start there and make it easy. And what I found is like, if you want to, for me, at least, it's like, if you want to do things that are really big, this is something new for me, certainly, but it, it doesn't, the path being hard doesn't indicate that you're doing something virtuous always, right? Like if, in my case, at least it's like, okay, if I am really loathe to do, I'll make something up, but it's like lower leg ankle prehabilitation. So I don't get injured later doing skiing or whatever. It's boring as fuck. It's really pardon my French, but it's like, leg ankle prehabilitation so i don't get injured later doing skiing or whatever it's boring as fuck it's really pardon my french but it's like it's really monotonous and not interesting at all but if i'm if i tell myself okay i'm gonna spend 30 to 60 seconds every other day like before i brush my teeth doing that and that's it that's enough that's a pass then uh i'm setting the

hurdle so low that i'm more inclined to do it and then i can always do extra credit but if i set the pass fail mark too high i'm never going to do it in the first place because or i'll put it off for whatever reason so in any case yeah diatribe i write complete i write a lot that's like the whole thing in my book better than, which is all about habit change. That's like a big theme is like start small, start big. Like how do you think about that? If you have a habit like that, how might you analyze yourself to know what's going to work for you? Because that's a perfect example of the kind of habit that it's like it can be – in a way, it's not hard.

In a way, it's extremely hard. And like how do you get yourself to succeed? There's like – it can be in a way it's not hard in a way it's extremely hard. And like, how do you get yourself to succeed? There's like, that's what that's like. How can I make this easier? How can I make this easier as a question? That's the whole inspiration for better than before. I was just like, what do people do? Like what, what, and it turns out there's 21 strategies people use and, um, some work better for some people and some work better for others and some don't work for some people at you know some people they don't some don't work at all and some you can use it sometimes in your life and not at other times in your life but it's good to know the

whole uh panoply of them because then you can you can say okay these three sound good because you just you said pairing which is doing it before you brush your teeth that's what i would call the strategy of pairing scheduling which is putting it on you brush your teeth. That's what I would call the strategy of pairing. Scheduling, which is putting it on the schedule, like I have an idea of when I'm going to do this. And safeguards, which is the strategy of thinking, how might I screw up? How might I abandon this habit? I'm going to think about what is likely to make me not do it, and I'm going to figure out a way to solve for that. And you're like, if I make this too much, I'm going to put it off when I do it. So I'm taking into account how I might fail. I'm going to figure out a way to solve for that. And you're like, if I make this too much, I'm going to put it off when I do it. So I'm taking into account how I might fail. I'm going to figure out a way to do it so I don't fail. So again, it's not that hard when you know what to do.

But at the same time, it can be very challenging, especially if you do it in a way that's not right for you. Yeah. For me, it's make it easy to pass and make it really expensive to not do it. And it's like, if, if I can be shamed by, let's say a friend of mine, who's going to bust my chops endlessly, if I do it or somehow try to embarrass me in front of other friends,

because we're on a group text where I committed to A, B and C and it's already on the calendar. So I have the sunk cost of having paid for lessons in abnc and someone is going to show up or be on skype at a given hour that social accountability will be very helpful and so on and so forth so it's uh bj fog has done some really cool stuff in this space as well fogg but uh gretchen he's a big believer in small steps he is yeah the micro steps flossing those front teeth as he would have somebody to, uh, some people don't like a small, they're there. They want to go bigger, but go home.

They're not interested in incremental change. They like radical, they like big things. And again, it's not that there's one way that's right or one way that's wrong. It's just whatever works for you. If small works for you, that's great. If small is boring to you and you're not going to stick to it, do something big and bold. It's like, you know, there's a lot of ways to do this. It just depends.

There's no magic one-size-fits-all solution, I think. It's just whatever works for us as individuals. Yeah, for sure. Well, yes, it is not one-size-fits-all, but part of the, I suppose, excitement, if you can look at it that way, is figuring out which tools to put in your toolkit over time. Well, I appreciate the experimental nature that you bring to bear in your own life and then in your work that you share with the world. So thank you for that. And thank you so much for the time today also.

Oh, it's so much fun to talk to you. I so appreciate it. And for everybody listening, you can find links to everything we have discussed in the show notes, along with the show notes for every other episode at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time,

as always, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend?

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