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AOA Transcript

EPISODE — GRETCHEN RUBIN

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:18.0] LC: Welcome to this week’s episode of the Art of Authenticity, I’m Laura Coe your

host and once again, thank you so much for tuning in. Today, we have Gretchen Rubin joining us. Most of you have heard of Gretchen Rubin for her very popular book, The Happiness

Project. She also has several other New York Times best sellers. Her latest book, Better Than Before, Happier at Home. She also has a top podcast, you should check it out, Happier with

Gretchen Rubin. It is a podcast where she discusses good habits and happiness with her sister Elizabeth Craft.

I had so much fun on this podcast because Gretchen came in and laid out habits. I have had

such an issue with this in the past. People ask me all the time, “Hey Laura, you’ve been a successful entrepreneur, you’ve written a book. How do I structure my day? How do I stay

organized?” I do think there is a couple of things to do that are just, you know, easy but as far as wake up in the morning at five AM and then go for a jog and then meditate, I just don’t ever feel

like there’s a one size fits all answer and Gretchen comes in and she crushes this question.

I love it. It’s essentially the answer is, you’ve got to do it in a way that works for you and let go of this prescriptive model that there is a one size fits all way of setting up habits in your life. Most of

us are failing because we’re not being honest about what works for us. Gretchen lays this out and I’m telling you, really worth tuning in.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Gretchen, she has a new book about tendencies

coming out, you can take a quiz on those tendencies, I did, turns out I’m a questioner. We talk about those tendencies also very, very informative. All of her information, GretchenRubin.com.

Her books, her manifesto, any information you want. Of course, we’ll list everything on our podcast page, lauracoe.com/podcast, you’ll find Gretchen Rubin, links to all the resources from

today’s episode and everything else that you could be interested in.

Again, thank you for tuning in and if you have any questions, anything you want me to speak to, send me a note, [email protected]. I love hearing from each and everyone of you.

© 2017 Art of Authenticity �1

http://gretchenrubin.com

http://lauracoe.com/podcast

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AOA Transcript

[INTERVIEW]

[0:02:31.2] LC: Welcomed to this week’s episode of the Art of Authenticity. I am Laura, your host, and I am so excited to have our guest on today. Most of you will know the name, just

because it’s hard not to, in this space, bump into something Gretchen has done. She has got an incredible amount of amazing work out there but Gretchen Rubin is here to join us to talk about

her latest work and her stories.

Hi Gretchen, thank you so much for coming on.

[0:02:54.9] GR: I’m so happy to talk to you, thank you for having me.

[0:02:58.4] LC: I am, likewise, so excited to hear more about your story and all of these incredible books. I have to be honest, you know, most of us have heard Gretchen Rubin, The

Happiness Project, huge success, millions of copies sold. I had no idea though that you’ve actually written eight books, that’s incredible.

[0:03:18.7] GR: That’s one of those things where you’re like, “It took me 10 years to be an

overnight success,” or something. Yeah. I have written many of books which had a bigger splash than others but all were so fun to write. I love them all.

[0:03:32.1] LC: Yeah, I think that’s when I wanted to kind of — there’s so much where we look

at people’s highlight reels, right? We see this one thing. I sold the company and people were like, “Oh my god, you sold the company.” I’m like, “Yeah. After 10 years of sweating it out.” It’s

just brutal to get there.

Yeah, if you could take us back a little bit, I was just fascinated to find out and I don’t know how many people out there have heard your story but you were a lawyer first, you were clerking for

supreme court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. How do you go from what is seemingly this incredible position to saying, “I want to go do something completely polar opposite, go become

a writer and start writing this incredible body of work.”?


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[0:04:11.1] GR: It’s interesting because like a bunch of things happened at about the same time

that I think helped me make the jump. I was clerking on the Supreme Court, which is an amazing job, I do not regret it for an instant. It was fantastic and you’re there with all this other

clerks who are clerking for your justice or other justices and one of the things that I realized was this people truly love law.

They wanted to talk about it in the cafeteria at lunch time and they were reading law journals on

the weekend. Like they loved it. I realized that I did what I had to do to do an excellent job for Justice O’Connor but I didn’t want to spend one more minute on it.

I realized there’s something different about me from this other people. Since then I will say, that

is a very important thing to notice about yourself. Do you enjoy shop talk? If you enjoy shop talk, that means you enjoy your job. I now, all I want to do is talk shop.

[0:05:01.5] LC: Oh my god, Gretchen, I got to interject here. I was an entrepreneur in

healthcare and my brother would read the books and he cared. We’re business partners and I just was like, “I’d rather read anything than the topic I was in,” right? That’s such a huge tell sign

and for some reason, I just blew right past it.

[0:05:19.1] GR: Yeah, it’s like my husband just like, all he loves to do is talk shop. Anyway, that’s an important thing. That happened and then I went over to a friend’s house and she was

an education graduate school and she had — this was in Washington DC, and she had like a really big boring looking book on her coffee table.

In a very dismissive way, I said something like, “Oh, is this the kind of thing you have to read for

your program?” And she said, “Oh yeah, but that’s the stuff I read on my own anyway.” Again, I was like, “I want my job to be what I would do on my own anyway.” Hey, big important clue, in

my free time, I was researching this giant project.

Now, this is something that happens to be true about me. I will often get really interested in subjects and read a ton about them basically for no good reason. Like right now, I’m obsessed

with color and I cannot even tell you how much I read about color to know apparent end. It has


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nothing to do with anything that I write about professionally. This is something that happens to

me throughout my life.

[0:06:15.9] LC: Color, like literally…

[0:06:17.5] GR: Literally color.

[0:06:18.6] LC: Like what we see or like different types of color?

[0:06:22.1] GR: What we see.

[0:06:22.2] LC: How it works like from the rods and cones?

[0:06:25.2] GR: Not the rods and cones. Anyway, don’t get me started on color because I will not stop. So at this point, I had had this moment where I was like out on my lunch hour, I went

for a walk, I was gazing up at the capitol dome and I said to myself, “What am I interested in that everybody in the world is interested?” I thought, “Power, money, fame, sex.” It came to me in

that phrase; power, money, fame, sex. That eventually became my first published book which is called Power, Money, Fame, Sex: The users guide.

At that moment I just realized. It hit me like a lightning bolt, this idea of the subject, this linked

subject, power, money, fame, sex, the worldly passions and I went on this gigantic research project. I would stay late at work, at this time there was no internet, I’d date myself. But I could

run free nexus Lexus searches, which is like the precursor to using the internet. So I had this giant database.

Turns out, if your supreme court justice, you actually can check out books from the library of

congress, everybody else has to just go like, read them in the library of congress, but a supreme court justice can take them home. So I would check out the craziest books under Justice

O’Connor’s name and what they thought Justice O’Connor — one of my favorite books, which this is an amazing book. It’s called, Deep in the Heart of Texas: The true story of three sisters

who were all Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. Fascinating meditation on the nature of fame.


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So I was doing this huge research project. I was working on the weekends, I was working at

night and then I thought, you know, finally it hit me, “This is what people do who were going to write a book and writing a book is something that some people get paid to, it’s their job. I’m

treating this like my hobby, but this could also be my job.”

My sister, she was a professional writer before I was. She’s a TV writer, but she had been writing kind of pulp fiction for teenagers at that point. So somebody very close to me was a

professional writer and so, at a certain point, I was like, “You know, I would rather fail as a writer than succeed as a lawyer.”

My husband and I, we were going to move. After my clerkship we were going to move from

Washington to New York and I was like, “If I get a law job, I may never try this. This is my moment, this is like, there’s an obvious transition point, I have an idea, just try it.”

My husband was switching out of law too so we were like, “We’re not paying our bar fees

anymore.” It was sort of like, I got a book called How to Write and Sell Your Nonfiction Book Proposal and followed the directions. That’s what I did. Yeah.

[0:08:42.1] LC: I love what you just said, “I’d rather fail as a writer than be successful as a

lawyer.” What I really like, if you really think about that, right? Follow your passions and fail and just sort of come to terms with the fact that that’s more important to you than the “success” even

if you’re not enjoying the process.

[0:08:59.3] GR: Yeah. I will say two things that I think made it easier for me. One is I think very often, people know what they don’t want but they don’t know what they do want. That’s very

difficult and painful and I was lucky and that I knew what I wanted and that was pulling me forward with an almost irresistible — once I had the idea, It was like, I could not help myself, I

felt so compelled to do it.

That made it easier, plus everybody in my life was super supportive. My parents who had just by the way paid for law school were totally like, “Oh okay, you want to start off again from nothing

with not a clip, not a contact, not a nothing, fine. Yeah, cool.” I was lucky because a lot of people out of so much love really want people to be safe, they don’t want them to fail, they don’t want


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them to take risks and so I was lucky that my husband, my parents, my sister, they were all you

know…

[0:09:49.2] LC: Supportive and in there. Yeah, that’s huge because you know, the projections that parents place on their children and these visions of grandeur that they have that this is

somehow a narcissistic extension of themselves, right? It’s bad and it can be stifling. So it’s totally fair point.

You went ahead and wrote a couple of books and what was it that sort of got you to write The

Happiness Project? Where did that book come from?

[0:10:13.8] GR: Well, I was just finishing up my biography of John F. Kennedy and there’s periods, it’s lesser now when there’s so much work for writers to do a social media and

everything. At that time, you had this sort of down period where you had basically written a whole book but it hadn’t hit the shelves yet and so it’s just sort of like this open period of

thinking.

I was stuck on a bus on a rainy day and I was just like had this random thought, I thought, “Well what do I want from life anyway? I want to be happy,” and I thought, “Well, that’s kind of funny

because I never think about whether I am happier or if I could be happier. I never think about it.”

I thought, “You know, I should have the happiness project and that was the phrase that I thought of, “the happiness project”. Like I said, again, it’s very common for me to get like really

obsessed with an idea. I went and ran to the library, got this giant stack of books about happiness and just started researching it for myself. I was just curious like, what is happiness?

Can you make yourself happier? What does the science show? What does the great minds from history show?

I was reading and taking notes, which is something that I do all the time but I was like, it just

kept getting bigger and bigger. It’s such a gigantic fascinating subject that at a certain point, I was like, “Wow, maybe this isn’t just a passing obsession which I will enjoy and then sort of

outgrow. Maybe this should be my next book?” And so that’s what happened. It started out just for me.


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[0:11:31.0] LC: Even with eight books, I mean, you’re basically saying that there are a bunch of these obsessive focus topics that you will dive into and they don’t become books, you just

research.

[0:11:40.5] GR: Yeah, most of them don’t. They become slight things. Like I was very interested in pain, chronic pain. That figures in happiness, certainly, but it’s like never really developed. I’m

obsessed with St. Therese of Lisieux, who is my spiritual master even though I’m not even catholic.

I am like an expert on St. Therese. I’ve read every book about St.Therese. I have very strong

feelings about St. Therese. I can barely hold myself back from writing a biography about her but nobody wants to hear what I have to say about St. Therese. So this happens to me. I used to try

to restrain it because I was like, “This is not professional.”

My research reading, note taking time is like, that’s all I have, that’s my asset, that’s my work. Then I was like, “You know what? Who knows what,” — like this, with The Happiness Project, it

ended up being like the best thing that ever happened to me professionally and if I had tried to squelch it, thinking like this is a digression from what I should be thinking about, I might never

have done it. So now I kind of just let myself — I let the kite you know, fly out and just see what happens.

[0:12:41.5] LC: Yeah, because I mean, there’s no way to tell. People ask me when I had this

company and it was very successful, did I know? You kind of know that there’s something there but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to blow up at some point.

[0:12:53.5] GR: Yeah, you can’t. You just really don’t know how things are going to work out.

And it’s fun.

[0:12:59.2] LC: You made a comment in passing and I just want to go back to it that, you know, things used to be different with the publishing industry and nowadays it’s moved. What are your

thoughts? I mean, I’ve come in to the publishing industry as it’s moved over but, you know, there


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was sort of a classic publishing, you get a book deal and you have this process and then you go

back and do it again.

Now it’s brand and social media and, you know, Twitter accounts and Facebook. How do you think about all of that?

[0:13:25.4] GR: Well, you know, it’s really different for every writer because every writer — talk

about authenticity. Everybody feels differently about these things. Some people really take to it, some people really don’t like it. Some people, their subject really lends itself to it and some

people they don’t.

I wrote a biography of Winston Churchill. That was like one of the highlights of my whole life. What a subject, what a book to write, I loved it. It does not lend itself to social media the way

something like happiness does, you know what I mean? So some people are just, whatever. Then some people, it’s their audience, you might have an audience that is really like if you are

on Instagram, you’re going to find your audience there and you love Instagram, it’s such a great way for you to connect.

Other people, it’s not so clear how that works and so I think it’s very specific to a particular

person’s subject audience and everything. I will say that for me, some writers, and this is less true than it used to be but some writers used to look at it as a distraction like it was taking them

away from their real work and they also felt like it was in position, it was like, extra credit that the teacher was assigning but it wasn’t like helping your grade.

[0:14:30.6] LC: Right, it’s like, “Oh my god, I have to go over to Twitter now but I really should

be focused on my work.”

[0:14:35.2] GR: Also, for writers who make their living, it’s sort of like, this is how I make my living, I don’t want to do all this stuff for free because that’s how I make my living. Also like, “Oh,

you’re telling me I need to have a website.” That costs me. I have to design it and run it and pay somebody to update it and everything like, I’m actually paying money for something that is not

like whatever.


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[0:14:55.1] LC: Like this podcast, I mean, it’s completely free and it costs — yeah.

[0:14:58.1] GR: It costs you money, time, energy and money for it all to infrastructure. I think

now, people feel they see the value of it, they see that you need to get yourself out there. For me, I’m really fortunate because my subject, so much of my learning is anecdata, it’s like, so

many people will say to me, I’ve experienced this or like, with my next book, which is called The Four Tendencies, which is about this personality framework that I came up with or that I

discovered that divides all of people into four categories.

One of the reasons that I understood is I kept noticing that people would say this following thing: “I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. If something’s important to me, I’ll do it right away. I

won’t wait for January first because January first is an arbitrary date.” It was like they’d all read that off some sheet and I’m like, “That’s so interesting because the arbitrariness of January first

doesn’t bother me.” But for these people, that was like a deal breaker. They hated that.

For me, hearing what people say, hearing their experiences, hearing their questions, their observations, how they take an idea and apply it in their own life. I mean, I see things in such a

different context. You know, people talking about, “Oh you talk about this to make your marriage happier. Well this worked for me, this worked for me.” Well, that’s really valuable information for

me. So I think some writers with their subject, they’re not really getting that much from it, I benefit enormously in terms of my own work.

So for me, it’s like, it’s so valuable. Personally, I don’t struggle with that. I’m like, I totally think it’s

worthwhile for me and I enjoy it. But you're right, it’s a new thing for writers. One thing I would say to somebody, if you’re in that situation, because a lot of people will say to me, kind of like

criticizing me back hand, they’d be like, “Oh well you know, I can’t do that because I can’t just brag on myself all the time or I just can’t self-promote all the time.” I will say, “One of the most

satisfying things about it is not the self-promotion but the opportunity to shine a spotlight on someone who’s work you value.”

I mean, like you have your podcast, it’s like, you can say like, “This is great.” I got obsessed with

this book A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Oseki. This novel that I think, I was just like, “This is such a great novel.” If you look at my blog, I’ve talked about this book like five times because


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I’m like, “You should go read A Tale for the Time Being, it’s such a great novel.” You don’t have

to talk about yourself all the time. You shouldn’t talk about yourself all the time. Talk about other people’s stuff.

[0:17:18.1] LC: Yeah, that’s such a good point.

[0:17:19.8] GR: Talk about interesting ideas or things that catch your attention or counter

intuitive principles or something. Shine a spotlight in other people. Then people are like, “Oh, this person has like cool ideas and is a trusted resource. I want to learn more about where

they’re coming from.” It feels good.

[0:17:35.9] LC: Yeah, it’s so funny, you’re making me think like I was obsessed with Krishnamurti for a little while and I was like, “I’ve written like four blog post on this, this is crazy.”

Yeah, it’s like, you can share what you’ve taken the time to — I’m kind of your opposite, I don’t read on masse like that.

I take like a very small book like, you know, where each sentence is painful to read and I just

percolate and think about it for half a year.

[0:17:58.9] GR: There you go.

[0:17:59.7] LC: I get obsessed with it. I love that. So your latest book, Better Than Before, it’s all about habits right? I was so excited to talk about this because in authenticity and all the work

I’ve done, I’ve thought about habits, BJ Fog, Power of Habit, all this stuff is out there. You know, I want to get to it in a minute with these tendencies, but why habits? What got you to think about

it and, you know, why this particular book?

[0:18:25.1] GR: You know what? I’ve been talking to people about happiness for years and I’ve been researching it relentlessly and what I realized is that a lot of times, people often know how

they could be happier, it’s not like it’s a big mystery to them. They’d like, “I would be happier if I exercised, I would be happier if I quit sugar, I would be happier if I wrote that novel in my free

time, I would be happier if I got more sleep.” And my sister’s kids, “I would be happier if I quit Candy Crush.” Why can’t I? Why don’t I? What’s the deal?


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I realized what it was, it was a problem of habit formation, that very often these were habits that people wanted to form, the habits would make them happier, the research was there and they

knew it themselves. Yet they were unable to form a habit and so I became very drawn to understanding the role that habits can play in helping us be happier, healthier, more creative,

more productive. I got drawn in to it but then okay, what I found, which to my surprise, what I say is truly revolutionary but it sounds, it’s so obvious that nobody even notices that it’s

revolutionary because when I say it, you’re like, “Well of course that’s true.”

By the way, nobody else says this. If you look at almost all of the habit experts out there, they’re like, “This is the answer. I’m going to tell you what to do, you’re going to start small, you’re going

to give yourself a cheat day, you’re going to do it for 30 days. You’re going to do it first thing in the morning,” and I am here to tell you, “Maybe, maybe not?” Because there is no one magic

one size fits all solution.

To this idea of authenticity, with habit formation, this is crucial. You have to do it in the way that’s right for you because you Laura could be a night person and I’m a morning person. Or you

Laura could be a moderator and I’m an abstainer. Or you could be a finisher and I’m an opener. Or you might be an abundant lover and I’m a simplicity lover.

The way you set up your running habit or you’re writing your novel habit or whatever, it might be

completely different from the way that would work for me. Not because you’re right and I’m wrong, or I’m right and you’re wrong. But because we’re different. There are a million ways to

set this habits up. Very often, people are like, “I should be able to do it this way. This way worked for my sister in law. if I can’t do it this way, I’m lazy, I have no will power. Okay so fine,

I’m giving up.”

[0:20:27.2] LC: Oh my god, Gretchen, can we just put in an “Amen”? Because I coach people on this and people want to feel more authentic, which is also another way of saying they want to

feel better, happier but habits comes up right? There’s a mindset out there and I’m so glad, I’m going to start literally giving your book out to everybody because…

[0:20:47.0] GR: Excellent.


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[0:20:50.6] LC: I felt this instinct like I hear people saying it over and over, “I should get up at five in the morning, I should meditate, I should do transcendental mediation two times a day,”

and I’m like, I kept thinking, “Why?” I’m a certain way, it works for me, I am an abstainer, thank you for explaining that to me.

I had a health issue, I was able to go off sugar grains and dairy for five years without a problem

just because it was like an all or nothing mindset. If you totally lose five pounds just because, I can’t do it. Knowing that there are these differences and you’ve put language around them, I

think this is brilliant because there are so many ideas out there, BJ Fog, “just anchor it to something small”. This doesn’t work for me.

[0:21:31.2] GR: I know, because for a lot of people, a lot of people start in small works, it’s like

this little accomplishments, you make room for it. But a lot of people, they just lose interest. They want something big and bold, that’s what’s going to excite them, that’s what’s going to

keep them going and like incremental change, they’re just like, “This is not even worth fussing with.”

[0:21:47.9] LC: Totally, my hands up in the air, I don’t care.

[0:21:54.0] GR: Yeah, it’s like, they’re both right. It’s whatever works for you and to say, “If this

is important to you, you should be able to do this.” It’s like, “Well, there’s a lot of ways I could achieve that aim. I don’t think I should,” — okay, so I’m an abstainer. I don’t eat carbs basically

except for nuts and vegetables. So I don’t eat sugar.

People will often say to me, “You should be able to have a brownie. You’re too rich, you should be able to do this.” I’m like, “Not eating brownies makes me so much happier than eating

brownies ever did. So why should I?” People will literally tell me it’s unhealthy. I’m like, “You can say many things and you can talk about your own experience, but you can’t tell me that I would

be healthier if I ate brownies.”

This is not the case but there’s this feeling like there’s a right way and a wrong way. You’re the one who has to get with the program. What I found is, and maybe you’ve seen this too, a lot of


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times, when people try and fail over and over and they get very discouraged and they feel like

failures I’m just lie, “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with you, you just set this up the whole wrong way.” I had a guy, a friend of mine, it’s such a night person. I’ve known him since college,

he is such a night person and he looked me in the eye and said, “My new year’s resolution is to get up early every day and go for a run.”

I’m like, “I’m sorry, have you met yourself? Because no you won’t. I’m just saying that right now,

I don’t want to be discouraging or fatalistic, but this is not going to work for you. You should go running at four.”

[0:23:17.5] LC: But Gretchen, why do we care if it works that way? Why do we care if we get it

done the way somebody else gets it done?

[0:23:23.8] GR: I think because people really want there to be one right way and you see somebody else has a success. You're like, “Oh my gosh, I see that this person I know wrote her

novel or she finished her PhD thesis in a year or, you know, you’re like, “That worked for her, therefore it will probably work for me.”

What I tried to do in Better Than Before is really just — you mentioned like having language. I

think a lot of times it’s that we don’t have language around things so it’s hard to talk about it. A way this comes up a lot in work is abundant lovers and simplicity lovers. You just think

whatever’s true for you is kind of universally true for everyone else. This is just sort of human nature.

So you’ll get a boss who walks around the office saying things like, “A cluttered desk is a

cluttered mind, and you need to have like one sheet of paper and that’s the way to do it and you’ve got too many icons on your desktop and you need to,” — and it’s like, I get that because

I’m a simplicity lover. That’s the way that I work.

But then there are abundance lovers and they like buzz and profusion and choices and stuff on the walls and things happening. It’s not the one way is right and one way is wrong, it’s just that

one way works for you and one way works for me. Now if we have to share a space, we may have to have that discussion. But it’s much easier to say like, “As a simplicity lover, I find all this


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stuff in this office very overwhelming. I’m wondering if we can dial it back?” That’s easier than

being like, “You can’t possibly have a clear thought, there’s junk everywhere, you need to get this out of here.” Because that’s also like pointing to successful people, there is an amazing

book by Mason Curry called Daily Rituals and he goes through the daily habits of like 300 people.

[0:24:51.3] LC: I love that book.

[0:24:52.8] GR: What you see is like, some people work all the time and some people hardly

work. Some people stay up all night, some people get up at dawn, some people you know, are drinking coffee all day, some people are drinking vodka all day. There’s a million ways. So what

is the answer? Find the way that works for you.

[0:25:08.5] LC: Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell did a great episode on his podcast about genius and there’s the geniuses that have a flash and it comes to them and in a week, they have this

Cézanne or somebody has a work for that we appreciate forever. Then there’s Hallelujah, that song and it went through several years of iterations, right? So that there’s no specific way to

really do this, you have to figure out what works for you.

I love it, I’m a simplicity person, I can’t stand clutter. My partner is an abundance person, every single wall is covered with something. If it was up to her, the entire house would be, right?

Finding that balance but not saying, “You’re wrong.”

Then, the deeper point, right? You can have success either way. You will find more success. Because that’s what people are looking for, they want the habits so that they can get the

success but they believe there’s a right way and they’re trying to find the prescription model but it’s more you're suggesting, figure out who you are than working within that framework.

[0:26:04.0] GR: Yes, here’s an interesting exercise if you’re trying to learn. I mean obviously, in

my book, I try to point out a ton of these things. One thing to do with yourself is to say, “Was there a time in my life when I had success with this habit? Maybe you want to cook more, was

there a time when you did cook more?


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Or you’re not making progress on your PhD thesis. Was there a time when you were making

progress on your PHD thesis? Because a lot of times like things change in ways that we don’t really recognize as being significant to a habit? So if you think back to a time when you were

successful, often there are clues there.

For instance, I talked to a woman who was like, “I hate cooking, I want to cook, I know it’s healthier, I know it’s more economical but I just hate to cook.” Then I was like, “Well, was there

ever a time in your life when you did cook?” She said, “Oh yeah, actually I lived in a group house in Washington DC and when I was there I cooked all the time.”

I said, “Well what was different?” We went through and she was like, “What about this? What

about this?” Then we realized what the difference was, was actually, she doesn’t mind cooking, she hated food shopping. She had a roommate who loved going to farmers markets and going

to a gourmet grocery store and like stopping off and picking something up.

They would say, “Like what do you want to make?” Her friend would do all the shopping and she got a big kick out of it and so then the woman I was talking to would cook. The question was not

how do I make myself cook, it’s like, how do I get food into my house without having to worry about it?

It’s like, she lived in New York City so she just got FreshDirect, which is like grocery delivery.

That’s an easy solution. She hadn’t even really understood what her problem was, which was if she didn’t like food shopping.

[0:27:36.5] LC: Right. But she probably thought she was lazy right? Or something’s wrong with

her.

[0:27:39.9] GR: Yeah. So there was this clue. The clue was, was there a time when you did cook? Or like with exercise, I have my personality framework and one of the things that I say is

that a very large group of people who I call obligers will do something if there’s a form of utter accountability but not if there’s just inter accountability.


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What you often see with obligers is if I say, “Well when did you successfully exercise?” It’s like,

“Well, when I was in high school, I was on the track team. I never missed track practice.” Well that’s because you had a team and a coach. “Or for years I had a neighbor and we would go

walking every morning with our dogs but then she moved away.” Well so you needed a partner.

“I had this amazing class where really was connected with the teacher and like if I didn’t show up, she would email me. But now, my teacher’s gone, I just have like this parade of characters

who like I don’t even know their names, they don’t know my name.” Okay, you’re not getting that accountability from the teacher. How do you fit in that other accountability? The clue is in the

past.

[0:28:32.9] LC: I love it.

[0:28:33.3] GR: When you were successful.

[0:28:34.8] LC: These are called your tendencies. By the way on the questioner.

[0:28:37.3] GR: I knew you were. As I can tell.

[0:28:41.1] LC: This was really enlightening because I’d love you to walk through these four tendencies, but your point about figuring out what specifically works for you and this other ways

but then also, I haven’t been doing as much yoga and it turned out that I have to have a deep reason. When you wrote that, I’m like, “Oh my god, that’s what it was.” It really was a huge

breakthrough for me.” So could you walk everybody through these four different tendencies?

[0:29:06.8] GR: So this is what my book in September is coming out, it’s called The Four Tendencies, it’s about this. Most people can tell that they are from a brief description, which I will

give but there is a quiz. If you go to happiercast.com/quiz you can take an online quiz and it will give you an answer but most people what they are pretty quick. So this has to do with how you

deal with expectations, how you respond to expectations and we all face two kinds of expectations.


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Outer expectations, which is like a work deadline or a request from a spouse and then there are

inner expectations like, “I’m interested in maybe switching careers, or I want to keep my New Year’s resolution, or I want to start meditating in the morning.” That’s my own inner expectation.

So there’s upholders, questioners, obligers and rebels. Upholders readily mean outer and inner expectations. They meet the work deadline, they keep their New Year’s resolution without much

fuss. They want to know what is expected of them but their expectations for themselves are just as important.

The next is questioners, which is what you are. Questioners question all expectations. They’ll do

something if they think it makes sense. They hate anything arbitrary, inefficient, or irrational. Like remember I was talking about the people who didn’t like the arbitrariness of January first, that’s

a big tip off of questioners. If you hear the word arbitrary that is big, big, big flashing sign…

[0:30:15.1] LC: Yep, it’s huge.

[0:30:16.0] GR: …that is a questioner. They really don’t like things to be arbitrary. Things like speed limits, “how many garments could I take in the dressing room?” Often it will make a

questioner crazy.

[0:30:23.8] LC: Totally, I’m like, “Did we meet before?” Because.

[0:30:26.9] GR: Yeah, it’s a very consistent pattern. So questioners, they can do anything they decide makes sense and so in a way they make everything an inner expectation because the

fact that you want me to do this doesn’t matter. “If I don’t think it’s a good idea, I’m not going to do it,” and questioners even sometimes questioners can get analysis paralysis because they

want to have more, more, more information before they act and sometimes you just have to act without perfect information, or the world isn’t going to give you perfect information.

Then there are obligors. Obligors readily meet outer expectations. This was the group I was

talking about before. They readily meet outer expectations but they struggle to meet inner expectations. So they will meet the work deadline, they will meet the request of the spouse but

when it’s just their inner expectation when, “Oh I want to start meditating. I want to start running,” they struggle. This is the largest group. Questioners and obligors are the two biggest


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groups and obligors is the largest group of all. So you probably are an obligor, or you have a lot

of obligor in your life.

Obligors are the rock of the world. They are the people who will come through for you but they often are very frustrated with themselves because they often don’t understand they need this

outer accountability so they are trying to rely on. They’re like, “Oh I lack motivation,” or, “Why can’t I put myself first,” or, “I’m never the priority.” That’s just psychologically — you are just

trying to explain the pattern. The pattern is you need outer accountability. Plug that in and I promise your problem will vanish.

[0:31:46.2] LC: So for them like getting a coach, if they want to exercise they should just pay for

that coach, they’ve got to get that.

[0:31:52.0] GR: A hundred percent. I actually have an app called The Better App, which is all about the four tendencies and one of the things that a lot of people do is that they’re obligors

who want to form groups with other obligors for something like writing a PhD thesis or working on a garden or learning a language where they need an accountability of a group. A coach is a

great thing, a teacher, thinking about your own duty as a role model for other people.

There’s a million ways to do it once you realize that’s what you need because a lot of times obligors don’t understand that’s what they need and so it’s like this giant revelation to them to

understand looking back on their past, “Why didn’t I exercise then and not then?” Or, “Why can I come through for other people and not for myself?” It’s like there’s something wrong with it. This

is a very striking pattern.

And then Rebels; rebels resist all expectations outer and inner alike. They want to do what they want to do, when they want to do it, in their own way. If you ask or tell them to do something

they’re very likely to resist and so this is the smallest tendency but it’s a very conspicuous tendency and on a side note, usually when rebels pair up either in work or in romance they

almost or always paired with obligors. That’s the common pattern of a rebel.

There aren’t many rebels and obligors hook up the best with everybody of the four tendencies. They are like the Type O, which is fitting, that’s part of the pattern and so with rebels when you


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are dealing with a rebel or you are a rebel, I hear from tons of rebels who are trying to

understand, if you’re a rebel who resists telling yourself what to do how do you form a habit? It’s like a special problem.

[0:33:16.7] LC: Right because they resist outer…

[0:33:17.4] GR: That’s epic love. They can’t put anything on the calendar, they can’t be

expected to do something so what do they do? I spent a lot of time researching that and talking to rebels about how they manage it and rebels have all kinds of ingenious solutions about how

to manage their rebel tendency and their spirit of resistance.

[0:33:36.0] LC: What’s one example of some way to get a rebel to motivate?

[0:33:40.3] GR: Okay, well one thing that is important to remember is that rebels can do anything they want to do. If they want to do it, they can do it. So if I want to be the big influential

force at work and I know that in order to do that I’m going to have to go to the 10 AM staff meeting every Monday even though I hate having to do it, I can do it because I want to be big

and successful. So I talked to a rebel who works for Facebook and I was like, “Wow, it seems a bit hard for a rebel to work at Facebook.”

And he said, “But you know what? I want to start my own company so they’re teaching me

everything I need to learn.” So it’s like, you’re working for me. So in his mind, he had made that flip but they can do anything they want to do. You will always find a rebel who can do things that

you’re like, “Wow I never thought a rebel could do that,” because that’s what they want but they are tricks that I use. Typically for rebels something like a to-do list doesn’t work because the

minute something is on the to-do list they don’t want to do it.

A rebel said she had a could do list, it’s not what I should do, it’s what I could do. I could do that if I felt like that, it’s like I’m just writing this down to remind myself. Or somebody said sometimes

they will turn things into a game. Like somebody said she wrote them in slips of paper and put them in a jar and then she would pull one out randomly, it’s like, “Ooh what am I going to do?

Like this?” and so it was like a game. Several rebels, this is really surprising to me, this is deep rebel.


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They will pretend to be a different person like I don’t know why this appeals to rebels but they will be like, “I pretend to be a paid house cleaner. I don’t know these people. They are paying

me to clean their house. I am acting out a role. There’s this playfulness of I’m acting out.”

[0:35:05.9] LC: How strange.

[0:35:07.0] GR: Yeah and so it’s not that rebels can’t be hugely successful because there are many rebels who are hugely successful, but they have to find a way to do it within that tendency

and understanding. A lot of times they work for themselves, a lot of times they are attracted to jobs where every day was different. Like somebody was saying that she worked in the

restaurant industry and so every day she would drive to a different restaurant.

So it was new people, she could go where she felt like. “I feel like I’m driving a long time, I feel like driving a short time.” Like, “Oh I want to go see these,” — she had a lot of freedom and a lot

of spontaneity and no one looking over her shoulder because she was off on her own. So she liked that aspect of her job very much.

[0:35:46.3] LC: So can a type change? Can somebody ever, like an obligator become a

questioner or is it really fixed?

[0:35:56.0] GR: I really do think that these are genetically hardwired that we come into the world with them, especially with the extreme personality types, the upholder and the rebel which

are the extreme personality types. They’re visible very early, and so I don’t think that you do change. I don’t think you change overtime. I don’t think you’re one at work and one at home but

what I do think is that with time and experience, we learn to manage the downsides of our tendency and to take advantage of the upsides.

So if you don’t like an aspect of your tendency like a lot of times obligors don’t like the aspect

that they need outer accountability, they’re just like, “Just deal with it. Just build in that outer accountability, build in that architecture and then it becomes invisible and then you’re just doing

whatever you want. It’s no big deal.” Or like I’m an upholder, which is a very small tendency and one of the problems of being an upholder is you’re really, really good at doing stuff.


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They’re really good at execution because they can do what you want them to do and they can do what they want them to do and so I’ve learned that I need to be a questioner. I am married to

a questioner and I really learned from him and sometimes I will literally ask him. “Do I have to do this? Should I do this?” Because it’s too easy for me to be like, “Yes, I can do. I will do that and

here I am. I am halfway through doing that.”

And I have learned from him to take a step back and say, “Should I do that, do I want to do that? Does that need to be done at all? Maybe somebody else should be doing that.” For him it

comes naturally, for me it always takes a second to remind myself to question. Don’t do it automatically, question.

[0:37:20.7] LC: Again, it’s really understanding who you really are and making peace with that

but then recognizing there’s the shadow side to these things and to not judge it or criticize it but to actually just deal with it in productive ways.

[0:37:34.0] GR: And I feel bad because sometimes people will say, “I don’t think I should be

this. I should be this other thing. How do I become that?” I’m like, “You know you get what you get and you don’t get upset. Just deal with what you are.” All of these include hugely successful

people and also big losers. There’s no magic to being one, and they all have their upsides but they all have their downsides and so you need to learn how to just manage that.

And also, to your point about authenticity, it’s very important not to get in the way of other

people. Because again, back to that idea of sometimes we just try to make other people do things the way that would work for us. I remember I was speaking to a woman, I was speaking

about the four tendencies and this woman came up to me afterwards and she said, “Oh I’m going to do something differently because of what you said.”

I said, “What is that?” And she said, “Well my son wants to go to graduate school and he keeps

telling me, “Hey mom I need to take the class to study for the GRE,” which is the big test that you take to get into graduate school and I keep saying to him, “No, no honey if it’s important for

you to do well in the GRE you can just buy a book and study on your own.” Now I realized he’s an obligor and he needs the class,” and I was like, “A 100%”.


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If somebody is saying to you, “I need accountability,” don’t insist to them that they don’t. She is either a questioner or an upholder who says that, “You don’t need that.” I studied for the bar on

my own, which is pretty hard core. At the time I didn’t think anything of it and now most people can’t do that and in fact almost everybody that I knew took a course, like went into a classroom

and took a course and I was like, “Why would I bother to go into a classroom?” That’s just going to take more time.

But its like, don’t get in other people’s way. If they say they need something or something is not

working for them, say, “Okay given what we know about what works for you, how do we set things up for you to succeed?” Or given what I know about myself, this is what I’ve succeeded in

the past, how can I learn from that? Not tell myself I should be different.

[0:39:23.5] LC: I love it. So basically the big message is don’t get in other people’s way because that’s who they are and it’s finding systems that work for you that all of us can be really

successful if we understand how to manage basically the temperament that we come with and don’t get in your own way, right? Because I can start being arbitrary because I am a questioner,

“Why am I not doing this? I did it before.” Well because I don’t have a compelling reason right now that’s why I am not doing it, right?

That is really enlightening to hear you talk about it that way and it’s like, “Oh I just need a

compelling reason,” and then I’ll be off to the races. Or some days just forget it, you know? You don’t have a great reason just get it done because there’s no time to really think about this one.

[0:40:02.4] GR: Well and one of the things for questioners, which is very poignant is that they’re

often really struggle in school because they’re ask to do something that they think is arbitrary and a big waste of their time so they don’t do it, and so like a guy who came up to me and said,

“I don’t understand my son. He’s super smart, he does really well on the test but he refuses to do the homework,” and I was like, “Why doesn’t he do the homework?”

And he said, “He says it’s stupid and he said why should I write a book report when they know I

read the book?” And I’m like, “You’ve got a questioner kid and somebody needs to explain to him why he’s doing that.” If he understands the academic value of it, then he’ll do it. Or you


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need to say to him, “I get you man, this is a big waste of your time but if you want to go to the

high school that you want to, you’re going to need to show them that you’re going to do the homework. So even if you think it’s stupid, you want to do it because you want to earn the

respect of your teachers because that’s going to give you more choices than let you know what you want.”

It’s not the first order, which is unlearning. It’s the second order of like, “I need to do something

in order to get something else that is important to me,” which questioners will accept but with more difficulty. But nobody is telling these children, “This is why I am making you do this.” But

the kid says to you, “Why do I have to learn Mesopotamia?” You should tell them. Why should they learn about it? They are literally asking you, why should I learn about that? There is an

answer to that.

It’s like, “You’re not just learning about that, you're learning how to analyze, you’re learning how to paraphrase, you’re learning how to pick out the important words in a text. You’re learning

about how to put things into historical context. These are skills that will serve you throughout your life, on top of learning about Mesopotamia. There’s much more to this assignment than just

what was the irrigation system used in Mesopotamia? Then they’re satisfied, then they get it.

[0:41:40.2] LC: Right. Because it pulls it out of the arbitrary and it answers that question and I swear to god, it’s like you’re literally like — you guys, if you haven’t gone over the quiz, check it

out because I feel like you’re literally describing me to a T. I hated school. If I have a reason then I’m totally — I actually hated school so much and then I drove my brother to college and I

was like, “Oh my god, there is a point to all of this.”

It really hit me like a ton of bricks, I came back and I got straight A’s and I went bananas, right? I just needed that bigger point. You know, if you’re hanging out with an upholder or an obligator

and you’re a questioner then they will think you’re crazy. It depends on what your parents are probably in depth, all this plays out in your homes.

[0:42:19.8] GR: It does, it matters a lot like how much you understand. People struggle with

rebels a lot because it can be very difficult to be with somebody who if you ask them to do something won’t do it. Many rebels have said to me, “I have a rebel child and I’m really glad that


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I’m a rebel because I don’t think I would know how to be a parent to a rebel if I didn’t understand

from the inside how they feel.”

I do think that you can be a very effective parent to a rebel even if you’re not a rebel, once you understand like how to speak to them in a way. Even something like, “Now, tell aunt Jane what a

nice time you had.” You might think that’s just a way of saying that. That’s actually telling somebody what to do and they might just feel like, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

Not because they want to be rude to Aunt Jane, not because they didn’t have a good time but

just because they’re not going to do it because you told them to. Maybe they were going to tell aunt Jane they had a good time anyway because their child was naturally polite but when you

tell them to do it then they’re going to resist. It’s interesting, once you see the tendencies, you see how you might be pushing people’s buttons, for good or for ill, without meaning to. There’s

little things that you can do.

[0:43:21.2] LC: Back to this broader point. Because they’re so much judgment that if you’re not doing it a specific way, you’re lazy or you’re this or so many judgments that we cast. You now

have this podcast, Happier. By the way, I’ve been in family business for 15 years, having fun working with your sister. Is that a…

[0:43:39.4] GR: Oh my gosh, it’s so fun, it’s like the greatest.

[0:43:42.1] LC: Yeah, what was the thought behind the podcast?

[0:43:45.3] GR: You know, it’s funny because if you look at my books, The Happiness Project,

and Happier At Home, it’s clear that like one of the big kind of unresolved aims of my life is to spend more time with my sister. I lived in New York, she lives in LA, so it’s hard for us to see

each other. There’s a big time difference, which matters when you’re like trying to call or text or whatever.

She’s got this big writing job in Hollywood. So her time is very intense and kind of irregular and I

have my own stuff. When I had this idea of having a podcast about how to be happier, I thought, “Oh my gosh, what would really be great is if I could do it with my sister.”


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[0:44:16.0] LC: That’s awesome.

[0:44:16.9] GR: Because we’ve always wanted to collaborate and this would be great. One of the things that’s nice is Elizabeth’s very different from me. It’s clear that we are so close and we

love each other, but we definitely have different personalities and so I think it’s good because you can hear how somebody might agree or disagree or struggle with something. Maybe

Elizabeth, it’s something that comes easily for Elizabeth but it’s harder for me or vice versa, and it’s just so much fun. It is just a joy to do it.

[0:44:44.0] LC: Yet again, it’s just doing phenomenally well. I’m in your space. You’re sort of at

the top five at every moments. If you guys haven’t checked out Happier, go check it out.

So Gretchen, I ask everybody this question and you’ve been studying habits and happiness for quite a while. What then does an authentic life mean to you?

[0:45:01.3] GR: I think that is really at the core, I think that you’ve put your finger on something

that’s just absolutely crucial, which is that we can really have a happy life only when it’s based on our own values, our own interests, our own temperament. So as part of the Happiness

Project book, I developed my 12 personal commandments, which is a super fun exercise, which is to try to really think of the high level aims and values of your life and really distill them into

kind of punchy phrases.

The number one personal commandment is to be Gretchen. Of course, everybody has to substitute their own name but it’s this idea that everything comes down to what is true for me.

You think like, “What could be easier than knowing yourself? You just hang out with yourself all day long.” It is hard, it is really hard. It’s something that takes constant examination. Here’s a

good tip — two good tips I have about knowing yourself because it’s so hard, right? It’s not so easy. Oh, be authentic. You’re like, “That will come naturally.”

[0:46:00.2] LC: I swear to god I was like, “Oh I’m just going to do this in a minute.” Carl Jung

says it’s a privilege of a lifetime to find out who you really are, right?


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[0:46:06.5] GR: 100% yeah. Because you're so distracted by who you wish you were or who

other people want you to be. Two questions I think are really helpful is to say like, what did you like to do when you were 10 years old? Because one thing I see in happiness is a lot of people,

I’m like, “You should have fun, you should give yourself treats,” and they’re like, “I don’t know how to have fun.”

I’m like, “There’s fun for the whole family,” and I’m like, “But that might not be so fun for you.

Give yourself a happy treat.” I don’t know what a healthy treat is. If it’s not a glass of wine, what would it be?

What did you do for fun when you were 10 years old, whether that was like walking in the woods

with your dog, or going fishing, or making arts and crafts, or coloring? That’s often a clue for something that you would enjoy in the present or that you can tap into as an adult.

The other one, and this is very uncomfortable question but it’s super helpful, is to say, “Whom

do you envy?” Because we don’t like to feel envy, we often deny that we feel envious of people but it’s a huge flashing sign that somebody has something that you wish you had. That can be

really helpful.

I remember talking to a friend of mine who said, she was really saying kind of mean things about this coworker like, “You know, all she does is talk about her trips, she’s just come back

from a trip, she’s going off to a trip, she’s planning her trip.” I was like, “You sound like you really envy her.”

My friend was like, “No I don’t!” Then she was like, “You know what? Yes I do. I love to travel

and I haven’t been on a trip in like two years,” and nothing was stopping her. She had exactly the same job, this one woman was just doing it. This coworker was just doing it and she had

nothing stopping her other than just kind of the inertia of life and she didn’t have kids, she had plenty of money.

[0:47:37.6] LC: Yup.


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[0:47:39.5] GR: It’s like that envy was really helpful, you know? It was like a giant arrow pointing

to something but we don’t like feeling envy. It’s so painful.

[0:47:48.7] LC: Well, we’re taught when we’re little right? “Don’t worry about what Joey’s doing, focus on yourself.” It’s like, I love that idea. It’s like, “Wait but if there’s something that I’m

looking at that I admire or envy, it’s like, what is that? Can I try to capture it instead of just feeling bad about myself?”

[0:48:03.3] GR: What can I learn from it? What can I learn for myself? If this looks really great. I

envy the fact that this person gets to do lots of presentations in a job? Well it turns out I’m a real ham and I would love to get in front of an audience and perform and talk. A lot of people don’t

want to do that.

But if that sounds like fun to you, it’s like well, probably, you could find this opportunities if you were like, you know what? This person is doing this and I feel like I’d like to do that. That would

be fun.

[0:48:28.3] LC: That’s awesome. This is something I’ve been thinking about lately and I just wanted to ask you, can you be happy if you're inauthentic? If you, number one…

[0:48:37.9] GR: Such a good question, right?

[0:48:40.2] LC: If you fail to be Gretchen for a day right? You’re just inauthentic for the day, are

you able to have happiness?

[0:48:46.7] GR: For a day? Yes. But what if I’m a doctor because both my parents were doctors and I was really good at science as a kid and everybody was like, “You should be a doctor.” So I

became a doctor and now I’m a doctor and I’ve been a doctor for 10 years. But I would really rather be doing something else. I don’t know. I think for some people it would be very difficult

and maybe explosive. You know, they wouldn’t be able to sustain it and then for other people, I don’t know. In others situations.


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Sometimes you do something that is not important to you because it’s not important to you

because it’s important to somebody else. My family was arguing about whether to get a dog and I was the hold out, I was like, “I don’t want the inconvenience of a dog and I got a dog because it

was really important to everybody else,” and now I love having a dog. So I’m glad I did it.

Even if I didn’t, I know people who really don’t like having a dog but they do it because it’s important to somebody else. So sometimes that’s part of love but getting a dog is different from

being a doctor for your whole life or, you know, this comes up sometimes with where you live. It’s sometimes hard, you can’t compromise.

It’s like you want to live in Los Angeles, I want to live in New York, it’s not like we can live in

Chicago and both be happy. It’s like, that’s a hard situation to manage, if you're just like, “The thing is, I just,” — I mean, it’s hard. There are things where it’s, to your point of it, I think the

more articulate you are and the more you’re explicate about your tradeoffs, the more at peace you can be.

It’s when you’re in denial about it. I could be happy anywhere. It’s like, “What?” Because, I

mean, I think it’s always surface these things. Be conscious of them because then you can think them through. It’s when they are subterranean you know and unacknowledged or even like

shamefully denied then they — well Carl Jung has a great thing about whatever you deny comes back. Comes right back you, right? Except he says in this beautiful Carl Jung way, which

is basically like, that stuff that you repress is going to come out.

[0:50:35.1] LC: What I hear you saying is if you’re clear about what matters to you and you prioritize it, sometimes you can give up on some of it if it’s in the name of family or love but you

kind of have to watch where that line is.

[0:50:47.5] GR: Well, because sometimes we want things that are incompatible. You can’t both have a clean, comfortable tidy house and come home and flop down on the sofa every night

after work. They both have value, they’re both good, but they’re kind of incompatible. But when you are articulating what it is that you want, you know, sometimes people make a false choice.


AOA Transcript

Well I can have a life of financial security and stability. Or I can live a life of true passion where

I’m following my dreams and doing what I really enjoy. It’s like, “Well, you know, is it really a life of sterility and boredom and financial security or a life of cheap job. Maybe there’s a way to

have a little bit of both?

[0:51:30.3] LC: Right.

[0:51:30.9] GR: I think sometimes we don’t want to admit that we want to force a choice by pretending like there’s only two things to choose from. Usually the world is complicated but

that’s painful to think about.

[0:51:41.1] LC: It is painful and that there’s more compromise than just you know, I set out to find authenticity and I was like, “When I get there, it will be like a beach vacation.” It’s like, “No.”

I love what I do now and it’s like deep passion but you know, there’s still a lot of things I don’t want do and it’s a tradeoff. There are a lot of compromises you still have to make and so it’s not

about just being in a bliss state all the time.

[0:52:03.0] GR: Also, I think the thing about authenticity is that, it can be very sad. Because I think to admit who you are is to admit all the things that you are not. Sometimes that makes you

feel sad. I remember, I wrote a blog post about this and I said something like, “It makes me sad that I never want to go to a jazz club at midnight.”

Somebody wrote on my blog, “Oh, Gretch, you live in New York City, you could totally go to a

jazz club at midnight.” I’m like, “That’s what makes me sad. I could literally go to a jazz club at midnight every single night of my life. What makes me sad is that I don’t want to go. I wish I

wanted to go but I don’t want to go. I wish I loved food. People get so much fun out of food. I’m not interested in food. I don’t really like music, not only jazz. I mean, I like a song here and there

but I’m just not passionate about music. I see how much pleasure people get out of it.

It’s sad because you have to admit that you have limitations and that you have your faults that you were going to fight over. It’s funny because on the podcast, Elizabeth and I talk about

demerits like when we give ourselves a demerit for making a happiness fail and we’ve been


AOA Transcript

doing it for two years and what’s happening is that you’re starting to see demerits come up

multiple times.

Because we’re just messing up in the same way, it’s like, “Here I am, losing my temper, flying off the handle for no good reason, again.” That’s what I have to worry about, that’s like what I

constantly am trying to manage, which is my tendency to do that.

[0:53:19.1] LC: So it’s really about self-acceptance?

[0:53:21.4] GR: Yes. I think it is. I think it really — and the fact is, accepting yourself doesn’t mean, you can accept yourself and expect more from yourself. I don’t think accepting yourself

implies complacency or that there’s no place to grow. I think what it means is just saying like, “I’m not going to fundamentally be a different person.”

I did an interview with a very well-known science writer and health writer, a reporter. She said to

me, well, she had struggled a lot with exercise and wanting to exercise more and I was talking about this and that and the other thing and trying to kind of, what I would think she would do.

And she goes, “But the thing is, Gretchen, I don’t want to do that. I want to be the kind of person who like loves to get up and go for an hour run, or who really like lovers to train for the marathon

or go on this long bike rides.” I’m just like, “You’re not that person. That is not, no, that is like…”

[0:54:08.4] LC: I love this.

[0:54:09.9] GR: “You’re not that person. So find a way to achieve your aim in a way that’s consistent with like the basic boundaries of your personality and a fantasy of 100%

transformation is just like, is just going to lead you to disappointment.” Then you’re not doing anything because you’re like, “Well, you know, one day I’m going to wake up and be that

person.” It’s like, well, unlikely you know?

Back to the tendencies, somebody was like, was married to a man, “Well I’ve been married to him for 15 years and I really have a problem with you suggesting that he’s not going to change

because I really think like one day a person grows up and realizes that an adult can’t live their life that way just doing what they want all the time.”


AOA Transcript

I’m like, “Well I hate to be the one to break it to you, he’s a grown up. You’ve been married to him for 15 years. No, I don’t think he’s,” — adults can’t live that way and they do live that way

and that is your husband and he’s not going to outgrow it one day. This is who he is. He could learn, it’s not like he can’t grow.

But to say like one day he’s going to be like, “You know what honey? I realize I’ve really been

neglecting my adult responsibilities, I’m just going to turn over a new leaf and be a completely different kind of person.” I’m like, “I’ve never seen that happen.”

[0:55:17.6] LC: Right. I mean, Gretchen, I love it, I love the messages, it’s just one big be

yourself and let go of the judgment, you know? Just own it and figure out. I’ve been thinking about this new project lately called The Manual of Me, like what if we were born with a manual

that told us, “These are my tendencies. This is who I am.”

Once you kind of know that if we think of cars, this car needs to get out of the highway and drive certain miles, this one doesn’t, right? You kind of deal with what you have and doesn’t mean that

there’s necessary limitations but there’s definite, you know, situations where a truck is more helpful than that Ferrari but everybody’s like, I also want to be like 5’11” but I’m 5’4”.

[0:56:03.8] GR: One of the things I always say is like treat yourself like a toddler. “Gretchen

can’t take the cold so she can’t be out too long. Gretchen gets really crabby when she hasn’t eating. She can’t eat dinner too late, you know? Again, “What’s the manual with me?” Yes, I love

that idea. I want to fill out the manual with me.

[0:56:21.6] LC: Awesome, I hear a collaboration in our future. Yeah, I was just thinking like, what if you — what were your interest, what were your hobbies, I have blue eyes, I have blonde

hair, I’m a certain height and then you just keep going, your interests and then to your point, I think it’s not a small idea to say, “You know, I wish I loved traveling around the world, I think

people who stay there are super adventurous on that way sounds amazing. I just don’t like it, you know?”

[0:56:44.7] GR: Me either.


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[0:56:46.0] LC: You just owning this things and you know, big events like conference events and hotels. I feel like I’m going to die in those things, I can’t stand them. You know, just being

more honest with yourself that this is how it is. As an author, one of the big things is to get out there and do lectures, it’s not my favorite medium, right? It’s a lot easier if you can ratchet off,

accept the parts that you do like and focus on those more.

[0:57:11.0] GR: Yeah, absolutely. Know yourself. It’s the oldest advice in the world. Temple of Apollo at Delphi, know thyself and we’re still talking about it because it’s true.

[0:57:23.0] LC: It’s true. Well, Gretchen, thank you so much, so much incredible information.

For anybody out there looking to follow up, you can jump on Gretchen Rubin’s website, gretchenrubin.com. She’s got the quiz, it definitely takes a couple of minutes. You guys should

all take it. Links to her books are on there, they will also be on my website, thank you again for coming on today’s show.

[0:57:43.7] GR: Thank you, it was so fun to talk to you.

[END]


http://gretchenrubin.com

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