Gretchen Rubin

First Draft Episode #279: Gretchen Rubin

November 19, 2020

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Gretchen Rubin is the New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project, Better Than Before, and more, co-host of the Happier podcast, and creator of the Four Tendencies framework.

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Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week, I'm talking to Gretchen Rubin, the New York Times bestselling author of many non-fiction books, including The Happiness Project, and Better Than Before. And co-host of the Happier Podcast and creator of The Four Tendencies framework, which is also a best-selling book. I'm a huge fan of Gretchen's work, so this interview was a real thrill for me.

I loved what Gretchen had to say about her history of indulging in research about things that she finds fascinating, the difficulty of learning the right lesson from success or failure. The unique non-fiction genre of reported memoir that she finds herself in, and how The Four Tendencies translate to the challenges that writers face. Gretchen shares a ton of really practical, useful advice, so you definitely want to hear what she has to say in this episode.

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Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Gretchen Rubin.

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Sarah Enni:  Okay. Hi, Gretchen. How are you?

Gretchen Rubin:  I'm great. I'm so happy to be talking to you today.

Sarah Enni:  So excited. I'm really thrilled to chat with you. You'll see how big of a fan I am of your work as we go.

Gretchen Rubin:  Good! Excellent.

Sarah Enni:  But I want to start at the beginning. So I'd love to hear about where you were born and raised.

Gretchen Rubin:  I was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. So I grew up in the Midwest.

Sarah Enni:  And how was reading and writing a part of growing up for you?

Gretchen Rubin:  Well, I was not one of these people who constantly thought of herself as a writer, but I was a reader. And so I read all the time. I went to the library all the time. I was a huge reader. It's always been a major, major focus of my life.

Sarah Enni:  And I think you talked in your book about quotes and that that's always been. So kind of always, in some ways, been reading for research?

Gretchen Rubin:  For quotations, it was more just something that I admired. I didn't think of it so much as research. But yeah, I've been collecting those since I was like eight or 10 years old. So it's fun to see that. Now I have this Moment of Happiness newsletter where I send out a quotation every day. And it's so fun to have something. If you love quotations, you want to put them out into the world. And so I love being able to put them out into the world. And it is also funny to see that I'm doing, as an adult, a version of what I did as an eight year old.

Sarah Enni:  Which you encourage people to think about in your books. And I have also found it enormously gratifying to look back. I would take a tape recorder, put two cassettes in it, where you could tape over one, so then you could record yourself talking. And I would pretend like I was hosting a radio show.

Gretchen Rubin:  Isn't that funny? There you go! Yes, and The Happiness lesson is if you don't know what to do for fun or for work, think what did I do for fun when I was 10 years old? Because what we did for fun when we were 10 is probably something that we would enjoy now. And you and I are both doing versions of what we enjoyed then.

Sarah Enni:  That's so funny. What about writing? I'm so interested in your process of coming to being a writer.

Gretchen Rubin:  Nowadays, there's a lot of emphasis and study of what you would call creative non-fiction. But back in the day, for me, I really felt like I either needed to be a novelist, or a playwright, or a poet. Or I needed to be a journalist, or I needed to be an academic writer, somebody who is writing a PhD thesis. And I didn't want to do any of those things. And so I really didn't see a place for myself in the writing world.

And so I went to law school and I was just sort of proceeding. I didn't think of myself as having a writing career, but I did everything a person would do. I have to say, looking back, I did everything that you would do if you wanted to be a professional writer.

Sarah Enni:  Wait, what things?

Gretchen Rubin:  Oh, I majored in English. In law school, anytime I could write a paper instead of taking a test, I would write a paper. I did something at Yale called Daily Themes, which is where you write every single day.

Sarah Enni:  That's like a famous class.

Gretchen Rubin:  Yeah. And then I was just reading, and reading all the time, and taking notes on what I read. So looking back, I wasn't publishing anything, or getting clips, but I was doing a ton of reading and writing. And of course law, itself, is a readerly and writerly endeavor even though it's a different thing.

Now in my mind, I know that this is not factually accurate, this is my mind playing tricks on me because I've tried to figure out the timeline and it doesn't work. But in my mind, I went into a bookstore and saw the book by Mark Kurlansky called Cod: The Eyes of the World Through the Mind of a Fish. And I was like, "Oh my gosh!"

This breaks open my concept of what non-fiction could be. That you could write a book about the history of the world through the lens of Cod and it just blew my mind. I don't think that actually happened, but that's what I remember. And that sort of began to show me the possibilities of non-fiction in a new way.

Sarah Enni:  That's such a funny way to remember that story too. Your mind consolidating that this was the important thing.

Gretchen Rubin:  Yeah, this is what emerged from it. But what really got me started in writing is I was clerking for Sandra Day O'Connor, so I was clerking on the Supreme Court, and I went outside on a bright summer day to go for a walk during my lunch hour. And I thought, and you know sometimes you ask yourself these theoretical questions, and so I thought, "What am I interested in that everyone else in the world is interested in?" Just as a kind of thought question.

I thought, "Well, power, money, fame, sex." And it was like, "Power, money, fame, sex!" I immediately became completely preoccupied with researching these subjects. And to me, they were very linked. And so I was doing all this research. And that happens to me often, I'll get really preoccupied with something and I'll do tons of research.

It happened to me when I was little. I remember I did a huge amount of research on the Salem witch trials. It happened to me just recently, I'm super, super preoccupied with the placebo effect right now. But then I was doing power, money, fame sex. And so I was working and working and working on that. And then finally it got to the point where I thought, "Well, this is what a person would do if they were gonna be writing a book." And then I thought, "Well, maybe I could write that book."

And then I went to the bookstore and got a book called something like How to Write and Sell Your Non-fiction Book Proposal. And then just followed the directions.

Sarah Enni:  Well, let's take a couple steps back and then get to that, I love this progression. First of all, I'm just interested in... I love the Supreme Court. I lived in DC for a while and I was lucky enough to cover a case one time. And Nina Totenberg is like a personal hero. And I don't want to skip over the fact that speaking of law crossing over with writing, you were the editor and chief of the Yale Law Review. So it is funny that there was these links.

What is it like to clerk for a Supreme Court Justice as far as like, what does your day look like? What kind of processing are you doing? I feel like this is seeds of researching and sorting out.

Gretchen Rubin:  It is. And in fact, one of the things that I feel was super valuable for me, well partly, is just that legal writing is extremely linear and you're making an argument. And you're dissecting an argument. And so I feel like a lot of writing is kind of sloppy and that they'll just assume something without proving it. And I'm like, "Well, nothing that you say makes any sense because you haven't proven to me that your framework is even..." So, I feel like it was a very good training in just making a consistent argument.

And I remember when I was writing my book about Winston Churchill, I was working in a library and I had a sentence that was some kind of assertion. And then I was like, "Okay, but somebody could say this, but then I would say that. And then they could say this, and I would say that." And I later realized that 20 minutes had gone by and I was just playing out the argument in my head. And then I was like, "I stand by my assertion." And none of that appeared on the page.

One of the things I had to unlearn from law is people don't want to go down every single rabbit hole with you the way they do in law. In law, you're like, "Every single thing has to be accounted for." But that doesn't work in regular lay non-fiction. And so that was good. But I also feel like one thing that really helped me, coming from law, is that a lot of it is really boring, really boring. I spent a lot of time on employment law, or RISA. And I feel like being able to harness your mind, and to be able to discipline my mind, to stay focused on something that's really boring, or very tricky, or very hard to come back to it over and over again, was a really, really good muscle that was strengthened during my clerkship.

Sarah Enni:  You do give advice to people, when you talk about career advice, you talk about the concept of drift.

Gretchen Rubin:  Yes.

Sarah Enni:  And that seems maybe like it applied while you were...

Gretchen Rubin:  Oh, a hundred percent. I am the embodiment of drift. That's why I can write about it with such authority. Yes. I use drift to mean the decision we make by not deciding, or by doing the obvious next thing, or doing what everybody expects from us cause you sort of want to avoid a conflict. So, "I become a doctor because both of my parents are doctors." Or, "I get married because somebody proposes to me and all my friends are getting married." Or, "I take a job because somebody offered me a job." Or I go to law school because everybody says to me, "You're good at research and writing, you should go to law school."

And I think things like, "Well, it'll keep my options open. It's great training. I can always change my mind later." I'm not making a mindful choice. I'm just drifting along. And the tricky thing about drift is the word drift suggests that it's kind of the lazy way, or the easy way, but often drift involves enormous amounts of work.

Because rather than sit down and ask myself, "What do I really want from life, anyway? What am I good at? What do I want?" I just go along with the flow and then end up going to law school, which is really, really, really hard. I mean, from taking the LSAT to taking the New York bar exam and clerking. I clerked for two years, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of years of my life.

And I don't regret it, sometimes drift works out fine, which is part of what's confusing about it, sometimes it does work out fine. But I was not making a mindful choice. And so now, looking back on it, I feel like I'm just lucky that everything worked out. I met my husband. I have tons of friends. I had this fantastic experience. But I did not mindfully choose that path in a way that now, I try to be much more purposeful in my actions.

Sarah Enni:  Right. And I heard you in an interview talk about the argument amongst thinkers over time about whether thinking about happiness too much is, and you kind of applied it to this. And in that interview, you said that you hadn't really thought about your happiness in that way at that point.

Gretchen Rubin:  Well, I mean, I just wasn't thinking about happiness at all. And that's why I feel like this idea that people are so worried about their happiness, that they're unhappy. I'm like, "I just don't encounter that in the world." I think that that's like a journalist problem that they've made up to write about. I don't run into people like that very often. I think most people just don't take it into account.

I don't think going to law school was a question of my happiness, though, I think it was a question of my aims. Like, "What kind of career aim do I want?" A lot of times you do things for your career aims that make you desperately unhappy. Like you're super anxious and worried and you dread every minute and figure like, "Well, this is what I have to do if I want to have this career." Happiness doesn't always make us feel happy. So I wouldn't have decided to go to law school, or not, based on whether it made me feel happy at the time. But I didn't think about it in a purposeful way.

Sarah Enni:  Well, let's talk about that, getting to jump forward to this book. I'm so struck by the fact that you did all this research in your spare time, which, law clerks, the Supreme Court, spare time is a loose term. But you were obviously very preoccupied by it. So what did you encounter as far as a non-fiction proposal? How'd you put that together? What was that like?

Gretchen Rubin:  I mean, I literally bought this book and followed the directions. Because I needed to get an agent first, of course. And I think one thing that a lot of people don't know is that getting an agent is harder than getting a book deal, I think, for many, many people. Once you have an agent, you have somebody on your side, you have somebody to give you advice, somebody to give you direction, somebody to kind of tell you what to do. But getting an agent, that's on you. And you feel totally naked in the world. And I felt very amateurish.

Once I had an agent, I felt like, "Well, now I'm a professional writer because it's money to somebody. They're spending their time on me, and that opportunity-cost means that I'm in the world of commerce." In a way that I desperately wanted to be. So I had to get an agent. So I wrote the pitch letter. I wrote the table of contents. I wrote the outline, and I wrote a sample chapter. Because this book, Power, Money, Fame, Sex: A User's Guide, was presented in an unusual visual format. And so that was another issue that I was trying to figure out how to do that. It was fun.

Sarah Enni:  When I look at that book, now we have the benefit of hindsight of your career so far, but Power, Money, Fame, Sex, it feels like a Happiness Project prototype. Like it's just such a different approach to these things.

Gretchen Rubin:  Well it's interesting, because to me, all my books feel very connected because they're all about human nature. But you're right, Power, Money, Fame, Sex is kind of the opposite of The Happiness Project in a way. But it was really good groundwork. I was trying to dissect human nature, and categorize, and find examples and ways to make arguments.

But for me, all my books are really about human nature. Even something like a biography of Winston Churchill. He's such a gigantic figure, he's easy to look at. He's such a powerful exemplar of human nature. And we know so much about him because he was so written about, and he did so many extraordinary things and was such an amazing writer. He's easy to study under the microscope. Whereas an ordinary person, you wouldn't be able to do it in the same way.

Sarah Enni:  So you did get an agent for that book. You sold that book, that book came out. And I might have my timeline wrong here, but somewhere in there, you're also moving to New York and deciding to become a writer.

Gretchen Rubin:  I moved to New York when I was writing the proposal. So I was writing the proposal, I moved to New York, got an agent, and got the book contract.

Sarah Enni:  And began a transition into choosing to write.

Gretchen Rubin:  No, no, no. There was no transition. It was like, drop mic. I moved to New York and I'm like, "That's it."

Sarah Enni:  So, from Power, Money, Fame, Sex to the Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, and The Forty Ways to Look at JFK, what made those projects interesting to you?

Gretchen Rubin:  Human nature. I really wanted to study these great examples of human nature. And I was also very interested in the problems of biography. And so, especially Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, is really also about the problem of biography. Which is, "You're gonna hear the story I want to tell you. And you think that you're making your own judgment about Winston Churchill, but you're really not. Because I'm telling you what I think is important and what I want to know. And I'm gonna spin the details to get you to the place that I want you to be."

I always have, for almost all my books, there's a moment where I had the idea for the book. And the idea for the Churchill book came, I was in a cab on 69th and Third and I said to my husband, cause at that point I was just preoccupied with Winston Churchill, I was reading all this Winston Churchill, and I said to him, this was before I was gonna write the book, and I said, "You know, you could write a very positive biography of Winston Churchill, or you could write a very negative biography of Winston Churchill, and they would both be true." And he said, "You could write a book like that." And I was like, "You're right! And I am gonna write that book. I'm going to write that book." And I did, because it is a fascinating question.

Sarah Enni:  That's so interesting. So lead me from the two Forty Ways books come out, but you didn't move forward doing more Forty Ways. What made you decide to shift direction?

Gretchen Rubin:  I had wanted to write a book Forty Ways to look at Richard Nixon. And I did a ton of research for that. And I've always been really, really interested in Richard Nixon. My editor was just like, "I don't want you to do that. I don't think anybody's gonna want to read it." And so I wrote about Kennedy instead. That was great. I was very, very interested in JFK. But, okay, so this is the book that did not work. And what they tell you when your book is a huge flop, is they say, "Your book did not find its audience." And that book did not find its audience.

And I also was talking to somebody, Jonathan Burnham, who's a very well-known, extremely brilliant literary guy. And he, not in reference to my work but just kind of in general, he was saying, "You know, when people read a biography, they like to read a big comprehensive biography with like new information. And it's very hard to write a successful biography that doesn't follow that." And, in fact, that is true. And I was like, "No, no, no, that's not the truth. I'm writing these books. They're amazing." And it's like, "Nah, people don't really like these books."

And like with the Churchill book, it was the people who are already deeply... I thought it would be like a gateway drug, because Winston Churchill is the most interesting person in the whole world. And so everybody would read this and then they would go read Manchester, whatever. No, the people who liked this book were the people who already knew everything about Churchill, so they were interested in the nuances that I was exposing.

And then with JFK, what I realized is, some people love JFK. Some people despise JFK. And nobody's interested in the nuanced version that kind of shows you both. They either want the adulation or they want the criticism. And my book was pleasing no one. So, hindsight.

But the thing that I really learned from the Kennedy book, first of all, I learned that the Forty Ways structure, as much as I loved it, and I wanted to write about Leonardo da Vinci, and I wanted to write about Franklin, and I wanted to write about Virginia Wolf in the Forty Way structure, it wasn't resonating with an audience.

The other thing that I learned was I felt incredibly powerless because I couldn't control who reviewed it. I couldn't control if I got any coverage for it. I couldn't reach people who I knew were interested in Kennedy to tell them about the book. Maybe they didn't even know the book existed. Maybe they would have been interested in the book, but they didn't know about the book. I couldn't put it on the shelves in the bookstore.

And it was just at that time that blogging was really taking off. And I became very interested in the idea of being able to reach an audience myself, and wanting to have the tools. Because I was so frustrated by not having any tools. I was very eager to learn about anything that promised the opportunity to reach an audience.

So I was fortunate, I think, in that failure. Because I think if that book had done even fine, even mediocre, I probably wouldn't have been open to learning how to blog, which was a huge amount of work and stressful. And it was just a huge amount of work, it has been a huge amount of work ever since. So, sometimes you don't know what's good news and what's bad news. So maybe I was very fortunate in that that book flopped so resoundingly, that I had no choice but to try to learn from it, which I did.

Sarah Enni:  That's great. That's great for authors to hear. I think you can always change directions.

Gretchen Rubin:  I think with success and failure alike, it's hard to learn the correct lesson. And I think that often we learn the wrong lesson and that's always a real danger. And I'm always thinking to myself, "Well, I feel like I learned this lesson, but is that the lesson I really learned? And is there a different lesson that I should be taking from it?"

I think something that I've seen happen, is that if your first book is a big success, you think, "Oh, I'm just that kind of author. I'm a big successful author." And you don't understand that maybe that's just not gonna happen every time. You can't count on that. So that you sort of learned the wrong lesson. Maybe the lessons of success are even harder to learn than the lessons of failure because the lessons of failure maybe are clearer. I don't know.

Sarah Enni:  I think, I would argue that you are right. I think it's a lot easier to move from failure to success than from success to failure and back. That seems really hard. And also you'd have to sort of have, we're speaking about agents and representation and feeling official, the people who I have seen come out of the gate and be very successful, we're also fortunate enough to have very judicious agents who were like, "This is uncommon. Don't get used to it."

Gretchen Rubin:  Yes. And that's something a good agent will really try to put that in context for you and try to help you understand it, or manage it. Yes, that's true.

Sarah Enni:  You're not always gonna have billboards.

Gretchen Rubin:  No, no, no, no. Right. No. I think you're right. And then there are some people where you're sort of like, "You had one really intensely fascinating story to tell. It's not clear where you take that." And I think that's where an agent can really help you understand, "Okay, what's the career that is gonna be made from this starting point?" I mean, another thing I would say, cause I know so many of your audience are in this situation. One thing that's important, I feel in hindsight, is you have to put up structures in advance.

Because what I've seen happen to a lot of my friends is, they'll be tootling along, one book, two books, fine, fine. And then a book will hit big. And then they're like, "Oh my gosh, I need to build a newsletter list. I need to try to..." And there's all these fish going down the river, but your net isn't up to get the fish.

And so all this stuff comes. You're promoting your book, promoting your book, and you're in this thing. And then it's all over. And then you're like, "Well, now I have a chance to build all this infrastructure." But it's kind of too late because you've missed your opportunity. And so one thing I would say to people is think about what you need in advance of when you think you're actually gonna need it, because when you actually need it, it's probably not possible to build it in time.

Now I think people have gotten much better about this. I remember when writers would say things like, "Well, my publisher is telling me I need to have a website. And I'm thinking 'Well, that's just extra work for me and you're not paying me for that.' So no way." I don't think anybody says that anymore, unless they're like, you know, Robert Caro or something. Because there are things that we just need to do to be professional.

But things like email capture, you know, there's certain things that you want to at least have a rudimentary sense of. If you think there's at all an opportunity that you don't want to miss. I mean, one thing I do, I'm a big, big believer in the email list. And even if you're not sending anything out, just capture them in some way. Every time I do an event, unless it's like a thousand people, I pass a legal pad with my handwritten thing, like "Sign up for Gretchen's free weekly newsletter, our daily happiness quotation." And I just pass that thing around. And it couldn't be more DIY.

Sarah Enni:  But that's kind of charming.

Gretchen Rubin:  It works. I mean, I've tried different things. This is the thing where actually the most people sign up and I just do that. And it's the long game. And I think a lot of times, you gotta be thinking about the long game. And it's not about like, "Okay, what am I gonna do for this month? Or like this three months cause I've got a book coming out."

Or if somebody writes an article that goes viral, or it's on the most emailed New York Times list, and you had no idea that was coming, and then all these people are emailing you. It's like, "Okay, what's your plan?" And again, a good agent will say to you, like, "This is pretty good. I think you might strike a chord here. Let's think this through." But you want to be prepared for that because it doesn't happen to everybody, but you certainly don't want to miss the chance if it does happen to you.

Sarah Enni:  Absolutely. I think that's fantastic advice, and we'll get to it, but I think Better Than Before, was a thing that helped me a lot with that.

Gretchen Rubin:  Oh, good, good, good. Oh yeah. Let's get to that.

Sarah Enni:  Let's talk about Happiness Project. Do you mind pitching that book?

Gretchen Rubin:  The Happiness Project is a one-year experiment I took in how to be happier using the Wisdom of the Ages, contemporary science, and lessons from popular culture, about how to be happier. I used myself as the Guinea pig to see if you actually did all the things that they tell you you should do, can you make yourself happier? And so it's sort of a cross between Eat, Pray, Love, and the Julia project. Now I can't even remember the name of that book. What's it called?

Sarah Enni:  Julie and Julia was the name of the book.

Gretchen Rubin:  Yeah. Yeah. So it was, you know, when you're using yourself as a Guinea pig in a personal experiment.

Sarah Enni:  Which, I think you were one of the first ones to do that. Then there was like The Year of Living Biblically and a lot of things like that.

Gretchen Rubin:  I'm friends with A.J. Jacob's cause we're both in this self-experimentation lane. Yeah, there are books like that. And it's funny because this is one of the things where they're like, "Is it too gimmicky?" Or like, "Has it been done?" But the thing is, that's how people think. It makes sense to people. And so it makes sense to me that people continue to use that because it's a form that is very appealing to people. So I think the challenge is to make it feel fresh and interesting, but people are gonna continue to write, 'the year of...' because it's just an appealing form. I still read these books all the time myself.

Sarah Enni:  I want to talk about where you were at, personally, in conceiving of this project for yourself. Cause I think it was after sort of having this thing of like, "What do I need to do next?" And you talk in the book about feeling this like, "Am I happy, or as happy as I could be?"

Gretchen Rubin:  So I was finishing up the JFK book and there's a period, with every book, where you're done with your part. So you've done the copy editing and all of that stuff has sort of gone quiet. And now the book is just getting ready to come out and you haven't geared up yet to sell the book. And it's a difficult, at least for me, I struggle to make good use of that time. Because it's hard to move forward with something new because the other book hasn't even hit the shelves yet. You know? So it has not lived its life. And yet there is kind of this open period. And so I was in that open period so I had more kind of time to reflect.

And I was thinking, "Well, what do I want from life anyway? I want to be happy! But I don't spend any time thinking about whether I am happy, or if I could be happier. Maybe I could be happier than I am. What would that even look like?" And I thought, "Well, I should have a happiness project." And that was the phrase that came to me. And I ran to the library the next day and got a giant stack of books and started researching. Again, this is just the kind of thing that I do. I'm constantly being like, "I'm obsessed with color. I'm gonna read every book I can find about color." And so that just felt very normal to me. I'm like, "Yeah, this is how we do."

But then it was just so interesting and so vast. And the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. And then there were all these things I wanted to try. And I was like, "I gotta do this. I'm gonna do that." And then finally I thought, "Well, this is so interesting. This is so rich. Maybe this should be my next book." And so it came out of my own personal experience, but it came at right exactly the time where I was able to execute on it and be like, "Okay, this is the next book."

Sarah Enni:  To this point, had you been thinking about your previous works as studies of human nature?

Gretchen Rubin:  No, I don't think so. That's a good question. I don't think that I did. I don't think that I had figured out the thread myself, which I'm backward looking.

Sarah Enni:  Yeah. It's so obvious now.

Gretchen Rubin:  But here's the thing. Sometimes people say things and they say them with such conviction you're like, "Obviously they're right." I remember saying to somebody like, "Oh yeah, my subject is human nature." And she said, "Your subject can't be human nature that's too broad." And I was like, "Oh, I guess not." And then I'm like, "What the hell? Yes it is. Who are you to tell me that's not my subject? The greatest minds in history have studied human nature. How can you tell me I can't do it?"

Sarah Enni:  You can get a degree in philosophy.

Gretchen Rubin:  For goodness sake! But I really fault myself for swallowing that, for like a good couple months I was like, "Gosh, I guess that's right." And then I was like, "What's she talking about?" She's probably jealous cause I said it and she was like, "Dang it. Why didn't I tell people, my subject was human nature?" I'm like, "I got dibs on that." Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Stay away from human nature people, I'm the writer about that now. I don't think so.

Sarah Enni:  Well, speaking of people who have studied human nature and all the different perspectives on it, when you say 'I started to research it' what does that mean? Were you reading novels? Were you reading essays? Were you reading psychological experiments?

Gretchen Rubin:  It's an issue for me, with everything that I write, because first of all I'll start with the things that are very obvious. So if I'm writing about happiness, I'll read a book that's got happiness in the title and then I'll start chasing the books that... if you're doing a lot of research in a subject, you start to see that certain things begin to be touchstones that everyone's referring to. So then you read the touchstones.

And like right now I'm writing a book about the body and the senses. So first I'm reading a book called something like The Eye. And then I'm reading books called something like Reading in the Brain, which is sort of going deeper. But then I get to a point with all my books where it's not clear where, in the Dewey decimal system, the idea is gonna come from.

And that's when I start trying to be much more promiscuous in my choices. Where I will start reading lots of novels, more than when I'm in my deep research phase where I'm reading a lot of non-fiction. There are certain writers and novelists who are just very, very thoughtful where it's not so much just about the plot, but it's sort of observations of human nature. Or I'll read essays, like Hazlitt or Samuel Johnson often will give me ideas. Even if I don't agree with it, it'll get me thinking about a certain thing.

But a lot of times, and I'm sort of hitting this with my next project, there comes a point where I don't exactly know what I'm researching. And it's very tantalizing, because every single book that crosses my path I think, "This book could have one sentence in it that will somehow be the insight that I need that would just turn everything around."

Because I have that experience often where I will read a single line, and I'll be like, "This!" I remember when I was writing Better Than Before, it was all about habit change. Before I read that I was reading, I'm obsessed with Samuel Johnson, read tons of Samuel Johnson. So then I was reading this, I don't even remember what they call it, it's like miscellany-related. Because Samuel Johnson is just so hilarious, people would write down everything he said.

And so it was just like some accounts of random conversations he'd had in his life, of Samuel Johnson. And Samuel Johnson said, somebody offered him wine, and he said, "I can't take a little, child. Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult." And when I read that, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm an abstainer. I can have none, but I can't have a little, I'm gonna give up sugar because it's just easier for me to have none."

So that one sentence completely transformed my understanding of myself, my understanding of habit formation, my understanding of human nature. And that was like in an appendix of a book that I checked out of the library randomly, you know? So I am very haunted by the idea that the research is everywhere.

And also I'm really lucky, cause now that I'm engaged with my listeners and my readers, they are my research assistants. So the whole world is like, "I know you're interested in color. Did you see this work? I know you're going to the metropolitan museum every day, did you see this funny piece on bored Panda?" People will be like, "Do you know about this writer? I'm writing about habit formation, here's this crazy thing that worked for me. What would you say to that?" So I have all this data coming in from all over the world. I feel so fortunate.

Sarah Enni:  Yeah. You are describing, though, a massive amount of input. So, how do you first manage that? And how do you make yourself do the writing and the processing that is not intake anymore?

Gretchen Rubin:  Every non-fiction writer knows that it's very hard to stop doing the research because that feels productive, and yet it's not like writing a book. So I do it in a very crude way and I've heard of people that have much more sophisticated systems, but I just have these giant documents of notes. So like I have one called, "Quotes 2006 Plus" which is every quotation that isn't otherwise categorized, that's usually beautiful writing, or very perceptive insight, not having to do with a subject.

Then I have like "Happiness," "Habits", "Churchill." Then I have something called Notes, which is when I'm wise, in like 30 years, I hope, I'm gonna write a book about symbols beyond words. And this is notes for that project, which I don't anticipate doing for decades. Right now I have a thing called Five Senses, even though I'm gonna argue for nine senses, I called it five senses just because what are you going to call it? And that's everything related to the five senses. And then I just word search through it if I need to find something.

Sarah Enni:  I was gonna say, are we talking about word documents?

Gretchen Rubin:  They're word documents. Now, because the five senses is gonna be a book, I did organize that into sections. But often I'll have something that's just even pre-organized, that's just a mass of stuff. And I kind of like that because I feel like unexpected juxtapositions sometimes promote ideas. Or sometimes in my quotes thing, I'll just look up something like nature, and I'll just look for every quotation that mentions nature. And it's just weird what it kicks up.

So it's kind of my own way of doing a commonplace book, but I know people have more sophisticated ways of organizing them. And I just only organize it once I've decided to write a book about it. And then that becomes the organization.

But I'm really good at remembering little pieces of things. So I can often be like, "Okay, George Orwell wrote that thing about 'what is work?'" And then I can find it because I can just search for 'what is work?', or 'George Orwell', or 'feather'. Because I think, doesn't he mention feathers in that quotation?

Sarah Enni:  I think every author can relate to also, when your book is almost done, you'll be like, "Oh, that one sentence. And I know it has this word in it, and it's on this page."

Gretchen Rubin:  Exactly. When you're like, "Where do I even talk about that?" No, I have that problem with my books cause a lot of things could go in a lot of different places, and I can't even remember where in the book it is, but I can remember what it's near.

Sarah Enni:  Yeah, "How I phrase that." Or whatever. And you're like, "Why am I such a savant about my own..."

Gretchen Rubin:  Here's a weird thing. Have you had this happen? I will write something and like sweat is pouring down my face, I'm working, working, working, working, working to write it. And then I'll realize, I'm like, "I actually wrote, almost verbatim, that exact sentence a month ago." I'm constantly trying to save myself that work. So I'm like, "Did I write this section about ketchup and like the magic of ketchup already, or not?" And I'll have to go look and make sure that I didn't to save myself the trouble of just plagiarizing myself, practically.

Sarah Enni:  I have had that. The book I'm writing right now I've been writing since 2012, so there was some times where I'm like, "Wait, is this work I have to do? Or I already done it?"

Gretchen Rubin:  How delightful it is when you're like, "Dang, that's good. Hey, nice transition."

Sarah Enni:  "I can spruce this up."

Gretchen Rubin:  Yeah, "Change a couple of adverbs and I think we're good to go." Yeah, that's rare, but nice when it happens. You don't want to miss the opportunity.

Sarah Enni:  I want to talk more about sorting processes and systems with Better Than Before, but for Happiness, I want to talk about the chart. I'm interested in how you were researching human nature and happiness and all the different perspectives on that, then how did you coalesce it into the monthly...? That process is really interesting to me.

Gretchen Rubin:  That is funny that you say that because if you look at the structure of that book, it's like, "Okay, there's 12 themes. Like energy, family, work, whatever." And then with each one there's like three to five resolutions. And I write about the research, and why I picked these things, and my experiences with them and whether they made me happy. It sounds like a totally straightforward structure, right?

It took me so long. I mean, I significantly rewrote the structure, significantly. To the point where, I remember I submitted the sample chapter to my agent and she called me and she was like, "I am so sorry to tell you this, but it's just not where it needs to be. And I think you just need to take another crack at it." And I was just like, "I don't even know how to do this." And so I restructured it again.

All my books are like this. Better Than Before is The 21 Strategies of Habit Change. You would think, what could be more obvious than the 21 habits of strategy change. This took me months and months and months and months. Because structure is everything, and once it's clear and makes sense, then it seems inevitable. But like right now with my book, I'm just struggling, struggling, struggling with the structure. And I can't figure out how to get the structure right. And yet I know once I do it, it'll be like, "How did this take me more than five minutes to come to it?"

So that was the structure of it. Every month has a theme related to happiness. And then each one has like three to five practical, concrete things that then I track. And of course there's themes throughout the book of things that keep coming up over and over. But yeah, it seemed like a totally obvious structure, but it took me a really, really long time to find my way through to it.

Sarah Enni:  To your credit, I read it, it feels so clean and organized, but it didn't feel obvious to me. I felt like, "This is incredible and must have taken a lot of..."

Gretchen Rubin:  Well good, good, good. Well, that's probably cause you know, like, "Okay..."

Sarah Enni:  I'm like, "This is so..." Taking processing and structuring, I mean, that's not easy.

Gretchen Rubin:  Well, because with Better Than Before too, about habits, I was like, "Do I do habits related to the body?" It's like, "What are the categories?"

Sarah Enni:  Well every person, and we'll get into this with The Four Tendencies too, but I have found what's so fascinating is everyone's abstraction of how to organize these things like mind clouds, spreadsheets. It's all so different.

Gretchen Rubin:  Yes. I think that's a very good point. And that sometimes maybe playing with different visualizations. I know somebody who writes things on index cards and then will shuffle them, or arrange them on the floor and then they just move. I think that can work really well. I did this thing, which I thought worked really well for Happier at Home, which was like, "I want my books to be fun to read and kind of light and playful."

And so I went through for the first three chapters and I highlighted one color for research, cause I also want a lot of research, and then one color for what I would consider a good bit, something that I'm like, "Oh, this is funny." Or, "This is really interesting." Or, "This is a juicy detail." Or whatever. To make sure that as you turn the pages, I could visually see, did I have enough? Or was there too much of one and another? And that kind of helped me too. So I think sometimes visualizations, on top of content, can be very helpful in terms of structuring and pacing and organization.

Sarah Enni:  Yeah, exactly what you're saying, I've seen people do for narrative, for fiction, with characters. Like if a character falls away from too many the pages, you can then see it.

Gretchen Rubin:  Or like dialogue like, "How much dialogue is there and where are the breaks?" Yeah. Cause you can get lost in your own content for sure.

Sarah Enni:  Oh my gosh. At some point, it's all trees. Let's talk about that, about developing a voice in this particular form of narrative non-fiction. I mean, do you call it narrative non-fiction?

Gretchen Rubin:  Yeah.

Sarah Enni:  Okay, cause I want to talk about how it's memoir adjacent, and being honest and talking about your family in the book. And also it's a very accessible voice and a very non-academic voice. And I'm just interested in how you developed that.

Gretchen Rubin:  Well, that's funny because I really had to unlearn that from law. I really, really had to unlearn it. And my natural, like if I'm naturally writing something, I'll often just write something to say, "This is the paragraph where I'm gonna talk about how, although we believe that the reality is objective, in fact, our senses are constantly filtering things out. So what you perceive as different from what I perceive, because whatever." So I'm like, "I'm just gonna write that out and then I'll go back and fix it".

That is a super like formal, legalese. I use all my fancy vocabulary and that's my natural, like the way I just spit it out. And then I go through and I'm like, bring it down, make it colloquial. And what I find is that as I make it clearer, often I'm like, "I'm not really saying anything, that's just babble." That's just like, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Or, "That's a transition that doesn't really work." Or, "These two sentences don't really...." I spend a huge amount of time editing, just rearranging my sentences. I'm like, "Why do I write them out of sequence? I wrote this? Why am I now rearranging it?" But it's like, I put the puzzle pieces... Do you have that too?

Sarah Enni:  Yes, absolutely.

Gretchen Rubin:  It's the strangest thing, I cannot figure it out, cognitively, it doesn't make sense. And yet I will just be like, "If I just move this sentence up three sentences, the whole thing makes perfect sense." Weird. And so I feel like as I make the language plainer, I make my own arguments plainer to myself. I feel like obfuscatory language can cloud my vision just as much as my readers vision. So I really work on that and really making it feel concrete and you can really identify with it.

Sarah Enni:  You do that often by sharing your own experiences. And I love reading the anecdotes about your friends, people who kind of go through their closets and things like that. But I want to ask about choosing to include your husband and kids in your book. Cause you are very honest about what it was like at home, especially during The Happiness Project, when you were trying all these new things. What was the conversation like with them? What was it like thinking about doing that?

Gretchen Rubin:  I think I'm sort of in this category, which I would almost call reported memoir, where you use your own experiences to talk about larger issues. And some people do this where it's much more on the reported side. Andrea Petersen wrote a book about anxiety, or Susan Cain talking about her own experience, where it's kind of in the background, it's sort of giving you a little bit of scaffolding, but it's mostly about research and reporting. Whereas I'm kind of on the other end of that.

Laura Ingalls Wilder said of her books, "It is the truth, but it is not the whole truth." And so I think books can feel much more revealing to the people who don't know you, than to the people that do know you. And look, I'm writing about happiness, so I would never include anything that even came up to the line of making somebody unhappy. So I don't include anything where I feel like I could be exposing somebody who would feel... and it's just not even right for my subject. I'm very focused on my own experience. And the only person you can change is yourself. So I'm talking about myself and what I'm doing, so I don't really need to get into them.

It's interesting, my husband never reads anything that I write, unless I really say to him, "Look, I'm writing about your parents here. I need you to take a look and make sure they're gonna be fine with it." And he's like, "That's fine." He just gets the heebie-jeebies and I totally understand that. So yeah, he's fine with it.

Sarah Enni:  Let's talk about, Better Than Before, which is the book that I most was sitting there reading it and being like, "Wow, this is like a rigorous thought experiment."

Gretchen Rubin:  Oh, good, good, good.

Sarah Enni:  Which was so engaging to me and I really enjoyed it. Do you mind pitching that for us?

Gretchen Rubin:  So Better Than Before is about the 21 habits that we can use to make or break our habits. And 21 seems like a lot, you may want the five. But it's important to have 21 because you need a lot to choose from, because some work for some people and don't work for other people. Some work for us at some times in our lives, but not in other times in our lives.

So you want to know all your options so you can pick and choose the ones that are right for you. Because it turns out it's not that hard to change your habit when you do it in the way that's right for you. There is no magic 'one size fits all' solution. So if you look at the 21, you can pick the ones that are the best choices for you.

Sarah Enni:  And it's interesting that you have The Happiness Project and you're doing this long project month-by-month. And then, tell me if this is correct, and then Better Than Before is all about habit formation. And it seems like that's sort of the result of what you learned from making big changes.

Gretchen Rubin:  That's very astute. So I wrote The Happiness Project, and then Happier at Home, which was like The Happiness Project but focused on home, because home is like so central to happiness. But what I realized as I was talking to people, because I am very, very engaged, so I was constantly talking to people about why they were happy. What had made them happier? And what the stumbling blocks were.

And what I found is that a lot of times it was a matter of habit. It wasn't that people didn't know what would make them happier. They knew they'd be happier if they exercised, they knew they'd be happier if they read more, they knew they'd be happier if they finished their novel, they knew they'd be happier if they spent less time on their smartphone, they knew they'd be happier if they quit sugar. So it's not a question of grasping what is needed. It's a question of follow through.

And people were, many times, feeling very challenged about executing on a habit. And that got me really, really focused on, "If you want to get more sleep, how do you do that? If you wanted to use every power within your grasp to change it, what would you do?" And so I wanted to figure that out.

Cause really when we want to change our habits, it's cause we want to be happier, healthier, or more productive, or more creative. Otherwise, why would you bother? You know, it's one of those. So it is all in the service of a happy life, but it's like, "Okay, how do you get there through your conscious thoughts and actions?

Sarah Enni:  And what I particularly loved and thought was super useful, was at the beginning of the book you do list out questions. They are questions that you were asking yourself, but I took them as prompts and wrote them out in my journal and the whole thing, to kind of get at what will make me happy and what are the ways that I can convince myself to do these things? And I love when you talk about willpower, or not willpower. Do you mind explaining?

Gretchen Rubin:  A piece of research that particularly fascinated me, when I started, was that when they looked at people who were very high-performing, they expected that they would be using a lot of willpower during their day to get all the things done that they needed to get done. And what they found is that they used unusually little willpower.

And what they realized is that very high-functioning people automate things, they make habits of them. And so they are not using their willpower to go to the gym, or using their willpower to put on their seat belt, or using their willpower to not go to the vending machine, they've made habits of those things. And so those things don't take any willpower, any self-control, any decision-making, it just happens. And so, again, that got me very focused on how we can use habits as this engine.

Because you could spend the whole day arguing with yourself about whether you should go to the gym. "I should go to the gym. Well, I don't want to go first thing in the day, so I think I'll go at lunch. But no, I don't want to go at lunch, why don't I go at three? Because it's three, I'll be ready to take a nap and I'll be good to go to the gym. But, oh no, ah. So, now I'll go after work." And then it's like, "Oh, but the whole day has gone."

I mean, you've been agitating and draining yourself the entire day and you never even went to the gym at all. Whereas if you're like, "Every day I go to the gym before work." Or, "Every day I go at lunchtime." I mean, whatever it is, then it just happens and it doesn't take anything from you. And then you get all the benefits of the healthy habit.

Sarah Enni:  I want to move into The Four Tendencies cause that's so interesting.

Gretchen Rubin:  Great for writers.

Sarah Enni:  It is great for writers, but I do want to ask, just before we move on, within Better Than Before, for writers, do you think there are any of those particular things that are more or less applicable?

Gretchen Rubin:  Well, I think one thing that's really important for writers to keep in mind is that there is no magic one-size-fits-all solution and you really need to think about what works for you. And there's a fascinating book called Daily Rituals by Mason Curry. And it's not about rituals, it's about habits. He talks about the daily habits of hundreds of highly, highly professional successful people. So writers, poets, painters, choreographers, scientists, sculptors, everything.

And what you see is that there's this gigantic disparity among their habits. Some stay up late, some go to bed early. Some work in a busy studio with a million people, some work in solitude. Some drink coffee some drink vodka. But what you realize is these people, whether it's Gertrude Stein or Charles Darwin, or Pablo Picasso, or whoever, they've all figured out what works for them and they get that. They make sure they get what they need. If they need a bunch of people around and a lot of stimulation, they get that. If they need solitude and silence, they get a little shack in the backyard and they sit there all day long.

And so for each of us, it's a question of getting what you want. And I think sometimes people will say like, "Well, everybody tells me I should do X, Y, Z." It's like, "Is that how you do your best work?" So for The Happier podcast, my sister and I interviewed Roseanne Cash. And she was saying she was very relieved when she read Better Than Before, because one of the things we said is some people who are creative, sit down and write from nine to five and they find that absolutely indispensable. And they're like, "Don't wait for the muse to show up. It's all about just being in the chair."

And then some people don't work like that. They work in bursts and their creativity comes and goes and they just don't have as regular a schedule. And she said, "I always felt like I was doing it wrong." And one day my husband walked by the piano and there was this scrap of paper on it. He was like, "Is this, is this a song? This is amazing!" And she was like, "Oh, I just wrote that down at some random moment." I'm like, "You're Roseanne Cash, whatever you're doing is working for you." Like, "Don't let anybody tell you you're doing it wrong. Obviously you're doing it right."

So I think sometimes writers are like, "I need to do this. I need to do that. I should be working in a coffee shop." It's like, "Maybe not." You need to think about when you do your best work. If you do your best work from 11:00 PM to 5:00 AM, your challenge is not, "You should work earlier." It's like, "How do you organize your life?" That's a hard way to have your life, but I know writers who do that, that's their best time. And they just organize their life that way, because you can't really change whether you're a morning person or a night person.

So I think it's more about figuring out what works for you and trying to fit it into your life rather than saying, "I need to jam myself into somebody else's model of what's the best way to produce."

Sarah Enni:  Right. And I feel like your book inspired me to pause and enter the stage of like, "Well, what does work for me? When am I most energetic?" And I think this might be quoting someone else, but you can't manage what you don't monitor. So I'm, we'll get to it, but I'm a Rebel. So I'm like, "Ugh! How do I monitor this? How do I work around my natural tendency to make sure that I can access what I need to, at the time I need to?".

Gretchen Rubin:  Well, and one thing that's often helpful is to say, "Is there a time in the past when I succeeded?" Because often if you can feel like, "Wow, when I was in college, it was so easy." Or like, "When I was living in that group house, it was effortless." Or, "Oh, gosh, yeah. When I was in Boston, I was so productive." It's like, "Well, what was it about it?" And in Better Than Before, I try to identify a lot of the circumstances that might've been influencing it. Because a lot of times there's a lot of clues about what will work now, if we look at when we were most successful.

Sarah Enni:  Let's get to The Four Tendencies, because something so fun about Better Than Before is that it does feel like you, serving as an interpreter, for a lot of history of amazing thought and research about happiness and habits. And then there's this thing that you came up with all on your own. A Kind of a matrices that you came up with all on your own. So for anyone that hasn't heard it, I'd love to hear your story about coming up with that.

Gretchen Rubin:  It just about melted my brain. This is the hardest thing that I ever intellectually did. But a friend of mine had said to me, "I know I'm happier when I exercise. 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 this just haunted me because I was like, "Well, it's the same person, it's the same behavior. At that time, it was effortless. Now she can't do it." Again, the past holds clues. What was the clue from the past?

So was it that she now has a family? Is it that it was social? What was it about it? And I started noticing other patterns as well. For instance, I am a happiness bully, my sister says, and so I would often say to people, "How do you feel about New Year's resolutions?" Cause that's an interesting insight into how people feel about habits. And certain people would say exactly the same thing. They would say, "I would keep a resolution when it made sense to me, but I wouldn't do it on January 1st, because January 1st is an arbitrary date."

And that really struck me cause I'm like, "They're so focused on this arbitrariness thing, but that doesn't really bother me. So what's going on with that?" So that's what led me to understanding that really, at the core of it, was expectations. And that I needed to think about inner expectations like my own desire to keep a New Year's resolution, my own desire to get back into yoga. Or outer expectations, which is like meeting a work deadline, answering a request from a friend. That's what divides people into Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels.

Sarah Enni:  Before we dive into it more deeply, this is like a thing that would, and is, a whole book unto itself. But it's kind of buried within Better Than Before. What was the reaction like immediately to this?

Gretchen Rubin:  When I was speaking about Better than Before, I would talk about all of my favorite parts, the juiciest bits of the things that I thought were the most delicious, and delightful, and exciting. And all anybody wanted to talk about was the four tendencies. And I was just overwhelmed with questions about the four tendencies. "What about this? What about that? This is my situation? What do you say? I use it in this way. I'm a teacher, I'm an endocrinologist."

And so I thought, "Well, I'll write a little FAQ." And then I'm like, "Well, then I'll write kind of like a pamphlet answering all these questions." And then I'm like, "No, I think this has to be a book." Because people were just asking me for more and more and more. And so the book came out of just my experience of having introduced it. And then I have the quiz, which is @Quiz.GretchenRubin.com, where people can take the quiz.

So two and a half million people have taken the quiz now. They would take the quiz, they would get the report and they would immediately say, "No, no, no, I want more. I want more." And then I would say, "Read Better Than Before." And then they'd be like, "No, no, I want more. I want more." So I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna write a book."

Sarah Enni:  I love that. Do you want to set up The Four Tendencies?

Gretchen Rubin:  So The Four Tendencies divides people into Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels, depending on how they respond to outer and inner expectations. So outer being like a work deadline, inner expectation being like a New Year's resolution. So Upholders readily meet outer and inner expectations. They meet the work deadline. 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. So their motto is "Discipline is my freedom."

Then there are Questioners. Questioners question all expectations. They'll do something if they think it makes sense. So they resist anything arbitrary like January 1st, inefficient and justified. They must know the reasons. And if something satisfies their standard of making good sense, they will do it. No problem. If it fails their inner standard, they will push back. So their motto is, "I'll comply if you convince me why."

Next are Obligers. So this is my friend on the track team. So Obligers readily meet outer expectations, but they struggle to meet inner expectations. So my friend, when there was a team and a coach expecting her to show up, she had no problem. But when she was trying to go on her own, it was a struggle. And the thing that is the key thing for Obligers to remember is, if they want to meet an inner expectation, they have to have outer accountability.

If you want to read a book, join a book club. If you want to write a novel on the side, work with a writing coach, pair up with a friend, tell your agent that you're gonna send a chapter every month. You have to have outer accountability to meet inner expectations. And so their motto is, "You can count on me and I'm counting on you to count on me."

And then finally, Rebels. Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike. They can do anything they want to do, anything they choose to do. But if you ask, or tell, them to do something, they are very likely to resist. And typically they don't like to tell themselves what to do. So they won't sign up for a 10:00 AM spin class on Saturday cause they think, "I don't know what I'm gonna want to do on Saturday. And the idea that somebody's expecting me to show up is just gonna annoy me." So their motto is, "You can't make me and neither can I."

And so here, you and I are both actually the small tendencies, the fringe tendencies. Cause you're a Rebel and I'm an Upholder, these are the extreme tendencies. The biggest tendency, for both men and women, is Obliger. That's the biggest tendency. You either are an Obliger, or you have many Obligers in your life. And then below them, is Questioner.

Sarah Enni:  And when you say biggest, what are the percentages? Do you have a concept of that?

Gretchen Rubin:  Oh, gosh. I should know this. So I think Rebel is 17%, Upholders, 19%, Obligers, is like 42%, and the Questioners.... I can't remember what the other ones are. So a majority is not Obliger, but it's the biggest.

Sarah Enni:  Right, which is so fascinating to me. So when I read this, and I took the quiz, and then it said Rebel, and it was really actually very impactful. I took it right to therapy, talked about it a whole bunch. I'm sure that you've had people talk to you about this before, the way you present it, which I really appreciate your writing style and how you presented all this, was very non-judgmental.

And it's not like, "Well, you're this, but if you want to be more like that..." None of that. It's sort of like saying, "Oh, that is what my tendency towards this stuff really is. And this is how my thought patterns are. And I don't have to fight that. I just have to learn how to work with that."

Gretchen Rubin:  Yes, exactly.

Sarah Enni:  And that was very relieving.

Gretchen Rubin:  Oh, good! Because I think sometimes people are like, "Well, what's wrong with me? I need to be different." Rather than being like, "Well, a tool that works for an Upholder doesn't work for Rebels. So what are the tools that Rebels tend to have a better success rate with? I don't need to use your tools, I gotta use my own tools, but what are those tools?"

Obligers need accountability. Rebels tend to resist accountability. So it's not a tool that works for everyone. To-do lists, Rebels often don't like to-do lists. So don't use it to-do list, there's other ways to get stuff done and just do it the Rebel way. Rather than feeling like, "I'm not a real grown-up because real grown-ups use to-do lists." It's like, "No, they don't. A lot don't."

Sarah Enni:  I make long, complex to-do lists, and then I kind of like walk away and do whatever I want.

Gretchen Rubin:  That is very Rebel. That is very Rebel. Or Rebels will put like, "What I want to do," to remember this is what I want to do. Or they will write it on a slip of paper. Somebody would put it on a slip of paper, would put it into a jar, and then pick it out. They kind of "gamified" it first, she liked the randomness of it. And then if she didn't want to do something that was on the slip of paper, she would just get the next one.

But I think a lot of Rebels make the list because they want to kind of memorialize it, but then they don't feel any kind of compulsion to do it. Whereas, with an Upholder or an Obliger, Obligers can even feel very oppressed by the list. Because once it's on the list, they might feel, not all Obligers, but some of them will feel like, "Well, now I'm kind of being bossed by the list."

Sarah Enni:  Right. And it was a funny moment, it was kind of clarifying, cause I was like, "Oh!" I hadn't realized that I had truly been believing that people who are running partners to train for a marathon together, or when people talk about accountability partners, I had always truly thought that we were all faking it to the same degree.

Gretchen Rubin:  Oh interesting! I mean, it is interesting to realize how differently people see the world, right? It's mind-blowing.

Sarah Enni:  Yeah. I was like, "Oh, that really works... it actually works for you. I've been faking it forever. And it's just me."

Gretchen Rubin:  No, I mean, it is funny. It's like now, whenever I'm in an office, I make a beeline for the office kitchen. Cause I don't work in an office so I'm fascinated by all the signs in office kitchens. And you can see the four tendencies playing out because they have such different views about what's happening. And they have different philosophies and different emotions. And I'm like, "You don't understand, not everybody shares your way of seeing the world."

And for me, as an Upholder, I think it was particularly revelatory to really try to get inside the Rebel mindset because that's the most opposite, and to understand the freedom. Rebels understand freedom in a way that I think the other tendencies often don't really face up to. So I think all the tendencies can really learn a lot from each other.

Sarah Enni:  How do you mean that?

Gretchen Rubin:  We're more free than we think. Like I might say, "Well, you know, I have to hand my book in on time." It's like, "No you don't. You totally don't have to hand your book in on time. I mean, there might be consequences to that." Or like, "I have to have a contract before I can write this book." No you don't. You don't have to. Just write the book now and get the contract later. It's like, "Yeah, you can do that."

And so I think a lot of times people don't realize that they're actually choosing to accept a framework rather than saying, "Well, if this doesn't work for me, I'm not gonna do it." Now, this is why Rebels can sometimes seem cold or thoughtless to other people cause they're like, "Well, everybody else is helping, why aren't you helping?" And the Rebel is like, "Well, I don't have to help and I don't want to help. And you can do it if you want to, you don't have to help either as far as I'm concerned." Like, "You're a bunch of chumps." You know what I mean? It's like, "Fair enough." So I think it's very helpful to think about the Rebel tendency.

I think that the tendencies come up a lot with writers. And now that I understand the Four Tendencies, I think sometimes Obligers think that they have writer's block when, in fact, I think what they're missing is outer accountability. So maybe somebody did really well when they were working on a newspaper, or magazine, or when they were in school, but then when they're just off writing a book... and so they need systems of accountability. And there's all kinds of ways to get that once you know what you need.

I have this Better app, which is like a free app, and a lot of times people use it to create accountability partners. But even agents and editors, I have had people say to me, "I said to my editor, give me deadlines. Convince me they're real. That's the only way I'm gonna get work done." And then the editor says, "No, no, no, you're amazing. Do it in your own time. I'm sure it's gonna be great." And then I wrote it all in the last two weeks because I need accountability. So if somebody is asking for accountability, you want to help them get it.

And sometimes it's very burdensome to hold people accountable, so maybe you don't want to do it. But you need to figure out what is the structure of accountability for them. But you, as a Rebel, probably don't like accountability.

Sarah Enni:  No. And we were talking before we started recording, and this is an interesting thing to get into, is I was telling you that I was having a conversation with my agent about whether or not I ever wanted to sell a book on proposal. I mean, that would be a privileged position to be in anyway.

Gretchen Rubin:  But we will note that for non-fiction, that's typical. Not typical for novels, or for early stage career novelists, but it's very typical for non-fiction.

Sarah Enni:  Right. And I actually did have the experience, with my first book, of writing while I was under contract. And it was very uncomfortable for me, and I blew past deadlines like they were jokes, and it was upsetting. Not to me, but I understood that it was upsetting to other people. So I'm just interested in within this specific framework, how does that...?

Gretchen Rubin:  Well, and just very much to that, I have a friend who's a Rebel who was writing a non-fiction book and he was gonna write the whole thing before he tried to sell it. And I said to him, "But usually with non-fiction, you sell it on proposal. Why aren't you going to do it that way?" And he said, "Oh, because if I had a proposal and I sold it, and then my agent was looking for it, my editor was asking me about it, it would drive me crazy and I would never write it. Right now, I'm writing it because I feel like writing it. I feel like writing this book. I'm having fun with it. And then once I've written it, I know I'll be like, 'I want to make money from this book.' And then I'll go sell it. And then it'll be fine. But if I try to sell it too early, then I'll just resist it."

And I think that's what happened to you. You started having this feeling of resistance cause you're like, "You can't tell me what to do. I don't like the idea that there's this deadline. People are looking over my shoulder. I want to do my own work in my own way. Back away." And so it was a distraction from you doing what you wanted, which is, "I want to write this novel." It started to feel like, "They're telling me to write this novel. And so that's igniting my spirit of resistance."

So I think it is really important to know what you are. And I think for Questioners, it's all about like, "Well, if I hand it on this date, then we'll have plenty of time for the copy editing to do. And no one will have to rush." But I think if you are dealing with a Questioner writer, and you're an editor or an agent, I think you really want to spell it out to them, "If you meet this deadline, that's gonna mean that the copy editing team is gonna have plenty of time. It's gonna mean that we have time to go through many iterations of cover, in case you don't like the cover. If we get the drop by this, then that process will start, and we'll have a lot of time. We'll get the catalog copy in. The sales reps. Everything will roll out." And to explain, because the Questioner can be like, "Look, this book isn't coming out until September 2021. I think it should be fine if I hand it in..."

And it's like, "Well, maybe you don't have the information that you need. I'm gonna give you the information. Then it will seem efficient to you. You'll understand the justifications. Maybe this deadline seems crazy early to you, too early. I'm gonna explain to you why actually that's a very sensible and well thought through thing. And now you're gonna be much more cooperative with me because you're gonna understand why." And as your agent, I might say, "Why do I need to explain this to you? This is inside baseball. All you need to know is you should hit your deadline." But I know that if I'm dealing with a Questioner, they're gonna be much better about doing what I want them to do, if they understand why I'm asking them to do it.

And by the way, if I don't have a good reason to ask them to do it that way, why am I imposing that on them? Maybe they're right. Maybe they don't need to hand it in. This is the thing that so many people argue about, "It shouldn't take this long to publish a book." The fact is that's how long it takes. You know what I mean? And it's like, "If you want to reinvent that process, like you better start early and get other people on board with you because you don't do it by yourself. You're not the only one in the system. And they have their own way of doing things. And if you don't do it their way, you're gonna have to work it through. And you can't just do that by missing your deadline." Which is what I think a lot of people try is, they're like, "Oh, they got plenty of give." It's like, "Eh, a lot of people have to have their hands on that book."

Sarah Enni:  Yes, and this is so funny that you're bringing this up. I'm working on a mini-series right now that's gonna come out in April. This will tell you how Questioner I am... leaning that way. It's going to be eight to 10 episodes. And it's just going to get into, how does publishing work. How do you publish a book? It's all this stuff. I talked to several editors about like, "What's going on back here that we don't have access to?" And that will soothe and explain and cause less anxiety for people out there.

Gretchen Rubin:  Transparency. So a Rebel who tips to Questioner, it's like, "I want to do what I want to do in my own way, but tell me what I need to know, so I know the consequences of what I do and don't do. Because maybe I'm not gonna do something, I'm not gonna do it just cause you tell me to, but I might do it if I think it's gonna get me a better jacket, because I care about that. That's important to me. So I'm not doing it because that's what you tell me to do, but that's what I want."

And I think the more people understand the connection between, "This is the book you want, and this is why they're saying it, and this is what's happening." I think that that's brilliant. I think that kind of information will work with all four tendencies because it's gonna give them all an understanding of a process that then they can figure out, "Okay, well, given that that's true..."

Like an Obliger might say, "Look, if I'm late, then the copy editing team, they have to work late. They have to work on the weekends. They've got multiple projects that they're juggling. They have it all figured out. If I'm late, then I could ruin somebody's Christmas vacation." That's the fact. So now my accountability is gonna help me cause I'm accountable to those other people and their work process. But maybe I wouldn't have really understood what that meant unless I'd watched your mini-series.

Sarah Enni:  Right, so I'm very hopeful for that. I think it'll be really exciting. I want to ask you about what you're researching now, but is there anything else about Four Tendencies, especially as it relates to writers that you want to share?

Gretchen Rubin:  I would say because Obliger is a big tendency, get outer accountability. If you are saying things like, "I need to make myself a priority, I need to take time for self-care. I need to get motivated." I'm not saying that those are not good, I'm just saying, they're not gonna help you write your book. They're not gonna help you get anything done. What you need is outer accountability.

I've heard of so many ingenious [unintelligible]. One person I know told her kids, "When you're doing your homework, I need to do my homework. And my homework is working on my novel. And if you see that I'm not working, you don't have to do your homework." And so her kids are her police. I've heard of people doing things like swaps. Like, "If I write a chapter, Sarah, you get a massage. And Sarah, if you were at a chapter, then I, Gretchen, get a massage. But if I don't write a chapter, you don't get a massage."

And so I'm writing it because I don't want to call up Sarah and be like, "Sorry, Sarah, you don't get your massage." There's all these ways to create outer accountability. Writers groups where you're not even criticizing each other, I know people who do this with PhDs, this comes up a lot with people who can't finish their PhD. Just keeping each other on track. PhD advisors often are not good about this. They don't impose accountability when they really should. And people would really benefit from it.

And also with Rebels, like back off, if people are like, "Let me do my work in my own way." And even if they're doing it all at the last minute, some people prefer to do it all in the last minute, don't think you're helping if you're nudging and you're reminding. Because often with a Rebel that makes things worse, not better. And so, yeah, so those are the things I would say.

Sarah Enni:  And those tricks are great. Especially the kids. I remember you wrote about that and I was like, "Ooh!"

Gretchen Rubin:  I think that's genius because kids love to be the police. They'll keep you off your smartphone. They'll keep you from eating sugar. It's like set your children on your tail and you will not get away with anything.

Sarah Enni:  I love that. So, Happiness Project, Better Than Before, Four Tendencies, you have your podcast, there's a lot going on. What are you researching now? And how did you think about where you wanted to go with your career going forward?

Gretchen Rubin:  I had sort of had these side obsessions with color and smell and so I was thinking more and more about color and smell. And one of the things about me, as kind of a person who writes about happiness, is I do not like meditation. I've tried it twice. I've given it a good solid try. And I really do not find it to be a helpful tool. And so I was thinking, "Well, how can I get to the mind?" And I was like, "I get to the mind through the body and I'm really interested in the body."

And so my book, which I still have no structure, no thesis, no title, no contracts, I'm in the very early stages. But I've done a ton of research into the body and how to get to the mind through the body. And so that's what I'm researching now. And so it's everything from like creativity to brain structure, evolution. Ketchup! Don't get me started about ketchup, I have a lot to say about ketchup.

So that's what I'm working on now. And I don't have a structure. And I'm sure I will come up with a structure that's like totally obvious, but right now it is not obvious to me.

Sarah Enni:  What I really, really like and am responding to in what you're saying is, and I hope if anyone's listening who is interested in writing non-fiction, I love that you are just following what you're passionate about, as opposed to trying to come up with some kind of theory and then prove or disprove it. It seems like you're just following whatever is exciting to you.

Gretchen Rubin:  Well, they say that a lot of times research is me search. And so I'm always am writing about like, "Well, what am I interested in?" Or like, "What do I feel like I need?" Cause I really always do write through the lens of my own experience. And so I was having this feeling of like, at once feeling kind of distracted and like walking around in a fog, but then also kind of like hyper-stimulated with like, "There's so much color, there's so much video, there's so much noise. There's so much tastes." Like everything's kind of super saturated. And I was like, "Okay, how can I make my body feel more alive and more vital?" But also not this kind of hyper-stimulated, glutted feeling that I sometimes feel you can have.

Like when I gave up sugar, one of the things I loved is I just felt like there's such a glut of sugar. And when I took that out, not everybody would want to do that, but that worked really well for me. It was an interesting experience to just dial that down.

Sarah Enni:  I really respond to that. I'm working on sleep at the behest of you and every other writer, about self. And it's a lot of being like, "Oh, well when I lay down, I still feel like there's a lot going on that I can't slow down." Which, I'm gonna try sugar and see if I can manage it.

Gretchen Rubin:  Well, you also might try writing down what's on your mind because the brain can let go of thoughts if they're memorialized. And so it may be that you've just got so much in your head. And it's not even a to-do list. It's just like, "I'm thinking about: tomorrow, I've got to do this and I need to pack. And do I have to get that cavity filled?" Whatever it would be. And then the mind can release.

Sarah Enni:  I have made 2:00 AM to-do lists and then been able to go back to sleep.

Gretchen Rubin:  Yes. My sister gets up in the middle of the night a lot and makes lists.

Sarah Enni:  Well, that's so fascinating. And thank you for giving me so much of your time.

Gretchen Rubin:  Oh, it's so fun to talk to you. Thank you

Sarah Enni:  I want to wrap up with just the last piece of advice. I like to ask for advice as a wrap-up and I guess I'd love to hear about non-fiction. About people who are interested in writing the very particular kind of non-fiction like you do, what would your advice be to getting started there?

Gretchen Rubin:  I give all writers the exact same advice that I give to myself, that I gave to my daughter when she was writing her college essay, which is, "Have something to say." You would think that would be the most obvious thing, but a lot of times people are writing and they don't really have something to say. You really need to have something to say.

And not just like, "I'm interested in something." But what is it that you are actually trying to say? And I think once that's clear, then writing comes much more easily. And whenever I'm struggling with writing, I'm like, "Well, what am I actually trying to say?" And so that's my piece of advice.

Sarah Enni:  And when you're talking about this kind stage you're in right now, this broad research stage, is it true that you're always reading with the filter of, "how do I feel about this?"

Gretchen Rubin:  Yes, and does it fit in? Which, in a way, is very exhausting because I'm constantly evaluating like every podcast episode I listened to, everything anybody says, I'm like, "Ooh, I need to write that down. That's a great example." But it's also very exciting cause everything feels rich. Everything feels like material.

It's like Nora Ephron, "Everything is copy." And I really do feel like everything is feeding into it. Just like you were saying, "Oh, well people in New York don't hear sirens." Well, this is something that I've been learning a lot about in my research about the mind and the brain. Which is, we only experience sensory perceptions when it's important information for us. Well, as a New Yorker, it's not important information for me that a siren's going by, cause they go by constantly and they never have anything to do with me.

So my mind just very nicely blocks that out so I don't get distracted from my lovely conversation with you. But you're not used to it, so you hear it. You're like, "Oh my gosh, there's a siren going by." But that's fascinating to me. So I'm like, "I gotta write that down. That's for the book!" So everything is copy.

Sarah Enni:  It's kind of wonderful too, when you're in that phase for any project, there's a lot of connections being made. That's a really exciting time.

Gretchen Rubin:  It's very rich. It does. It is exciting. It's a little daunting. I would like to have structure, I would like to be in the editing phase where I'm cutting instead of adding. But it is fun and exciting to be in this stage.

Sarah Enni:  Yeah. Well, Gretchen, thank you so much.

Gretchen Rubin:  Oh, it's so fun to talk to you. I feel like we could talk all day.

Sarah Enni:  I know, thanks.

Gretchen Rubin:  Thank you.

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Thank you so much to Gretchen follow her on Twitter and Instagram @GretchenRubin. Follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). And thanks again to our sponsor, Sips By, which you can follow on Instagram @SipsBy, that's S I P S B Y, for weekly giveaways and more. For listeners of First Draft only, use the code firstdraft for 50% off your first Sips By box @SipsBty.com.

Hayley Hershman produces First Draft and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks also to transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson. And, as ever thanks to you, fellow Rebels for listening.

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