2017-09-04
1 小时 5 分钟I got this very poignant email from a woman who said, you know, I don't like reading about your tendencies, because when you describe them, you make it sound like people can't change or they don't grow out of their tendency.
I'm married to a rebel.
And don't you think that just someday he's gonna grow up and realize that people can't just go through life doing what they want to do all the time?
And I was like, well, the fact is, I don't think he's ever gonna realize that, and I don't think he's gonna change.
And the fact is, you can go through your life just doing what you want to do, and your husband's gonna clearly figured that out.
Today's guest is an old friend of mine, Gretchen Rubin.
She's actually been on the podcast before.
You may know her from her massive runaway bestseller, the Happiness Project.
Happier at home, better than before.
Gretchen and I have known each other for a pretty long time at this point.
We started out in this tiny writer circle or writers group in New York, and I've had the benefit of having a lot of conversations with her over the years.
And when she came out with her prior book, better than before, which is all about habit, she keyed in on and introduced this concept that she called the four tendencies.
And they are all about how we meet expectations, meaning how we actually do what we claim to want to do.
That's at least my overlay.
And Gretchen had this sort of massive awakening that we all fold into one of four tendencies.
And when you understand what your tendency is, it kind of profoundly changes the way you live in the world, the way you relate to other people, the way you understand people, and the way that you structure your life and your interactions with people in the world in order to support your quest to do things, to meet your expectations, to consistently meet the expectations that you set for yourself in life.
She has a new book out called the four Tendencies, because when she shared those tendencies in a smaller way in her prior book, the conversation around that exploded and led to sort of this global thing where she decided she needed to go way deeper into understanding the mechanisms behind it.
She created a quiz that you can take online, and we'll share that in the show notes.
And she has now had something more than 600,000 people complete that.
So she now has a giant data set validating a lot of the ideas behind the tendencies and incredible stories.