Interview with Gretchen Rubin

Zachary Karabell (0:06)

For this episode of What Could Go Right, I am speaking with Gretchen Rubin. I've known Gretchen for 15 years, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, and watched her career evolve and blossom with fascination. She is now one of the most influential writers on the subject of happiness, habits, and human nature. She has written several books on that set of topics, including The Happiness Project, Happier at Home, Better Than Before, and her latest book, which is out soon and may, by the time you're listening to this, be out called The Four Tendencies. She has sold almost three million books worldwide, translated into multiple languages, and she has also been an absolute genius at cultivating social media and networks of social media to create a critical mass of a community who are learning from each other and interacting around all of these questions, as well as her own podcast. So, it's a real pleasure to have her on this podcast.

So, Gretchen Rubin, you have been making a study of happiness, which also means, I suppose to some degree, a study of why people either are unhappy or perceive themselves to be unhappy. And you've been doing this for 15 years, 12 years, something?

Gretchen Rubin (1:32)

You know, that is a good question. How long have I been doing this? I think, yeah, I'm gonna look up, I can never remember my own pub date, so I'm literally looking at the pub date of The Happiness Project, which is 2009 So, I think since 2007 So, for like 10 years, I've been really studying happiness, but before then, I was basically, my subject is human nature. And so, I think ever since I became a writer, I've been looking at one aspect of human nature or the other.

Zachary Karabell (1:57)

So, in happiness and looking at it, and as many people know and probably some people don't, you're now at the epicenter of a community that you've helped generate, right? So, it's not just the books, it's the social media, it's the online presence, it's the interactivity of these questions and discussions. And I know you have a new book coming out in a couple of months, right? The Four Tendencies, so that will continue. But I'm curious, separate from what you put out as observations and tools, which we can talk about a little bit, although I think you have a, there are a lot of other outlets for you talking about them. So, I'm more interested in what have you learned, what have you learned about human nature, Gretchen, in the many, many, many inputs you now get around these ideas?

Gretchen Rubin (2:45)

Well, I would say, like, the thing that to me becomes clearer with every year that passes, and I would have said that I believed this probably when I started, but I didn't really understand how true it was, which is that you really have to recognize that in some ways, maybe in most ways, you're pretty much like everybody else, but the differences are very important, and that when you're trying to figure out how to make yourself happier or healthier or more productive or more creative, you really have to think about, well, what is true for you? Because there's this impulse among, I think, I think regular people, and certainly among experts and writers and pundits and all that, to come up with the best way. This is the best way to do it, this is the right way to do it, this is the seven key habits that successful people do before breakfast or whatever. And the fact is, there is no one best way, there's certainly no one right way, because people are so different. And one of the things, because all my stuff, I always begin by looking at myself, that's sort of my angle is to study myself. And when I started, like when I did The Happiness Project, I thought I was way more typical than I have turned out to be. And in some ways, I'm very much like other people, in some ways I'm very different. And I have a lot more understanding of other people now, because I've spent so much time thinking about, well, how are people different from each other?

Because it's just very easy to look out in the world and assume that everybody's basically seeing what you're seeing. They really aren't.

Zachary Karabell (4:17)

So speaking about everywhere out in the world, I believe your books have been published into many, many languages, 30 languages, a lot of different countries.

Gretchen Rubin (4:25)

Yeah.

Zachary Karabell (4:26)

Is there, what's the cultural part of this? Like how much is happiness an American thing versus understood differently by other cultures? How much have you learned about how these things break along national and international lines?