How To Handle Dilemmas, Drift, Indecision, and Difficult People | Gretchen Rubin

An avalanche of practical advice and brief (but powerful) life lessons. Gretchen Rubin https://gretchenrubin.com/ is a New York Times bestselling author and happiness expert who explores human nature and habits. She's a highly acclaimed writer, host of the podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin https://gretchenrubin.com/podcasts/ and the founder of the award-winning Happier app https://thehappierapp.com/. In this episode we talk about: What aphorisms are, and why they're useful How to make decisions that lead to a "bigger life" Why you should pay special attention to anything you lie about or hide The argument against task-sharing The dangers of being indecisive Why offering emotional validation can often be more powerful than offering solutions Why you should pay close attention when people repeat themselves over and over And much more Related Episodes: The Happiness Project: Revisited https://www.danharris.com/p/from-happier-with-gretchen-rubin-457?utm_source=publication-search How To Use Your Five Senses To Reduce Anxiety, Increase Creativity, and Improve Your Relationships https://www.danharris.com/p/gretchen-rubin-on-how-to-use-your-d5d?utm_source=publication-search Small Ways to Improve Your Everyday Life Right Now https://www.danharris.com/p/small-ways-to-improve-your-everyday-3d9?utm_source=publication-search Outer Order, Inner Calm https://www.danharris.com/p/gretchen-rubin-outer-order-inner-bbb?utm_source=publication-search 'The Four Tendencies' https://www.danharris.com/p/gretchen-rubin-the-four-tendencies-c61?utm_source=publication-search Gretchen Rubin (Our Long-Lost Pilot Episode) https://www.danharris.com/p/gretchen-rubin-our-long-lost-pilot-274?utm_source=publication-search Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: Gretchen's books https://gretchenrubin.com/books/ The "Five Things Making Me Happy" Newsletter https://gretchenrubin.com/newsletters/ Gretchen on Substack: Secrets of Adulthood https://secretsofadulthood.substack.com/ Get ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-2025. To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? I say this all the time, but it bears repeating. One of the hardest parts about self-improvement, or getting happier, or spiritual growth, whatever you want to call it, one of the hardest parts is remembering to do all the smart shit you hear about on podcasts, or read about in books, remembering to actually do all that stuff. Because we listen to a podcast, or we watch a great video, or we read a great book, and then we go back into our lives and we're just drifting along on the very powerful habit patterns. I suspect you might relate to this. You get your mind blown by a scintillating conversation, or a fascinating read, but then you get sucked back into the habit patterns of daily life, and boom, the wisdom evaporates.

• 1:03Dan Harris?

  In my experience, one of the best ways to counteract this is to have memorable little phrases that capture the wisdom, and pop it into your mind, just at the moment when you need it. This is a technique that my longtime meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, uses. He has these little catchphrases, like "dead end," or "is this useful?" And they become earworms in the most positive sense of that term. They arise in my mind, often at exactly the right moment. So now comes my old friend, Gretchen Rubin, who's an author and podcaster and entrepreneur, and she's been on the show a million times, and she's got a new book filled with her own aphorisms. In other words, little happiness-inducing missiles that you can use in all aspects

• 1:46Dan Harris?

  of your life. When you're confronting a dilemma, when you're dealing with a difficult person, when you're experiencing drift, or indecision. Long way of saying brace yourself for an avalanche of practical and profound wisdom from my friend Gretchen. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Gretchen, she's the host of a podcast called Happier, and she's the author of many, many books, including her newest, which is called The Secrets of Adulthood. In this conversation, we talk about what exactly an aphorism is and why it can be so useful, how to make decisions that lead to a quote unquote "bigger life," why you should pay special attention to anything you lie about or hide, the dangers of being indecisive, why offering emotional validation can often be more powerful than offering

• 2:29Dan Harris?

  solutions, why you should pay close attention when people repeat themselves over and over, and much more. Just to say, before we dive in, mindfulness and meditation can be great ways to help you figure out how to proceed when you're at a crossroads and have a big decision to make. And if you want to get better at that, we've got a guided meditation specifically tailored to this episode, and it comes from our Teacher of the Month, Kyra Jewell-Lingo. It's only available to paying subscribers over at danharris.com. As you may know, we're now providing bespoke meditations for all of our Monday/Wed episodes, and if you sign up at danharris.com, you'll get those, and you'll get ad-free versions of the show and live video sessions with me where we meditate together and I take your questions.

• 3:11Dan Harris?

  So sign up, join the party, danharris.com. We'll get started with Gretchen Rubin right after this.

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• 4:21Dan Harris?

  Gretchen Rubin, welcome back to the show.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  I'm so happy to be talking to you, Dan. It's always so fun.

• 4:29Dan Harris?

  The feeling is mutual. I think, I don't know that this is true, but I think you may be the person who's been on this show the most.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Really? That's exciting.

• 4:40Dan Harris?

  If it's not you, you're like tied with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein or something like that.

• 4:45Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 4:45Dan Harris?

  And I believe you may have been my second guest or third guest of all time at the beginning.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  Wow, you've been in this business a long time, Dan.

• 4:55Dan Harris?

  Well, we both have.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, we both have, yeah.

• 4:57Dan Harris?

  Okay, well, congratulations on your new book. I'm gonna ask you a really basic question to start here. What is an aphorism?

• 5:04Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, the book is called Secrets of Adulthood because nobody knows what an aphorism is. So, an aphorism is a brief, like a sentence or two, general insight about human nature that is attributed to a person. So, we all know about proverbs like, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears," or "You can't push a rope," or "A stumble may prevent a fall." That's folk wisdom that we pass around. With an aphorism, you know that Mark Twain said it, or Oscar Wilde said it, or Dolly Parton said it, or Montaigne said it. It's something that's attributed to a particular person. And so, I wanted to write my own.

• 5:41Dan Harris?

  We'll get into your aphorisms and why you wanted to write them. As a modality for living life better, why are aphorisms useful?

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Well, I think because they're concise. They stay in the brain better, and they kind of clarify our thinking because they are so crystallized, they're so condensed. You know, it's hard to have a thought. And to say it very concisely, you really have to get that clarity. And then, it's just easier to remember. It runs through your mind. And maybe you disagree with an aphorism. Often, that's the fun of an aphorism is if you disagree with it. Even that brings more clarity to your thinking. Many famous aphorisms are from the Buddha or attributed to because there is something like, when something is expressed very concisely, it lands harder in our minds. It just, it sticks with us better, influences our thoughts better.

• 6:32Dan Harris?

  I completely agree. I'll give you a somewhat long response here, but my meditation teacher, a guy you know, Joseph Goldstein, teaches in phrases, or he calls them phrases, but they are aphorisms. Some of them his, some of them ones that he has appropriated from others. As he once said to me when I was... Sheepishly confessing to stealing a lot of stuff from him in my own public utterances, he said, "We're part of a lineage of thieves."

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Ah, nice.

• 7:00Dan Harris?

  Which is a very nice framing. And I find that with Joseph's phrases, again, either of his own coinage or those he has borrowed from others, they actually surface in my mind at the exact right moment all the time.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:15Dan Harris?

  And similarly with, as I've been reading yours, and we're going to talk about them, they have been surfacing in my mind. I'll give you an example. One of the aphorisms we're going to talk about is how, I don't have the exact verbiage in front of me, but the importance of when somebody recommends a TV show or sends a podcast to you, you should watch or listen to it because it is really a form of not only respect, but of deepening a relationship. And just this morning, a friend of mine, another meditation teacher, Sebene Selassie, sent me a two-hour podcast on the history of astrology, a subject in which I have very limited interest. And at first, I was like, "I'm not going to listen to this." But now, I'm going to listen to it because your aphorism surfaced just at that moment.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  And I think we've all had that experience where you read a line or two, or somebody says, maybe even just an offhand remark, or you encounter an idea somewhere, and all of a sudden, it's like you see the world more clearly, you understand how you should move forward. Like, it's so exciting when you have that. And also, when people recommend, when they're basically saying, like, "I'm thinking of you, I think this is something that you will find interesting." When we say, "Oh, okay, I'm going to follow up on that," it is a way to deepen a relationship. Yeah.

• 8:26Dan Harris?

  Staying at a high level, before we dive into your aphorisms that I specifically want to talk to you about, one of the riffs I often go on, one of the raps I often find coming out of my mouth when I'm in front of a microphone, is that I think among the hardest, if not the hardest, part of learning how to do life better, getting happier, whatever, is remembering all the smart shit you read or heard. And it seems like aphorisms go right at that. They're like earworms in the best possible way.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  That is a great analogy, yes. It's like, how do you get that earworm so that it pops up and helps you to kind of move forward in the right way at the right time? But I'm curious, what are some of the ones that have stuck with you from the teaching phrases?

• 9:10Dan Harris?

  Well, I'm laughing a little bit because as you know, because we've talked about it a lot offline. I've gone through the last couple of years, a very hard business separation. I used to have a meditation app and I don't anymore. And that's been very, very difficult. And I can, because of my conditioning, probably as a, or maybe as a part of being a man, I can revert to kind of angry inner diatribes, which are often frankly unfair because it took two to tango here. It's not like this was somebody else's fault. I was a part of the situation. And there are two phrases that Joseph has directed me to drop into my mind when I'm like delivering some glorious expletive filled speech to some counterparty or another.

• 9:55Dan Harris?

  One of them is dead end. Like, you know, I've gone down this road a million times. There's nothing, a dead end.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  So that truly is just a phrase. Yeah, dead end.

• 10:08Dan Harris?

  Dead end. So it's not so much an aphorism. And the other is love no matter what, which is going to sound a little bit like a kind of recipe for being a doormat, but Joseph means it in the sense that you should understand that everybody is just acting out their conditioning, including you. And if you came out of the womb of whatever person you're disagreeing with currently, you would probably be doing the same shit they're doing because of the causes and conditions that are driving all of us all the time. And so love as a form of understanding, love no matter what. So that's the other phrase I drop into my head.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Interesting. It is true that if you just runs through your mind like an earworm, then you can remember it at the right time. Because as you say, like so often, I mean, even things that I really love to do or want to do, I'll just sort of forget about them for months on end. I have all kinds of ways that I remind myself of my aims for myself because otherwise, because you're like, how could you just forget? And yet you get distracted, it falls to the bottom of the list and somehow months have passed and it's forgotten. So yeah, I think that anything that helps us really get right back in focus is very useful.

• 11:20Dan Harris?

  Other than aphorisms, what are the other ways that you remind yourself of your aims?

• 11:24Speaker 04

  Hmm, okay. I talk about this a lot on the Happier podcast with my sister, but every year, based on the year, just for fun, I'll make a list of 20 things I want to do that year. So it's called 25 for 25, or 26 for 26, or whatever. So I make a list of things that I want to do. Because again, it's like, I might just forget to do it if I don't write it down. And so then I'll check on that periodically, like halfway day, which is halfway through the year. It's like, that's one of the times where I pull out my list and remind myself. If something's important to me, I'll often do it every single day, because I maybe strangely find it easier to do something every day than to do it some days. So like, in 2025, I'm doing watercoloring every single day, except I did take two weeks off because we got a new puppy. And I'm like, okay, this is just gonna melt my brain. I have to have taffy time for the puppy,

• 12:08Speaker 04

  take two weeks off. Because I'm like, if I don't do it every day, I'm afraid that it might just drift away from me, because it's, you want to do it most days, but then you do it some days, and then you do it sometimes, and then you do it a few times, and then you don't do it at all. So for me, like, doing something every day is a really good way to make sure that it stays in the uppermost of my mind. And I'll often pick a theme for the year. One year it was salt, and one year it was bigger. And then this year, it's door, because my younger daughter left, and I'm kind of rebranding the empty nest phase as the open door phase. And we also, my husband and I, as you know, Dan, bought a lake house, and so we have a new door, we have a new puppy, like, we have all this kind of coming and going.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  And so my theme is door, because door is a word of transition, it's a word of hospitality, and it's a word of leaving and returning.

• 12:57Dan Harris?

  Can we do a brief digression on Taffy, your new dog?

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, let's do it. Taffy, yes. My daughters manifested this dog. I was happiness bullied, my husband and I, into getting this dog. They just made this dog happen by sheer force of will. But we love her, and she is wonderful.

• 13:13Dan Harris?

  Okay, well, so that's my question. Your sister sometimes calls you a happiness bully. Your sister, who's the co-host on your podcast, which is called Happier, and- You got happiness bullied into adopting Taffy.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 13:25Dan Harris?

  Are you happier?

• 13:26Speaker 04

  It's interesting, right? Because one of my secrets of adulthood is happiness doesn't always make us feel happy. And one of the things about Taffy is it is a lot more work. She's a puppy, so you kind of have to watch her every minute. Both my husband and I had forgotten about this puppy phase where like, you can't just say like, oh, I'm going to be gone for nine hours today and you're going to be gone for nine hours too. And we'll, you know, our older dog is very chill and he's got his whole routine worked out. And so we have this feeling of being much more tied down than we did. And, you know, and there's all the frustration of training. And it's never the dog's fault. It's your fault. So we got to figure, we've been bickering a lot because he's like, you just keep telling me I'm doing it wrong. You're being very critical. And I'm like, yes, that's true, but you are doing it wrong.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  And all that kind of thing. But my daughters, they did, they quoted my own words back to me. They're like, oh, you know, that it'll bring so much happiness into our life and it'll be, you know, the atmosphere of growth. And it is true that all the research shows that like having a dog tends to make people happier. Also makes them healthier just because they even get more exercise. I said to my daughters, like, well, I really wanted to have like a big family adventure trip. I don't know what that would even be this summer. And my daughter said, having Taffy is a bigger adventure than any trip could ever be. And I thought that that was really true. Like having, having another dog. And she is so cute and we like send pictures back and forth. And everybody's reporting on like the adorable things she did. And, and I'm actually, my next book is going to be about the empty nest, which again, I'm calling the open door phase because I don't like empty nest.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  But one of the things in it is like, do you have an atmosphere of growth in your life that things are growing or like building? And getting bigger? Do you have that feeling in your life? And it is definitely true. It has added so much to our lives already. Yeah.

• 15:06Dan Harris?

  Just to get back to Taffy for a second, because it does lead to another aphorism. And again, I'm going to screw up the exact verbiage here, but something about when you're at a crossroads, you say, Make the decision that will lead to a bigger life.

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Yes, and that is exactly what we did with Taffy because, well, originally with my dog Barnaby, I couldn't decide because my daughters were begging for a dog. My husband was like, fine. But I was like, it seemed so perfectly balanced to me, the pros and the cons. But then when I said, well, let's choose the bigger life, it was instantly clear to me that for our family, the bigger life was to get the dog. And for another family, it might have been not to get a dog because you have more money, you have more freedom, you have more spontaneity, less responsibility. But for us, it was the bigger life. And the same thing with Taffy. Again, my daughters begging for the dog. My husband was like, yeah, it could be fun to have a second dog. And again, I was like, okay, but we already have one dog, on and on and on. And then I thought, well, let's choose the bigger life. And again, the bigger life for our family was to get the dog.

• 16:04Dan Harris?

  Okay, so now we're in aphorism territory firmly. So let's go through some of the aphorisms that I want to talk about from your book. Just to say, the book is divided up into five sections with different types of aphorisms for each section. The five are self, relationships, making things happen, including at work, confronting life's dilemmas. And then there's a whole section called simple secrets of adulthood.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  Those are the ones that are not transcendent, you know, are kind of like bigger ideas. They're more like hacks because I can't resist a hack. So the last section is just the hacks.

• 16:37Dan Harris?

  I love a hack too, and we'll get to them. Let's go in order, though. Let's start with the self, cultivating the self. I'm just going to read some of these often at random and

• 16:46Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 16:47Dan Harris?

  get you to hold forth. The first one that comes to mind is, we should pay special attention to anything we lie about or try to hide.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  Yes. Okay, so a lot of these came out of specific moments in my life, either something like a conversation I had with somebody or something that I read or something, you know, that I saw that made a big impression. And this one, I started thinking about this after a friend of mine said, we had little kids then, and she said, oh, my pediatrician asked me how many hours a day my children watch TV, and I lied. And the thing that's interesting about this is like she lied because her actions were in conflict with her values. Because if she deeply believed, and some people believe, like, it doesn't matter. Let them watch as much TV as they want. That's fine. Because then she wouldn't have lied, because there wouldn't have been any reason not to just tell the truth. But she lied because there was something that was out of sync with her

• 17:40Speaker 04

  values. Another guy I was talking to, he was saying, somebody said, how often do you ride your bike to work? And he gave an answer, and then he said to me later, but like, actually, I've only ridden my bike like, once or twice, or maybe three times. And I'm like, okay, probably that means once. Because, but I lied, because I really liked the idea of myself as riding the bike to work every day. And so again, his actions didn't reflect his values. And so the fact is, like, when we catch ourselves in these lies, it's like, well, this is really good information. Because in some way, your values are not aligned with your actions. And so one thing you can do is you could say, like, well, this is just an idea of a fantasy self. I have this fantasy of myself as somebody who's gonna ride the bike every day. And look, that's just not me. And give up the fantasy self. Or you could say, look, I really want to be the kind of person who rides the bike to work every day.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  So let me become that kind of person in the most simplest and straightforward way, which is by riding my bike to work every day. You could do either thing. But because you're deceiving, it's a tell that something's out of whack.

• 18:39Dan Harris?

  So you don't have to kick your own ass for noticing that you've been insufficiently truthful. You shouldn't view it as a kind of divining rod pointing to attention in your life that requires attention.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  It's information. Yeah.

• 18:51Dan Harris?

  Here's another from what I believe to be the self section. One day, now will be a long time ago.

• 18:59Speaker 04

  I find that very reassuring. And it's kind of back to the truth that you were talking about, Dan, that like, we want to care deeply, but we also want to not care. It's like, we want to recognize the urgencies of now. But also to remember that now will be a long time ago. It also makes me appreciate now more, because I always want to say to myself, like, remember, Whatever experience I'm experiencing in the moment feels like, oh, this is just the way it's gonna be forever. But I know now, because of time and experience, that that is absolutely not true. So I should really appreciate now. One of the things that I did as an exercise along these lines is I made something called the album of now, like two years ago now, I think. I just went around and took pictures of now. I took pictures of every room in our apartment. I took pictures of what was in our fridge

• 19:44Speaker 04

  and pantry. I took pictures of our street. I just wanted to have a picture of like, what do things look like now? Because I realized now, when I look back on pictures saved from my childhood, I'm not interested in seeing my family in front of the Eiffel Tower. I'm like, what did my bedroom look like? What did our kitchen look like? It's, you know, oh, I remember those shoes. Because it feels like now is boring. Now is so ordinary. I could never forget now. But one day now will be a long time ago. And it's also reassuring because if like, things seem really bad now, you're like, well, this too shall pass.

• 20:17Dan Harris?

  Yes. No, I love that. I sometimes think about, if I woke up in my bed in seventh grade, would I know what to do?

• 20:26Speaker 04

  What do you mean?

• 20:27Dan Harris?

  Like, would I know like, what my life was like then? And how, what time my classes were? Or how to talk to my parents?

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Oh, Freaky Friday for yourself, right?

• 20:36Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes. Can you inhabit your current life with that spirit to reanimate everything?

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. Well, it's interesting. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a novelist, and she writes children's and young adult novels. And I was like, when I read your books, I'm so much back in that way of thinking. And how do you remember it? And she said, I remember it so well. I can go back to any year of my life, and I know what my worries were, who my friends were, what music I listened to, like, what I wanted to do on the weekends. Like, she just has such a recall of that. And I don't have that at all. I call that, are you a movie person or a snapshot person? Because movie people have like, they have the ongoing movie, but I just have like, a few intensely vivid snapshots. But they stand out against kind of nothingness. And so I'm always trying to find ways to help myself remember, to jog my memory into like, try to leave myself

• 21:27Speaker 04

  information for later, so that I can remember the past. And I really envy that. Because like, she could drop right back into seventh grade, but I feel like I'm with you. I'm like, what, what, what's going on? It's confusing to think about what that would have been like.

• 21:41Dan Harris?

  You and I were speaking at some event together a couple of months ago, and you said that whole movie versus snapshot thing.

• 21:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:48Dan Harris?

  It stuck with me because I'm definitely a snapshot person, too. Let me give you another. It might be an aphorism. It might be a proverb because I actually don't know who said it, but it seems apropos to the one day now will be a long time ago aphorism from you. These are the good old days.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  Yes, right, yes. I think that's a proverb because I also have heard many people say it, but that's true. That's true. I had a neighbor say it to me just a couple of years ago. She's like, just remember, these are the good old days. I'm like, yes, you're right.

• 22:20Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Gretchen talks about why offering emotional validation can be more powerful than offering solutions when somebody's complaining to you about something. A lesson I've learned the hard way. Why you should pay close attention when people repeat themselves over and over. Another lesson I've learned the hard way. The argument against task sharing in romantic partnerships and much more.

• 22:49Speaker 02

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• 23:09Speaker 03

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• 23:21Dan Harris?

  The next section. This one is about facing the perplexities of relationships. I love so many of these, but I'll start with this one. We make people happier by acknowledging that they're not feeling happy.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  This was a really hard one for me to learn because I do have kind of a happiness bully, fix it tendency and kind of look on the bright side. It's not so bad. Like, okay, you're not afraid of clowns. You always have fun at these things, that kind of thing. And, you know, I finally noticed like this does not work. It actually makes people feel worse because then they feel like they have to insist on their feelings because you're denying their feelings. It just doesn't make them feel better. It's like telling somebody to calm down almost never works, right? But when you say things like, well, that sounds really frustrating, or wow, that really hurt your feelings. Or I remember one of my daughters took an exam and in the middle of it sort of misread a chart,

• 24:16Speaker 04

  had no idea what to do, totally freaked out, had just like a huge reaction. And I said, wow, it really sounds like you got really got jangled nerves in the middle of that exam. I remember it because it was like, never have I felt that I said the perfect thing because she was like, yes, jangled nerves. And it was like, that framed it in a way that she's like, yeah, it wasn't such a big deal. My nerves got jangled, you know? Because instead of trying to convince her that she hadn't had this feeling or that nothing had happened, I was just trying to help her just say like, I get it. Yeah, I know what it's like. You're in an exam and you get jangled nerves because you don't know what you're looking at. The impulse to say like, it's no big deal, or cable guys never come when they say they're gonna come. I don't understand why you're so frustrated. You know, it's just like, no, it sounds like it was really frustrating. Like, you wasted

• 25:01Speaker 04

  your whole morning and they never showed up. That is just such a bummer. It's like, that's much more satisfying.

• 25:08Dan Harris?

  I will never forget, right here on the show, interviewing Brene Brown, talking about how to deal with her kids when they were upset. And she said, the thing she says to them is, I can't fix it, but I can sit in the dark with you.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 25:23Dan Harris?

  You know, it's like, people just want to feel validated, not

• 25:27Speaker 04

  Corrected.

• 25:28Dan Harris?

  It's, there's a kind of invalidation when you rush to the fix.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  Right, right. Well, and even it kind of in a smaller way, that that sounds like was something that's a big issue, but something that I really loved that I did when my kids were really little. And this is an idea I got from my all time favorite. Parenting book, but it actually it's aimed at like the parents of really little kids, but all of the advice is just as useful with like your boss or your mother-in-law or whatever. It's just like universally good advice. And one of them was give them their wish and fantasy. So if somebody's like, oh, my gosh, we're out of eggs, but I really feel like having eggs today. And you're like, I wish that I were Glinda and I could wave a wand and you would have all the eggs you wanted, because a lot of times you just want to know that somebody's like, I get it.

• 26:09Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  I'm here with you. I understand. I wish that I could, but I can't. I wish that I could make it snow two feet and then you could go sledding all day long, but it's raining instead of snowing or whatever it is. Yeah. Sitting with you in the dark is much more profound.

• 26:25Dan Harris?

  What we're pointing at here, what you're pointing at here, I think, is in my experience, kind of the skeleton key to interpersonal excellence, which is, is the understanding that what people want, whether they know it or not, is to be understood.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 26:41Dan Harris?

  And that is related to-

• 26:43Speaker 04

  Or even to be heard and being, and you're trying to understand-

• 26:46Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Even if you haven't gotten there yet.

• 26:49Dan Harris?

  Correct.

• 26:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 26:49Dan Harris?

  I totally agree with that correction. It does lead to another aphorism, which is we know what matters to people when they repeat themselves.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah, right? When somebody tells you a story over and over, you're like, I always am like, oh, that's interesting. Why is that the story they're telling? It's often very interesting.

• 27:10Dan Harris?

  That and often when I hear people making a point over and over again, I realize I haven't acknowledged it.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Yes. This is like make people happy by acknowledging that they're not feeling happy. That's exactly right, because if you don't acknowledge it, they'll just keep repeating it over and over because they need you to acknowledge it. But then if you acknowledge it, then they can move on. Exactly. Exactly. For some reason, we find this counterintuitive, even though it shouldn't be counterintuitive, because- It never works to just deny and deflect that the impulse is real.

• 27:43Dan Harris?

  Well, I think it's counterintuitive because we're all in our own movies. So I'm pursuing my own agenda. I'm not fucking thinking about your agenda. And so, but I should be because actually if I think about your agenda, my agenda will be better able to achieve my agenda. But there is a small mindedness that is very easy to fall into that I personally have fallen into many, many times.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  Well, and I also think, and a lot of the secrets of adulthood are about this, is that you can't help but think that other people see the world the way you do, and that they're framing things the way you're framing them and they're responding to them more or less the way you would respond to them. Whereas in fact, just like you can't smell your home the way a guest smells it, they could be having a completely different experience. They could be sizing up a situation in a completely different way. And so much of what I do in kind of my study of happiness and human nature is really to understand like there are movie people and snapshot people. And so when somebody's telling you about their experience, it's not to say you're right, I'm wrong, you're better, I'm worse, or whatever. It's just to say, this is interesting. People, they're coming to this with just a very different mind and just understanding that

• 28:47Speaker 04

  just because something's true for me, doesn't mean that it's true for somebody else. I used to be really bad about this. Like I'd be like, everybody should just get up early and do what's important to them first thing in the day. And if you can't do it, you should just go to bed earlier. That's just such bad advice. That's just not true. You know, 30% of people are night people and it's largely genetically determined in a function of age. So this idea that you're just gonna make yourself be completely different. It's like, no. Here's a great example, just again, digression, because I think this is the most amazing thing. I was talking to somebody, she was the host of a morning talk show, which she did virtually. And it was really hard for her because she had to get up really early in the morning to do it. And then she moved to Europe. She solved her morning problem by going to a different time zone.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  Now she has a very leisurely morning because everything happens six hours later. You know, her show, she has to do her work at the show at the same time, but it's much later in her day. And I was like, okay, that is thinking outside of the box and dealing with your chronotype for sure.

• 29:45Dan Harris?

  I love that. I wish I could have done that when I worked for Good Morning America.

• 29:48Speaker 04

  Well, I know. What time did you get up? You had that super punishing morning slot.

• 29:54Dan Harris?

  3:45 in the morning. It sucks.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  I mean, that is rough. That is rough. I mean, imagine how different it would have been if you could have done that at 7:45. If you were getting up at 7:45 and your show had gone live at the same time.

• 30:06Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it would have been great. I would have enjoyed it.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:09Dan Harris?

  Here's another aphorism that relates to relationships, but relationships broadly understood, very in a capacious understanding of the term relationships. And it's also very Buddhist. Here it is. "I admire nature, and I'm also nature. I resent traffic, and I am also traffic."

• 30:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, often we're part of it, for good or for ill. Yes, I am traffic, I am nature.

• 30:36Dan Harris?

  It speaks to the permeability of the self.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 30:42Dan Harris?

  You know, we've been talking about this, like, we feel separate from the universe, but we are the universe. We're made up of atoms from exploding stars, and all the ideas coursing through our heads, of course, are influenced by or injected by the outside culture.

• 30:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:58Dan Harris?

  So there's something really profound about the impersonality and interdependence that this aphorism points to.

• 31:07Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Well, and then there's a related one, which is also that, and I can't remember exactly how I worded it, but it's like, we're often part of the problem that we deplore. So it's like the tourist who's saying like, well, all these tourists are just ruining this place. I reject tourists, I am tourist. Yeah.

• 31:23Dan Harris?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:25Dan Harris?

  All right, let's move to section three, which deals with life's dilemmas. The aphorism I'll start with here is, "The person who works the hardest isn't necessarily doing the best work." Say more.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  I mean, I have to remind myself of this secret of adulthood all the time, that just because I'm working really, really hard, or putting in a lot of hours, or grinding it out, does not mean that my work is the best, or that I'm making the biggest contribution. Sometimes it can be very startling and kind of annoying when you think you're doing all this work, and then somebody kind of marches in, does one or two things, and sets everything to rights, and you think, but I've been working so hard. But that doesn't mean you're doing the best work. And so I'm always trying to figure out... Not to replace just the grind, not letting that take away from really thinking

• 32:20Speaker 04

  about what is the essential thing that should be done. And to give credit for it, because sometimes people do something that looks so easy, but you're like, yeah, but if they can do it, and nobody else can do it, or nobody else thought to do it, then their contribution is enormous.

• 32:33Dan Harris?

  This can be the source of a lot of tension on work teams. A lot of tension.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  For sure, because some people think, I've been doing the hardest work, I've been doing the most unpleasant work, I've been doing the most work, therefore, my contribution is the greatest. And it's like, well, maybe, but maybe not.

• 32:49Dan Harris?

  There's also the dynamic that I talk about a lot, or I don't want to take credit for this, actually. It's Tony Maguire, the CEO of my team. One of the things that she talks a lot about is that there's a lot of invisible work that happens, by which she means invisible to me, at the top of the food chain in this company. And this is a bit of a digression, again, because not necessarily totally on point with the aphorism, but it's a thing as a leader, I have really tried to attune myself to.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  Well, this is one of the things I love about aphorisms, is they will often inspire other thoughts, or kind of like, adjacent, or you're trying to think of illustrations. And so I think they spark ideas just in that way. And I think 100%, you're right. Another secret of adulthood is the sharing of tasks often leads to the shirking of tasks. And the way it connects with your observation is that when they look at shared work, work teams, or married couples, research shows that if you ask people, what percentage do you contribute? And you add it all up, it'll be like 167%. Because everybody thinks they're contributing more to the total than they are. And that makes sense, because we're very aware of what we're doing. But like you say, what other people do is often invisible to us. And also, we tend to do the work that we think matters, and maybe we think other things don't really matter.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  Like, I don't really care about air conditioning. Jamie, my husband, cares deeply about air conditioning, so he does everything related to air conditioning. But I'm like, well, that's not really that big a deal. But actually, for the height of summer, and we had no air conditioning, I think I would be persuaded that his contribution was very significant. We just do have this tendency to overweight our own contribution and not understand. As you say, if you're at the top, you literally do not realize like, oh, well, actually the schedule, the sub stack, these 10 steps have to happen. You don't realize that that's necessary or that that's part of it, or that if you make a sudden change at the last minute, why that might have a downstream complication for somebody else because you're just not attuned to it. So, yeah, I think it's really important to remember, like, you don't know what you don't know, you don't see what you don't see.

• 34:49Dan Harris?

  Exactly. What are the practical implications of the aphorism about shared tasks being synonymous with shirked tasks?

• 34:59Speaker 04

  I'm very much in favor of assignments and not sharing tasks and certainly not like volunteering for tasks because it can lead to so much conflict. And the funniest example of this is like, now it's not so much a thing because so many people work from home or they're in a hybrid workplace, but my favorite thing in the world to do is to go to an office kitchen and just observe and like read the signs because there is so much about human nature. I feel like I could write a coffee table book or a PhD thesis about the deep secrets of human nature that are revealed in the office kitchen. And one of the places is like, how do we load and unload the dishwasher? Right? Because a lot of people are like, well, just if it's full, empty it. And like, if your dishes are dirty, put them in the dishwasher. And I'm like, this isn't gonna work because some people aren't gonna do it and some people

• 35:43Speaker 04

  are, and the people who do it are gonna get resentful and they're not gonna understand why the people who don't do it and the people who don't do it are like, this is not my job. My job is to be a salesperson. If I'm making sales, that's how I support the company. Any minute that I'm doing unloading a dishwasher is a minute that I'm not making a sale and that's not good for any. So everybody, like you say, everybody from their own point of view has a reason that why they do make sense. If you want the dishwasher to be unloaded, loaded and loaded, like make it somebody's job. Like, say this is part of your responsibility, do it or figure out some way to do it. But if you're just like, let's all just share in this task. We're pretty good at thinking of reasons why, well, today, I'm not going to step up. Or we step up all the time, cover for other people, and then get bitterly resentful.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  Sharing of tasks tends to lead to shirking of tasks.

• 36:32Dan Harris?

  But aren't some tasks inevitably, inexorably shared, like taffy, for example?

• 36:37Speaker 04

  Hmm, no, but instead of saying like, okay, on Saturday afternoon, let's both take care of her. In which case, both of us are like trying to sneak off and leave the other one holding the bag. It's more like, okay, how about I take the morning shift and you take the afternoon shift just to be on duty? And then it's like, okay, you need to run out to the grocery store or something like, I can deal with it. But at least in my observation, it's often easier to just know that something is, it's your responsibility right now, rather than expecting people to just sort of chip in, step up. It just often, it's, they're shirking. Maybe not everybody's shirking, but that probably means that somebody else is overcompensating, like overworking.

• 37:20Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  And that's not fair. And then often that will lead to resentment. But even if it doesn't, it's not really fair. But you can dispute this. That's an aphorism. You may disagree. You may say, I don't believe that sharing of tasks leads to shirking of tasks. That's great. Then I have room in the back for your own secrets of adulthood. You could write a secret of adulthood about that. This is just what I've learned, but I am not infallible for sure. So that's one where people might disagree.

• 37:46Dan Harris?

  Okay, well, here's an aphorism that may be slightly apropos. The opposite of a profound truth is also true.

• 37:52Speaker 04

  Well, I think that's very Buddhist. You know, the union of opposites. Or maybe not, I don't know. You know that much better than I do. Is that accurate to say that? That the opposite of a profound truth is also true? Is a Buddhist idea?

• 38:04Dan Harris?

  In later stage Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, about which I don't know that much, there's this

• 38:11Dan Harris?

  Talk about emptiness and form being opposites, but also complementary. And I don't know enough to even explain what that means. So maybe it is a Buddhist idea.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Well, okay. I've just often seen that both can be true, that two things can be true at the same time. The ideas can be intention, but both are true. So like to take a proverb that we all know, out of sight, out of mind. And absence makes the heart grow fonder. Both are true. And a lot of my secrets of adulthood are like that, like love is unconditional and love is demanding. Love accepts you just as you are and love expects the best from you. Or for ourselves, we want to accept ourselves and expect more from ourselves. Both are true. Hell is other people. That's Sartre, a famous line. But heaven is other people. Both are true.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think it's often interesting to think of like, well, could the opposite be true?

• 39:09Dan Harris?

  Okay, so I didn't fully understand you until you just explained. And so I do think it's a Buddhist thing. What you're pointing to, if I understand you correctly, is the power of paradox.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  Mm hmm, yes. And the aphorism is often, and like Oscar Wilde is one of the exemplars of this. It's often employs paradox.

• 39:29Dan Harris?

  That's very true in Buddhism. So like one towering example is that in the Dharma, one of the central ideas is that the self that we spend a lot of time building up and defending is on a fundamental level, an illusion. Like if you look really closely for some core nugget of Gretchen, you can't find it. But it's also true that if you look in the mirror, you'll see Gretchen. That's the union of the ultimate truth and the relative truth. So on the level of relative consensual reality, Gretchen's real. But ultimately, there's no Gretchen. That seems to me an example of exactly what you're talking about with this aphorism.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  Uh huh, that it's both real and not real at the same time, that there's a, yeah. Interesting, interesting, yes.

• 40:15Dan Harris?

  Or as another paradox comes from T S Eliot, but the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein talks about it a lot. The idea, T S Eliot exhorts us to care and not to care. It's actually playing off of relative and ultimate. Like, yeah, it matters. I don't want Gretchen to be unhappy. So I care. But also, on some fundamental level, it's all an illusion. So I don't care. But these two truths can inform one another so that you can not care too much and also not fall into nihilism.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  Exactly. That's a perfect example of the kind of thing that I was thinking about with that aphorism. Yes.

• 40:52Dan Harris?

  Here's another aphorism I like. To make something beautiful, it's often necessary to add a touch of ugly. Beautiful music often features notes of dissonance. A lovely fragrance often incorporates some bad smells. An elegant living room includes a garish green pillow. A hint of sour deepens flavors. Hold forth on that, if you will.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly that. That it's interesting that you kind of have to add a bit of ugly to things to make them more beautiful. I just think that that's interesting to see it work its way into so many different areas. One of the fun aspects of the aphorism is kind of the mic drop quality, where you just say something. But there were many where there was a story or examples or illustrations like this one, where I just couldn't resist adding them in because I thought that they were so interesting. I think it was Eugene Delacroix said, "To finish a painting, one must spoil it a little." This idea that something has to have a little bit of something that isn't quite right and that that can be more perfect than perfection.

• 41:53Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Gretchen talks about the dangers of being indecisive, how to interact successfully with other human beings, and other nuggets of brilliance in this ongoing avalanche of wisdom.

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• 42:45Dan Harris?

  All right, I've been working through the five sections of your book, Self, Relationships, Making Things Happen. So now we're going to move to confronting life's dilemmas. Here we go. Decisions will be made by choice or by chance, because not deciding is a decision. Not choosing is a choice.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  Yes, I mean, this is just the fact. A lot of times, if you don't decide, you are deciding. You know, you can't not make a choice because to not choose is a choice. And I'm very wary of this in my life. And I'll even say to people, it's fine not to do this, but I want to mindfully choose not to do this. I don't want just the opportunity to slip away. Let's say, let's take a big family trip this summer. If you just don't decide, it will be decided because it will just be too late. Or like, you think you want to switch careers. Well, at a certain point, you don't know necessarily when exactly that point is, it will become too late. Like, you'll just feel like, I've missed my chance, whatever. Or you might say, well, it's never too late.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  Maybe it's never too late for you, but maybe for someone else or for a certain kind of training, it would become too late. I remember when I was switching from law to writing, I came to a point where I had to decide whether to get another law job or, and continue to work on my book on the side, or whether I really should try to do it full-time. And I thought, well, at this point, I would rather fail as a writer than succeed as a lawyer. So I really want to like, try and either fail or succeed and then like, take it from there. But if I hadn't forced myself to really say, because maybe I would have said like, oh, I want to take a law job and I will work on this on the side. But then I would have been like, okay, given that I'm doing this on the side, how am I really still committing to this? As a project that's really important to me, but just to like not decide and just to drift along.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  And then like somebody offers me a job and then I interview and I'm like, wow, this seems really great. I'll take this job. I can always change my mind later. This seems like the safe choice. You can just drift through, but you're making decisions all the time without realizing it. You know, or like you're in a relationship and it's you're not moving forward, but you're not moving back. And it's just continuing and continuing and continuing. And at a certain point, you're like, I've been making a decision by not deciding.

• 45:03Dan Harris?

  Isn't there an aphorism specifically about drift?

• 45:06Speaker 04

  Maybe. I talk about drift all the time. Do I have another aphorism or is that the aphorism for it? Now I can't remember. Again, I have, you know, it is when you're writing a book, I put in and took out so many times. But yeah, because I talk about drift all the time because I drifted into law school. So I know drift very well. Drifting is when you just kind of go with the flow. So you're making decisions, but you're not really making decisions. You're just doing what the default is or what everybody else around you wants, or the easier choice rather than like really mindfully choosing.

• 45:36Dan Harris?

  Isn't the idea of going with the flow often used in a positive way? Aren't there some upsides to that version of drift?

• 45:46Speaker 04

  Well, it depends on how much you care. If you don't really care about something, go with the flow. And then if other people care more, just be carried along. And then there are situations where we will mindfully refrain from making a decision. Like maybe we don't have enough information or we're letting events play out, or we're sort of balancing in our mind, but we're mindfully engaged. Or we're purposefully saying, I'm not going to move forward. I'm just going to take a break from this. The thing that I'm warning against is when you are really making a decision.

• 46:18Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  Because time is passing and time will foreclose certain opportunities just by the nature of time passing. And there comes a point where certain things are no longer options. And I just think it's fine for that to happen, but you want to mindfully grapple with it.

• 46:34Dan Harris?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I'm not a drifter, so I have some trouble relating to it. But I will tell one story about drift in a positive sense. When I was 30, I went to Europe with a bunch of college friends and we were going around Spain. Everybody was arguing all the time about like what to do next? What, where are we gonna have dinner? Where we're going tonight? My friend Rudy was always on the outside of those scrums. And I went to him one day, I was like, why don't you participate? He's like, because I know I'm gonna be happy whatever we do.

• 47:03Speaker 04

  There you go. It just didn't matter, right? But if somebody was like, oh, I really want to go see this one cathedral because I'm thinking that I'm gonna write my senior thesis about it and it's really, really important for me to go. But we could do it this day, we could do it that day. We'll get to there eventually, blah, blah, blah. And then, okay, we're not gonna go because it turns out it's closed on Wednesday. And so you can't go. And that was like the one thing that you really wanted to get done. But because you never sort of decided to make it happen, you lost the opportunity. So yeah, not caring is fine. Like if it just really doesn't matter to you. But then sometimes it really will make a difference. And that's what you want to just be careful. You know, that you're not just taking a job because somebody offered you a job or you become a doctor because both your parents are doctors.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  Or you're just doing things because it's the easier course.

• 47:52Dan Harris?

  Another aphorism from this section, which again is confronting life's dilemmas. If we take the credit, we must accept the blame.

• 48:01Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. Well, I think about this with parenting all the time. Because I'm like, I don't take the credit. But that also means that I don't, I don't feel that much responsibility in a way. I mean, I feel a certain kind of responsibility, of course. But I do think the more you take credit for something. It's like if you take credit for the economy, you have to be like, okay, if we have a bad economy, that's my fault too. Those two things go together.

• 48:24Dan Harris?

  Yeah, our current president doesn't necessarily believe in taking blame for the economy or anything else.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  There are two sides of the same coin because they're about responsibility. If you're responsible, you get the credit and you also get the blame.

• 48:38Dan Harris?

  Yes, if you're responsible, if you're a responsible person. All right, let's just stay with this section. We can be wrong for a very long time without noticing. Bloodletting was a common medical treatment for two millennia.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  Yes, George Washington died of bloodletting.

• 48:54Dan Harris?

  I didn't know that.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  Yes, he did. He wasn't that sick, but they were like, look, he's not getting better. We better let out more blood. And then more blood, and my gosh, he's just weaker than ever. We gotta let out some more blood. The guy died.

• 49:06Dan Harris?

  It wasn't the wooden teeth that did it, man?

• 49:08Speaker 04

  Apparently not, though I don't know, they could have been a contributing factor. I don't know, but it's just one of these things where it just becomes what everybody assumes, and it's hard to notice that it's not the case.

• 49:20Dan Harris?

  So it's the danger of conventional wisdom?

• 49:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:24Dan Harris?

  And it's a call for consistent reexamination, I would imagine?

• 49:29Speaker 04

  Well, I'll give you an example with my first daughter, and this was many years ago. I was put on bedrest. Even at the time, I thought, this is a terrible idea. This just doesn't make, like, just to me intuitively, it doesn't make any sense. It's never good for the body to be just like taken out of action, right? It's like, it's never good, it seemed to me. And so I said to my doctor, what is the evidence that shows that this is like an important thing to do and would be helpful? And she's like, well, there really is no evidence. It was basically like, well, it's an old wives' tale. So, you know, better safe than sorry. Seemed to be kind of the message. And I don't want to sound like a science denier, because no one is a bigger fan of science than I am. Like, my husband was cured from hepatitis C, which was like a deadly, deadly virus that he got from a blood transfusion when he was a child.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  So absolutely, but it was a very striking exam. And I was just like talking to a renowned OB-GYN, saying like, oh, would they say that now? And he's like, oh, no, no, we wouldn't say that now. But it is one of these things where it's like you get it in your mind, and you're like, well, better safe than sorry. But it is just recognizing that there are things that if we don't have any reason to believe what we think we believe. Why do we believe it?

• 50:40Speaker 04

  Let me see if I can get this right. This is a aphorism from like one of like the old doctors before they had like the scientific method. And it was something like, he always gave the same treatment to a patient. It was the panacea. Because if the patient could be cured, he was cured. And if the patient was really beyond help, well, then he would die. It's like, okay, then that medicine will work. You know? If it's like, either they die or they get well.

• 51:07Dan Harris?

  Exactly.

• 51:10Dan Harris?

  Okay, so section five is simple secrets of adulthood. A lot of these are really, really, really practical. Here's one. If you don't know what to do with yourself, go outside or go to sleep.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  Right? It always works.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Because I love a hack, like I love a secret of adulthood. I love a transcended truth, but I also love a hack. And as I was working on, on the book, I just couldn't resist keeping this kind of side list going. And I submitted them with a manuscript, like as it is, and thinking that my editor would say, Gretchen, what are you doing? Like, this is just you goofing around. It doesn't belong in the book. But she really liked them. And I think a lot of people really do like them. They just like the concrete, practical nature of them. So I was really delighted that I got to keep them.

• 51:56Dan Harris?

  I like the hacks too. And I think they exist in a nice relationship with the profound truths.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  Oh, good.

• 52:03Dan Harris?

  And often are not, not shallow. Here's another one that I think actually is quite profound, and it's this. It's okay to ask for help.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  Why is this so hard?

• 52:17Dan Harris?

  Is it hard for you?

• 52:17Speaker 04

  It's so hard.

• 52:19Dan Harris?

  Really?

• 52:19Speaker 04

  It is so hard. It's so hard to ask for help. I'll be indecisive about something or, you know, I won't know what to do. And then it'll occur to me like, actually, what I need is more information. I could just ask somebody who knows about this. Or I can just say to somebody, I need help with this. I don't know. Do you find it easy to ask for help? I am perplexed. Not even that it's difficult, meaning that I'm reluctant to do it. It's difficult in that I don't even remember that I can do it. I have to remind myself that it's even possible, instead of just like figuring everything out myself, which is just nonsense.

• 52:55Dan Harris?

  Do you have this story, subconsciously or otherwise, that if you can't figure everything out yourself, then you're somehow bad or wrong or dysfunctional?

• 53:03Speaker 04

  It's more like, well, can't I just figure this out? Think it through. I don't think it comes from a place of kind of self punishment. I don't know. It doesn't feel negative like that. Maybe it is. Do you find it easy to ask for help?

• 53:15Dan Harris?

  You know, in many ways, I'm, to use the term the kids use, a heteronormative male. And, you know, like that stereotype about dudes is they won't stop and ask for directions, et cetera, et cetera. But I actually am asking for help all the time. Yeah, I don't suffer in silence.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  Well, I think it's the better way, for sure.

• 53:34Dan Harris?

  I agree. Here's another hack. If you're dreading a family occasion, bring a guest. Many difficult people behave better in front of outsiders.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 53:44Dan Harris?

  Have you tested this?

• 53:45Speaker 04

  Well, a lot of these things come from my own experience. So I remember, I have a long, long, long time friend. We were friends all the way back in high school. Much later in life, I came to understand that her mother was very, very depressed and very, very difficult. But when we were children, this was, I did not know this at all. I saw her as like this super kind of extremely hospitable woman who was like, we were always over at my friend's house. There was like tons of food, you know, it was just, and I said to my friend, I didn't know that. I didn't see that side of her and I wasn't aware that this whole thing was happening to you as a child. And she said, we always like to have friends over because then our mother, it really brought out the best in our mother. So we were always trying to have people over. And you see this like in family dinners, if somebody brings a guest, then there is

• 54:28Speaker 04

  a little bit of company manners that can be helpful.

• 54:32Dan Harris?

  Many of these hacks, or at least the ones that stuck out to me, are really about kind of manners, you know, how to conduct yourself in the world in a more skillful way.

• 54:42Speaker 04

  I did not see that as a theme. That's interesting.

• 54:47Dan Harris?

  Well, let me give you some. People probably aren't as interested in your hobby or your travels as they seem to be.

• 54:53Speaker 04

  Right? I mean, that's just the fact of the matter.

• 54:57Dan Harris?

  The thing is, what some people don't realize, and I'm sure this happens to me, but I'm not realizing in the moment, but I see it with others in my world, is that we have a tendency to humor people. And then as the person being humored, you don't know you're being humored, and so then you bore the shit out of people.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes. No, and it's all in this very well-meaning circle of boredom. Yeah, I mean, there is a certain amount of that. There's a certain amount of that, and there is a certain amount of it just being like a way as an icebreaker. Like, one of the nice things about having a new puppy is people are like, how is your new puppy? And then you can talk about that for a minute. I always remind myself, there's a quite a limit in how interesting someone else's puppy is, you know? Have a cute story or two and then let it go. Let's say you've had like a life-transforming travel, and you really just want to talk about it for like two hours if people are not interested. But I will tell you one of the most, the rudest things I've ever done in my whole life.

• 55:47Dan Harris?

  Please.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  Okay, so we were going on a family trip to Berlin in the summer. It's like our big family trip, and I am not a foodie. I just really do not care that much about food. I'm not interested in restaurants. That's just something that's not, when, when I wrote Life in Five Senses, it became very clear to me. That's the most neglected sense. That's my most neglected sense. I'm having conversation with this person about what we're doing for the summer and said, oh, we're going to Berlin. And somebody who I don't know, came zipping over and in a very, very friendly, like, you know, energetic way said, oh, you're going to Berlin. Like, I have to tell you all the amazing restaurants that we went to. Like, let me give you a list of all the places you need to go. And I looked into her face and I was like, I could see my future stretching out in front of my eyes of like a half an hour

• 56:31Speaker 04

  of her going into great detail about amazing meals that she'd had in places that I would never go and never cared about. And even if I went, it wouldn't even give me that much pleasure, whatever. And I basically was just like, I just, I just. Like, and I said, I'm not really involved in that part of the planning and just turned and walked away. I just fled because I'm just like, I simply cannot manage even like the five minute, like get in, get out that that would have required. I was just overwhelmed, but I've been haunted by it ever since because here was somebody who was really reaching out with pleasure, but not recognizing that like hearing about an amazing meal that you had is not something that most people will find that interesting. And if they will, they will ask, but that's me coming from my perspective as a non foodie, which makes

• 57:16Speaker 04

  me feel like this terrible Scrooge. Julia Child said, the people who love to eat are always the best people. And I'm like, well, what does that say about me? But anyway, but yes, I could tell that she was somebody who would not read my cues that I was not interested. So I fled very rudely. I've repented.

• 57:34Dan Harris?

  You're not extolling the virtues of fleeing here.

• 57:37Speaker 04

  It's seared in my memory is rudeness. So just, hey, kids, don't do it yourselves.

• 57:43Dan Harris?

  Some others, just to back up my point about the fact that the simple secrets of adulthood section of this book do include a lot of secrets that have to do with sort of manners or how to interact successfully with other people. Here's one. If you can't think of a topic of conversation, ask what's keeping you busy these days?

• 58:00Speaker 04

  So this is a really great question, especially if you don't know what somebody does for a living and you feel like it's not polite to ask. Some people don't like it when you say, what do you do for a living? And so this is, I think, a really good question because people can just answer whatever they feel like talking about. Like if they've had an amazing trip and they want to tell me all about the restaurants, now I will listen to you. Or they've got an exciting work project. If you kind of can't remember exactly what somebody does, but you really should remember, I don't know about you, but like I will often be encountering with people and I'm like, I should really sort of know exactly what they're up to, but I don't. But so if you say that, then they are just like, well, you know, I'm still promoting the book that just came out a month ago. And you're like, oh, right. I forgot you had a book that just came out or, you

• 58:42Speaker 04

  know, it's a question that lets them answer as they like, and also will fill in a lot of information if you're not sure of information that you think you should remember.

• 58:51Dan Harris?

  I like it a lot. I'm gonna use it. Another that I'm going to use, and it really rings true to me, especially right now as I'm about to read it back to you. It rings true because over this past weekend, I was at a bunch of social situations and introducing people to one another. And there were moments where I, even though I knew the person's name, I couldn't recall it because it was just a cognitive overload. And so the aphorism here is if someone might not remember your name, reintroduce yourself.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  You know, and I will just say, if you do this, which I do this all the time, people often be like, oh gosh, of course I know who you are. But it's like, it never hurts. And you don't know if they're telling the truth or not, you know? And a lot of times you know perfectly well what someone's name is, but the typewriter keys are jamming in your brain, especially if you're seeing a ton of people all at one time. I wish we all wore name tags all the time. That would be my dream.

• 59:42Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yes. Or had them tattooed into our forehead at birth. Let's end on this one because this one, I think, could bear some unpacking. And I think it's pointing at something really helpful. If possible, have a challenging conversation while walking.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  Yes. This is really, really helpful for a lot of reasons. Often, people speak more freely when they're side to side instead of face to face. This is why like, a lot of times people will say, the time you can get your teenager to talk to you is when you're driving together someplace. Also, a walk tends to have a beginning, middle, and an end. And so people know that it's kind of got, and it's not going to stretch out endlessly. Whereas if you're just like in your bedroom, you're like, are we trapped here in this kind of no exit argument forever? You know, but people have a sense of like, okay, we're gonna start, and we're gonna go, and then we'll end up, we'll be back at the car, or whatever. And then also, there is like, the nervous energy that comes from

• 1:00:41Speaker 04

  having a difficult conversation, that can be hard to manage. And it can be expressed by sort of elevating your tone, or like, but I think, at least for me, when I'm walking, it soothes my kind of, I'm very high strung, and very irritable. And when I'm walking, that, that's an outlet for that nervous energy that is more constructive. And there is just something about walking itself, which is just very calming, especially if you're in a beautiful place, like you're in a park, or you're on a hike, or like in an interesting neighborhood or something. If things get too intense and you need just like, you want to stay in the conversation, but maybe you need a little break, that's like, oh, look at that. Should we stop and get a coffee or whatever? It lets you stay together because another thing that's good about walking is like,

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  no one's going to come in and interrupt you, or someone's not going to be like, their eyes aren't going to be flicking to the TV screen every 10 seconds. Or, you know, your iPad isn't going to be pinging on the coffee table. There's just a lot of reasons why a walk is, I find, especially if there's something that needs to be kind of talked through, it lends itself to that kind of conversation.

• 1:01:47Dan Harris?

  Isn't there something also about syncing strides with someone?

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  Oh, I didn't even think of that, but that's exactly right. Yeah, what is that called? That's called, um, is it synchronizing? Even like your heartbeat will start to synchronize with someone.

• 1:02:01Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a great point. I never even thought about that aspect of it. That's very true.

• 1:02:06Dan Harris?

  I would say there's another piece of it, and you may have already covered this, but there's something about being in a wide open space in nature. That sparks creativity, allows you to see things from a different perspective, which can be very helpful in a situation of conflict or potential conflict.

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I think that's exactly right. If you're standing, like, you can also be sort of irritated by like little things that you're seeing or that whatever. There's something very calming just about being in nature. And if you have light in your face, that's also good for you. There's all sorts of things. Good things happen when you go outside and if it's for a difficult moment. Now, there are sometimes I do think where you need to be sitting down and like, really with the intensity that just comes from being face to face or right next to each other. And in that case, it's really helpful to hold someone's hand or have your hand on their back, or you have your knees touching. I have a secret of adulthood that it's harder to yell at somebody when you're holding their hand. But you can hold hands while you're walking through nature, so you can get a double thing there.

• 1:03:09Dan Harris?

  Well, this book is like an avalanche of good advice.

• 1:03:12Speaker 04

  Oh, I love that. I love that phrase.

• 1:03:17Dan Harris?

  Maybe I'll title this podcast episode in Avalanche.

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  I like that. I like that. I feel, I feel like someone's tumbling through the snow with their skis sticking out. But yeah.

• 1:03:26Dan Harris?

  Two final questions I always ask first. Is there something that you were hoping we would get to that we didn't?

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  No, I feel like we covered so many. It's so interesting for me to know which ones stood out for you. Again, like, that's one of the most interesting things for me, as I've been talking to people about the book, is they're not always the ones that I thought people would focus on.

• 1:03:44Dan Harris?

  Final question. Can you just remind everybody of the name of this book? And you've written so many other books. I'd love to, and you have a website and you have an app. And this, you just, can you kind of tell us about the Gretchen Rubin Empire?

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like, what is it? Not the extended?

• 1:03:56Dan Harris?

  Cinematic.

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Cinematic Universe of Gretchen Rubin. Yes, indeed. Everything basically is on my website, gretchenrubin.com. And so that's a great place to go because you can read about all my books. My most recent book is called Secrets of Adulthood: Civil Truth for Our Complex Lives. Yeah, it's a little book with all of these little secrets of adulthood. And I also have a podcast called Happier with Gretchen Rubin, which is a weekly podcast where I talk about how to be happier with my co-host, who is also my sister, Elizabeth Kraft, who is a TV writer. I have a newsletter, Five Things Making Me Happy. I just launched on Substack, something called Secrets of Adulthood, which is like teaching stories. Because I really, I love a teaching story. I love a parable. So this is where I share my favorites and write my own. I have an app called Happier. I have a, a bunch of like

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  journals that will help people do different things, like track their habits. Or there's a one wonderful little journal called I Want You to Know, which is like how kind of to express your feelings about somebody else if you find that hard. A lot of different things, but anything can be found at gretchenrubin.com. And I'm all over social media and I love to connect with people with insights or observations, resources. I feel like the world is my research assistant, constantly giving me great insights and ideas and things to read and watch. So yeah, I'm in all the places.

• 1:05:12Dan Harris?

  Always a gigantic pleasure to talk to you, Gretchen. Thank you.

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  Oh, Dan, thank you so much.

• 1:05:21Dan Harris?

  Thanks, Andy Gretchen. Always great to talk to her. Don't forget to check out her new book, The Secrets of Adulthood. Also, don't forget to check out danharris.com, where today we've got a guided meditation that comes with this episode. It's all about how to tune in to your mind and body when you're at a moment of making a big decision, which of course is something we talked about in the show, indecision and drift, et cetera. So we're going to give you the way to counteract indecision and drift. And that guided meditation comes from our Teacher of the Month, Kyra Jewell-Lingo. Check it out, danharris.com. Before I let you go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing

• 1:06:05Dan Harris?

  producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

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  Get started at safeguardveterans.net. Click on Community Organizations. Safeguard Veterans is a 2026 pilot research program funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs.