Gretchen Rubin: One sentence can change your life

Let's face it: it's hard to be an adult. Even in the past, when times may have seemed easier or simpler, it was still incredibly hard. But try being an adult now, amid a tech revolution, a climate crisis, global political upheaval, economic chaos – you get the picture.

So, when someone writes a book that offers to reveal the "secrets of adulthood" – it's worth a listen, especially when that person is Gretchen Rubin.

Many of you may know her for her best-selling book, The Happiness Project, but in her latest, Secrets of Adulthood, she unpacks why single-sentence bits of advice are often the most useful at cutting through the noise of life's craziness. 

The book is chock-full of dozens of profound, yet digestible, bits of wisdom that just seem to make going through life a bit more simple: 

"The world looks different from a footpath than from a car."

"Recognise that, like sleeping with a big dog in a small bed, things that are uncomfortable can also be comforting."

Gretchen is such an insightful writer and we had a really thoughtful conversation about advice, life and what it really means to be an adult.  

If you have a few minutes, you should definitely watch or read some of our discussion below:

Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. 

Katty Kay: Gretchen, you've spent a lot of your career looking at things like happiness and habits. Now, you are looking at the Secrets of Adulthood. Do we ever understand the secret of adulthood? I mean, I'm now 60 and I feel I'm a long way off understanding the actual secrets of adulthood.

Gretchen Rubin: No, I don't think that we ever do figure it out. But we do learn some lessons throughout life, usually the hard way. And I think that it's very easy to forget those lessons as soon as we've learned them. So, part of it is just reminding ourselves of everything that we've learned and have to keep learning over and over.

KK: What is it about the format of a sentence or two that appeals to our brains or that sticks in our brains in a way that a paragraph or a chapter doesn't? 

GR: There's something called the fluency heuristic, which is the idea that the easier something is to remember, the stickier it is in our brains. And this is why things like alliteration or rhyme often are very powerful. Like 'If it bleeds, it leads', right? I'm sure you've heard that as a journalist. That sticks in the mind better than 'negative news is more likely to attract people's attention than positive news'.

Lytton Strachey said that the truest test of a man's intelligence is his ability to make a summary. There is such a discipline in trying to express yourself very, very briefly. A lot of times, my thinking got much clearer when I tried to say it in a very, very short way.

KK: We are living in these rather extraordinary, overwhelming times, both technologically, politically, geopolitically, economically. Do you think that is a time when people want aphorisms more?

GR: People are always searching for insight and wisdom. I think it's a question of the readiness of the person to hear it. One of my aphorisms is 'it always seems like times are hard.'

There's a wonderful anecdote about Michelangelo, who, after he painted the Sistine Chapel, wrote to his father and was like, well, 'the pope is very pleased with my work, but, you know, times are really hard for an artist like me.' And he was living in the High Renaissance, which is considered to be like the high point of Western art. But even he was like, 'Man these are tough times!'

That's not to say that we are not in tough times; I think we are. But I'm just saying it's not unusual to feel like you are in tough times.

KK: Was this book the culmination of years of experience and failures and ups and downs? Could you have written it when you were 30?

GR: I think I needed time and experience to see these things. With the Secrets of Adulthood, a lot of them are just one sentence or two, but for each of them, there is a story behind them. I could tell you, 'Oh, that's that story that's haunted me for years, or that's this paradox that's always puzzled me that I finally figured out.'

There's a proverb that [goes], 'When the student is ready, the teacher appears.' I think we've all had that experience where you read a single line and suddenly you see the way forward, or your own thinking is illuminated or something that you kind of vaguely understood is crystallised. And I love it when I read something like that. So, I've been collecting these for years. I couldn't have sat down to write this. They had to come to me over time.

KK: Let me give you my non-secrets of my adulthood, which is still a mess, so if you could do my therapy for me –

GR: My sister calls me a happiness bully, because if I think there's a way I can make you happier, I can get very insistent. So, OK, bring it on!

KK: Excellent. So, I get distracted a lot. This morning, I found myself listening to one of your interviews, flicking through Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, all whilst listening to a podcast. None of this is effective. I know this. I'm a reasonably sensible, intelligent adult. I know that's a crap way to spend my time. What's the way to fix that?

GR: The one that comes to mind is the secret of adulthood, which is 'working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination.' So, if you find yourself multitasking as a way to avoid doing something that would be very difficult and is probably your real priority.

As somebody who writes nonfiction, I'm always like, 'I need to research that.' And research is great, but if I find myself going down some deep rabbit hole of information just because I'm interested, I often stop and say, 'OK, this might be valuable, but is it a good use of my time right now? Am I actually working on what my project is right now?' And often the answer is no, it is not.

KK: OK, I'm gonna repeat one of your own lines back to you, one of which I loved and helped me this morning. So, when I was stupidly multitasking, I thought of this one: 'If you don't know what to do with yourself, go outside or go to sleep.'

And I went and walked around the block and you were right!

GR: Yes, it works, right?

KK: I was almost kind of annoyed at how well it worked! 

But there's another one: 'It's easier to notice the exceptional than the familiar. So, to observe the obvious requires intense attention.' Talk me through that one a little bit. What were you thinking of?

GR: I'm always better off when I'm idiosyncratic. So, for instance, I'm one of these super all-or-nothing people. I can do something never or I can do it all the time, but I can't do it sometimes or just a little bit. I have a sweet tooth and people kept saying, 'Well, be moderate, follow the 80-20 rule. Just have half a brownie. Don't demonise certain foods.'  And then I was like, 'You know what? I'm going to just try giving it up altogether.' And for me – and it turns out for a small number of people – it was easier to have none of something that is a strong temptation.

Something that was working very well for other people did not work for me. And so instead of thinking, 'What's wrong with me?' I thought that maybe, there's a different way for me.

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