Quotes from Gretchen Rubin

a Secret of Adulthood: things often get harder before they get easier—but

When we change our habits, we change our lives. We can use decision making to choose the habits we want to form, we can use willpower to get the habit started; then—and this is the best part—we can allow the extraordinary power of habit to take over. We take our hands off the wheel of decision, our foot off the gas of willpower, and rely on the cruise control of habits. That's the promise of habit.

Our lives are in the space between Isaiah Berlin's "We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail an irreparable loss" and Borges's Garden of Forking Paths, where every choice produces a quantum explosion of alternate future.

Researchers were surprised to find," write Roy Baumeister and John Tierney in their fascinating book Willpower, "that people with strong self-control spent less time resisting desires than other people did.… people with good self-control mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines in school and at work." In other words, habits eliminate the need for self-control.

nothing was insurmountable if I did what I knew ought to be done, little by little. My

it takes at least five good acts to repair the damage of one critical or destructive act.

Rebels have shown me that We're more free than we think

making. A habit requires no decision from me, because I've already decided.

When possible, the brain makes a behavior into a habit, which saves effort and therefore gives us more capacity to deal with complex, novel, or urgent matters.

What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while.

leisure must be entered on the schedule as its own activity; it's not something I get only when I have nothing else to do. Because I always have something else to do. Having

A habit requires no decision from me, because I've already decided.

Bur surely Rebels eventually realize that we can't just do whatever we want - adults can'ts act that way. Adults can act that way, and Rebels do act that way. For better or worse.

Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened.

I later changed my passwords to a goal I've been working on, or an achievement I want.

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking

Upholders respond readily to both outer expectations and inner expectations. Questioners question all expectations, and will meet an expectation only if they believe it's justified. Obligers respond readily to outer expectations but struggle to meet inner expectations (my friend on the track team). Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike.

This phenomenon of pareidolia explains why we see the Man in the Moon or the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich (which, by the way, sold for $28,000).

I told my Rebel daughter that I would tuck her in 'in five minutes.' She responded, 'How about four?

another reason not to say critical things about other people: "spontaneous trait transference." Studies show that because of this psychological phenomenon, people unintentionally transfer to me the traits I ascribe to other people.

The more readily you respond to a spouse's bids for attention, the stronger your marriage—but it's easy to fall into bad habits.

book Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar

Habit makes it dangerously easy to become numb to our own existence.

Like Buridan's Ass, the donkey that starves because it can't decide between two bales of hay, I become paralyzed by indecision.