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1-Page Summary of Better Than Before
Overview
Gretchen Rubin is a successful self-help book writer, lifestyle blogger and bestselling author. In her latest book, Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, she reveals how to maintain habits that can improve people’s lives. She also references several successful people across different disciplines to illuminate the power of habits. Her main argument is that there are no universal formulas for adopting good habits; it depends on personality traits and circumstances.
In order to change your life, you must first understand what type of person you are. You need to consider whether you’re a morning or night person, someone who needs deadlines or accountability in order to accomplish goals, and so on. Once you figure out how you function at your highest level, then it’s easier for you to tailor your habits accordingly.
Rubin looks at different aspects of life to show how habits can help people. Her main conclusion after studying and observing the habits of others is that there’s no drastic change in most people, but they can still improve their lives through habit formation.
Key Takeaways
To change your habits, you must change your lifestyle. The author outlines four tendencies to help you do this: Upholders, Questioners, Obligers and Rebels. There are four techniques that will help people make changes in their lives: Monitoring, Foundation (setting the stage), Scheduling and Accountability (holding yourself accountable).
The most effective way to create a habit is taking the first step. A change makes it easier for us to create a habit because we can start fresh and not be bogged down by past mistakes. We must take small steps, but if we get used to those small changes, they will eventually lead to bigger ones. The author also points out that lightning bolts are great ways of creating habits quickly because they give us new ideas that force us into action immediately.
If you have an unhealthy impulse, one way to deal with it is to completely abstain from indulging in that impulse. Another is to indulge moderately. Both can be effective for different personality types.
People are often influenced by convenience when it comes to habits. The author calls this the strategy of safeguards, which anticipates that a lapse in one’s bad habit will not turn into a full-on relapse.
Good habits can be rewarded, but they aren’t necessarily lifelong. It’s important to know yourself and understand how you want to achieve your goals in order to stick with good habits, regardless of the situation or comparisons with others.
Key Takeaway 1: In order to change their lives, people must change their habits.
Analyze Issues
To understand why some people are successful, we must look at their daily routines. Successful leaders in every field tend to be those who stick to their habits and routines. This is not a new concept; it can be traced as far back as the Greeks. After all, Aristotle said that “we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” In other words, our habits create our true selves.
The author of this passage is saying that different people need to develop different habits. Each person has a unique genetic makeup and background, which means they will respond differently to the same situation. It’s impossible to have one method for developing good habits because everyone is so different from each other.
To fully understand how people can adopt or reject habits, we need to know what they value the most and how much they’re willing to sacrifice in order to attain their goals. Once someone knows what he wants, it’s easier for him to figure out whether his habits will help him achieve that goal. For example, if a person wants to lose weight and is willing to exercise regularly as well as follow a healthy diet, then she’ll be able to determine if those habits are enough for her weight loss goal.
