Gretchen Rubin is one of today’s most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness, habits and human nature. She’s a highly acclaimed writer, known for her ability to distill and convey complex ideas—with levity and clarity. She’s the author of many bestselling books, including her breakout memoir, The Happiness Project, Better Than Before, and The Four Tendencies, which have sold millions of copies in more than thirty languages. Her most recent book is Life in Five Senses. 

She’s also host of the popular podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and founder of award-winning Happier app, which helps people track their happiness-boosting habits.

TO kick off 2024 we invited Gretchen to talk with us about how we can inject more happiness into our lives and how we can cultivate new habits with greater ease. She challenges us to make our ’24 for 2024’ list to identify our aims for the year. There’s no one right way to make your list—you might create different categories, follow a theme, choose all fun items—just think about what you want the year to hold.

And remember, there is no one size fits all for happiness.

Here’s Her Habits Manifesto.

• What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while.
• Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong.
• Focus on actions, not outcomes.
• By giving something up, we may gain.
• Things often get harder before they get easier.
• When we give more to ourselves, we can ask more from ourselves.
• We’re not very different from other people, but those differences are very important.
• It’s easier to change our surroundings than ourselves.
• We can’t make people change, but when we change, others may change.
•  We should make sure the things we do to feel better don’t make us feel worse.
•  We manage what we monitor.
•  Once we’re ready to begin, begin now.

Resources: Gretchenrubin.com

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