Chai's Blog

Last month I read Gretchen Rubin’s book on habits titled Bet­ter than Before. Thanks to Tony at Coach.me for send­ing a free copy of this book. I received it in March and I final­ly got to read it in June.

This book is based on the premise that every­one is dif­fer­ent. So there is no uni­ver­sal solu­tion that works for every­one. The key is to find your habit ten­den­cy and frame your habits form­ing strate­gies around that per­son­al­i­ty.

Here is The Four Ten­den­cies Quiz to deter­mine your habit ten­den­cy. I am an Uphold­er. I am not sur­prised by it.

Each chap­ter intro­duces a strat­e­gy and details how it applies to each of the four ten­den­cies. She shared a lot of her per­son­al sto­ries as well, which is great. There are lit­tle nuggets of wis­dom all over the book title Secrets of Adult­hood, which I liked but I did not high­light them until it was too late.

Every­one needs Four Foun­da­tion Habits: Food, Sleep, Exer­cise, Declut­ter. Wher­ev­er you are and what­ev­er you do, you bet­ter be good at them, she advis­es.

Although I like to declut­ter as much as pos­si­ble in my life, I am not con­vinced that it is a foun­da­tion­al habit. I heard most cre­atives and high per­form­ers are messy. But I don’t dis­pute the first three.

The chap­ter I liked the most is about Habit Loop­holes. I blogged about it ear­li­er. They help you real­ize when you are kid­ding your­self.

This book pro­vid­ed some unique ideas like ten­den­cies and loop­holes which I nev­er came across ear­li­er. For these ideas alone, it is a wor­thy read.