Gretchen Rubin is perhaps best known for her book, The Happiness Project, where she details the little ways you can actively make yourself a happier person. In line with this idea of being mindful and conscious of improving the quality of your life is Better Than Before, which is about habits.

Why did Rubin focus so much on habits? She talks a lot about how our habits make up who we are, at the end of the day. These are the actions that we do frequently, reliably, dependably. What are we but the sum of our habits, good and bad? Habits are really powerful because good habits help us be the person we want to be and bad ones often are obstacles to us achieving that goal.

I’m going to go into some issues I had with the book before covering what I really liked.

TL;DR – While nothing Rubin says is revolutionary or particularly novel, and her approach to encouraging habits in other people comes off as really pushy, I really admired her thorough investigation and categorization of personality types and how best to form habits for those types.Read More »