Last week, I put my name on the waiting list for a puppy. It's been a decision I was umming and ring over for the better part of a year, and I finally made it in part thanks to my interview with Gretchen Ruben. I think of Gretchen as my own personal happiness guru. She's the host of the popular weekly podcast Happier with Gretchen Ruben and is the author of several best selling books, including the massive international bestseller
The Happiness Project. When I spoke to Gretchen earlier this year, I wanted to know how one of the world's most famous happiness experts makes decisions to lead to a happier life. And Gretchen's methods for making better decisions have helped me immensely and also led to me getting a puppy, or
at least being on the waiting list to get one. So, if you have some big decisions to make in your life, at work, or just in life in general, it turns out that asking to write my questions is often the key to making decisions that lead to a happier life. My name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, And this is how I work a show about how to help
you do your best work. On today is my favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from that interview. In today's show, I speak with Gretchen Ruben about how she makes her biggest decisions.
Well, I'm a big pros and cons person, so I will make that list, but I have found a super useful chest when I have a big decision where the pros and cons feel very balanced, and sometimes it's sort of like an apple and an orange. So nope, a
pros and cons list doesn't even really help you. So, like we were trying to decide it's a family whether to get a dog, like five or six years ago, and it's sort of like there's all these pros, there's all these cons, but in the end, it's just like do you want to have a dog or do you not want to have a dog? And I couldn't figure out how to decide, and then I realized, So my
test is choose the bigger life. And I think for some people a bigger life would be a life without a dog, because They're like, I could travel more freely, I'd have more disposable income. I can always get a dog later. That's the bigger life. But I knew that for my family, the bigger life was to get the dog, and so we got our dog. We'd love our dog.
Barnaby was exactly the right decision. And I've talked to people like I talked to someone where he and his wife were trying to decide whether they should move to be closer to family. So it's like, now we're in the big city, it's so exciting, but life is harder. We could move back home, and like that's a smaller city, so maybe we don't have the same opportunities, but we're closer to family and friends, and we're thinking about having a family, you know. And it's like pros and cons
and you go back and forth. And I said, Okay, what's the bigger life. Choose the bigger life. And he was instantly He's like, the bigger life for us is to move back. That's just a bigger life for us. It's more opportunity, more friends, more family, like and he just knew it right away. And then and then he was sort of like, Okay, that's kind of like all I need to know, because only you know what the bigger life is for you. But it's it's clarifying. I think I found it very clarifying.
What is about the questions that you usually ask yourself when you're making decisions about how to spend your time or energy, your money.
Well, I always do say is this going to make me happier? And that's how I made my decisions. So with that, like anything that goes to relationships, anything that deep into relationships or broadens relationships is likely to pay off in terms of happiness. Anything that helps me learn or grow that you know, the atmosphere of growth is
so important for happiness. So anything like that is something that I would be inclined to do, something where I feel like, maybe it's the fantasy self, it's like my idea of the kind of person I'd like to be. I watch out for that. That's a big warning sign for me. My big, my big personal commandment is to
be Gretchen. And then sometimes I'm like, that just feels like me kind of wanting to do something that would be a good idea if I were a different kind of person, Like by Linen Cocktail napkins because they're on sale. What am I thinking? There is no that is not Gretchen Linen cocktail napkins, that would not be, that would not That's not something to spend my time, money or energy on.
I love your twelve personal commandments. I got to say, can you can you talk about some of the other ones that I guess that you apply in your life?
My stuff in well, one of them comes from my father. That's enjoy the process. And this is really helpful because you know sometimes in life, and this goes back to decision making that you were talking about. You know, sometimes we can decide to do something that we really do not want to do at the time, maybe for years, but then we think, oh, there's going to be this big payoff. So I've got to like put up with all this badness in the in the in the process
because there'll be this payoff. So I don't like being a lot lawyer, and I don't like being an associate in law firm, but in seven years I'll be a partner and that'll be great. Or I don't enjoy writing this book, but one day it'll be a bestseller and then it'll all be worth it. The problem with you when you don't enjoy the process is that a lot of times things don't work out the way we wish they did. We're not in control of outcomes. We can we can focus on process, but we can't. We can't
control the outcome. And if you enjoy the process, then the disappointment if things don't go your way is less. So I wrote a book called forty Ways look at JFK. I loved writing that book, and it flopped. It flopped so hard. It didn't reach an audience, didn't reach its audience. That's what they tell you when your books it fails. But I loved writing that book, and you know, I'm sad that it didn't find its audience. But I don't regret it because I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the process
so much. But if somebody had said, oh, you should write a book about X Y Z, and I had had no interest in it, and I had just forced myself to do it, thinking like, well, there would be a big payoff in the end. So if you can enjoy the process, then I always just remind myself and also just remind myself like I enjoy the process, Like okay, maybe today I don't feel like writing this part, but I love writing, like as my sister's a TV writer.
She has a big sign in her office that says it's a fun job and I enjoy it to remind herself that she picked TV writing, this is what she wants, and then I think. One of the most thought provoking happiness project resolutions for me has been to imitate a spiritual master. One of my spiritual masters is Saint Trez of Lziu, which I'm not even Catholic, but I am like obsessed with her book Story of a Soul, and in there, Saint Terrez says that when one loves, one
does not calculate. And so one of my personal resolutions is no calculation, because I can be a bean counter, like, well, if I did this for you, husband, then you should do this for me. And you took a nap yesterday, so it's my turn today, you know, and that's just not good. You should just give and not calculate. So no calculation comes from Saint Teres.
Thank you sorry much for liceing. And if this is maybe your first time listening to how I work, you might want to hit subscribe or follow wherever you're listening to this podcast from because on Thursday, I've got someone that I've been trying to get on the show for the better part of a year, Phil Libbon, who co founded ever Note, one of the world's, if not the world's,
most popular note taking software. And I've been a fan of Phil's and ever notes for so so long, and I highly recommend tuning in on Thursday to hear that episode. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.