Gretchen Rubin is one of the world’s most influential psychologists and she has written several outstanding books such as “The Happiness Project” and “Better than Before: How to Make and Break Habits and build a Happier Life”. Her latest book is titled “The Secrets of Adulthood”. In this interview she tells the BBC that:
“There’s something called the fluency heuristic, which is the idea that the easier something is to remember, the stickier it is in our brains. And this is why things like alliteration or rhyme often are very powerful. Like ‘If it bleeds, it leads’, right? I’m sure you’ve heard that as a journalist. That sticks in the mind better than ‘negative news is more likely to attract people’s attention than positive news’.
Lytton Strachey said that the truest test of a man’s intelligence is his ability to make a summary. There is such a discipline in trying to express yourself very, very briefly. A lot of times, my thinking got much clearer when I tried to say it in a very, very short way.”
Ms Rubin then expounds further on this theme of short, sharp communication: “With the Secrets of Adulthood, a lot of them are just one sentence or two, but for each of them, there is a story behind them. I could tell you, ‘Oh, that’s that story that’s haunted me for years, or that’s this paradox that’s always puzzled me that I finally figured out.’
There’s a proverb that [goes], ‘When the student is ready, the teacher appears.’ I think we’ve all had that experience where you read a single line and suddenly you see the way forward, or your own thinking is illuminated or something that you kind of vaguely understood is crystallised. And I love it when I read something like that.”
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