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i am so excited to be here with gretchen rubin today. Gretchen is the bestselling author of many

books, including the number one New York Times bestseller, The Happiness Project. She's also

written Happier at Home, The Four Tendencies, Better Than Before, and her latest book, Outer Order

in Her Calm. Her books have sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide in more than 30 languages.

Gretchen hosts the podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, which she co-hosts with her sister Elizabeth Craft.

She hosts video courses, has spoken at 200-plus events including TEDx conferences,

and has appeared in the Today Show, Oprah's Super Soul Sunday, and many other TV shows.

A former lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Clerk to Sandra Day O'Connor. She currently lives in New York with her husband and two daughters. So welcome, Gretchen. Thanks so much for coming on moms. Don't have time to read books. Oh, I'm so happy to be talking to you. So you've achieved so much at this point. Your pile of books is sitting here next to us. You have a podcast, the books, you've spoken everywhere, we've done all these things. You started as a Supreme Court justice, clerk. Clerk. Clerk, obviously, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. After that gig. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what took you from there to this sort of new realm of self-improvement and wanting to help everyone else with all the things that you've learned on your own? Well, as you said, I started out my career in law, and so I, and for all the wrong reasons, all the classic mistakes, it's a great education, I'm good at research in writing, I can change my mind later, it's good preparation for other things, and so I, so I was clerking on the Supreme Court. And I think that part of me always

wanted to be a writer because I did everything that a person would do to prepare to be a writer.

I majored in English. I always wrote tons of papers instead of taking exams, all that kind of

thing. I wrote a novel for credit in law school. That should have been a clue. But at that time,

weirdly enough, I didn't see a

place for myself in the writing world. So I knew I didn't want to be a novelist or a playwriter or a poet. I knew I didn't want to be an academic writer, and I knew I didn't want to be a journalist of any kind. And I don't know. I just, I had always read fiction. I didn't really read nonfiction and I didn't think of the ways that I could write nonfiction.

And so I just didn't see a place for myself, I think, in the writing world.

And then... read nonfiction and I didn't think of the ways that I could write nonfiction. And so I just didn't

see a place for myself, I think, in the writing world. And then when I was clerking, I had this

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