Little Happier: When One Proverb Sparks Dozens: the Inspiration of “No Receiver, No Thief”

Happier with Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin / The Onward Project

Education, Health & Fitness, Self-improvement

4.7 • 13K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

While writing my book "Secrets of Adulthood," I discovered how the structure of a single traditional proverb could spark dozens of new insights. The elegant formula "No X, no Y" began with the traditional wisdom "No receiver, no thief," but soon expanded into observations ranging from the paradoxical ("No expectations, no disappointment") to the historical ("No Plato, No Socrates ") to the practical ("More highways, more traffic").

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0:00.0	Gretchen, we always on this podcast talk about the importance of getting good sleep. And part of good sleep is a great pillow. There are side sleepers, back sleepers, even starfishes. I'm a side sleeper. And Gretchen, I got a pillow from coop sleep goods that is so perfect for me. I went from using like two pillows together that were not
0:23.3	quite right to using my one coop pillow, which is perfect. I love it. Visit coop sleepgoods.com
0:30.8	slash happier to get 20% off your first order. That's C-O-O-P sleepgoods.com slash happier.
0:40.9	Lemonada.
0:44.9	I'm Gretchen Rubin, and this is a little happier. As I've mentioned, my new book,
0:50.1	Secrets of Adulthood, is hitting the shelves. For years, I've been writing aphorisms, that is,
0:55.6	short, concise statements that convey larger truths. I have a giant trove, so it took a lot of
1:02.0	adding, subtracting, and polishing to assemble the very best ones to include in my new book. There,
1:08.2	I included only my most interesting insights that were useful in guiding us through
1:12.7	life. I weeded out any aphorism that was a mere observation, such as, the tulip is an empty flower,
1:21.2	or the periodic table of the elements is an ingredient list of the universe, or bread makes food seem clean. I also emitted my
1:31.2	large set of bleak aphorisms, which make for quite discouraging reading. And I also emitted a lot
1:38.2	of material I gathered that didn't fit into the Secrets of Adulthood framework. For instance,
1:43.3	I have a huge collection of
1:45.4	proverbs of the professions. I love proverbs of the professions. I have collections of jokes
1:51.9	that are actually teaching stories. I have a manifesto for creativity. One list I wrote as part of my
2:00.2	work for Secrets of Adulthood that I ended up leaving out
2:03.4	was a list of statements I wrote inspired by the traditional proverb, no receiver, no thief.
2:11.6	If you don't know, a receiver is a person who knowingly buys stolen goods in order to sell them later for a profit. The receiver
2:18.7	is the fence, the middleman, between thieves and buyers. I found that proverb, no receiver, no thief,
2:27.1	extremely thought-provoking. If no one creates a market for stolen goods, then many people won't become
2:32.8	thieves. The person who knowingly
	...

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