I started reading Gretchen Rubin's Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives this weekend. The premise of this book is that habits, because they don't require choice, free up your willpower and mental resources to be spent elsewhere. Gretchen then digs into the different types of people and ways to help establish new habits.

The way Gretchen categorizes people is whether they're motivated by internal or external expectations. Upholders are motivated by both, Questioners by internal expectations and they question external ones, Obligers are motivated by external expectations and often ignore internals ones, and Rebels are motivated by neither. Understanding this helps explain why certain things work for some people and not others. For example, for an Obliger to actually stick to a new habit like exercise, they need a partner they don't want to disappoint, otherwise they're likely to do something else for someone else.

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