Obligers, however, often dislike their Tendency. They’re vexed by the fact that they can meet others’ expectations, but not their expectations for themselves. With the other three Tendencies, much of the frustration they create falls on others. Other people may get annoyed by stickler Upholders, or interrogator Questioners, or maverick Rebels, but it’s “people pleaser” Obligers themselves who bear the brunt of the downsides of that Tendency.
Obligers, in fact, may reach a point of Obliger rebellion, a striking pattern in which they abruptly refuse to meet an expectation. As one Obliger explained, “Sometimes I ‘snap’ because I get tired of people making assumptions that I’ll always do things as expected. It’s sort of a rebellious way of asserting myself.” Another added, “I work very hard to keep my commitments to other people, but I’ll be darned if I can keep a promise to myself … Though every once in a while I will absolutely refuse to please.” They may rebel in symbolic ways, with their hair, clothes, car, and the like.
This contrarian streak among Obligers explains another pattern I’ve noticed: almost always, if a Rebel is in a long-term relationship, that Rebel is paired with an Obliger. Unlike Upholders and Questioners, who are distressed by the Rebel’s expectation-rejecting behavior, the Obliger enjoys the Rebel’s refusal to truckle to outward expectations. One Rebel explained the dynamics of this combination: “My husband is a big part of how I’m able to look like I function well in the normal adult world. He mails the rent check, which is nice because I always resent it being due on the same day every month. He deals with trash day, and moving the car for snow plows, and he makes sure the peskily regular bills are paid on time. (I really hate punctuality.) While when we talk through big decisions, I’m usually the final word.”
But whatever our Tendency, we all share a desire for autonomy. If our feeling of being controlled by others becomes too strong, it can trigger the phenomenon of “reactance,” a resistance to something that’s experienced as a threat to our freedom or our ability to choose. If we’re ordered to do something, we may resist it—even it’s something that we might otherwise want to do. I’ve watched this happen with my daughter Eliza. If I say, “Why don’t you finish your homework, get it out of the way?” she says, “I need a break, I’ve got to stop.” If I say, “You’ve been working so hard, why don’t you take a break?” she says, “I want to finish.” It’s easy to see why this impulse creates problems—for health-care professionals, for parents, for teachers, for office managers. The more we push, the more a person may resist.
After I gave a talk about the Four Tendencies, a man asked me, “Which Tendency makes people the happiest?” I was startled, because that obvious question had never crossed my mind. “Also,” he continued, with an equally obvious follow-up question, “which Tendency is the most successful?”
I didn’t have a good response, because I’d been so focused on understanding the Tendencies that I’d never considered them in comparison to each other. After much reflection, however, I realized that the answer—as it usually is, which I sometimes find annoying—is “It depends.” It depends on how a particular person deals with the upside and downside of a Tendency. The happiest and most successful people are those who have figured out ways to exploit their Tendency to their benefit and, just as important, found ways to counterbalance its limitations.
In an interview in the Paris Review, novelist and Rebel John Gardner made an observation that I’ve never forgotten: “Every time you break the law you pay, and every time you obey the law you pay.” Every action, every habit, has its consequences. Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels, all must grapple with the consequences of fitting in that Tendency. I get up at 6:00 every morning, and I pay for that; I get more work done, but I also have to go to sleep early.
We all must pay; but we can choose that for which we pay.
Different Solutions for Different People
Distinctions
Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But … like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation.
—Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox
The Four Tendencies framework had given me a crucial insight into human nature, but there was much that it didn’t illuminate. I couldn’t yet turn to the more concrete, action-oriented strategies that I was eager to investigate because I hadn’t yet exhausted the possibilities of self-knowledge.
As one of the exercises for the happiness project I undertook a few years ago, I’d identified my twelve “Personal Commandments,” which are the overarching principles by which I want to live my life. My first commandment is to “Be Gretchen”—yet it’s very hard to know myself. I get so distracted by the way I wish I were, or the way I assume I am, that I lose sight of what’s actually true.
I was slow to understand some of the most basic things about myself. I don’t love music. I’m not a big fan of travel. I don’t like games, I don’t like to shop, I’m not very interested in animals, I like plain food. Why didn’t I recognize these aspects of my nature? Partly because I never thought much about it—doesn’t everyone love music?—and partly because I expected, based on nothing, that one day I’d outgrow my limitations. I’d learn to love travel, or to appreciate exotic cuisines.
Also, I’d assumed that I was pretty much like everyone else, and that everyone else was pretty much like me. That’s true; but our differences are very important. And they have a big influence on habit formation. For instance, I kept reading the advice that because our minds are clearest in the morning, we should do our most demanding intellectual work then. I thought I “should” follow this habit, until finally I realized that my own habit—starting my day with an hour of email grunt work—suits me. I need to clear the decks before I can settle down to serious work, and I suspect that if I’d tried to change my habit, I would’ve failed.
I should tailor my habits to the fundamental aspects of my nature that aren’t going to change. It was no use saying “I’ll write more every day if I team up with another writer, and we race to see who can finish writing a book faster,” because I don’t like competition.
To avoid wasting my precious habit-formation energy on dead ends, I need to shape my habits to suit me. For this reason, I developed a list of questions to highlight aspects of my nature that are relevant to habit formation.
They say the world is made up of two types of people: those who love dividing the world into two types of people, and those who don’t. I’m clearly in the former category.
Am I a Lark or an Owl?