Whatever Happened to Just Being Type A?

nytimes

A few years ago, Gretchen Rubin, the best-selling self-help author, pivoted from the happiness racket into the habit business with her seventh book, “Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives.” Embedded in it was a personality typing system of her own invention she called the Four Tendencies: a homage to Freud’s “fateful tendencies.”

She’d had an insight, Ms. Rubin wrote in a typical flurry of italics, as seismic as Archimedes’s eureka moment in the bath: how does a person respond to an expectation? The answer to this question, she averred, revealed a fundamental law of human nature, a linchpin of personality, a Sorting Hat — Ms. Rubin is a J. K. Rowling fan — for the drives that motivate us.

Whether you chafe at or thrill to outer expectations like deadlines or speed limits, or inner ones like New Year’s resolutions or fitness goals, you might find yourself to be an Obliger or an Upholder (that is, a people pleaser or a hard-working Hermione type), a Rebel or a Questioner; Tendencies that are perhaps self-explanatory. (Ms. Rubin has a Swiftian fondness for capital letters.)

Rubinettes everywhere were captivated, as Ms. Rubin explained her framework on her weekly podcast, “Happier With Gretchen Rubin,” which she hosts with her sister, Elizabeth Craft; on her website; and at speaking gigs. One reader sent a series of light bulb jokes based on the Tendencies. (“How do you get a Rebel to change a light bulb? Answer: Do it yourself.”)

Ms. Rubin devised an online quiz and, last summer, introduced an app, Better, a digital hub for women — and the occasional man — eager to join accountability groups, tweak their organizing, exercise and networking practices and debate the finer points of the Four Tendencies. The other day, an Obliger wondered how birth order may affect the Four Tendencies; a Questioner wanted to talk tattoos. “Do all tendencies have them?” she wrote.

Meanwhile, Ms. Rubin gestated her eighth book.

“The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too),” out last month, is already a best seller. By mid-September, over one million people had taken Ms. Rubin’s online quiz, making her the queen of personality typing.

A colleague of mine took it and learned she is an Obliger, “which is totally messing up my career,” she said. She thinks I’m a Rebel because I’m squirrelly about deadlines, but the quiz deemed me an Upholder when I first took the test, and then a Questioner the second time around; a couple of days ago, I took the test again and came up an Obliger.