
Secrets of Adulthood
Simple Truths for Our Complex Lives
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Narrated by:
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Gretchen Rubin
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By:
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Gretchen Rubin
About this listen
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Happiness Project and Better Than Before distills her key insights into simple truths for living with greater satisfaction, clarity, and happiness.
The right idea, invoked at the right time, can change our lives. Drawing from her long studies of happiness, and also from the challenges she’s faced herself, writer Gretchen Rubin has discovered the “Secrets of Adulthood” that can help us manage the complexities of life. To convey her conclusions, she turned to the aphorism—the ancient literary discipline that demands that a writer convey a large truth in a few words.
Perhaps you’re paralyzed by indecision, struggling to navigate a big change, fighting a temptation, or puzzled by the behavior of someone you love; whatever you face, the right aphorism can help. From procrastination to the pursuit of happiness, Secrets of Adulthood is filled with witty and thought-provoking reflections such as:
- “Recognize that, like sleeping with a big dog in a small bed, things that are uncomfortable can also be comforting”
- “Accept yourself, and expect more from yourself”
- “Easy children raise good parents”
- “What can be done at any time is often done at no time”
For anyone undergoing a major life transition, such as graduation, career switch, marriage, or moving, or for those just encountering everyday dilemmas, these disarming aphorisms will inspire you by articulating truths that you may never have noticed but instantly recognize.
©2025 Gretchen Rubin (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
One Sunday afternoon, as she unloaded the dishwasher, Gretchen Rubin felt hit by a wave of homesickness. Homesick - why? She was standing right in her own kitchen. She felt homesick, she realized, with love for home itself. In a flash, she decided to undertake a new happiness project, and this time, to focus on home. And what did she want from her home? A place that calmed her, and energized her. A place that, by making her feel safe, would free her to take risks. Also, while Rubin wanted to be happier at home, she wanted to appreciate how much happiness was there already.
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A lot of repeated information and stories
- By Elizabeth on 07-27-18
By: Gretchen Rubin
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Life in Five Senses
- How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and into the World
- By: Gretchen Rubin
- Narrated by: Gretchen Rubin
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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A Life in Five Senses is an absorbing, layered story of discovery filled with profound insights and practical suggestions about how to heighten our senses and use our powers of perception to live fuller, richer lives—and, ultimately, how to move through the world with more vitality and love.
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Remembering to use your senses
- By Schase on 05-12-23
By: Gretchen Rubin
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Your Worry Makes Sense
- Anxiety and Burnout are Logical (and You Can Overcome Them)
- By: Dr Martin Brunet
- Narrated by: Dr Martin Brunet
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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On the surface, anxiety and panic seem to make no sense at all. But if you dig a little deeper, you can understand why we need some anxiety to survive and how it can escalate to become a problem. And once you learn that it really does make sense, you can learn how to overcome it! Written by GP Dr Martin Brunet, who has over 30 years of professional experience and is well known online for his popular mental health videos, Your Worry Makes Sense explores the logical basis for the common experiences of both anxiety and burnout.
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Highly empathic
- By Anonymous User on 04-09-25
By: Dr Martin Brunet
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Wild Courage
- Go After What You Want and Get It
- By: Jenny Wood
- Narrated by: Jenny Wood
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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To be successful you need to be Weird, Selfish, Shameless, Obsessed, Nosy, Manipulative, Brutal, Reckless, and Bossy. And that takes courage. As a former Google leader and top career coach who chased an attractive stranger off the subway and later married him, Jenny Wood knows her way around courage. In this book, Wood shatters conventional wisdom about achieving your goals. She gives you permission to ditch your fear and chase after what you want, unapologetically.
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Liberal Views
- By RP on 04-07-25
By: Jenny Wood
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Embrace Discomfort
- Lean Into Challenge to Improve Your Life
- By: Michael Easter
- Narrated by: Michael Easter
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Original Recording
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In Embrace Discomfort, Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort. Each of the 10 episodes except for the final one will feature an expert in a discomfort area, including ultra-runner Courtney Dauwalter, survivalist Laura Zerra, nutritionist Dr. Trevor Kashey, and fear expert Dr. Joseph E. LeDoux
By: Michael Easter
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Ordinary Magic
- The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts
- By: Gregory M. Walton PhD
- Narrated by: Gregory M. Walton PhD, Hattie Tate
- Length: 14 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The emotional questions we face can define our lives. If you’re expecting an interaction to go wrong, that expectation can make it so. That’s spiraling down. But as esteemed Stanford psychologist Greg Walton shows, when we see these questions clearly, we can answer them well. Known to social psychologists as wise interventions, these shifts in perspective can help us chart new trajectories for our lives. They help us spiral up. This is ordinary magic: The ordinary experiences that help us set aside the ordinary worries of life to unleash extraordinary change.
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How to Be Enough
- Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists
- By: Ellen Hendriksen
- Narrated by: Ellen Hendriksen
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Ellen Hendriksen—clinical psychologist, anxiety specialist, and author of How to Be Yourself—charts a flexible, forgiving, and freeing path, all without giving up the excellence your high standards and hard work have gotten you. She delivers seven shifts—including from self-criticism to kindness, control to authenticity, procrastination to productivity, comparison to contentment—to find self-acceptance, rewrite the Inner Rulebook, and most of all, cultivate the authentic human connections we’re all craving.
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worth every minute
- By Jeremy Hylen on 03-12-25
By: Ellen Hendriksen
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The Narrowing
- A Journey Through Anxiety and the Body
- By: Alexandra Shaker PhD
- Narrated by: Alexandra Shaker PhD
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Most of us are intimately familiar with anxiety, and with its increasing hold on our minds, our hopes and plans, and our bodies. But how well do we really understand it, and what can we do to transform it into something new—into resilience, or courage, or creativity? In this extraordinary book, Dr. Alexandra Shaker, a clinical psychologist, takes us on a journey through the body—from brain to blood to heart to guts—to examine the connections between our emotional, psychological, and physical lives.
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Mindsight
- The New Science of Personal Transformation
- By: Daniel J. Siegel M.D., Daniel Goleman - foreword
- Narrated by: Daniel J. Siegel M.D., Darren Joel
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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A Harvard-trained physician, Dr. Siegel is one of the revolutionary global innovators in the integration of brain science into the practice of psychotherapy. Using case histories from his practice, he shows how, by following the proper steps, nearly everyone can learn how to focus their attention on the internal world of the mind in a way that will literally change the wiring and architecture of their brain.
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i like it
- By David on 04-11-25
By: Daniel J. Siegel M.D., and others
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Searches
- Selfhood in the Digital Age
- By: Vauhini Vara
- Narrated by: Vauhini Vara, Anastasia Davidson
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?
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Brilliant!
- By Lisa on 04-19-25
By: Vauhini Vara
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Good Stress
- The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things
- By: Jeff Krasno, Schuyler Grant - contributor
- Narrated by: Jeff Krasno
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Jeff Krasno, the founder and CEO of the global wellness platform Commune Media, thought he was pretty healthy. Though he suffered from brain fog, chronic fatigue, and bouts of insomnia, those symptoms seemed utterly normal in today’s society. When he learned he had diabetes, his first thought was, How can that be? I run a wellness company! His diagnosis propelled him to consult every expert at his disposal and engage in intensive “me-search” in order to turn his health around. On this journey, he began to form a larger picture of what’s wrong with our health in the modern world.
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Packed with Digestible Info
- By KThor on 04-13-25
By: Jeff Krasno, and others
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Me, but Better
- By: Olga Khazan
- Narrated by: Olga Khazan
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In recent years, Olga Khazan had been spiraling toward an existential crisis. Though she treasured her loving, long-term relationship and her dream job, she often caught herself snatching dissatisfaction from the jaws of happiness. Her neurotic overachieving had always been a professional asset, but lately, Olga felt that her brittle disposition could shatter under the weight of just one more thing. She knew something had to give—but was it really possible to change her entire approach to life?
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Great for introverts who want to be more social
- By ShawnaJ on 03-19-25
By: Olga Khazan
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Shatterproof
- How to Thrive in a World of Constant Chaos (and Why Resilience Alone Isn't Enough)
- By: Tasha Eurich
- Narrated by: Tasha Eurich
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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We’ve been taught that resilience is the secret to navigating life’s most difficult moments. According to New York Times bestselling author and organizational psychologist Dr. Tasha Eurich, there is just one problem with this assumption. Scientifically, resilience isn’t an unlimited resource, especially with the growing pressure, uncertainty, and chaos we’re experiencing today. But what if, instead of merely “bouncing back” from stressors and setbacks, we could harness them for forward growth?
By: Tasha Eurich
What listeners say about Secrets of Adulthood
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- lmhb
- 04-09-25
Not like author's other books
I love all of Gretchen Rubin's books and should probably now go write a glowing review of her other books, especially Better than Before. I wish I wasn't writing this review, but this book was very frustrating! It was cheap, so at least that is good. It is extremely short, which is clear when purchasing, but is is really just a listing of sayings, with no expansion on those sayings. There are many long, awkward pauses in the book, sometimes just silent and some with faint bird sounds, it is like the book is being stretched the fill the hour or so. Worst, and this is the case with all of her books, the author reads in her own voice and it is not pleasant to listen to. She has a lisp, or sounds like she has something in her mouth, it is hard to listen to. I drive a lot and listen to a lot of Audible, I wish so much that her books were available with a professional reader. Rubin is a wonderful author, but not everyone has a voice fit for an Audible book. There are many wonderful narrators out there!
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- Matthew R Miner
- 04-24-25
Big Truth, Compact Packaging!
Gretchen brings wisdom, charm, and occasional laugh out loud moments in this brief audiobook.
Some reviewers have expressed disappointment with the length of the production. They have it all wrong! The whole point of aphorisms is to be short and memorable.
This book is loaded with concise value. If you benefit from a handful of these sayings, you’ll be miles ahead. Thanks Gretchen & team!
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- michael
- 04-08-25
Insightful!
I love how Rubin neatly organizes all of these aphorisms in one place. She gives the reader space to think about how each might apply to his or her own life. Simply a tidy, useful book of succinct, uncomplicated advice.
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- Gary D. Brooks
- 04-19-25
Great format
the in between music was odd at times and not beneficial to the topics being covered. it did not add much
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- Jaclyn Smith
- 04-02-25
this is just an audiobook of someone saying phrases that other people have already said.
I was very disappointed I thought I would definitely learn a few things instead I spent my time listening to someone repeat phrases the other people have already said in the past there was no experiences shared no lessons taught no lessons learned no point no plot and it was not helpful at all it was free that was the only good thing about it I'm very disappointing I expect something totally different.
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2 people found this helpful