The Four Agreements

"Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream."

— Miguel Ruiz

Miguel Ruiz is Mexican. He was born in 1952 into a family of healers: his mother was a curandera and his grandfather a nagual. He studied medicine and became a surgeon, until in the early seventies a car accident in which he nearly died led him to study the Toltec tradition. The Four Agreements was published in 1997, spent more than a decade on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into more than 50 languages.

The book starts from a belief that changes how you see problems: much of what makes us suffer is not the facts, but the agreements we accept without realizing it. From childhood we learn from family, school and society what we should believe about ourselves and how to react to others, and many of those agreements limit us. Ruiz proposes replacing them with four:

• Be impeccable with your word. Speak with integrity and say only what you mean. Don't use your word against yourself or to speak ill of others.
• Don't take anything personally. What others say and do speaks of them, not of you. When you don't depend on others' opinions you stop suffering needlessly.
• Don't make assumptions. Have the courage to ask and to say what you really want. Communicate as clearly as possible to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama.
• Always do your best. Your best changes from one moment to the next: it isn't the same healthy as sick, rested as tired. If in every circumstance you do the best you can, you avoid judging yourself, mistreating yourself and regretting.

Three ideas to remember:

• The agreements are simple to understand and hard to practice. The most demanding for a founder is usually the second, because their work is full of rejection: the customer who doesn't buy, the candidate who says no, public criticism of their product. If they take it as information and not as an attack, they can decide more clearly what to fix.
• Many conflicts in a team are born from expectations nobody said out loud. Assuming the other person understood, or that you know why they did something, is more comfortable than asking, and almost always costs more.
• Being impeccable with your word also applies to what you tell yourself. Ruiz insists the first damage of a misused word is to the one who says it, and in a company gossip does the same damage outward.

The practice the book proposes is consistency, not perfection. Ruiz acknowledges you will break the agreements many times, especially at first, and proposes not punishing yourself for it, but starting again. Over time, keeping them takes less effort and they become habit.

A simple place to begin: work on a single agreement for a week. If you choose the third, every time you catch yourself assuming why someone did or didn't do something, ask them directly. Keep a list of the assumptions you resolved by asking and notice how many were wrong.

As a founder it will help you take criticism and rejection as information and not as attacks, and to build a team where expectations are stated clearly and the word is kept. And in your family and personal life it will help you have clearer conversations with your partner and your children, and stop carrying what others say about you.