The Four Agreements

The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz, came out in 1997 and became a bookstore phenomenon, with millions of copies sold and a line many people know by heart: don't take anything personally. The author was born in Mexico into a family of healers, and he studied to become a surgeon.

By his own account, after a car accident in which he nearly died, he turned back to what he had learned at home, from his mother, who was a healer, and from his grandfather, and he dove into what he calls the Toltec tradition. It is worth noting that the term here describes a philosophy of life presented as an ancestral inheritance, and not a historical study of the Toltecs, a people who lived in central Mexico centuries ago.

The book is short and written like a conversation. It presents an idea of how we become who we are and proposes four personal agreements for living with more freedom. Let's look at where the idea comes from and what each agreement asks of you.

The starting point is domestication. Ruiz compares raising a child to training a dog: you reward what pleases, punish what displeases, and the animal learns to act in order to earn praise and avoid scolding. Something similar happens with children, except the reward is approval and the punishment is rejection.

Phrases like boys don't cry, sit still and be good, you have to become a doctor, or what will people think show the process. The child stores rules they never chose and starts taking those voices as their own, a habit that lasts a lifetime.

The author calls the set of these rules a personal dream, a map of beliefs that filters what we see, and he combines all the individual dreams into one great collective dream of the planet, inherited from family, school, church, and media. The thesis is that much of our suffering comes from agreements we made without knowing it.

For Ruiz, we make agreements with ourselves, with others, and with life. Some are useful, others imprison us: I'm no good at math, that's just how I am, money is dirty. Most of them were signed in childhood, without anyone asking us.

The author proposes swapping those old agreements for new, conscious ones. Four would be enough, and they work as a package of mental habits, which explains the title. They are not religious commandments: they are decisions each person makes on their own, and they only work if they are repeated.

Before going into detail, the book itself offers a warning: none of the four is easy. The path is to practice, slip up, and start again, and change is slow. That is good news for anyone who has already started and quit on day two.