Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Four Agreements, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Judgment and Fear
Beliefs, Agreements, and Transformative Happiness
Human Perception, Reality, and Universal Love
Childhood, Adulthood, and Freedom
Summary
Analysis
The fourth agreement, “always do your best,” is important because it enables the others to become habits. No matter what the scenario, you should always do your best. It’s crucial to remember, though, that your best will change from moment to moment— your best will be better when you’re well-rested than when you’re tired, or for example. Your best will also depend on your mood. As you build new habits, your best will also evolve.
Ruiz’s final agreement centers on tackling a person’s need for perfection. It shifts the focus of doing something away from whether or not it’s achieved and toward simply making a genuine effort. The person essentially agrees to accept themselves for trying, regardless of the outcome, instead of judging themselves for failing and rewarding themselves for succeeding.
Themes
It’s important to remember that doing your best is not the same as overdoing it. Ruiz explains this with a story about a man who wants to rise above his suffering, so he goes to a Buddhist temple to find a master who can help him. The man asks his Master how long it will take if he meditates four hours a day, and the Master estimates that it will take four years. The man asks how long it will take if he can meditate eight hours a day. To his surprise, the Master says, “twenty years.” The Master explains that if the man can do his best in two hours a day, spending eight hours a day will just make him frustrated and miserable, thereby elongating his suffering.
Through Ruiz’s anecdote about the meditating man and the Master, he emphasizes that “doing your best” is not the same as doing the best. His aim is to stop a person from comparing themselves to others and to themselves at different points in time. Cutting off the tendency to compare stops a person from judging how much they are doing and limits the chance of them inadvertently causing more suffering by overworking themselves.
Themes
Ruiz believes that doing your best means being active, productive, and good to yourself, and contributing to your community and society. Doing your best also means acting because you love it, not because you want a reward. A lot of people don’t actually like their work, they just do it to get paid; they suffer all week as they work because they have to, not because they want to. Then, when they get paid, they spend their money on escapism—say, buying alcohol and getting drunk—to forget that they are unhappy and hate their lives. By contrast, when we like what we do, we don’t get bored or frustrated. We are happy.
For Ruiz, “doing your best” entails making a shift of attitude away from the rewards of completing a task and toward the pleasure of doing the task itself. If a person tries to do things they enjoy, they are less likely to shirk their responsibilities and cut corners. Ruiz essentially argues that one way in which a person can easily do their best is to focus on doing tasks they love.
Themes
When you do your best, you also stop your inner “Judge” from blaming you, and you learn to accept yourself. If you start judging yourself, you can respond “I did my best.” When you do your best, you also don’t do it to please the Judge or other people. Doing your best is doing the actions that make you happy and that authentically express what you are. Ruiz explains what he means with the story of Forrest Gump: Forrest didn’t always have amazing ideas but he always took action and did his best at whatever he was doing. His rewards were a bonus but they weren’t the reason he took action. Ruiz equates taking action with being alive and taking the risk to express your dream.
Ruiz now explains how agreeing to “always do your best” limits the problematic tendency to reject oneself for not being perfect. When a person focuses on the fact that they made their best effort (regardless of the outcome), they silence their inner Judge who focuses on the outcome and not the effort. Doing one’s best thus orients a person toward accepting themselves for trying hard instead of rejecting themselves for failing to succeed.
Themes
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Ruiz says that he does his best in every aspect of his life by turning every action into a ritual. When he takes a shower, for instance, he tells his body how much he enjoys the water and he does his best to meet his body’s needs and appreciate the sensations it gives him. Ruiz also thinks that letting go of the past and of what you’ve lost allows you to be alive now and enjoy the dream that’s happening in this moment. If you dwell on missing someone or something, you’re not enjoying what’s happening right now and this leads to self-pity and suffering.
Ruiz now argues that “always do your best” orients a person toward focusing on the present moment because the emphasis is on the effort (which happens in the moment) and not on the outcome (which involves dwelling on future outcomes and past expectations). Thus, the fourth agreement also encapsulates a commitment to be present in the moment, which Ruiz believes alleviates suffering.
Themes
For Ruiz, being alive is recognizing life—and God—passing through you. Instead of trying to prove yourself, just be. You have the right to be alive, to be happy, to be you, to say yes when you want to, and to say no when you don’t. You don’t need others to accept you. You express the God in you by existing, loving yourself, and loving others.
Ruiz explains that the fourth agreement, like the other three agreements, allows a person to dismantle fear. This time, the fear of failure is tackled. A person accepting themselves for trying is closer to self-love than a person thinking they need to achieve something in order to be worthy of love.
Themes
Doing your best is the key to achieving the other agreements. As you try to change your habits, you won’t always be impeccable with your word, you will sometimes take things personally, and you might still make the odd assumption—but if you’re always doing your best, your habits will change. You’ll misuse your words less often, take things less personally over time, and make fewer assumptions as you go. Instead of judging yourself when you fail to keep an agreement, just do your best and you’ll feel good about your effort, because “Practice makes the master.” Remember, Ruiz says, that you learned everything you know—say, writing, driving, walking, and talking—by repeating actions. Action is what makes change possible.
Ruiz ties all four agreements together by showing that because the fourth agreement tackles the fear of failure, it also tackles the fear of failing to uphold the agreements themselves. Even if a person slips up—which is inevitable—they can accept themselves for trying their best and keep going instead of triggering their inner Judge to chime in and tell them that they have failed and that they aren’t good enough. The fourth agreement, thus, is set up to help a person cultivate new habits, because it doesn’t stop a person in their tracks when they mess up.
Themes
Ruiz means that you can’t just daydream or meditate on the agreements to reap their benefits—you have to act by feeding, cleaning, and healing your body; exercising; and doing “what makes your body feel good.” You don’t have to worship religious idols (like Buddha or Jesus) because your own body is already a “manifestation of God,” but you can certainly do so if it makes you feel good. When giving love to all the parts of your body becomes your ritual, you love, respect, and honor yourself and God. You begin to live a dream that has no judgment, no victimization, no gossip, and no abuse.
Shifting one’s outlook from a fear-based worldview to a love-based worldview entails taking care of the body and treating it with love. Taking care of the body, for Ruiz, is something like the action-based analogue for prayer or meditation: everybody is God, in his view, so treating the body with care and keeping it functioning is the same thing as honoring a deity.
Themes
Ruiz says it’s impossible to “live in hell” when you practice the four agreements, because you’ll be 100 percent in control of your life. Toltec wisdom says that together, the four agreements enable to you to master transformation: to “transform hell into heaven,” and to transform the “dream of the planet” into your “personal dream.” You can do your best to honor the four agreements today, but it takes a strong will to keep honoring them every day because they are in conflict with the agreements that are part of “the dream of the planet.” Ruiz says that each time you fail, you shouldn’t become the Judge (and criticize yourself) or become the Victim (and feel sorry for yourself). Instead, just tell yourself that you broke the agreement but that you’ll try again.
Ruiz reminds the reader that agreeing to adopt the behaviors he has outlined takes repeated effort every day. To motivate the reader, Ruiz reminds them that the effort is worth it, because adopting the four agreements will eventually enable a person to channel all the energy that they would have been spending on judging and criticizing into the pursuit of their own personal desires, which means doing things they love. Ruiz uses the metaphor of shifting from “hell” into “heaven” to emphasize the impact that his advice will have on a person’s life.
Themes
