The Happiness Project: The blog begins.

The Happiness Project

I’m working on a book, THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, a memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happy--from Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah. On this daily blog, I recount my adventures as I grapple with the challenge of being happier. THE HAPPINESS PROJECT will hit the shelves in December 2009 (Harper).

What Started Me Thinking

"Whoever is happy will make others happy, too." Mark Twain.
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” Robert Louis Stevenson
"Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Luke 10:41-42
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Simone Weil
“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” Colette
“It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” G. K. Chesterton
“A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.” Joseph Addison
“Best is good. Better is best.” Lisa Grunwald
“Order is Heaven’s first law.” Alexander Pope

Happiness Theories I Reject

Flaubert: "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
Vauvenargues: “There are men who are happy without knowing it.”
Eric Hoffer: “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Sartre: "Hell is other people."
Willa Cather: “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them…”
Alexander Smith: “We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.”
John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

Today is the first day of the Happiness Project blog.

Now, what is the Happiness Project?

One afternoon a few years ago, I realized with a jolt that I was allowing my life to flash by without facing a critical question: was I happy?

From that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking about happiness. Was it mostly a product of temperament? Could I take steps to be happier? What did it even mean to be “happy”?

So The Happiness Project is my memoir of one year in which I test-drive every principle, tip, theory, and research-study result I can find, from Aristotle to St. Therese to Benjamin Franklin to Martin Seligman to Oprah. What advice actually works?

That very fact that I’ve started this blog makes me happy, because now I’ve achieved one of my chief goals this month (just in time, too). I set myself a task, worked toward it, and achieved it.

Preparing to launch the blog reminded me of two of LIFE’S TRUE RULES:

First, ask for help. When trying to get started, I floundered until I thought to do the obvious: ask for advice from friends with blogs.

Second, keep moving, slow and steady. We tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish in an hour or a week, and underestimate how much we can accomplish in a month or a year, by doing just a little bit each day.

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. --Anthony Trollope

Comments

very inspired by yr blog and the happiness project and would like to take up a simlar project for myself for my life.

Just a suggestion for yr blog. As a newcomer, it took me a while to reach the last post ( or the first post) as archived post. Possibly there can be a guiding links on home page for newcomers to briefly tell them abt the project, what yr pholisophy is all abt ( expalined in this post)

Otherwise....fantafabulous...thx for sharing and inspiring

Posted by: Shally K | June 07, 2009 at 08:26 AM

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