The Happiness Project: This Wednesday: Tips...to keep friendships strong.

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT is the memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier – happily, it was a #1 New York Times bestseller. As one of the hundreds of experiments I've conducted, I started this blog. Here, I recount my daily adventures in pursuit of happiness. –

Gretchen Rubin

Twelve Personal Commandments

Four Splendid Truths

First: To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.
Second: One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy; One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.
Third: The days are long, but the years are short. (click the link to see my one-minute movie)
Fourth: You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.

30-Second
TV Commercial

What Started Me Thinking

"The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up." 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.”

This Wednesday: Tips...to keep friendships strong.

Every Wednesday is Tip Day.
This Wednesday: Tips…to keep friendships strong
1. Remember birthdays; it guarantees that you get in touch at least once a year. I use Happybirthday.com to get email reminders.
2. Consider standing dates that make getting together easier: a baseball game every Fourth of July, a monthly brunch, a book group.
3. Keep a friend’s needs in mind—by passing along useful information, setting up a blind date, making a business introduction.
4. If you can pull it off, have a very big party (brunch, BBQ, cocktails) every few years.
5. Send out a holiday card to everyone you know. I send out Valentine’s Day cards, because December is such a crazy time.
6. Show up: to a wedding, a birthday party, a funeral, to see a friend’s new baby.
7. Don’t forget to send out change-of-address cards or emails so people can reach you.

Posted May 10, 2006

Comments

I would also add: do, but more importantly, ask for favors. Not that people should ask for spare kidneys every day, but it's nice to feel needed, and friends hardly ever resent small requests. To the contrary, when a friend asks me for a small favor, I feel that she needs and trusts me. Someone told me that this was one way to enhance a friendship, and I had one of those "That's Totally True" kind of moments. :-)

Posted by: Jessica | December 13, 2006 at 05:59 PM

Dont assume; be sensitive and do to others what you would like done to you.

Posted by: Rose | February 18, 2008 at 01:44 AM

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Gretchen Rubin is the best-selling writer whose book, The Happiness Project, is the account of the year she spent test-driving studies and theories about how to be happier. Here, she shares her insights to help you create your own happiness project.