The Happiness Project: This Saturday: a happiness quotation from Samuel Johnson.

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 Saturday: a happiness quotation from Samuel Johnson.

“Depend upon it, sir, vivacity is much an art, and depends greatly on habit.” --Samuel Johnson

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Posted September 15, 2007

Comments

Great quote! It has been bookmarked. Thank you.

Have a nice weekend-

Erin
www.ExpectingExecutive.com

Posted by: Erin - ExpectingExecutive | September 15, 2007 at 01:27 PM

I saw your post on HuffPo, and was thinking about your mission. A very good one, by the way. I wonder if the happiness project may be known by other names, like the centered-ness project, or the faith-in-something greater project. I guess the word happiness is something everyone can relate to, but when you get to the bottom of it I think it's remaining centered and having faith in something everlasting that ultimately does the trick. Anyway, good luck with your book!

Posted by: Jessica | September 15, 2007 at 07:08 PM

You're right, one of the trickiest aspects of happiness is the problem of defining it. In the end, rather than trying to figure out what lay at the very core of happiness, I decided to stick to the word "happiness," which is broad enough to take in a lot of different meanings. Although there may not be one final answer for everyone, it's a question that's worth a lot of reflection.

Posted by: Gretchen Rubin | September 15, 2007 at 10:53 PM

I am glad you call it the Happiness Project. I would be put off by a "belief in something greater" project. I believe that a belief in right now is part of what makes happiness.

My two grown daughters and I are setting out on our own happiness project now: http://happiness4us.blogspot.com.

Posted by: Judith | September 17, 2007 at 01:47 PM

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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.