The Happiness Project: Achieving your goals: How do you think big?

The Happiness Project

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

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.”

Tallbuilding One of my most effective happiness-project resolutions is to "Think big." In work and play, tackling a big challenge can be a major source of happiness.

In work, to think big, I started this blog. It felt like an impossibly huge goal when I was getting ready to launch it, but slowly but surely, I've built it into something I love.

For fun, to think big, I'm doing the Boy Castaways project with a friend. It's big, it's time-consuming, it's complicated, it's exhausting...it's so much fun.

As a work/fun project, I wrote a novel in a month. Yes, a 50,000 word novel in one month. I was absolutely inspired by Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days. The brilliant Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, suggests doing the "24-hour comic" exercise, when you write an entire comic in one day. This kind of boot-camp approach to thinking big can be a lot of fun.

I'd love to read some examples of things other people have tried -- whether at work or at leisure -- to set themselves a very large goal and to work toward it. Did it make you happier? How did you decide what goal to pick?

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

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