The Happiness Project: And now for a moment of blatant self-promotion...

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.”

Churchill_2 'Tis the season to buy presents, so I’m going to make a plug for my biography, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill.

I wrote that biography thinking, “Churchill is the most interesting person ever, but if you don’t know anything about him, and want to dip your toe in, learning about him requires a huge commitment. Every WSC biography is at least 800 pages long, if not multi-volume, and almost all his own work is multi-volume. I want to write a manageable book so that people can learn enough about Churchill to want to tackle those other volumes.” I wanted everyone to be as interested in Churchill as I was.

When my book came out, however, I learned that the people most likely to want to read about Churchill are the people who already know a lot about him. If you know someone who is a big Churchill fan, I offer Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill for your gift-giving consideration. I’m biased, of course, but I do love that book – of course, it’s simply not possible to write a boring book about Churchill. He is supremely fascinating. And this is my one book that became a bestseller.

Ok, enough self-promotion!

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A reader who started her own happiness project realized the importance of being grateful. To help other people appreciate the power of gratitude, she worked every morning from 5:00-7:00 for months to create an iPhone application that allows you to keep a gratitude journal in your phone. So cool. Check it out: happytapper.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my personal 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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