The Happiness Project

Be Happier: Join or Start a Happiness-Project Group.

I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you could have one, too! Everyone’s project will look different, but it’s the rare person who can’t benefit. Join in -- no need to catch up, just jump in right now. Each Friday’s post will help you think about your own happiness project.

A few months ago, in a post about the resolution to Join or start a group, I threw out a suggestion: you might consider launching a group for people who were interested in pursuing their own happiness projects.

As I explained, I think this would be great. People could swap ideas, build enthusiasm, give each other accountability for doing happiness projects – and not only that -- just the fact of joining a group, whatever the focus might be, would build happiness.

I promised that if people were interested, I’d create a starter kit to help get the ball rolling. To my shock and delight, more than a thousand people have written to request the starter kit. Zoikes! Sign up here to get your own kit.

It’s very exciting to see the first few local Happiness-Project Groups begin to take shape. Who’s next?

-- Michael has started a group in Los Angeles.
-- Wendi has started a group in Gainesville, Florida.
-- Elizabeth has started a group in Waterville, Maine.
Elizabeth reports: “I introduced the happiness toolbox, photocopied the
weekly topics pages and have started to do the projects as an
adjunct to our group support…At this point almost everyone in the Women's Group has signed up for the Happiness Project Group.”
-- I’ve heard about groups forming in DC, Chicago, and the SF Bay area…more on those soon.

If you have friends in those cities, please let them know that these groups that are forming

Also, if you’ve started a happiness-project group yourself, please set up a Facebook Group for it and add yourself to the Group Directory. (This sounds like a pain, but it’s not as arduous as it sounds -- but if you can’t deal with these logistics, don’t worry about it.)

Now, I realize that many (or perhaps even most) of the people starting happiness-project groups are forming them with friends. In that case, you don’t need help spreading the word. Please do go ahead and make a Facebook Group for yourself, and add yourself to the Group Directory, anyway.

In the future, I’m hoping to be able to offer certain things to the Groups and the Group Leaders, so I need to be able to find you! Also, a directory will allow the groups to communicate among themselves.

One observation for those who are considering forming a group: it takes special energy to start something. The number of people who are willing to get something rolling is much smaller than the number of people who will join up. As Samuel Johnson noted, “The production of something, where nothing was before, is an act of greater energy than the expansion or decoration of the thing produced.” But every time I’ve made the effort to start something (for example, my two children's literature reading groups), I've ended up being very happy that I did.

Keep me posted about these groups! I can’t tell you how interested I am to hear about what everyone is doing.

* On Gimundo, I ran across a video that shows 500 years of female faces in Western art in less than three minutes. Mesmerizing.

* Again, if you're interested in forming a group for people who are working on their own happiness projects -- to share ideas, provide accountability, and have fun -- you can sign up for a starter kit here.

Decide to Be Happier NOW, Not Someday.

During my study of happiness, I’ve noticed that I often learn more from one person’s highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal principles or cite up-to-date studies. There’s something peculiarly compelling and instructive about hearing other people’s happiness stories.

Alex Fayle has a great blog, Someday Syndrome. There, he writes about the importance of not waiting until “someday” to pursue your dreams or make important changes, but to put these ideas into action now.

He just released an e-book, Someday My Ship Will Come In, to help people make the transition from autopilot to conscious choices. It leads readers through a series of short lessons and exercises designed step by step to get people thinking and choosing.

Gretchen: What’s a simple activity that consistently makes you happier?
Alex: Each day I choose to be happy. When I wake up in the morning, I think about my day and I smile in anticipation. When I don't make this conscious choice, my day usually passes with low energy.

What’s something you know now about happiness that you didn’t know when you were 18 years old?
When I was 18, I decided that it was too scary to follow my dreams, so I made a conscious choice not to pursue writing. I let fear put my dreams on hold for nearly twenty years and I spent that entire time not feeling happy. Until I made the choice to follow my writing dreams, I never realized that I had the power to make myself happy. I always waited for it to come to me, saying "Someday my ship will come in."

Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness?
When I see all the work ahead of me and the all the details each task entails, I get paralyzed and depressed. However, when I focus on just the next step facing me, I'm intensely happy. I find the more I look to the future - the more I look for that Someday Ship - the less I act in the moment. Each day therefore I ask myself - what can I do right now to bring my dreams closer to fruition.

Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve find very helpful? (e.g., I remind myself to “Be Gretchen.”) Or a happiness quotation that has struck you as particularly insightful?
I love this quote: “One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.“ – Eleanor Roosevelt

It leads me to my motto, which is: Life is a choice.

Is there anything that you see people around you doing or saying that adds a lot to their happiness, or detracts a lot from their happiness?
Happiness is difficult to find when we live on autopilot and live without making conscious choices. The more aware we are our of choices and the more we decide to be happy, the happier we are. We tell ourselves "Someday my ship will come in" and so put off making choices, believing that somehow happiness will come to us without having to act.

I wrote my ebook, Someday My Ship Will Come In, to help get readers thinking and choosing about their choices.

* I had a great time meeting Aidan Donnelley Rowley for coffee the other day -- we were set up by Danielle LaPorte of White Hot Truth fame -- and we could've talked all afternoon. She was nice enough to mention me and the happiness project in a post If You're Happy and You Know It... on her excellent new blog, Ivy League Insecurities.

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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. (Sorry about writing it in that roundabout way; I’m trying to thwart spammers.) Just write “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

Thirteen Tips for Actually Getting Some Writing Done.

Every Wednesday is Tip Day.
This Wednesday: 13 tips for actually getting some writing accomplished.

One of the challenges of writing is...writing. Here are some tips that I’ve found most useful for myself, for actually getting words onto the page:

1. Write something every work-day, and preferably, every day; don’t wait for inspiration to strike. Staying inside a project keeps you engaged, keeps your mind working, and keeps ideas flowing. Also, perhaps surprisingly, it’s often easier to do something almost every day than to do it three times a week. (This may be related to the abstainer/moderator split.)

2. Remember that if you have even just fifteen minutes, you can get something done. Don’t mislead yourself, as I did for several years, with thoughts like, “If I don’t have three or four hours clear, there’s no point in starting.”

3. Don’t binge on writing. Staying up all night, not leaving your house for days, abandoning all other priorities in your life -- these habits lead to burn-out.

4. If you have trouble re-entering a project, stop working in mid-thought — even mid-sentence — so it’s easy to dive back in later.

5. Don’t get distracted by how much you are or aren’t getting done. I put myself in jail.

6. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that creativity descends on you at random. Creative thinking comes most easily when you’re writing regularly and frequently, when you’re constantly thinking about your project.

7. Remember that lots of good ideas and great writing come during the revision stage. I've found, for myself, that I need to get a beginning, middle, and an end in place, and then the more creative and complex ideas begin to form. So I try not to be discouraged by first drafts.

8. Develop a method of keeping track of thoughts, ideas, articles, or anything that catches your attention. That keeps you from forgetting ideas that might turn out to be important, and also, combing through these materials helps stimulate your creativity. My catch-all document, where I store everything related to happiness that I don’t have another place for, is more than five hundred pages long. Some people use inspiration boards; others keep scrapbooks. Whatever works for you.

9. Pay attention to your physical comfort. Do you have a decent desk and chair? Are you cramped? Is the light too dim or too bright? Make a salute—if you feel relief when your hand is shading your eyes, your desk is too brightly lit. Check your body, too: lower your shoulders, make sure your tongue isn’t pressed against the top of your mouth, don’t sit in a contorted way. Being physically uncomfortable tires you out and makes work seem harder.

10. Try to eliminate interruptions — by other people, email, your phone, or poking around the Internet — but don’t tell yourself that you can only work with complete peace and quiet.

11. Over his writing desk, Franz Kafka had one word: “Wait.” My brilliantly creative friend Tad Low, however, keeps a different word on his desk: “Now.” Both pieces of advice are good.

12. If you’re stuck, try going for a walk and reading a really good book. Virginia Woolf noted to herself: “The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw.”

13. At least in my experience, the most important tip for getting writing done? Have something to say! This sounds obvious, but it’s a lot easier to write when you’re trying to tell a story, explain an idea, convey an impression, give a review, or whatever. If you're having trouble writing, forget about the writing and focus on what you want to communicate. For example, I remember flailing desperately as I tried to write my college and law-school application essays. It was horrible – until in both cases I realized I had something I really wanted to say. Then the writing came easily, and those two essays are among my favorites of things I’ve ever written.

Teaser for The Happiness Project book (due out in January) – there I write about my experience when I wrote a novel in a month, inspired by Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem!. Yes, you can write a real novel in one month. It was a lot of fun.

* I always find something great on Dumb Little Man.

* If you're starting your own happiness project, please join the Page on Facebook to swap ideas. It's easy; it's free.

A Strategy to Alleviate Anger.

One of my personal major, constant happiness challenges is trying to deal constructively with feelings of anger and irritability. Yesterday morning, my father-in-law mentioned a strategy that he recommends: when a person does something that annoys him (or whatever the negative emotion might be) he recalls a situation in which he made the same mistake, himself. That makes him less angry, more understanding.

This strategy doesn’t work well for everyone, however. Some people, my father-in-law observed, are able to do this effectively, but for others, the recognition that they’ve behaved similarly doesn’t translate into greater understanding or forgiveness. And a third category isn’t able to see any parallels at all -- to these folks, they must have had a good reason to have acted the way they did, and the mistakes others make are inexcusable.

I tried to apply this strategy myself. Here’s a small thing, but a recurrent source of anger in my life: my husband’s failure to answer my emails dealing with logistics. “Can we have dinner with so-and-so on June 22?” “Do you leave for London on the 3rd or the 4th?” “Did you reschedule the orthodontist’s appointment?” These emails just don’t get answered. It drives me nuts.

I’ve tackled this problem in lots of ways. I’ve tried working on the logistical side, and I’ve tried working on my mental-attitude side. But I had never thought to try to put myself in my husband’s place, and ask myself, “Do I fail to answer people’s logistical emails?” The answer to that question is a resounding YES. I often procrastinate on doing exactly this kind of work. I just can’t face the kind of systematic thinking, checking, and replying that it takes.

Ok. I think I do understand better now. Does it makes me less angry? Actually, I think it does. It also reminds me that I should do a better job of answering other people's logistical emails.

* Penelope Trunk has a fascinating post about how to decide where to live. This is a complicated, difficult, and extremely important decision that has a lot of significance for your happiness.

* Considering doing your own happiness project or have some ideas to share? Join the discussions on the Facebook Page to swap insights, strategies, and experiences.

Loving-Kindness and the Less Exhilarating Elements of Goodness.

“Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists and makes it a little less difficult to practice those minor virtues of self-control and self-restraint, patience, discipline, and tolerance, which are the passive and not very exhilarating elements of goodness. Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward. I am ashamed to have reached so commonplace a conclusion….I have gone a long way round to discover what everyone knew already.” -- W. Somerset Maugham

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If you haven't seen my one-minute movie, The Years Are Short, you might enjoy seeing that.

Be Happier: Control Your Exit.

I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you could have one, too! Everyone’s project will look different, but it’s the rare person who can’t benefit. Join in -- no need to catch up, just jump in right now. Each Friday’s post will help you think about your own happiness project.

This weekend, when I was home in Kansas City to go to my high-school reunion, I ran into an old family friend. “Let me tell you one of my personal secrets for happiness,” he said. “Control your exit.”

“’Control your exit?’” I asked. “What exactly does that mean?”

“It means, always be able to leave when you want. Drive yourself to a party instead of getting a ride, so you can leave when you’re ready. Try to go to someone else’s house, or a public place, instead of having people over to your house, because there’s nothing worse than seeing someone lean back and cross their legs when you’re ready to go to bed. Or else have people over to your house before some event – before a dinner reservation or a movie – so you have to leave by a certain time.”

My husband would certainly agree with this advice. He never agrees to go to a party on a boat, or to go on a bus tour, or to put himself in any situation that would prevent him from leaving whenever he wants. He feels trapped and unhappy if he knows he’s stuck.

It occurs to me that “Control your exit” is advice that’s figuratively true, too. For me, one of the most memorable pieces of advice from Stephen Covey's classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is “Begin with the end in mind.” That is (if I remember correctly), know where you want to go. When you start or do something, maintain a vision of where you’re headed – especially important for people who are considering law school! Friends, don’t go unless you know where you want to end up!

Speaking of my husband and law, he applied this rule when he was considering post-law-school jobs. He thought that working as an Assistant U.S. Attorney sounded great, but he wasn’t sure what he’d do after that. What was the exit strategy? He knew he didn’t want to work in a law firm, and he wasn’t sure what other jobs would follow from a stint in the U.S. Attorneys office; he was worried about taking a job that didn’t seem to lead to any other opportunities that interested him.

My newest Secret of Adulthood is that “The opposite of a great truth is also true.” It occurs to me that in some situations, not controlling your exit would lead to happiness. There’s a lot of happiness to be gained from spontaneity, impulse adventures, and unpredictable undertakings. Even in those cases, however, I imagine it’s better mindfully to embrace this idea of uncertainty – to know that you’re deliberately choosing to give up control of your exit – rather than to have it take you unawares. For instance, people often ask me, “Where is all this happiness project stuff going?” I’m not really sure, and I’m trying to embrace that uncertainty as exciting and fun, instead of letting my control-freak side become obsessed with certainty and control.

What do you think? Is a resolution to “Control your exit” more or less likely to lead to happiness? Maybe, as Bill Murray explained in Ghostbusters, of “never getting involved with possessed people,” “Actually, it’s more of a guideline than a rule.”

* Gimundo had an interesting post about Happy News from the Recession: 5 Good Things about Hard Times. Encouraging information there!

* If you're starting your own happiness project, please join the Page on Facebook to swap ideas. It's easy; it's free.

How to Get a Quick Fix of Happiness.

There are certain images, phrases, songs, and memories that always make me happy.

For some reason, this line from Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson strikes me as one of the funniest things I’ve ever read (and it's not even a quotation from Johnson):

"Lord Chesterfield being mentioned, Johnson remarked, that almost all of the celebrated nobleman's witty saying were puns. He, however, allowed the merit of good wit to his Lordship's saying of Lord Tyrawley and himself, when both were very old and infirm: 'Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years; but we don't choose to have it known.'"

An image that always makes me happy: the famous opening hat toss from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Mary Richards’s feeling of sudden exhilaration is familiar, but rare and precious.

A memory that always makes me happy: early in our marriage, my husband walked into our bedroom in his boxers and announced, “I am LORD of the DANCE!” and started doing that Celtic dancing. I still laugh out loud every time I think of it. He’s never done it again, though I’ve often begged him for a repeat performance.

I like keeping a mental list of these kinds of things. It’s a way of cultivating an area of refuge.

Do you have any ways to give yourself a quick fix of happiness when you need one?

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Want to talk more about happiness? Join the Facebook Page.

Seven Tips for Making Good Conversation with a Stranger.

Every Wednesday is Tip Day.
This Wednesday: 7 tips for making good conversation with a stranger.

I posted before about tips for knowing if you're boring someone and tips to avoid being a bore. But while it might be fairly easy to avoid topics that are likely to bore someone, it's much harder to figure out what to say if you want to be interesting. Making polite conversation can be tough.

“So where do you live?”
“Chelsea.”
“Really. I live on the upper east side.”
“Great…”
Painful silence.

Here are some strategies to try when your mind is a blank:

1. Comment on a topic common to both of you at the moment: the food, the room, the occasion, the weather. “How do you know our host?” “What brings you to this event?” But keep it on the positive side! Unless you can be hilariously funny, the first time you come in contact with a person isn’t a good time to complain.

2. Comment on a topic of general interest. A friend scans Google News right before he goes anywhere where he needs to make small talk, so he can say, “Did you hear that Justice Souter is stepping down from the bench?” or whatever might be happening.

3. Ask open questions that can’t be answered with a single word. “What’s keeping you busy these days?” This is a good question if you’re talking to a person who doesn’t have an office job. It’s also helpful because it allows people to choose their focus (work, volunteer, family, hobby) — preferable to the inevitable question (well, inevitable at least in New York City): “What do you do?”

A variant: “What are you working on these days?” This is a useful dodge if you ought to know what the person does for a living, but can’t remember.

4. If you do ask a question that can be answered in a single word, instead of just supplying your own information in response, ask a follow-up question. For example, if you ask, “Where are you from?” an interesting follow-up question might be, “What would your life be like if you still lived there?” If you ask, “Do you have children?” you might ask, “How are you a different kind of parent from your own parents?” or “Have you decided to do anything very differently from the way you were raised?”

5. Ask getting-to-know-you questions. “What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to? What internet sites do you visit regularly?” These questions often reveal a hidden passion, which can make for great conversation.

6. React to what a person says in the spirit in which that that comment was offered. If he makes a joke, even if it’s not very funny, try to laugh. If she offers some surprising information (“Did you know that one out of every seven books sold last year was written by Stephanie Meyer?”), react with surprise. Recently, I’ve had a few conversations where the person I was talking to just never reacted to what I said. I was trying to be all insightful and interesting, and these two people reacted as though everything I said was completely obvious and dull. It was unsatisfying.

Now, what to do if a conversation is just not working, and there’s no way to use the “Excuse me, I need to go get something to drink” line? Recently, at a dinner party, the guy sitting on my right side was clearly very bored by me. He explained to me at length about how happiness didn’t really exist, but after setting me straight on that subject didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and after a few failed attempts at other topics, after an awkward pause in the conversation (my fault as much as his), he said, “Um, so where are you from?” It was such a listless, uninspired effort that I leaned over, put my hand on his arm, and said meanly, “Now, Paul, surely we can do better than that!” and changed the conversation. (It is moments like that that make me happy that I basically gave up drinking.)

So what can you do when the conversation is such a struggle?

7. A friend argues that you should admit it! “We’re really working hard, aren’t we?” or “It’s frustrating—I’m sure we have interests in common, but we’re having a difficult time finding them.” Clearly this is a desperate measure, but my friend insists that it works. I’ve never had the gumption to try it, I have to admit.

What are some other strategies for starting an interesting conversation with a stranger? What have I overlooked? On a related note, here are some tips if you can't remember someone's name.

* I’m a huge fan of Twitter, in part because it has helped me find so many great writers and great information, and one person –- and blog -- that I discovered on Twitter is Gwen Bell. She writes about branding, social media, and creativity, and always has fresh, interesting things to say.

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I send out short monthly newsletters that highlight the best of the previous month’s posts to about 20,000 subscribers. If you’d like to sign up, click here or email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. (sorry about that weird format – trying to to thwart spammers.) Just write “newsletter” in the subject line. It’s free.

Happiness is...Seeing 8,674 Species of Birds.

From time to time, I post short interviews with interesting people about their insights on happiness. During my research, I’ve noticed that I often learn more from one person’s highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal principles or cite up-to-date studies.

I just finished a fascinating biography: Olivia Gentile’s Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds, the story of Phoebe Snetsinger. In the 1950’s, Snetsinger was a brainy, shy housewife with four children, and she was feeling depressed and trapped. A neighbor showed her a bird through binoculars (it happened to be a Blackburnian Warbler), and she saw a “blinding white light” – “Here was something that had been happening all my life, and I’d never paid any attention to it.” She became an ardent birder in a flash.

Time went on, and Snetsinger received a terrible diagnosis: she had cancer and just one year to live. Instead of giving up birding, she pursued birds for her “life list” with ever increasing zeal. The cancer never caught up with her, and she traveled the world, had astonishing adventures, saw more than eight thousand bird species, and became one of the world’s leading birders, until she was killed at age 68 in Madagascar on a birding trip.

On the one hand, Life List is a beautiful story of intellectual passion, love of nature, self-education, self-reinvention, and high adventure. On the other hand, Snetsinger’s family paid a high price for her devotion to birding, and she seemed, many times, to abandon the proper instinct for self-preservation.

I’m fascinated by happiness projects of all sorts, and Phoebe Snetsinger’s happiness project enthralled me. There’s practically no overlap between the things that made Snetsinger happy and the things that make me happy, and I certainly have no interest in birds, and yet I learned a lot about happiness from reading about her life.

I asked the book’s author, Olivia Gentile, to do a happiness interview, because she’s obviously done a lot of thinking about happiness and the elements of a happy life. (For more info, check out her author website, which is much more interesting than the average site and well worth a visit!)

Gretchen: What’s a simple activity that consistently makes you happier?
Olivia: Spending time in nature! This might mean a walk in Central Park, a morning of watching the birdfeeder, a swim in a pond, or a hike up a mountain. I even get a little burst of happiness from flipping through my National Geographic.

What’s something you know now about happiness that you didn’t know when you were 18 years old?
Well, I certainly didn’t know how soothing nature could be—I don’t think I gave the natural world a moment’s attention until I was in my twenties. And I didn’t really start appreciating nature until I began learning about Phoebe.

Also, when I was 18 I thought success (which to me meant getting good grades, winning a tennis match, getting into college, etc.) would bring me happiness. Since then I’ve realized that while those kinds of things might bring me satisfaction, they don’t have a lot to do with my happiness. Happiness is more about how we experience something than about whether we’re successful at it—i.e., I might be made happy by the feeling of the sun on my face during a tennis match, but I probably won’t be made happy by winning the match (at least not for more than a second, and not in a very deep way). Look at what happened with Phoebe: birding made her ecstatic year after year, until she began focusing more on becoming the number one birder than on the inherent pleasures of being in the field.

Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness?
Yes! I spend too much time on the Internet and watch too much cable news. And I worry too much about what people think of me.

Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve find very helpful? (e.g., I remind myself to “Be Gretchen.”) Or a particular book that has stayed with you?
I still get shivers whenever I pick up Walden—I’m a real sucker for all those exhortations to be true to yourself and make the most of every day.

Is there anything that you see people around you doing or saying that adds a lot to their happiness, or detracts a lot from their happiness?
Some of my friends have gotten into meditation, and it has helped them get and stay happy. (I keep vowing to meditate regularly, but never seem to be able to do it.)

Have you always felt about the same level of happiness, or have you been through a period when you felt exceptionally happy or unhappy – if so, why? If you were unhappy, how did you become happier?
My happiness has gone up and down a lot. My unhappiest time was during college, because I suffered from a lot of anxiety, and also because I was ashamed of my anxiety. After a few years of this, I finally got some good therapy and did some deep thinking about what kind of life I wanted for myself—this was how I started to realize that happiness is more about the way we experience things than what we accomplish. (By the way, I don’t claim to have mastered this lesson. I still get caught up in overachieving, but at least I know it’s bad for me.)

My happiest period began a couple of years ago, when my husband asked me to marry him. I was happy before he proposed, because I was in love with him, but it was hard for me to trust my happiness—to really relax into it—until I knew we were going to get married. This happiness was interrupted (to put it mildly) last fall, about eight months after we got married, when he became gravely ill with a twisted and perforated colon. He nearly died, and he was sick for three months. Now, he’s as good as new, but we’re both still recovering emotionally. We’re trying to use the experience as a reminder that you have to seize the moment and live each year as if it might be your last, because it might be. Phoebe’s story had taught me that, too, but I learned the lesson more vividly last fall.

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Want to talk more about happiness? Join the Facebook Page.

Life’s Cruel Truth: You Get More of What You Already Have.

One of my happiness-project resolutions is to Meditate on koans. In Buddhist tradition, a Zen koan (rhymes with Ken Cohen) is a question or a statement that can’t be understood logically. Monks meditate on koans as a way to abandon dependence on reason in their pursuit of enlightenment. The most famous koan is probably: “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?”

I'm haunted by my own koans – lines that flicker through my mind and evade logical thinking. One of my koans is from the Bible, Mark 4:25: “For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.”

This doesn’t really sound fair, on first reading! I think the meaning of Jesus’ words is something like, “Those who have sought to understand divine truth will learn more, and those who haven’t tried won’t even remember the little they’ve learned.”

But whatever Jesus meant in the context of that verse, I find myself thinking about it in the happiness context, and I’ve often reflected that this statement sums up one of the cruel truths about happiness, and about human nature generally: you get more of what you have.

When you feel friendly, people want to be your friend. When you feel sexy, people are attracted to you. When you feel confident, others have confidence in you.

This truth is cruel because so often, you want others to give you what you feel you’re lacking. It’s when you’re feeling isolated and awkward that you want people to be friendly. When you’re feeling ugly, you want someone to tell you how sexy you are. When you’re feeling insecure, you wish someone would express confidence in you.

During my happiness project, I’ve been startled to discover the efficacy of the third of my Personal Commandments: Act the way I want to feel.

This commandment is important for two reasons. First, although we think we act because of the way we feel, often we feel because of the way we act. So by acting the way we wish we felt, we can change our emotions – a strategy that is uncannily effective.

Second, the world’s reaction to us is quite influenced by the way we act toward the world. For example, in situation evocation, we spark a response from people that reinforces a tendency we already have — for example, if I act irritable all the time, the people around me are going to treat me with less patience and helpfulness, which will, in turn, stoke my irritability. If I can manage to joke around, I’ll evoke a situation in which the people around me were more likely to joke around, too.

Life isn’t fair. People with a propensity to good cheer will find themselves in a friendly, cheerful environment, while people who are already angry or crabby will find themselves surrounded by uncooperative, suspicious people. “For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.”

Which leads, as always, to the same conclusion: that even though it’s tempting sometimes to think that I’d be much happier if other people would behave differently toward me, the only person whose behavior I can change is myself. If I want people to be friendlier to me, I must be friendlier. If I want my husband to be tender and romantic, I must be tender and romantic. If I want our household atmosphere to be light-hearted, I must be light-hearted.

Goethe wrote: “I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather.” And he that brings a sunny day will find a sunny day waiting for him.

* The folks from the terrific site Wise Bread have done a great new book, 10,0001 Ways to Life Large on a Small Budget. It's an excellent resource, and the information is presented in an attractive, accessible, and even funny way. I got a lot of great ideas from the book.

* I send out short monthly newsletters that highlight the best of the previous month’s posts to about 20,000 subscribers. If you’d like to sign up, click here or email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. (sorry about that weird format – trying to to thwart spammers.) Just write “newsletter” in the subject line. It’s free.