The Happiness Project: Choose the Bigger Life; No Pressure Knitting.

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.”

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.

I love visiting this blog’s companion site, the Happiness Project Toolbox – it’s fun to add to my own Inspiration Board, keep up with my own One-Sentence Journal (mine is a journal of what I’m reading), check my Lists, etc.

But I’m really addicted to the site because I love looking at what other people are writing. I can’t get enough of reading other people’s favorite quotations on the Inspiration Boards, seeing other people’s Personal Commandments, and all the rest. (To see what other people have added, you can click on the Tools listed across the top, or on the “more” running down the right side.)

Today, instead of proposing one of my resolutions for your happiness project, I gathered six of my favorite resolutions from that section of the Toolbox. These are resolutions posted by other people that I’m going to start to follow myself:

1. Say “I love you” every day
2. Choose the bigger life
3. Read books with my children
4. Laugh with my wife daily [ok, I’ll change this to “husband”]
5. Kindness
6. Put clothes away

I don’t knit, so I won’t follow the resolution “No pressure knitting,” but that resolution gave me such a clear picture of that person and that happiness project! I laughed out loud; I know exactly what that means.

One note: I see that a lot of people have the resolution to “Drink more water.” It’s not clear that this is a helpful resolution. Maybe you don't need to drink more water. If you love drinking water, then by all means, drink water, but from what I can see, the benefits are quite overblown, so you don’t need to worry about this too much.

We all have a limited capacity for sticking to resolutions, so make sure you’re getting the biggest happiness bang for the buck. You'd probably be better off using your precious resolution-energy toward going for a ten-minute walk instead of trying to drink water.

What resolutions have proved most helpful in your happiness projects?

* Ashby Jones at the Wall Street Journal law blog did a two-part interview with me this week. We had a great time talking about happiness, lawyers, and career choices in general.
Part I
Part II

* Join the discussion on the Facebook Page. Lots of interesting commentary there.