The Happiness Project: Happiness Is…A Great Book Event in Kansas City.

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.”

Last night, my book tour took me to Kansas City, and I loved being in my home town, even just for one night.

The event was co-sponsored by the Kansas City Public Library and Rainy Day Books, and it was tons of fun. It made me especially happy to be speaking at the Plaza branch, a place that played a huge role in my childhood. The building has been renovated, so the familiar downstairs children’s room, with its distinctive, wonderful smell, is gone…I remember so well the first few times that I strayed upstairs to look at the adult shelves, instead of heading down the stairs. Nothing else in my life has felt like such a significant passage to adulthood. The new building is terrific, but alas, the two-story clear tube of bubbling water that, inexplicably, graced the library is now gone.

As my parents and I were leaving the house to head to the library, I got the message that The Happiness Project is again at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list, for the third week, where it has been such publication! Quite a morale-booster before speaking.

* 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 gretchenrubin1 [at] gmail [.com] -- and don't forget the "1". (Sorry about writing it in that roundabout way; I’m trying to thwart spammers.) Just write “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.