The Happiness Project: Unbelievable! My Book Is Being Advertised on TELEVISION!

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.”

My happiness-project resolutions include Push myself, Conquer a device, and Aim higher. I remind myself frequently that novelty and challenge bring happiness (they bring frustration, annoyance, and fear, but they bring happiness, too).

A few weeks ago, after I watched a video by Slate ad critic Seth Stevenson, How I Ran an Ad on Fox News, about how it’s truly cheap and possible to use Google to advertise on TV, I was dying to try it for The Happiness Project. An ad for a book on TV? Fantastic!

I was lucky. First, although I had no idea how to make an ad myself, I knew someone who could. Maria Giacchino, of My Little Jacket, made my fabulous book video and shoots and edits my weekly videos for the 2010 Happiness Challenge. So I knew I could call her.

Also, I was confident that Angie Lee, the fantastic director of marketing at my publisher, Harper, would be excited to try the experiment. She’s extremely creative and very interested in harnessing new technology to spread the word about books.

So here’s the amazing thing. I watched the Slate V video on March 19, immediately sent out an email saying, “Let’s try this!” And the ad campaign starts today. Yes! It’s true! With just thirty days of preparation, and not much money, my book will be advertised on television. Crazy! I love technology and the internet! Maria made it; Angie figured out the campaign of when and where it should run. Here it is:

We based the ad on my little story "The Years Are Short," because that story -- about my realization that, in my life with my children, "The days are long, but the years are short" -- has resonated so deeply with people. There’s a slightly longer, different video version of the story here, and it was also adapted by the Today show here; Maria had the challenge of doing a 30-second version. (Actually, 27 seconds, because we had to leave time at the end to give the URL for the blog and to show the book jacket. Twenty-seven seconds is short.)

I hadn’t expected to play such a starring role, but hey, if you make an ad on the cheap, you use people who will work for free and show up when you need them! You can also see glimpses of my younger daughter.

So…it’s starting today. Thrilling.

Instead of being a traditional advertisement for the book, it's a little story about my daughter and me. If you know people who would enjoy it, please forward it to them (here’s the YouTube link.) It would make a nice message for a mother in your life, in honor of Mothers’ Day!

It’s interesting about creative projects – it’s easy to assume that creativity is something that comes from an individual, but often I can do something creative only because I know the right person with whom to collaborate. For example, I couldn’t have done Four to Llewelyn’s Edge by myself. I needed to work with my very creative friend who knows a lot about costumes, props, and book-making, and we needed Tracy Charnock to take the photos, and we wouldn’t have been able to make our project into a book with the fantastic Gabe Greenberg. I had the idea to do this ad, but I couldn’t have taken even one step toward doing it without Maria and Angie.

A larger happiness point: It’s easy, when you’re feeling overwhelmed, both at work and at home, to shy away from taxing, unfamiliar tasks. Why take on anything more? But even though doing this ad took a lot of time and mental energy, at a time when I was already frantically busy, it also energized me. Aim higher.

* If you know people who might enjoy the ad, please forward them the link. In particular, it seems to strike a chord with parents. The days sometimes feel interminable, and it seems like you'll be picking up toys or searching for mittens forever, but it all passes in a flash. The challenge is to appreciate now.