The Happiness Project: 11 Happiness Paradoxes to Contemplate As You Think About Your Happiness Project.

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.”

Every Wednesday is Tip Day, or List Day.
This Wednesday: 11 paradoxes to contemplate as you think about your own happiness project.

As I’ve worked on my happiness project, I’ve been struck by the paradoxes I keep confronting. As physicist Niels Bohr said, "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."

One of my Secrets of Adulthood is “The opposite of a great truth is also true” – and I try to embrace these contradictions:

1. Accept myself, but expect more of myself. This tension is at the core of any happiness project.

2. Take myself less seriously—and take myself more seriously.

3. Push myself to use my time efficiently, yet also make time to play, to wander, to read at whim, to fail.

4. Strive to be emotionally self-sufficient so I can connect better with other people. Only recently have I begun to understand the importance of this idea.

5. Keep an empty shelf, and keep a junk drawer.

6. Think about myself so I can forget myself.

7. Control and mastery are key elements of happiness; and so are novelty and challenge.

8. Work can be play, and play can be work. As George Orwell observed, “But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody.”

9. The days are long, but the years are short. (Watch the video here.)

10. Happiness doesn't always make me feel happy.

11. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection. In Japanese, there is a beautiful term, wabi-sabi, which describes the special beauty of the imperfect, the incomplete, and the transient. Superficially similar, but actually different in meaning (as I understand it), is the phrase from software development, Worse is better.

12. Spend out, to become rich.

Often, the search for happiness means embracing both sides of the paradox.

Take, for example, #1 above. W. H. Auden articulates beautifully this tension: “Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.”

What are the accidental limitations, and what the necessary limitations? The first and most important of my Twelve Personal Commandments is to Be Gretchen, and this question is one of the most significant to consider.

What paradoxes of happiness have you discovered?

* My fried Mike Errico is an amazing musician, and he just released this video of his new song "Count to Ten." I love it. I have to say, it seems almost like magic when someone I know sings and plays music beautifully. Or paints a picture right in front of me.

* Sign up for the Moment of Happiness, and each weekday morning, you'll get a happiness quotation in your email in-box. Sign up here or email me at gretchenrubin1 at gmail dot com (don't forget the "1"). More than 25,000 people have signed up in just a few months.