The Happiness Project: I’m Gretchen Rubin

The Happiness Project

I’m working on a book, THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, a memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happy--from Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah. On this daily blog, I recount my adventures as I grapple with the challenge of being happier. THE HAPPINESS PROJECT will hit the shelves in December 2009 (Harper).

What Started Me Thinking

"Whoever is happy will make others happy, too." 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.”

A few years ago, I had an epiphany on the cross-town bus. I asked myself, “What do I want from life, anyway?” and I thought, “I want to be happy”—but I never spent any time thinking about happiness. “I should do a happiness project!” I realized. And so I have.

My happiness project has convinced me that it’s possible to be happier by taking small, concrete steps in your daily life. In my book and on this daily blog, I write about what I’ve learned as I’ve test-driven the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture. Plutarch, Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin, St. Thérèse, the Dalai Lama, Oprah, Martin Seligman…I cover it all.

Every Wednesday, I post a list of tips about how to be happier; every Friday, I propose a resolution for your happiness project; every Sunday, I post a quotation to get you thinking more deeply about happiness. Throughout the week, I write about my adventures as I work to be happier.

More than 35,000 people subscribe to this blog and more than 26,000 get my monthly newsletter. The blog appears on Slate as well as the Huffington Post, Yahoo! Shine, Psychology Today, Intent.com and elsewhere, and I also post on RealSimple.com. I feel lucky to be connected in so many ways to people who share my interest in happiness.

I’m a bestselling writer who has published four books and written three unpublished novels—which are safely locked in a drawer. Before turning to writing, I started out in law. At Yale Law School, I was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, and I was clerking for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when I realized that I really wanted to be a writer.

Raised in Kansas City, I live in New York City with my husband and two young daughters. My only hobbies are reading and writing—and helping other people to clean out their closets. I’m left-handed, hopeless at sports, tone-deaf, a constant hair-twister, and afraid to drive. I talk to my parents and my sister all the time, and I live around the corner from my in-laws.