The Happiness Project

"Doing Things That Scare Me Can Make Me Both Happy and Unhappy, and the Line is Often Surprising."

Happiness interview: Janine DiTullio.

Last week, I went to the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. On the flight down, although I usually never talk to my rowmate, I eventually struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me.

It turned out she was a TV comedy writer who was headed down to SXSW to introduce Chirpbug, a technology that connects performers and fans over the internet. She helped found this company in her free time, along with writing for the heavy-metal cartoon Metalocalypse on Adult Swim. (She didn't mention it, but I found out later that she's written for Conan O'Brien, Jon Stewart, and Jimmy Fallon, and been nominated for multiple Emmy awards.)

But here's the crazy thing. We were talking away, and suddenly I remembered a panel about comedy-writing that I'd attended at the New York Public Library. "You know what," I said to her, "I may have seen you speak about eight years ago."

"Really?"

"If that was you, I've been quoting you ever since. Do you remember saying this? A guy in the audience asked, 'How do you get a job as a comedy writer?' And you, or whomever it was, said, 'You do what you love, and then your friends hire you.' Meaning, if you spend your time doing what you love with people who love it, too, eventually it turns into work opportunities."

"Oh, yes, I said that," said Janine.

I was floored by this! I'd been quoting her for years, and here she was! And it was such good advice. I thought about it a lot with my resolution to Do what you do.

"This is just like that scene in When Harry Met Sally!" I said. "When the character Marie quotes Jess's magazine piece, 'Restaurants are to people in the eighties what theater was to people in the sixties,' and Jess says, 'I wrote that.'" What a crazy small world.

So naturally I asked her to do an interview about happiness.

Gretchen: What's a simple activity that consistently makes you happier?
Janine: Gambling.

What's something you know now about happiness that you didn't know when you were 18 years old?
Happiness does not equal complacency.

Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness?
Drinking soda + not exercising.

Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you've found very helpful? (e.g., I remind myself to "Be Gretchen.") Or a particular book that has stayed with you?
No. But I might start reminding myself to "Be Gretchen."

If you're feeling blue, how do you give yourself a happiness boost? Or, like a "comfort food," do you have a comfort activity? (mine is reading children's books).
I take a bath every day at 5pm.

Is there anything that you see people around you doing or saying that adds a lot to their happiness, or detracts a lot from their happiness?
People seem to do a lot for their future happiness at the expense of their current happiness.

Have you always felt about the same level of happiness, or have you been through a period when you felt exceptionally happy or unhappy - if so,why? If you were unhappy, how did you become happier?
I had a very unhappy period a few years ago precipitated by a break-up. I took some prozac and moved back home to help my Mom battle lung cancer.

Watching someone appreciate every drop of life and having the opportunity to help a parent deeply fortified my happiness even while adding sadness. Oh, and the prozac worked wonders, too.

Do you work on being happier? If so, how?
Luckily, my Dad brought us up to put happiness before almost everything, except maybe birth control. So, I had a head start at it, but it still takes work. I try to avoid things that make me feel a loss of personal freedom.

I find bad jobs can do that fast. I'd rather take financial risks than have a "stable job" any day. Of course, that might not be the case if it weren't for the birth control.

Have you ever been surprised that something you expected would make you very happy, didn't - or vice versa?
Doing things that scare me can make me both happy and unhappy and the line is often surprising.

* Also at SXSWi, I also met Nathan Thornburgh of DadWagon. I spent a lot of time checking out the site -- "trying to make sense of the sometimes baffling, often excruciating, occasionally amusing world of fatherhood."

* Join the happiness discussion on the Facebook Page. Lots of interesting conversation there. And follow me on Twitter as @gretchenrubin.

Yay! The Happiness Project and I Made It Onto JEOPARDY!

I fell out of my chair in shock and delight when I heard that The Happiness Project and I were a question on Jeopardy! last night.

The category was "Glee," and the clues were all synonyms for the word. My clue was "Gretchen Rubin chronicled a year in which she tried to be more gleeful in a blog and a book called this 'project.'" Answer: "The Happiness Project."

That certainly makes me very HAPPY. I mean -- Jeopardy! Wow.

** Update: Now I have the clip -- have to say, I didn't really believe it until I watched it myself. I especially loved the way Alex Trebek said "The Happiness Project" with a happy lift.

"The Less Money Matters to You, the More Careful You Need to Be With It."

Happiness interview: Zac Bissonnette.

I met personal finance expert Zac Bissonnette when we were on a panel together, and I was impressed by his command of the research and statistics related to working, debt, higher education costs, and money -- particularly because he was still in college! He's now entering his senior year at the University of Massachusetts.

His new book, Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching Off My Parents, just came out.

The relationship between money and happiness is one of the most complex, and most emotionally charged, topics within the large subject of happiness, so I was very interested to hear what Zac had to say.

Gretchen: Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful? (e.g., I remind myself to “Be Gretchen.”) Or a happiness quotation that has struck you as particularly insightful?
Zac: A few years ago – when I was in high school -- my dad was going through a ton of financial problems that culminated in him living at a friend’s house.

My dad was born in 1948 and is a classic hippie; He lived in a treehouse in a state park for awhile in the early 1970s, he’s a carpenter, and he is probably the coolest, most loving person I know.

But he’s never really given much thought to money. He always said that it wasn’t important to him and that it didn’t matter. So I was sitting on the couch with him at his friend’s house watching the Red Sox (weirdly, this was the same game during which Denis Leary gave his famous pro-Jewish baseball player/anti-Mel Gibson rant, which is guaranteed to make you happy if you haven’t seen it before) and I asked him, just off the top of my head: “Who do you think thinks about money more? You or Bill Gates?” And I’ll never forget his response: “Without a doubt, me. I spent my whole life thinking I was above money and that it didn’t matter and now it dominates my life and is all I think about. It’s like money is exacting its cruel revenge on me.”

I interviewed you once for a piece and you told me that “Money affects happiness primarily in the negative” and that’s exactly right. When it comes to happiness, the less money matters to you, the more careful you need to be with it. If you don’t like thinking about money and don’t pay enough attention to it, it will one day become all you think about.

Is there anything that you see people around you doing or saying that adds a lot to their happiness, or detracts a lot from their happiness? One of the most discouraging things I see in a lot of young people is a defeatist mentality when it comes to their financial lives: “Student loans are a fact of life, and I’ll be repaying them well into my forties. I wish Congress would do something to make my life better.” I remember a high school history teacher telling our class that in a joking way – “This is the way it is: You’re going to graduate with a bunch of debt and it will be with you for a long time.”

The problem with this defeatist mentality is that it leads people to lose the financial game without even trying to play it. What I’m saying is this: Before you resign yourself to $20,000, $30,000, or even $100,000 in student loans for an undergraduate education, stop and look at all the alternatives and get creative: Is there a way to do this debt-free? What if I attend a cheaper public college instead of a fancy private one? If I work 30-hour weeks during the summer, my parents drive their car an extra year instead of getting a new one, and we sell some stuff on eBay and cut back on dining out, can we make this work.

I started working when I was in high school and saved a huge chunk of everything I earned – enough that I’ve been able to pay for college in cash without help from my parents. That makes my mom happy and if mom’s happy, everybody’s happy.

What’s something that people think will make them happy – and put a lot of effort into getting – that often doesn’t lead to the desired result?
Without a doubt, it’s the college admissions game.

In recent years, we’ve seen a considerable amount of research showing that the financial benefits to attending an elite college are not as strong as most people think. A study at NYU found that, once you control for SAT scores and high school GPAs, at least 60% -- and possibly a lot more – of the gap in earnings between graduates of elite schools and graduates of non-elite schools is eliminated. A study conducted at Princeton found that students who get into elite schools but attend less selective schools earn the same amount of money as students who attend elite schools.

In other words, a tremendous amount of stress and an entire cottage industry of admissions gurus and magazines has been built around a shell game of selling people something that they often can’t afford that doesn’t deliver nearly the benefit that people are thinking it will – and very possibly doesn’t deliver any benefit at all. And they’re borrowing an amount of money that will impede their pursuit of happiness to make it happen and getting really stressed out in the process. It’s sad.

What’s something you know now about happiness that you didn’t know when you were 18 years old?
Everything in Gretchen’s book. [Awww, Zac!]

If you’re feeling blue, how do you give yourself a happiness boost? Or, like a “comfort food,” do you have a comfort activity? (mine is reading children’s books).
This is going to sound like a totally weird answer, especially because of my age – but I guess most answers to this question are probably strange.

When I’m not happy, I listen to Perry Como and it gives me an instant happiness boost. I first heard his version of ""Magic Moments" (an exceptionally cheesy, sentimental song) in the car with my mother when I was in sixth grade and, for whatever reason, ever since then I’ve turned to him for “feel good” music.

Incidentally, one of the better (and more apocryphal) quotes on happiness is sometimes attributed to Perry Como: “Happiness is a byproduct of making other people happy.” If Debt-Free U can help people make college selection and financing decisions that will enable them to have a shot at the happy life that I believe everyone deserves, I’ll be happy.

* I was intrigued by this study which suggests that people who have something to do, even something pointless, are happier than those who are idle. One question about the study, however: the "something to do" was to take a walk, which itself boosts happiness. So was the effect from the mere activity or from the walking?

* If you'd like to sign up for my free monthly newsletter, which highlights the best of the month's material from the blog and the Facebook Page, sign up here or email me at grubin at gretchenrubin dot com (just write "newsletter" in the subject line). About 49,000 people get it.

A Happiness Lesson from...Simon Cowell? Yep.

Studies show that when people find meaning in their experiences, even painful experiences, they are more apt to find happiness and fulfillment. In fact, a happiness-boosting exercise sometimes assigned is to ask people to write their life stories. When people are asked to do this, and when they reflect on their lives in a constructive way, they feel happier.

I know this is true for myself. When I’ve been able to take painful past experiences and feel like I’ve learned something important from them, they lose some of their negative charge. For example, my biography of John Kennedy, Forty Ways to Look at JFK, didn’t sell well at all. How I love that book! And yet it didn’t sell. This was very disappointing to me, and had potential serious consequences for my career. But I kept asking myself, “What have I learned? About myself, my writing, the reading audience, the publishing industry? Am I myself satisfied with the book I wrote?” Etc. I learned a lot from that disappointment, and that was a comfort. My former boss Reed Hundt often quoted Benjamin Franklin: “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”

I never watch the insanely popular TV show American Idol – I can’t stand to watch people lose – so I know almost nothing about Simon Cowell. But a friend told me to take a look at his Letter to My Shallow, Reckless, Cocky Younger Self, written on the occasion of his 50th birthday, and I was fascinated by it.

Simon Cowell’s letter to himself is a great example of writing a life story to find meaning in painful past experiences. As he writes to his younger self, Cowell expresses gratitude to the people he loves, he shows how he’s learned from his mistakes, he reflects on how he was responsible for some of the problems he faced, he emphasizes how he’s learned to trust his own judgment and taste, he considers his choices and why some were right for him and some wrong, he emphasizes his values, and he shows a sense of perspective and even humility.

I've never sat down to do something like this, but I'm sure it would be a very useful exercise. I loved reading this letter.

* I spent waaaay too long poking around Fresh Living on Belief.net this afternoon -- "health and whole with two women who (usually) practice what we preach." Great material there.

* More happiness-project groups are forming! Excellent! One has started in Toronto, and another in Chicago. I can’t wait to hear more about what they’re doing. If you’re interested in launching a happiness-project group of your own, click here for the starter kit.

A new study shows that happiness is contagious.

Several thoughtful readers sent me links to a fascinating new study that explores the contagiousness of happiness. The phenomenon of emotional contagion in fleeting interactions is well-known, but this study sheds some interesting light on how happiness spreads over time and across a large group of people.

Ever since I read that study about how people quit smoking in groups, I’ve thought that the next big thing in behavioral research would be the examination of how people’s behaviors spread across social networks.

The bottom line of this new study (which looks at the same data as the smoking study): happy people make other people happier. On average, for example, each happy person in your social network boosts your chance of happiness by 9 percent.

I liked reading this study, because it provides further scientific support for my own Second Splendid Truth. It took me a long time to see this truth clearly, because there’s a circularity to it that confused me, but once I understood it, a lot of things became much clearer:

One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy.
One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.

Therefore, contrary to what a lot of people argue, striving to be happier isn’t a self-centered concern; happy people make other people happy. Happy people are also more inclined to volunteer, to donate money, to try to help other people, to persist with problem-solving, etc. than are unhappy people. Some people assume that happy people tend to be complacent and self-absorbed, but just the opposite is true.

One thing that surprised me was the apparent finding that unhappiness isn’t as catching as happiness within a social network. That’s odd, because in general, negative emotions are much stickier than positive ones — that’s the negativity bias.

It may be that in this study, looking at networks, what’s happening is that people are avoiding unhappy people altogether, or the unhappy people are isolating themselves, so that mood isn’t catching on. My guess would be that in any particular interaction, unhappiness is more catching than happiness.

There were other findings in the study that I questioned – but I wholeheartedly accept the idea that we all influence each other to be happier.

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Speaking of psychology, a great place to find a ton of fascinating posts is on the Psychology Today blogs site. It covers every angle of human psychology.

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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 grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

Your Happiness Project: Don’t follow the stock market too closely.

I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you should 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.

This has been a crazy week in the financial world. What’s happening in the economy has consequences for everyone – for some people, very directly and immediately, for others, over the long term.

But no matter what it means to you, it’s unnerving to see those stock market numbers crash down through new barriers, even if they climb back up.

On Monday, I kept checking the Dow number throughout the day. I realized that this activity wasn’t useful, and it certainly wasn’t happiness-inducing, but I couldn’t resist. For the rest of the week, though, I managed to restrain myself, and I didn’t check the numbers until the end of the day.

I drew a lesson from the contrast: don’t keep checking the numbers. I’d been stoking my anxiety for no good reason. After all, I’m not going to respond to the information in any immediate way, and if my goal is to be a well-informed citizen, I can do that just as well by checking at the day’s end to see what happened. Similarly, I’m avoiding reading or listening to the wild doomsday predictors. No one knows what will happen. There’s value to reading a thoughtful analysis of the economic situation, but I don’t need to spend my time listening to not-particularly-well-informed people speculate on various catastrophe scenarios.

The happiness challenge posed by the economic situation is severe, so it’s a good idea not to add to the problem by constant, purposeless monitoring.

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I always find interesting material when I poke around Pick the Brain.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

I worry about the happiness of the American Idol contestants.

Last night, they announced the winner of American Idol. Now, I know practically nothing about American Idol. I’d never watched for even one minute until a few months ago, when the Big Girl asked to start recording it so she could watch during her TV time.

Since then, I’ve watched bits and pieces with her. It’s not a show I like, because I feel too sorry for the people who lose – I don’t watch the Olympics or the Super Bowl, either. (I have a lot of these weird quirks -- like my distaste for the theme of unjust accusation. It annoys the Big Man from time to time; I pass on a lot of Netflix suggestions.)

Also, because I think about happiness all the time, I started worrying about the contestants’ happiness. It’s painful to lose, of course. And along the way, sometimes the judges, being nice, would say things like, “You really have star quality,” “I know you’ll make it in the music industry, even though you’re being eliminated now,” etc.

On the one hand, it’s important to have a big dream and a big vision for ourselves – and that means being open to the possibility of failure. I remind myself constantly of my resolution to “Embrace the fun of failure.”

But usually, when you’re pursuing a big dream, you work at it step by step. You gradually move up through a series of challenges which you surmount, or not. The thing about American Idol is that everyday people are catapulted into the glare of tremendous fame, and a dizzying world of possibility opens. Then, for most of them, it ends very abruptly. (I’m assuming – am I wrong? Do many contestants manage to turn American Idol into a good career opportunity?)

This strikes me as a likely route to dissatisfaction. I’m reminded of the conclusion of the Christopher Guest movie, Waiting for Guffman, when the dentist, captivated by show business, leaves his dental practice to try to make it as a performer; in his final appearance, we see him telling jokes in front of a bored crowd at a seniors center. The possibility of being taken up by a famous Broadway producer had completely altered his sense of himself.

Fame has a crazy effect on people. It’s like money. Wanting it, winning it, having it thrust upon you without any effort on your part, losing it…fame and money can create strange, powerful disturbances in the normal fields of life.

As Plutarch observed, “For dealing with the blessings which come to us from outside we need a firm foundation based on reason and education; without this foundation, people keep on seeking these blessings and heaping them up but can never satisfy the insatiable appetites of their souls.”

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Hmmmm...I don't think I agree with everything in this very provocative post about some reasons that people have affairs on the Psychology Today blogs, but there's a lot of interesting material here. I've been thinking about equity theory lately, and wanting to learn more about it. It was also interesting to me as someone who wrote a biography of JFK. In college, a friend told me, "In the best relationships, both people think they're getting the better deal." This post undercuts that argument!

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