Happier at Home hits the shelves in less than a month! To celebrate, I’m giving away one book each day for the next few weeks–hot off the presses.

Enter your name and email here, and every day, someone will be picked at random. U.S. and Canada only, alas.

If you’re wondering about the book, you can…

–learn more about it here

–read a sample chapter on the subject of “time” here

–email me for a one-page reading group guide here

–watch the Behind the Scenes video here (though you’d probably enjoy that more after you’ve read the book)

What a joy it was to write this book! I hope you enjoy it.

People talk a lot about the happiness risks of the internet, such as how online shopping or celebrity news can suck away our time, or how Facebook can foster comparison with other people.

The internet amplifies aspects of human nature, so I try to watch out for its bad effects. But I also remind myself of how happy the internet makes me! I try never to take it for granted.

For instance, I’m often haunted by some quotation or anecdote I read somewhere, someplace, in the past. When I read it, it didn’t strike me as important, but now for some reason I desperately want to re-read it. So often, with just a few bits  of information, the internet locates what I’m looking for, to my immense relief.

For instance, when I was doing my research for Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, I came across an anecdote in a diary related to World War II. I loved it — but I lost it.

I’d read so many wartime diaries — from where did this story come? I was sure that I’d copied the passage into my huge trove of notes and quotations, but somehow it had vanished. I thought it was in Jock Colville’s wonderful Fringes of Power, and I actually paged through the whole book, but couldn’t find it.

Finally, I turned to the internet. Now, I couldn’t remember the story exactly. I hadn’t read it in five or six years. And search, search, search…Eureka! I found the story that had eluded me for so long.

Here it is. It wasn’t Jock Colville, it was Harold Nicolson. In June 1941 he was working at the wartime Ministry of Information, and he wrote in his diary for June 10:

The Middle East have no sense of publicity. The Admiralty is even worse. We complain that there are no photographs of the sinking of the Bismarck. Tripp says that the official photographer was in the Suffolk and that the Suffolk was too far away.

We say, ‘But why didn’t one of our reconnaissance machines fly over the ship and take photographs?’

He replies, ‘Well you see, you must see, well upon my word, well after all, an Englishman would not like to take snapshots of a fine vessel sinking.’

Is he right? I felt abashed when he said it. I think he is right.

At the beginning of the summer, I had a similar experience. One of the pitifully few scraps of knowledge that I retained from college was a single line, which I remembered as something like, “Can one coin make a man rich? Pile up one coin and then another, and at a certain point, he becomes rich.” I was preoccupied with this idea and very much wanted to re-read this line.

Where did it come from? I pulled out a few college books and started leafing through them. Then I thought, “Hey, I could check online.” Bingo. Erasmus, The Praise of Folly. The funny thing is that I hadn’t even underlined this story in the book! And it wasn’t even in the actual text of the book, it was in the editor’s note in the footnote explaining the text’s reference to the “argument of the growing heap.”  And yet it was the only thing I remembered from that class, so many years ago — and I was able to find it again, in a flash.

If ten coins are not enough to make a man rich, what if you add one coin? What if you add another? Finally, you will have to say that no one can be rich unless one coin can make him so.

(I explain my preoccupation with the significance of the “argument of the growing heap” here.)

The internet is a good servant, and a bad master. But a good, good, good servant.

How about you? Does the internet add or subtract from your daily happiness?

“Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labour by taking up another.”

– Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

Agree, disagree? What kind of labour do you take up, in order to relax?

Yesterday, I got a copy of the actual finished book of Happier at Home.

It’s the strangest feeling…it feels momentous, but I’m not sure I would describe my emotions as exactly “happy.”  For one thing, I’m scared to look inside the pages  for fear that the first thing I’ll see is a typo. I know this isn’t necessarily the  most helpful “happiness” minded attitude, but nevertheless, that’s how I feel.

Okay, I did just look, to check out the last page. I have to say,  I love the ending to this book.

And I just flipped through to look at the photographs (I took them myself, of my own home). I love adding pictures to a book. All my books have had photos, in fact, except for The Happiness Project–not sure why I didn’t include them there.

Enough for now. I don’t want to look inside anymore, but seeing it on the edge of my desk makes me happy. For the better, for the worse, it’s truly finished.

Every Wednesday is Tip Day.
This Wednesday: 7 tips for dealing with criticism.

I have a very tough time being criticized, corrected, or accused – of even the smallest mistakes – and I react very angrily. I’ve wrestled this instinct under control in a professional context, more or less, but I have more trouble with it at home. All it takes is for my daughter to make a mild comment such as, “You forgot to remind me to bring my library book,” to set me off. “What do you mean…it’s not my responsibility…I didn’t know Wednesday was Library Day…” etc., etc.

More and more, I see the connection between perfectionism, control, and anger. Zoikes, how I struggle to keep my sense of humor and light-heartedness! Here are some of the strategies that I try to use to accept criticism. If I manage to use them, they never fail me, but I don’t always manage to put them to work.

1. Listen to what a critic is saying. Really listen, try to understand that point of view, don’t just nod while I formulate my retorts. Accept just criticism.

2. Don’t be defensive. This is the toughest step for me. With my writing, for example, I always have to take a deep breath before reading an edit letter or meeting with an editor, to remind myself, “I welcome criticism. This person is helping me. I’m eager to hear how to improve my book/article/post.” Along the same lines…

3. Don’t expose myself to criticism from people I don’t respect. I pay a lot of attention to criticism from people I respect, but I try to shield myself from criticism from people I don’t know or don’t respect, because I fear that I’ll react to it, even though it may be unfounded. So when I get trustworthy criticism about my writing, I act on it, but I try to avoid reading drive-by snarkiness. Bad is stronger than good, and I fear that I’ll change my writing in response to some person’s thoughtless comment, in ways that won’t make my work stronger.  I need to stay creative, open-hearted, adventuresome, and honest, and if I feel defensive and apologetic, I won’t maintain those elements.

4. Delay my reaction. Count to ten, take a deep breath, sleep on it, wait until the next day to send that email…any kind of delay is good. A friend told me her rule: when she’s upset about something that happened at her children’s school, she won’t let herself do anything about it for three days – and usually she decides that no action is better than action.

5. Admit my mistakes. My father gave me an outstanding piece of advice when I got my first real job. He said, “If you take the blame when you deserve it, you’ll get the responsibility.” I’ve found that to be very true. Difficult, but true. In my experience, until someone in a group (or in a family) accepts blame, everyone stays very anxious and focused on fingering the person at fault. Once I raise my hand (if appropriate), then everyone else can relax. And then we can all focus on what needs to be done.

6.  Enjoy the fun of failure. Fact is, trying new things and aiming high exposes me to criticism. I remind myself to Enjoy the fun of failure to try to re-frame failure and criticism as part of the fun. Otherwise, my dread of criticism can paralyze me. Once, when I told my husband that I was upset because I’d received a mean comment here on the blog, he said, “Remember, this is what you want. You want to put your ideas out there. Not everyone is going to be nice.” That made me feel better.

The discussion of criticism reminds me of a passage from Stephen Spender’s autobiography, World Within World:

To overhear conversations behind his back is more disconcerting than useful to the writer; though he can perhaps search for criticism which may really help him to remedy faults in style. But he should remember that the tendency of reviewers is to criticize work not for what it is but for what it fails to be, and it is not necessarily true that he should remedy this by trying to become other than he is. Thus, in my own experience, I have wasted time by paying heed to criticism that I had no skill in employing rhyme. This led me to try rhyme, whereas I should have seen that the moral for me was to avoid it.

This passage is a good reminder that criticism should help us do better what we want to do, and to be more wholly ourselves, and criticism that doesn’t serve those goals isn’t helpful.

What am I overlooking? Have you found any other strategies that work for you?