The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

by Gretchen Rubin

I hope that reading the account of my happiness project will encourage you to start your own. Whenever you read this, and wherever you are, you are in the right place to begin.

Of everything I've ever written, this short paragraph is one of my favorites -- in fact, I've used that last sentence in other books as well. But boy, it took me forever to get the words right, to say exactly what I meant. I wanted to remind readers -- and myself -- that the time is always right for a happiness project. One of the very nicest things anyone has ever said to me was a friend who said, "I've never read a book that made me think so much about myself."

All these thoughts flooded through my mind, and as I sat on that crowded bus, I grasped two things: I wasn’t as happy as I could be, and my life wasn’t going to change unless I made it change. In that single moment, with that realization, I decided to dedicate a year to trying to be happier.

Many readers and listeners have told me about their happiness projects. People have so many imaginative resolutions and aims; over the years, I've copied many of my favorite ideas from other people: choose a signature color; celebrate holiday breakfasts, quit reading a book if I don't like it, and so many more. I've had a lot of requests for resources to help people organize -- and just as important, follow through -- with their own happiness projects. I've created a sample resolution chart, a time tracking chart, a video course, a one-sentence journal, a habit-tracking journal, discussion guildes...so if you're looking for tools to help you with your own happiness project, take a look at my site.

I wanted to focus on a different subject each month, and twelve months in the year gave me twelve slots to fill. Research had taught me that the most important element to happiness is social bonds, so I resolved to tackle “Marriage,” “Parenthood,” and “Friends.” I’d also learned that that my happiness depended a great deal on my perspective, so I added “Eternity” and “Attitude” to my list. Work was crucial to my happiness, and also leisure, so I included the topics “Work,” “Play,” and “Passion.” What else did I want to cover? “Energy” seemed like a basic ingredient for the success of the entire project. “Money” was a subject I knew I wanted to address. To explore some of the insights I’d come across in my research, I added “Mindfulness.” December would be a month in which I would try to follow all my resolutions perfectly—so that gave me my twelve categories.

As I continued to think about happiness after the book came out, I realized that an idea at the heart of many of these themes is "home." There aren't many universals in happiness, but for most people, and certainly for me, "home" is at the heart of happiness. If I'm not happy at home, it's hard to be happy. This realization led me to my next book HAPPIER AT HOME. There, I did a happiness project that stretched from September (the other January) until May -- because for me, the school year is a "year," even though I'm not in school any more. I undertook various resolutions, for instance, related to time, possessions, neighborhood, body, family, and what I call "interior design" (meaning, inner work). It was exciting to take the ideas that I'd thought about for THE HAPPINESS PROJECT and push them even deeper, into one area.

I gave this question a lot of thought. In the end, I sided with the ancient philosophers and modern scientists who argue that working to be happier is a worthy goal. According to Aristotle, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” Epicurus wrote, “We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it.” Contemporary research shows that happy people are more altruistic, more productive, more helpful, more likable, more creative, more resilient, more interested in others, friendlier, and healthier. Happy people make better friends, colleagues, and citizens. I wanted to be one of those people.

Whenever I'm working on a book, an important stage is when I go through and cut at least half of the quotations. How I love quotations! When I'm writing the first draft, I can never resist putting in all my favorites, but after I start to edit, I always realize that although each quotation may be thought-provoking, including too many quotations slows down the pace of the book. It's always so hard to choose which ones to cut. However, the process is easier now I send out my free "Moment of Happiness" newsletter, where I send people a daily email with happiness quotation. So I know that even when I have to cut out some wonderful passages, I have a way to share them with other people. I have a giant trove of quotations that I love, and I add to it constantly. As a child, I copied passages by hand, but now I use the computer -- just so much faster to type, and my handwriting is so poor that it's hard to read.

psychologist William James explained, “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.” Advice from every quarter, ancient and contemporary, backs up the observation that to change our feelings, we should change our actions.

Since "The Happiness Project" came out, this idea seems to have really struck people. It's perhaps not obvious, but once you try it, it's clear that it works: we can change our emotional state by changing our actions. In my own life, I often do this to raise my energy. When I'm dragging, I do jumping jacks, run down stairs, clean out a drawer in the medicine cabinet, race around the apartment clearing clutter, putting more enthusiasm into my voice. When I act with more energy, I really feel the boost.

This exchange led me to an important insight into how to manage myself better. I’d been self-righteously telling myself that I did certain chores or made certain efforts “for Jamie” or “for the team.” Though this sounded generous, it led to a bad result, because I sulked when Jamie didn’t appreciate my efforts. Instead, I started to tell myself, “I’m doing this for myself. This is what I want.” I wanted to send out Valentine’s cards. I wanted to clean out the kitchen cabinets. This sounded selfish, but in fact, it was less selfish, because it meant I wasn’t nagging to get a gold star from Jamie or anyone else. No one else even had to notice what I’d done. I remember talking to a friend whose parents had been very involved in the civil rights movement. “They always said,” he told me, “that you have to do that kind of work for yourself. If you do it for other people, you end up wanting them to acknowledge it and to be grateful and to give you credit. If you do it for yourself, you don’t expect other people to react in a particular way.” I think that’s right. Nevertheless, for all my talk of giving up gold stars, I have to admit that I still thought it would be nice for Jamie to hand them out a bit more lavishly. Whether or not I should want them, I do.

My desire for gold stars continues, I must confess! I always want to get a gold star. In fact, in the podcast "Happier with Gretchen Rubin," which I co-host with my sister Elizabeth (spoiler alert: it's about how to be happier), we have an entire weekly segment called "Demerits and Gold Stars." We take turns giving ourselves a happiness demerit one week, and doling out a gold star the next week. Sometimes we give gold stars to other people, and sometimes we give them to ourselves. Now that I've come up with my "Four Tendencies" framework, I wonder if my desire for gold stars is tied to being an Upholder. Perhaps partially, at least. But I think Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels also enjoy getting gold stars. It has been reassuring to hear from so many readers that they too struggle with the greed for gold stars.

As I mention above, coming up with this "First Splendid Truth of Happiness" was extremely difficult. It seems like a very basic goal for someone writing about happiness, but I really had a tough time -- it was challenging to sum up all the elements of a happy life in one sentence. I tried and failed with many formulations, and it was a real thrill to figure this out. And even then, when I thought I had it right, I realized that I'd left out an important element! The atmosphere of growth is so important to understand, for happiness. It's a Secret of Adulthood: A true test of understanding is the ability to summarize. As I've talked to people about their own happiness projects, I've noticed that people focus on different elements. Some people work on getting more "good," some like me work on eliminating "bad," and so on.

Enthusiasm is more important to mastery than innate ability, it turns out, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice. Therefore, career experts argue, you’re better off pursuing a profession that comes easily and that you love, because that’s where you’ll be more eager to practice and thereby earn a competitive advantage. I love writing, reading, research, note taking, analysis, and criticism. (Well, I don’t actually love writing, but then practically no writer actually loves the writing part.) My past, when I thought back, was littered with clues that I wanted to be a writer. I’d written two novels, now locked in a drawer. I’ve always spent most of my free time reading. I take voluminous notes for no apparent reason. I majored in English. And the biggest clue: I was writing a book in my free time.

More and more, I pay attention to any spark of enthusiasm. Say, if I get interested in the subject of placebo (as I am), I let myself follow that enthusiasm, even if I don't really understand why I'm doing it. It's so much fun! I used to tell myself, "Stay focused, don't get distracted by subjects that aren't relevant to your writing project," but now I let myself go. And as you might predict, those enthusiasms often end up being very useful with my "work." For instance, when I was writing THE FOUR TENDENCIES, I had a hooky-book that I would work on, just for fun, when I wanted a break. It was a chance to explore a subject that has always fascinated me: why outer order contributes to inner calm, and how to create outer order. I worked on this project just because I got such a kick out of it -- and then voila, it turned into its own book, OUTER ORDER, INNER CALM. If I hadn't followed my enthusiasm, I might never have started it.

But my passionate interest in kidlit didn’t fit with my ideas of what I wished I were like; it wasn’t grown up enough. I wanted to be interested in serious literature, constitutional law, the economy, art, and other adult subjects. And I am interested in those topics, but I somehow felt embarrassed by my love of J. R. R. Tolkien, E. L. Konigsberg, and Elizabeth Enright. I repressed this side of my personality to such a degree that when one of the Harry Potter books came out, I didn’t buy it for several days. I’d fooled even myself into thinking that I didn’t care.

My passion for children's and young-adult literature continues as strong as ever. How I love this literature! I love rereading my old favorites, and also reading the excellent books that are being written today. Many readers email to ask me for reading suggestions, so I made a list of my 81 favorite works of children's and young-adult literature. You can request it or download it from gretchenrubin.com. Now, why 81? I planned to make a more conventional list of 100, but I found that I had 81 true, true, true favorites. After 81, I had many books that I loved, but not at that extreme level. So I decided to end the list at 81. It has been thrilling for me to realize that so many adults love kidlit as much as I do. I think this interest is much more widely acknowledged than it was when I was doing my happiness project.

I wanted to start a collection—but what should I collect? I didn’t have enough passion to justify an expensive collection, and I didn’t want to collect junk. I decided to collect bluebirds, because bluebirds are a symbol of happiness. As far as I know, this connection arose from Maurice Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird. A fairy tells two children, “The Blue Bird stands for happiness,” and she orders them to set out to find the Blue Bird for her sick daughter. After many adventures, the children come home, unsuccessful—to find the Blue Bird waiting for them. “It’s the Blue Bird we were looking for! We’ve been miles and miles and miles, and he was here all the time!” This unsubtle moral, of course, was quite fitting for my happiness project. For no other reason except to keep my resolution to “Go off the path,” one afternoon I stepped into an oddly comprehensive hardware store that’s tucked into my neighborhood. It’s small yet carries everything from lightbulbs to wooden puzzles to vacuum cleaners to fancy candles. I found myself staring up at an array of realistically carved, battery-operated “Breezy Singers” birds, which are outfitted with motion sensors so they move and twitter when anyone walks by. I wouldn’t have considered buying one

As a simplicity-lover, I'm not much of a collector, but I have continued to collect bluebirds, in a small way. I have two framed drawings of bluebirds in my office. A good friend sewed me a bluebird figure that sits on my desk lamp. My sister Elizabeth, who loves mugs, has given me several bluebird-themed mugs. Most spectacular: at Christmas time, I have a tabletop tree that's decorated solely with bluebird ornaments. It's fun to look for these ornaments, but they're pretty rare, so I don't feel overwhelmed.

At a bare minimum, you can remember birthdays. I’ve never been good at remembering friends’ birthdays—or, to be more accurate, I never remembered any friend’s birthday (except one friend whose birthday falls the day after mine). Sending out birthday e-mails would ensure that I was in touch with my friends at least once a year. That sounded meager, but the fact is, it would be a vast improvement in many cases. Many of my friends were on Facebook, which tracks birthdays, but many weren’t, so I had to send out a bunch of e-mails to ask for birthdays. While I was at it, I decided to update my entire address book and copy the information onto my computer. For years, I’d been adding and crossing out entries in the pages of my Filofax, which were now practically illegible and dangerously irreplaceable.

One big change since I wrote this book? Social media and technology, especially smartphones. With friendships, certainly, and with so many other parts of our lives, technology is playing a complex role. In some ways it's terrific, in some ways, terrible. I remind myself, "Technology is a good servant but a bad master," and that I need to be in control of technology instead of letting it take control of me, my time, my energy, and my focus. Easier said than done! In writing about habits for BETTER THAN BEFORE, I was struck how many people wanted to change habits related to technology -- everything from using it to remember birthdays (my resolution here) to stopping themselves from texting while driving (yipes). True confession: I'm not very good about remembering birthdays. This is not one of my more successful resolutions.