The Happiness Project

by Gretchen Rubin

There’s a common belief that happiness and ambition are incompatible. Many ambitious people I’ve known seem eager to claim that they aren’t happy, almost as a way to emphasize their zeal, in echo of Andrew Carnegie’s observation “Show me a contented man, and I’ll show you a failure.” Perhaps the happiness-thwarting feelings of dissatisfaction, competitiveness, and jealousy are necessary goads for ambition. If I remained ambitious, was it impossible to be happy? If my project made me happier, would I become complacent? Was the arrival fallacy an important mechanism to keep me striving? Studies show that many creative, influential people in the arts and public life score above average in “neuroticism” (i.e., they have a greater propensity to experience negative emotions); this discontent arguably urges them to higher achievement. Other studies, however, show that people tend to think more flexibly and with more complexity when they’re feeling happy. But whatever a wide-ranging study might show about the connection between ambition and happiness generally, I realized that for my own part, I was much more likely to take risks, reach out to others, and expose myself to rejection and failure when I felt happy. When I felt unhappy, I felt defensive, touchy, and self-conscious.