-
sponsorship
One of the most exciting things about working on my happiness project is seeing other people start their own happiness projects.
I get a real kick from seeing these happiness-project blogs, where people have taken my basic idea and run with it themselves -- taking the concept in so many different directions. Every happiness project is different; every one is fascinating. Check these blogs out yourself:
Positively Present
Starfish Envy
Our Happiness Project
Happiness
Habit BlogOne Woman’s Search for Happiness
Wake Up LaughingInsideOutHappy
Abby’s World
Take a Walk on the Happy Side
My Own Personal Happiness Project
Lena’s Notebook for the Modern Mom
Wonderful World of Make Believe
Gleeful
PHATMommy
Michael Faulkner’s Blog
The Happiness Project
Better Me
Amy Williams/My Happiness Project
Shimmer And Shake
Egg Day--The Brunch Project
Hollis Adoption- Columbia South America
The Beautification Project
Happiness Project
Mind Over Matter
Holy Happiness Project
The Rose Happiness Project
Blessed Lessons
If you have a blog that's not on this list, please add yours to this simple form. I'm keeping a running list and want to be able to highlight what you're doing. (Over on my own home blog, The Happiness Project, I have a chart that updates automatically each time a new entry is added to the form, but I can't get the chart to appear on Slate, for some reason.)
If you'd like to start a happiness project, but don't want to do it using a blog, here are some ideas for getting started. Happiness projects for everyone!
* How can I resist a column on Money & Happiness? I can't, so I'm a big fan of Laura Rowley's writing Yahoo! Finance.
* For more discussion about happiness, join the Facebook Page. Lots of people, lots of fascinating insights and conversation.
-
sponsorship
I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you could 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.
One thing my happiness project has taught me is to follow my instincts when reading. I’m a voracious reader, and I used to spend a lot more time worrying about what I “should” be reading. Instead of just reading the book that appealed most to me at a particular time, I’d ask myself—should I do more research for my book? Should I read something for the first time, instead of rereading, as I love to do? Should I squelch my love for children’s literature? And while I’m reading, should I spend so much precious time taking notes?
But now I worry more about my First Commandment, to Be Gretchen. I read what I want to read. This makes me very happy, and funnily enough, even when I’m reading something that seems completely unrelated to my research, it often does end up being useful.
For example, recently I’ve been plowing through a lot of books about acting and directing. Why? I like movies, but I’m not passionate about them, yet I love reading about directing. I’m enthralled by any description of the creative process, in any medium, and right now, I’m particularly attracted to how the people in this arena talk about what they do.
That’s why I found myself reading Michael Shurtleff’s Audition. (I think it was recommended to me by the incomparable Colleen Wainwright after I asked her for a list of good books about acting.)
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of drift, and Shurtleff made a point that has many implications for happiness:
Negatives are always written in a play and it is the actor’s job to provide the positive.
This means that the no is strongly and literally written:
No, I don’t want that
I want to leave
Leave me alone
I won’t do what you want
It is the actor’s job to see through the negative to the other side … to find the yes that is also in the scene:
What do you want?
Why are you still here, if you say you want to leave?
If you want to be left alone, why are you still having this relationship?
What do you want to do?
…
Actors must learn to remember an important thing: you [the character] always have a choice. If you really want to leave, then why are you still there having this scene with this other person? Answer that question and you [the actor] will be able to do the scene.
This strikes me as a good happiness-project approach. When you feel trapped in a negative, ask yourself the positive question, and maybe that will shed light on how to change it or at least change your mind. The reason for “no” is easy to identify and express; the answer to “yes” can be elusive and upsetting. Why aren’t you trying to leave a job you hate? Why are you staying in a relationship that’s making you crazy? If you don’t want to do this, what do you want to do? In my own case, I can think of plenty of cases in which I saw the "no" very clearly and even enjoyed proclaiming the "no," but the "yes" proved much more of a struggle to discern.
What do you think? Can you think of an example where you found it easier to find the "no" than the "yes"? Somehow seeing this question raised in the issue of acting a scene and portraying a conflict in a play makes it clearer to understand.
* I can never get enough time-lapse photography of nature—here are clouds moving above the San Francisco Bay Area.
* Interested in launching a group for people doing happiness projects? More and more of these groups are forming—recent additions include Atlanta; Toronto, Canada; Oklahoma City; Williamsburg; and, yes, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The leader of the Inspiration Club of West Midlands, U.K., has integrated the Happiness Project into their daily activities—photos from their first anniversary here.
-
sponsorship
I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you could 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.
One of my happiness-project resolutions is to “Forgive an accident.” Now, you might think, why should I try to forgive an accident? After all, if something is an accident, there’s nothing to forgive. Accidents happen, we all know that.
Yes, I know that. Accidents happen. But I still find it hard not to be annoyed—and to act annoyed—in the face of certain accidents. Reminding myself of my resolution helps me to respond in the right way.
Here are just two examples:
1. When we were flying to Kansas City to spend Christmas with my parents, my daughter lost her “functional appliance.” If you’re not current with the latest parlance of orthodontia, this is like a fancy retainer. My daughter is supposed to wear it at all times, except when she’s eating. We were on the plane, she took it out to eat, and the next time she looked for it, it was gone. We all looked, couldn’t find it. We think it must’ve been thrown away when the stewardess took her food tray.
I was annoyed: She wouldn’t be able to wear this thing again until we were back in New York and had managed to replace it; getting a new one would be expensive; it would be inconvenient.
2. Recently, my husband left his wallet in a cab. The second he reached the sidewalk, he realized he didn’t have his wallet, and he raced down the street to stop the cab, but it was gone. He waited anxiously for two days before he had to admit to himself that it really wasn’t coming back. Before that, however, we had to cancel our credit cards.
I was annoyed: We’d put a lot of recurrent and online charges on one of the lost cards, so that number had to replaced many times, by me.
In each situation, I could feel the accident-causer bracing against my possible annoyance, and it was very, very hard to resist the temptation to say things like “You should’ve been more careful!,” “Now we’re going to have all this hassle to fix this!,” “How could you have not noticed that you didn’t know where it was?,” etc. But I realized—what was the point? My daughter felt terrible, my husband felt terrible. In general, they’re both very responsible. My daughter had never lost her F.A. before, and my husband had never lost a wallet before. They obviously hadn’t done these things on purpose. Why make a bad situation worse?
In each case, once the moment passed, I was very glad that I reacted mildly. (I even came up with a good idea about credit cards: Now we have a card that never leaves the house that we use for online charges.) When you’re feeling bad about something you’ve done, it’s awful when someone adds to that feeling—you feel defensive, resentful, and misunderstood. I didn't want to cause that.
Also, one of my Personal Commandments is to Act the way I want to feel; although we think we act because of the way we feel, in fact, we often feel because of the way we act. By acting calm and forgiving, I help myself to feel calm and forgiving, instead of annoyed.
The resolution would be more accurately phrased as “Let go of an accident” or “Forget an accident,” but somehow I need the little extra kick supplied by the word “forgive.”
How about you? Have you ever felt tempted to react harshly to something someone did, even though it was an accident?
* I loved this little video on Gimundo—especially because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to use photographs to keep happiness-project resolutions like “Take time for projects” and “Be a treasure house of happy memories." The Black Lake Island project and Taking tourist photos of my own romance, for example, both use photographs.
* I send out short monthly newsletters that highlight the best of the previous month’s posts to about 24,000 subscribers. If you’d like to sign up, click here or e-mail me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. (sorry about that weird format—trying to to thwart spammers.) Just write “newsletter” in the subject line. It’s free.
-
sponsorship
I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you could 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.
Two of my happiness-project resolutions are Enjoy the fun of failure and Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I’m a perfectionist. I hate to be criticized. I’m defensive. I’m thin-skinned. As a result, I really, really, hate to make a mistake or to be connected with things that aren’t perfect.
The problem is, failure and imperfection are quite common (maybe you’ve observed this yourself), and if you aren’t willing to make mistakes or to accept flaws or failure, you can’t achieve much.
Novelty and challenge bring happiness, but they also bring frustration, anxiety, flaws, and failure – in fact, the more challenging the undertaking, the more likely it is to fail or to be flawed.
I often feel myself shrinking away from opportunities or ideas, because I’m worried about doing a less-than-perfect job – even though I know that I’m happier when I create, when I push myself, when I try new things. That’s why these two resolutions are important for me.
Enjoy the fun of failure reminds me to lighten up – to accept failure or mistakes as an important part of a process. It’s okay if something fails. In fact, that’s part of the fun!
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good reminds me that it’s more important to do something at all than to do something perfectly. Many things worth doing are worth doing badly. Doing something badly is often a necessary stage toward doing it well.
For the past two days, since I announced the link to the Happiness Project Toolbox, I’ve been reminding myself of both these resolutions.
I worked so hard and so long to create the Toolbox, and the site has been tested up and down, both by the designers and also by the wonderful Super-Fans, who were hugely helpful in highlighting problems. We thought the site was working perfectly.
But guess what? It wasn’t. Within fifteen minutes of announcing the link on Wednesday morning, I got a message from a friend telling me that he’d gotten an error message. And so it went.
This upset me a lot more than it should have. In the last two days, every time I heard about a problem with the site, I felt terrible. I hate knowing that it's less than perfect. The negativity bias aggravates this feeling; lots of people have said very nice things, and when I go to the Toolbox I can see that lots of people are using the site and posting great stuff there, and yet the few criticisms – which were more like gentle, friendly notices about problems, rather than criticisms – hit me far harder. Negative is much sticker than positive.
“Enjoy the fun of failure,” I keep reminding myself. It’s a great site, a lot of people love it, I love it, it’s getting fixed. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
It's doesn't always work, but it helps. Have you found any good strategies for helping yourself be calmer about accepting mistakes or failure?
* Gimundo has a great time-lapse video that shows beautiful settings across the world. Lots of dramatic movement by clouds and light.
* Check out the Happiness Project Toolbox. Probably it will work for you, but it's not perfect yet. If you have a problem, you can post it here. But I really, really hope that it will be practically perfect in every way within a very short time.
-
sponsorship
Every Wednesday is Tip Day or List Day.
This Wednesday: 8 tools to help you boost your happiness.
This is an exciting week for me! First, my book became available for pre-order
. For the first time, the book feels real.
Second, and even more thrilling, the Happiness Project Toolbox is finally ready for prime time. Yes, it’s ready! I’ve been working on this companion site for so long; it’s hard to believe it’s actually going out in the world at last.
What is the Happiness Project Toolbox? As I was working on my happiness project, I invented several methods that helped me to boost my happiness. My One-Sentence Journal, my Personal Commandments, my Secrets of Adulthood, and of course—most important of all—my Resolutions Chart.
I remember exactly where I was when I got the idea for the Toolbox. I was walking up Lexington Avenue, between 77th and 78th streets, when I thought, “Wow, it would be great to have a site where people could chart their resolutions.” About 10 steps later, I thought, “But a site like that should also allow people to keep their one-sentence journals, or post their happiness hacks.” Then it hit me. A Happiness Project Toolbox! I was so struck by the idea that I literally stopped in my tracks—I remember that the woman behind me ran into me and shot me a very annoyed look as she passed.
It was easy to have the idea; hard to turn it into reality. As with so many things in life, if I’d known how challenging it would be, I might not have attempted it. But now that it’s ready, I’m so happy I did it.
Novelty and challenge bring happiness; they also bring frustration and anxiety. In this case, despite periods of frustration and anxiety, I also had a tremendous amount of fun—in large part because of the brilliant, creative people at the Chopping Block, the web-design firm that built the site. They love the project, too—they wrote, “The Happiness Project Toolbox is easily among the best projects in our twelve-year history. We're excited about the potential for building of a large community audience.”
They had a lot of good ideas to add, and also helped me figure out if some of my ideas were possible. For example, I’ve always been mesmerized by PostSecret, and I’m fascinated whenever people post on my blog with their own Personal Commandments, etc. (for example, I think often of one commenter's Personal Commandment, "Choose the bigger life"), so one of my favorite Toolbox features is the ability to see other people's posts—unless they choose to keep entries private, of course. It’s superaddictive to read other people’s Personal Commandments, browse through their Inspiration Boards, learn from their Happiness Hacks … utterly absorbing. (Use the bar across the top to see other people’s entries.)
The Happiness Project Toolbox offers eight free Tools:
• Resolutions: record and track your resolutions.
• Group Resolutions: challenge several people to a group resolution.
• One-Sentence Journal: keep a journal on any subject you like (my online one-sentence journal is “What I’m reading today”).
• Personal Commandments: identify principles to guide your life.
• Secrets of Adulthood: record what you’ve learned so far.
• Happiness Hacks: share your hacks about clutter, exercise, mindfulness, etc.
• Lists Tool: keep any list: to-do, favorite things, things-to-do-before-I-die, etc.
• Inspiration Board: pull together your favorite books, quotations, images, and Web sites.
The amazing Super-Fans group got the first look at the Toolbox. Thanks again, Super-Fans, for your enthusiasm and your efforts! The Super-Fans were great about alerting me to problems. When I sent out the link, I thought the site was perfect, but of course, when hundreds of people tested it, they discovered a lot of bugs. Now it should be working very well indeed.
However, there still may be some issues to iron out. I’d really appreciate it if you let me know if you have a problem (or praise). It would be a huge help, though, if instead of e-mailing me directly, you post to this discussion on the Facebook Page. That way, the Web designers can see your comment and address it, without me needing to act as a go-between. It’s helpful to know what browser (and version) you use and whether you’re on PC or Mac.
I had a great time designing the Happiness Project Toolbox. Check it out! I hope it will help you reflect on your values, keep your resolutions, and pull together material that inspires you. And I hope it’s fun! Please pass the link on to anyone else who would enjoy it.
* If you'd like to work on your happiness project, but are more drawn to the idea of doing it with other people instead of using the Toolbox, sign up here for a starter kit for launching a group for people doing happiness projects. Groups have started from L.A. to Enid, Oklahoma, to Boston.
-
sponsorship
I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you could 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 weekend, when I was home in Kansas City to go to my high-school reunion, I ran into an old family friend. “Let me tell you one of my personal secrets for happiness,” he said. “Control your exit.”
“’Control your exit?’” I asked. “What exactly does that mean?”
“It means, always be able to leave when you want. Drive yourself to a party instead of getting a ride, so you can leave when you’re ready. Try to go to someone else’s house, or a public place, instead of having people over to your house, because there’s nothing worse than seeing someone lean back and cross their legs when you’re ready to go to bed. Or else have people over to your house before some event—before a dinner reservation or a movie—so you have to leave by a certain time.”
My husband would certainly agree with this advice. He never agrees to go to a party on a boat, or to go on a bus tour, or to put himself in any situation that would prevent him from leaving whenever he wants. He feels trapped and unhappy if he knows he’s stuck.
It occurs to me that “Control your exit” is advice that’s figuratively true, too. For me, one of the most memorable pieces of advice from Stephen Covey's classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
is “Begin with the end in mind.” That is (if I remember correctly), know where you want to go. When you start or do something, maintain a vision of where you’re headed—especially important for people who are considering law school! Friends, don’t go unless you know where you want to end up!
Speaking of my husband and law, he applied this rule when he was considering post-law-school jobs. He thought that working as an assistant U.S. attorney sounded great, but he wasn’t sure what he’d do after that. What was the exit strategy? He knew he didn’t want to work in a law firm, and he wasn’t sure what other jobs would follow from a stint in the U.S. attorney's office; he was worried about taking a job that didn’t seem to lead to any other opportunities that interested him.
My newest Secret of Adulthood is that “the opposite of a great truth is also true.” It occurs to me that in some situations, not controlling your exit would lead to happiness. There’s a lot of happiness to be gained from spontaneity, impulse adventures, and unpredictable undertakings. Even in those cases, however, I imagine it’s better mindfully to embrace this idea of uncertainty—to know that you’re deliberately choosing to give up control of your exit—rather than to have it take you unawares. For instance, people often ask me, “Where is all this happiness project stuff going?” I’m not really sure, and I’m trying to embrace that uncertainty as exciting and fun, instead of letting my control-freak side become obsessed with certainty and control.
What do you think? Is a resolution to “Control your exit” more or less likely to lead to happiness? Maybe, as Bill Murray explained in Ghostbusters
, of “never getting involved with possessed people,” “Actually, it’s more of a guideline than a rule.”
* Gimundo had an interesting post about Happy News From the Recession: 5 Good Things about Hard Times. Encouraging information there!
* If you're starting your own happiness project, please join the Page on Facebook to swap ideas. It's easy; it's free.