How to Apply 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
A comfortable, ordinary life gets twelve months of deliberate small changes to test whether happiness can be built on purpose
About This Book
Gretchen Rubin was riding a city bus one ordinary morning when she realized she might be wasting her life without ever asking what would make her happier. A former Supreme Court clerk turned writer, she spent the next year testing centuries of philosophy and modern research on herself, month by month, resolution by resolution. Some experiments were tiny: buying better pens, singing at breakfast, keeping one empty shelf. Others reshaped how she fought with her husband, disciplined her children, and spent money. Along the way she discovered why acting cheerful can make you feel it, why clutter drains energy, and why chasing other people's idea of fun leaves you flat.About the Author
Gretchen Rubin trained as a lawyer, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and worked at the Federal Communications Commission before leaving law to write. She is the author of biographies including Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill and Forty Ways to Look at JFK. In 2006 she began asking, systematically, what made her happy, and turned the question into a year-long personal experiment and a popular blog. She lives in New York City with her husband, Jamie, and their two daughters, Eliza and Eleanor, and writes from the position of someone who was already fortunate, not in crisis, but wanted to appreciate and improve an ordinary life.
Biggest Takeaway
Work through this and you'll stop waiting to feel motivated before you act, because you'll have tried acting energetic first and felt the mood follow. You'll spot the difference between what you wish you enjoyed and what actually makes a Tuesday better, and stop wasting money and time chasing the wrong kind of fun. Arguments with the people you love will end faster, because you'll catch yourself nagging or scorekeeping before it escalates. Your closets, your to-do list, and your evenings will feel lighter after small, specific fixes. And you'll have a simple way to check, on any ordinary day, whether you're actually building the life you want.
Key Insights from This Book
Explore the most important ideas and learn how to apply them in your life.
The one-sentence formula it took Gretchen Rubin six months to find
Bounding into a playroom on purpose actually lifted her mood
Why psychologists never study clutter and ordinary people can't stop talking about it
Pushing two acquaintances toward a book deal made her happier than her own work
Why telling her daughter she wasn't scared of clowns never once worked
A Harry Potter book she was too embarrassed to buy for three days
What a strained back finally taught her about money and happiness
A ferry dock wait became her third rule for happiness
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