Pushing two acquaintances toward a book deal made her happier than her own work

At a reunion for her daughter's old nursery school, Gretchen Rubin listened to the two directors, Nancy and Ellen, field parents' questions about the transition to kindergarten with such clear, hard-won insight that a thought struck her on the way out: these two should write a book. She said so on the spot. We've thought about that, one of them admitted, but never very seriously.

That night, Rubin couldn't sleep for excitement over an idea that wasn't even hers. She barely knew these two women, so she wasn't sure whether to push, but she suspected nothing would happen unless someone nudged. She asked them to coffee. Their enthusiasm grew as they talked, she put them in touch with her literary agent, and within a stretch of months they had a contract and, eventually, a published book, Practical Wisdom for Parents. Rubin's own contribution had been small: one sentence of encouragement and one phone call. The happiness she got from it was not small at all.

That experience, along with a string of others, like organizing a reunion of former Supreme Court clerks or setting up a friend on a blind date that turned into a real relationship, led Rubin to what she called the Second Splendid Truth: one of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy, and one of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself. She'd worried, early in her project, that focusing on her own happiness might be selfish. This resolved the worry rather than dodging it. The two directions feed each other, so that even acts done partly for the good feeling they produce in you don't lose their value as acts of generosity.

The trick, she found, was matching her generosity to who she actually was. She didn't enjoy shopping for gifts, but she loved clearing clutter, so she started offering friends her help with closets instead of birthday presents, and both sides came away thrilled. And at home, she noticed that the moment she started running a private ledger with her husband, tallying who let whom sleep in, who did the dishes, resentment crept back in. Generosity that keeps score, she concluded, stops working as generosity.

This week, listen for someone near you, a coworker, a friend, a relative, saying something sharper or more capable than they realize, and tell them directly that they should pursue it, instead of letting the compliment stay unspoken in your head. Look for two people in your life who don't know each other but share an interest, and take the small trouble of introducing them properly. Think about what you're actually good at giving, not what convention says you should give, and offer that instead, whether it's an hour of your time, a skill, or simply your full attention. And at home, catch yourself the next time you start silently counting who did more, and let that particular tally go, because the moment you stop keeping score is often the moment the resentment stops too.