Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Gretchen Rubin

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir, Happiness, Self Improvement

301 pages, published December 29, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The genesis of The Happiness Project was author Gretchen Rubin’s epiphany that she was happy with her life, but perhaps not as happy as she could be.  This led her to dedicate a year to her happiness project and, through research and experience, discover if there were things she could to make herself happier.  Every month, she covered a new topic including Order, Exercise and Sleep, Friendship, Children, Marriage, and Money to name a few.  Along the way, she developed her Twelve Personal Commandments, Four Splendid Truths and Secrets of Adulthood.  They are listed below.

Twelve Personal Commandments

Be Gretchen

Let it go

Act the way I want to feel

Do it now

Be polite and fair

Enjoy the process

Spend out

Identify the problem

Lighten up

Do what ought to be done

No calculation

There is only love

Four Splendid Truths

1. To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right in an atmosphere of growth.
2. One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.
3. The days are long, but the years are short.
4. You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.

Secrets of Adulthood

• The best reading is re-reading.
• Outer order contributes to inner calm.
• The opposite of a great truth is also true.
• You manage what you measure.
• By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished.
• People don’t notice your mistakes and flaws as much as you think.
• It’s nice to have plenty of money.
• Most decisions don’t require extensive research.
• Try not to let yourself get too hungry.
• It’s important to have family rituals.
• If you can’t find something, clean up.
• Someplace, keep an empty shelf.
• Turning the computer on and off a few times often fixes a glitch.
• It’s okay to ask for help.
• You can choose what you do; you can’t choose what you LIKE to do.
• Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy.
• What you do EVERY DAY matters more than what you do ONCE IN A WHILE.
• You don’t have to be good at everything.
• Soap and water removes most stains.
• It’s important to be nice to EVERYONE.
• You know as much as most people.
• Over-the-counter medicines are very effective.
• Eat better, eat less, exercise more.
• What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you–and vice versa.
• People actually prefer that you buy wedding gifts off their registry.
• Houseplants and photo albums are a lot of trouble.
• If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough.
• If we have habits that work for us, we’re much more likely to be happy, healthy, productive, and creative.
• Save and spend wisely.
• Stop procrastinating, make consistent progress.
• Engage more deeply—with other people, with God, with yourself, with the world.
• Doing a little work makes goofing off more fun.

Quotes 

“The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It’s more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tries to keep his spirits high. He seems self-sufficient; he becomes a cushion for others. And because happiness seems unforced, that person usually gets no credit.”

 

“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.”

 

“I knew I wouldn’t discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstances; it was right here, right now— as in the haunting play “The Blue Bird,” where two children spend a year searching the world for the Blue Bird of Happiness, only to find it waiting for them when they finally return home.”

 

“Of course it’s not enough to sit around wanting to be happy; you must make the effort to take steps toward happiness by acting with more love, finding work you enjoy, and all the rest. But for me, asking myself whether I was happy had been a crucial step toward cultivating my happiness more wisely through my actions. Also, only through recognizing my happiness did I really appreciate it. Happiness depends partly on external circumstances, and it also depends on how you view those circumstances.

 

“According to current research, in the determination of a person’s level of happiness, genetics accounts for about 50 percent; life circumstances, such as age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, income, health, occupation, and religious affiliation, account for about 10 to 20 percent; and the remainder is a product of how a person thinks and acts.”

 

“I had everything I could possibly want — yet I was failing to appreciate it. Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehend the splendor of what I had.”

 

“As I turned the key and pushed open the front door, as I crossed the threshold, I thought how breathtaking, how fleeting, how precious was my ordinary day Now is now. Here is my treasure.”

 

“To eke out the most happiness from an experience, we must anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness, and recall a happy memory.”

 

“In fact, in what’s known as “rosy prospection,” anticipation of happiness is sometimes greater than the happiness actually experienced.”

 

“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 knew I wouldn’t discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstances; it was right here, right now— as in the haunting play “The Blue Bird,” where two children spend a year searching the world for the Blue Bird of Happiness, only to find it waiting for them when they finally return home.”

 

“Studies show that each common interest between people boosts the chances of a lasting relationship and also brings about a 2 percent increase in life satisfaction.”

 

“Happiness,” wrote Yeats, “is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn’t goal attainment but the process of striving after goals-that is, growth-that brings happiness.”

 

“Enthusiasm is a form of social courage.”

 

“There is only love.”

 

“One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.”

 

“Happy people generally are more forgiving, helpful, and charitable, have better self-control, and are more tolerant of frustration than unhappy people, while unhappy people are more often withdrawn, defensive, antagonistic, and self-absorbed. Oscar Wilde observed, “One is not always happy when one is good; but one is always good when one is happy.”

 

“Both money and health contribute to happiness mostly in the negative; the lack of them brings much more unhappiness than possessing them brings happiness.”

 

“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.”

 

“Nothing,’ wrote Tolstoy, ‘can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”

 

“Keep it simple’ wasn’t always the right response. Many things that boosted my happiness also added complexity to my life. Having children. Learning to post videos to my website. Going to an out-of-town wedding. Applied too broadly, my impulse to ‘Keep it simple’ would impoverish me. ‘Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings,’ warned Samuel Johnson, ‘let us therefore by cautious how we strip her.”

 

“Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity…When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently.”

 

“The days are long, but the years are short.”

 

“I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn’t sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time–but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was “productive.” Time spend with my family and friends was never wasted.”

 

“What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.”

 

“It’s about living in the moment and appreciating the smallest things. Surrounding yourself with the things that inspire you and letting go of the obsessions that want to take over your mind. It is a daily struggle sometimes and hard work but happiness begins with your own attitude and how you look at the world.”

 

“While some more passive forms of leisure, such as watching TV or surfing the Internet, are fun in the short term, over time, they don’t offer nearly the same happiness as more challenging activities.”

 

“It struck me as poignant that my long relationship with my beloved grandparents could be embodied in a few small objects. But the power of objects doesn’t depend on their volume; in fact, my memories were better evoked by a few carefully chosen items than by a big assortment of things with vague associations.”

 

“Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but every day is a clean slate and a fresh opportunity.”

 

“It’s easy to be heavy; hard to be light.”

 

“Once I started trying to give positive reviews, though, I began to understand how much happiness I took from the joyous ones in my life—and how much effort it must take for them to be consistently good=tempered and positive. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. We nonjoyous types suck energy and cheer from the joyous ones; we rely on them to buoy us with their good spirit and to cushion our agitation and anxiety. At the same time, because of a dark element in human nature, we’re sometimes provoked to try to shake the enthusiastic, cheery folk out of their fog of illusion—to make them see that the play was stupid, the money was wasted, the meeting was pointless. Instead of shielding their joy, we blast it.”

 

“When we do stumble, it’s important not to judge ourselves harshly. Although some people assume that strong feelings of guilt or shame act as safeguards to help people stick to good habits, the opposite is true. People who feel less guilt and who show compassion toward themselves in the face of failure are better able to regain self-control, while people who feel deeply guilty and full of self-blame struggle more.”

 

“Although we presume that we act because of the way we feel, in fact we often feel because of the way we act.”

 

“The pleasure of doing the same thing, in the same way, every day, shouldn’t be overlooked. The things I do every day take on a certain beauty and provide a kind of invisible architecture to my life.”

 

“With habits, we don’t make decisions, we don’t use self-control, we just do the thing we want ourselves to do—or that we don’t want to do.”

 

“Did I have a heart to be contented? Well, no, not particularly. I had a tendency to be discontented: ambitious, dissatisfied, fretful, and tough to please…It’s easier to complain than to laugh, easier to yell than to joke around, easier to be demanding than to be satisfied.”

 

“Never start a sentence with the words ‘No offense.”

 

“When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself, I realized that it was because I was afraid of failure – but in order to have more success, I needed to be willing to accept more failure.”

 

“I enjoy the fun of failure. It’s fun to fail, I kept repeating. It’s part of being ambitious; it’s part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”

 

“Look for happiness under your own roof.”

 

“Studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn’t relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.”

 

“The things that go wrong often make the best memories.”

 

“It was time to expect more of myself. Yet as I thought about happiness, I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously — and also more seriously. I wanted to use my time well, but I also wanted to wander, to play, to read at whim. I wanted to think about myself so I could forget myself. I was always on the edge of agitation; I wanted to let go of envy and anxiety about the future, yet keep my energy and ambition.”

 

“From my observation, habits in four areas do most to boost feelings of self-control, and in this way strengthen the Foundation of all our habits. We do well to begin by tackling the habits that help us to: 1. sleep 2. move 3. eat and drink right 4. Unclutter. ”

 

“Enthusiasm is more important than innate ability, it turns out, because the single more important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice.”

 

“When I find myself focusing overmuch on the anticipated future happiness of arriving at a certain goal, I remind myself to ‘Enjoy now’. If I can enjoy the present, I don’t need to count on the happiness that is (or isn’t) waiting for me in the future”.”

 

“[S]tudies show that one of the best ways to lift your mood is to engineer an easy success, such as tackling a long-delayed chore.”

 

“Studies show that in a phenomenon called “emotional contagion,” we unconsciously catch emotions from other people–whether good moods or bad ones. Taking the time to be silly means that we’re infecting one another with good cheer, and people who enjoy silliness are one third more likely to be happy.”

 

“… one flaw throws the loveliness of [everything else] into focus. I remember reading that Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn’t aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.”

 

“There are no do overs and some things just aren’t going to happen. It is a little sad but you just have to embrace what is.”

 

“I think adversity magnifies behavior. Tend to be a control freak? You’ll become more controlling. Eat for comfort? You’ll eat more. And on the positive, if you tend to focus on solutions and celebrate small successes, that’s what you’ll do in adversity.”

 

“[S]tudies show that one of the best ways to lift your mood is to engineer an easy success, such as tackling a long-delayed chore.”

 

“Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

 

“I can DO ANYTHING I want, but I can’t DO EVERYTHING I want.”

 

“Money. It’s a good servant but a bad master.”

 

“Because money permits a constant stream of luxuries and indulgences, it can take away their savor, and by permitting instant gratification, money shortcuts the happiness of anticipation. Scrimping, saving, imagining, planning, hoping–these stages enlarge the happiness we feel.”

 

“He is my fate. He’s my soul mate. He pervades my whole existence. So, of course, I often ignore him.”

 

“It isn’t enough to love; we must prove it.”

 

“There is no love; there are only proofs of love.” Whatever love I might feel in my heart, others will see only my actions.”

 

“The biggest waste of time is to do well something that we need not do at all.”

 

“What you do everyday matters more than what you do once in a while.”

 

“How we schedule our days is how we spend our lives.”

 

“There’s a great satisfaction in knowing that we’ve made good use of our days, that we’ve lived up to our expectations of ourselves.”

 

“[Benjamin Franklin] identified thirteen virtues he wanted to cultivate–temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility–and made a chart with those virtues plotted against the days of the week. Each day, Franklin would score himself on whether he practiced those thirteen virtues.”

 

“In the chaos of everyday life, it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters, and I can use my habits to make sure that my life reflects my values.”

 

“We won’t make ourselves more creative and productive by copying other people’s habits, even the habits of geniuses; we must know our own nature, and what habits serve us best.”

 

“For work: I bought some pens. Normally, I used makeshift pens, the kind of unsatisfactory implements that somehow materialized in my bag or in a drawer. But one day, when I was standing in line to buy envelopes, I caught sight of a box of my favorite kind of pen: the Deluxe Uniball Micro. “Two ninety-nine for one pen!” I thought. “That’s ridiculous.” But after a fairly lengthy internal debate, I bought four. It’s such a joy to write with a good pen instead of making do with an underinked pharmaceutical promotional pen picked up from a doctor’s office. My new pens weren’t cheap, but when I think of all the time I spend using pens and how much I appreciate a good pen, I realize it was money well spent. Finely made tools help make work a pleasure.”

 

“Sleep is the new sex.”

 

“Another study suggested that getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for a person’s happiness than getting a $60,000 raise.”

 

“I had everything I could possibly want — yet I was failing to appreciate it. Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehend the splendor of what I had.”

 

“The desire to start something at the “right” time is usually just a justification for delay. In almost every case, the best time to start is now.”

 

“It’s so easy to wish that we’d made an effort in the past, so that we’d happily be enjoying the benefit now, but when now is the time when that effort must be made, as it always is, that prospect is much less inviting.”

 

“The most important step is the first step. All those old sayings are really true. Well begun is half done. Don’t get it perfect, get it going. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started, and strangely, starting is often far harder than continuing.”

 

“I’m not tempted by things I’ve decided are off-limits, but once I’ve started something, I have trouble stopping. If I never do something, it requires no self-control for me; if I do something sometimes, it requires enormous self-control.”

 

“In fact, for both men and women—and this finding struck me as highly significant—the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a difference.”

 

“There are times in the lives of most of us,” observed William Edward Hartpole Lecky, “when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.”

 

“A sense of growth is so important to happiness that it’s often preferable to be progressing to the summit rather than to be at the summit.”

 

“This is one of the many paradoxes of happiness: we seek to control our lives, but the unfamiliar and the unexpected are important sources of happiness.”

 

“W. H. Auden articulated this tension beautifully: “Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.”

 

“The imperfect book that gets published is better than the perfect book that never leaves my computer.”

 

“It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that if you have something you love or there’s something you want, you’ll be happier with more.”

My Take

As is readily apparent from the sheer volume of quotes that I have included from The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin has many, many pearls of wisdom to impart.  As she herself opines, the best reading is re-reading.  This was my third reading of The Happiness Project and it was still fresh for me and I had new takeaways that I had forgotten about.  I really appreciate her writing style that includes her own personal experience, reference to scientific research on topics related to happiness, relevant literary quotes and lots of practical tips on how to implement happiness improvements into your own life.  More than any other book, The Happiness Project has changed my life for the better.  I consider Gretchen Rubin to be my guru for happiness.  Often as I go through my day, a quote from The Happiness Project (such as “do it now,” “there is only love,” “outer order leads to inner calm,” “by doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished,” and “people don’t notice your mistakes and flaws as much as you think”) will pop into my head and influence my actions. Her other books, Happier at Home, Better than Before, and The Four Tendencies are also very much worth a read, but my favorite is still The Happiness Project.  A rare five stars and strongly recommended.