The Happiness Project Read online

  People are very adaptable, and we quickly adjust to a new life circumstance—for better or worse—and consider it normal. Although this helps us when our situation worsens, it means that when circumstances improve, we soon become hardened to new comforts or privileges. This “hedonic treadmill,” as it’s called, makes it easy to grow accustomed to some of the things that make you “feel good,” such as a new car, a new job title, or air-conditioning, so that the good feeling wears off. An atmosphere of growth offsets that. You may soon take your new dining room table for granted, but tending your garden will give you fresh joy and surprise every spring. Growth is important in a spiritual sense, and I do think that material growth is gratifying as well. As much as folks insist that money can’t buy happiness, for example, it’s awfully nice to have more money this year than you had last year.

  So I arrived at my final formula, and it struck me as so important that I named it the First Splendid Truth—I’d have to trust that I’d have at least one more Splendid Truth by the time the year was over. The First Splendid Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

  I called Jamie the minute I got home. “At last!” I said. “I have my happiness formula! It’s just one sentence long, and with it, I can tie together all the studies, all the loose ends that were driving me crazy.”

  “That’s great!” said Jamie, very enthusiastically. Pause.

  “Don’t you want to hear the formula?” I hinted. I had decided not to expect Jamie to play the role of my female writing partner—but sometimes he just was going to have to do his best.

  “Of course, right!” he said. “What’s the formula?”

  Well, he was trying. And maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that now that I was trying harder, Jamie was trying harder, too. I couldn’t put my finger on what was different exactly, but he seemed more loving. He wasn’t much interested in talking about happiness—in fact, he felt like a bit of a martyr to my inexhaustible enthusiasm for the subject—but he had started replacing the dead lightbulbs without waiting for me to bug him, and he seemed to be answering my e-mails more diligently. He bought us the backgammon set. He asked me for my happiness formula.

  When thinking about happiness in marriage, you may have an almost irresistible impulse to focus on your spouse, to emphasize how he or she should change in order to boost your happiness. But the fact is, you can’t change anyone but yourself. A friend told me that her “marriage mantra” was “I love Leo, just as he is.” I love Jamie just as he is. I can’t make him do a better job of doing household chores, I can only stop myself from nagging—and that makes me happier. When you give up expecting a spouse to change (within reason), you lessen anger and resentment, and that creates a more loving atmosphere in a marriage.

  3

  MARCH

  Aim Higher

  WORK

  Launch a blog.

  Enjoy the fun of failure.

  Ask for help.

  Work smart.

  Enjoy now.

  Happiness is a critical factor for work, and work is a critical factor for happiness. In one of those life-isn’t-fair results, it turns out that the happy outperform the less happy. Happy people work more hours each week—and they work more in their free time, too. They tend to be more cooperative, less self-centered, and more willing to help other people—say, by sharing information or pitching in to help a colleague—and then, because they’ve helped others, others tend to help them. Also, they work better with others, because people prefer to be around happier people, who are also less likely to show the counterproductive behaviors of burnout, absenteeism, counter-and nonproductive work, work disputes, and retaliatory behavior than are less happy people.

  Happier people also make more effective leaders. They perform better on managerial tasks such as leadership and mastery of information. They’re viewed as more assertive and self-confident than less happy people. They’re perceived to be more friendly, warmer, and even more physically attractive. A study showed that students who were happy as college freshmen were earning more money in their midthirties—without any wealth advantage to start. Being happy can make a big difference in your work life.

  Of course, happiness also matters to work simply because work occupies so much of our time. A majority of Americans work seven or more hours each day, and time spent on vacation is shrinking. Also, work can be a source of many of the elements necessary for a happy life: the atmosphere of growth, social contact, fun, a sense of purpose, self-esteem, recognition.

  Whenever I feel blue, working cheers me. Sometimes when I sink into a bad mood, Jamie says, “Why don’t you go to your office for a while?” Even if I don’t feel like working, once I plunge in, the encouraging feeling of getting something accomplished, the intellectual stimulation, and even the mere distraction lift me out of my crabbiness.

  Because work is so crucial to happiness, another person’s happiness project might well focus on choosing the right work. I, however, had already been through a major happiness quest career shift. I’d started out in law, and I’d had a great experience. But when my clerkship with Justice O’Connor drew to a close, I couldn’t figure out what job I wanted next.

  During this time, I visited the apartment of a friend who was in graduate school studying education, and I noticed several thick textbooks lying around her living room.

  “Is this what they make you read for your program?” I asked, idly flipping through the dense, dull pages.

  “Yes,” she said, “but that’s what I read in my spare time, anyhow.”

  For some reason, that casual answer shocked me to attention. What did I do in my spare time? I asked myself. As much as I liked clerking, I never spent one second more on legal subjects than I had to. For fun, I was writing a book (which would later become Power Money Fame Sex), and it occurred to me that perhaps I could write books for a living. Over the next several months, I became convinced that that was what I wanted to do.

  I’m a very ambitious, competitive person, and it was wrenching to walk away from my legal credentials and start my career over from the beginning. Being editor in chief of The Yale Law Journal, winning a legal writing prize—inside the world of law, these credentials mattered a lot. Outside the world of law, they didn’t matter at all. My ambition, however, was also a factor in leaving the law. I’d become convinced that passion was a critical factor in professional success. People who love their work bring an intensity and enthusiasm that’s impossible to match through sheer diligence. I could see that in my co-clerks at the Supreme Court: they read law journals for fun, they talked about cases during their lunch hours, they felt energized by their efforts. I didn’t.

  Enthusiasm is more important to mastery than innate ability, it turns out, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice. Therefore, career experts argue, you’re better off pursuing a profession that comes easily and that you love, because that’s where you’ll be more eager to practice and thereby earn a competitive advantage.

  I love writing, reading, research, note taking, analysis, and criticism. (Well, I don’t actually love writing, but then practically no writer actually loves the writing part.) My past, when I thought back, was littered with clues that I wanted to be a writer. I’d written two novels, now locked in a drawer. I’ve always spent most of my free time reading. I take voluminous notes for no apparent reason. I majored in English. And the biggest clue: I was writing a book in my free time.

  Why hadn’t it occurred to me sooner to think about writing for a living? There are probably several reasons, but the most important is the fact that it’s often hard for me to “Be Gretchen.” Erasmus observed, “The chief happiness for a man is to be what he is,” and although that sounds easy enough, it has always been difficult for me. That’s why “Be Gretchen” is the first of my Twelve Commandments.

  I have an idea of who I wish I were, and that ob
scures my understanding of who I actually am. Sometimes I pretend even to myself to enjoy activities that I don’t really enjoy, such as shopping, or to be interested in subjects that don’t much interest me, such as foreign policy. And worse, I ignore my true desires and interests.

  “Fake it till you feel it” was an effective way to change my mood in the moment, as I followed my Third Commandment to “Act the way I want to feel,” but it isn’t a good governing principle for major life decisions. By “faking it,” I could become engaged in subjects and activities that didn’t particularly interest me, but that enthusiasm paled in comparison to the passion I felt for the subjects in which I naturally found myself interested.

  Self-knowledge is one of the qualities that I admire most in my sister. Elizabeth never questions her own nature. In school, I played field hockey (even though I was a terrible athlete), took physics (which I hated), and wished that I were more into music (I wasn’t). Not Elizabeth. She has always been unswervingly true to herself. Unlike many smart people, for example, she never apologized for her love of commercial fiction or television—an attitude vindicated by the fact that she started her career writing commercial young-adult novels (my favorites among her early works include The Truth About Love and Prom Season) and then became a TV writer. I sometimes wonder if I would have become a writer if Elizabeth hadn’t become a writer first. I remember talking to her while I was struggling with my decision.

  “I worry about feeling legitimate,” I confessed. “Working in something like law or finance or politics would make me feel legitimate.”

  I expected her to say something like “Writing is legitimate” or “You can switch to something else if you don’t like it,” but she was far more astute.

  “You know,” she said, “you’ve always had this desire for legitimacy, and you’ll have it forever. It’s probably why you went to law school. But should you let it determine your next job?”

  “Well…”

  “You’ve already done highly legitimate things, like clerking on the Supreme Court, but do you feel legitimate?”

  “Not really.”

  “So you probably never will. Okay. Just don’t let that drive your decisions.”

  I took one more legal job—at the Federal Communications Commission—then decided to try to start a career as a writer. It was daunting to take the first step toward an unfamiliar, untested career, but this switch was made easier by the fact that Jamie and I were moving from Washington, D.C., to New York City and Jamie had decided to make a career shift, too. While I’d been reading a book about how to write a book proposal, he’d been taking a night class in financial accounting. I still remember the day we decided to stop paying our bar fees.

  Leaving law to become a writer was the most important step I ever took to “Be Gretchen.” I’d decided to do what I wanted to do, and I ignored options that, no matter how enticing they might be for other people, weren’t right for me.

  So if my goals for this month didn’t include a reevaluation of my work, what did they include? I wanted to bring more energy, creativity, and efficiency to my work life. No one loves the familiar and the routine more than I do, but I decided to stretch myself to tackle a work challenge that would force me to navigate unfamiliar territory. I would think about ways to work more efficiently by packing more reading and writing into each day—and also more time spent with other people. And perhaps most important, I would take care to remind myself to remember how lucky I was to be as eager for Monday mornings as I was for Friday afternoons.

  LAUNCH A BLOG.

  My research had revealed that challenge and novelty are key elements to happiness. The brain is stimulated by surprise, and successfully dealing with an unexpected situation gives a powerful sense of satisfaction. If you do new things—visit a museum for the first time, learn a new game, travel to a new place, meet new people—you’re more apt to feel happy than people who stick to more familiar activities.

  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. What’s more, because novelty requires more work from the brain, dealing with novel situations evokes more intense emotional responses and makes the passage of time seem slower and richer. After the birth of his first child, a friend told me, “One reason that I love having a new baby is that time has slowed down. My wife and I felt like our lives were speeding by, but the minute Clara was born, it was like time stood still. Each week has been like an era, so much happens.”

  So how was I going to incorporate novelty and challenge into my happiness project? I wanted to choose a goal related to other things I liked to do—no violin lessons or salsa-dancing classes for me, no matter what the experts said. At the point when I was trying to figure this out, my literary agent suggested that I start a blog.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know how to do that,” I answered. “It’s too technical. I can barely figure out how to use TiVo.”

  “These days, it’s pretty easy to set up a blog,” she said. “Think about it. I bet you’d really enjoy it.”

  She’d planted the idea in my mind, and I decided to give it a try. Reading the research on the importance of challenge to happiness had convinced me that I should stretch myself to tackle a large, difficult goal. Not only that—if I did manage to start a blog, it would connect me with other people with similar interests, give me a source of self-expression, and allow me a way to try to convince others to start their own happiness projects.

  But despite the promise of a big happiness payoff, I felt apprehensive. I worried about the time and effort a blog would consume, when I already felt pressed for time and mental energy. It would require me to make decisions that I didn’t feel equipped to make. It would expose me daily to public criticism and failure. It would make me feel stupid.

  Then, around this time, I happened to run into two acquaintances who had blogs of their own, and together they gave me the few pieces of key advice that I needed to get started. Maybe these providential meetings were a product of cosmic harmony—“when the student is ready, the teacher appears”—or maybe they were examples of the efficacy of articulating my goals. Or maybe I just got lucky.

  “Use TypePad,” my first adviser suggested. “That’s what I use.” She kept a blog about restaurants and recipes. “And keep it simple—you can add features later, as you figure out what you’re doing.”

  “Post every day, that’s absolutely key,” insisted my second adviser, who ran a law blog. Oh dear, I thought with dismay, I’d planned to post three times a week. “And when you send an e-mail to alert someone to a post you’ve made, include the entire text of your post, not just the link.”

  “Okay,” I answered uncertainly. “So, to follow up on that…sounds like I should plan to send e-mails about my posts to other bloggers?” Such a thing had never occurred to me.

  “Um, yes,” he answered.

  After three weeks of confused poking around on the Internet, cautiously, almost furtively, I opened an account on TypePad. Just this step—before I’d even made one decision about the blog—filled me with anxiety and elation. I kept reminding myself of one of my Secrets of Adulthood: “People don’t notice your mistakes as much as you think.” Even if I did something wrong on the blog, it wouldn’t be a disaster.

  Each day, I spent an hour or so working on it, and slowly the blank template supplied by TypePad started to take shape. I filled in the “About” section that described me. I wrote a description of the blog to appear in the header. I put in links to my books. I added my Twelve Commandments. I sort of figured out what “RSS” was and added an RSS button. Finally, on March 27, I took a deep breath and wrote a “blog post” for the first time.

  * * *

  Today is the first day of the Happiness Project blog.

  Now, what is the Happiness Project?

  One afternoon, not too long ago, I realized with a jolt that I was allowing my life to flash by without facing a critical ques
tion: was I happy?

  From that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking about happiness. Was it mostly a product of temperament? Could I take steps to be happier? What did it even mean to be “happy”?

  So The Happiness Project blog is my memoir of one year in which I test-drive every principle, tip, theory, and research-study result I can find, from Aristotle to St. Thérèse to Benjamin Franklin to Martin Seligman to Oprah. What advice actually works?

  That very fact that I’ve started this blog makes me happy, because now I’ve achieved one of my chief goals this month (just in time, too). I set myself a task, worked toward it, and achieved it.

  Preparing to launch the blog reminded me of two of my Secrets of Adulthood:

  It’s okay to ask for help.

  When trying to get started, I floundered until I thought to do the obvious: ask for advice from friends with blogs.

  By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished. We tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish in an hour or a week and underestimate how much we can accomplish in a month or a year, by doing just a little bit each day. “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”—Anthony Trollope

  * * *

  Since then I’ve posted six days a week, every week.

  Seeing that first post hit the screen gave me an enormous rush of triumph. I couldn’t believe I’d managed to do it. The experts had certainly been correct about the happiness effect of novelty, challenge, and an atmosphere of growth.

  However, I quickly discovered that even after I’d launched it, my blog remained an excellent source of happiness through challenge. To put it more baldly, it often drove me crazy with frustration. The more I did, the more I wanted to do. I wanted to add images. I wanted to drop the word “typepad” out of my URL. I wanted to podcast. I wanted to add live links to my TypeLists. As I was trying to solve these problems, I’d find myself overwhelmed with nasty feelings of ignorance and helplessness. The image wasn’t loading. The images were too small. The links weren’t working. Suddenly every word was underlined.