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 by Gretchen Rubin.

3/5 rating. 289 pages.

Book #41 of 2022. Read November 20, 2022.

This is Gretchen’s telling of her year of studying happiness and trying to apply it in her life.

The book is set up by months and her resolutions for each month of ways to improve her happiness based on research. The book had some useful ideas, resolutions and quotes, but overall, I think just reading the below takeaways might be all you need to do to get 70% of the good ideas.

Here are some of her findings and some of my favorite quotes:

• You must choose that you want to be happy.
• “‘There is no love; there are only proofs of love.’ Whatever love I might feel in my heart, others will see only my actions.”
• Take photos or find other ways to remember happy memories
• Set up traditions
• “I wasn’t as happy as I could be, and my life wasn’t going to change unless I made it change.”
• “What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.”
• Be okay with not liking or wanting to do certain things
• “My Quaker grandparents, who were married seventy-two years, said that each married couple should have an outdoor game, like tennis or golf, and an indoor game, like Scrabble or gin, that they play together.”
• “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.”
• “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”
• Make time for fun
• Kindness matters
• “Give without limits, give without expectations.”
• Be yourself

Additional Quotes:

“One April day, on a morning just like every other morning, I had a sudden realization: I was in danger of wasting my life.”

“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” – Collette

“Perhaps because men have this low standard for what qualifies as intimacy, both men and women find relationships with women to be more intimate and enjoyable than those with men. Women have more feelings of empathy for other people than men do (though women and men have about the same degree of empathy for animals, whatever that means). 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.”

“To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.”

“Research shows that regularly having fun is a key factor in having a happy life; people who have fun are twenty times as likely to feel happy.”

“I have plenty of time to have fun!”

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

“Not only does having strong relationships make it far more likely that you take joy in life, but studies show that it also lengthens life (incredibly, even more than stopping smoking), boosts immunity, and cuts the risk of depression.”

“It’s a Secret of Adulthood: Do good, feel good.”

“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.”

“The ‘fundamental attribution error’ is a psychological phenomenon in which we tend to view other people’s actions as reflections of their characters and to overlook the power of situation to influence their actions, whereas with ourselves, we recognize the pressures of circumstance.”

“When one loves, one does not calculate.” – Saint Therese

“What’s more, one intriguing study showed that Sarah Bernhardt’s pronouncement is literally true: people who give money to charity end up wealthier than those who don’t give to charity. After doing complex number crunching to control for different variables, a researcher concluded that charitable giving isn’t just correlated with higher income; it actually causes higher income.”

“Sometimes ‘later’ becomes ‘never.’”

“Buddhists talk about ‘skillful’ and ‘unskillful’ emotions, and this has the right connotation of effort and competence. People assume that a person who acts happy must feel happy, but although it’s in the very nature of happiness to seem effortless and spontaneous, it often takes great skill.”

“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.”

“After college, my roommate was in a bad car accident, and I flew out to Hawaii to see her. She was wearing a halo brace with bolts drilled into her skull. ‘Do you feel lucky to be alive?’ I asked. ‘Well, actually,’ she said, ‘I feel like I really wish I hadn’t been in a damn car crash.’”

“I could just sit down and do it.”

“When researchers tried to figure out what helped third- and fourth-graders remember what they read, they found that the students’ interest in a passage was far more important than the ‘readability’ of the passage—thirty times more important.”

“One thing that makes a passion enjoyable is that you don’t have to worry about results. You can strive for triumph, or you can potter around, tinker, explore, without worrying about efficiency or outcomes.”

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

“A willingness to be pleased requires modesty and even innocence—easy to deride as mawkish and sentimental.”

“As I’d learned in February, within a marriage, it takes at least five good acts to repair the damage of one critical or destructive act.”

“We just realized there are a lot of things we take for granted, having been together for so long, and there are so many little things that we’re realizing we have neglected over time that would probably make us happier if we paid attention to them now.”

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

“Each day I try to live up to my resolutions. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but every day is a clean slate and a fresh opportunity. I never expect to be done with my resolutions, so I don’t get discouraged when they stay challenging. Which they do.”

“Having a feeling of autonomy, of being able to choose what happens in your life or how you spend your time, is crucial.”

#thehappinessproject #happiness #gretchenrubin #kindness #beyourself #choosehappiness #books #bookreview #bookstagram

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