I am reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. I bought this book on a whim at a local bookstore. ‘She’s an attorney for god’s sake, what would she know about happiness?’, I thought.
I have been reading about happiness science for years. So I thought, ‘OK, I’ll see what she has to say’.
And she has nailed it. She Keeps It Simple.
The book is a chronology of how she changed one thing every month for a year that she knew would make her happier, her relationships happier, and her life happier.
She is an ordinary workingwoman, with no big crisis in her life. She just knew that she could do better in being happy.
It’s like listening to your best friend chat about the same things you think about… and how she tweaks her daily life, one step at a time.
She’s straightforward, not heady, not preachy and REAL.
No wonder this has been a best seller since 2009.
Rubin makes it clear that her project was designed for her and that each of our happiness projects need to be custom made by each of us. She wrote about her project because she thought others might learn something from her experience.
What she defines as happiness:
“I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.”
And these were her big takeaways from her experience:
“One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy.”
“One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy myself.”
Wow….
Happy Holidays to each of you.
Rubin G. The Happiness Project, Updated. New York: Harper; 2015.
