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

Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany. One rainy afternoon on a city bus, she realized that she wasn't as happy as she could be. In danger of wasting her days - always yearning for something more, waiting for problems to miraculously solve themselves - she realized her life wasn't going to change unless she did something about it. On January 1, she embarked on her Happiness Project, and each month she pursued a different set of resolutions: to get more sleep, quit nagging her husband, sing in the morning to her two young daughters, start a blog, imitate a spiritual master, keep a one-sentence journal. She immersed herself in everything from classical philosophy to contemporary psychology to see what worked for her-and what didn't. Illuminating yet entertaining, profound yet compulsively readable, "The Happiness Project" is one of the most thoughtful and prescriptive works on happiness to have emerged from the recent explosion of interest in the subject. Filled with practical advice, sharp insight, charm, and humour, her story will inspire readers to navigate their own paths to happiness.

• ISBN10: 0061962066
• ISBN13: 9780061962066
• Publish Date: 29 December 2009
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Imprint: HarperCollins eBooks
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 336
• Language: English

Reviews

[adamfortuna]

A combination of 12 mini books, each in the form as a months goals. Somewhat a condensed version of Getting Things Done, relationship advice, family, friendship, religion and time. One interesting insight by Gretchen was the comment that Agnostics/Athiests read biographies to identify with people for a similar reason that Catholics read the bible. Some good insights and many good reminders on how to be happy.

[wyvernfriend]

Author embarks on a year of finding herself and trying to find some measure of happiness in that year. Part of the journey is in trying to discover what happiness means to her, originally blogged this book was quite useful in making me think about my life and living it as me not as someone else thinks how I should live.

I think it's a book that I will think about a lot again. I'm not sure about how universal her experiences were but I do agree with a few of them, like how there is an I in happiness; that you sometimes have to invest in your own happiness, and that sometimes that means paying for it.

It's a theme I may have to bring into my own life and work on over time. It's all about creating SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound) goals. By breaking down her goal to become happier in her life into smaller pieces and working on those small things every month for a year she changes her life.

The one quote she missed was that of Socrates (quoted by Plato) "the unexamined life is not worth living" and this is what she's doing here, examining her life.

[clementine]

I will tackle what I liked first. I thought Rubin's approach to her project was very clever. She focused on one area each month, and then added the previous months' goals to the new month, constantly building on what she had. This was a great way to break things into manageable chunks and gradually build up to her goals. I also thought that she had some decent tips and insights, although they could easily be condensed into about 5 pages.

Gretchen Rubin does not come across as a likeable person. She gets points for honesty, but overall I found her rather insufferable, which detracted from my enjoyment of the book quite significantly. It's not just that she seems to find little pleasure in her husband or kids (who she's always complaining about or micromanaging, and who she very rarely mentions in a positive light), it's not just that despite the fact that she's trying to be positive she is SUCH a downer, it's that this whole experience was very shallow and doesn't make up for any of her irritating character flaws. While some of what she did was surely useful to her, most of it wasn't very meaningful - cleaning her closet, reading children's books. The few times that she did do something a little deeper, she barely skimmed the surface. I was so frustrated by her horribly simplistic and shallow brushes with Buddhism and books about mortality. It just makes me feel like she didn't really get anything new out of this project, and like it was less about deep spiritual happiness than about doing a few things differently. I could be totally wrong, but I never got the sense that anything changed fundamentally within her, and she just seemed so irritatingly superficial.

Stylistically, this book irked me. First of all, she had a tendency to pepper the text with quotes and examples from other people. This can be effective when used sparingly, but it seemed like she did it every other page! I found myself skimming over these quotes without losing anything. She also did the same with comments on her blog, which I also skipped. Finally, her constant referencing of her own truths, commandments, etc, was pretty annoying. We get it, you want to be Gretchen.

Overall, this book left me cold. It doesn't bother me that it's one of those fad stunt books. I actually think that the format of her project could be useful to people if they adapted it to suit their needs. But her own experience, and the way in which she writes it, is shallow, self-indulgent, and irritating.