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.
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.
Reading updates
-
Started reading
-
17 July, 2013:
Finished reading
-
17 July, 2013:
Reviewed