GHCL Digest JULY 2018

Book Review
The Happiness Project - by Gretchen Rubin
One of my core beliefs is this:'Its more important to be happy than it is to be
rich My personal experience bears this out (though I'm fortunate to be both).
No surprise then that for the past couple of years, one of my favorite blogs has
been Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project. Rubin is a former lawyer who
abandoned her promising high-paying career to follow her bliss: She decided to
become a writer. She started her blog as a part of a year-long experiment to find
new ways to be happy. She's now turned that experience into a best-selling
book.
The Happiness Project
Rubin decided to spend one year consciously pursuing happiness. Each month, she tackled one specific aspect
of life — marriage, work, a tude, and so on — and during that month, she a empted to meet a handful of
related resolu ons she hoped would make her happier.
Her financial resolu ons for July, for instance, were about money. Rubin is an “under-buyer”; she's frugal by
nature. For this month, she wanted to indulge in a modest splurge, buy needful things, spend out (meaning to
actually use the stuff she has), and give something up (Rubin stopped obsessing over office supplies).
Fortunately, the book isn't lame. Rubin's style is warm and engaging. Though The Happiness Project includes
tons of info from research into happiness and well-being, this data isn't presented in a dull, dry way; it's neatly
woven into Rubin's account of her day-to-day progress toward happiness (or lack thereof). She shares the
research in casual prose, not in academic jargon.
Among my favourite findings, I bookmarked these:
“The most effec ve way to judge whether a par cular course of ac on will make you happy in the future is to
ask people who are following that course of ac on right now if they're happy and assume that you'll feel the
same way.”
You can do anything you want, but you can't do everything you want. This insight is remarkably similarly to the
one I had a couple of years ago, when I realized that I can buy anything I want, but can't buy everything I want.
“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.”
“Best is good, be er is best.” In other words, the perfect is the enemy of the good. When you spend too much
me pursuing the best, you're bound to be unhappy.
“Money doesn't buy happiness the way good health doesn't buy happiness. When money or health is a
problem, you think of li le else; when it's not a problem, you don't think much about it. Both money and health
contribute to happiness mostly in the nega ve; the lack of them brings much more unhappiness than
possessing them brings happiness.”
I loved this p from a reader of Rubin's blog: “[I] change my passwords to a goal that I've been working on, or an
achievement I want. They become a constant reminder of my goals, my dreams, of what I want to achieve.”
July 2018
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