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

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    When making a choice about what to do, choose work.
    Looking at my True Rules showed me something. Several of them were difficult to balance. How could my kids, Jamie, and work all be top priorities? Also, I was pretty sure that Jamie operated under the rule of “Try to skip as many social events as possible.” That explained certain ongoing marital debates.
    Some of my True Rules were very helpful, such as one I learned from my mother: “The things that go wrong often make the best memories.” This is very comforting and very true. For example, my mother put a tremendous amount of work into planning Jamie’s and my wedding—right down to the wedding-weekend informational letter decorated with cows and ruby slippers to symbolize Kansas City—and our wedding was gorgeous and perfect in every way, except for one single, tiny detail: the misspelling of the composer Haydn’s name as “Hayden” in the order of ser vices. And sure enough, now I love remembering that superfluous “e.” Somehow it reminds me of all the time my mother and I spent together planning the wedding (she did most of the work); the one flaw throws the loveliness of the whole wedding into focus. I remember reading that the Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn’t aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.
    On the other hand, some of my True Rules were unhelpful. “I’m in a hurry” ran through my head dozens of times each day—not always a constructive thought. I worked to change that rule to “I have plenty of time for the things that are important to me.” By questioning my True Rules instead of applying them unthinkingly, I could make sure I applied them only when they’d guide me to decisions that reflected my true priorities.
    Was I the only one who thought this way? When I asked my friends if they had True Rules, they understood exactly what I was talking about, and they had their own examples:
    Always say hello.
    What would my mother do?
    Don’t get up in the 5:00’s or go to sleep in the 8:00’s ( A.M . or P.M .).
    Down with boredom.
    Change is good.
    First things first (example: eat before a job interview).
    Choose the bigger life.
    Buy anything you want at the grocery store; cooking is always cheaper than eating out.
    Things have a way of turning out for the best.
    Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.
    I picked up a very helpful True Rule from my sister. Elizabeth told me, “People succeed in groups.”
    As a TV writer in Los Angeles, she works in a notoriously competitive, jealous industry. Jamie and I had coined a phrase, “the funny feeling,” to describe the uncomfortable mixture of competitiveness and self-doubt that we feel when a peer scores a major success. When a friend of Elizabeth’s cowrote the screenplay of a movie that was a box-office hit, I asked her, “Does it give you the funny feeling that your pal had such a huge success?”
    She answered, “Well, maybe a bit, but I remind myself that ‘ People succeed in groups.’ It’s great for him to have a big success, and his success is also likely to help me to be successful.”
    By contrast, I have a friend who described her brother as having a zero-sum attitude toward good fortune: if something good happens to someone else, he feels as if something good is less likely to happen to him. As a result, he’s never happy for anyone else.
    Now, it’s debatable whether it’s true that people succeed in groups. I happen to think it is true—but whether or not it’s objectively true, it’s a True Rule that makes a person much happier. Of course, pure magnanimity would be more admirable, but telling yourself that “People succeed in groups” helps when you’re feeling small-minded.
    Jamie has a very helpful True Rule: he says, “The first thing isn’t the right thing.” So when a friend doesn’t get the job he wanted or wasn’t able to buy the apartment she bid on, Jamie says, “The first thing isn’t the right thing—wait and see, you’ll be glad in the end that this didn’t work out.” Again, the point isn’t whether this True Rule is factually true (I recognizethat his precept has the “Why do you always find a lost object in the very last place you look?” kind of logical flaw), but that it’s a way of thinking that boosts happiness.
    Gathering True Rules was a fun exercise, and it was useful, because as I questioned my