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

a great tennis player and played a lot when I was growing up. At some point, he started playing golf and, over time, gave up tennis. I asked him why. “My tennis game,” he explained, “was gradually getting worse, but my golf game is improving.”
    People are very adaptable, and we quickly adjust to a new life circumstance—for better or worse—and consider it normal. Although this helps us when our situation worsens, it means that when circumstances improve, we soon become hardened to new comforts or privileges. This “hedonic treadmill,” as it’s called, makes it easy to grow accustomed to some of the things that make you “feel good,” such as a new car, a new job title, or air-conditioning, so that the good feeling wears off. An atmosphere of growth offsets that. You may soon take your new dining room table for granted, but tending your garden will give you fresh joy and surprise every spring. Growth is important in a spiritual sense, and I do think that material growth is gratifying as well. As much as folks insist that money can’t buy happiness, for example, it’s awfully nice to have more money this year than you had last year.
    So I arrived at my final formula, and it struck me as so important that I named it the First Splendid Truth—I’d have to trust that I’d have at least one more Splendid Truth by the time the year was over. The First Splendid Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.
    I called Jamie the minute I got home. “At last!” I said. “I have my happiness formula! It’s just one sentence long, and with it, I can tie together all the studies, all the loose ends that were driving me crazy.”
    “That’s great!” said Jamie, very enthusiastically. Pause.
    “Don’t you want to hear the formula?” I hinted. I had decided not toexpect Jamie to play the role of my female writing partner—but sometimes he just was going to have to do his best.
    “Of course, right!” he said. “What’s the formula?”
    Well, he was trying. And maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that now that I was trying harder, Jamie was trying harder, too. I couldn’t put my finger on what was different exactly, but he seemed more loving. He wasn’t much interested in talking about happiness—in fact, he felt like a bit of a martyr to my inexhaustible enthusiasm for the subject—but he had started replacing the dead lightbulbs without waiting for me to bug him, and he seemed to be answering my e-mails more diligently. He bought us the backgammon set. He asked me for my happiness formula.
    When thinking about happiness in marriage, you may have an almost irresistible impulse to focus on your spouse, to emphasize how he or she should change in order to boost your happiness. But the fact is, you can’t change anyone but yourself. A friend told me that her “marriage mantra” was “I love Leo, just as he is. ” I love Jamie just as he is. I can’t make him do a better job of doing household chores, I can only stop myself from nagging—and that makes me happier. When you give up expecting a spouse to change (within reason), you lessen anger and resentment, and that creates a more loving atmosphere in a marriage.

3
MARCH
    Aim Higher
    W ORK
    Launch a blog.
    Enjoy the fun of failure.
    Ask for help.
    Work smart.
    Enjoy now.
     
    H appiness is a critical factor for work, and work is a critical factor for happiness. In one of those life-isn’t-fair results, it turns out that the happy outperform the less happy. Happy people work more hours each week—and they work more in their free time, too. They tend to be more cooperative, less self-centered, and more willing to help other people—say, by sharing information or pitching in to help a colleague—and then, because they’ve helped others, others tend to help them. Also, they work better with others, because people prefer to be around happier people, who are also less likely to show the counterproductive behaviors of burnout, absenteeism, counter-and nonproductive work, work disputes, and retaliatory behavior than are less happy people.
    Happier people also make more effective leaders. They perform better on managerial tasks such as leadership and mastery of information. They’re viewed as more assertive and self-confident than less happy people. They’re perceived to be more friendly, warmer, and even more physically attractive. A study showed that students