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

you feel it” was an effective way to change my mood in the moment, as I followed my Third Commandment to “Act the way I want to feel,” but it isn’t a good governing principle for major life decisions. By “faking it,” I could become engaged in subjects and activities that didn’t particularly interest me, but that enthusiasm paled in comparison to the passion I felt for the subjects in which I naturally found myself interested.
    Self-knowledge is one of the qualities that I admire most in my sister. Elizabeth never questions her own nature. In school, I played field hockey (even though I was a terrible athlete), took physics (which I hated), and wished that I were more into music (I wasn’t). Not Elizabeth. She has always been unswervingly true to herself. Unlike many smart people, for example, she never apologized for her love of commercial fiction or television—an attitude vindicated by the fact that she started her career writing commercial young-adult novels (my favorites among her early works include The Truth About Love and Prom Season ) and then became a TV writer. I sometimes wonder if I would have become a writer if Elizabeth hadn’t become a writer first. I remember talking to her while I was struggling with my decision.
    “I worry about feeling legitimate, ” I confessed. “Working in something like law or finance or politics would make me feel legitimate.”
    I expected her to say something like “Writing is legitimate” or “Youcan switch to something else if you don’t like it,” but she was far more astute.
    “You know,” she said, “you’ve always had this desire for legitimacy, and you’ll have it forever. It’s probably why you went to law school. But should you let it determine your next job?”
    “Well…”
    “You’ve already done highly legitimate things, like clerking on the Supreme Court, but do you feel legitimate?”
    “Not really.”
    “So you probably never will. Okay. Just don’t let that drive your decisions.”
    I took one more legal job—at the Federal Communications Commission—then decided to try to start a career as a writer. It was daunting to take the first step toward an unfamiliar, untested career, but this switch was made easier by the fact that Jamie and I were moving from Washington, D.C., to New York City and Jamie had decided to make a career shift, too. While I’d been reading a book about how to write a book proposal, he’d been taking a night class in financial accounting. I still remember the day we decided to stop paying our bar fees.
    Leaving law to become a writer was the most important step I ever took to “Be Gretchen.” I’d decided to do what I wanted to do, and I ignored options that, no matter how enticing they might be for other people, weren’t right for me.
    So if my goals for this month didn’t include a reevaluation of my work, what did they include? I wanted to bring more energy, creativity, and efficiency to my work life. No one loves the familiar and the routine more than I do, but I decided to stretch myself to tackle a work challenge that would force me to navigate unfamiliar territory. I would think about ways to work more efficiently by packing more reading and writing into each day—and also more time spent with other people. And perhaps most important, I would take care to remind myself to remember how lucky I was to be as eager for Monday mornings as I was for Friday afternoons.
    LAUNCH A BLOG.
    My research had revealed that challenge and novelty are key elements to happiness. The brain is stimulated by surprise, and successfully dealing with an unexpected situation gives a powerful sense of satisfaction. If you do new things—visit a museum for the first time, learn a new game, travel to a new place, meet new people—you’re more apt to feel happy than people who stick to more familiar activities.
    This is one of the many paradoxes of happiness: we seek to control our lives, but the unfamiliar and the unexpected are important sources of happiness. What’s more, because novelty requires more work from the brain, dealing with novel situations evokes more intense emotional responses and makes the passage of time seem slower and richer. After the birth of his first child, a friend told me, “One reason that I love having a new baby is that time has slowed down. My wife and I felt like our lives were speeding by, but the minute Clara was born, it was like time stood still. Each week has been like an