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

era, so much happens.”
    So how was I going to incorporate novelty and challenge into my happiness project? I wanted to choose a goal related to other things I liked to do—no violin lessons or salsa-dancing classes for me, no matter what the experts said. At the point when I was trying to figure this out, my literary agent suggested that I start a blog.
    “Oh, I wouldn’t know how to do that,” I answered. “It’s too technical. I can barely figure out how to use TiVo.”
    “These days, it’s pretty easy to set up a blog,” she said. “Think about it. I bet you’d really enjoy it.”
    She’d planted the idea in my mind, and I decided to give it a try. Reading the research on the importance of challenge to happiness had convinced me that I should stretch myself to tackle a large, difficult goal. Not only that—if I did manage to start a blog, it would connect me with otherpeople with similar interests, give me a source of self-expression, and allow me a way to try to convince others to start their own happiness projects.
    But despite the promise of a big happiness payoff, I felt apprehensive. I worried about the time and effort a blog would consume, when I already felt pressed for time and mental energy. It would require me to make decisions that I didn’t feel equipped to make. It would expose me daily to public criticism and failure. It would make me feel stupid.
    Then, around this time, I happened to run into two acquaintances who had blogs of their own, and together they gave me the few pieces of key advice that I needed to get started. Maybe these providential meetings were a product of cosmic harmony—“when the student is ready, the teacher appears”—or maybe they were examples of the efficacy of articulating my goals. Or maybe I just got lucky.
    “Use TypePad,” my first adviser suggested. “That’s what I use.” She kept a blog about restaurants and recipes. “And keep it simple—you can add features later, as you figure out what you’re doing.”
    “Post every day, that’s absolutely key,” insisted my second adviser, who ran a law blog. Oh dear, I thought with dismay, I’d planned to post three times a week. “And when you send an e-mail to alert someone to a post you’ve made, include the entire text of your post, not just the link.”
    “Okay,” I answered uncertainly. “So, to follow up on that…sounds like I should plan to send e-mails about my posts to other bloggers?” Such a thing had never occurred to me.
    “Um, yes, ” he answered.
    After three weeks of confused poking around on the Internet, cautiously, almost furtively, I opened an account on TypePad. Just this step—before I’d even made one decision about the blog—filled me with anxiety and elation. I kept reminding myself of one of my Secrets of Adulthood: “People don’t notice your mistakes as much as you think.” Even if I did something wrong on the blog, it wouldn’t be a disaster.
    Each day, I spent an hour or so working on it, and slowly the blank template supplied by TypePad started to take shape. I filled in the“About” section that described me. I wrote a description of the blog to appear in the header. I put in links to my books. I added my Twelve Commandments. I sort of figured out what “RSS” was and added an RSS button. Finally, on March 27, I took a deep breath and wrote a “blog post” for the first time.
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    T oday is the first day of the Happiness Project blog.
    Now, what is the Happiness Project?
    One afternoon, not too long ago, I realized with a jolt that I was allowing my life to flash by without facing a critical question: was I happy?
    From that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking about happiness. Was it mostly a product of temperament? Could I take steps to be happier? What did it even mean to be “happy”?
    So The Happiness Project blog is my memoir of one year in which I test-drive every principle, tip, theory, and research-study result I can find, from Aristotle to St. Thérèse to Benjamin Franklin to Martin Seligman to Oprah. What advice actually works?
    That very fact that I’ve started this blog makes me happy, because now I’ve achieved one of my chief goals this month (just in time, too). I set myself a task, worked toward it, and achieved it.
    Preparing to launch the blog reminded me of two of my Secrets of Adulthood:
It’s okay to ask for help.
When trying to get started, I floundered until I thought to do the obvious: ask for advice from