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

friends with blogs.
By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished. We tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish in an hour or a week and underestimate how much we can accomplish in a month or a year, by doing just a little bit each day. “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”—Anthony Trollope
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    Since then I’ve posted six days a week, every week.
    Seeing that first post hit the screen gave me an enormous rush of triumph. I couldn’t believe I’d managed to do it. The experts had certainly been correct about the happiness effect of novelty, challenge, and an atmosphere of growth.
    However, I quickly discovered that even after I’d launched it, my blog remained an excellent source of happiness through challenge. To put it more baldly, it often drove me crazy with frustration. The more I did, the more I wanted to do. I wanted to add images. I wanted to drop the word “typepad” out of my URL. I wanted to podcast. I wanted to add live links to my TypeLists. As I was trying to solve these problems, I’d find myself overwhelmed with nasty feelings of ignorance and helplessness. The image wasn’t loading. The images were too small. The links weren’t working. Suddenly every word was underlined.
    As I struggled to master these tasks, I felt rushed and anxious when I couldn’t figure something out right away, until I hit upon a way to help myself slow down: I “put myself in jail.” “I’m in jail,” I’d tell myself. “I’m locked up with nowhere to go and nothing to do except the task in front of me. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, I have all the time I want.” Of course, this wasn’t true, but telling myself that I had all the time I needed helped me to focus.
    As I worked on the blog, I often had to remind myself to “Be Gretchen” and to be faithful to my vision of my project. Many kind, smart people gave me advice. One person encouraged me to “stick with irony,” and several people suggested that I comment frequently on news items. One friend, in all sympathy, told me that the phrase “The Happiness Project” was no good and made the pitch for “Oh Happy Day.”
    “I can’t really imagine changing the name,” I said uncertainly. “It’s been the Happiness Project right from the first moment I thought of the idea.”
    He shook his head. “It’s not too late to change!”
    Another friend had a different suggestion. “You should explore your conflicts with your mother,” he urged. “Everyone’s interested in that.”
    “Good point…but I don’t really have much conflict with my mother,” I said, regretting my close relationship with my mother for the first time ever.
    “Huh,” he answered. Clearly he thought I was in massive denial.
    All these suggestions were sound and very well intentioned, and each time I got a new piece of advice, I’d worry; one of the biggest challenges posed by my blog was the doubt raised by my own inner critic. Should I recast the Happiness Project? Did the word “project” sound difficult and unappealing? Was it egocentric to write so much about my own experience? Was my earnest tone too preachy? Very likely! But I didn’t want to be like the novelist who spent so much time rewriting his first sentence that he never wrote his second. If I wanted to get anything accomplished, I needed to keep pushing ahead without constantly second-guessing myself.
    The gratifying thing was that once I’d launched it, people responded enthusiastically to my blog just as it was. At first I didn’t even know enough to be able to track my traffic, but little by little, I figured out how to monitor it. I remember the shock of delight I got when I’d checked Technorati, the leading blog monitor, for the first time—and discovered that I’d made it into the Technorati Top 5000, without even knowing it. Because I’d launched the blog as part of my personal happiness project, I hadn’t expected it actually to attract an audience, so its slowly expanding success was an unanticipated pleasure—and a great contributor to the atmosphere of growth in my life.
    One reason that challenge brings happiness is that it allows you to expand your self-definition. You become larger. Suddenly you can do yoga or make homemade beer or speak a decent amount of Spanish. Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened.