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

Losing your job might be a blow to your self-esteem, but the fact that you lead your local alumni association gives you a comforting source of self-respect. Also, a new identity brings you into contact with new people and new experiences, which are also powerful sources of happiness.
    That’s how it worked for me. My blog gave me a new identity, new skills, a new set of colleagues, and a way to connect with people who shared my interest. I’d expanded my vision of the kind of writer I could be. I had become a blogger.
    ENJOY THE FUN OF FAILURE.
    As I was pushing myself on the blog, I wanted to extend myself in other parts of my work, too. I wanted to nudge myself out of my comfort zone into my stretch zone. But wasn’t that resolution inconsistent with “Be Gretchen”?
    Yes and no. I wanted to develop in my natural direction. W. H. Auden articulated this tension beautifully: “Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.” Starting my blog, for example, made me feel anxious, but deep down, I knew I could do it and would very likely enjoy it, once I’d overcome the initial intimidating hurdles.
    Pushing myself, I knew, would cause me serious discomfort. It’s a Secret of Adulthood: Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy. When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself, I realized that it was because I was afraid of failure—but in order to have more success, I needed to be willing to accept more failure. I remembered the words of Robert Browning: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”
    To counteract this fear, I told myself, “ I enjoy the fun of failure .” It’s fun to fail, I kept repeating. It’s part of being ambitious; it’s part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
    And in fact this mantra helped me. The words “the fun of failure”released me from my sense of dread. And I did fail. I applied to the prestigious writing colony Yaddo, and I wasn’t accepted. I pitched a column to The Wall Street Journal, and although it looked promising, the editors ultimately told me there was no room for it. I was dismayed by the sales report for Forty Ways to Look at JFK, which didn’t sell nearly as well as Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill (“I don’t want to be flip,” my agent said comfortingly, “but maybe you can use this disappointment for your happiness project”). I talked to a friend about starting a biography reading group, but the idea fizzled out. I submitted an essay for the back page of The New York Times Book Review, but it was rejected. I talked to a friend about teaming up to do webcasts, but that didn’t work out. I sent innumerable e-mails to try to get links to my blog, most of which were ignored.
    At the same time, risking failure gave me the opportunity to score some successes. I was invited to contribute to the enormously popular Huffington Post blog, and I started to get picked up by huge blogs such as Lifehacker, Lifehack, and Marginal Revolution. I was invited to join the LifeRemix blog network. I wrote a piece about money and happiness for The Wall Street Journal . I started going to a monthly writers’ meeting. In the past, I think I might have shied away from pursuing these goals, because I wouldn’t have wanted to deal with rejection.
    Friends told me about similar shifts in thinking that had helped them. One friend said that in his office, whenever crisis strikes, he tells everyone, “This is the fun part!” Although I wasn’t even halfway through my happiness project, I could already appreciate that feeling happier made it easier for me to risk failure—or rather, made it easier for me to embrace the fun of failure. A goal like launching a blog was much easier to tackle when I was in a happy frame of mind. Then, once the blog was launched, it became an engine of happiness itself.
    ASK FOR HELP.
    Despite the fact that “It’s okay to ask for help” is one of my Secrets of Adulthood, I constantly had to remind myself to ask for help. I often had the immature and counterproductive impulse to pretend to know things that I didn’t know.
    Perhaps because I was constantly reviewing my goal and my resolutions in March, I