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

that I’d been reading, or to answer some e-mails. As I’d found in January, when I started applying the “one-minute rule” and the “evening tidy-up,” small efforts, made consistently, brought significant results. I felt more in control of my workload.
    I halfheartedly considered trying to get up early each day to work for an hour or so before my family awoke. Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, attributed his productivity to his habit of starting his day at 5:30 A.M . In his Autobiography, he notes, “An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy.” Which suggests that it’s not easy to get out of bed at 5:30 A.M .—especially if you don’t have an old groom on hand to shake you awake. Nope, 6:30 A.M . was as early as I could push it.
    I found a small way to make my office more pleasant. At a party at someone’s house, I smelled a scent so lovely that I walked around the room sniffing until I found the source: a Jo Malone Orange Blossom candle. Although I never buy this sort of thing, when I got home, Iwent straight to the computer and ordered one for myself, and I started the habit of burning it in my office. Though I sometimes mocked the scented-candle-pushing brand of happiness building, I discovered that there is something nice about working in an office with a candle burning. It’s like seeing snow falling outside the window or having a dog snoozing on the carpet beside you. It’s a kind of silent presence in the room and very pleasant.
    ENJOY NOW.
    As I worked, and especially when I was pushing myself to do things that made me slightly uncomfortable, I kept reminding myself of my resolution to “Enjoy now.” As a writer, I often found myself imagining some happy future: “When I sell this proposal…” or “When this book comes out…”
    In his book Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar describes the “arrival fallacy,” the belief that when you arrive at a certain destination, you’ll be happy. (Other fallacies include the “floating world fallacy,” the belief that immediate pleasure, cut off from future purpose, can bring happiness, and the “nihilism fallacy,” the belief that it’s not possible to become happier.) The arrival fallacy is a fallacy because, though you may anticipate great happiness in arrival, arriving rarely makes you as happy as you anticipate.
    First of all, by the time you’ve arrived at your destination, you’re expecting to reach it, so it has already been incorporated into your happiness. Also, arrival often brings more work and responsibility. It’s rare to achieve something (other than winning an award) that brings unadulterated pleasure without added concerns. Having a baby. Getting a promotion. Buying a house. You look forward to reaching these destinations, but once you’ve reached them, they bring emotions other than sheer happiness. And of course, arriving at one goal usually reveals another, yet more challenging goal. Publishing the first book means it’s time to start the second. There’sanother hill to climb. The challenge, therefore, is to take pleasure in the “atmosphere of growth,” in the gradual progress made toward a goal, in the present. The unpoetic name for this very powerful source of happiness is “pre-goal-attainment positive affect.”
    When I find myself focusing overmuch on the anticipated future happiness of arriving at a certain goal, I remind myself to “Enjoy now.” If I can enjoy the present, I don’t need to count on the happiness that is (or isn’t) waiting for me in the future. The fun part doesn’t come later, now is the fun part. That’s another reason I feel lucky to enjoy my work so much. If you’re doing something that you don’t enjoy and you don’t have the gratification of success, failure is particularly painful. But doing what you love is itself the reward.
    When I thought back on the experience of writing my Churchill biography, for example, the most thrilling moment came when I was sitting at a study table at the library where I do most of my writing and I read two lines from Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940: “We shall go on to the end…we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.” As I read, the thought occurred to me, “Churchill’s life fits the pattern of classical tragedy.” This