The Happiness Project (10 page)

Extreme Nice also started me thinking about the degree to which Jamie and I accepted orders from each other. It’s safe to say that married people spend a lot of time trying to coax each other into performing various chores, and the ability to cooperate in tackling daily tasks is a key component of a happy marriage. Often I wish I could tell Jamie, “Call the super” or “Unload the dishwasher,” and have him obey me unhesitatingly. And I’m sure he wishes he could say, “Don’t eat outside the kitchen” or “Find the keys to the basement storage room,” and have
me
obey
him.
So I tried to do cheerfully whatever he asked me to do, without debate.

As the days went by, I did feel a bit of resentment when Jamie never seemed to notice that he was the winner of a Week of Extreme Nice. Then I realized that I should be
pleased
that he didn’t notice, because it showed that the Week of Extreme Nice wasn’t a shocking improvement over our regular, unextreme lives.

The Week of Extreme Nice proved the power of my commandment to “Act the way I want to feel” because I was treating Jamie extremely nicely, I found myself feeling more tender toward him. Nevertheless, although it was a valuable experiment, I was relieved when the week was over. I couldn’t keep up the intensity of being that Nice. My tongue hurt because I’d bitten it so often.

As I was filling in my Resolutions Chart on the last afternoon of February, I was struck by the significance of the chart to my happiness project. The process of constantly reviewing my resolutions and holding myself accountable each day was already having a big effect on my behavior, and it wasn’t even March yet. I’d made dozens of resolutions in my life—every New Year since I was nine or ten years old—but keeping the Resolutions Chart was allowing me to live up to my resolutions more faithfully than I’d even been able to do before. I’d heard the business school truism “You manage what you measure,” and I could see how this phenomenon worked in my case.

The end of February brought me another important realization as well. For a long time, I’d been puzzling to come up with an overall theory of happiness, and one afternoon, after many false starts, I arrived at my earth-shattering happiness formula.

It hit me while I was on the subway. I was reading Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer’s
Happiness and Economics,
and I looked up for a moment to ponder the meaning of the sentence “It has been shown that pleasant affect, unpleasant affect, and life satisfaction are separable constructs.” Along the same lines, I’d just read some research that showed that happiness and unhappiness (or, in more scientific terms, positive affect and negative affect) aren’t opposite sides of the same emotion—they’re distinct and rise and fall independently. Suddenly, as I thought about these ideas and about my own experience so far, everything slipped into place, and my happiness formula sprang into my mind with such a jolt that I felt as if the other subway riders must have been able to see a lightbulb appearing above my head.

To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right
.

So simple, yet so profound. It looks like something you might read on the cover of a glossy magazine, but it had taken enormous effort to
come up with a framework that ordered and distilled everything I’d learned.

To be happy, I needed to generate more positive emotions, so that I increased the amount of joy, pleasure, enthusiasm, gratitude, intimacy, and friendship in my life. That wasn’t hard to understand. I also needed to remove sources of bad feelings, so that I suffered less guilt, remorse, shame, anger, envy, boredom, and irritation. Also easy to understand. And apart from feeling more “good” and feeling less “bad,” I saw that I also needed to consider
feeling right.

“Feeling right” was a trickier concept: it was the feeling that I’m living the life I’m supposed to lead. In my own case, although I’d had a great experience as a lawyer, I’d been haunted by an uncomfortable feeling—that I wasn’t doing what I was “supposed” to be doing. Now, though my writing career can be a source of “feeling bad” as well as “feeling good,” I do “feel right.”

“Feeling right” is about living the life that’s right for you—in occupation, location, marital status, and so on. It’s also about virtue: doing your duty, living up to the expectations you set for yourself. For some people, “feeling right” can also include less elevated considerations: achieving a certain job status or material standard of living.

After the first few minutes, the ecstasy of discovering my formula wore off, and I realized that it wasn’t quite complete. It was lacking some important element. I searched for a way to account for the fact that people seem programmed to be striving constantly, to be stretching toward happiness. For example, we tend to think that we’ll be slightly happier in the future than we are in the present. And a sense of purpose is very important to happiness. But my formula didn’t account for these observations. I searched for the missing concept—was it striving? Advancement? Purpose? Hope? None of these words seemed right. Then I thought of a line from William Butler Yeats. “Happiness,” wrote Yeats, “is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” Contemporary researchers make the same
argument: that it isn’t goal attainment but the process of striving after goals—that is, growth—that brings happiness.

Of course. Growth. Growth explains the happiness brought by training for a marathon, learning a new language, collecting stamps; by helping children learn to talk; by cooking your way through every recipe in a Julia Child cookbook. My father was a great tennis player and played a lot when I was growing up. At some point, he started playing golf and, over time, gave up tennis. I asked him why. “My tennis game,” he explained, “was gradually getting worse, but my golf game is improving.”

People are very adaptable, and we quickly adjust to a new life circumstance—for better or worse—and consider it normal. Although this helps us when our situation worsens, it means that when circumstances improve, we soon become hardened to new comforts or privileges. This “hedonic treadmill,” as it’s called, makes it easy to grow accustomed to some of the things that make you “feel good,” such as a new car, a new job title, or air-conditioning, so that the good feeling wears off. An atmosphere of growth offsets that. You may soon take your new dining room table for granted, but tending your garden will give you fresh joy and surprise every spring. Growth is important in a spiritual sense, and I do think that material growth is gratifying as well. As much as folks insist that money can’t buy happiness, for example, it’s awfully nice to have more money this year than you had last year.

So I arrived at my final formula, and it struck me as so important that I named it the First Splendid Truth—I’d have to trust that I’d have at least one more Splendid Truth by the time the year was over. The First Splendid Truth:
To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

I called Jamie the minute I got home. “At last!” I said. “I have my happiness formula! It’s just one sentence long, and with it, I can tie together all the studies, all the loose ends that were driving me crazy.”

“That’s great!” said Jamie, very enthusiastically. Pause.

“Don’t you want to hear the formula?” I hinted. I had decided not to
expect Jamie to play the role of my female writing partner—but sometimes he just was going to have to do his best.

“Of course, right!” he said. “What’s the formula?”

Well, he was trying. And maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that now that I was trying harder, Jamie was trying harder, too. I couldn’t put my finger on what was different exactly, but he seemed more loving. He wasn’t much interested in talking about happiness—in fact, he felt like a bit of a martyr to my inexhaustible enthusiasm for the subject—but he had started replacing the dead lightbulbs without waiting for me to bug him, and he seemed to be answering my e-mails more diligently. He bought us the backgammon set. He asked me for my happiness formula.

When thinking about happiness in marriage, you may have an almost irresistible impulse to focus on your spouse, to emphasize how he or she should change in order to boost your happiness. But the fact is, you can’t change anyone but yourself. A friend told me that her “marriage mantra” was “I love Leo,
just as he is.
” I love Jamie just as he is. I can’t make him do a better job of doing household chores, I can only stop myself from nagging—and that makes me happier. When you give up expecting a spouse to change (within reason), you lessen anger and resentment, and that creates a more loving atmosphere in a marriage.

Aim Higher

W
ORK

Launch a blog.

Enjoy the fun of failure.

Ask for help.

Work smart.

Enjoy now.

H
appiness is a critical factor for work, and work is a critical factor for happiness. In one of those life-isn’t-fair results, it turns out that the happy outperform the less happy. Happy people work more hours each week—and they work more in their free time, too. They tend to be more cooperative, less self-centered, and more willing to help other people—say, by sharing information or pitching in to help a colleague—and then, because they’ve helped others, others tend to help them. Also, they work better with others, because people prefer to be around happier people, who are also less likely to show the counterproductive behav
iors of burnout, absenteeism, counter-and nonproductive work, work disputes, and retaliatory behavior than are less happy people.

Happier people also make more effective leaders. They perform better on managerial tasks such as leadership and mastery of information. They’re viewed as more assertive and self-confident than less happy people. They’re perceived to be more friendly, warmer, and even more
physically
attractive. A study showed that students who were happy as college freshmen were earning more money in their midthirties—without any wealth advantage to start. Being happy can make a big difference in your work life.

Of course, happiness also matters to work simply because work occupies so much of our time. A majority of Americans work seven or more hours each day, and time spent on vacation is shrinking. Also, work can be a source of many of the elements necessary for a happy life: the atmosphere of growth, social contact, fun, a sense of purpose, self-esteem, recognition.

Whenever I feel blue, working cheers me. Sometimes when I sink into a bad mood, Jamie says, “Why don’t you go to your office for a while?” Even if I don’t feel like working, once I plunge in, the encouraging feeling of getting something accomplished, the intellectual stimulation, and even the mere distraction lift me out of my crabbiness.

Because work is so crucial to happiness, another person’s happiness project might well focus on choosing the right work. I, however, had already been through a major happiness quest career shift. I’d started out in law, and I’d had a great experience. But when my clerkship with Justice O’Connor drew to a close, I couldn’t figure out what job I wanted next.

During this time, I visited the apartment of a friend who was in graduate school studying education, and I noticed several thick textbooks lying around her living room.

“Is this what they make you read for your program?” I asked, idly flipping through the dense, dull pages.

“Yes,” she said, “but that’s what I read in my spare time, anyhow.”

For some reason, that casual answer shocked me to attention. What did
I
do in my spare time? I asked myself. As much as I liked clerking, I never spent one second more on legal subjects than I had to. For fun, I was writing a book (which would later become
Power Money Fame Sex
), and it occurred to me that perhaps I could write books for a living. Over the next several months, I became convinced that that was what I wanted to do.

I’m a very ambitious, competitive person, and it was wrenching to walk away from my legal credentials and start my career over from the beginning. Being editor in chief of
The Yale Law Journal,
winning a legal writing prize—inside the world of law, these credentials mattered a lot. Outside the world of law, they didn’t matter at all. My ambition, however, was also a factor in leaving the law. I’d become convinced that passion was a critical factor in professional success. People who love their work bring an intensity and enthusiasm that’s impossible to match through sheer diligence. I could see that in my co-clerks at the Supreme Court: they read law journals for fun, they talked about cases during their lunch hours, they felt energized by their efforts. I didn’t.

Enthusiasm is more important to mastery than innate ability, it turns out, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice. Therefore, career experts argue, you’re better off pursuing a profession that comes easily and that you love, because that’s where you’ll be more eager to practice and thereby earn a competitive advantage.

I love writing, reading, research, note taking, analysis, and criticism. (Well, I don’t actually love
writing,
but then practically no writer actually loves the writing part.) My past, when I thought back, was littered with clues that I wanted to be a writer. I’d written two novels, now locked in a drawer. I’ve always spent most of my free time reading. I take voluminous notes for no apparent reason. I majored in English. And the biggest clue: I was writing a book in my free time.

Why hadn’t it occurred to me sooner to think about writing for a
living? There are probably several reasons, but the most important is the fact that it’s often hard for me to “Be Gretchen.” Erasmus observed, “The chief happiness for a man is to be what he is,” and although that sounds easy enough, it has always been difficult for me. That’s why “Be Gretchen” is the first of my Twelve Commandments.

I have an idea of who I
wish
I were, and that obscures my understanding of who I actually am. Sometimes I pretend even to myself to enjoy activities that I don’t really enjoy, such as shopping, or to be interested in subjects that don’t much interest me, such as foreign policy. And worse, I ignore my true desires and interests.

“Fake it till 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 “You
can 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.