The Happiness Project (11 page)

This is one of the many paradoxes of happiness: we seek to control our lives, but the unfamiliar and the unexpected are important sources of happiness. What’s more, because novelty requires more work from the brain, dealing with novel situations evokes more intense emotional responses and makes the passage of time seem slower and richer. After the birth of his first child, a friend told me, “One reason that I love having a new baby is that time has slowed down. My wife and I felt like our lives were speeding by, but the minute Clara was born, it was like time stood still. Each week has been like an 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 other
people 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.

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. 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 came up with a novel way to ask for help: I pulled together a strategy group. I had recently met two writers, Michael and Marci. Each of us was working on a book, each of us was trying to be smart about our project and our overall career, each of us was an extroverted type working alone much of the time and eager for conversation. When I discovered that, coincidentally, Michael and Marci knew each other, I had an inspiration.

In February, I’d identified a problem. I wished I had a writing partner, someone with whom I could discuss writing and career strategy. I’d let Jamie off the hook, mostly, but maybe Michael, Marci, and I could form a group that would help fill that need. Benjamin Franklin, along with twelve friends, formed a club for mutual improvement that met weekly for forty years. Maybe we could form a group, with a slightly narrower mission than “mutual improvement.”