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 improve
ment.”
I tentatively floated the idea in an e-mail to Michael and Marci. To my surprised gratification, they both immediately embraced the idea. Michael suggested a structure for our meetings. “How about every six weeks, for two hours? Twenty minutes of catch-up conversation, then thirty minutes each to talk about our individual concerns, with a ten-minute break in the middle.” Marci and I embraced this highly defined structure, which was a good indication that the three of us were well matched.
“And we should give ourselves a name,” Marci said, only half joking. “And what kind of group are we?”
We decided to call ourselves MGM, after our initials, and we decided that we were a “writers’ strategy group.” We didn’t talk about actual writing very much, though sometimes one of us circulated a chapter or two; we spent most of our time talking about strategy. Should Michael hire a virtual assistant? Was Marci spending too much time touring for her book? Should Gretchen send out a happiness project newsletter? The group was an instant success. Sitting with two other energetic, encouraging, smart writers for a few hours exhilarated me. Also, as with groups such as Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous, and with my Resolutions Chart, we gave one another a sense of accountability.
Only after we’d met a few times did I stumble on some career-building articles that suggested forming a “community of aspirants” or, in less elaborate terms, a “goals group.” Shoot, I’d thought I’d invented the idea.
WORK SMART.
Turning aside from lofty ambition to prosaic details, I figured that I’d work better if I spent some time thinking about how to boost my efficiency. At the very least, I could make my day feel calmer. I felt as if I never had enough time for all the work I wanted to do.
I started paying close attention to how I spent my days. Were there pockets of time that I was wasting? Could I find the equivalent of loose change under the sofa, like an overlooked habit of watching a Law & Order rerun every night? Alas, I was running pretty close to efficiency. If I was watching a rerun, I was paying bills at the same time. Nevertheless, considering the way I spent my time yielded some good results.
I changed the way I thought about productive time. In the past, I’d believed that I couldn’t sit down and write productively unless I had at least three or four hours with no interruptions. Often, that was hard to arrange, and I felt inefficient and frustrated. To test that assumption, for a few weeks, I added a note on my Resolutions Chart to remind myself of what I’d worked on each day. It didn’t take me long to see that I did better when I had less time. Not several hours but ninety minutes turned out to be the optimally efficient length of time—long enough for me to get some real work done but not so long that I started to goof off or lose concentration. As a consequence, I began to organize my day into ninety-minute writing blocks, separated by different non-writing tasks: exercising, meeting someone, making a phone call, tinkering with my blog.
Also, although I’d always considered fifteen minutes to be too short a period in which to get anything done, I started to push myself to squeeze in an extra fifteen minutes somewhere during the day. This was often wedged in between two appointments or at the very end of the workday. It did, indeed, boost my productivity. Fifteen minutes a day, several times a week, was not insignificant—fifteen minutes was long enough to draft a blog post, to make notes on research 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, I went 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’s another 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 realization gave me such an ecstatic shock of recognition that tears welled up in my eyes. I spent the next several days testing my theory, and the more I read, the more excited I became. The requirements of a classical tragedy are very stringent, yet I was able to prove that Churchill’s life met every one of them. Ah, that was the fun part.
But the arrival fallacy doesn’t mean that pursuing goals isn’t a route to happiness. To the contrary. The goal is necessary, just as is the process toward the goal. Friedrich Nietzsche explained it well: “The end of
a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.”
To enjoy now, there was something else I was going to have to master: my dread of criticism. Too much concern about whether I was getting praise or blame, too much anticipatory anxiety about what my detractors would say—those kinds of fears spoiled my pleasure in my work and, what’s more, probably weakened my work.
I’d had a chance to tackle this very issue, during my preparation stage for the happiness project, when The Washington Post published a critical review of my biography Forty Ways to Look at JFK. At that point, I’d learned a lot of happiness theories and I’d identified my Twelve Commandments, but I hadn’t put much into practice.
The review made me feel depressed, defensive, and angry; I wished that I felt secure, open to criticism, with benevolent feelings toward the reviewer. I decided to apply my Third Commandment, to “Act the way I want to feel.” Would it really work in this extreme case? I made myself do something I did not want to do. I sent a friendly e-mail to the reviewer, in order to show myself that I was confident enough to take criticism graciously and able to respond without attack or self-justification. It took me a very, very long time to compose that e-mail. But guess what—it worked. The minute I sent it, I felt better.
Hello David Greenberg—
As you can imagine, I read with interest your review of my book on Wednesday.
While writing, I have the disheartening habit of composing negative reviews—imagining how I’d criticize the very work I’m doing. Your review hit three of my dark themes—gimmick, arbitrary, obvious. You criticized me most where I criticized myself. In brighter moments, I was satisfied that I captured some of the insight I felt I gained into Kennedy, and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to convey that to you.
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