[MUSIC]
EMILIYA ZHIVOTOVSKAYA: A lot of people are taking a stronger interest in happiness right
now than ever before.
EBONY STATON WEIDMAN: Why wouldn't you want to do something to increase your happiness?
JENNIFER PELKA: I've decided that I'm actually going to buy all of the women in my life this
book.
JENNIFER PELKA: I remember hearing about the happiness project and thinking this sounds
so incredibly annoying, I'm never going to read it.
And I ended up actually really loving this book.
EMILIYA ZHIVOTOVSKAYA: I really love the element of the story that Gretchen brought to it.
I felt like I was her long lost best friend.
Just hanging out with her and getting to know her kids, getting to know her husband.
EBONY STATON WEIDMAN: I read the book last year and had a chance to meet the author and
was really fascinated and captivated by her.
And recently I decided to start my own happiness project.
ANGRY BOB: Here's the deal.
I like this book.
You know why?
Makes a very weird noise when you throw it against the wall.
GRETCHEN RUBIN: I had the idea for "The Happiness Project" when I was on the city bus in the
pouring rain and I thought "What do I want from life anyway?
I want to be happy."
But I realized I had never spent any time thinking about whether I was happy or how
I could be happier.
GRETCHEN RUBIN: This book is really a memoir of thinking and researching and experimenting.
So its one of these "year of" experiments.
JENNIFER PELKA: Every month Gretchen creates different happiness resolutions so she can
figure out what really makes her happy.
EMILIYA ZHIVOTOVSKAYA: Reading "The Happiness Project", the image I sometimes get is like
Gretchen trying on all these different outfits.She tries on the "let me clean up the house" project,
"let me put on the connect with my friends" one and then at the end of the day she kind
of tries to put that outfit together.
EBONY STATON WEIDMAN: She was doing it almost as a researcher and using herself as the subject.
JENNIFER PELKA: I think what's so amazing about her twelve experiments is that many
of them..she fails at.
She realizes that her happiness is not the same as other people's happiness and that's
ok.
GRETCHEN RUBIN: Clearly I am way over the top with my happiness project and part of
the idea was it was like "I'll do all these things so you don't have to."
And my sense of it is that most people read it and they take away a few things that really
work for them, but they don't do the whole project as systematically.
EBONY STATON WEIDMAN: There was lots going on in my life at the time and I could tell
that I was ready for a change.
There's tons of self-help books out there but I think this seemed very doable, involving
every day changes to make a really big impact.
EBONY STATON WEIDMAN: So what I'm doing with the vision book is, you know, some writings
but a lot of visual things as well.
Picture and things that inspire me or just little sketches.
It not a diary but rather let me start to envision my future and let me start to envision
my happiness.
EMILIYA ZHIVOTOVSKAYA: If you ask people why do you want to have a successful career?
Why do you want to learn more?
Why do you want to get healthy?
If you keep asking them at the root of it they would say that they want to be happy.
EBONY STATON WEIDMAN: I can't think of one person who doesn't want to be happy.
But they don't pause to sort of say, "What does success look like for me?
What does happiness look like for me?"
And so they're searching for it but they never stopped to define it for themselves.
ANGRY BOB: Happiness is something that doesn't need to be pondered.
Just do your life.
Go enjoy yourself.
Hang out with your friends.
Stop thinking about it!
Stop writing about it!
GRETCHEN RUBIN: There's this idea that the minute that you start asking yourself if you're
happy you're gonna kinda trip over own feet and that you're much better off instead of
pursuing happiness, pursuing other things and then letting happiness come as a by-product.
JENNIFER PELKA: I think there are so many ways that asking yourself if you're happy
allows you to be happier.
GRETCHEN RUBIN: If you don't remind yourself that you are happy, it can just pass unnoticed
right under your feet.
ANGRY BOB: We have it too good in this country.
If you were in a third world country you're worried about finding food.
You're worried about running from animals or political insurgents, you know?
We have too much free time on our hands to engage in this asinine introspection.
GRETCHEN RUBIN: We really live in a very prosperous time relative to all of history and I think
that it's just natural when people feel safe and secure that they turn their minds to higher
things like happiness.
ANGRY BOB: There's been a thousand books written all on the same subject lines is "I have almost
everything I want in my life, I need a little more."
JENNIFER PELKA: It is a little bit frustrating that the narrator of this book truely is like
pretty in control of her life and now she has created this, you know, daily document
to make her life incrementally that much more perfect.
GRETCHEN RUBIN: A lot of people felt like well it was very sort of self indulgent for
a person who wasn't deeply unhappy to be spending time thinking about how to be happier.
EMILIYA ZHIVOTOVSKAYA: I think the fact that Gretchen comes from a slightly happy state
to begin with is actually one of the biggest strengths of this book.
Because most people are actually in the same boat.
GRETCHEN RUBIN: Happiness has this really bad reputation.
And a lot of people say like oh well happy people are smug and self-centered, but research
shows that it's when we're happier ourselves that we have the emotional wherewithal to
turn outward and think about other people.
EMILIYA ZHIVOTOVSKAYA: When you are authentically happier yourself, that resonates.
That's an energy that people pick up on.
JENNIFER PELKA: As somebody who rides the subway everyday I can say that when people
around me are unhappy, I am also unhappy.
GRETCHEN RUBIN: It turns out that unhappy people are more likely to be defensive, isolated,
and preoccupied with their own problems.
ANGRY BOB: So Gretchen's argument about that unhappy people make other people unhappy,
well my feeling is everyone needs a hobby.
EBONY STATON WEIDMAN: Happiness is contagious.
I think the negative can be contagious too and so people have to be responsible with
how they treat other people.
So I hope that everything that comes out of this project for me, you know, making me happier
but also kind of sending that out and paying that forward and then other people, you know,
being happier as well.
GRETCHEN RUBIN: Really I feel like all the things that I was working on, I'm going to
be working on for the rest of my life.
I'm more interested in happiness than ever.
I feel like the deeper that I go, the bigger it gets.
[MUSIC]