Let it be Fun

Why Gretchen Rubin set out on a search to understand happiness and what she learned about her life along the way.
By Jenna Schnuer

The apology for the mess is by no means necessary. Actually, it's overkill. With two daughters, 3 and 9, it would be understandable—and, even, expected—for author Gretchen Rubin's living room to be littered with plastic ponies and school backpacks. Instead, the coffee table is out of place. That's pretty much the extent of the mess. And, on this traditionally frenetic day before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, Rubin, who has just returned to her apartment in time for the interview, looks more put together than most people do on their best mornings.

The apology is the first sign that Rubin, 43, has a bit of a perfectionist streak, that she considers everything. But it also becomes clear that the apology is as much a clue to Rubin's warmth and generosity. Of ideas. Of discussion. Of making sure that a guest in her home feels welcome and comfortable.

Considering Rubin's current book project is about happiness, it's all rather perfect. Spending time with her is really a great joy.

Rubin latched onto happiness while riding the M79 bus across Manhattan.

"I have these moments of epiphany which, I realize, makes me sound like I'm very dramatic but I'm not," Rubin says. "It was raining, and I was looking out the window. And I thought, ‘What do I need from life anyway?' I was thinking, ‘What do I want?' I want to be happy. I realized I never think about happiness even though I say it's my big priority. I never think about what would make me happy or how I could be happier or even what it means to be happy. I thought I should have a happiness project."

Within minutes her analytical nature pushed the idea forward.

"I'm very planned out and plotted out," she says. "And then I thought I could write a book about the happiness project. I could see the whole thing and how it would all come together."

She continued to shape the idea while finishing her fourth book, Forty Ways to Look at JFK: "I went through many evolutions of my thinking."

In the past, Rubin immersed herself in her book topics by reading anything and everything she could dredge up on the subject. Much of the wall space in her living room is devoted to built-in bookshelves that are neatly—though tightly—packed. But, for the book she's working on now, Rubin has turned to an additional source of material: her own life. For The Happiness Project, due out in late 2009 by HarperCollins, Rubin spent a year "test-driving every principle, tip, theory and scientific study" she could find about the quest for happiness.

Over the last three years, Rubin's work on the project and her life have become completely intertwined. And that's a good thing.

Even if she learned nothing else along the way—but how much she's learned!—Rubin makes it clear that 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill's statement, "Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so," is as far from the truth of happiness as you can get. With every sentence she offers up about the ways the happiness project has expanded and enriched her life, the author glows just a bit brighter.

Breaking Away
Rubin credits that rainy day cross-town bus ride as the birth date for The Happiness Project, but it really started much earlier. A 1994 graduate of Yale Law School (where she was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal), it would have been a safe bet to count on Rubin having a long and high-powered career in law. Her father was a successful and happy lawyer back in Kansas City, Mo., and, well, Rubin's first post-degree job was as a clerk for former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Not a shabby start. It was the next step that tripped her up. She realized she just wasn't sure what she wanted to do, "which is kind of a bad sign." She could have played it safe and stayed with law but, as she has learned, success can be a trap.

"People can be good at things that aren't really the highest and best use of their time," she says.

Around that time, Rubin visited a friend who was in graduate school for education.

"She was reading all these dry books about education. I said something very dismissively like, ‘Is this what you have to read for your program?' She said, ‘Yeah, but that's the kind of stuff I read anyway.'"

Cue the light bulb.

"That's when I realized I was surrounded by all these people who loved law. They talked about law on their lunch hours. They read law journals for fun. They were totally into it," she says. "I [spent just what time] I needed to do to do my job well and not one minute more."

While her friends were soaking up the law journals, Rubin spent her spare time writing a book exploring power, money, fame and sex.

"I was doing it as a hobby," she says.

Rubin ended up taking one more law-related job, at the Federal Communications Commission, before she and her husband (whom she met in law school) decided to leave their legal careers behind and move to his hometown, New York City.

After the move she bought a book about how to sell a book proposal "and switched to being a full-time writer." She published Power Money Fame Sex: A User's Guide in 2001.

So, years before she took that bus ride, she had already practiced one of the essential elements of happiness: stay true to your nature. Nowadays, she sums it up in the first of the 12 commandments she has developed for her own happiness: Be Gretchen.

Get in on the Project
No, there isn't a precise recipe for happiness. Instead, Rubin offers up a basic framework of four elements essential for a happy life: 1) Make sure you have "enough feeling good" in your life, 2) know what makes you feel bad, 3) know that you are living the life that feels right for you, 4) develop an atmosphere of growth.

"You need positive change," she says.

Think of it as though you're choosing a location for a regular client's annual event. You'll need a place that fits the needs of the group. You don't want a room that's too cramped or loud for the meeting. You choose a location that fits the personality of the group. And, to really make the event shine, you find a place that excites and inspires the participants.

"One of the findings of the science of happiness—and it's certainly buttressed by the philosophers of happiness from the past—is that novelty and challenge bring happiness," Rubin says. "Part of it is that you get the feeling of mastery and part of it is that when your brain is forced to do something new you have a more intense emotional experience."

Trying something new is also one of the best tools around to stop life from just speeding on by.

"When something new happens, time slows down," Rubin says. "You think that time is going to speed up but the first month of a job is like a year. Or the first three months with your baby is like a lifetime. That can be good."

The key to finding positive change—whether through a new hobby or a job challenge—is to figure out "what are you intimidated by but secretly attracted to?" She set out to find her own challenge to test the positive change theory. "I thought, ‘What could I do that would be novel and challenging?' People said, ‘Well you can try line dancing' and I thought, ‘Oh, I don't want to do that.' Then my agent suggested a blog."

This was in 2006 and, at the time, Rubin was a self-professed luddite. Blogging had started to take off but it was hardly the widespread rage that it is today.

"I had no idea how these things worked," she says. "I didn't read blogs. But it was reading and writing and creative. It was more the kind of thing that would appeal to me."

Basically, blogging had all the hooks that charged Rubin up—but with a twist. She launched her blog, www.happiness-project.com, in March 2006. It quickly became a favorite activity for the writer. While the book "is much more coherent, woven together and analytical," the blog gives her a home for all the bits that didn't fit in.

"The book is deeper but it's not as wide," she says.

Rubin has since become an active member of the blogging community.

"It's interesting to have immediate feedback from an audience—especially on something like happiness where people come at it from different points of view that I couldn't have generated on my own, so that's really fascinating," she says. "And I've connected with all these other bloggers who write about it from their own points of view."

The Joy of Barry Manilow
Unfortunately, happy people often take a hit. They are often perceived as naïve when held up against crankier counterparts. One study showed that if people read two book reviews, one critical and one positive, the critical reviewer gets higher marks for smarts.

"It does bug me because I think it's very shortsighted," Rubin says. "I think it takes a lot more energy and self-discipline to be happy."

While reading for the project, Rubin came across a prayer by St. Augustine of Hippo "[that said] something like, ‘dear Jesus, console your sick ones, comfort your dying ones' and then it says ‘shield your joyous ones.'" At first, she rejected the notion that the joyous ones needed any help as, well, they were already happy.

"Then I realized they're always under attack and being criticized. They do need to be shielded."

Rubin posted a blog entry about it and, soon enough, some self-described joyous ones wrote in to say that they didn't understand why people were always trying to knock them down.

"I think there is this feeling where people kind of pride themselves on their irony and their discernment."

The joy of joy in action (sans the bad vibes) became evident to Rubin at a Barry Manilow concert for a law school friend's birthday.

"I was so impressed by the fact that she could be so wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it," she says. "There was no irony. It was not campy. She loved it. I got so into it. I thought this is so much better than us all sitting around making snarky comments about Barry Manilow or not even going because we were so busy making fun of it. Let it be fun."

Let it be Fun
It's one of the greatest lessons Rubin has learned. Though a fan of children's literature, Rubin hid her passion.

"It didn't comport with my idea of myself: that I was very educated, very sophisticated, very grown up," she says. "That I had these very erudite tastes. Which is true, but then I also had this taste for children's literature. One of the ways I was living a false life was that when one of the Harry Potter books came out I didn't even buy it for like two weeks. I hadn't embraced how much I really loved it."

The Happiness Project gave her the chance to bring Potter (and loads of other kid lit) out into the sun.

"I happened to go out to lunch with somebody who is this incredibly beautiful, polished, elegant, dainty, incredibly hardcore, intimidating literary agent," Rubin says. "We were trying to be friends. You know how when you're trying to be friends and you haven't really figured out how exactly to be friends? I said something abut Stephen King and I was like ‘ew, maybe she's too fancy for Stephen King.'" But the response was a great surprise. "She said, ‘Well I love Stephen King but it's not as good as J.K. Rowling.' And all we did was talk about Harry Potter the whole time."

Since that lunch meeting, Rubin has started a children's literature book club with nine other now-very-happy, kid-lit-loving writers, editors and literary agents.

"This is the joy of my life," she says.

And, once again, she's beaming.

JENNA SCHNUER is a New York-based freelance writer.