Gretchen Rubin is an author mainly focusing on the human psychology, with multiple bestsellers such as The Four Tendencies, Better Than Before, and The Happiness Project. On this occassion, I just finished reading The Happiness Project. I dare say this is the book that propelled Gretchen to fame as an author. First released in 2009, it has been reprinted multiple times, and spent 2 years on the bestseller list.
The book started off sharing who Gretchen is, The Happiness Project started when Gretchen was still working in the field of law, for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, “What do you want out of life?”. These questions are often posed to us, even as a kid. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. And often times, we answer in terms of what job we want to have, what kind of social status we want to be, but rarely a simple “I want to be happy”. It’s a paradox that when you tie your happiness to something else entirely, you lose your sense of self and you rely on others to make you feel happy. In this book, Gretchen spent 1 year of her life thinking about happiness and taking action to maintain it.
A great friend of mine gave me this book and said “Chris, I saw your instagram stories are full of serious stuff like the HBR. Unwind a bit and read this book”. And I agree. This book is not a revelation. The content is not mindblowing. A lot of it gives you the sense of “Duh, an idiot knows that”. But it serves as a good reminder on the little things, on finding what’s important for you.
Gretchen shared her 12 commandments:
1. Be Gretchen.
2. Let it go.
3. Act the way I want to feel.
4. Do it now.
5. Be polite and be fair.
6. Enjoy the process.
7. Spend out. (This is probably the most enigmatic of my commandments.)
8. Identify the problem.
9. Lighten up.
10. Do what ought to be done.
11. No calculation.
12. There is only love.
Those are her guideline for the year, that she implements step by step in the book. Every month she picks up one of them and focuses on it, while still maintaining her previous months habit. Each chapter represents a month of the year, and it represents a commandment. While doing this, she also did a blog on The Happiness Project, and it sparked a lot of reactions from people around the world. It’s one of the things that I like about the book, she shared some of the comments from the blog, and you can see how her project can be implemented in different ways for different people.
What resonated with me really well is her first commandment to “Be Gretchen”. The idea that it’s okay for you to like what you like, and to not like what you not like, instead of what society deems good resonates with me so much, that I decided to make it one of my 5 resolutions of the year, seen on my previous post, which is to be honest with myself.
Read this book for a light read and slice of life kind of material. Don’t expect something revolutionary, and keep an open mind. Maybe in the course of reading this book, you’ll find stuff that resonates with you and can be applied to your own daily life to make yourself happy/ier.
In spite of that, I have to caution that this book is not for everyone, as proven by the lukewarm rating of 3.58 at Goodreads at the time of this writing. With 109,378 ratings, 44% rated it 3 and below, while 55% rated it 4 or 5. This book likely won’t resonate well with people that is still struggling with day to day expenses and people without leeway in their spending. It needs to be reiterated that Gretchen is from a well-off background, and this is not a research book that can be applied to everyone. This is a book that shares her experience in particular.
