If you haven't read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, I highly recommend adding it to your 2011 reading list. The author spends a year synthesizing and digesting the latest research about happiness as well as the wisdom of the ages on the subject, and then tries to incorporate the findings into her life.
In case you're wary, this book is not of the self-help genre. It's an interesting, quick read about one woman trying to change her life without substantively changing her life (i.e. moving to a tropical island and retiring).
Some of her insights that struck me as particularly profound include:
*You can choose what you do; you can't choose what you like to do.
*One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.
*Do good, feel good.
*If it takes less than a minute, do it now.
*And much, much more (of course).
[Spoiler alert.] She concludes at the end of the year that she is indeed happier, and that the single most important element of her happiness project was not any of her specific happiness resolutions but her daily chart to record how she was doing keeping those resolutions. If you manage what you measure, then you have to measure whether you're going where you want to be going, and that very act of measuring will do a lot to propelling you to where you want to go.
I'm not sure if this works for people who aren't type A. Why? I suspect it takes a type A sucker like me to be anal (some might say "particular") enough to make a daily resolution chart and actually use it. But if something works for someone else, I think it deserves a try before you dismiss it: the old if-you-want-what-we-have-then-do-what-we-do philosophy.
So, I've made my own resolutions chart and so far I'm liking using it. Knowing that I get to give myself the proverbial gold star at the end of the day if I do what I aspire to, really is keeping me doing the things I want to be doing. Ridiculous but true.
And if you're wondering about this recent flurry of blog entries that actually involve substantive thought, guess what? One of my resolutions is to write something every day. (Not necessarily on the blog, of course, but until I get a more substantive project I think more will end up here than has been here in awhile.)
Check out Gretchen Rubin's blog: www.happiness-project.com
