Rubin: I divided the elements of happiness that I felt like I needed to work on for my Happiness Project into 11 categories – things like friendship, marriage, parenthood, leisure and spirituality. I then spent a month focusing on each one. I started in January and went to December, and each month I would turn my attention to this new element. I always had three, four or five very concrete resolutions that I was going to follow that I thought would help me achieve more happiness in that element. For example, I started with energy because I thought, well, if I have more energy, everything else will be easier. For energy, I focused on things like sleeping, getting exercise and getting rid of clutter because it turns out that clutter and nagging tasks really drain your energy. Each month I would add a new set of resolutions.
By the end of the year I was following all the resolutions all the time. And it was great. It really did add a lot to my happiness. But it was surprisingly difficult to break it down into those elements. It’s a very productive thing to try to do because happiness can seem all tangled together. It’s very abstract. Everything’s interlocked with everything else. By teasing it apart like that, I think it really clarified my thinking.
Knowledge@Wharton: In March, you looked at aiming higher in your work. You reported that happy people work more hours each week and they work more in their free time, too. I think that may seem like a paradox to some. How can that be?
Rubin: One of the reasons people are happy is that they like their work. If you like your work, you’re more inclined to [do] it. I always think that a great sign of a person who’s happy at work is talking shop. People who love their work love to talk shop. A lot of times people think that that’s a negative and say, “Oh, you shouldn’t be talking shop all the time.”
But the desire to talk shop shows that you’re really very satisfied, you’re really still engaged and even in your free time you want to talk about it. When I was in law, I never wanted to talk shop. Now I’m in writing, and I want to talk shop all the time. It’s my favourite subject to talk about: writing or anything related to writing or publishing or books.
Happy people bring that enthusiasm with them. When we’re unhappy, it’s very easy to become self-focused. You become isolated and defensive, and you’re preoccupied with your own problems because you’re unhappy. When you’re happy, you can turn out work. You have more emotional wherewithal to think about other things. Happy people naturally find it easier to focus on things outside themselves, like work or helping other people. Happy people are also more altruistic. They volunteer more time and give away more money. Part of that is because they feel they have the reserves so they can afford to turn outward and to think about other people and other people’s problems.
Knowledge@Wharton: Tell us about how you made those resolutions and how you went through the process of sticking to them.
Rubin: I was very inspired by Benjamin Franklin who is one of the patron saints of the Happiness Project because he was this extraordinarily productive genius. He had this chart that he [created] with 13 virtues that he wanted to cultivate. They are very founding father-y virtues, like temperance and frugality.
Every day, he would check off whether he had observed that virtue or not. I thought that seemed like a good system. I wanted some way to hold myself accountable and to keep reminding myself what my resolutions were. I have a resolutions chart, and I write down all my resolutions. Every night I check off whether I observed that resolution. At times, there’s not an occasion for a resolution to be kept, so then I just leave it blank. Like “no gossip”. Maybe I didn’t have an occasion to gossip, so it wasn’t that I gossiped or didn’t gossip; I just spent the day alone.
I found this was a really helpful system. First of all, I held myself accountable, and I could see whether I was making progress. If I was consistently not making progress, then I would know it wasn’t working. It also kept them uppermost in my mind. Sometimes with a resolution – and I’m sure we’ve all experienced this – you make a New Year’s resolution and then you just forget about it. Every once in a while you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I was going to try to go to that yoga class’ – but you forget. This kept them very awake in my mind. It also helped me reward myself because, when you do something right, you want to feel like you’re giving yourself a gold star. I am a total junkie for gold stars, so feeling like I am really making progress, I really am holding myself accountable and I’m making that forward progress is very reinforcing. Those are really helpful things about the resolution charts.
Knowledge@Wharton: In your next book, Happier at Home, you look at how to make a home a happier place. What made you embark on this particular Happiness Project?
Rubin: As with all my books, there’s this crazy moment of epiphany when the lightning bolt comes out of the sky and hits me on the head. This time I was standing in my own kitchen unloading the dishwasher. My husband was in the next room watching golf on television, and my daughters were in there playing restaurant. I was hit by an intense wave of homesickness. I felt the way I did when I went away to summer camp for the first time, which was such a puzzling feeling, because why was I feeling homesick if I was just standing in the middle of my own kitchen? It was almost as if I had flashed forward 30 years and, from the future, was looking back with yearning at what I have right now, right here.
That got me to focus for the first time on home. With the Happiness Project, I had been doing all this research and writing, and I divided my happiness into these elements. But somehow I had never focused on this idea of home. The minute I focused on it, because of this feeling of homesickness, I became overwhelmed with thinking, ‘Well, this is really the foundation.’ For me, and I think for so many people, so many of the essential elements of happiness come together in home.
I really wanted to go deeper into this area and understand it better. Like what is wrapped up in our idea of home? You could be single, you could be married, you could be young, you could be old, you can be in so many different life circumstances, but this is something that is practically universal – this idea of home. How could you be happier at home? I’m a big Laura Ingalls Wilder fan. I love children’s literature. There’s this wonderful line in one of the books where Carrie doesn’t want to go home because she and Laura are in trouble. The writer observes, “There is no comfort anywhere for anyone who dreads to go home.”
Knowledge@Wharton: You note that there are many happiness paradoxes. One, for example, is you accomplish more by working less.
Rubin: Yes.
