Happiness Project

I cannot call this site happyconnected without speaking about my exploration of the topic of happiness.  I was looking at my journal entries over the last ten years, I realize that I came across Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness  in 2007.  At the time, I was in a book store in Seoul when the topic caught my eyes.  The take home message for me was that we need to be careful with what we think makes us happy.  It was the first time I dabble into popular psychology.

A friend of mine recommended Gretchin Rubin’s The Happiness Project to me in late 2010.  Since then, I’ve read/listened to the book over and over again.  I liked the way Mrs. Rubin approached such a philosophical question of “how do I become more happy” by research,  to do list, and project completion.  I feel that I can relate to her more than to other authors.  Instead of a single theory, I’d like to see research across disciplines and periods.  Mrs. Rubin did exactly just that.

I am listing to Happier at  Home now.

My Happiness Project started in 2011 when I was traveling.  I identified a list of things that make me happy and did more of them.  I also identified a list of things that make me unhappy and tried minimizing exposure to them.  The hardest was finding a list of the right things to do.  On my twelve hour flight to Europe that year, I opened my laptop and started mindmapping all the things that I think of and move them around to understand how these different concepts relate to each other.  That exercise of figuring out what was right for me was one of the most useful exercises I had ever done.  Figuring out what is right meant looking at my values, wants, and needs.  I was traveling with my friend at the time and she thought that amount of rigor I was spending on such a spiritual question was a little bit too mechanical.  I understood exactly what she meant but to me, it was the right thing to do at the time.