While reading a biography of English writer Sydney Smith, Hesketh Pearson’s The Smith of Smiths, I stumbled across this letter. In 1820, Smith wrote a letter to an unhappy friend, Lady Morpeth, in which he offered her tips for cheering up.

I have my own variety of tips lists for cheering up, and I was interested to hear what someone from two centuries ago would recommend. Most of Smith's suggestions are as sound now as they were almost 200 years ago – though a few are amusingly odd, and it might be tougher today to work "good blazing fires" into everyday life.

“1st. Live as well as you dare.
2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75 or 80 degrees.
3rd. Amusing books.
4th. Short views of human life—not further than dinner or tea.
5th. Be as busy as you can.
6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.
7th. And of those acquaintances who amuse you.
8th. Make no secret of low spirits to you friends, but talk of them freely—they are always worse for dignified concealment.
9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.
10th. Compare your lot with that of other people.
11th. Don’t expect too much from human life—a sorry business at the best.
12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion, not ending in active benevolence.
13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.
14th Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.
15th. Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant.
16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness.
17th. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.
18th. Keep good blazing fires.
19th. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.
20th. Believe me, dear Lady Georgiana.”

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A thoughtful reader sent me the link to PocketMod, which shows you how to make your own mini-personal organizer. I can't wait to try it out myself.

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Check out my new one-minute internet movie, Secrets of Adulthood.

From time to time, I post short interviews with interesting people about their insights on happiness.

During my study of happiness, I’ve noticed that I often learn more from one person’s highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal principles or cite up-to-date studies. There’s something peculiarly compelling and instructive about hearing other people’s happiness stories. I’m much more likely to be convinced to try a piece of advice urged by a specific person who tells me that it worked for him, than by any other kind of argument.

Tyler Cowen is one of my blogland friends – I’ve never met him.

Some people argue that the internet/Facebook/email/texting/etc. have a bad impact on our social relationships, because they distract us from face-to-face contact, which is more satisfying. That may be true, but these tools also permit us to have relationships with people we would have otherwise have never known – and that’s very satisfying.

I got to know Tyler through his provocative economics blog, Marginal Revolution. How do economics and happiness overlap? In lots of interesting ways.

He also recently published a fascinating book, Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist. Although his book wasn't about happiness, I found it quite relevant to the Happiness Project.

Gretchen: What’s a simple activity that consistently makes you happier?
Tyler: Why don't we start with food, sleep, and sex? There's writing, blogging, and reading too, not to mention consuming artificially created stories. In fact most of life seems to fit under #1.

Gretchen: What’s something you know now about happiness that you didn’t know when you were 18 years old?
Tyler: I wasn't so wise at 18 but I'm still not so wise today. I have the same basic temperament, which is the main thing.

Gretchen: Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness?
Tyler: Not that I can think of. Being grudge-free is very important and I've done OK on that score.

Gretchen: Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve find very helpful?
Tyler: Kids change people, but most people don't change so much otherwise. Acceptance is therefore important.

Gretchen: If you’re feeling blue, how do you give yourself a happiness boost?
Tyler: Think of me as a liar if you wish, but (short of witnessing the decay or death of loved ones) I don't really get depressed. See #2.

Gretchen: Is there anything that you see people around you doing or saying that adds a lot to their happiness, or detracts a lot from their happiness?
Tyler: Grudges and blaming other people are very harmful, in my view. Their actions really are determined by forces outside their control and it is time to accept that. Don't blame them for what is wrong in your life.

Gretchen: Have you always felt about the same level of happiness, or have you been through a period when you felt exceptionally happy or unhappy – if so, why? If you were unhappy, how did you become happier?
Tyler: Same, same, same. Same!

Gretchen: Do you work on being happier? If so, how?
Tyler: I don't believe in working on being happy, I think it produces anxiety. I'm pretty happy but I also don't see happiness as an all-important value. We pursue values other than happiness all the time, and for the better.

Gretchen: Have you ever been surprised that something you expected would make you very happy, didn’t – or vice versa?
Tyler: Marriage is good for the happiness of men, but I had expected that. Travel is an interesting issue. It makes people deeper, and makes their internal mental stream much richer, but I'm not sure it ever makes them *happier* per se. It can be a lot of hard work and also some frustration. Still it is worth doing as much as you can.

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Check out my new one-minute internet movie, Secrets of Adulthood.

One of Orwell's main arguments is that Gandhi's saintliness makes him inhuman:

But one should, I think, realize that Gandhi's teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from. It is worth considering the disciplines which Gandhi imposed on himself and which...he considered indispensable if one wanted to serve either God or humanity. First of all, no meat-eating, and if possible no animal food in any form. And finally-- this is the cardinal point--for the seeker after goodness there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves whatever.

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because "friends react on one another" and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children,
but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which--I think--most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid...it is too readily assumed that "non-attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. It is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is "higher". The point is that they are incompatible.

This issue arose in St. Therese's life. When Therese entered the Carmelite convent at the age of sixteen, she was joining two of her biological sisters, with whom she was extremely close. But Therese allowed herself to show no special interest for these sisters or to seek out their company, although this hurt their feelings very much. Interestingly, though, when she was dying, the Mother Superior arranged things so she could see more of her sisters, and Therese did permit that of herself in that circumstance (though maybe she saw it as an aspect of obedience). Throughout her spiritual memoir, we see Therese discussing this challenge of preference.

In the August 2, 2004, issue of the New Yorker, in the profile "The Gift," Ian Parker wrote about Zell Kravinsky, a real-estate developer with a compulsive desire to give things away, such as most of his $45 million fortune to charity, and one of his kidneys to a stranger, both against the wishes of his family. Is his action saintly or pathological? It's hard to decide.

Kravinsky said, "The sacrosanct comitment to the family is the rationalization for all manner of greed and selfishness," and following this precept, he makes it clear that he tried not to favor his own children above unknown children. When I read this, I had a hard time figuring out why I found that morally shocking. On what basis did I think it right to love and favor your own children more than other people's children? Or why, in the case of Therese, would it seem shocking if she didn't want to have her own beloved biological sisters with her as she died, in preference to the other nuns? Orwell explains why. There are two systems of values.

On a much more trivial scale, prompted by Orwell's observation, I thought about goals that I'd rejected because I assumed they were too difficult, without questioning whether they were actually worthy goals for me, or whether I'd actually be happier if I adhered to them: being a vegetarian, giving up TV, never eating any refined flour or sugar.

Or more to the point, waking up early to work. I've always thought it would be a huge advantage if I could get up at 4:40 or 5:00 am to work, before my family wakes up.

Anthony Trollope, who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, attributed his productivity to his habit of starting his day at 5:30 a.m. In his Autobiography, he notes, "An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid 5 pounds extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy." Which suggests that it's not easy to get out of bed at 5:30 a.m. -- especially if you don't have an old groom on hand to shake you awake.

As it happens, for the last week, and as I write this right now, I spontaneously woke up around 5:00 am, and I got up to work. So I have to decide whether I want to stick to this plan, and MAKE myself get up at that time every day, or go back to 6:45 am.

Well, it turns out that waking up at 5:00 am, while good for my work life, has its drawbacks. It means that I have to go to sleep around 9:30 or 10:00 pm (getting enough sleep is a TOP happiness priority). And that means giving up my time with the Big Man, after our children are in bed. It seems a bit bleak to be going to bed by myself while he's up having fun.

I'd always assumed that if I really had the right stuff, I'd be getting up before dawn to write. Now I'm not so sure.

If you violently disagree with Orwell's points, please read the entire essay. This quotation doesn't capture the complexity of Orwell's argument or his views on Gandhi.

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Check out my new one-minute internet movie, Secrets of Adulthood.

“Being conscious of having done a wicked action leaves stings of remorse behind it, which, like an ulcer in the flesh, makes the mind smart with perpetual wounds; for reason, which chases away all other pains, creates repentance, shames the soul with confusion, and punishes it with torment.” -- Plutarch

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Check out my new one-minute internet movie, Secrets of Adulthood.

I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you should have one, too! Everyone’s project will look different, but it’s the rare person who can’t benefit. Join in -- no need to catch up, just jump in right now. Each Friday’s post will help you think about your own happiness project.

For me, outer order brings inner serenity. I find it much easier to stay calm when my office, my apartment, and my calendar are well-regulated. One sign of disorder is to be surrounded by things that are broken, need new batteries, or need to be re-filled, re-charged, or serviced in some way.

Here are some things that don’t work in my apartment right now: a video camera, a smoke alarm (this is actually dangerous), an alarm clock (well, it works but I can’t figure out how to reset the time), a cabinet drawer, the electric socket in the master bathroom, the lightbulbs in the hallway light-fixture, and one of the phones. Plus my laptop has a huge black spot on the screen which blocks my view of the upper-right-hand corner of any document.

Each of these failure represents a task, and they’re weighing on me. Every time I’m reminded of them, I feel annoyed and overwhelmed.

I try to do an errand each day, but for some reason these these things haven’t made it onto the errand list. They’ve just been lurking in the background, inoperable.

We tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish in an hour or a week, and underestimate how much we can accomplish in a month or a year, by doing just a little bit each day. Over and over, as I do my Happiness Project, I remind myself that if I just do a little bit each day, I can get a huge amount done. If I write one sentence in my one-sentence journal, by the end of the year, I’ll have a meaningful record of what has happened. If I clean up for ten minutes each night before bed, the apartment will stay noticeably tidier. If I write a blog post each day, over time, I’ll amass a huge archive.

Look around your home, your office, your car, etc. What isn’t working? Throw it away, give it away, or fix it. Throwing away, of course, is easiest – once you’ve made up your mind that something should be tossed (which can be surprisingly difficult). For anything more complex, just tackle one restoration per day. At the end of the month, the elimination of these nagging tasks will make you feel more energized and free.

Anthony Trollope, the novelist who managed to be hugely prolific while also revolutionizing the British postal service, wrote: “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

Each day, get rid of one thing that doesn’t work. It adds up.

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I was intrigued this story in Gimundo about how keeping a food journal made a huge difference when people were trying to watch what they were eating. I tried this myself for my happiness project, and I just COULD NOT manage to remember to write down everything I ate. At the end of the day, day after day, I'd realize that I'd forgotten to make any notes, and I had only the spottiest recollection of what I'd eaten. Reading this article has inspired me to try again.

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Check out my new one-minute internet movie, Secrets of Adulthood.

I confess: I can’t touch each piece of paper just one time. I can’t return every email within 24 hours. I can’t maintain a clear desk at all times. I can’t go paperless. Nevertheless, I’ve found some realistic strategies for getting things done that have helped me a lot.

One thing I know about myself is that an accumulation of tiny tasks, even if they aren’t particularly irksome in themselves, combine to make me feel overwhelmed and drained. If I can keep little chores from piling up, I feel much more capable of tackling bigger, more difficult tasks.

For that reason, many of my most important daily personal productivity rules are very low-tech and simple – they’re aimed to help me accomplish the most basic tasks of my day.

1. Follow the “one-minute rule.” I don’t postpone any task that can be done in less than one minute. I put away my umbrella; I glance at a letter and toss it; I put the newspapers in the recycling bin; I close the cabinet door. Because the tasks are so quick, it isn’t too hard to make myself follow the rule, but it has big results.

2. Observe the “evening tidy-up.” I take ten minutes before bed to do simple tidying. Tidying up at night made our mornings more serene and pleasant, because I’m not running to and fro like a headless chicken; and it also helps me prepare me for sleep, because putting things in order is calming, and doing something physical makes me aware of being tired.

3. Do a daily errand, or a bi-weekly errand afternoon. I keep a list of things I need to do (get a prescription filled, buy a new toner cartridge, return library books), and each day, I do one of them. Doing one errand is manageable, and although it doesn’t sound like much, it adds up. My mother prefers to spend one afternoon every few weeks running errands—perhaps a more efficient strategy in a place like Kansas City, where she needs to do a lot of driving from place to place, in contrast to New York City, where I usually do my errands while I’m walking someplace. And while I’m running those errands, I…

4. Buy necessary supplies and keep them in order. Nothing annoys me more than spending time vainly searching for some obscure yet important office supply: a jumbo binder clip, an index card, a ruler, double-sided tape. I dislike running errands (therefore, tip #2), but having the right equipment, and keeping it organized enough so I can find what I want, makes a big difference to how much I can get accomplished in a day. Also my level of aggravation.

5. Ask yourself, “Why do I need this?” before you keep anything. I have a friend who filed the stubs from her gas bills for years. “Why do you keep those at all?” I asked, when she was complaining about how far behind she was with her personal paperwork. “My father always told me to keep that kind of thing,” she said. That’s not a good enough reason!

6. If there’s something you don’t want to do, prepare all the necessary preliminary steps the night before, and make yourself do it first thing in the morning. For example, I dislike making even the easiest phone calls, so I always steel myself to do those right away. (Check here if you need more tips for making yourself place phone calls you don’t want to make.)

7. Be diligent about “unsubscribing.” I need to be better at this. We all find our way onto email lists and newsletters of all sorts, and I often let weeks or months go by before taking five seconds to unsubscribe. But it’s worth it, to weed out clutter from your in-box.

8. Keep a daily scratch pad. You know those notes you write to yourself—phone numbers, URLs, the “call John Doe” reminders, the quick “don’t forget” notes…all those nagging loose ends that clutter the surface of a desk, and then vanish, get thrown away, or can’t be deciphered when you’re looking for them? Now I keep a scratch pad on my desk, and anytime I have the urge to make a note, I discipline myself to write it there. At the end of the day, I copy anything I need to keep (this is important!), then toss the paper.

9. Remember my Eighth Commandment and “Identify the problem.” This sounds so obvious, but it’s astonishingly helpful. For example, I like to work in coffee shops, and for years, and I mean years, I spent a lot of time running out of battery power and chasing around looking for someplace to plug in my laptop. Then I asked myself: “What’s the problem?” Answer: “I need more battery power.” Light dawned. I could buy an extra battery! I did, and it gave me a huge boost in productivity.

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I’ve started sending out short monthly newsletters that will highlight the best of the previous month’s posts. If you’d like to sign up, click on the link in the upper-right-hand corner of my blog. Or just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “newsletter” in the subject line. I’ll add your name to the list.

"[S]tudies revealed that as much as 45 percent of what we do every day is habitual — that is, performed almost without thinking in the same location or at the same time each day, usually because of subtle cues. For example, the urge to check e-mail or to grab a cookie is likely a habit with a specific prompt. Researchers found that most cues fall into four broad categories: a specific location or time of day, a certain series of actions, particular moods, or the company of specific people."

These findings seem hugely interesting, because much of what I’m doing with my Happiness Project is to change my habits and my automatic responses. I’ve been thinking about whether there’s a way for me to apply that information to my own habits.

One of my worst habits is hair-twisting. I twist my hair constantly, and what’s worse, I break it off (that’s the fun part for me). If you look carefully at the hair on the left side of my head, you can see a line. I twist my hair when I’m reading, thinking, sitting, and waiting in line. I do it when I’m feeling peaceful and serene, or anxious, or tired. It’s hard for me to see how I could use this new information to break that habit, because it's such a ubiquitous behavior. Also, if I'm honest with myself, I don’t really want to break myself of the habit. (Hair-twisters, are you with me?) So I don't have the will to make the change.

But I am going to try applying this information to my habit of stopping in the kitchen each time I walk through my front door. After dumping my stuff, I always head to the fridge or a cabinet for a little smackerel of something, even if I’m not hungry—without even consciously deciding to get a snack.

This seems like a straightforward habit that I could break, by training myself to run through a different pattern whenever I come home. I need to think about what I'd like my new habit to be.

Does anyone have any good tips or success stories about breaking bad habits? Or adopting new ones?

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I’ve started sending out short monthly newsletters that will highlight the best of the previous month’s posts. If you’d like to sign up, click on the link in the upper-right-hand corner of my blog. Or just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “newsletter” in the subject line. I’ll add your name to the list.

A friend of mine was in Paris recently, and he wrote me an email about how, while sitting in a café, and, as it happens, helping me out by editing a draft of THE HAPPINESS PROJECT book, he decided to apply his own happiness resolutions.

I asked him if I could reprint his email, because I thought it was a great example of how keeping your resolutions active in your mind can help you make small choices that boost everyone’s happiness.

I was in the café across from my hotel. It was kind of overcast and rainy. Next to me were an American mother and her teenage/college-ish daughter. They were not having a good interaction. The mom was saying things like “never mind,” in an irritated tone and the daughter was clicking her tongue and rolling her eyes.

So then we went back to our respective things and we were all happier. I felt energized, and I could tell that they had broken through their low moment in mother-daughter relations.

My resolutions include “Reach out,” “Always say hello,” and “Make three new friends,” but this kind of encounter would be very tough for me. A paramount resolution is to “Be Gretchen,” and striking up a conversation with strangers would drain, not energize, me. But for my friend, a short, friendly encounter provides a big boost – and also boosted the happiness of the people he met.

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Via the commments to a post on the always-interesting Freakonomics blog, I found a super-fun tool on BabyNameWizard that allows you to enter a name and see a graph that shows how its popularity has changed over the last century. It's interesting information -- and also a great example of data beautifully and meaningfully presented.

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Check out my new one-minute internet movie, Secrets of Adulthood.

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Check out my new one-minute internet movie, Secrets of Adulthood.

I had so much fun with my last one-minute movie, The Years Are Short, I decided to do another one. The Years Are Short is touching (or at least I hope it’s touching); Secrets of Adulthood is on the whimsical side. It features some of my favorite Secrets of Adulthood (see left-hand column of my blog for the complete list).

What exactly are Secrets of Adulthood? They’re the lessons I’ve learned as I’ve grown up. I’m not sure why it took me years to grasp that over-the-counter medication actually will cure a headache, or that what I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while, but it did.

Check it out! Secrets of Adulthood.

This week's proposed resolution: Think about your own Secrets of Adulthood. What have you learned the hard way? What hard-won wisdom do you have to keep repeating to yourself?

I remind myself of the observation by Benjamin Franklin, one of the patron saints of the Happiness Project: "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." If you come up of your own Secrets of Adulthood, please consider posting them – we can all benefit from seeing what other people have learned.

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Zoikes, childhood fantasies fulfilled -- Gimundo has an article about a Swiss man who has built himself a real-life flying suit. Perhaps this will be a happiness project expedition one day!

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I’ve started sending out short monthly newsletters that will highlight the best of the previous month’s posts. If you’d like to sign up, click on the link in the upper-right-hand corner of my blog. Or just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “newsletter” in the subject line. I’ll add your name to the list.