Zoikes, it’s hard to believe that almost a full decade has passed since The Happiness Project first hit the shelves.
In many ways, my life is much the same—and of course, many things have changed as well. The Tenth Anniversary edition is on shelves today.
By far the most important thing that happened was that my husband Jamie’s hepatitis C was cured—a medical miracle.
As I write about in The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, Jamie got hepatitis C from a blood transfusion during a heart operation when he was eight years old. You really don’t want to have hepatitis C; eventually, it destroys your liver. Jamie tried many treatments over the years, but nothing worked.
When a new treatment was approved, Jamie went on it right away, and as of January 9, 2015 (a date we celebrate every year), Jamie was cured. You can read more about it in my post “Today is one of the happiest days of my life. Here’s why.”
Brief service announcement: If you support organ donation, sign the registry at organdonor.gov, tell your family that you’d want to donate your organs, or post a message with #organdonor.
Other big news: My older daughter Eliza is now off at college! That was a big family milestone. Here’s the advice I gave her when she left.
After much discussion and pleading, my family got a dog, a delightful black cockapoo named Barnaby. If you want to hear me talk about this decision, Elizabeth and I discuss it in episodes 24 and 27 of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast.
Speaking of the Happier podcast, launching the podcast has been one of my favorite undertakings from the last ten years. My co-host is my sister Elizabeth Craft, the TV writer and producer who lives in Los Angeles, and together we talk about happiness, habits, and human nature. We’re sisters, so we don’t let each other get away with much! We’ve had so many terrific sisterly adventures together because of the show.
I quit sugar, and really, almost all carbs. (If you want to know more about this change, I write about it in my book Better Than Before.)
Since The Happiness Project came out, I’ve written four additional books: Happier at Home, Better Than Before, The Four Tendencies, and Outer Order, Inner Calm. (Plus I’ve written My Color Pilgrimage, but it’s still in the manuscript stage.)
In The Happiness Project, I write about starting a children’s literature reading group. Well, that group got so big that I started a second group, and now even a third group. Yes, I’m in three kid-lit reading groups, and these groups are a giant engine of happiness for me.
A big personal highlight was getting interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. She recorded the interview at her home in Montecito, so I got to visit “The Promised Land,” and I also got to bring my sister Elizabeth with me, on a terrific sisterly adventure. Oprah is so…Oprah. In person, she’s exactly the way I’d imagined her to be. (You can listen to the interview here.)
Another highlight was meeting the Dalai Lama. In fact, at the end of our meeting, we needed to walk to the other end of the conference center in the rain, so he grabbed my arm to help him stay steady—yes, I walked arm in arm with the Dalai Lama.
I had dinner with Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman—he’s notable for his work on the psychology of judgment, decision-making, and behavioral economics, subjects that fascinate me. He’s the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, among countless other accomplishments, and a person I was thrilled to meet.
One very fun thing that happened—though I had nothing to do with it—was that “The Happiness Project” was an answer on the gameshow Jeopardy!
Less flashy, but very gratifying, was that my personality framework of “Four Tendencies” was written up in a scientific journal.
I’ve been on the cover of a few magazines. That’s surreal.
I’ve also created several interesting projects. One-sentence journals, habit journals, mugs, Page-a-Day calendars, 21 Day Projects—I even designed a coloring book.
My blog (which I now call my “site,” because the very word “blog” seems old-fashioned) has been going strong for more than a decade. To celebrate the tenth anniversary, I created an e-book, The Best of the Happiness Project Blog—that was a lot of fun to put together.
I started “Ask Gretchen Rubin Live,” a weekly show on Facebook. It’s great to get a chance to talk about happiness, habits, and human nature with people in real time.
I launched the free “Better” app to help people make their lives happier, healthier, more productive and more creative—just search “Better Gretchen Rubin” in the app store. It’s a place where you can join discussions, ask questions, weigh in, and form accountability groups.
I also created my first video course to help more people harness the power of the Four Tendencies.
Of everything I’ve written in the last ten years, I think my one-minute video “The Years Are Short” resonates most with people. It was a truth that I felt deeply at the time that I wrote The Happiness Project, and I feel it more deeply with every passing year. The days are long, but the years are short.
Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home and Better Than Before. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter.
Image courtesy of Nicole Honeywill.
