The Happiness Project (12 page)

I tentatively floated the idea in an e-mail to Michael and Marci. To my surprised gratification, they both immediately embraced the idea. Michael suggested a structure for our meetings. “How about every six weeks, for two hours? Twenty minutes of catch-up conversation, then thirty minutes each to talk about our individual concerns, with a ten-minute break in the middle.” Marci and I embraced this highly defined structure, which was a good indication that the three of us were well matched.

“And we should give ourselves a name,” Marci said, only half joking. “And what kind of group
are
we?”

We decided to call ourselves MGM, after our initials, and we decided
that we were a “writers’ strategy group.” We didn’t talk about actual writing very much, though sometimes one of us circulated a chapter or two; we spent most of our time talking about strategy. Should Michael hire a virtual assistant? Was Marci spending too much time touring for her book? Should Gretchen send out a happiness project newsletter? The group was an instant success. Sitting with two other energetic, encouraging, smart writers for a few hours exhilarated me. Also, as with groups such as Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous, and with my Resolutions Chart, we gave one another a sense of accountability.

Only after we’d met a few times did I stumble on some career-building articles that suggested forming a “community of aspirants” or, in less elaborate terms, a “goals group.” Shoot, I’d thought I’d invented the idea.

WORK SMART.

Turning aside from lofty ambition to prosaic details, I figured that I’d work better if I spent some time thinking about how to boost my efficiency. At the very least, I could make my day feel calmer. I felt as if I never had enough time for all the work I wanted to do.

I started paying close attention to how I spent my days. Were there pockets of time that I was wasting? Could I find the equivalent of loose change under the sofa, like an overlooked habit of watching a
Law & Order
rerun every night? Alas, I was running pretty close to efficiency. If I was watching a rerun, I was paying bills at the same time. Nevertheless, considering the way I spent my time yielded some good results.

I changed the way I thought about productive time. In the past, I’d believed that I couldn’t sit down and write productively unless I had at least three or four hours with no interruptions. Often, that was hard to arrange, and I felt inefficient and frustrated. To test that assumption, for a few weeks, I added a note on my Resolutions Chart to remind myself of what I’d worked on each day. It didn’t take me long to see that I
did better when I had
less
time. Not several hours but ninety minutes turned out to be the optimally efficient length of time—long enough for me to get some real work done but not so long that I started to goof off or lose concentration. As a consequence, I began to organize my day into ninety-minute writing blocks, separated by different non-writing tasks: exercising, meeting someone, making a phone call, tinkering with my blog.

Also, although I’d always considered fifteen minutes to be too short a period in which to get anything done, I started to push myself to squeeze in an extra fifteen minutes somewhere during the day. This was often wedged in between two appointments or at the very end of the workday. It did, indeed, boost my productivity. Fifteen minutes a day, several times a week, was not insignificant—fifteen minutes was long enough to draft a blog post, to make notes on research that I’d been reading, or to answer some e-mails. As I’d found in January, when I started applying the “one-minute rule” and the “evening tidy-up,” small efforts, made consistently, brought significant results. I felt more in control of my workload.

I halfheartedly considered trying to get up early each day to work for an hour or so before my family awoke. Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer 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 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. Nope, 6:30
A.M
. was as early as I could push it.

I found a small way to make my office more pleasant. At a party at someone’s house, I smelled a scent so lovely that I walked around the room sniffing until I found the source: a Jo Malone Orange Blossom candle. Although I never buy this sort of thing, when I got home, I
went straight to the computer and ordered one for myself, and I started the habit of burning it in my office. Though I sometimes mocked the scented-candle-pushing brand of happiness building, I discovered that there is something nice about working in an office with a candle burning. It’s like seeing snow falling outside the window or having a dog snoozing on the carpet beside you. It’s a kind of silent presence in the room and very pleasant.

ENJOY NOW.

As I worked, and especially when I was pushing myself to do things that made me slightly uncomfortable, I kept reminding myself of my resolution to “Enjoy now.” As a writer, I often found myself imagining some happy future: “When I sell this proposal…” or “When this book comes out…”

In his book
Happier,
Tal Ben-Shahar describes the “arrival fallacy,” the belief that when you arrive at a certain destination, you’ll be happy. (Other fallacies include the “floating world fallacy,” the belief that immediate pleasure, cut off from future purpose, can bring happiness, and the “nihilism fallacy,” the belief that it’s not possible to become happier.) The arrival fallacy is a fallacy because, though you may anticipate great happiness in arrival, arriving rarely makes you as happy as you anticipate.

First of all, by the time you’ve arrived at your destination, you’re expecting to reach it, so it has already been incorporated into your happiness. Also, arrival often brings more work and responsibility. It’s rare to achieve something (other than winning an award) that brings unadulterated pleasure without added concerns. Having a baby. Getting a promotion. Buying a house. You look forward to reaching these destinations, but once you’ve reached them, they bring emotions other than sheer happiness. And of course, arriving at one goal usually reveals another, yet more challenging goal. Publishing the first book means it’s time to start the second. There’s
another hill to climb. The challenge, therefore, is to take pleasure in the “atmosphere of growth,” in the gradual progress made toward a goal, in the present. The unpoetic name for this very powerful source of happiness is “pre-goal-attainment positive affect.”

When I find myself focusing overmuch on the anticipated future happiness of arriving at a certain goal, I remind myself to “Enjoy now.” If I can enjoy the present, I don’t need to count on the happiness that is (or isn’t) waiting for me in the future. The fun part doesn’t come later,
now
is the fun part. That’s another reason I feel lucky to enjoy my work so much. If you’re doing something that you don’t enjoy and you don’t have the gratification of success, failure is particularly painful. But doing what you love is itself the reward.

When I thought back on the experience of writing my Churchill biography, for example, the most thrilling moment came when I was sitting at a study table at the library where I do most of my writing and I read two lines from Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940: “We shall go on to the end…we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.” As I read, the thought occurred to me, “Churchill’s life fits the pattern of classical tragedy.” This realization gave me such an ecstatic shock of recognition that tears welled up in my eyes. I spent the next several days testing my theory, and the more I read, the more excited I became. The requirements of a classical tragedy are very stringent, yet I was able to prove that Churchill’s life met every one of them. Ah,
that
was the fun part.

But the arrival fallacy doesn’t mean that pursuing goals isn’t a route to happiness. To the contrary. The goal is necessary, just as is the process toward the goal. Friedrich Nietzsche explained it well: “The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.”

To enjoy now, there was something else I was going to have to master: my dread of criticism. Too much concern about whether I was getting praise or blame, too much anticipatory anxiety about what my detrac
tors would say—those kinds of fears spoiled my pleasure in my work and, what’s more, probably weakened my work.

I’d had a chance to tackle this very issue, during my preparation stage for the happiness project, when
The Washington Post
published a critical review of my biography
Forty Ways to Look at JFK
. At that point, I’d learned a lot of happiness theories and I’d identified my Twelve Commandments, but I hadn’t put much into practice.

The review made me feel depressed, defensive, and angry; I wished that I felt secure, open to criticism, with benevolent feelings toward the reviewer. I decided to apply my Third Commandment, to “Act the way I want to feel.” Would it really work in this extreme case? I made myself do something I did
not
want to do. I sent a friendly e-mail to the reviewer, in order to show
myself
that I was confident enough to take criticism graciously and able to respond without attack or self-justification. It took me a very, very long time to compose that e-mail. But guess what—it worked. The minute I sent it, I felt better.

The minute I pushed “send,” I felt terrific. No matter what David Greenberg did, I’d changed myself. I felt magnanimous, open to criticism, sending good wishes to someone who had hurt me. I didn’t even care if I got a reply. But I did. I got a very nice response.

Having an effective strategy to deal with criticism of my work made it easier to enjoy the process of working. Also, this exchange had an added benefit, one that I, as the one being reviewed, didn’t consider at first. We often dislike those whom we’ve hurt, and I bet David Greenberg wasn’t very pleased to see my name pop up in his e-mail in-box. By initiating a friendly exchange, I showed that I bore no hard feelings and let him off the hook. If we were ever introduced at some cocktail party, we could meet on friendly terms.

Nevertheless, even while I was writing about happiness and focused precisely on the issue of handling criticism, I never did manage entirely to “Enjoy now” with no anxiety about the future. I spent a lot of time arguing with imaginary critics of my happiness project.

“You have it easy,” one whispered in my ear. “No cocaine, no abuse, no cancer, no divorce, no three-hundred-pound weight loss…you didn’t even have to quit smoking!”

“What about the millions of people who go to bed hungry?” another added. “What about people who suffer from real depression?”

“You don’t care about plumbing the depths of your psyche.”

“You’re not spiritual enough.”

“The idea of a one-year experiment is stale.”

“You just talk about yourself.”

Oh, well, I told myself, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. If I do my project my way, I’m unspiritual and gimmicky; if I tried to do it a different way, I’d be inauthentic and fake. Might as well “Be Gretchen.”

March’s focus on work and happiness highlighted a tricky issue: the relationship between ambition and happiness. There’s a common belief that happiness and ambition are incompatible. Many ambitious people I’ve known seem eager to claim that they aren’t happy, almost as a way to emphasize their zeal, in echo of Andrew Carnegie’s observation “Show me a contented man, and I’ll show you a failure.”

Perhaps the happiness-thwarting feelings of dissatisfaction, competitiveness, and jealousy are necessary goads for ambition. If I remained ambitious, was it impossible to be happy? If my project made me happier, would I become complacent? Was the arrival fallacy an important mechanism to keep me striving?