Little Bit in Love with A Book on How to Get, Grow & Stay Happy October 1, 2010

This is the first entry in the category on the blog called “Little Bit in Love with…”  It’s just things that I find cool, helpful, interesting, inspirational, educational, funny, yummy or just plain fun.  In other words, they’re tips and recommendations and a lot of them will probably consist of books, movies, music, and websites but who knows, I could fall in love with a many a splendid thing as there are many things out there to fall in love with.

So I’m definitely a little bit in love with Gretchen Rubin and The Happiness Project. It is a great book that I picked up because I read a few reviews in my fav mags which you will realize I read and get much information and many ideas from such as Elle, Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine – several of my interviews in my book come from reading articles in these magazines, oddly enough (yes, I know what you might be thinking, but they are not all fluff and fashion.)  And then when I went to look at my book on Amazon when it first got put up there for pre-sales, I saw that it was recommended to me in that section that says, “if you like this book, you might like…” and The Happiness Project was the first one listed.  Hmmm.  Need to check this book out.  Then I was in a clothing store, (Anthropologie) and saw the book sitting there so I picked it up and read the flaps and the first sentence says, “Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places: a city bus.”  Yes, that’s right – an epiphany.  I had to get it of course, and once I started it, I found I could hardly put it down!  This was quite unexpected because it seemed to be a ‘self-help’ or ‘how to’ book and I thought it would be informative but not fun reading.  WRONG!  So funny.  So real.  So inspirational because this woman gets SO much accomplished but she’s not Patty Perfect and admits the failures as well as the triumphs.  Her research is thorough and excellent and everything is incredibly useful and doable.  And hey, if she’s doing it with 2 kids, I can do it.  She did a lot of research in Positive Psychology, which I love and follow and I interviewed Barbara Fredrickson, one of the leaders in the field, for my book. Gretchen also has this amazing blog and website and you can see her in videos and she is a very faithful blogger, extremely organized and diligent, unlike, (clear my throat), yours truly.  I’m getting better though, right?  About once a week now!

Everyone I have referred this book to loves it.  And you might be thinking, you should interview Gretchen about her epiphany!  And you would be the kind of person who thinks like me.  I emailed her to ask for one and she immediately emailed me back herself saying she was too swamped right now but to definitely be in touch in the future and best of luck with my book.  Very sweet, very cool, just like she was/is in her book. Another more personal thing I gained from her is that she says for years she has collected passages from books, quotes, spent hours in the library doing these kinds of things for no reason – just because it brought her joy and she just had to.  And she realized later that this is part of being a writer.  I have never heard of anyone else doing that – I’ve always done that!   I used to think I was a bit strange and I’ve had people (well, mainly one person) make fun of me for holding onto files of just random musings and quotes and passages and notebooks of these kinds of things because they were seemingly useless and a waste of my time — but I too have just always had to do it.  But she said she discovered this is all part of being a writer … so I had a mini- epiphany of, “hey, maybe I really am a writer and have been all along.” This is my first book and it came out of a film project I was developing so I think because I’ve done so many other things that maybe I wasn’t really thinking of myself as a real writer yet.  But a lot of the people I ended up interviewing came out of magazine articles I’d torn out over the years and just put in a file.  Quotes from people led to ideas of who to interview and led me to certain questions. It’s interesting.  Because of reading about her realization about this, it made me realize that perhaps I really do belong in the tribe of writers.  Anyway, just a little personal epiphany I had in reading this book, but there are many to be had…I recommend at least checking out her website – you can even start your own Happiness Project!  She has Happiness Project Toolboxes for you to get started…Happiness Project Club, anyone?