Gretchen Rubin is the author of The Happiness Project: Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun (Harper), an account of the year she spent test-driving the current scientific studies, wisdom of the ages, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happy -- everything from Aristotle and Seneca to Martin Seligman and the Dalai Lama.
Soon after she turned 36, Rubin realized that the years were passing quickly, and that she should make time for the things that were important to her now. So instead of continuing to wait for her problems to correct themselves, Rubin decided to make changes, and on January 1, the Happiness Project began. Each month for the following year, Rubin pursued a different set of resolutions: clean the closets, quit nagging, sing in the morning, write a novel, and remember birthdays. To supplement her efforts, she read everything from classical philosophy to current scientific studies, from Aristotle to Oprah, formulating her own definitions of happiness and how to achieve it. She kept track of which strategies worked and which failed, sharing her stories and collecting those of others through a daily blog.
Bit by bit, she learned how to make herself happier. Weaving together philosophy, scientific research, and real-world strategies, The Happiness Project talk is her engaging, relatable account of what worked -- and, humorously, what didn't -- as she sought to become a happier person. With practical advice, sharp insight, and charm, Rubin's story will energize audiences hoping to apply her tips as they shape their own paths to happiness.
Rubin's idea for a "happiness project" no longer describes just a book or a blog: it's a movement, with Happiness Project groups springing up from Los Angeles to Boston to Enid, Oklahoma to Tucson, Arizona. Almost 30,000 people get her monthly newsletter. Her companion website, the Happiness Project Toolbox, www.happinessprojecttoolbox.com, is a place online where people can gather to track their own happiness projects, as well as those of others.
Rubin has also written for numerous publications, including the Washington Post, Real Simple, Elle, and George magazine. Her daily blog, www.happiness-project.com, ranks in the Technorati "Top 2K" and is cross-posted on Slate, the Huffington Post, and Yahoo! Shine.
Rubin is also the author of Forty Ways to Look at JFK and the best-selling Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill. In each book she plays with the biography form to capture the crucial aspects of the subject's oversized character and life. Her first book, Power Money Fame Sex: A User's Guide, assumed the shape of a self-help satire to expose and analyze the techniques exploited by strivers for those worldly ambitions.
Rubin received her undergraduate and law degrees from Yale and was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and served as a chief adviser to Federal Communications Commissions Chairman Reed Hundt before becoming a fulltime writer. For many years she taught a seminar at Yale Law School and Yale School of Management.
Raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Rubin now lives in New York City with her husband Jamie Rubin and two young daughters.
Praise for The Happiness Project:
"This book made me happy in the first five pages. And the more I read it, the happier I got. It's filled with great insights that have changed every part of my life, from love to money, from work to play, from writing to Diet Coke." -- AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
"A cross between the Dalai Lama's The Art of Happiness and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, and seamlessly buttressed by insights from sources as diverse as psychological scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, Gretchen Rubin has written a book that readers will revisit again and again as they seek to fulfill their own dreams for happiness." -- Sonya Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
"Happiness is contagious. And so is The Happiness Project. Once you've read Gretchen Rubin's tale of a year searching for satisfaction, you'll want to start your own happiness project and get your friends and family to join you. This is the rare book that will make you both smile and think -- often on the same page." -- Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind
"The Happiness Project is a wonderful book. Gretchen Rubin shows how you can be happier, starting right now, with small, actionable steps accessible to everyone. Among her many attainable strategies, her discovery of the connection between inner happiness and outer order is spot on!" -- Julie Morgenstern, New York Times best-selling author of Shed Your Stuff, Change Your Life