The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin is a one year chronicle of one woman's attempt to increase her level of happiness by focusing on a new area each month. She covers the basic topics that are expected: marriage, work, parenting, friendship, and leisure. A few of the topics were more personalized: vitality, the relationship between money and happiness, mindfulness, and attitude among others. Taking a page from Benjamin Franklin's virtue chart, Rubin created a resolution chart that she slowly added to over the course of a year and referred to each night to gauge her success for the day. She did an excellent job of taking an abstract concept and creating concrete resolutions. For example, during June when she focused on friendship, her resolutions included remember birthdays, don't gossip, and make three new friends.
I appreciated her very practical approach but found her sheer volume of resolutions a bit overwhelming. It will for example take me more than a month to declutter parts of my house. Overall though I give the book five stars because of its very practical approach to what is usually a very abstract concept. It was inspiring to see how much change is possible within the bounds of one's own normal life.
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