Happiness at Home by Gretchen Rubin


I read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin about a year ago and just finished the sequel, Happier at Home. I'll start by saying that I found Happiness at Home to not be as enjoyable or ground-breaking as the first one, even if I was already biased towards liking it. What disappointed me most about this is the dearth of original ideas and the amount of material rehashed from the first book.  I think it's because she wants new readers to be able to relate to HAH even if they have not read THP.  I also found the writing to be self-indulgent.  Granted it's her personal happiness project and but unlike the first one, there is less of 'what you can do' in this book and more of 'here's what I did.'

That said, I still finished the whole thing, and picked up some ideas to try.  The valuable lesson to be learned here is to discover the things that make you happy, and then build habits around them.  I actually applied some of Gretchen's resolutions from the first book like making the bed in the morning (consistently!) and doing a task/errand right away if it takes less than 3 minutes to do (in progress).

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