I wasn't an excessively happy person even at that age, but I still turned my nose up at the idea of "self-help".  Even today, the words have a negative connotation to me.  If you needed to help yourself, that clearly means whatever it was that needs fixing is so embarrassing you can't even get professional help for it, right?  All that changed for me last summer when I bought an ereader.  In the interest of being frugal, I decided to stick as much as possible to borrowing ebooks from the library.  The fact that I could do this at home where no one could see what I was checking out and that I was limited to what the library had on offer led me to my first foray into self-help books.

I'm not sure what it was about The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin that drew me to it, but I knew I would love to learn to be a happier person.  I'd read biographies like Eat, Pray, Love and Walden where the author found great happiness by making big changes and I admired them but found the idea unapproachable.  Afterall, if happiness required grand gestures, most of us are screwed.  Gretchen's main premise is about finding happiness by making small adjustments in attitude and habits.  It's sort of the equivalent of saving all your pocket change and then being able to afford a vacation.  It's practical and doable by everyone.

Gretchen's "day job" is as a researcher and writer of non-fiction books, and it shows in how the book is written.  In addition to being methodical and organized, everything she does is backed by research that most of us wouldn't begin to know how to find and that sadly doesn't usually see the light of day outside of a small circle of scientists practicing in the same field.  Then she takes that research and puts it to the test.  Not everything she tries is right for her, but even the learning process is valuable.

I loved this book best of all because it doesn't have a holier-than-thou feel to it.  She admits her faults and failings, and then she grows and learns from them.  She encourages the reader to make their own happiness project and to use her's as a framework and not a rule book, which is exactly what I've done.  It also helped me to see that you don't have to be "broken" to want to improve.  The book is not for people who are depressed; it's for the average folk who want a little more happiness in their daily lives.

In the end, I bought a copy of the ebook for myself so I could read it again make notes and highlights on what inspired me most.  I also follow her blog and earlier today I read that The Happiness Project has now been on the New York Times bestsellers list for two years running.