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Gretchen Rubin and the Power of Happiness

She has started a happiness movement as an ongoing narrative that extends to us and embraces us. This is the most moving aspect of her work. She creates a dialogue with her fans, followers and friends.
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Real Estate Agent at HOM Sotheby's

Best-Selling Author of "The Road to Social Media Success", Keynote Speaker, Digital Producer,

and

Culture Critic, Curator and Writer, living in New York City

Real Estate Agent at HOM Sotheby's
Best-Selling Author of "The Road to Social Media Success", Keynote Speaker, Digital Producer,
Culture Critic, Curator and Writer, living in New York City
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This is the latest post in our series TwitterPowerhouses, which focuses on the contributions of people who've helped to expand, influence, and redefine how we view social networking.

Millennium after millennium, the word "happiness" has provided a portrait of the range of emotions positively impacting the human condition. We know the satisfaction that comes from starting a business, taking a well-deserved vacation, overcoming a crippling fear, or mastering a new language. However one defines it or makes their way to it, this much is certain: Very few have come to symbolize the power and possibilities of happiness more than writer Gretchen Rubin. She has helped to set the tone.

We know how happy people spend their money, the names of the world's happiest countries, and we just observed the first United Nations World Day of Happiness. People around the world are assembling and attempting to hack happiness and universally crowd source contentment, well being, and joy to make happiness accessible for the entire global community. The country Bhutan measures their country's worth in Gross National Happiness, and psychologists who are a part of the very popular positive psychology movement, like Jonathan Haidt, have written extensively and beautifully about happiness. Indeed, feeling good clearly has the momentum.

And this is why Gretchin Rubin soars! What her work hasn't inspired in this arena, it has certainly complemented.

She has started a happiness movement as an ongoing narrative that extends to us and embraces us. This is the most moving aspect of her work. She creates a dialogue with her fans, followers and friends. She encourages an interactive relationship through her many social media channels, including her YouTube channel. The extraordinarily relatable Rubin deserves our praise and gratitude for living out her happiness project publicly and for sharing her insights and multi-layered research with us. Lucille Ball said "It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy." How lucky we are to have a guide like Rubin, to accompany us on our journey by taking us along on hers and for making each step a lot brighter.

First of all, we want to say what an honor this is for us. We loved reading Happier At Home and The Happiness Project so much that it feels like our own books. It feels so personal.
I’m thrilled to hear that my work strikes a chord with you, and it’s been very gratifying to hear how much people identify with my approach. People often say, “I feel like we were separated at birth,” or “I read parts out loud to my friends, and they laughed because what you wrote exactly described me.”
As soon as we read them, we felt that if we applied these principles, we really could change our lives, and we did start noticing a difference immediately. Why?
The strategies I try are very concrete and very realistic -- things that don’t take a lot of time, energy, or money, because no one has much extra time, energy, or money!
What do you want your readers to take away from your books the most?
That for most of us, it is possible to become happier, by making small, manageable changes in our everyday lives.
You post daily on your popular blog, The Happiness Project. How does your blog affect your happiness, and what parts of blogging do you enjoy the most?
My blog is a huge engine of happiness for me. The thing that makes me happiest is my ability to hear from readers. Getting responses to what I’ve written has enormously deepened my understanding of my subject. When I have a new idea, I throw it out there, and people tell me whether it rings true or not.
What is one thing that very few people know about you?
I still have to think for a minute to know my left from my right.
How would you describe yourself in 140 characters or less?


Obsessive reader, bestselling nonfiction writer, longtime blogger, member of very loving family, hair-twister, caffeine addict, live in NYC.

To find out more about Gretchen Rubin and her absorbing, feel-good perspective on happiness, pin her on Pinterest and follow her on Twitter.

Authors' Note: In case you missed it, here's Part 25 of the series: Social Media and Inspirational Leadership

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