Enjoy Your Inexplicable Passions
Cultivate your passions, they can be a huge engine of joy in your life. Do you have so many passions that you could drop one without losing an important source of happiness?
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The Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin shares that to counteract her impulse to work all the time she pushes herself to follow resolutions like: force herself to wander, take time for projects, read at whim, and take notes without a purpose. “And my most important resolution, of course, is to Be Gretchen.”
What’s the Big Idea?
Another key thing that Rubin does is to allow herself to follow a new passion as far as she wants. And sometimes she’s lucky enough to have turned these passions into her work. “When I became obsessed with Winston Churchill, I wrote a book about Churchill. What a joy it was to write that book! My preoccupation with St. Therese ended up playing an important role in The Happiness Project. …I no longer worry about whether they’ll be useful in that way, or not. I just let myself go. That’s because, a few years ago, it finally dawned on that I didn’t have so many passions that I could drop one without losing an important source of happiness.”
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