I really enjoy the app TimeHop, which shows me photos from this day of the year one year ago, five years ago, twelve years ago. I often forward these photos to the people who appear in them; my family gets a kick of these blasts from the past, and seeing a friend or acquaintance in a photo gives me an excuse to send a quick, fun text. For the past two months, however, looking at the app has been a very poignant experience. My beloved late father appears in so many of the photos, and every time, it hits me: Just a year ago, we were having a big family dinner at a downtown bistro in New York City, or visiting the Met together, or eating at Winstead’s. It’s hard to believe he’s really gone.
Onward,
5 Things Making Me Happy
In writing my book Life in Five Senses, I learned that we humans possess many abilities that we don’t typically use—such as echolocation—because we don’t need to. Another fascinating capacity is wave piloting. The article “A voyage into the art of finding one’s way at sea” reports that scientists are studying navigators from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. These navigators find their way across the trackless ocean by using the traditional wave-piloting technique of feeling and watching swells and waves. This kind of navigation came up in a novel that I re-read recently, Nevil Shute’s Trustee from the Toolroom (great novel, terrible title).
One of my favorite people in the world, Delia Lloyd, just hit the first anniversary of her Substack newsletter, Mature Content. It’s one of the few newsletters that I read the minute it hits my in-box. Description: “A newsletter about lifelong learning, where I provide tools, insights, and resources for personal growth and discovery.” I especially love Delia’s reading recommendations.
Knowing my passionate interest in the five senses, a listener suggested a terrific article, “How to create a home that appeals to all five senses.” It includes many practical, inexpensive suggestions for making your surroundings more appealing to the senses. If you’ve never taken my super-fun, interesting, and short quiz, What’s Your Most Neglected Sense?, give it a try—it can also give you some good ideas for making your home more appealing.
I love a clever mnemonic, and I could never remember which Disney theme park was located in California or Florida, so I was delighted to learn this trick: DisneyLAnd is outside of L.A., and DisneywORld is in Orlando.
Would you like to introduce a bit more whimsy and fun into your everyday life—but need some ideas to get you started? I wrote this article, How to add whimsy to your life, about the value of whimsy and how to add it to your schedule and surroundings.
Your scale doesn’t tell the whole story
The scale can stay the same even when your body is changing. The Hume Pod tracks muscle mass, body fat, and 40+ metrics to show what’s really happening beneath the surface. When you can see real change, it’s easier to stay consistent and keep moving forward.
This week on Happier with Gretchen Rubin
PODCAST EPISODE: 572
Want to Make a Little Money and Also Clear Clutter? Plus an Insight About Estrangement
INTERVIEW
Daniel Coyle
Daniel Coyle is an New York Times bestselling author—for instance, The Culture Code—and speaker whose work explores leadership, talent, and skill development. His new book, Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment is out now.
Q: Can you suggest something we might try to help ourselves to become happier, healthier, more productive, or more creative?
Look for the Yellow Doors.
Most of us move through life scanning for clear, unmistakable signals: green doors that are open and red doors that are closed. But life becomes richer when we start noticing the yellow doors – the subtle, half-visible opportunities that appear out of the corner of our eye, the passing chances to spark new connections and explore different paths.
Yellow doors might be small – a moment in a conversation when you sense a chance to open up, to go a layer deeper. Or they might be bigger, like an invitation to try a new skill, enter a new community, or explore an unfamiliar place. All require the same essential move: you pause, loosen your grip on control, and step into uncertainty.
That step almost always feels inefficient, and sometimes even foolhardy – and that’s how you know it matters. If you could predict exactly how it would turn out – if you could control it – it wouldn’t make you come alive in the same way. Stepping into uncertainty is how flourishing begins. I learned the idea of Yellow Doors from Lisa Miller, a psychologist at Columbia, and following them has quietly reshaped my life. One led me to try indoor climbing, something I’ve long avoided because of a fear of heights. Over time, that door opened into a whole new community, friendships and adventure that I never could have planned my way into.
Q: Do you have a Secret of Adulthood? A lesson you’ve learned from life the hard way; something you’d tell your younger self?
I love this, because it makes me picture my younger self and me standing face to face. He’s looking at me skeptically, maybe a tad disappointed (“Wait, is that a bald spot?”). I’d give him a hug and say: Life is not a game — it’s a garden.
My younger self would be mystified. He believed life was a giant game, an elegant machine where everything connected, and where there was always an optimal strategy. If you found the right answers — the best career path, the best neighborhood, best mentor – you could succeed.
This mindset wasn’t useless – it led to some good outcomes. But maximizing and optimizing ends up being a dead end because life only looks like a game. In truth, it’s a set of living relationships that is always growing and changing. And the thing about gardens is that they have to be nurtured, not through one sweeping strategic move but over time, in a thousand little moments of caring attention.
My younger self loved equations, so I’d sum it up like this: QR = QL: The quality of your relationships equals the quality of your life. Or to put simply, flourishing is just another word for “community.”
Q: What simple habit boosts your happiness or energy?
Over the years I’ve explored a lot of habits – journaling, playing guitar, carving out time to daydream – but for me there’s nothing like a hard workout. I have a set-up in my basement that the kids call “The Dungeon” – a stationary bike, a bench, and some weights. It looks depressing, but for me it’s a transformer station. A 45-minute session down there, with the Grateful Dead cranked up, and the day shifts for the better.
This is a weird thing for a writer to say, but over the years I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the power of words when it comes to boosting happiness and energy. You can’t think yourself into a new way of behaving — but you can behave yourself into a new way of thinking. That’s what I get reminded of in the dungeon.
Q: Is there a particular motto that you’ve found very helpful?
Lately I’ve been obsessed by one that I adopted from the writer Peter Block: See the Gifts. As in: stop scanning for the problems (which, God knows, are easy to find), and start noticing the good stuff that is out there, just in the background, waiting for you. It helps because it tunes me into the fact that we don’t have just one way of paying attention – we actually have two. You can focus narrowly, using what psychologists call task attention. Or you can open warmly and broadly, using relational attention. Seeing the gifts helps knock me out of narrow-beam task attention, and activate relational attention.
When I’m traveling, for instance. Traveling is a headache, no question, with no shortage of problems. And it’s perfectly normal to notice those problems – the seats, the schedules, the hassles. But when I ground myself in seeing the gifts – I’m in a chair in the sky, zooming toward a place I want to go – it gets me out of my small, grouchy self and into a bigger, warmer version.
Fred Rogers had a similar mantra when it came to dealing with tragedies: Look for the helpers. It’s the same move – and it underlines a deeper truth: the type of attention we bring to the world determines the world we find.
Q: Has a book ever changed your life? If so, which one and why?
The book changing my life right now is A Swim in A Pond in the Rain, by the wonderful George Saunders. On the surface it’s about short stories, drawn from the class Saunders teaches at Syracuse. But underneath, it’s a book about how people actually change.
Saunders understands that change isn’t about forcing ourselves to be better versions of who we think we should be. It’s about gently re-channeling the energies we already have—our attention, our empathy, our natural responsiveness to the world. Saunders keeps returning to a single psychological move—where a character loosens their grip on their certainty, their self-importance, their need to be right—and allows themselves to be redirected by reality. They’re not being improved; they’re being re-aimed; the same essential energy is directed toward something other than themselves.
Reading the book has shifted how I feel about growth. Less as self-construction, more as self-interruption; less about becoming “better” and more about becoming available. It reminds me that the moments that change us most often begin not with willpower, but through moments when we let go and create community with something greater than ourselves.
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