Update

If you’re listening to the episode on the day it goes live, remember that tomorrow (January 10, 2019) is the last day to register for “The Happiness Project Experience.” The course gives structure and ideas to participants who want to create their own happiness projects. Over twelve months, with video lessons, live calls, expert interviews, and more, this tool helps you identify the resolutions that will bring more happiness to your life—and then helps you keep those resolutions. 

It’s $15 a month ($150 a year), and registration closes on Thursday, January 10. After that day, the course won’t be available to join again until the next year; it’s a twelve-month program that a group will go through together. Register here. 

Try This at Home

Make your “19 for 2019” list for the year—and our lists are revealed! Gretchen:

1. Give away Christmas decorations we don’t want.
2. Figure out what to do with My Color Pilgrimage, the little book I wrote out of my obsession with the subject of color.
3. Get to inbox zero, at least for one moment. Right now, I have 74 emails, going back to 2012.
4. Create more terrific merchandise for Happier and my books.
5. Use phone technology to make my life easier. I want to get in the habit of dictating texts, using Siri reminders, deleting apps I don’t use, etc.
6. Stop eating off other people’s plates—as promised, here’s the Checklist for Habit Change.
7. Learn to play the ukulele—at least one song. If you want to listen to our interview with the brilliant Roz Chast, where she talks about her love for the ukulele, it’s here.
8. Launch a daily Flash Briefing and an accompanying podcast.
9. Have a Summer of Proust—my friend is Caroline Weber; read Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siecle Paris. I also mention the brilliant set of memoirs by Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle.
10. On my book tour, read children’s literature instead of watching HGTV before-and-after shows, which for some reason is what I want to do when I’m alone in a hotel room.
11. Visit Museum of Illusions in New York City with my daughters.
12. Take Eliza to Las Vegas.
13. Make a scrapbook of “now.”
14. Walk faster.
15. Plan a 2020 reunion for my year of law clerks.
16. Have six people over for dinner, six times.
17. Figure out what, if anything, to do with the little pieces I wrote a few years ago for the New York Times Motherlode site about my love of picture books.
18. Mad Men binge watch—it would take 92 hours!
19. I reveal my 19^th item during the hack.

As suggested in the Happier in Hollywood Facebook Group, Elizabeth decided to do “9 for 2019.”

1. Visit the Integratron in Joshua Tree National Park, as discussed in Happier in Hollywood episode 72.
2. Throw an adult dinner party. She’s done this with families, but now wants to do a party just for adults.
3. Plan a weekend away with Adam—repeat from 2018.
4. Hold a Happier in Hollywood retreat.
5. Plan a Happier in Hollywood meet-up.
6. Learn to make a perfect guacamole.
7. Buy the perfect long gold necklace.
8. Get Fraxel.
9. Spend time with college friends—repeat from 2018.