Little: A Happiness Lesson From the Cat in the Hat

Happier with Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin / The Onward Project

Education, Health & Fitness, Self-improvement

4.7 • 13K Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2016

⏱️ 2 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW! It is fun to have but you have to know how." It can be surprisingly hard to know how to have fun. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to a Little Happier. I'm Gretchen Rubin. This video is brought to you by the Happiness
0:06.3	Newsletter. Sign up and you'll get my newsletter for free. It has highlights from the podcast,
0:11.6	the blog, my Facebook page, and everything else. To sign up, just text me at 66866 and in the
0:19.2	message box, enter the word Happier. You'll get a text back that asks you to enter your email address.
0:25.2	Type in your email and you'll get a confirmation and you'll be signed up.
0:30.0	A book that we're probably all intimately familiar with is The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss.
0:35.8	A book that I love, though also made me very anxious as a child. But there's a particular line
0:42.0	in that book that I think about all the time now. I was haunted by it as I was writing the Happiness
0:46.9	Project and also again as I was writing better than before. And that is when The Cat in the Hat
0:52.1	says to the children and to the fish. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me now.
0:58.8	It is fun to have fun. But you have to know how.
1:03.2	And I think that's a really good thing for people to keep in mind because one of the things that
1:07.2	has really struck me as I've been writing about happiness and good habits is that people need to
1:13.2	have fun. You really do need to have fun. When you have fun, you're happier. When you have fun,
1:18.9	you have more forbearance for other people. You have a better sense of humor. You're healthier.
1:23.9	You're better able to stick to your good habits. This is why I write about the strategy of treats
1:28.9	and better than before because when we give ourselves fun, when we treat ourselves, we energize
1:34.0	ourselves and we make it easier to behave ourselves better. And so it's not only fun to have fun,
1:40.4	but it's important to have fun because it really helps us to live a better life. But the fact is,
1:46.4	you have to know how to have fun. And a lot of adults don't know how to have fun. And so it's
1:51.6	really worth putting in the time to think, what is fun for you? Maybe everybody else in your
1:57.4	family thinks it's fun to go skiing, but if it's not fun for you, then it's not fun for you. Or maybe
	...

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