40 Day Project

(Feel free to use this Facebook Photo for your own
#40dayproject.)

Days before I lost my 3-month old Samsung Mega, the most reliable object that I have on Earth next to my laptop, I discovered about the #100happydays. I have seen this hashtag being used by my friends on Facebook and Instagram. I got curious so I Googled it. Apparently, it was a campaign to post on social media photos of anything that made the participants happy for 100 straight days. The campaign resulted to many good things as shared by the participants who joined. Some of the benefits include being in a better mood every day, starting receiving more compliments from other people, becoming more optimistic and even falling in love.

I thought it was great. Actually, two things popped into my head, when I saw it. First is The Happiness Project book by Gretchen Book, which I wasn’t able to finish reading. And second, the movie Julie & Julia. The movie is about the young New Yorker Julie Powell, played by Amy Adams, who aspired to cook for 365 days the 524 recipes of Julia Child, played by the awesome Meryl Streep. Julie documented her progress in her blog, which became popular.

These things amazed me. There was something in documenting someone’s progress in a specific measure of time that made me drawn to these materials. As a blogger, I have dreamed of starting a project similar to what Julie had – involves blogging and is time-bound. This is actually one of my motivations in buying The Happiness Project.

But who got time to read a book?