Happiness Quiz: How Well Do You Know Yourself?
How well do you know yourself? It's surprisingly difficult.
"Just because something is fun for someone else, doesn't mean it's fun for you - and vice versa" and "You can choose what you do, but you can't choose what you like to do."

I've noticed that people often assume that everyone enjoys the same activities that they enjoy, because they believe those activities are inherently enjoyable. For example, when I commented on how well a friend had arranged some flowers, she explained, "I needed a part-time job during college, so of course I tried to get a job at a flower shop."

"Why did you try to work at a flower shop?" I asked, puzzled. "Well, everyone loves working with flowers," she answered matter-of-factly. Well, actually, nope. I would never try to get a job in a flower shop. In college, I always got temping jobs, because I could work on my own writing projects while looking productive. (Speaking of not recognizing your true nature, I missed this obvious clue that I wanted to be a writer.)
People also assume that they in fact do enjoy what they think they should enjoy - e.g., they enjoy going to the theater, because going to the theater is a fun thing to do. Nope! Not true. There are so many "fun" things that I don't enjoy one bit, like skiing, drinking wine, going to concerts, eating pasta, shopping. And I love to do many things that other people dread doing - cleaning out closets, for example. I beg my friends to let me help them clean out their closets.

Here's a quiz, lightly adapted from The Creative Lawyer, to help you figure out your interests. Not what you wish interested you, but what actually interests you.

1. What part of the newspaper do you read first?

2. What are three books you've read in the past year?

3. As a child, what did you do in your free time?

4. What's a goal that has been on your list for a few years?

5. What do you actually do with your free time? [This is perhaps the most helpful question. I finally switched careers from law to writing when it dawned on me that I was always writing books in my free time.]

6. What types of activities energize you?

7. What famous people intrigue you?

You need to pay close attention to yourself. The better you understand your true likes and dislikes, the better able you are to make decisions - in work and leisure - that will make you happy. It's not possible to build a happy life, filled with enthusiasm and engagement, based on the way that you wish you were. For better or worse, we're all stuck with ourselves.

As Thomas Merton noted in his diary, "Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself."

Have you found any good ways to understand yourself better?

Gretchen Rubin is a writer working on The Happiness Project https://www.happiness-project.com/
—an account of the year she spent test-driving every conceivable principle about how to be happy, from
the wisdom of the ages to current scientific studies, from Aristotle to Ben Franklin to Martin Seligman.
On her Happiness Project blog, https://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/about.html
she reports her daily adventures on her way to becoming happier