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Frankly I have mixed feel­ings about Gretchen Rubin’s Hap­pi­ness Project. Although it’s a sat­is­fac­tory entry point into what you could call applied pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy, I find that I actively dis­like many of her “Moment of Hap­pi­ness” quotes of the day (still can’t bring myself to unsub­scribe from the emails though because at least they are some food for thought?) And I am so deeply skep­ti­cal of devot­ing so much time and atten­tion to the explicit goal of becom­ing happy, per se.

But there is one real gem of a tip buried in her cor­pus that has the poten­tial to be a real game changer for me, and maybe for you too. Rubin calls this hap­pi­ness com­mand­ment “spend­ing out.” It’s a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to describe explic­itly, and explained through exam­ples. I really fully under­stood one of Rubin’s non-spending-out traps as soon as she men­tioned it: re-using razor blades way too many times. Some more of my non-spending-out weak­nesses: splurg­ing on decent clothes and hair prod­ucts and makeup but never using them because my life is kinda casual, allow­ing clean sheets to sit in the drawer while the ones on my bed become down­right grimy, fill­ing Ever­note and spi­ral note­books and every­where else with zil­lions of writ­ing ideas and then never writ­ing a damn thing.

Spend­ing out is more of an atti­tude adjust­ment than a behav­ior. I don’t like this word because it’s pretty woo-woo but when you spend out, you move in the world with an “abun­dance” mind­set. Rather than assum­ing, on some level, that shit is scarce and you have to con­serve, con­serve, con­serve, spend­ing out is a behav­ior pred­i­cated on the belief (how­ever firmly or ten­u­ously you hold it at present) that your life is, and will con­tinue to be, full of goodness.

When it comes to razor blades or hair prod­uct or what­ever, there’s just no good rea­son to act as if these things are in short sup­ply, even if your ani­mal brain is nudg­ing you in that direc­tion. You are a com­pe­tent adult com­mit­ted to adding value to the world and receiv­ing value in return, and that is likely to be suf­fi­cient to fund ample razor blade pur­chases in the future.

And when it comes to ideas, hoard­ing them is actu­ally coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. When you put ideas down, work them out, and let them min­gle, you end up with many more and bet­ter ideas than that with which you started, and more moti­va­tion too.

I quit grad school over a year and a half ago. Spent most of the first year read­ing books and blogs about entre­pre­neur­ial stuff and being under­em­ployed at a dead-end job that still left me accru­ing debt and exhausted besides. I thought that I couldn’t and shouldn’t start spend­ing out, with ideas espe­cially, until after I clawed my way into a sig­nif­i­cantly less pre­car­i­ous pro­fes­sional and finan­cial situation.

Now, I believe that the spend­ing out must come first. Humans don’t do well, ener­get­i­cally and cre­atively and productivity-wise, when we’re oper­at­ing from a place of stress and worry. Even just phys­i­o­log­i­cally, the cards are stacked against your mind then, you know… cor­ti­sol and what­ever. You may not be able to just flat-out decide to be less scarcity-minded. But spend­ing out as much as you can, every day, doesn’t require a blind faith in the universe’s mag­i­cal abun­dance. Rather, it’ll actu­ally become a prox­i­mate cause of cre­at­ing a stim­u­lat­ing flow of stuff (and ideas, and activ­i­ties, and peo­ple) through your life.