After 365 consecutive days of interviewing everyone from friends and family to neighbors and strangers, Elisabeth Oosterhoff is endearingly self-aware and just a little uncomfortable being the subject of the conversation.
The 17-year resident of West Windsor, Norwegian native and global traveler who has lived all over Europe might have launched her at-least-one-a-day “happiness dates” a decade ago to collect fodder for her book The Many Faces of Happiness: Inspiring Stories on What Makes People Happy, but the instincts that helped her conduct hundreds of soul-baring interviews in 2010 come bubbling back to the surface all too easily as she jokes about dominating the conversation.
“I feel like we’re talking about me too much!” she laughs.
Oosterhoff published her book this past November, and the work is especially relevant this month—the International Day of Happiness is celebrated on March 20.
The newly minted author, who worked on the book on and off for about a decade, has traveled a long and winding road to bring her labor of love to the light of day. Born of an idea she had with a messenger to her job at the United Nations, Oosterhoff decided on Dec. 31, 2009, that she would spend the next year interviewing a person a day.
Oosterhoff set out on her mission armed with three prompts. She asked people to list three things that make them happy, recall the happiest moments in their life and define happiness in their terms while describing what makes them happy
“In the beginning, it was kind of scary: I had to force myself to go out there, especially once I ran out of friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, people I knew,” she says. “But after a while, I really looked forward to these daily encounters—I called them my happiness dates because, to me, they were dates with happiness.”
Oosterhoff soon found herself talking to everyone. In “happiness dates” that lasted from 20 minutes to an hour and a half, she heard from people who not only ranged in age from 5 to 95 but also hailed from three different continents.
For the most part, her efforts were met with success.
“If I got an interview that wasn’t so good, I’d find someone else,” Oosterhoff says. “Usually I have very good antenna, but some people weren’t receptive to my questions at all, so I talked to more that 365 people to make sure I had good answers every day.”
As Oosterhoff went further beyond her comfort zone to seek out new people to talk to, she became more aware of needing to distill her approach into more of a conversation and less of an interrogation.
“There was a lot of give and take—I use the word ‘dance’ because it came to be a lot like one,” she explains. “They would give me their stories, people shared all these things with me. So I always tried to share something back so they wouldn’t feel that I was only taking from them.”
It became clear that Oosterhoff’s need to offer reciprocity wasn’t just actively giving advice if someone’s stories followed a similar path to her own history. She soon found that simply asking people to consider their happiness was the spark of inspiration they needed to reconsider if they were satisfied with the lives they’d been living.
“They told me personal stories, and I made people think about things,” Oosterhoff says. “There was this one guy, he had just quit his job after many years. He was pushing 50 and had two kids in college. In the end, he thanked me because I made him think about what he really wants in life.”
The results of what Oosterhoff calls her “happiness project” yielded a 275-page book—carefully whittled down from the original 1,500-page, single-spaced manuscript—that’s chock-full of lovingly rendered interviews.
Each person’s chapter isn’t just left as a Q&A transcript but rather polished into narrated vignettes that reflect the personal nature and unique feeling of that particular exchange.
After all, one of the most prevailing lessons Oosterhoff learned is that happiness is an extraordinarily personal matter.
“Happiness is a very private thing,” she says. “How each person finds happiness will be different because everybody has different values and values different things.”
But there were some recurring themes that Oosterhoff was surprised to learn would become the prevailing trends in what makes people happy.
Family and friends “were the two big, big ones,” she reports, followed closely by helping others as well as traveling, enjoying food and drinks, being active, indulging creative expression, nature, art, faith and music.
But it was the answers she didn’t hear a lot that surprised her the most.
“I noticed something interesting: It was very few people who mentioned that their happiness came from their jobs and even less said money—only two people mentioned money,” Oosterhoff says. “It was mostly women who mentioned their jobs as a factor of happiness. I was surprised by that.”
The biggest takeaways Oosterhoff learned from bringing The Many Faces of Happiness to life are uplifting lessons told by people who shared both their happiest stories and darkest tales with her. Having such an intimate look at so many different people’s lives altered her own perspective for the better.
That cumulative positive impact is a big reason why she felt it was finally time to bring the project she initiated a decade ago into the world.
“I want to make people feel less alone, because I think when you share stories and we see that other people go through similar problems, it makes us feel less alone,” she says.
Oosterhoff now does readings from her book at local libraries, nursing homes and events to bring her and 365 other individuals’ thoughts on happiness to the community. She will also talk about her book at the March 8 International Women’s Day event in Princeton at the Princeton Italian-American Sportsmen’s Club at 2 p.m. Call (609) 658-4528 for more information.
Oosterhoff says that sharing what she learned in the past 10 years is the least she can do in the give-and-take dance and active pursuit of happiness.
“I think that if people, and I’m including myself, thought more about other people’s happiness and making other people happy, I think we would become happier,” Oosterhoff says. “A lady I was interviewing said that when she feels blue, she does something to make other people happy, like bake cookies or write a card or buy them a gift because when they get happy, she gets happy.
“I think that when we take a little of the attention off ourselves, when we are grateful with what we have, when we choose to find something to be happy about, that’s where happiness comes from. We need to realize that most things pass: You can be unhappy today but tomorrow you can always be happier.”
West Windsor resident Elisabeth Oosterhoff is pictued at the United Nations, where she works as a human resources partner. She recently published her book, “The Many Faces of Happiness.”,
