The key ideas

Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy

Mo Gawdat, 2017

Mo Gawdat was a successful engineer and executive at Google, yet for years he could not enjoy his life. He approached happiness as an engineering problem and worked out an equation that later survived the hardest test there is: the death of his son. In this book he takes apart the errors of thinking that make us unhappy, and shows what you can lean on when nothing can be changed anymore.

Who it is for

For people who seem to have everything and still feel no joy. And for anyone living through a loss and looking for a way to go on, without pretending nothing happened.

If you have the energy to worry about the future, then by definition there is nothing to worry about right now.

Two rare cars and an emptiness inside

One day Mo Gawdat bought two old, rare Rolls-Royce cars online. He was a successful engineer and executive who had worked at IBM and Microsoft, and he had plenty of money. But the cars changed nothing. Gawdat admits that for all his rewards, material and intellectual, he had never learned to enjoy his life.

So in the early 2000s he took on happiness the way an engineer takes on a hard problem. He broke it into small parts, tested each one, and over about ten years built a model that worked. Later he joined Google and became Chief Business Officer of Google X, the division where the company's boldest projects are developed.

In 2014 the model faced its hardest test. His son Ali, twenty-one years old, was visiting his parents in Dubai when he was diagnosed with appendicitis. A routine operation went wrong through a series of medical errors, and Ali died. Seventeen days later Gawdat began writing this book. He set himself a goal he called #10millionhappy: to help ten million people become happier. The book became his way of reaching that goal in his son's memory.

And Gawdat writes like an engineer. He has an equation, six illusions, seven blind spots and five ultimate truths. The pages ahead take these parts one at a time: what they are, how they fit into a single algorithm, and what to do when life does not match your expectations.

Unhappiness starts where life falls short of expectations

Gawdat's whole model rests on one equation. Your happiness is greater than or equal to the difference between how you perceive the events of your life and what you expect from life. When events match your expectations or beat them, you feel good. When they fall short, you feel bad.

Notice the word “perceive”. The equation holds not the events themselves, but your view of them. The same traffic jam or the same curt reply from a colleague looks different to every person. So you can work on both sides of the equation: see events more clearly, and set your expectations more honestly.

Gawdat reached this point after a conversation with his mother. He realised that for years he had treated happiness as a prize you have to earn and work for, and put up with life until you get it. The mistake was in how he had framed the problem. If you are solving for the wrong unknown, you will never solve the equation, however well you calculate.

This leads to a conclusion Gawdat returns to again and again. You can rarely remake the world to suit you. But you can understand where your expectations come from, and why your brain so often shows events as worse than they are. That is what the rest of the book is about.

Read in Livria

About the author

Mo Gawdat was born in Egypt in 1967. He worked at IBM and Microsoft, and at Google he rose to Chief Business Officer of Google X, the company's research division. After his son died in 2014, he wrote this book and started a movement with one aim: to make millions of people happier.

All books by this author: Mo Gawdat

Terms from the book

  • Ali
  • materialism
  • Butterfly effect
  • Rolls-Royce: A British make of luxury cars. Its older models are prized by collectors.
  • Google X: Google's research division, where bold projects such as self-driving cars are developed. Gawdat was its Chief Business Officer.
  • Dubai: The largest city in the United Arab Emirates. Gawdat's family lived there.
  • Appendicitis: Inflammation of the appendix, a small pouch attached to the intestine. It is usually treated with surgery to remove the appendix.
  • #10millionhappy: The movement Gawdat started after his son's death. Its aim is to help ten million people become happier.
  • Six illusions: A concept from the book: thought, self, knowledge, time, control and fear. Gawdat believes these familiar beliefs distort the way we see things.
  • Seven blind spots: A concept from the book: filters, assumptions, predictions, memories, labels, emotions and exaggeration. This is the author's name for the brain's habits of replacing reality with its interpretation of it.
  • Five ultimate truths: A concept from the book: the present, change, love, death and design. In Gawdat's view, these are what you can lean on when circumstances can no longer be changed.
  • Observer: An image from the book: a person's true self, which notices the body, feelings and thoughts but is none of them. This is the author's model, not a scientific term.
  • Cycle of arrogance: A pattern from the book: an idea moves from discovery, through debate and general acceptance, to arrogance, when people stop questioning it.
  • Killingsworth: Matt Killingsworth, an American happiness researcher. He studied how mind wandering relates to mood by surveying people through a smartphone app.
  • Committed acceptance: A principle from the book: do everything that depends on you, then accept the outcome, whatever it turns out to be.
  • Design: The fifth truth in the book. Gawdat believes the universe is more likely the result of intelligent design than of chance. This is his personal position, and many people disagree with it.

All terms

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