Solve for Happy — Mo Gawdat
Full Summary | Striving for Peace | The Happiness Equation 🙂
Whenever I’m walking around with a book or sitting somewhere reading it, people come up and ask the standard question: “whatcha reading?”
Normally I show them the cover, they’d nod, say “nice” and then continue with whatever they were doing before.
But for some reason, with this book, people are intrigued by the title.👀 They ask “what’s it about?” My answer has always been the same:
Happiness from an engineering perspective.
A lot of people then continue to ask for more details, for examples. For me, someone with an analytical mind, when I heard about this book, I knew I had to read it. Breaking down emotions in a first principles way sounded like the ultimate skill to me. 🤩
And it was in every way one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. Anything I write here is not going to do it justice. So as a preface, I HIGHLY recommend you read the book yourself. 📖Mo truly did an amazing job. 🙌
A bit of background: Mo Gawdat was the chief business executive at Google X, which is a division that focuses on moonshots🚀 (think 10X not 10%). I recently created a moonshot project, so reading this book was particularly relevant.
Almost like fate :)
Mo was inspired to write this book after the tragic death of his beloved son, Ali. 🥹The story is so . . . heartbreaking but heartwarming — at the same time.
Should happiness be the ultimate goal in life?
Oddly enough, we discussed this within TKS recently. We broke up into smaller groups, and then came together after. We brought nuanced thinking to this question.
The immediate response may be yes — you hear all these stories of people who strove for success (whether that be money, fame, or something else) instead of happiness, and are now miserable with their lives. 😥
My group approached it a different way though. The very act of chasing happiness is a limit — you’re signing yourself up for an endless chase that you’ll never complete.
But what if it’s not about the destination — it’s about the journey? Say you want to become a painter. 🖌️You can focus on the process of becoming a painter, or the result of creating a masterpiece. Process vs result. (Shoutout Aatik)
If you decide to focus on the process of becoming a painter, say you choose to paint everyday. You want to make it a habit. Fulfilling your goal is now within your control. Whether you paint every day or not is up to you, your discipline and commitment. Fulfilling your goal will make you happy. 🙂
But let’s say you choose to focus on results. You want to create a masterpiece. How do you define masterpiece? Let’s say you choose to define it as “being admired by many people.” You just outsourced your fulfillment to other people. Now other people are deciding whether you achieve your goal or not. You can work forever and ever, but you won’t be fulfilled until someone else calls your work a masterpiece. 📉
Even if you simply wanted to create something that you yourself deemed a “masterpiece,” how would you define that? Then you can easily fall into the trap of always wanting more, so this is going to take forever to achieve, so chances are you won’t feel like you achieved it. Or you could fall into the trap of perfection, and become so invested in making it perfect you are essentially paralyzed and don’t ever start. 😶
So applying the same thinking to happiness, if you view happiness as a habit, you can be fulfilled in that manner. But if you view happiness as a end result, it may be harder to achieve.
Then we asked what creates happiness, and how do we define it? Well first of all, definitions vary from person to person. A lot of our happiness is from external events: “when I get this job I’ll be happy,” “I just got a wonderful gift from my aunt which made me happy,” “I’m so happy — x just happened!”
So that begs the question, can we be happy from inside, not being dependent on external events? 🫂If you think about it this way — events mean nothing until we assign meaning to them. An A+ student who gets an 80 on a test might be severely disappointed, meanwhile a student with an average of 70 might be absolutely ecstatic with the same result.
Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
— Shakespeare
So now we’ve somewhat defined what it means to be happy. But let’s circle back to the original question: should happiness be our ultimate goal in life?
Well, there’s a lot of stuff you wouldn’t do if you were only optimizing for happiness. Take for example, exercise. 💪Most people don’t enjoy the feeling of physical pain. So exercising doesn’t make them happy. But the interesting thing here is that after you exercise, it makes you happier. You become healthier, and you are flooded with endorphins. A lot of things that make you happy require you to be unhappy first. So should you stop doing those things?
Avoiding things that are in the moment unpleasant has unfortunately become more and more common. I’m sure you’ve heard about instant gratification- doing what is easiest and most rewarding in the moment. An extrapolation of this may be hedonism — optimizing for pleasure and minimizing suffering in your life.
Hedonistic people are pursuing pleasure, so they may engage in things such as drinking, overeating, or avoiding exercise. 😶Seeking pleasure it not necessarily bad — it’s when we do considering only the short term effects, forgoing the long term effects, that it becomes a problem.
Instant gratification isn’t really happiness. 📝To be happy is more than to just feel pleasure in the moment. A lot of the behaviors described above leave the person feeling worse, even somewhat depressed, after they stop engaging. This is also where addiction comes in.
To be happy is so much more than that. At the end of this discussion, we came to a definition that really resonates with me.
Happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things.
— Naval Ravikant
At the root of all unhappiness is desire. You desire something else in your life, you are unsatisfied with your current situation. So you’re unhappy. Because you don’t have that thing. So to be happy is to be at peace with where you are in life right now.
And at the root of desire is attachment. You can desire things, but it’s when you become attached to the outcome that you begin to suffer. 🧠
Rise above thought, there you will find joy. This is what Ali did. He went through life as a “wise old sage,” nothing could disturb his uninterrupted calmness.
If you let go of all emotion to the point where you’re content with where you are, you can achieve anything. True joy is to be in harmony with life exactly as it is.
This can also be defined as peace. Happiness comes with peace. Happiness is a part of peace. Strive for peace. ✌️
But back to that question about how a lot of things that make you happy require you to be unhappy first. Do you continue to do those things?
A interesting perspective I heard recently was to have 1–2 desires (goals) you’re willing to suffer for to achieve. But then let go of everything else. (shoutout Theo).
Those 1–2 desires are your mission. Being aligned to this level on your life and what you want will do wonders for you, I haven’t gotten to that place yet. But I know a couple people who have, and it’s incredible to see the amount of progress they’re able to make. When they have that clear definition on what they want, they can just grind until they get there. Example.
To achieve the level of peace that will release you from all desires requires a certain amount of suffering first. Take the monks: they attempt to reach Nirvana through suffering. They attempt to run a marathon every day for 1000 days. 🤯
So the main takeaways here are: strive for peace, not happiness. And to achieve that peace, you have to undergo a certain amount of suffering. Have 1–2 “missions” you are willing to undergo that suffering for.
A final quote I’ll leave you with before we move onto breaking down the book:
Mens sana, corpus sanum
Sound mind, sound body. (shoutout Theo — it’s a different theo XD). To achieve this peaceful mind and good mental health, you have to have a healthy body. This is where the suffering portion ties in — you gotta exercise 💪. Now that we understand happiness at a basic level, let’s go back to what Mo said in his book.
The Happiness Equation
This was one of the first, and most simple things discussed in the book.
Happiness ≥ events — expectations
If you perceive the events as equal to or greater than your expectations, you’re happy. But the thing is that it’s not just the events that make us unhappy, its the way we think about them that does.
Think of a time when you were unhappy. Let’s say its “I was unhappy when my friend said something mean to me.” Think about this unhappy time. Now think of something else — don’t think of an elephant though. Not an elephant. 🐘(Ironic Process Theory — keep telling yourself not to think of something and you’ll undoubtably end up thinking about nothing else🙃). Distract yourself and get that negative thought out of your head. You can prime your brain to be happy, to remove negative thoughts.
You’ll notice, that when the thought is gone, so is your unhappiness. Your friend still said something mean, but you are no longer suffering because of it. When the thought disappears, so does the suffering.
It’s the thought, not the actual event, that’s making you unhappy.
This goes back to what we discussed above — nothing has any meaning until we assign it so. Let’s circle back to the perception of the events — because thoughts are not always an accurate representation of reality.
Mo talks about this in the book. One of his happiest days was when his Saab 900 Turbo got totaled in a crash. 🤔He loved that car🏎️. But the thing was: his wife was in the car at the time. But the car’s safety features — airbags, seatbelts ect — all worked perfectly and she was left unharmed. 🙌
So Mo was incredibly happy. But if the car had been totaled without Nibal (his wife) in it, he would have been devastated.
So you can see that the actual event doesn’t really matter that much. It’s how you look at it that makes the difference. So if the events remain the same, but we change our thoughts about them, can we make ourselves happy?
It happens all the time. When a rude person apologizes, it doesn’t erase the event, but it makes you feel better because you are thinking differently about the event. Life is more how you want it to be, your happiness equation is better in balance. As a result, you’re happy, or at least not unhappy.
Happiness is our default state. If you remember mini you — a wonderful baby. 🐣You were always happy. Smiling, giggling, ect. 🤩Sure, some things made you unhappy, maybe you were hungry. But as soon as you got food, you went right back to being happy.
Earlier in the book, Mo asked the reader to make a list of things that make you happy. (you could try this now 👀) Most of the things you listed are probably simple, small, moments in life. A child’s smile, a cup of tea, a hug. All these things make us happy because its how we expect them to be. It aligns with our happiness equation.
So being happy isn’t really that complicated. But for some reason, there are so many people in our world who feel that they’re not happy. Or not even that, just that they aren’t completely fulfilled.
We’ve looked at the equation for happiness. Happiness ≥ events — expectations.
So now how do we solve it? 🟰
Back to first principles: understanding what’s preventing it from being solved.
As we’ve progressed through life, we’ve believed in some illusions. We’ve been confused by filters. And we’ve forgotten about some of the most fundamental truths.
Mo breaks them down into:
6 Grand Illusions
7 Blind Spots
5 Ultimate truths
Now you just have to remember 3 numbers- 6 — 5 — 7
As a prerequisite — Mo is careful to point out that these are just the things that have worked for him — he’s not claiming that they’re the answer to everything. But I personally have found all these to be incredibly profound and impactful. So choose what you like, and leave what you don’t :)
With that, let’s dive in.
6 Grand Illusions
These illusions cause confusion and cause us to have difficulty making sense of the world. Most of us who try to solve our happiness equation do so using these illusions as input. If you think about AI — if that data isn’t right you’re not going to get the output you want. These illusions cause us to view life as difficult and the world as cruel. By seeing beyond these illusions, we see the world as it really is and happiness becomes more frequent.
- Thought
- Self
- Knowledge
- Time
- Control
- Fear
Thought
Take a moment to enjoy some peace and quiet. What do you hear? Perhaps a voice — inside your head? How long can you last before this voice pops up? Reminding you about all the stuff you have to do, the thing your friend said to you this morning, the co-worker who’s going to beat you out for the promotion.
What your voice talks about is different for everyone. But we all have that endless chatter going on in our head. Why do we even have it — who is it? It doesn’t really make sense if it’s you, because why would you need to talk to yourself? So what is it?
The voice is not you. A vantage point is a prerequisite to perception.🔭 You have to be outside of the thing you want to perceive. We couldn’t see Earth until the astronauts left it. You can’t see your eyes because they’re the things doing the seeing. The image from a mirror is just a reflection.
So it stands to reason that the voice in your head can’t be you. Or else you wouldn’t be able to perceive it. Still don’t think so? Consider this: what would happen if you stopped thinking for a few seconds — we all do it.
Do you cease to exist? Are you no longer you? Who’s enjoying the silence then?
The real you, of course. :) We’ll come back to this soon. But for now — the voice in your head is not you. It’s a separate entity. Many different cultures have a name for it: “the Whisperer,” “the Companion.” These all identify this voice as a separate being. It’s basically your brain though.🧠
Our brain is a wonderful machine. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with an operator’s manual, so many of us don’t know how to use it. Consider this example Mo uses in the book: imagine you had the fastest sports car in the world. (insert car here, I don’t know anything about cars XD). Now let’s say you only used the sound system. Or what if you decided to take it off road, where it got stuck because this is not what its meant for. Or perhaps you didn’t learn how to drive it and caused chaos.
We do all of these things with our brain. We use it for the wrong reasons, don’t use it to it’s highest potential, and allow it to spin out of control with our thought.
This complex machine talks so much for a very interesting reason: our childhood. When you were a baby, your parents talked about different things: bottle, food, ect. You repeated those, and were praised for it. So you started to describe everything around you. As you became older, this became socially awkward, so you moved the dialogue to your head.
Your brain is built to ensure your survival. So that’s its job. When you get to a beautiful view, your brains first reaction isn’t to sit back and enjoy it — it’s to assess the area for any possible threats. Unfortunately, as a result of this survival mechanism, the brain’s thoughts tend to be negative.
Since we want to be happy (or at peace) here, we sometimes don’t want to listen to our brain and all it’s negativity. Well, you are in charge of your brain! So you can tell it: “go bring me a better thought.”
Look at the bolded word below, take a moment to really focus on it.
Seal🦭
Are you by chance thinking of a seal now? When you read the word “seal,” your thoughts very likely changed to thinking about just that. So your brain can be primed. And when we have infinite choices as to what to prime it on, what should we choose? You guessed it — happy thoughts!
The brain is a bit stubborn. So you might have to ask a few times. Be patient, like talking to your 5-year-old self. Go get me a better thought!
Ex. I hate my job.
So what do I like about this place?
It’s horrible, the food is terrible and my boss is mean.
So, is there anything good about that place?
I guess the commute isn’t bad, and the receptionist is nice. But man this place is ugly.
Keep holding on to the positive thoughts, and they’ll flow easier. You can control your thoughts. Because the voice inside your head is not you, it’s your brain. And the real you is in charge of your brain — you’re the boss! ✊
Self
Who are you? A lot of people can’t answer this question, or spend a ton of time trying to answer it. Myself included. Who you really are is hidden underneath layers and layers of “masks.” 🎭
These masks are created by our ego. Here, Mo isn’t talking about the ego that is associated with arrogance. He’s using ego to mean sense of self. We’re born without one, but over time, as we learn words, we start to create an identity for ourselves. 🪪
Let’s say your parents call you Pooki. To get the things you want, you might refer to yourself in the third person: “Pooki hungry.” Eventually this progresses to “I”, and your ego is born. As you grow older, you keep testing different behaviors to see which one gets you the most praise, lets you feel the most accepted. 🫂
You start to form an identity around this. We move further away from our true nature and closer to the accepted nature in our peer group. This goes right back to survival instincts, to be different and cast out meant death. So the masks keep piling up as we play more and more roles — trying to fit into all of them. 😵💫
As you start to remove these masks, to see through them, you’ll realize what you’re not. Eventually you’ll get to a layer that withstands the tests of both perception and permanence.
Perception is quite simple, and we’ve discussed it before. You can’t be the subject observing something unless you’re in a vantage point outside that object. If you’re looking at a dog, you’re not that dog. 🐕
Permanence is asking if the quality or description that you associate with yourself changes. If it changes while you remain unchanged, then it’s not you. If you were once a lawyer and now you’re a teacher, neither is the permanent you.
Let’s break down what you’re not, to get to that level of who you really are.
Kicking this off: You are not your physical body. If the body you see in the mirror now is you, then what happens if you look at your body as a 6 year old? Is it still you? What if you lose a limb in a horrifying accident? Are you less you? If you need an organ transplant, are you a bit of the donor and a bit of you? Not to mention that your body is made of cells, which die off every 4 days to one year (varying for different types of cells). Your physical form is almost entirely replaced every few years. So which one of the changing forms is the real you?
Are you your emotions? “I am in love.” What if you stop feeling in love? Do you vanquish? You are not your emotions. What about your beliefs? “I am Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Atheist.” What if you change beliefs? Are you a new you? You are not your beliefs.
You are not your name. You are not the group you belong to. You are not your achievements. You are not your possessions.
Ok so if you’re none of these things… who are you? This was the first time I heard this concept, and it’s one of my favourite things from the book.
Take a moment in full present awareness. Sit in silence. Notice the thoughts in your heat, your breath, the blood pumping through your body, your fingers holding whatever device you’re reading this on. The light in your eyes, the sounds around you.
You’re none of what you just observed.
You are the observer.
If you’re the observer nothing really matters. If you’re only observing life, nothing that happens really has any effect. like if you’re watching a movie do you really care what happens to the characters? No, you don’t have a stake in the game. So why do we care so much?🤔
Unfortunately, we are in a physical world, and our self is not something physical. So it’s quite difficult to comprehend. We simply don’t have the right instruments to measure it. But it makes sense to me.
Let’s continue on with the deepest illusion of self. Do you sometimes get caught up in your life — how everyone is focused on you? Maybe you sometimes feel like you’re the center of attention?
Take this miniscule example (from the book XD):
Tim is enjoying a cappuccino in front of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. “This must be the best coffee ever, he thinks. The barista paid so much attention to making it — and then she added this wonderful art on top. She must know how much I love a good coffee.”
Although it’s a super small moment in Tim’s life, you can see how he’s entirely focused on himself. He feels like he’s the star of the movie. But who’s the star in the barista’s movie? If she is, what does that make Tim? Is he a supporting actor? 🎬
You’re a supporting actor in thousands of people’s movies: the barista, the grocer, a random person on the street, the list goes on and on. So if you’re the supporting actor in thousands of movies and only the star in one, how much of a superstar does that make you? 📽️
Knowledge
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s arrogance. — Confucius
“There are known knowns, there are things we know we know. We also know that there are known unknows, that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Donald Rumsfeld
Every question asked will go through what Mo calls “The Arrogance cycle.” Discovery -> debate -> acceptance -> arrogance. Through all these new discoveries, we humans continue to assume that we know everything. We reject any possibility that we could be wrong — we’re the smartest beings on the planet after all. 🌍
Even when we know something accurately, we know such a small portion of all there is to know about that thing. 90% of the oceans remain unexplored, we only understand about 3% of our DNA.
In addition, the way we communicate puts a limitation on our knowledge. We use single words to encompass objects with incredible variety. Skyscraper, for example, describes countless designs, thousands of different materials, and the work of millions of people into one word.
The illusion of knowledge is strongly supported by the illusion of self, by the ego. Think of a time when something you believed to be true couldn’t have been further from the truth.
This can be particularly common when categorizing events as “good” and “bad.” Mo also talks about something called the Eraser Test. ✏️Take any event in your life, and you have the chance to test drive a new technology that will allow you to erase that event.
As a result, everything that happened because of that event, the people you met, things you learned, will also be erased. So think about what event you want to erase, considering all the other twists and turns that came with it.
If this technology actually existed, how many events would you actually want to erase? Most of the people Mo surveyed opted to keep that event, even though at the time they thought of it as bad. Understanding this can help to make your happiness equation true.
So remember, real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s arrogance. And every moment in your life is neither all good nor all bad.
Time
We constantly deal with time, but we don’t understand it. Our struggle to make sense of both the past and the future affects our happiness. The most important thing when it comes to defining time is to understand that you are moving though time, time is not moving. Time is also largely a human construct, or at least our measurement of it is.
Different cultures also treat time differently. ⌚Generally, in the west, meeting start exactly on time, and a few minutes before the scheduled end time, people start to pack up. Even if they’re in the middle of a deep conversation. In the Middle East and Latin America, events generally have a rough start time and continue for as long as it seems necessary/worthwhile.
Another incredibly interesting concept there is that almost all emotions anchored in present moment are happy. (Physical pain is not an emotion.) While all emotions are felt in the present, they are typically anchored in the past or future. For example, embarrassment, anger, contempt, ect, these are anchored in the past. Anxiety, fear, stress — anchored in the future.
Calmness, affection, love, satisfaction, delight — these are all anchored in the present. Take a moment here and think about this seemingly silly question: have you ever experienced anything outside the present moment?
We place so much importance on the past, but it’s just a collection of memories. And these memories are notoriously unreliable. The only time that ever exists is the moment as you experience it now. Once that moment happens, it’s gone. Forever. 😶
Nothing happens in the future either. Any event “there” is imagination. You have absolutely 0 guarantee that, of the infinite possibilities, the one you’re thinking about will come to be true. When we’re living in the past or present, we’re in our thoughts, not reality. 🙈
Another thing — does time seem to whiz by for you? A week felt like a day, it just vanquished? Well, that’s likely because you barely spent any time in the present moment. If the past month feels like a day, you only spent a day’s worth of time in the present moment. Being present can slow down time.
Let’s say you were going on a trip. It was 70 days. Or was it 70 years — I can’t remember. And at the end of that trip, you die. :(
Would you spend all your time thinking about day 70? Or would you enjoy each moment? The only moment that ever exists is right now. So enjoy it. :)
Control
Have you ever had a time when you thought you had everything all figured out, but then something went horribly wrong? Some external event threw a massive wrench into your carefully coordinated plan? 🔧
Take Mo’s example: 4 days into the (well-planned) summer vacation when Ali was visiting home, he was admitted into the “wrong” hospital, and unfortunately a medical error occurred. Mo wasn’t able to control that.
We think that we control everything: our friends, family, finances, everything. But we really don’t. If inflation is raised, taxes increase, your brother moves far away, you can control none of these things. 😥
A lot of the time, we say that we can’t possibly plan for these unexpected events because they are just that — unexpected! But how often do these things really happen? All the time!
And we also neglect to consider the millions of events that happen every day: natural disasters, economic crisis, bankruptcies — life altering events. And since we’re not even considering those, why would we think of events that have a much more subtle impact on our lives?
In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassum Nicholas Taleb demonstrates that rare and improbable effects occur much more often that we think. And a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz coined “The Butterfly Effect.” He ran a series of weather models in which he added a slight change to the wind speed. These were almost imperceptible (he compared them to a butterfly flapping it’s wings), the ultimate outcome changed significantly. This led to the speculation that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Florida. 🦋
There is virtually no way to control all these butterfly effects, as many of them probably started months before the actual event.
Between black swans and butterfly effects, nothing is under your control.
When you try to control everything, your expectations of how the world should be skyrocket. This results in suffering when these expectations are not met. We have to learn to accept that we can’t control everything. To thrive out of control. 🚀
Take algebra for example. A+C= 2B+C. We can cancel C out, because it doesn’t affect the equation. A=2B will be the same no matter the value of C. C represents the things we cannot control.
There are truly only two things that are under your control: your attitude and your actions. Take the responsible action, and then surrender. And choose your attitude. That’s all you can really do.
Fear
Everyone is afraid of something. Someone may not even know that the motivation behind many of their actions is fear. Or they may just hide their fear well. Even if you are the most powerful person in the world, there is something you are afraid of. 😱
For our final session in TKS, we did an exercise similar to this, called fear setting. I’m gonna be pulling insights from both places. 🚀Highly encourage you to take the time to do this activity.
Our brain is wired to be grumpy. It’s a survival thing. There’s no point in recognizing the beauty of the tiger over the danger that it poses — one is an immediate threat to your survival. And thus the danger is the thing your brain notices first.
The first step in overcoming these fears is to admit that you are afraid. Write a list out of all your fears. And then pick the 3 that are the most present in your life.
The goal here is to find the worst possibility if your fear came true — go down to the bottom. And then climb back up. 🪜
Now what would happen/what would life look like if you lived like your fears were true?
What I found from doing this exercise is that my fears would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I lived as though no one enjoyed being around me and was scared of being lonely, I wouldn’t go out and see people, I’d be quiet and reserved. And as a result, I’d become lonely.
All fears are a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We create our own realities.
Next question: what’s the worst case scenario of my life?
When you take the time to walk through your fear, you realize that you have a bit more control than you thought at first. Your brain’s neurons start forming differently and the fear doesn’t look as scary anymore. You can remove the threat. The fear doesn’t go away, but you get to create your reality.
Is your worst case-scenario really as bad as you thought? And what’s the likelihood of your worst case scenario happening? Maybe you have to give a presentation, and the worst case scenario is that you get booed off stage. How often does that happen? How many presentations have you seen, and how many of those resulted in the speaker being booed off the stage?
So now, what would you do if this worst case scenario was true? Could you recover?
You’ll realize that there would actually be quite a few things you could do if this scenario came true.
What do you have control over to choose your worst case scenario?
You might end up with different answers, but this is what I came up with.
- MY behaviour → my habits, my actions, my perceptions
- who i talk to. i can reach out to whoever i want
- my decisions. how i move forward after reaching that worst case scenario
Let’s take another key thing here. When you start to spiral monkey🙈 (imagine that worst case scenario), slow down and ask yourself what are the facts.
Let’s say (heaven forbid) you get cancer. You can create this whole story. But the fact is that you have cancer. Remove the emotion. Rewriting the story that your brain immediately jumped to would be so easy. Tell your brain: go get me a better thought. There are two circles: fear and fact. When they’re overlapping, you’re spiral monkeying🙈. When they’re separated, you’re good.
7 Blind spots
These blind spots affect the way our brain processes information, and as a result leaves us with a blurred view of the world and reality. As a survival mechanism, these blind spots are combined with our brain’s pessimistic tendencies. It’s a roadblock to solving our happiness equation, and causes us to suffer.
- Filters
- Assumptions
- Predictions
- Memories
- Labels
- Emotions
- Exaggerations
The whole reason we have these blind spots goes back to our evolutionary roots. This is one of the most fascinating things to me: everything that we now perceive as bad was once the thing keeping us alive.
Imagine this: you’re back to prehistoric times and out hunting. A branch behind you rustles. Your attention narrows and you filter out other sensory inputs. 🔭You need to focus, this branch gets your full attention.
Based on the height of the branch that moved, you assume that it is a large predator you’re up against. The bush stops moving, an indication that the predator realizes he’s been discovered. 🐅You predict a battle. You wave to your group, taking caution to prepare. You’re recalling memories of past events: you’ve seen beasts just like this tear apart many victims before.
There’s not much time left. You have to make a snap decision, so you label the situation a present danger. You feel an overwhelming emotion of panic, which floods your body with adrenaline to prepare you for the fight. As the seconds tick by, your brain exaggerates everything, seeing every possible scenario as far more dangerous than it is.⚠️
The branches rustle more loudly now, and you whip back around expecting an immediate attack. A few birds fly away. Your tiger was a few birds. At least we’re still alive. (🥲)
Our brains have had these features outline above: filtering, assumptions, predictions, memories, labels, emotions, and exaggerations. They ensured our survival long ago, but in the developed world, tigers aren’t all that common, and as a result these features aren’t nearly as effective or useful.
Take a look at this image from the book. Make note of what you see, just after a first glance.
Did you notice the book falling out of the girl’s bag, the teddy bear she’s holding, the empty parking meter? What did you observe? Was it the imminent accident? Most of us do.
Now zoom out, see the bigger picture. Everything’s fine — the car’s parked, there’s a crossing guard, and everyone’s safe. Why isn’t that the scenario you imagined?
Most of us tend to be negative most of the time. If the conversation in our ancient hunter’s head was “there’s no tigers around here, relax. Walk into the cave. You’ll be fine.” Although that would most certainly be less stressful life, when survival is at stake, it’s not the most ideal situation.
But life is made almost entirely of positives. What’s the norm: typhoons or nice weather? Sickness or health? Earthquake or solid ground? Focus on the positives, the white of the page, not the black ink.
Filters
The way we see the world is slightly skewed because our brain omits some of the truth to focus on what it deems to be priority. As we’ve seen, that tends to be the negative stuff.
But there are other examples. Check out this video:
Most of the observers report the number of passes correctly. But when asked about the gorilla, most respond: “what gorilla?” This is a prime example of the filtering that humans do. We obsessively focus on counting the number of passes, so we miss what’s right before our eyes.
The story your brain tells is always incomplete.
Assumptions
After filtering out the majority of the truth, the brain assumes any remaining missing information to fill in the gaps. This is to help us make decisions.
This combined with our brain’s negative bias can lead to a pretty interesting world view. For example: “my boss missed her last quarter.”
You may assume that she’s under pressure, and therefore your achievements will make her replaceable. So you’re assuming, with no foundation, that your boss is your enemy. And you’ll behave accordingly.
Let’s look at this scenario with a more positive mindset. You’d observe the same fact, but create a completely different story. (Interesting how almost everything comes down to the stories we tell ourselves about it, isn’t it?👀). You might assume that it’s necessary for the team to work extra hard to make the next quarter, and you’ll assume that your boss will do everything she can to make you succeed. Your boss is now your ally, and you’ll behave accordingly. 🦾
Both are equally plausible, however our grumpy brain may trend towards the previous one. But these stories are not true, because:
An assumption is nothing more than a brain-generated story.
Predictions
Our brain makes assumptions to fill in the gaps, and the biggest gap is the future. We can never be sure what will happen, but our brain tries nonetheless. It takes two data points and identifies a sort of trend between them. 📈
For example, if you just finished watching a show in which the best friend of the main character turned on her, and had your own best friend tell you a similar story about her ex-best friend, you might assume that your friend is bound to betray you as well. 😶Your brain will continue to expand on this story, and as a result you will act as though your friend will betray you, taking any action as a sign that you’re right. You’re acting like your friend will, so she/he just might.
Predicting that something will happen often lays the path to make it happen. But your predictions aren’t the truth. So don’t let them control you!
Memories
Our brains also rely on past experiences as a guide to decision making. 🔮But our bias that something we tried in the past won’t work fails to consider the other circumstances that may have lead to that particular outcome. We are blending the current situation with our memories of struggle, which leads to decisions that are not completely based on reality.
Our memories contaminate our perception of reality, almost like if you put a drop of ink into a bucket of water. 🩸You may have visited a beautiful island, but then had a fight with someone you travelled with. Now that place is logged as sad because of that sad memory.
The most astute thing here is that your memories likely aren’t even the whole truth! They’re just recollections of the events as you remember them. What you think happen. They’re often not the truth!
Labels
Labels also come from the past, like memories, but are more potent. They act like a tag that comes from past experience, but they remove the context from that specific event. A rainy day is labelled miserable, a group of teenagers walking around in hoodies are labelled trouble, and an exotic-looking car is labelled fast.
These labels allow our brain to work much faster — it doesn’t have to perform the whole analysis and association over again each time, it instead can call on it’s database and make a quick judgement.
Labelling is so instinctive even monkeys do it. There were bananas hanging in their cage, with a ladder underneath it. When the monkeys attempted to get the bananas, the researched sprayed them with water.💦 Eventually, when one brave monkey tried to get the bananas again, the other monkeys held him back and began screeching. The association was clear: ladder = cold water.
Labelling hides the truth for us. We think we know everything about something because of the one word description we give it. I see labels as the root of prejudice and discrimination. In the absence of context, labels very often cover up the truth.
Emotions
Emotions can affect our decisions when we combine them with logic. Even though most of our decisions are ideally driven by logic, in reality they’re driven by emotions. We work hard because of desire, ambition, and love. We hide because of fear and shyness.
Our emotions exist again because of survival mechanism. When that tiger shows up, the panic that we feel causes our system to be flooded with adrenaline, which allows us to get out of there lightning fast or attack the tiger. 🐅
Our brains still create these emotions, even in these modern times. Life before was much simpler. And our emotions were more aligned with those of nature. For example, a tiger chasing an antelope. That antelope feels panic, but after it manages to escape, goes right back to eating grass calmly. And likewise with the tiger — it’s aggressive while chasing the antelope but becomes peaceful after realizing it wouldn’t be able to capture it.
But us humans are engaged in many emotions, sometimes conflicting ones at the same time. And we allow these to continue, sometimes throughout our whole lives without acknowledging their influence.
If you want to buy a TV, you may decide in a few seconds that it’s a “good deal.” You might then starting to look for other reasons to back up why you should buy it. And if you are a member of a particular political party, you might dislike the opposing before they even speak, and then gather evidence after as to why it was a bad speech. The reality is that we make our decisions based on emotions first, then gather data to prove them. 📊
We’re not as rational as we’d like to think, and our decisions are often driven by our irrational emotions.
Exaggeration
Our brain’s motto is “you can never be too careful.” It will exaggerate our perceptions to convince us to take action.
For example, it’s not hard to teach a lab rat to identify between a rectangle and a square.🐀 Just give it cheese every time it picks the rectangle. Soon it will pick the rectangle every time. And you’ll also be able to observe what’s called a “peak shift” — the rat picks the longest, skinniest rectangles. The exaggerated ones if you will.
And even evolutionary — female peacocks🦚 prefer males with larger tails, the strongest male lion or gorilla gets all the females. But none of these exaggerations are true characteristics. For example, the peacock with the biggest tail may not be the best mate. The exaggeration deceives us. More importantly, when the negative is exaggerated, it causes us to suffer.
Airline crashes, shark attacks, and terrorism are present in our thoughts as an immediate danger, while everyday dangers that kill thousands are overlooked. Princeton Professor and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman refers to this as the “availability heuristic.” Your brain will exaggerate the likelihood of an incident where you believe the risk to be confirmed.
“Somehow the probability of an accident increases [in your mind] after you see a car turned over on the side of the road,” says Kahneman.
Another example is from Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon: “With 9/11 we lost 3,000 people in one day, but during 1994 in Rwanda 800,000 people were killed in 100 days — that’s 8,000 a day for 100 days — and the world didn’t react at all.”
Exaggeration inflates our expectations and therefore causes us to suffer.
Your happiness equation remains unsolved often because you are feeding your thoughts with the wrong information. Because of the blind spots outlined above, you are seeing a disorientated view of what life actually presents to you. And our expectations of what they should be are inflated, which results in both sides of the equation being unsolved.
“Teach your brain to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.“
You can keep asking your brain “is there anything else I should know?” and your brain will respond “oh yes, I forgot about this.” Ask again and again and you will have a much more objective view of the truth. Ask simply “is it true?” and your brain, being a tool, will respond accordingly.
Keep asking “is it true?” until you realize how insane the statements our brain gives us really are. Practice this as often are you can.
Most of the time, the only thing wrong with our lives is the way we think about them. When you see the world in reality, you will notice that the events of your life, when perceived correctly, line up with our expectations, when set correctly. Solving the happiness equation isn’t really that hard.
So if the reality of life mostly meets realistic expectations, why should we bother with the Happiness Equation at all? Great question. We’ll discuss it next, at 5.
5 Ultimate Truths
These are all you need to know to realize that life always behaves as expected. Even the harsh events always meet the expectations when you set them realistically — knowing how life really behaves, not how you would wish it to behave. None of the twists and turns will matter anymore, because you expect them and know how to deal with them. Anchor yourself to the truth, and move above the state of happiness that is conditional, and into a state of permanent joy.
- Now
- Change
- Love
- Death
- Design
Mo also has a few notes he shares on the following chapters — I think it’s relevant to mention them here.
The truth will set you free. When he lost Ali, he would go to the cemetery to be with him. He saw many others there as well. The first few months were followed by a period of deep grief. They would visit often and stay a long time. And one day, one of these visitors would smile.🥹 Perhaps tell their loved one a story, and how much they missed them. And then over time, they would visit less and less often. So Mo wondered, is death expected?
Death is unwelcome, painful, and intrusive, but who can say it’s unexpected? Death is very real, and it should be expected. So is every truth. We may reject it and wish it wasn’t true, but it overpowers us.
Every truth happens exactly as expected, even when you least expect it.
This is a good thing. Because when reality matches your expectations, your Happiness Equation is solves. All life’s harshness is no longer a surprise, it doesn’t shock you, so you find peace.✌️ And please also note, these truths are Mo’s truths, the ones that helped him find joy and survive the tragedy of losing Ali.
Some of the truths may be easier to accept than others. There are points, however, where you can neither prove that something is true or that it is not true. This is when you have to make a crucial choice and follow Mo’s Golden rule for Happiness: Choose to believe in the side that makes you happy. It’s likely closer to the truth. Choosing the side that makes you suffer with no evidence to do so isn’t that smart.
“When nothing is certain — and nothing ever is — choose to be happy. “
Now
All of life is here and now. But why do most of us live inside our heads, outside the present moment? There was an experiment conducted by Matt Killingsworth that found that when people were in the present, it didn’t matter what they were doing, they were noticeably more happy.
Being fully aware of the present moment considerably increases your chance of being happy. 📝
Awareness is the ability to grasp the world at a given moment. Presence is what enables this awareness. Awareness is a dimmer, not an on off switch. When you choose to crank it up, you become more aware.
Maintaining awareness seems to be hard, especially in our distracting modern world. So what are some things you can do to become fully aware? Think about it.
Now let’s compare answers. Yes, sorry it was a trick question.
Do Nothing.
You don’t need to do anything to be aware. Your default state is awareness. To be aware, you just need to stop doing! You don’t do aware, you be aware.
There are a few different things you can be aware of. Many meditation techniques identify 4 corners.
- The world outside. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings of touch.
- Inside your body. Pains, sensations, heartbeat, breath.
- Thoughts and emotions. Observe the dialogue, observe the drama. Watch your thoughts flow through you and freely let them go.
- Connection to the rest of being. The highest level of pure awareness. The connection you have with the rest of being: the love you have for the waves, admiration you have for butterflies, sympathy you have for fellow humans. These aren’t sensory perceptions of the world, aren’t feelings, and aren’t thoughts or emotions. They make you feel like you’re part of a bigger community that extends way beyond your individual experience of the world.
Our busy lives give us but a second to be aware. One of the most interesting things for me is that top performers, like Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI), the CEO of Nike (John Donahoe) and so many more make time to meditate. So if they are some of the most successful people in the world, have the busiest lives, and they still take the time to meditate and be aware, maybe I should too. 👀
Be an awareness fanatic. Try to figure out how many different types of trees 🌳🌲🌴you come across. Measure the time your commute takes along different routes. Monitor your daily water consumption, or your posture. It doesn’t matter what you choose to notice, just give yourself a reason to be alert. Try to remember as much as you can, and spend time trying to recall what you’ve forgotten.
When your mind wanders, you don’t have to do anything, except notice that it did. The black belt of presence is to notice when you’re not aware. 🥋
Remove the distractions in your life. Keep your phone in your pocket when you have quiet time. Spend time doing absolutely nothing instead of watching TV. Add “me time” appointments to your calendar, and treat them as you would a job interview. Get rid of distractions to free up the space you need to be fully present.
Another thing — don’t do multiple things at once. Multitasking is a myth. Your brain truly cannot do two things at once.
Whatever you do, give it your undivided attention.
Live life in the here and now, not inside your head.
Change
The only thing you can accurately predict is that the world tomorrow will be different than the world today. Every subtle change, every butterfly effect, changes every instance of our lives.
An interesting side of science that demonstrates the power change has is the multiverse. You smile, one universe. You frown, a different one.
Instead of trying to control all the tiny events in our lives, let most of the events in your life seek equilibrium. Every factor that affects you like acts like the swing of a pendulum. And a pendulum seeks its point of equilibrium, the point of balance where it is effortlessly still.
When a force is applied, that pendulum can be removed from its point of equilibrium. Once the force is removed, the pendulum will rush back to that equilibrium state. 💨
Extremes exhaust us. Trying to control thousands of pendulums is unfeasible and pointless. Better to let them find their own equilibrium so you exert minimal effort. We do better in balance. Work too much and you lose the joy of living, work to little and you suffer from a feeling of worthlessness.
Let everything seek it’s natural balance.
When everything feels effortless, you have found your path.
Along with success and progress, another core value of modern society is ambition. We always want more, bigger, better. The strange thing though is that we measure relative success: we teach kids to measure their worth by how much they achieve in absolute terms, but also in competitive, comparative terms. It’s not enough to achieve, we have to achieve more than others. 🏆
When we compare, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment. There will always be someone who’s gone further or done better. This makes our expectations inflated, causing our Happiness Equation to remain unsolved.
We forget the most important thing though: in one narrow aspect of life, for example prettiness, there will always be someone who has “more” than you. But each of them also has “less” than you in at least one other thing. It’s just how life works. 📊
There is nothing wrong with wanting to advance in life, its when we do so motivated by comparison that it becomes an issue with regards to happiness.
I heard this both from Mo and from Aatik: reframe ambition so that its about becoming a better person regardless of how you compare to others.
Don’t look at what you don’t have, it’s infinite. Look instead at the billions who have less. In Japan, there is a silent culture, and it’s not customary to express negative emotions. A smile is used instead. Mo asked his friend, and she said “We keep our suffering for ourselves and give our smile to you.” 🥹🫶
I’m sure you know how effective gratitude is for happiness. There was a study conducted in which participants wrote a letter of gratitude each week and delivered it to someone they wanted to thank. Participants experienced a huge surge in happiness scores, with the impact lasting sometimes as long as a month.
While you may not be the luckiest person alive, you most certainly are not the unluckiest. :)
Love
I love cats. Every single cat that has ever existed. 🐈
I also like cats. I like their cuddliness. I like when they make me smile with their silliness. I admire their beauty and their athleticism. I respect them for their unwavering air of self-importance.
Liking, admiring, respecting, and love are all different. I like and admire and respect for reasons. But love is unconditional. True love is real, its not temporary. Admiration is temporary, when the thing I admire goes away, the emotion is gone.
Conditional love is driven by the thought “I love because…”
True love is just “I love.” Unconditional love is real. It’s the only emotion that’s not generated by a thought in your head. True love is always felt, every second of the day.
There is no happiness without love. Conditional love may cause suffering, but true love delivers lasting joy. True love has no expectations, it just is. “No expectation” can never turn into a missed expectation. Which means you’re happy. 🤩
The true joy of love is in giving it. The more love you give, the more you get back. Consider the law of conservation of energy. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It changes form, but doesn’t go away. Love is the same. The more you love, the more you will feel loved.
Here are Mo’s secrets for how to benefit from the spectacular economics of love.
- Love everything and everyone. Snakes might look creepy, but they are jut doing what they were made to do. If you hate them, you hate the story you made up about them.
- Love yourself. How can you love anything, or expect anything to love you if you don’t love yourself? Nothing causes more unhappiness in the Western world today than the lack of self-love. Love yourself for doing your best.
- Be kind. Give unconditionally, materially and not. Donate a few cents to a charity. Acknowledge those who cross your path. Treat everyone as you would like to be treated. If you give, life always gives back to you. To love is to give all you can.
Love is all you need to find your unconditional state of joy. 🥰
Death
I almost don’t want to attempt to summarize this chapter. This one was written so beautifully, directly from the heart. I feel like I’d mess it up. So I’ll just provide my key takeaways, and you can go read that actual book should you want a more comprehensive view.
Death is expected. We all know that at some point we will die. So why does it cause us to suffer? Well the only reason is because we are not setting realistic expectations.
Death is an essential part of the food chain. Without death, there wouldn’t be life. The only species that makes such a big deal of death is our own.
We all know deep down inside that we will die. However, we wish that death would book an appointment rather than showing up uninvited. And we’d prefer a late appointment.
In actuality, we are dying a little every day. The day of death is simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.
And as we discussed earlier, the physical form is an illusion. Death is, at least what I think currently, the end of our physical form. But not the end of life. Death is the opposite of birth. Birth and death are the portals through which we come in and go out of this physical form. But life is independent of the physical world. Life observes the physical.
While our physical form decays, we never really die.
Death scares us because we are comfortable with the familiarity of life. When you were born, you felt the same with the environment of your mother’s womb. You wouldn’t have wanted to leave, you might have thought that was as good as it was gonna get.
But now, would you really go back?💭
Apply that to the next transition. If we knew it would all be fine after we dies, would it matter if we did? Millions of near-death experiences have been recorded, many of them positively.
Death teaches us three very important lessons.
- Death is inevitable. The first lesson death teaches is for us to accept it.
- Life is now. The start and end of your life are like the covers of a book, what matters is the story you tell in between. How would you live if you knew today was your last day? Would you be upset that the waiter was not friendly if it was your last meal? Or would you slowly savor every bite. Live this moment as if it was your last.
- Life is a rental. When the time finally comes, you will leave everything behind: the people you love, material wealth, and everything else. Nothing can be gained that will not eventually be lost. Rent a full and happy life. The verb to die never requires an object, only a subject. I die. I’m not afraid to die because I choose to die on my own terms. Stop thinking of the time that you will rest in peace, and instead live in peace. (L.I.P.)
And the most beautiful analogy I have ever heard was then presented. 🤩
How different is your life on earth from a video game?🎮 If you are a character living through first person view (remember, you are the observer), why does it matter if you face a few challenges along the way? Serious gamers set the difficulty to high, in fact. When games are too easy, it’s not fun. The harder the game gets, the more fun it becomes.
Life is a game. So play, live, learn, and have fun!
Design
Did we create the idea of a “God,” or did God create us?
Is our life and our universe the product of randomness, or of design? To answer this question, Mo dives into the classic engineering/entrepreneurial approach: defining the problem statement. If we don’t know what we’re solving for, then whatever answer we come up with may not actually solve the issue.
Problem Statement:
The big bang, evolution, and natural selection could have created our universe and every life form on it.
The process of intelligent design equally could have.
What is the mathematical probability of either? 🧮
Should you want the actual analogies Mo uses (they are quite wonderful) I would recommend reading the book itself. Honestly if you’re still reading this article, the concept has probably particularly intrigued you, and you should probably read the book anyways. 😼
Before we attack the problem statement, let’s address an overlooked detail. Evolution is a scientific fact. The distinction comes between macro-evolution and micro-evolution.
Micro-evolution is changes within species. A classic example of this would be Darwin’s finches and their beak sizes changing based on the food that was available to them. At the end of the day, they are still birds. 🕊️
However, there is no evidence of macro-evolution found in evolutionary literature. There has been no observable evidence proving that a fish evolved into an amphibian. Scientists have found historical evidence, for example fossil records, and then built theories to explain them.
Evolutionary adaptation is true, but it doesn’t fully explain the variety of creation in our world. To find if there’s a more plausible story, we need to look at evolution vs. design.
Let’s say that an alien species lands on this planet, and is investigating archaeological remains. They find several specimens of a species names “Audi.” If these aliens look at what they found with today’s evolutionary mentality, they will believe that Audis evolved as a species. 📈
And if you compare them from 1980 to 2023, you can see a clear difference. The species became more durable and reliable, enabling the Audi to go for hundreds of thousands of miles. They became more aware of their surroundings through sensors and GPS devices. They evolved!
But to assume that they just randomly came into existence with no engineer is a bit foolish. It’s theoretically possible, with infinite time and attempts that this could occur. But is it probable? 🤔
And not to mention that cars are WAY simpler than we are. An entire car is equivalent to the complexity of one of the many hundreds of systems in our bodies. And besides, for the above to be true, we’d need infinite time. But we don’t have infinite time!
If we take protein folding, which is extraordinarily complex, but incredibly necessary for us/life to exist, we can see how ridiculous this concept of randomness really is. 🎲
For all twenty thousand proteins in your body to randomly fold correctly to make one of you would take luck equivalent to:
rolling 20,000 dice at the same time and getting them all to land on 6. And each die has not only 6 faces, but trillions upon trillions!
It would be highly highly unlikely that we were created at random. The math is clear, nothing is created at random. We are all part of a grand design.
Again my summarization of all the logic and math is quite limited, Mo wraps all this up in a wonderful story regarding the design of an iPhone. 👀
And so we conclude that the likelihood that our universe was created by a designer is much higher than randomness. 📝
A question that may come up next is why is the design so harsh? What Mo proposes, and I think that it makes a ton of sense, is that the designer created the rules, but does not control the individual events.
The design is just functional. Apply the eraser test. Erase any part of the universe, along with all its consequences, and see if you end up with a world you like better.
If you take away nothing from this book, says Mo, take away that nothing is random. The designer doesn’t run the show, the equations he created do. Focus on your happiness equation, it’s the only one you can control. When you compare your expectations to reality, understand that everything that happens is exactly what’s supposed to happen. Life always meets realistic expectations.
Live the truth. Finding joy is truly that simple.
Conclusion
This book has had an incredible impact on my life, from how I live my day-to-day life to how I view seemingly ethereal concepts such as death and happiness.
One of my biggest takeaways from this book was a quote by Ali himself:
“The gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace.” — Ali Gawdat
As I mentioned at the beginning, Mo wrote this book after the tragic death of his son, Ali. I didn’t talk about Ali much in this article, because I feel like it’s not my place to do so. However, the story is truly a beautiful one, so if you buy the book even just to hear that one story, it will be worth it.
I highly encourage you to read the full book, because this article barely scratches the surface. And if you read this whole thing, thank youuu this is crazy long I know.
Everything I wrote can be accredited to Mo Gawdat, and if anything is misrepresented, it is my own misinterpretation, not his. And another shoutout to the summer velocity crew as well as Pranav and Aatik for helping me strive to understand some of these concepts.
Lastly, if you want to discuss happiness (or anything else to be honest) — I’d be thrilled. Still trying to figure this stuff out myself and would love some new perspectives :)
Feel free to email me at sasha.przybylski23@gmail.com ❤
bye!
— Sasha
