Mo Gawdat: Moment 153: Happiness Engineer Explains The Exact Formula For Happiness: Mo Gowdat

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00:15So, what is the cause of unhappiness as you see it? Especially if you are building machine learning applications that are going to solve or make people arrive at contentment or happiness in a personalized way, we must be able to know what is causing this lack of happiness.

00:31Allow me a bit of time to explain it because it is simple when we get it, but it is not simple to get to it. Happiness is very predictable. If you look back at any point in your life where you ever felt happy, there is one commonality across all of those moments that can actually be documented in a mathematical equation.

00:53You have never felt happy because of a specific event in your life. Take, for example, rain. Rain doesn't make you happy or unhappy; there is no inherent value of happiness in rain. Rain makes you happy when you want to water your plants, and it makes you unhappy when you want to sunbathe.

01:13So, it is not just the event, rain. It is the comparison between the event and an expectation in your mind of how life should be. If you're worried about your plants, then life should be generous to me and get me rain so I can water the plants. If life does that, then life meets your expectations and you are happy.

01:34Happiness in that sense becomes equal to or greater than—it’s really mathematics—your perception of the events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be. Apply that to anything.

01:50My favorite example is nature. We are all happy in nature. Why are we all happy in nature? You go out there and there are ants, flies, trees are crooked, and there are shrubs everywhere. It is just really not that hedged and organized, but that is what we expect.

02:11Nature's chaos is what we expect nature to be, and so we feel happy. Nobody ever sits in front of the ocean and says, "I like the view, but please mute the sound." You just take it—the monotonous sound, the view, the wind, the sun, and the whole experience.

02:32Because of that, happiness becomes very different than what was defined to us. What was defined to us is that happiness is found in gathering at the pub, a party, an activity, or some kind of pleasure, fun, or elation. That is not at all true. I call these the "states of escape."

02:54Happiness, per the definition of the happiness equation, is events equal to or beating expectations; life going my way. Basically, happiness is that calm and peacefulness you feel when you are okay with life as it is. It doesn't really matter what life is; what matters is that you can be okay with it.

03:19Take any example. If your boss is annoying and your expectation is, "Yeah, bosses are annoying. This is what life is about; they become bosses because they are annoying." If that is your expectation, you are going to look at it and go, "I need to learn the skill of managing annoying bosses."

03:41If that is the case, then you are not going to be upset about it. Similarly, anything else. If you look at it, then it is not just the event. It is your perception of the event, so you have something to influence. It is not just the event. Your partner might say something hurtful on Friday at 4:00 PM.

04:02That is the event: my partner said something hurtful. At Sunday morning, you tell yourself he or she doesn't love me anymore. That is your perception of the event. That is not actually the event. Your perception of the event is your work; it is your brain adding color to it. Then you compare that to your expectations.

04:31You compared "my boss is annoying" to "my boss shouldn't be annoying." Where did you get that from? We blur the happiness equation and we break the happiness equation because of what I call "the six and seven." These are six grand illusions and seven blind spots.

04:51The six grand illusions are basically pathways that the modern world teaches us to navigate the modern world that are illusions and are not true. Take, for example, control. Everyone knows that to succeed in the modern world, you have to learn to control certain events.

05:11You start to believe that the way to succeed in life is to control everything. But the truth is, even if you go down to the basics of physics, we are never in control. The absolute design of nature itself, of the universe itself, is entropy and chaos. That is the actual design.

05:33If you try to control it, you are bound to be disappointed. A lot of events are going to miss your expectations. I am not saying don't control anything at all, but start to understand that you are going to be selective because you have a finite amount of effort.

05:51Even if you are selective and you try to control everything, sometimes things will fall out of control. That should be your expectation. Once you get that right—that was my biggest illusion. I am a mathematician, a software developer, a physicist, an engineer, and a senior executive. It doesn't get worse than that.

06:14I am like the absolute worst. I used to give my wonderful wife a spreadsheet that would tell her when to wash the colors and when to wash the whites based on our average consumption as a family to save the environment. Nibal would actually smile at me and say, "Sure, baby, I will use this."

06:36Of course, she ignores the hell out of me because that is how crazy you can be when it comes to control. These are the illusions. If you live your life through the illusion of control, good luck finding happiness. The six grand illusions are the illusion of thought, self, knowledge, time, control, and fear.

07:01That disrupts your entire view of what to expect from life because you are expecting life to behave through a lens of an illusion. The other side of it is what I call seven blind spots. The seven blind spots are not really defects in your brain; as a matter of fact, they are the very design of your brain.

07:23Your brain is designed to tell you what's wrong. It's not designed—if a tiger shows up right here now, my brain has no use whatsoever in telling me, "Oh my God, look how majestic that animal is." It's a beautiful animal, but my brain will say we're going to die.

07:44"We're going to die" is the idea that basically makes our brain constantly look for what's wrong and blur the events of life. You ask a mother and she will say, "Oh, my daughter's been sick all winter." No, she just had two episodes of flu, three days each.

08:02To the caring heart of a mother, that needs to be exaggerated. Exaggeration is one of the blind spots. Your brain is trying to get you to take action, so it pushes you by exaggerating the event a little bit so that you jump in and take action. Accordingly, you're comparing the wrong event to the wrong expectation, and the happiness equation falls apart.

08:33Under all of this, you're inferring something which I think will annoy a lot of people, and that is that happiness is a choice.

08:42Oh, totally.

08:43And that you can choose to be happy. If you're unhappy, in many circumstances in our life—day to day, in work, in love, in relationships—personal responsibility is the answer, and a lack thereof is the cause.

08:59Absolutely. You know what you just did? You've just lost us 8% of the audience.

09:05I know. Do you know why I know? Because I did a tweet one day about this. My tweet was—there’s like a mental model, a reframing that has brought me happiness—when something happens to me, I used to, like many people, say, "X thing that happened has pissed me off."

09:24Just by changing that sentence to "I've pissed myself off because of X thing," I tried it. Reframe it and take personal responsibility for how you're feeling. In the comment section, everyone was like, "Nope." People don't like the idea that they have control over their emotional response.

09:44When I write books, in general, I write them like software. I issue a beta version and I get 270 people to read it on Google Docs. I give them editor privileges so they can actually edit the text. Then something fascinating happens. They edit the text, then others edit what they edited.

10:07There is a conversation happening and it takes the book to its best possible version. In *Solve for Happy*, I had a sentence on page 11 that basically said exactly what you said: happiness is a choice. At that page, I lost 8% of the readers.

10:25I looked into the information they gave me about themselves, and most of the 8% that left were already in depression. To tell someone it's your responsibility to get yourself out of this horrible place that you're in is quite disturbing because we like the idea of saying, "No, no, hold on, it's not me. Life is treating me really badly."

10:50"That's why I'm not happy. I can't do anything about it. Life took my son." Life took my son; that's true. You have the right to be unhappy, but you're never going to get out of unhappiness if you wait for life to bring him back or you wait for life to correct its action.

11:11The only way you can come out of unhappiness is if you choose and say, "Okay, it's going to be a long journey. It's going to take a lot of time and I'm going to try and try, but I'll get there." Neuroplasticity proves that.

11:25Neuroplasticity basically tells you that if you just run a happiness kind of activity once a day, every day, your brain will be better at it. Please don't get me wrong, but what do most of us do every day? We watch negative news, we swipe on toxic positivity, and we're just drowning ourselves in negativity.

11:49What happens is we become really good at being negative. We become really good at finding what's wrong with life. We become very good at getting pissed off with the Prime Minister because it's an activity we do on a daily basis. So your brain goes, "This must be important for her or him; I'm just going to make sure I have the neurons aligned around that."

12:12We are basically configuring our brains to be unhappy. I have not watched a horror movie for 15 years.

12:19Really?

12:20Yeah. You know what that means? I have not had a nightmare for 15 years. Not a single one. I have not watched a violent movie unless it was really badly recommended to me because it has a good message in it. I watch Michael McIntyre every night before I sleep.

12:41I love Michael McIntyre. Who's going to get me to say hi to Michael McIntyre? But think about that practice. My brain, before I go to sleep, is laughing. That's a choice. That is the kind of neuroplasticity that we need to shift.

13:00If you go to the gym and lift weights every day, you're going to look like a triangle. If you squat every day, you're going to look like a pear. The same is happening inside your brain; you just don't see it. If you're constantly watching news media, you're literally building your muscles that are concerned, critical, and worried about the world.

13:24In reality, most of the time you can't do anything about it. I'll give you a very strange example. When I was locked down—first lockdown I was in London, second lockdown I was in Canada. As the lockdown was approaching, I stopped watching news after April 2020. Zero news.

13:46By the time I was in Montreal, someone texted me and said, "Hey, by the way, did you know we're going to Code Red tomorrow?" I said, "Yeah, what's Code Red?" She said, "All restaurants are closed; you wear a mask everywhere." I said, "Good." That's it. That's all the news I needed to know.

14:04People would go like, "No, how come? You need to know the numbers, the statistics, and the death rate." No, I don't. Someone else is doing this. By the way, if I know it and I don't like it and I don't believe in what they're doing, I'm going to be locked down anyway.

14:24Can I utilize my time in building a podcast that becomes one of the top half-percent of all podcasts globally? Isn't that a better use of my life than just watching the news and creating that illusion for myself that I can actually influence anything when in reality I can't?

14:44I normally advise people and say, look, if you've been following a certain topic for the last two months and have not been able to influence the decision on that topic, you're useless. So stop watching that topic and start choosing topics that you can champion.

15:05Find one or two real purposes that you actually care about and try to learn enough about them—enough depth about them—to influence them. That's the way to make the world better. That's the way to make your life better. Yeah, climate change is really something very important, but it's not on my agenda.

15:27I don't work on climate change; I work on happiness. That's my part of life. Someone else I trust will be working on climate change, which I believe is as important if not more important, but it's not mine. I don't need to watch everything about it and concern myself about it all the time. I need to be updated and do my part by changing my habits as a human, but that's it.

15:53There's something in there which is clearly a theme in three topics we've touched on: the passing of your son, COVID, and other elements. This is the theme of radical acceptance. Instant radical acceptance.

16:09Oh, absolutely. This is what I call the Jedi Master level of happiness. There are three levels of happiness. If you really think about it, I call it the happiness flowchart. Events are going to piss you off; it's just the truth. If you can manage to acknowledge your emotion and say, "Oh my God, I feel—am I angry? Is this anger?"

16:35You take that feeling and you say to yourself, "Okay, interesting. I am angry. I need to do something about it." I will give you three steps. The beginner's level is: ask yourself if what you're thinking is true. Your partner said something hurtful on Friday; your thought is he or she doesn't love me anymore.

16:59Ask yourself if that thought is true. If it isn't, drop it. There is no point to being unhappy. If it is, then let's go to the Black Belt level of unhappiness, which is: can I do something about it? That's the second question. It doesn't take more than two seconds to feel the emotion, ask if it's true, and go to "can I do something about it?"

17:26If yes, then do it. What are you waiting for? Text him or text her and say, "Baby, can we please talk over dinner? What you said on Friday hurt me," instead of just banging your head against the table hoping that they will find out and come and say, "Oh, I'm so sorry."

17:47This story really hurts me. I was teaching—before lockdown I taught a lot of people in workshops and seminars, more than 20,000 people. One day, one of them comes to me in the first break and says, "What are you talking about? What do you mean happiness is a choice? You have no idea what happened to me."

18:10I said, "Okay," and she said, "When I was 17..." She was 74 at the time. Can you believe that? 57 years of holding on to one thought, hitting her head against the wall. I hugged her and I cried. I said, "Did it work? Did all of that work? Or was the better thought: okay, it was horrible, but can I do something about it?"

18:42That's question number two. That's Black Belt. Sometimes, however, there's nothing you can do about it. Whatever she experienced could be irreversible. What I have experienced, the loss of Ali, is irreversible. There's nothing you can do about it. I'm not asking everyone to get there quickly, but the Jedi Master level of happiness is to say, "Okay, it happened and I have no choice to change it."

19:12There is nothing I can do to fix it. So can I accept it, but not surrender and lie down and die? Accept it and then start to do something to make my life better despite its presence, or maybe because of its presence. Can I accept that Ali died and start to spread his message so that my life and the life of others become better?

19:39Can I accept that I'm locked down and start my podcast so that I can use the time where I'm not traveling? Can I do that? I call that committed acceptance. It's very simple. If you accept things you can't change and commit to make your life better despite of or because of their presence, nothing can beat you.

20:06Does it mean I don't love Ali? What are you talking about? I adore Ali. I cry about missing him still today. It's not that there is nothing to prove in that. What I can prove is I love him so much that I actually dedicated my life to spreading his message. That's so much better than sitting there and saying life hit me.

20:34That's a six-year-old attitude, honestly. Adults will say, "Okay," and especially business people. Your audience—the market changes all the time. Do you sit down and go, "I lost another deal," or do you just get up and say, "Why did we lose this deal? What can we do about it?" If there is something wrong with the product, can we change the product?

21:01What you talk about there regarding business in particular rings very true. In business, you've been a very successful entrepreneur yourself and worked with teams; you'll get people who are high in defaulting to logic in moments of chaos and also default to personal responsibility, and those that don't. The outcomes of both groups are quite predictable.

21:28Very different. Actually, this approach of "is it true, can I do something about it, can I accept it and commit?" I learned that in business. I spent most of my career managing managers. What do managers do? They open your door, they sit down, and they complain. After a while, it becomes too much.

21:52My attitude was very straightforward. I would give them 10 minutes to vent, then 10 minutes to ask them: "Is this true? Is there anything you're missing? Is the legal team also nice, not just making your life miserable? Have you seen evidence that they've helped you before?" So, is it true?

22:12Then I go, "Great. Last 10 minutes of the meeting: what are we going to do about it? Are we going to be able to improve it, fix it, or are we going to accept it and do something despite its presence?" It's a very simple business approach. Most of us do that in business, but when it comes to our personal life, we don't.

22:33Interestingly, most of us who do that in business are very successful in business, and most of us who do that in life are very successful in life. It's not just happy; it makes us successful because it doesn't waste our cycles on things that are not necessary. If you can do it at work, do it at home, do it in your life, do it in your relationships. It's really a very straightforward flowchart.

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