Solve For Happy
Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy by Mo Gawdat
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Happiness is our default state.
By removing our unhappiness, we can get back to our innate state of happiness.
Happiness as an equation is the difference between your perceptions of the events of your life less your expectations of how life should behave.
🎨 Impressions
I like the premise of this book, engineering a path to happiness. And Mo has an incredibly unique story.
How I Discovered It
I wanted to give this a read after Elizabeth Day's podcast with Mo.
Who Should Read It?
If you want a self-development book on happiness and it's surrounding topics this book covers the lot.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
When nothing is certain - and nothing ever is - choose to be happy.
What you suffer when you stay in fear is almost always more damaging than facing your fear.
Happy emotions are mostly anchored in the present. Now.
📒 Summary + Notes
Happiness in the modern world is surrounded by myths. Much of our understanding of what happiness is and where to find it is distorted. When you know what you’re looking for, the quest becomes easy. It may take time to unlearn old habits, but as long as you stick to the path, you’ll get there.
For human beings, simply put, the default state is happiness. If you don’t believe me, spend a little time with a human fresh from the factory, an infant or toddler. Obviously, there’s a lot of crying and fussing associated with the start-up phase of little humans, but the fact is, as long as their most basic needs are met—no immediate hunger, no immediate fear, no scary isolation, no physical pain or enduring sleeplessness—they live in the moment, perfectly happy
It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, tall or short, male or female, young or old. It doesn’t matter where you come from, what you do for a living, what language you speak, or what tragedies you’ve endured. Wherever you are, whoever you are, you want to be happy.
Look back into your own experience. Summon up a time when nothing annoyed you, nothing worried you, nothing upset you. You were happy, calm, and relaxed. The point is, you didn’t need a reason to be happy. You didn’t need your team to win the World Cup. You didn’t need a big promotion or a hot date or a yacht with a helicopter pad. All you needed was no reason to be unhappy
Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.
Parental or societal pressure, belief systems, and unwarranted expectations come along and overwrite some of the original programming. The “you” who started out happily cooing in your crib, playing with your toes, gets caught up in a flurry of misconceptions and illusions.
If we were to picture it, the times when you’re unhappy are like being buried under a pile of rocks made up of illusions, social pressures, and false beliefs. To reach happiness, you need to remove those rocks one by one, starting with some of your most fundamental beliefs.
Success, wealth, power, and fame don’t lead to happiness
Happiness happens when life seems to be going your way. You feel happy when life behaves the way you want it to.
Unhappiness happens when your reality does not match your hopes and expectations.
Think positive thoughts and agree with the events of life and you’ll reach the state of happiness.
Happiness is all in a thought—the right thought—one that aligns with reality and solves the Happiness Equation positively. Funny, but we won’t directly discuss happiness in this book. We will discuss how to stop the suffering, which will restore your default state of happiness. When you see the truth of your unfolding life and compare it to realistic expectations of how life actually unfolds, you will remove the reasons to be unhappy and realize, more often than not, that everything’s fine, and so you will feel happy.
Knowledge is in no way a prerequisite to happiness. Your default state before you had any knowledge was happiness. As a matter of fact, false knowledge is the underlying reason for most unhappiness. Our conviction that all we know is true leads us to use such knowledge as the input to our Happiness Equation. By the time we find out that what we know is actually false, the equation is already dysfunctional and the suffering has already set in.
“Does anybody know what time it is?” That was a trick question. Regardless of where you are in the world as you’re reading this book, the time is now. There will never be any other time. Any other interpretation of time is just a detour into illusion.
Success (which in our case is happiness) doesn’t come from ignoring unpleasant realities. It comes from realism and objectivity in understanding life with all of its imperfections. Happiness comes from our ability to navigate such reality based on facts, not illusions. Acknowledging our limited control shouldn’t cause us to despair. Addressed head-on, it should lead us to a realistic path to happiness. It all starts with understanding the true nature of our control.
