I recently came across Mo Gawdat’s book Solve for Happy. Happiness is a topic that has interested me for a long time, and as a strong believer in positive psychology, I particularly like approaches that do not ask what is wrong with us, but rather: how can we live a good life?
Positive psychology is a relatively young field of psychology. Its focus is not on treating mental illness, but on how people can live more meaningful and satisfying lives, develop their strengths and bring out the best in themselves.
Mo Gawdat’s book is closely connected to this way of thinking.
Gawdat is an engineer. During his career, he rose to the position of Chief Business Officer at Google X. He had success, a lot of money, a loving family and an exceptional career – practically everything we tend to think should make us happy.
Yet most of the time, he did not feel happy. So, with an engineer’s mindset, he set out to understand happiness and create a mathematical equation for it. Here is his formula:
Happiness ≥ how we perceive the events in our lives – what we expect from life.
In other words, we are happy when life turns out at least as well as we think it should.
What I find particularly interesting about this is that we can influence both variables in the equation.
It is not the event itself that makes us happy or unhappy, but how we interpret it
The human brain is an extraordinary system but it does not necessarily show us the truth.
It filters the enormous amount of input around us. Then, when it needs to make sense of something, it fills in the gaps, exaggerates, assumes, predicts and labels. Based on old, partially stored stories it tries to explain what is happening now.
Within seconds, it can turn an event into a story:
’She hasn’t replied to my message. She must be angry with me.’
’They didn’t choose me. I’m not good enough.’
’This didn’t work out. Nothing ever works out for me.’
But are these facts? Or are they simply stories our brain has created?
One of Gawdat’s simple tools is to question our thoughts: Is this really true?
When an answer comes, ask again: Is this really true?
This immediately reminded me of the Lean 5 Whys method. We do not stop at the first answer, but keep asking.
We know that our brain is not perfect, so we do not have to automatically treat every thought as true. It is worth reviewing our thoughts regularly.
For leaders, this is particularly important. Every day, we interpret incomplete information, other people’s behaviour, results, conflicts and feedback. It is easy to confuse what actually happened with what we think about it.
Shakespeare expressed this well more than four hundred years ago: ’There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’
Perhaps one of the most important skills we can learn is that we should not immediately believe everything our own mind tells us.
And then there are our expectations
The other side of the equation is what we think life should be like.
Where I should be by now. How much I should be earning. What kind of job I should have. How my partner should behave. What my child should be like. How successful I should be.
The greater the gap we perceive between what is and what we think should be, the greater our dissatisfaction.
For leaders, this can easily come with additional expectations. I should always know the answer. I cannot make mistakes. I should be able to handle the pressure. My team should be performing better.
I believe expectations have a place in our lives. They give us goals, encourage us to develop and provide direction. The question is whether we notice when they stop serving us, or when they are simply unrealistic.
There is only one certainty in life: change.
What feels like a disaster today may, years later, turn out to have been one of the most important turning points in our lives. And something that feels natural today may no longer be there tomorrow.
That is why the present matters so much
It is worth noticing that most of our negative emotions do not come from what is happening right now, but from something that has already happened, or from something we fear may happen in the future.
We regret the past and worry about the future, while our life is actually only happening in the present.
’I’ll be happy when…’
Perhaps one of the biggest traps we can experience is that happiness is waiting for us somewhere in the future.
Study hard. Get a good job. Earn a lot of money. Buy an apartment or a house. Buy a car. Find a partner, have children. Build a career, become successful, be recognised. And then you will be happy.
But what happens when we get there? The finish line simply moves.
This is exactly what makes Mo Gawdat’s story so interesting. He reached what many people from the outside would consider the height of success, yet he still did not find the happiness he had expected.
Later, he had to face one of the greatest tragedies of his life: the loss of his adult son. The way of thinking he had developed earlier also gave him something to hold on to in his grief. By then, happiness no longer meant that painful or negative things would never happen to us in life.
Perhaps it is simpler than we think
One of Gawdat’s ideas is that happiness is our natural, inborn default state. To illustrate this, he uses the example of babies: when their basic needs are met and they are not in physical pain, they are happy. In Gawdat’s interpretation, happiness is therefore the absence of unhappiness.
Perhaps, as we grow up and become socialised, we gradually overwrite this natural default state. We learn that something else still needs to happen before we can be satisfied.
But perhaps happiness does not always require us to add something to our lives. Sometimes it may be more about taking something away: unrealistic expectations, the stories our brain creates, the ’I’ll be happy when…’ way of thinking.
If I were to take one practical idea away from this book, it would be this:
Question your thoughts. Keep your expectations in check. Be present as much as you can.
Or, whenever something throws you off balance, simply ask yourself: What actually happened? What story am I creating around it? Which expectation am I comparing it to that makes it feel wrong?
Because while we are constantly preparing ourselves for the moment when we will finally start truly living, it is easy to forget that life is already happening. Now.
If you would like to read more about the topic
If you are interested in positive psychology, Martin Seligman’s The New Era of Positive Psychology talk is worth watching.
You can find more about Mo Gawdat’s thinking and books here .
I also highly recommend Dr Laurie Santos’ The Happiness Lab podcast to anyone interested in what research tells us about happiness.
If decision-making is also on your mind, I can recommend my article Leadership decision-making in uncertainty: Why the perfect decision is not the goal.
