Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path To Joy by Mo Gawdat, Review

I’m a pretty pragmatic person.  I was always good at math and tend to look at things quantitatively.  So when I heard about a book about happiness written by the Chief Business Officer of Google X and a tech nerd, I was interested. 

Gawdat starts off the book detailing a horrible tragedy that set him on the path to write the book, the unfortunate death of his son during routine surgery.  It’s a sobering reminder that life can be snatched away from any of us at any time, regardless of our health, vitality, or wealth. 

But he had been thinking about happiness way before that.  He briefly details his rise in the tech industry, with the high salary and jet-setting that comes with it.

It took him to Dubai, where he noted

“In the streets, Porsches and Ferraris jockey for parking spaces with Lamborghinis and Bentleys.  The extravagance of the concentrated wealth dazzles you, but at the same time it tempts you to question whether, compared to all of this, you’ve actually achieved much of anything.” 

This section which came early in the book roped me in since he seemed to be speaking to the ethos of the financial independence movement.  The notion that fancy things and extravagance do not make happiness, and in fact they tend to steal it.

During this time he once bought two vintage Rolls Royce’s online, on a whim.  When they came, he wasn’t any happier. 

This led him to tap his engineering skills and work on “an equation for happiness” with his son, which he would rely on when his son passed many years later. 

In a nutshell, it says “happiness is greater than or equal to your perception of the events in your life minus your expectation of how your life should be.”  The fundamental message of the book is that happiness is our default state, it’s our resting state when nothing clouds the picture or causes interference.  

But there are many “unhappiness traps”, and Gawdat goes on to detail them at length.  These are the bulk of the book.   He calls them:

• The “Grand Illusions” that cloud our thinking such as the illusion of time, of control, and of fear. 
• The “Blind Spots” that we must overcome such as the tendency to exaggerate, label, and assume. 
• The “Ultimate Truths” that we must embrace like change, the now, and death. 

He also dives deep into controversial waters and uses equations and mathematical probability to prove the existence of a “higher designer” of the universe.  This is a section of the book that’s sure to get disagreement and objections from many. 

What I Learned

My main takeaway from the book was that I have to learn to control the voices in my head and stop living in the past and the future.  I have to live in the now.  

Gawdat says “When we are focused on the past or the future, we are living in our thoughts, and not in reality.”  The more I think about this, the more it hits home for me.

Our brains are wired to think that the future will be more important or happier than the time we’re in right now.  And since the past already happened and is familiar, we’re also wired to ruminate on it because it can bring a sense of comfort.  The present is all we have, and many of us don’t spend our brain energy there. 

Then there’s worry.  Gawdat explains that “Our brains evolved in the era of the caveman. For them, it made sense to assume the worst because the worst frequently happened.”  It’s hard to override this ingrained trait of survival, and it again comes back to living in the present.

Gawdat reminds us that instead of focusing on our hardships and problems, we should think about the millions and perhaps billions of others in the world who have things worse.  People who died of cancer at a young age, or who live with horrible diseases.  This is very simple and oft-repeated advice, but that doesn’t make it wrong, and it’s something that we in the first world need to constantly revisit.

Verdict

I enjoyed the book and learned.  I think it will resonate more with pragmatic and practical thinkers such as myself.  It’s not a mathematical treatise on happiness, but the author does often use STEM-based lines of thought and logic to flesh out his ideas.

Sometimes Gawdat gives quasi-naive and simplistic advice like “when you get a bad thought in your head simply remove the unhappy thought and think of something happy.”  I highly doubt it’s that easy for most people who have depression and constant negative thoughts.

Also the book jumps around a bit and you’ll find yourself at one moment reading about the “more squishy” aspects of happiness such as unconditional love and contentedness, and the next you’ll be diving into the physics of time and the theory of relativity.  It’s definitely not a smoothest of reads but not the worst either. 

Overall I recommend this book.  It will likely have you contemplating your emotional habits, and it gives good tips to make them better.

ISBN – 978-1501157585
My Rating: 7/10

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