Solve For Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy

by Mo Gawdat

While success doesn’t lead to happiness, happiness does contribute to success.

As Malcolm Gladwell puts it in Outliers, if you spend ten thousand hours doing something, you become one of the best in the world at it.3 And what’s the easiest way to spend so many hours on one thing? Doing something that makes you happy!

an attitude of gratitude, which happens when you acknowledge the truth about our modern lives and the fact that there is plenty to be happy about after all.

If events remain as they are, but changing the way we think about them changes our experience of them, could we become happy simply by changing our thoughts?

All the thinking in the world, until converted into action, has no impact on the reality of our lives.

Imagine that you need a root canal and the dentist offers you either (a) the standard procedure with a few days of recovery or (b) a root canal with additional bonus days of extensive excruciating pain. Why on earth would you ever choose (b)?

It all begins when you accept the thought passing through your head as absolute truth. The longer you hold on to this thought, the more you prolong the pain.

In the hostile environments our ancestors inhabited, they needed fight-or-flight responses to survive. The basic rules were these: It’s safer to mark something as a threat when it isn’t than to mark something as safe when it’s a threat. And it’s best to do that fast. As a result, their brains handled the information the real world presented to them in a way that was sufficient for survival, though it was not an accurate reflection of the truth.

Those who reach joy are not only accepting of life as it actually is but are utterly immersed in it.

If fun suspends your thoughts, and happiness arises when your brain agrees with the events of your life, then joy is when thoughts are no longer even needed because the analysis has ended, and the equation has permanently been solved.

Your brain belongs to the category of controllable devices because you have partial control over it. You can tell it what to think about, how to think, and even to stop thinking altogether. You just need to practice that control until you master it. It’s doable. Isn’t this incredible news?

You can watch your thoughts, knowing that the only power they can gain over you is the power you grant them.

“What we’re finding is that it’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.

Be aware of the journey. This is where all of life happens.

Treat everyone as you would like to be treated.

For any single particle to exist—including those that make up that original mass, the expanding gases, and the original Earth, every particle of oxygen in its atmosphere, and every drop of water in its rivers—some kind of life was needed to observe it into existence. Unless the laws of physics as we know them did not apply from the point of the Big Bang until life appeared in its physical form, then life existed before the physical world did.