Solve For Happy: An original, insightful guide to finding joy

by Mo Gawdat

Eugenio Proto, and Daniel Sgroi from the University of Warwick found that being happy made people roughly 12 percent more productive and, accordingly, more likely to get ahead.2 And so:

Happiness happens when life seems to be going your way.

But here’s the tricky bit: it’s not the event that make us unhappy; it’s the way we think about it that does.

So here’s the $50 million question: 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?

the reality is that our most useful thoughts are usually silent. There are three types of thought that our brains produce: insightful (used for problem solving), experiential (focused on the task at hand), and narrative (chatter).

True

Shockingly, the accuracy of most knowledge—even scientific knowledge—suffers because we ignore unknown unknowns. Take physics, for example. Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity and published his laws of motion in 1687, forming the foundation of what we now know as classical mechanics. Those laws were fiercely debated until they were undisputedly proven and accepted. Once proven, scientists embraced them as facts that govern everything from the falling of an apple to the orbiting of the moon and planets.

past event you don’t like and simply erase it as if it never

plans that naturally extend to cover my family as well.

“It is all going to be fine in the end. If it is not yet fine, then it is not yet the end.”

You suffer, not because life did not give you what you expected but because you failed to notice what life had actually given you.

backgrounds, age groups, and a million other variables.

the past and you’ll understand why life has become

happened. The tiger, on the other hand, won’t linger

The reality we cover up is that we tend to make our decisions based on emotions first, and then gather the data that support those decisions.

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

take yourself to a quiet spot where you have no access to any time instruments. Go to the ocean or to the woods—or just stay in a quiet room. Make sure you have no connections to time—no clocks, no phones, and no external events keyed to the current time.

They constantly try to push themselves out of their “comfort zones,” and they try to “move the needle.” They even try to run their personal lives like machines. Their evenings are reserved for networking dinners and business events. Their kids are driven from tennis practice to music lessons. Every minute is planned and is expected to tick by precisely like a clock. On the rare occasion these power executives allow themselves a short break, they find another extreme, perhaps exercising like Iron Men and Women or running marathons. They push beyond the balance it takes to stay healthy and fit. They

But as we obsessively compare, we set ourselves up for disappointment because there will always be someone who’s gone farther or done better.

Studies show that only 4 percent of all women in Western societies believe they are beautiful, and more than 60 percent believe they need to be thinner to deserve to be loved! Sadly, this shouldn’t be surprising.

sequence. Being a monkey, though, it agrees to give it a try, but instead of asking for a banana