Solve For Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy

by Mo Gawdat

Well, it sure does feel that way to all of us!

Everything is both good and bad. Or perhaps everything is neither.

You are not the star of the movie!

I would remove our obsession with being “right.” I would erase the Illusion of Knowledge. Arrogance is all around us.

Shockingly, the accuracy of most knowledge—even scientific knowledge—suffers because we ignore unknown unknowns.

Can you see how misled we can be? Something as basic as the elementary laws of physics that seemed to function properly and accurately for more than two hundred years was, at best, an approximation.

Every question you’ll ever ask will be governed by a refinement cycle that I call DDAA: Discovery, Debate, Acceptance, Arrogance.

Often what’s said isn’t what is understood. Yet we still call that knowledge.

We truly don’t know that much after all.

The extreme data-driven approach to decision making, on the other hand, frequently exposed the invalidity of some perspectives. Sometimes ideas that were originally defended passionately turned out to be wrong. But the openness encouraged people to speak up and brought tremendous diversity to the conversation.

Luckily, my eagerness to learn overpowered my ego’s desire to be right. This revelation gave me a deep sense of joy as I relinquished the endless struggle to defend my view and just enjoyed the journey of endless learning. That joy drives me, even as I write this book, to frequently pause and ask if what little I know matches your perception. It drives me to ask that you question its validity and find your own truth. If some of what you read turns out to be wrong, please forgive me.

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”

Think of a few times when something you believed to be true surprised you by turning out to be the furthest thing from the truth.

Sometimes when you stray off your track, life nudges you hard . . . and that’s not bad!

Knowing that erasing an event erases the trail it created, the majority of people I interviewed chose to keep the nudge, grateful for the path onto which it took them. Some even said that looking at those experiences as nudges makes it clear that they might have been the best things that ever happened to them—though this was not always easy to see.

You truly never know for sure.

“Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

all of space and all of time exist perpetually. Imagine space-time as a loaf of bread, where every slice represents everything that is happening anywhere in the universe in a specific instant. We humans can move in different directions in space, but we experience the dimension of time only slice by slice as we move through it. If we had the ability to perceive time as we do space, we would be able to hop back and forth through time as if we were getting on and off a train at any station we please.

Time isn’t moving; you’re the one who is moving through time.

Time changes for everyone.

Time completely fails the test of time!

You might be surprised to learn that events-based cultures are more common globally than clock-based cultures.

Time is experienced very differently across human cultures. There may be a better way to deal with time than what we’re used to.

Almost all emotions anchored in the present moment, though, are happy (note that physical pain is not an emotion).

Happy emotions are mostly anchored in the present.

Once the present moment passes by (and it doesn’t take long!), it no longer exists. It’s gone. Forever.

When we’re focused on the past or the future, we’re living in our thoughts, and not in reality.

Have you ever noticed how quickly your life has gone by? Doesn’t it sometimes feel like the past twenty years have just evaporated without your even noticing? There’s a good reason for this.

Events totally match your expectations when you observe the world as it is. How peaceful!

With the exception of pain, no one ever suffered from what was going on in the present moment. Think about that for a minute. It’s true. Even for you.

If you want to be happy, live in the here and now.

Thoughts associated with clock time are practical, actionable thoughts, such as I wonder how long it will take me to get to my doctor’s appointment. They lead to precise answers,

Brain time, however, tends to get caught up in thoughts about the past and the future. It gets lost in endless—and unlikely—scenarios of how an event in the future might turn out.

Brain time obsesses over past events that didn’t turn out the way you hoped they would.

Every time you examine your thoughts you’ll notice that whatever you’re upset about is rooted in a past you cannot change or a future that may turn out to be completely different from what you expect.

In this very moment there is absolutely nothing wrong at all.

Life is now and now is amazing.

Between black swans and butterfly effects, nothing is under your control.

Happiness comes from our ability to navigate such reality based on facts, not illusions.

Take the responsible action first, then release the need to control.

Choose your attitude!

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

In its purist form, fear is a defense mechanism that is triggered to warn you of proximity to harm.

When you put your mind to it, you can overcome pain.

There is no safe model. The harder you try, the more you will fail.

Yoda, the wise Jedi master of Star Wars, sums it all up in one statement: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.”

There are no positive aspects to fear. It’s your actions and not your fears that keep you safe.

The only thing life wants is to be experienced.

Right now, you’re okay.