Solve For Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy

by Mo Gawdat

Happiness is the absence of unhappiness. It’s our resting state when nothing clouds the picture or causes interference.

If we were to picture it, the times when you’re unhappy are like being buried under a pile of rocks made up of illusions, social pressures, and false beliefs. To reach happiness, you need to remove those rocks one by one, starting with some of your most fundamental beliefs.

Success is not an essential prerequisite to happiness.

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

Happiness happens when life seems to be going your way. You feel happy when life behaves the way you want it to. Not surprisingly, the opposite is also true: Unhappiness happens when your reality does not match your hopes and expectations.

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

It’s the thought, not the actual event, that’s making you unhappy.

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?

There is ample evidence that we can actually manage our thoughts. We do that whenever asked to complete a specific assignment (such as what you are now doing by instructing your brain to read these lines of text). We tell our brain exactly what to do and it complies. Fully!

most of the everyday discomforts of adult life are not only transient but also useful. The pangs of hunger prompt you to eat. The crankiness of inadequate sleep pushes you to get to bed. The prick of a thorn makes you pull back your finger, and the pain of a sprained ankle prompts you to give it a rest so it can heal.

As much as we hate it, pain and the discomforts of life are useful!

We let our suffering linger as a form of self-generated pain.

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

Suffering offers no benefit whatsoever. None!

Happiness starts with a conscious choice.

With no thoughts, we return to our default, childlike, state: happiness!

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.

The gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace.

True joy is to be in harmony with life exactly as it is.

You should never settle for anything less than joy.

The little voice in your head is not you!

The more something matters, the more incessant thought will be left out of it. Have you ever noticed that? Well, guess what: Happiness really matters.

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).

often the reason we’re unhappy isn’t justified, and therefore there is no real solution for it, just as there wouldn’t be for a false premise. So the easiest way to become happy is to just be happy. Remove the unhappy thought, replace it with a happy one, and let the rest take care of itself.

Happiness is always found in the positive side of every concept.

So much of your happiness depends not on the conditions of the world around you but on the thoughts you create about them. When you learn to calmly observe the dialogue and the drama, you begin to see the ones and zeros. You can watch your thoughts, knowing that the only power they can gain over you is the power you grant them.

You are not the voice in your head.

Your physical body is made up of fifty to seventy trillion cells, and two to three million of them are replaced every second.1 Red blood cells live for about four months, while white blood cells live on average for a year. Skin cells live about two or three weeks; colon cells have it rough—they die off after about four days. Your physical form is almost entirely replaced, sometimes many times over, every few years.

You are not your body!

Your body is the physical avatar that takes you through the physical world, a vehicle, a container. Nothing more. That vehicle, however, is not nothing. It’s important. If you were allowed to own only one vehicle your entire life, you obviously would take care of it, keep it healthy, in perfect working condition, and you’d make sure it didn’t break or cause you troubles on your long journey. You would keep it looking clean and shiny and be grateful for the years of service and lifelong relationship it offered you. Still, whatever you did with it and regardless of how often you were seen in it, you would never think of it as you.

The illusion driving you to protect all of the possessions in your life is an attempt by your physical form to control the physical world around it. The real you is unaffected by that physical layer and all that it contains.

Discovery leads to debate, then to acceptance, and on to arrogance—which is then diminished by new discoveries.

“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”

wise. Define yourself by openness to those who contradict what you “know.” Be an explorer, a seeker of the truth, always ready to admit being wrong in order to continue the quest.

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

To be bored you need to long for a state other than what’s happening in the present. To be ashamed you need to re-create a moment that no longer exists. To be unhappy you need to focus on what you want that you don’t yet have.

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

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

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

when we act in spite of our fear, we realize that there is nothing to fear.

We’re not as rational as we think. Our perception of the truth is often distracted by our irrational emotions.

Being fully aware of the present moment considerably increases your chances of being happy.