Solve For Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy

by Mo Gawdat

The parameter you choose to solve for drastically changes your approach to the solution. The same is true when you decide to solve for happy.

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

subjective well-being increases proportionately to income—but only up to a point.

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

The incremental layer of internal dialogue only leads to deeper and longer suffering by brooding over the story until it makes us miserable.

the misery we feel then is not the product of the world around us—the event is already over while we continue to suffer. It’s the work of our own brains.

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

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

By resorting to fun as an escape, we leave our Happiness Equation unresolved and ignore the core issues that make us unhappy.

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

they don’t define us. Once again, you are not your thoughts. Your brain produces thoughts, as a biological function, to serve you. And discovering that each of those types of thoughts happens in completely separate brain regions means that we can be trained to use one type more than the other.

What we don’t really need is the narrative component of thought, the useless, endless chatter—the part that makes us feel a bit crazy and keeps us trapped in suffering.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll become a master at finding the good side of things. They’re always there; you just haven’t been searching for them.

So much of your happiness depends not on the conditions of the world around you but on the thoughts you create about them.

Your physical form is almost entirely replaced, sometimes many times over, every few years.2 So which one of those ever morphing forms is you?

To reach the state of uninterrupted joy, you need to accept that everything in the physical world will eventually vanish and decay, but the real self will remain calm and unaffected.

Once we start wearing masks to reinforce our egos, we spend the rest of our lives playing roles.

Good and bad are just labels we apply when our minds fail to grasp the comprehensive, never-ending movie spanning across the billions of lives and extending over all of time. If we could grasp the complexity of the web of perspectives that compose our experiences, we would realize that everything is just what it is, just another event in the endless flow of the big movie that features all of us.

Every living being, atom, and beam of light is diligently following a path that occasionally happens to overlap with yours.

It’s inherent in the nature of knowledge to occasionally be wrong.

The concepts that have the deepest impact on us are the ones we believe most strongly to be true—when usually they’re not.

Be an explorer, a seeker of the truth, always ready to admit being wrong in order to continue the quest.

Happy emotions are mostly anchored in the present.

Time and mind are inseparable. When you remove the timestamps from your thoughts, there will be nothing unhappy left to think about.

Life is now and now is amazing.

is there anything ever under our total control? Yes, two things are: your actions and your attitude.

I made practicing committed acceptance my priority. I focused on doing the best I could every minute in every situation. I kept aiming high but remained emotionally detached from the results.

Life wants you to sample every flavor it can offer you. Sour isn’t worse than sweet; they’re just different.

If you can afford the brain cycles to worry about the future, then by definition, you have nothing to worry about right now.

By broadcasting their exaggerated views inside our heads, our brains use our peak shifts and availability heuristic tendencies to grab our attention.

In a modern world that’s too noisy, the exaggeration goes overboard, inflating a sizable proportion of what our brains present as truth. Exaggeration in all its forms inflates our expectations and destroys our satisfaction with life, regardless of how pleasant life may actually be.

your longterm happiness is predicted not by the external world but by the way your brain processes the world.”

Keep asking the question “Is it true?” as many times as you need until you realize how ridiculous the statements our brain offers us really are.

the effort needed to live an unbalanced life adds up exponentially as the number of systems you need to handle increases.

There will always be a reason to feel that what you may have achieved is not good enough.

Instead of looking at the few who appear to have more than you, look instead at the billions who have less.

Unconditional love, on the other hand, withstands every change. It cuts through the Illusion of Time.

“No expectation” never turns into a missed expectation.

Love yourself for doing your best.

Choose to be kind instead of right!

We die a little every day.

Without death, there wouldn’t be life.

death is the end of our physical form, but it is not the opposite of life. Death is the opposite of birth. Birth and death are the portals through which we come in and go out of this physical form, but life is independent of all that’s physical. Life observes the physical. It resides outside of it, where there is no before or after.

If nothing is mine, then nothing can be lost.

When we eliminate the self-referential stories our brains create about why events happen, we realize that everything happens as part of a highly synchronized universe where specific equations (though not always known to us) always apply.

As I try to influence the events with my input into the equations, I understand that I’m but one in a million parameters that affect the path of life.

Absence of a proof that something exists does not prove that it doesn’t.

Absence of a proof that something does not exist should be seen as a probability that it does.