Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy

by Mo Gawdat

surround yourself with people who make you feel good about yourself.

What you just said made me feel bad about myself, and I don’t like being around people who make me feel bad, so, don’t do it again.

You make me feel bad about myself. I deserve better!

Assertiveness will save your life and will also help teach them to treat their other friends better.

You’re not your ego. You’re not your achievements or possessions. You’re not the success or status or anything that you demand from yourself as a precondition for self-love. The real you, Pooki, deserves to always be loved.

Be Kind What do you do when you truly love? You willingly give.

give more than just material gifts. I invite you to give a smile, a word of appreciation, a good conversation, or a compliment.

Give love, acceptance, and understanding with no judgment.

Call those going through a tough time and just listen. Help if you can. Make them feel that someone cares.

Treat everyone as you would like to be treated. That’s the golden rule of love.

If you give, life always gives back to you. Think of it as if you were giving to the whole universe when you give. It

To love is to give all you can.

Life thrives when it flows.

Let life flow. Keep what you use and give the rest away.

The more we give, the more abundance we create. Giving never takes away from the sack. More always comes back.

When you help someone you don’t even know, you do so with no expectation of payback—and that’s when you hit gold. When we give selflessly, life itself assumes the debt and pays back generously with its unlimited resources.

money can indeed buy you happiness—if you give it away.

give: your smile, your time, attention, knowledge, compliment.

Giving is the good side of selfish! It makes the giver happy.

Forgive and you will be forgiven. It always comes around.

Forgive those who argue, even when you believe them to be wrong.

Choose to be kind instead of right!

unconditional love is one of the pillars of our universe.

Beatles said it best: Love is all you need.

Mexicans, for example, celebrate their deceased during the Day of the Dead festival

Dying is an integral part of the process of living. The minute we’re born is the minute we start to die.

As Woody Allen said, “I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Peter Saul, an intensive care specialist, discusses this dichotomy in his TED Talk, “Let’s Talk about Dying.”

Arabic proverb puts it, “The reasons are infinite, but death is one and the same.”

Observer’s Paradox: the observation creates the outcome, and the outcome doesn’t exist unless the measurement is made.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle

The uncertainty principle suggests that the physical world—the world all around us—is observer-dependent.

understood that I was much greater; in fact, all of us are much greater and more powerful than we realize when we’re in our physical bodies.

Death and Happiness The path to joy is to see life for what it’s worth.

Things that seemed to be important were exposed as worthless,

Death anchors us in the truth.

Islamic culture counsels, “When you seek a teacher, look no further than death.”

How would you live if you knew that today was your last day?

Why does it have to be the last time for you to choose to relish the moment?

Live this moment as if it were your last.

Every day a version of you and everyone you love dies. They leave and never return.

We keep adding to our bucket list, forgetting that the time to live that list may never come. Life is one long bucket list. Live it while you still can. Live before you die.

Life Is a Rental Understand that when the time finally comes, you will leave everything behind: material wealth, the people you love, and everything you hold so dear.

Life is a zero-sum game: we come into it with nothing and leave it with nothing.

If nothing is mine, then nothing can be lost.

let things come and go, and I experience them while they last.

When I finally learned to let go and let everything flow, I seemed to end up with more—a

Whenever something moves out of my life, space is created for new experiences to move in.

Letting go makes my li...

Rent a full and happy life.