80% of People Disagree that Happiness is a Choice, They’re Wrong
One man’s mission to make 1 billion people happier
Happiness is not only predictable and a choice, according to Mo Gawdat, it’s also a solvable equation.
That sentence could rack a lot of people off. It probably raised a few eyebrows. Events start to swirl in your own head, right? I hear you. How can you choose to be happy about death, tragedy, lack of health, wealth decline? The list goes on. Life is tough.
I was ready to turn the podcast off there and then. Rich folk telling everyone else that life is as hard as you make it and that we can all be happy if we choose to be — cool. Can we change the record? But just before I pressed ‘next’ there was something that kept me interested, something about his conviction, his deep mesmerising voice and his passion kept me listening. And I’m glad I did.
How to make 1 billion people happier
“I took on an ambitious mission: To help one billion people become happier, a movement One Billion Happy.” — Mo Gawdat
Mo Gawdat has a cool work history; I guess. If you’re interested he worked at Google. It’s the ‘classic boy done good story’. Mo made more money than most can imagine. He had 16 cars in his garage but was miserable. Rich boy with all the toys that wants more because who’d of thought it, happiness can’t be found sitting in a posh sports car.
This story is so old it’s become a classic, stupid cliche. Give up everything in the hope of being richer, chase nicer cars, better suits, an iPhone with 17 cameras instead of 16 — you know the drill. How we are still having this conversation I’m not quite sure but we are.
In true rich boy style, Gawdat, in the midst of his unhappiness, searched for answers. But unlike most, Gawdat became a student of science, he went hard on this happiness thing.
- Academic research papers
- Scientific books
- Educational YouTube videos
- World-renowned podcasts
Gawdat became a student of happiness science. He was hooked. He would spend hours making notes, citing papers, pondering thoughts. He was nearly complete, but one thing was missing. Like every good student, Mo needed a master.
Happiness > Events — Expectation
And would become his master? None other than his very own son.
Ali, his son, was a master of happiness. At eight, that’s quite something. As Mo puts it, Ali used to laugh and enjoy life most of the time. If he wasn’t laughing and enjoying his life he would engage in interesting conversations. He would ponder questions deeply before responding. He was a real thinker.
Then and only then, he would respond with a few words that would change the conversation. He was one of those people that I love in meetings. Those that say very few things but everything they do say, add value.
Through their work together, Mo and Ali became masters of this happiness thing. Mo was on cloud 9. Nothing would touch him. Nothing could impact his happiness flow. No silly comment, no amount of rudeness, nothing would influence him. He was peaceful in his happiness.
He’d built a happiness equation. He was living proof that the happiness equation worked.
The eight-year-old master of happiness
The biggest test was yet to come.
In a routine operation, one that would take no longer than 6 minutes, a total of 5 things went wrong. All those things were preventable. But just like that, Ali died. Mo was heartbroken.
It’s hard to not hate life when something like that happens. But the way Gawdat saw it was that his son wasn’t coming back. He knew that to be true.
“Gawdat had the ultimate challenge to his theory: He had to find a way to find happiness after his son’s death. And he did.” — CNBC
And it was the ultimate test to his 20 years in the making happiness research. This could have broken the equation. Something unbelievably terrible had happened and now he had a decision to make.
“It’s not the events of our life that make us unhappy, it’s the way we think about them” — Gawdat
Mo saw things differently.
The truth about happiness
The way Mo describes it is that his mission in life is now to teach the world the lessons Ali taught him. In a way, it’s Ali’s spirit living on in everyone. Mo appreciates that of course, to a point, happiness is derived from having more. Basic needs must be met in order to even be having conversations like this. Wealth leads to happiness to a certain point.
We’re talking about after that. We’re talking once you have the money, time and access to read articles like then that’s when the conversation changes. It’s when life becomes more about the little things.
You can choose to go home on time and see your kids or you can choose to stay late, impress the boss in hopes of a promotion. But if you’re staying late for a promotion because once you get it you’ll be able to buy the latest Tesla and a fancier pair of jeans, things have gone wrong.
The point is, for most, going home to see the smile on their kid’s face is a better ROH (return on happiness). Going home to unwind and have a chat with their partner about what to have for dinner whilst walking their dogs is much more efficient.
The takeaway
The choice to be happy is rooted in simplicity and complication. Simplicity is about the expectation of the events being less than the event itself. It’s about you expecting your boss to be awkward and finding ways to work with them. It’s about you expecting life to throw curveballs at you and you seeing that as a challenge rather than life trying to beat you up.
Complication because things have a way of getting mashed together so much that it’s hard to see the wood from the trees.
It’s about, I guess, expecting life to be as life is. Hard. And learning to use the wind to sail in the direction you want to go.
“It basically starts with a simple assumption — which is incredibly eye-opening — that happiness is not outside you; you don’t strive to attain it. Happiness is … within you,” Gawdat says.