[MUSIC PLAYING]
ELISE BIRKHOFER: Hi, everyone.
Thank you so much
for being here.
My name is Elise Birkhofer.
And I'm the Global Program
Manager for Women at Google.
I'm delighted to be
here with Mo today.
Mo Gawdat is the
Chief Business Officer
for X, a serial
entrepreneur, and author
of "Solve for Happy."
Mo joined Google in 2007
to kick start its business
in emerging markets.
In 2013, he moved to Google's
infamous innovation arm,
Google X, where he now leads
the business strategy, planning,
sales, business development,
and partnerships.
Mo is currently on a
six-month sabbatical
to dedicate himself to his
personal mission of helping 10
million people find happiness.
So thank you so much,
Mo, for being here.
MO GAWDAT: It's a
delight to be here.
Thank you.
ELISE BIRKHOFER: So what
qualifies you, a business man,
to write about happiness?
MO GAWDAT: OK.
That's a good start
for the conversation.
What happened is, I've been
a very successful businessman
for a very long time.
As many of you know, being
the Chief Business Officer
of Google X is
probably the luckiest
you can get in the
professional world.
I've been that lucky almost
since my very early start
in business.
And as life was extremely
kind to me, an Egyptian,
who is educated in the
public schools of Egypt--
I started to become very
successful in my late 20s.
I was a director for the Middle
East of a major consumer goods
company.
I was a day trader making very,
very hefty returns at the time.
And I was miserable.
I was totally, totally,
totally depressed.
Regardless of how
much life gave me,
I continued to feel unhappy.
I had everything that we work so
hard all our lives to achieve,
including a wonderful
family, a wonderful wife, two
amazing children who
filled our life with peace,
and happiness, and fun.
And I constantly was depressed.
And being a Middle Eastern,
therapy was not really
an option, if you want.
So I did what I know how
to do best at that time.
To dig myself out of
my misery, I sort of
started to read extensively
about the topic of happiness.
I dedicated more than
10 years of my life
to reading about the topic.
And that's a lot of hours,
if you think about it.
I read at least an
hour or two a day.
In the first couple of years,
I could not get it at all.
I couldn't understand
what they were telling me.
There was a ton of
amazing practice of things
you can do to become happy.
Happiness is an ancient
science, if you think about it.
But I just couldn't get it.
It just did not speak
to my mind at all.
And so I sort of used, if you
want, my business background,
but more my
engineering background
to tackle the topic from a very,
very different point of view.
I started to look at
the topic of happiness
from a mathematical,
scientific point of view.
Assuming that being
a young man who
grew, maybe till my mid-20s,
to be a very happy young man,
and then ran out
of happiness, that
must have meant that something
went wrong with the machine,
that this was operating
fine, and then it
wasn't working anymore.
So maybe we should
unassemble the machine
and find a way to find out
which parts are not working,
and then make them work again.
Or maybe the
machine was just not
suited for the
current environment.
Maybe if you take a sports car--
and I'm not a sports car in any
way--
but if you take a sports
car and put it out
in the middle of the
desert, it gets stuck.
It gets unhappy.
And so this approach
to happiness,
that engineering, scientific,
experimental approach
to happiness reflected a
very, very, very different
perspective, very
different approach
to solving the problem.
And that's what I summarize
in "Solve for Happy."
ELISE BIRKHOFER: So
after all this research,
you found happiness
in many ways.
But then something happened.
What ended up making
you write this book?
MO GAWDAT: So my
research, as I said,
took around 10 years or so.
And I was at a point in my
life where almost nothing
could dent my happiness.
Again, I come from a
Middle Eastern background.
So post-9/11 I would travel to
the US for business at least
once a month.
It would take me 12 to 14
hours to get to the US.
And then I would almost always
spend two to three hours
in random check in
Homeland Security
with this silly
smile on my face.
Nothing would make me unhappy.
I would win a deal, lose a
deal, get stuck in traffic.
It doesn't even matter.
I was just constantly
OK with life, grateful,
and enjoying every bit of it.
And in an interesting
way, I think
this must have been my
training, if you want.
Because in 2014, I think
I got the ultimate test
of being able to stay peaceful
and calm that a parent could
ever do.
My wonderful son, Ali, who
was 21 and 1/2 at the time--
a beautiful, handsome, wise,
kind, and honest young man,
who made me proud in
every possible way,
who was my friend
much more than my son.
I had him at a very young age.
And so we played
video games together.
We played music together.
We read books together.
He was a very funny young man.
And so we watched a
ton of comedy together.
It was always an amazing
experience to be with Ali.
He came to visit us
in Dubai in July 2014.
And instead of going through
a wonderful vacation,
Ali, unfortunately,
was diagnosed
with an appendix inflammation.
We took him to a local hospital.
And the surgeon made
five mistakes in a row.
In four hours, our life
turned from planning
for the best time of
our life to losing
the one that meant most to us.
And even though the
pain was unbearable--
I think anyone here
who has children
will know that to
lose a child is almost
to lose a part of your heart.
Truly, I'm even lost
for words today,
two and a half years later.
I honestly cannot describe
what it feels exactly.
There is that lasting
pain, if you want.
But we were so peaceful
and calm as a family.
I wouldn't say we were happy.
That would be a
big exaggeration.
But we were not unhappy.
We were not angry at the world.
We were not disgruntled
with what happened.
We did not want to
kill the surgeon,
or we didn't want
to blame ourselves
for the rest of our
life for driving him
to that specific hospital.
And in an interesting way, when
people came to Ali's memorial,
they would come in crying.
Probably more than a
thousand people came.
And they would come in crying.
And they would then--
we would hug them.
And we would explain to them
our view of life and death.
And we would explain to
them our view of happiness,
and how we go through life.
And they would smile.
And then if you did not know
the background to the event,
you would have thought
that this is maybe
Ali's birthday or something.
Everyone was smiling, and
hugging, and laughing,
remembering wonderful
memories of Ali.
And the atmosphere was amazing.
And so my friends,
basically, started to say,
you have to write this down.
And Ali had actually
asked me before he left--
it's almost as if he knew
he was going to leave.
He sort of dictated his will a
few days before, and told me,
you need to continue to make
a difference to the world.
But maybe you should start
to depend on your heart
a little more.
On top of all of the business,
and finance, and technology,
that you've been doing
it all your life,
there is another part
of you that you may
want to share with the world.
And so I sat down to write
exactly 17 days after Ali left.
And I could not stop.
And as Paulo Coelho says, when
you know your life's purpose,
the universe conspires
to make it happen.
Everything fell in place.
Four and a half months later, I
had 600 pages of a manuscript.
I met one of the best agents in
the business, Michael Carlisle
from InkWell, who introduced me
to publishers across the world.
Today, we are published
in more than 12 languages,
even before the
launch of the book,
and including some of the top
publishers worldwide, Simon
Schuster, North Star Way,
and Macmillan's Bluebird.
So it's definitely been
a mission in the making,
if you want.
ELISE BIRKHOFER: That's
such a beautiful way
to honor your son.
And that was such a
powerful ask of him
to do the work of your heart.
How is it feeling to do
that work of your heart?
MO GAWDAT: I think what you
realize after a while is that,
when you lose a loved one,
and definitely when you
lose a child, the pain remains.
It doesn't go away.
Most of us who have experienced
the loss of someone they love
would think that they
were given one choice.
And the choice would
be to sort of surrender
to the harshness of life,
and just accept, and cry,
and close your door, and decay.
I think very early on, I
realized that I was really
given two choices.
One was to close
my door and decay.
And it wouldn't bring Ali back.
And the other was
to do this, try
and honor Ali in a
way that sort of tells
the world about
his way of living.
I mean, Ali was so peaceful
going through life.
He actually had a tattoo
on his back that read,
that gravity of the battle
means nothing to those at peace.
And surprisingly, when he was
going into the operations room,
the last thing he
did is he sat up.
And through his scrubs,
I saw that tattoo.
That was the very last thing
he told me, if you want.
Now we all go through
harsh events in our life.
And imagine if you can
share a way of living
with 10 million
people who will go
through the harshness of life.
And instead of
closing their doors
and decaying, or
closing their doors
and feeling unhappy, or
disgruntled with life,
imagine if I can
honor Ali by having
10 million people
remember his way,
and hopefully, send
him a happy wish.
I've spoken to
around 12,000 people
so far about the
concepts of the book.
And every time I speak
about it publicly,
I get hundreds of
people who will tell me,
this changed our life.
I've spent a
privileged life working
on projects like Project
Loon, or on Google itself
in emerging markets to spread
the amazing knowledge that
comes with Google
to every language
and market in the world.
And I will tell you,
I have rarely ever
found anything more
rewarding than to show people
sort of the defects
that our brains take us
through, and make us miserable,
sometimes for a lifetime.
And once you see through
them, they go away.
Nothing is more rewarding.
ELISE BIRKHOFER: So we've done
a few courses here at Google
and have taken hundreds of
people through the content,
and a lot of them, yeah,
saying it's life changing.
How would you summarize
in just a few minutes
what your happiness model is?
How is this different from
other books about happiness?
MO GAWDAT: Yeah.
Googlers and most of us-- what
I call modern day warriors
today--
people who get stuck on the
101, and fight in meetings,
and have to close deals.
We don't have the time for eat,
pray, love, or to go and live
in an ashram somewhere.
I think most of us need to
understand how something works
before we are told what to do
with it to make it work better.
And so my approach started with
some very basics, by the way.
And we do that, as you
recall, in the trainings,
is when you ask people,
what is happiness,
most people don't even know
what is the thing they've
been searching for.
And so we take a very simple
engineering approach to this.
We say, OK, let's plot
as many arbitrary data
points as you can recall about
moments when you felt happy,
and find the trend
line between them.
The equation that
describes this trend line
is really what happiness is.
And there could
be a million ways
you can describe happiness.
The one that is common
across all human beings,
across all the moments
of happiness-- at least
the one I found-- was
this, that your happiness
is equal to or greater
than the difference
between your perception
of the events
of your life and
your expectations
from how life should behave.
So in a very interesting
way, every single moment
in your life where you felt
happy was a moment where you
felt that life was
going your way,
regardless of how realistic
your expectation from life is.
As if life owes you something--
it's like, hey, you know what?
I should lose 25 pounds in
the next two and a half weeks.
You know what?
I have this very important
event in Rio de Janeiro.
And I really need to lose that.
If you don't, you get upset.
It's like, seriously?
Who loses 25 pounds in
two and a half weeks?
And you start to go like,
oh, my metabolism is wrong.
And I was created in a way
where I really don't eat at all,
but look at me.
We start to describe
things to ourselves that
are so unrealistic just
because life did not
meet what we expect.
Now with that
equation in mind, you
start to realize that
most of our unhappiness
truly is a thought in our head.
We think of the events
of life in a certain way.
We compare that to
our expectations
of how life should behave.
And when the event
misses the expectation,
the thought triggers
unhappiness.
You do nothing about
it most of the time.
So your brain goes like, but I
told you something was wrong.
It brings it up again.
And it triggers unhappiness.
And then you go through that--
what I call-- the
suffering cycle.
An event triggers a thought.
But then the thought
triggers suffering.
And the suffering is
followed by inaction.
So it triggers more thought,
more suffering, more inaction,
and so on.
And life continues that way,
for some of us, for years--
for years.
So the interesting
thing is, there is a way
to shortcut that cycle.
So I offer a model
that I call 6-7-5.
6-7-5 is basically--
the 6 and the 7
are the reasons why we,
more often than not,
end up thinking that
the events of our life
don't meet our expectations,
even though most of the time
life is OK.
The 6 is six grand illusions.
For us to succeed
and be successful
Google employees, what we do
is we learn certain skills that
allow us to navigate the modern
world, that make us successful.
But to do that, we have to
start dealing with things not
exactly as they really are.
Let me give you an example.
We all are very proficient,
in terms of handling time.
We all know how to be punctual.
We all know how to
start a meeting on time,
how to end a
meeting on time, how
to plan for tomorrow's meeting.
But time is nothing like
what we think it is.
As a matter of fact, I use
very, very complex science
presented in a very simple
way in the chapter about time,
where I basically show you all
from the theory of relativity
that the only slice of time
you will ever experience
is the slice off now.
The only time you
will ever live is now.
You have never
lived in the past.
You will never
live in the future.
But because we are so adept
at thinking about the future
to plan for it, and
thinking about the past
to learn from it, we
end up in those cycles
of thoughts that completely
destroy our happiness.
They make us efficient.
But who wants to solve for
efficiency if you're eventually
going to end up unhappy?
So six grand illusions
put us in a state,
not of sadness, they put
us in a state of confusion.
It's like constant,
uninterrupted suffering.
If you go above
those, you end up
in a place where you
are allowed to think
about every event of your life.
Take every event of your life
through the happiness equation.
You take an event.
You compare it to
your expectations.
If you end up with
a positive thought--
yeah, this is better than my
expectations-- you're happy.
If you end up with
a negative thought--
no, this misses my
expectations-- you're unhappy.
And that incessant thought cycle
is a cycle that, unfortunately,
humans, on average-- this
is scientific research
in the University of Texas--
will end up thinking a negative
thought 60% to 70% of the time,
not because the world is bad
and missing our expectations
60% or 70% of the
time, but because there
are seven blind spots in
the way we look at life.
We look at life in a way that
was designed for the caveman
years.
So those blind spots make us--
let's say, they make
our brain grumpy.
They sort of make our brain
constantly come back to us
with the results of the
happiness equation that
should make us unhappy.
They make us safe and they
help with our survival.
But they make us unhappy.
And so if you manage to fix
the seven blind spots, if you
manage to see through
them, suddenly,
you find yourself--
when you compare events
to expectations in your
happiness equation,
you're constantly going up
to the happiness quadrant.
The 5 in my model, however,
is, if you continue
to do this long enough, if
you continue to compare events
to expectations without
the six grand illusions,
without the seven blind
spots, very frequently,
you will realize that
most events of life
should meet your expectations--
even the harsh ones, by the way.
If you know the truth about
life, you should expect them.
We all know that change is
the only constant, that we
should expect change tomorrow.
We should expect that tomorrow
is not going to be like today.
Now if you allow yourself to
look at the world this way,
then when change happens, it
doesn't miss your expectations
anymore.
You constantly feel OK with it.
You feel happy about it.
And so I say, if you hang on
to those five ultimate truths,
you won't even need to
solve the equation anymore.
More frequently than
not, you will just be OK.
You will be happy in a state
that I call the state of joy--
uninterrupted
happiness all the time.
ELISE BIRKHOFER: OK,
so that's complex
stuff that I want to unpack
a few things in particular.
So you brought up time, which
is one of the grand illusions,
and the importance of
the present moment.
Why is it so important?
And how does that
relate to our happiness?
MO GAWDAT: It is complex
stuff, by the way.
So one of the differences
between "Solve for Happy"
and other happiness books is it
is truly a book for reflection.
So you read.
You think about it.
You go like, what
did he just say?
I didn't believe
that all my life.
And then you read it again.
I don't know if you recall,
we spoke about the concept
of early readers.
So I wrote this book
like a Googler would.
You know how we use the
Google Docs to review
proposals, or client's
presentations,
or whatever together?
So I did that, actually.
When I got to version 2 of
the book, I posted it online.
I put a message on social media,
and got 500 early readers.
People that I don't
even know all,
basically, went into the book
and edited it themselves.
They would go like, nah, I
don't like this sentence.
Maybe you should
make it this way.
Or here is a bit
of research that
proves what you're
talking about,
or a bit of research
that disproves
what you're talking about.
And they would argue
between them, which
was an incredible experience.
So it's I got tens of
thousands of comments
that made versions 3 of the
book really almost written
by the readers, if you want.
Now when you think about the
pressure that we go through--
going back to the
topic of time--
the pressure that we
go through with time
is there are various
views of time.
Time here in the West,
we are clock-based.
We are a clock-based culture.
We respond to the clock.
The clock ticks, and we follow.
And it's surprising,
when I speak
to someone who is so punctual
and so into that culture,
for them to know that there are
other cultures around the world
that are not like that at all.
The majority of the world-- as
a matter of fact, Latin America,
Southern Europe, Middle East,
Africa, Indian subcontinent,
and so on are events-based.
They would prioritize
the value of the event
higher than the value of time.
So if we're having
a good conversation,
and someone says,
oops, time's up.
In Latin America, they
would say, hey, that's OK.
We can take ten more
minutes on this.
It's worthwhile.
That's not the case here.
And so that kind of
knowledge of what time is
allows you to think about
it slightly differently.
But the deeper
knowledge, really,
is when you start to
realize how time itself,
from a physics point
of view, what it is.
No one really knows
what time it is.
As a matter of fact, we
know how to measure it.
And we don't really
measure time.
What we measure is we
measure mechanical movements,
if you want, that's are sort
of associated with times,
whether that's the
rising of the sun,
or the change of the seasons,
or the very, very highly
accurate atomic clocks which
measure the oscillations
of certain atoms.
But what we're measuring truly
is something that is unknown.
As a matter of fact, if you
understand Einstein's view
of relativity, what
we live in is not
a three-dimensional space.
We live in a four-dimensional
space, one of which
is the arrow of time.
The only difference
between our ability
to move in space and our
ability to move in time
is that we're governed by the
arrow of time, which basically
means that the entire
universe, with you in it,
is propelled from
second to second
across the arrow of time.
He imagines it as
a loaf of bread
where you cut through
the loaf of space time.
And every instance is
the entire universe
at a specific instance in time.
It goes a lot more bizarre
when you understand
that time is so relative that
it changes for you and for me.
Not only that if what
I'm talking about
is boring for you, you feel
that the time is moving slower,
but truly, if you're on top
of Burj Khalifa, the highest
tower in the world, time
will tick faster for you
than if you were at the
bottom of Burj Khalifa.
If you're moving fast,
time will move differently.
And so time truly
is an illusion.
The only truth about
time is this second--
I mean, this second--
no, this second, right?
That's how it is.
Yet, most of us, especially
the professional thinkers,
we live in the second that will
happen in two and a half hours
from now.
And we think about that.
And then we shift
back to the second
that happened two and
a half hours ago when
coming to work in a taxi
and someone was rude to you.
We are either in
regret or in worry
all the time,
while the truth is,
this is all you will
ever experience.
Now what I do is in
"Solved for Happy"
is I don't tell you that
mindfulness works for you.
Because mindfulness does work.
Presence does work.
Awareness does work.
This is science that's as
ancient as humanity itself.
But now you know why.
Now you understand
why is it that living
in any other moments other
than the present moment
truly is just living
inside your head.
Because those moments
will never exist
until you live
them, and have never
existed until you were in them.
A moment in the past
truly was a moment of now.
Now as we go through this
with modern day warriors,
as I say, people who are
engaged in the real world,
suddenly, you understand
why presence is important.
But you don't need to do it in
the meditation room anymore.
You can do it everywhere.
You can pay attention
to a presentation.
You can pay attention to
the trees that are around
when you're stuck in
traffic, instead of just
living inside your head
cursing that day you
lived in that city.
ELISE BIRKHOFER: OK, so speaking
of living inside our head,
one of the trickiest illusions
is the illusion of thought.
What do you mean by that?
MO GAWDAT: I think the
fundamental premise
I built "Solved for Happy"
on is that emotions are
the results of your thoughts.
And every thought that
you have inside your head
is a thought that
you would associate
a lot more with if you believed
that the person thinking
inside your head is you.
Of course, spirituality
will tell you the person
inside your head is not you.
There are so many
terminologies for it.
Some religious
beliefs will believe
that it's a devil and an angel
who have their conference
room inside your head.
They are chatting all the time.
One of them is telling
you to go right,
and the other is
telling you to go wrong.
Others will say-- Eckhart
Tolle for, example,
who definitely is one of my
teachers, calls it the thinker.
There are lots of ways to
associate with thought,
as if thought is not you.
Even though that modern
Western belief is, I think,
therefore I am.
Now in "Solved for
Happy," I basically
provide very concrete,
scientific evidence
that the thoughts in your head
are just a biological function,
just like you breathe.
Your lungs are tasked with
the important survival
task of taking oxygen
into your blood
and taking CO2
out of your blood.
Your brain is tasked with
the idea of providing you
comprehension of the real world
in the only building blocks
you know how to understand
after you've learned words.
So once we start to
comprehend the world around us
in the form of words, you
need to start continuing
to look at the world this way.
You cannot observe the world
silently and make a decision.
Unfortunately, your
brain is constantly
translating that into language.
And so that voice
inside your head--
books like "Thinking
Fast and Slow"
will tell you a lot about how
that voice, the conversation,
the almost the conflict
inside your head
is basically different
sides of your brain trying
to make sense of the world.
Once you start to realize
that thought is not you,
thought is just a
biological function--
and I'm sorry to use
bad English here.
But I always take the
example of saying your colon
is responsible
for creating crap.
And your head is sometimes
responsible for creating
more crap.
And if you start
to see it that way,
you suddenly realize that you--
one, you don't always
have to obey, by the way.
Because your brain's function,
as a biological function,
is to present you with as
many ideas as possible.
It's up to you to choose.
And two is you don't
have to associate.
So if you get a thought
that's a little crazy,
that doesn't mean you're crazy.
Until you actually put
that thought into action,
it's just a thought
presented to you.
You can tell your brain,
hey, thanks, brain.
Thank you very much.
I realize, by the way,
that you're not me.
I realize you are doing your
biological function very well.
Thanks for presenting this idea.
Can you bring me a better idea?
And I know I make
that sound easy.
And of course, there
are tons of techniques
that I discuss
around how you can
make that a common practice.
But it's so interesting
when you start
to see the world from
the perspective of,
it's not I think,
therefore I am.
It's I am, therefore I think.
It's I am, therefore
my brain thinks.
If you make that separation,
your view of the world
will never be the same again.
ELISE BIRKHOFER: OK, and so
this relates a little bit
to control.
And you are admittedly
a retired control freak.
What have you
learned about control
and the illusion of control?
MO GAWDAT: Yeah, I
apologize for everyone
that I tried to control
in my life before.
Don't laugh.
I know you're doing it yourself.
So we try to control
everything in our life.
We believe that it's almost our
function-- again, by the way,
this is the expanded
functionality of your brain.
The reason why our
species survived
is, not only did we
manage to coordinate
the events of the world
and run from the tiger
when the tiger showed up, but we
actually managed to plan ahead,
and say, hey, if we go down that
path, or we go into that cave,
there will be a tiger there.
It's not very wise to do this.
There are no more
tigers in our cities.
But we continue to plan
and control obsessively.
And the funny bit
is that we actually
somehow manage to convince
ourselves that we have control.
And one of the exercises I
do in the training at Google
is I, basically, allow you to
measure how often things go out
of control.
And I get an answer that
falls somewhere between very
frequently and all the time.
And of course, you
can tell yourself,
but I bring it back in control.
And then you start to
think and ask yourself,
how much effort exactly
did you put into this?
Was it really
worth it to control
the temperature of the coffee?
I told you that
example about, can we
control the coffee
machine so that it
fills in a half an ounce more?
So that it's closer
to the top, so
that we have more efficiency
for our employees,
so that they are a
little more awake
through one cup of coffee.
It's crazy, really, when
you start to think about all
of the things we try to control.
Now Nassim Taleb, in his
incredible book "The Black
Swan" talks about those
massive events that
are so rare in their occurrence,
that when they occur,
they would be compared
to spotting a black swan,
instead of all of the
whites swans we know,
but that when they occur,
they so drastically
change the world--
Google being one of
them, by the way.
So no one expected
Google to happen.
And when Google
happened, it completely
democratized our
approach to information.
World War I is another
one that he cites.
And every one of us-- not
only at the macro level
of our economies, and
politics, and what have you--
but even in our normal, personal
lives, we have black swans.
My black swan was losing Ali.
And on top of that--
and those do drastically
change your life.
But the ones that
you don't notice
are even more
potent, if you want.
They call them
butterfly effects.
And butterfly effect, as I'm
sure you all know, are those--
when you're doing
weather forecasts,
they say that wind
speed changes that
are so small that they could
be comparable to a butterfly
flapping its wings in Brazil
could cause a hurricane
or a sunny day in Florida.
And butterfly effects
happen every single second
of your life, so many of
them, as a matter of fact.
You came here today.
You sat on a yellow
chair, not a red chair.
Or you came here--
I don't know.
I don't want to disappoint the
ones that came a little late.
But you came a little early,
you got your copy of the book.
You came a little
late, you didn't
get your copy of the book.
And so and that's not only about
saving the price of the book,
but maybe you will
read the book today,
and it will affect you tomorrow,
and so on, and so forth.
And so butterfly
effects are endless.
My butterfly
effects are whatever
it is that Ali has eaten
maybe two weeks earlier
that caused his
appendix to be inflamed,
or the proximity of our home
to that specific hospital.
Maybe if we had chosen
a different home,
we would have gone to
a different hospital.
And this was a choice
we made years earlier.
Now between the
two of those, you
realize that you
have zero control.
There is nothing you have
control over, perhaps,
other than two things.
And I discuss those
heavily in the book.
I discuss that the only things
you can have control over
are your actions--
not the results
of your actions--
and your attitude.
Your attitude truly
is the game changer.
If you wake up in the
morning and expect today
to be a horrible day, because
maybe it's raining or whatever.
You know what?
It's going to end up
being a horrible day.
And at the end of
the day, you're
going to tell yourself,
oh, I told you
it was going to be horrible.
I'm the Oracle.
I know everything just
because it rained.
No, it ended up being
horrible because you
wanted it to be horrible.
You spotted everything
that was horrible.
And you acted horrible.
And then you're going
to blame the rain.
Now there is a lot of
cause for unhappiness
when we try to control
further than our actions
and our attitude.
Some of the most profound
spiritual beliefs--
in Hinduism, for example, the
concept of detachment, of I'm
going to do the
absolute best I can,
and whatever the result
is not entirely up to me.
It's up to me, and
a few black swans,
and a million butterflies,
and by the way, 7.2 other
billion human
beings who also have
their own view of
the world, and maybe
trillions of other beings.
All of that comes
together to create
what might be your reality.
And it will always be
outside your control.
ELISE BIRKHOFER:
So the last thing
that I want to ask before I open
it up for audience questions is
about the concept of good
versus bad, and our desire,
as humans, to constantly label
things as good versus bad.
You lost your son.
I've lost my brother.
It immediately felt like, oh,
this is such a bad, bad thing.
Can you talk a little
bit about your take
on that and
committed acceptance?
MO GAWDAT: Yeah.
So the illusion that drives
us to believe that something
is good and something is bad--
the fundamental
illusion is what I
call the illusion of knowledge.
And I think you Googlers
know that much, much better
than I do.
I sort of understood the
illusion of knowledge
when I came to Google.
Because I came to
Google from Microsoft.
I was a senior executive who
worked in technology for years.
I thought I knew it all.
I thought I had
nothing more to learn.
And I came here.
And this place completely
opened my eyes.
And you know how it is.
I joined in 2007.
And I would be in
a meeting room.
And the youngest
person in the room,
who may have started
two weeks ago,
will say, Mo, I think
you're an idiot.
And I'm like, OK
[COUGH COUGH] can you tell me
a little bit more about that?
Like why?
And he would give me data
and information that actually
changes my point of view.
And often, a few
weeks later, we would
realize that he, too,
was wrong, and that we
missed something else.
And if you actually look at
our entire scientific history,
there is that cycle
I call DDAA, it
which is basically Discovery,
Debate, Acceptance,
and Arrogance.
Everything we go through in
our science background is--
we discover something.
Everyone argues it, and says,
oh, you're absolutely crazy.
The Earth is flat.
This whole Earth is round
thing-- you're crazy.
And then, there is
enough evidence provided.
And then, we go like,
OK, let's accept that.
The Earth is round,
but it's the center
of the heavenly universe.
And then we are arrogant
about that new knowledge.
And then someone else comes
and says, hey, by the way,
we might be the one
revolving around the sun.
As a matter of fact,
it seems that this
is what it is, a new discovery.
And so we debate.
And that cycle continues.
We don't really know.
And when it comes
to knowledge, I
think the most eye opening
part of knowledge, for me,
was that whole concept of
labeling something good
and labeling another thing bad.
I'm not saying right
and wrong, by the way.
Morality is different.
But good and bad is, I
wish this did not happen,
because it contradicts my
expectations from life.
This is bad.
And how often do you recall
parts of your own life
when something that appeared
bad when it happened
turned out to be the best thing
that ever happened to you?
As a matter of fact, quite
often, most of the profound,
fundamental changes that really
made you who you are started
with something that
you labelled as bad.
And somehow, when we
label it as bad first,
we curse life for a few years.
And then we go like,
wow, that was nice.
I'm OK with that now.
And of course--
I refer to an interesting
test called the eraser test.
And I ask the readers to
go back and really, really
dig through the events of their
life, and see which of them
would they really erase.
Of course, there
may be one or two
that you may still erase
that were so bad to you
for your life.
But most of the
events that were bad,
that you considered bad
at this point in the past,
become good over time.
And you would not erase them.
You would actually
look back at them,
and say, these were the
most important things
that happened to me.
More importantly, of course,
in an interesting way--
a bit contradictory
to the Western,
individualistic
view of the world--
the idea of what's good
for me is bad for you,
and what's bad for
you is good for me,
or what's bad for
me is good for you.
So the whole idea of, if we
really look at the universe
much more as oneness, as
we're in this together,
that if we all succeed,
we succeed together,
then there is really
nothing that's good or bad.
I cite the example of how Ali,
when he went to the hospital,
he was fasting for
the month of Ramadan.
And so the doctors
basically said,
hey, he might as well continue
fasting until the operation,
because of the anesthesia
and all of that.
And so by the time
Ali left our world,
he was thirsty for
almost 24 hours.
And on top of all of the
pain I was going through,
that completely pained me.
It completely hurt me that my
son had to suffer for 24 hours
before he had to leave us.
And so what I did,
sitting outside the ICU,
is I made the promise that
I'm going to try and do
something for the people
that actually suffer this
every single day.
There are more than
780 million people
around the world who do not have
access to clean water at all.
So they suffer what Ali
suffered once in his life
every day of their life.
And so basically, when you think
about it, what happened to Ali
was bad for Ali,
horrible for me.
But it might have been
good for a few thousand
people, or tens of
thousands of people
that got some blessing of
getting some clean water
as a result of that event.
So can you mark it good or bad?
As a matter of fact, if I went
back Ali now, and I said, Ali,
would you fast 24 hours for
tens of thousands of people
to get water?
He would say, absolutely.
That would be a
good thing to do.
So our perception
of good and bad
constantly puts us
in a corner where
we are so unhappy with life--
I'm sorry to say, a bit of
a six-year-old attitude.
It's like, do your homework,
or eat your vegetables.
No, it's bad.
I don't like my vegetables.
Come on, man, seriously,
you're going to need them
when you're my age.
So just go for it.
And life will go on.
And so sometimes, I
wish we look at life
a little more holistically,
and realize that nothing truly
is good or bad.
Shakespeare says that
nothing is good or bad,
but thinking is
what makes it so.
ELISE BIRKHOFER:
OK, last question
is how you came up
with this target?
You talk a lot about thinking
10X and setting targets
being really important.
What is your target?
What does success look like?
MO GAWDAT: Yeah, I'm supposed
to be talking about happiness.
But I still do that
as a businessman.
Like I said set myself an OKR.
So I have to say, I don't know
if I came up with the target
or the target came up
with me, to be honest.
But there was a point as
I started to discuss--
especially during the
process of the early readers
review of the book--
where I started to realize
that the message was actually
working.
And in conversations
with my publishers,
they were talking about
the reach of books,
and so on, and so forth.
And I said, well, maybe I
should set myself a target,
so that we, at least, can
measure and move forward.
And I gave myself a
target of trying--
I call it 10 million happy.
So I'm trying to reach
10 million people
with this message of
happiness-- hopefully,
to get 10 million
people to click
on the counter on my
website, and say, yes, you
made me happy.
Now of course, you can imagine,
as a businessman, that's
cheating.
Because if I actually do
get 10 million people,
and they do go out
and tell two friends,
then hopefully, through
six degrees of separation,
we can get to hundreds of
millions, or maybe a billion?
I don't know.
But to me, I felt that,
what would be a better way
to honor Ali?
And I say selfishly, I don't
think it brings him back.
I don't think it
takes away the pain.
But at least it somehow makes
it feel a little better.
I'm sure, at least,
that it somehow
would make him proud of me.
And I think that
definitely has been
driving my life for the
last two and a half years.
ELISE BIRKHOFER: I
think that to be true.
All right, let's go
ahead and open it up
for our audience questions.
AUDIENCE: So you were talking
about how the brain produces
a lot of different
thoughts that are related
to what we're perceiving.
And I'm curious if you
believe in free will,
and how that sort of affects
your whole outlook on life?
And then the second question
is if you think free will even
matters to what you're trying
to talk about, true happiness?
MO GAWDAT: OK, so first
let's talk about thought,
and then talk about free will.
So there are three
types of thoughts.
There is that chatter,
that incessant thought,
that happens someone somewhere
in the mid-line areas
of our brains--
this is provable by MRI--
where it's the constant,
useless thinking.
It's like, the taxi
driver was rude to me.
Oh, my god, he was rude to me.
Life shouldn't be this way.
I should kill myself.
How can I live in America
anymore if the taxi drivers are
rude, and so on, and so forth.
And you never turn
that into action.
You just turn your life
into misery because of it.
And as I say, some
of us would take days
off thinking about
an event like that.
But this is useless thought.
The useful thought happens
on the right hand side
and in the insula.
So there are two types
of useful thoughts,
one is the insightful thinking
where you solve a problem.
So can worry about an
exam or a presentation
that you have tomorrow.
And it would happen in the
incessant thought space.
But you can move it to the
right hand side of your brain,
and turn that into, let's put
the presentation together.
Let's work on what the
messages are going to be.
You're actually practically
working through that.
And it happens in two
areas of the right hand
side of your brain.
Or you can actually focus on
the experience of preparing
a presentation, look at the
colors of it, reviewing it,
and so on--
also happens in the right
hand side of the brain
and in your insula.
So those are useful thoughts.
Thoughts are good for you.
Now those thoughts,
insightful specifically,
will lead you to make choices.
Now the whole conversation
around free will
is actually quite interesting.
And definitely one of the
reasons that we sometimes
debate free will is the
whole idea of space time,
that all of space and all
of time has already exists.
Now the interesting side of free
will-- and believe it or not,
it's actually one of the ideas
of what I'm writing next.
I have three ideas
I'm working on.
One of them is what I
call understanding fate.
And the concept of
free will basically
is that you did make a
choice on which T-shirt
you chose to wear today.
You had a choice
of blue or black.
And you make a choice of blue.
And I call those micro choices.
And I tend to believe that
your fate, the destination
of your final fate is going to
be the sum of three free wills.
One of them is
your micro choice--
that's your own free will--
plus the free will of
all of the other beings.
Because you know what?
Maybe the laundry guy did not
bring back the black T-shirt,
so you really did not
have that choice at all.
And then the third would be
the free will of the universe.
If we tend to believe that
the universe is following
certain equations and
functions, maybe there
could be an earthquake
in the morning that
leads you to rush and take one
T-shirt instead of the other.
So do we have free will?
I tend to believe we have the
will to make our micro choices.
As a matter of fact, I tend to
believe that we have the will
to impact on the
universe's choices,
and definitely on the
choices of others.
And much more
importantly, in my view,
I believe that we have the
will to impact on our thoughts.
And that truly is the
core of "Solve for Happy,"
that we have the choice.
You chose to sit in this
room and focus on my words
for the last 45 minutes.
We can control what
our brain does.
You can tell your brain to do
something, and it will do it.
As a matter of
fact, you've never
told your brain to do
something, and it said, hey,
you know what?
I'm really not interested
to raise my right arm now.
So no, no, brain, seriously.
We want the right arm.
No, you know-- it's
raises the right arm.
You tell it, raise
the right arm.
And it goes, yes, sir.
I'll do what you tell me.
Yet, when suffering
starts to happen,
when the incessant
thoughts starts to happen,
somehow we let the
brain be the boss.
Somehow we tell it,
hey, you know what?
Yes, you can take me to misery.
I will just follow.
As I told you, I could have had
the choice of letting my brain
tell me things like,
you drove Ali there.
You chose the wrong hospital.
You did this, or you did that.
Or I could tell my brain,
you know what, brain?
Let's move this to
useful thinking,
and try to do the best out
of the situation we have.
Maybe if we can get 10
million people to be happy,
Ali will smile upon you.
So it's a choice.
And that's, in my view, the
biggest part of your free will.
AUDIENCE: What about when you're
thinking in a dream state?
MO GAWDAT: Yeah, I'm not
qualified to answer dreams yet.
Again, it's surprisingly
you guys are catching
touching on interesting
topics that I'm
researching at the moment.
I don't know.
I think that dreams are a
very interesting indication
of something I call
the illusion of self,
that we do exist informs that
go beyond the physical form.
Exactly how that
thought happens,
I haven't dedicated
enough research for this.
Can I just-- before you
ask the next question--
however, understand this.
Sometimes, when a
bad dream happens,
we go like, OK, events
missed my expectations.
And we feel bad,
surprisingly, even
though there were no events.
So it was just a dream.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for your talk.
As you know, Google, we're
now going through perf season.
And if I write in
my perf results,
well, knowledge is an illusion.
Control is an illusion.
I don't actually
know or did anything.
And if I go into
the, how can I prove
next quarter, or next cycle?
And I go, time is an illusion,
it's not predictable,
it seems very kind
of contradictory
to a successful
career at Google.
So how do you reconcile these
two seemingly contradictory
viewpoints?
MO GAWDAT: So I should
start by saying,
I've had a very good career.
So it seems that
this stuff works.
But let's put it this way.
There is nothing
better to be successful
than to acknowledge the truth.
Do you Understand that?
So the best of us
are those who make
decisions based on truly what's
going on, not what we think
is going on.
Now let me tell you this.
In my career, I will say that
one of the biggest, biggest
things that completely
propelled me forward
was that complete conviction
that I know nothing
at all, that you guys know
so much more than I do.
And so I would sit in
meeting rooms, and say,
hey, this is my point of view.
But because I sit on
the top of the table
does not mean I
know more than you.
As a matter of fact,
most of the time,
you know much more than I do.
Most of the time, you are
so close to the reality
that you know much
more than I do.
And that openness to, I don't
know, someone else might know,
or the collective
wisdom of all of us--
you remember that
wisdom of the crowd
was something that we
built Google on top of.
So the idea of, we can
get closer to the truth
if we actually assume that
we don't exactly know,
is not a bad thing
to do in perf.
And often, when you look
at your own skill set,
and say to yourself, hey, by
the way, I don't know this,
it gives you a
target to improve.
It gives you something to start
to learn, and try to know.
That's one.
Control is an illusion is
actually the story of my life.
Like, I'm a businessman.
How often does people who
may have been in my teams
in the past would come to me,
and say, hey, Mo, by the way,
this deal is going wrong.
This is not going the
way we want it to be.
We expected it to
close this way.
It's going to close that way.
And you could take
this and panic.
Or you could take
this, and simply
say-- like Tom Hanks in
"Apollo 13," you would say,
Houston, we have a problem.
It's OK to have a problem.
We really don't
have much control.
So let's respond to it.
Let's work on it.
And normally, actually,
people who worked in my teams
will remember that
I would always
say, your target in the
absence of force majeure--
in the absence of something
that completely goes out
of control--
is this.
There are two types of time.
There is what I
call practical time.
I discuss that at
length in the book.
There is practical time.
And there is brain time.
Practical time is
when I say to myself,
I need to be in
Palo Alto by 4:30.
It's Friday, so the traffic
is going to be a little early.
So it's going to take me 40
minutes instead of 25 minutes.
And I need five minutes to
park, and two minutes to walk,
so I need to plan 47 minutes.
Let me plan 50 minutes.
There is no emotion
involved in this.
It's practical time.
I look at the world as it is.
I design my time patterns.
And I deploy them.
And I execute.
There is no emotions involved.
Brain time is the
stress happening.
If I'm actually
going to Palo Alto,
and I leave 15 minutes
early, and there
is an accident on the road.
And I sit there.
And I start to curse
myself, and curse my life,
and tell myself,
oh, my god, they're
never going to meet me again.
They're never going
to talk to me again.
As a matter of fact,
they're probably
going to tell the
government I'm never going
to be allowed in America again.
We all allow ourselves to
go through that thinking.
But how much of it is true?
And it's all related
to that stress
that time puts on top of you.
If you manage to move
the stress of time
from your thinking back
to the past and regret--
thinking forward to the
future and feeling worried,
that incessant side of your
brain to the insightful side
of your head--
make time a practical
practice that you work on,
you won't be unhappy.
And you will perform
a lot better.
AUDIENCE: How often do
you get this 100% right?
MO GAWDAT: Never.
Yeah, I mean, seriously.
I'm not His Holiness the
Dalai Lama, by the way.
And no, as I started
my presentation,
I fight in meetings.
I get stuck on the
101 like everyone.
And occasionally, I will
find myself feeling unhappy.
All I know is that it's
almost like software.
You have an operating system
that's running this brain.
And there is a
few lines of code,
that every time you
will run, your brain
will do something different
than what it normally
does if let loose.
So the first few times
I discovered my model,
it was very hard to apply.
And the more I
practiced, the more
I told myself, this is an
illusion, that is an illusion,
it became a little
more second nature.
Is it all the time?
I hope to get there someday.
That would be the Olympian
championship of happiness.
But I don't think
anyone is there.
AUDIENCE: I wanted to ask you
a question about consciousness.
And a large part
of what you spoke
was sort of distilling
down emotions,
and sort of having
objective control over it
so that you can actually
solve for happy.
The other sets of emotions
around expanded consciousness
would be around, say,
gratitude, or where being human
and being emotional
about those things
is a different
experience altogether.
I would love to hear
some of your thoughts
around those aspects
of consciousness.
MO GAWDAT: So again, two
parts to the question.
I'd like to start by talking
about emotions themselves.
Because sometimes,
I may come across
as if I'm distancing
myself from emotions.
As a matter of fact,
I'm not at all.
I embrace my emotions fully.
I feel them and experience
them as much as I can--
harsh, by the way, or happy.
There is an interesting
approach to going through life.
I normally have the analogy
of life and video games.
And unless you
experience all of life,
with its tough times
and good times,
it would be a very, very,
very boring video game.
Imagine if you started to play
Halo, and all you had to do
is push forward button, and
just brrr, go through it
until the end of the level.
Where's the fun in that?
So emotions are to be embraced.
But emotions, when they
become overwhelming--
by the way, either way, you need
to start to become aware, where
is the emotion coming from?
Because every
emotion, by the way--
and we do this exercise
in the training--
every emotion stems from
a thought, not an event.
It stems from a thought.
So the taxi driver
is rude is the event.
The thought might be something
like, people should not
be rude to me.
I should be respected.
This is threatening to
my kids and their future.
Whatever that thought is what
drives that feeling of anger,
or anxiety, or
worry, or whatever
that is that comes as a
result of the rude driver.
So we need to be aware of those.
We need to embrace those.
And then when we start
to realize that they're
taking over and
overwhelming us, we need
to start tracing
them, and finding out,
why are they doing that?
Which thoughts did
they stem from?
Are those thoughts true at all?
Now consciousness
goes way beyond that.
And consciousness, I always
like to use the example of love.
Because I think love is very
universal and very understudied
concept.
So I call it my romantic,
unscientific chapter,
if you want.
And there are two types of love.
There is that love that
happens in your brain.
I love you, because--
let's say, I love Google
because of the cafes.
If Larry decides to
cancel the cafes tomorrow,
I no longer love Google.
There is a reason for my love.
But I love butterflies.
That's it.
There is no because.
I have no idea why.
I just love butterflies,
whichever shape.
If it's pale gray,
I love butterflies.
I don't know.
I admire their story.
I don't know.
There is is that kind of love.
And that kind of love
truly is awareness extreme.
That's you connecting
with the rest of being.
I feel Aya's love for
me, even though Aya
is thousands of miles away--
Aya, my daughter, in Montreal.
Now those kinds of
awarenesses, if you want,
are truly the top
of all awareness.
This is truly when
you start to connect
with the real you,
the one that's
not rushing through
life every day trying
to get the next iPhone.
The real you is the one
that's aware beyond this.
And it's rare.
And it takes a ton of practice.
And I think the problem
is that we dismiss it,
because it doesn't
seem very scientific.
But you asked about dreams.
You ask about all of
those not understood
and unexplained
events in our life
where we go beyond
the physical, where
you feel that someone needs
you to call them, or whatever.
And all of these awarenesses
are probably the next stage.
I'd encourage everyone who
is a modern-day warrior
to start by the
awarenesses of this,
to feel the pain in
your neck, to feel
the coldness in the room,
to feel the time passing by,
to feel the thoughts
popping up in your head,
to feel the link between
the thought and the emotion,
to become aware of all of these.
And then as you progress
in your belts, if you want,
you get to the black belt
of all awareness, which
is consciousness.
AUDIENCE: The topic
is a [INAUDIBLE]
from an individual level.
But you no have this
background from other culture,
and also have an
emerging market.
From a society point of view,
we talk about these happiness
globally.
From culture, from this
global, from society level,
you think, what can we
challenge and we can contribute
to lead to the happiness?
MO GAWDAT: It definitely
is not a secret
that happiness is becoming
more and more of a challenge
across all cultures.
But it's also not a secret
that there are cultures
that are happier than others.
And I wouldn't want to classify
cultures by East or West,
or by Asian and
European, or whatever.
I'd probably try to pinpoint
the Industrial Revolution.
I'd say that between the
Industrial Revolution
and World War II were
points before which
we were a lot more in touch with
the reality of being a human.
I think what happened in
the Industrial Revolution is
that we started to focus
a lot more on progress
and productivity than our
own well-being and happiness.
By the way, those who are
happy are 12% more productive--
this is scientific--
than those who are not,
at the aggregate
level, a big company
might not care very much
if you are slightly less
productive than you should
be because you're unhappy.
Now the whole
approach to chasing
more, the whole approach
to being pressured by time,
the whole approach to be
more individual focused
on your own success is a spiral.
Because you start in a culture
where the society is taking
care of each other.
And then you end up in a
society where, if you fail,
you're going to be homeless.
And then the importance
of you not going
through that threat
of being homeless
becomes even more important.
And so you strive
harder and harder,
and you fall further and further
away from your happiness.
There is a core
to this operating
system, to this machine.
And the core of this
machine is our needs
are much less than
we think they are.
And our universal indicator
of well-being, if you want,
is to feel happy.
It's almost, again, part
of your survival function.
If you're happy, that's sort
of a signal for your brain
that everything's OK.
But it's not a reason to slack.
We need to worry.
That's your brain thinking.
We need to worry.
We need to ensure your survival.
And now in the modern
world, survival
goes much, much beyond
running away from the tiger.
It goes into your 401(k).
It goes into the kind
of car that you drive.
It goes into, do
I have the ability
to get the latest phone or not?
And none of that, none of that--
I promise you-- none of that
will ever make you happy.
Happy is not to be
found outside you.
Happy is there inside you.
It's your default state.
It's how we are all born, how
all children join our world.
And if they're fed, if they're
safe, if they're loved,
they're happy.
They don't need a
toy to be happy.
They can play with
their toes and be happy.
You understand?
And now by adding all of the
pressures of the Industrial
Revolution and the fears
that we got after the World
War and the Great
Depression, we started
to aim for that
insurance policy.
I just want to
make sure I'm safe.
And if I pay that with
my happiness, that's OK.
At least I know I'm safe.
You know what?
Most of us are already safe.
If anyone is watching this
video anywhere in the world,
they have a screen
that they can look at.
That's probably the
luckiest 1% in the world.
And we still don't
see it that way.
We continue to strive,
and strive, and strive.
The cultures that are
happier are cultures that
prioritize the present moment.
They prioritize their happiness.
They prioritize time
with the ones they love.
And they understand that life
will go on with its harshness
and with its good times.
And if they can do something
about the harshness,
they fix it.
If they cannot, they'll accept--
what I call committed
acceptance-- and try again.
These are the happiest
cultures in the world.
AUDIENCE: So as I
understand it, you've
been on sabbatical
working on this book.
And congratulations
on launching it.
I'm curious to hear
what the next steps are,
what else you're
working on-- you touched
on three additional
research projects--
and also, how Googlers can help
propel those missions forward?
MO GAWDAT: I think I've never
been more in the state of flow
as I am right now.
So I'm truly moving with the
events of life as they happen,
trying really hard to
maximize the impact of "Solve
for Happy," but
also, really, really,
really struggling
with so many ideas
that I'm taking notes about.
And hopefully, will sit
down and write soon.
But I also made a promise
to come back, and hopefully,
do the best I can to continue
the incredible mission
of Google.
Between all of these,
all I know is this.
I have a mission of making
10 million people happy.
If I make one person
happy, I'm very happy.
If I make two, I'm
a little happier.
If I make 100, then
I'm even happier.
And I don't know how
far this will go.
I'm hoping to be able
to get happy people that
grasp the concepts to be the
ambassadors of the concept.
I'm also hoping to find
technological ways, maybe apps,
or online presence, or whatever,
that allows us to spread
the message even further.
And I'm hoping that
Googlers-- and I know
many who attended
the training have
been truly ambassadors of this.
I've spoken at Stanford
and many other places
as a result of people
spreading the word and saying,
this changed my life right.
So all I know for now is that
for the next three and a half
months almost, I'm
completely dedicated to this,
trying to list down my notes
on the next few thoughts
if I have the time, and
that by July, I am back,
and trying to put 14 hours
a day instead of eight,
so that I can continue to
do both as best as I can.
ELISE BIRKHOFER: All
right, I think we're
getting need to wrap it up now.
Thank you so much
for being here.
For last words, can
you let people know
where they can get the book?
And if they were touched
by this message, where
they can mark that they were?
MO GAWDAT: Oh, yeah, yeah.
So forget happiness.
The businessman now--
I have a counter on my website.
If you go to SolveforHappy.com,
and if I managed to send you
a message that made you
a little bit happier,
click on the counter that
says, you made me happy.
Thank you.
And of course, the book is
launching on the 21st of March.
So you can get it on Google
Play books or on Amazon.
And yeah, I promise you,
it will make a difference.
So I hope you can find
your happiness in this.
I'm Mo@SolveforHappy.com I
give a one-day service level
agreement if your email is
shorter than four lines.
And yes, I do ask
you to get in touch,
and give me ideas, and tell
me how I can make this better.
At the same time, if you
are reading and finding
thoughts that you
would like to discuss,
there is nothing that
is more enjoyable for me
than learning new perspectives
and your points of view.
So yeah, do stay in touch.
And I hope to make
you a little happier.
ELISE BIRKHOFER: Thank you
so much, Mo, for being here.
