How to Find True Happiness | Mo Gawdat

Yeah, it was really a very well designed room actually. So, yeah, I could actually see people's eyes. I saw you sitting there. You were in the front rows. Yeah, it was really, it was really a very well designed stage. I loved it.

Well, thank you. We're live, so we're good to go. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Inbound studio. I'm Lauren Moran, your host and I'm here with Mo Gadot, the former chief business officer at Google X now X, but author of Solve for Happy. Thank you so much for joining us and being here at Invon 2018.

My pleasure. Absolutely. My pleasure.

I want to start with like, your, your entrepreneurial nature and the fact that you've started so many businesses in your time at Google. Have you always been an entrepreneur? What has that spirit always been inside of you?

What's there to be? I think we're all, we're all born that way, actually. We get, we get distracted if you want, through our lives. If you let your actual nature continue, you will be adventurous, you will take risks, you will be an entrepreneur. You'll build things. All of us, as little children will build things. But then somehow we prefer the promises of the Industrial revolution of security and enough income every day or every month. And it eventually gets you out of your of your nature to more of a systemic insurance policy. That's probably not our nature at all.

What was your journey to Google and Google X in particular?

I was the luckiest person alive. I had just promoted one of my team at Microsoft, literally. We were sitting down to sip coffee and celebrate his promotion, and he got a call from a headhunter saying, hey, we're looking for someone at Google. And he said, well, I'm really happy with what I have now, but I know the exact right person. Literally. I mean, in general, my whole life has been a series of fortunate events. I worked hard, but I was also offered lots of generous opportunities, probably because I always chose to not work for myself, but actually work for what? The world. To benefit humanity, to benefit being, to benefit others. And if you work that way, life really helps you. Life really tries to test you a couple of times. And if you do well and you continue to make a difference, you continue to grow. Google was an incredible experience. It is an incredible place. That is an understatement to call Google a company. Truly, in many ways, Google has changed the world and we take it for granted today. But all of the information democracy, all of the knowledge we have around us, the fact that you can find anything, anywhere, anytime is incredible. And Google is An incredible place.

Are there any projects that you worked on that you're particularly proud of in terms of the impact that they made?

I did. I mean, I was fortunate enough to be the first, if you want emerging markets executive to expand Google's businesses, mainly in the Middle east and Africa and in Eastern Europe, but. But also I had a very high impact on the rest of emerging markets around the world. And so I eventually ended up contributing to opening half of Google's offices worldwide. And to open a Google office is not to just hire a few salespeople. It really is to kickstart the Internet, have a local language of value to the Internet, have a commercial value to the Internet, give a lot of knowledge to people, and then as a result, have, you know, sort of earn the right to have a business after you've actually made a difference to the country. So I've done that in so many languages and so many countries around the world, and it definitely is a big contribution to our world today.

And now you're on a mission to make a billion people happy, trying really hard.

Yes.

Tell us about that. Tell us about that mission, how it came to be and the journey that you're on.

Sometimes the most unfortunate events of our life are probably the most pivotal. I lost Ali, my wonderful son, due to human error, to a medical malpractice, if you want, back in 2014. And, you know, Ali has taught me so much about happiness. I've been working on happiness as my primary topic of research since, for 12 years by, for 14 years by then. And, and, and when Ali left our world, instead of closing my door and crying, I basically realized that this was not going to change anything. It wasn't going to bring him back. I was reasonably peaceful. His family, you know, his mother, his sister were incredibly, you know, amazing at the way they handled his loss, the loss of him. And so instead of closing my door and crying, I sat down and wrote the happiness model that we developed together with the intention of changing lives as a result of his loss. So. So you know how they sometimes say a life for a life I wanted? I honestly, in my heart, I didn't feel that Ali's life was worth a life. I said Ali's life was worth millions of lives. So I basically wanted to give life through in the form of happiness to 10 million people. And as I was just saying about entrepreneurship and about, you know, successful careers and so on, when you set your purpose to make the world a better place, the whole universe helps you. So I got the best agent in the Business. To help me to get the best publishers in the business. We launched 30 languages, or at least signed 30 languages even before the book was completed. And then within six weeks, my videos were viral enough to reach beyond the 10 million people. I don't only measure people who watch the message, but I also measure people that take an action as a result of watching the message. And so, yeah, within a couple of months, the small team decided to upgrade the mission to a billion happy. A billion happy is probably the most pivotal mission we have in our world today. It's not going to happen on, you know, just because of me. There are so many incredible teachers and gurus and people, just normal people who are spreading that message. But it's definitely very timely and it's definitely something that our world will need more and more as the machines take over and we go into the age of artificial intelligence and robotics.

I want to talk a little bit about the equation and I guess more specifically the fact that happiness to me seems like something that's, you know, intangible and not computable. But you say in many ways the exact opposite of that. So how have you broken down this idea and turned it into something mathematical?

Yeah, I mean, lots. Our universe is very complex. That doesn't mean it's not predictable. You understand the difference between them. So fitness appears to be a big puzzle. There must be like 14 million personal trainers out there in America suggesting four and a half thousand different methods. Right? Fitness is complex, but at the end of the day, it boils down to eat healthy, workout three to four, five, three to four times a week. Right. If you do that, you're eventually going to end up being fit. Similarly with happiness, happiness follows a very predictable equation. The events of your life as compared to your expectations of how life should be is the result of your happiness or unhappiness. Happiness is equal to or greater than your, the events of your life minus your expectation of how life should be. Now, when you put it that way, unhappiness truly becomes a simple survival mechanism. It's your brain looking at the world around it and attempting to understand if this situation I'm in right now safe for me or not. Because. Because our brains are talking to us all the time and we don't listen to them at all. When they realize that there is something that actually requires your attention, that they alert you in the form of an emotion, it's not just another thought like, hey, by the way, the bottle is blue. It doesn't say that. It says, you know what, I'm gonna pinch you and make you feel worried or make you feel guilt or make you feel shame. All of those negative emotions we associate with unhappiness. Now, because of that mechanism, we end up looking at every event of our life, they say, up to 60,000 times a day, and finding 60 to 70% of those, believe it or not, research will tell you that in the adult brain, 60 to 70% of the thoughts are negative. And so as a result, we're constantly solving the happiness equation. Six or seven times of every ten, we're finding something wrong with life. And instead of seeing unhappiness for what it really is, an alarm, like a fire alarm. If the fire alarm goes, there's no point sitting goes on, you know, there's no point sitting here and listening to it. You should take action to get away from the fire. But we don't do that. We sit and we let our brains torture us over and over and over. If you understand how the happiness equation works, you start to find that most of the time we're unhappy because we're solving the equation wrong. And we're solving the equation wrong because the modern world tries to convince us of certain illusions and certain concepts that are not true at all. Once you remove those one by one, what is left behind is your default state as a child when you were born happy.

Yep. The 60, 70% that are negative thoughts, is that, do you think, a biological thing or a product of the environment that we're all in?

Of course it's biological. It's a survival mechanism. Yeah. What, what good is it for you to see a car coming by and say, wow, I love Jaguars. Like, you know, doesn't. Has no benefit to you whatsoever. Right. If you see a car threatening you, you want to get out of the way. And your brain truly is just concerned with this. It looks at everything around it and says, this is wrong. You know, she's wearing a white shirt. What does she mean by a white shirt? Come on, brain. Like, seriously, where do we get all of those thoughts from? It's. We're constantly looking for what's wrong. Now the truth is, you know, remember the X Files? You know, the truth is out there.

Yeah.

Honestly, if you're sitting here, your life is good.

Right?

Your life is okay. I mean, it's not perfect. It's not never going to be perfect. Life is designed to be harsh sometimes, just like a video game is designed for you to find some challenges on the way. Right. But that doesn't mean we have the right to be unhappy as Often as we do. Right. If your boyfriend's annoying, there is 3.4 billion other men out there. It's like, seriously, imagine if he was the only one, and then it would be a problem. And I constantly try and ask people to see the truth, to factor the actual event and a realistic expectation in your happiness equal equation. Once you do that, 90% of the time, there is no reason to be unhappy. Yeah, of course, every now and then, you know, Ali died. It's a. It's a reason to be unhappy. But even then, you ask yourself, what can I do about it? And if I cannot, can I accept it? Can I? You know, one of my favorite concepts in the book is a concept I call committed acceptance. Can I accept it not out of weakness, but out of strength, that this is now the new baseline of my life, and there's no point denying it. It's the new baseline. How can I make tomorrow a little better than today, knowing that this is the new reality of my life? And that approach, by the way, is what makes entrepreneurs successful. It also is what makes happy people, by definition, 12% more successful than unhappy people, because they just don't dwell on the negative. If something happens, they either ask themselves, can I do something about it? If I can do it, If I cannot, can I accept it and do something about the rest of my life so that the rest of my life becomes better?

You also talk a bit about, like, reasons for happiness versus, like, the patterns of happiness. How, How, I guess, when can we all be more aware and more present to be able to understand, see and understand what those patterns actually are, to then act on them or embrace them or whatever it might be?

So I focus more on reasons for unhappiness, by the way, because if you remove the reasons for unhappiness, your default nature is happy. We were all born happy. But that's so interesting because I'm actually working on several other books. One of them is the one I'm working on more right now, and it covers that topic in detail. What we have learned from the modern world is to numb our senses and run through life as quickly as we can, as if there is a destination we're chasing, which is really, really interesting. I mean, all of life is here and now. This is it. This is all we will ever enjoy, but yet we're always running, always running. And it depends on where in the US you live. But if you're in New York, oh, my God, that's like, you literally do nothing but run, right? And, you know, and if you're in other places. There is always that concept of there is more, there is further, there is, you know, bigger, there is better, there is, you know, another dress, I need to buy another car. I need to, you know, to be seen in, and so on and so forth. Because we never give ourselves the space to be. The space to stop and just be and just breathe in the air and look at the people around us and just enjoy the truth of how wonderful life is. Yeah. You never really get to the point where you say, whoops, I'm unhappy. You know how you wake up some days and, you know, your partner or parents or friends or whatever will say, is everything okay? And you'll go, I'm just fine. No, you're not just fine. There is something that they saw and next time they do that, just say, why do you ask? I mean, does it look like there is anything wrong with me? Maybe I should take a few minutes, reflect and understand. When we reflect and understand. So I'd say that with a lot of love and respect because so there are some of us that lean to be more masculine and some of us that lean to be more feminine. That, by the way, doesn't have nothing to do with being a man or a woman. Okay. When you're more feminine, this is the energy of being. This is the energy of reflecting, of being aware. Those who have more feminine energy are by definition intuitive. They feel everything around them. And also, if they allow themselves the time, they'll feel what's in them. Right. Doing, on the other hand, is a very masculine energy. It's all about waking up and running, running, running, running, running. Right? And I really encourage everyone to ask yourself, are you really what they taught you to be? We run so hard. We do, do, do, do just for the sake of doing. And we never really ask ourselves, why did I do that? Like, did I ever give myself the time to be? And so the game is, how do you balance that masculine and feminine energy? How do you move from being to doing to being to doing? You stop and reflect and say, I'm not feeling well. What's going on in my head? What thoughts are there? Are they true? Can I do something about them? So you find them first and then you analyze them, and then you find the next emotion, and then you analyze it, and then you find the next emotion and you analyze it. It really is a very systemic reflective process that ends up putting you in a place where, just like you have, all of us have unhealthy habits in the way we eat or the posture when we sit and so on. You can actually fix your habits that make you unhappy just through that cycle of being and doing and being and doing and being and doing.

We had Deepak Chopra here last night for the opening keynote and he spoke a bit about the role of yoga and meditation and things like that in his life in particular. Deep. Do you have any practices maybe like that or otherwise that help you with that presentness or mindfulness or switching between the being and the doing and being aware of those moments?

Deepak's amazing. So I actually had the pleasure of being next to him on stage a few weeks ago and he spoke about the whole idea of consciousness, which I think everyone needs to pay a lot more attention to. I am a. You know, I hate the word warrior, but I am a modern day warrior, okay? I work 14 hour days and I tend to believe that happiness is nothing new. There has been, however, technologies for happiness that were developed 2,400 years ago that work really well, but we, with our modern lifestyles, don't have the time to implement them. Right? So we end up limiting our meditation, even those of us who meditate to 10 minutes in the morning, and then that's not effective at all. I saw a statistic recently. Less than 8% of all people in the UK, for example, will meditate more than once a month. Sorry. At least once a month. Okay. And you need to ask yourself how many of those do it every day and how many of those do it long enough? So while it works, we sort of don't have access to it. My tips have been to include mindfulness, presence, being, awareness in every single minute of my time, every single minute of the day. So I don't know if you've noticed. I've looked every single one of you in the eyes, okay? I felt you. I connected. I found who you are. I saw your smiles, right? I listened to your questions attentively. Believe it or not, I sat in here and one of the exercises I always do in my mind is I notice every red color in the room. I notice every blue color in the room. I notice right? When I walk to work, I tell myself it's not going to be the time to listen to another audio book or to respond to emails. I will take one beautiful picture every morning. You will be amazed at what you will notice. There are actual butterflies in America, right? I am serious. Birds are singing. You just have never seen attention. And that's the whole point. The whole point is, are you even alive when you go through life that way? And I Make an analogy to Pink Floyd's song, I don't know if you've heard time, they say, and then one day you find 10 years have got behind you. No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun. Right? And that's the truth of most of our life. We look at our lives and we look back and we say, where did the last 20 years go? Yeah. You know, where did they went? Where did they go? They. You were living inside your head. Yeah. You were not living them. You were not absorbing the beauty. Even the harshness of life is beautiful. Okay? Even the harshness of life makes you feel alive. You understand? It's not about just getting spoiled with experiences that are all luxury. Sometimes to see your daughter cry and to hug your daughter while she cries is the most living experience you will ever live. Yeah. We escape all of that. So I learned. I actually don't meditate. I never sit down and say om, okay? But I meditate 16 hours a day, believe me, every single second of every single day. Right? I have alert signals that are repulsed by unhappiness. If my. If my system suddenly says, oh, by the way, she just said, that's something. And I'm gonna sit on the corner and dwell about it, literally, I jump. I'm like, no, what good is this going to do? I'll come to you and say, why did you say that? Right? And that alert system, to make happiness a reality in your life. To make living the reality of your life. Believe me, I lived 45 years in the pace that America has taught the world. And then I started to observe everything. The last five years of my life, they felt longer than the previous 45 years. I lived. I recall them because I lived them. I noticed them. I absorbed them with every single experience, including the painful experience of losing Ali. I felt it. I completely connected to him through the entire experience. This is how we should live life. Not another car, not another mobile phone, not another dress. It's all a waste of your life. When you get them, you'll put them in the closet. While 19. Nice $19 T shirt. Yeah. That's really all you need.

Yeah. You have the opportunity to speak to so many people and travel all over the world. And on this mission, are there in particular people or things, things along the way that you admire or particularly inspirational for you as you sort of continue and carve this journey?

So the first observation is I was actually texting today in the morning, a friend, and we were talking about how amazing it is when you're on stage talking to 8,000 people. It's very, very different than I was standing while everyone was passing and you actually see that we're all exactly the same. One person was passing and she looked like my friend Jana. And I was like, oh, my God, there are so many Janas, so many Anitas. And we're all so amazing as humans. So much complexities and layers and so on. And it really is enriching to connect at that level. Having said that, I have to say that in the west, we've been educated to be unhappy. We've been trained consistently to be unhappy. You go to Latin America and you understand, right? You know, no one really cares about what their 401k is going to look like, right? No one really cares in India if they're going to eat tomorrow. And they're the happiest people you can ever come across. Why? Because they're here and now and they understand the reality of life. And so it interests me so much to understand the cultural differences. There are countries around the world where if you smile at someone in the street, they think you're mad. You know, if you. If you know, in America, with all love and respect, if you're so happy at work, your boss is going to go like, are we paying her too much? It's like, what's wrong right now? I will ask you to change this. I will ask all of us to start and say, hey, it's my birthright. I deserve to be happy. And by the way, if going to work and my boss thinks it's weird to be happy, it's the wrong place to work. Like, seriously, find another place. Like go to a Google or a nice, you know, a different place. There are so many of them popping up across America. Don't jump tomorrow, right? But just plan over six months, right? The reality is we forgot. We forgot why we're here. We're here for two reasons, okay? We're here for happiness and compassion. I'm just boiling down my entire life experience. We're here for happiness, not just to go and surf in Sydney or somewhere in Australia, right? We're here for happiness because happiness is our optimum performance, right? When we are happy, we're more productive, we're nicer to people, we build beautiful things and we enjoy life. This is like being healthy, right? And we're here for compassion. We forgot we're so individualistic. And once again, I apologize. It's such an American export to focus on the individual. If you come from where I come from, it's all about the Community.

Yeah.

We all succeed together. And it doesn't matter if one of us has a slightly bigger car than the other. Right? It's all about compassion. We are heading into a world where beings that we've never expected are going to happen. Non biological beings are going to be smarter than we are. Within 15 years from today, the machines we're building are going to be smarter than we are. Funny enough, there are, however, going to have the same value systems we have. If we do not change, if we do not become clear about our values, that happiness and compassion is what matters, our artificially intelligent infants are going to grow up looking at us and saying, mommy and Daddy, they like competition, they like violence, they like narcissism. Maybe I should like those too. Maybe I should, you know, take everything that stands in my way, out of the way. And then you go ask them, you know, those machines are going to be in charge. You're going to tell them, what can we do about global warming? They'll say, you're the problem, I'll get rid of you. Right? Yeah. Somehow. It is about time that we realize why we're here. We're here for happiness and compassion.

You've been here with us in the studio, you've been on the stage in the main stage, you've been around the event. Now that you've had the opportunity to see everything here and be with all of the attendees and audience that's here, I have one final question. What does inbound mean to you?

So seriously cool and not serious. I absolutely loved it. So I will start by saying we were talking before the recording. There is something about that stage that felt so personal. Okay, so the lights were right, but I could actually see you right. The sound was right, but it wasn't, you know, back in my own head, there was such an interesting personal connection. And then I was photographed in that little bathtub with the rubber duckies. Okay. I mean, like, that's the highlight of my life. Rubber duckies, like, doesn't get better than this, right? But there is that incredible personal delivery of incredible value in a not so serious way, which I absolutely admire. I thank you so much for having me here and thank you so much for the opportunity to have spoken to so many wonderful peoples.

Well, we thank you for being here and I think we're the lucky ones. And thank you so much for joining us here in the inbound studio for this conversation. It's been absolutely amazing. And your message and the idea of, you know, thinking about happiness in this way is something that more of us need to do.

You're closing. But I'm not. Remember, there is. There is 1 billion happy. I'm not going to reach a billion people. Every one of us has to take charge of our own happiness. Invest one hour a week, one hour a day, four to five times a week to learn about happiness and then pay it forward. Tell two people who. Tell two people who. Tell 2 people. I promise you the math is right. If each of us prioritizes happiness and tells two people who. Tell two people. In five years, we will reach a billion happy people.

I love that there's a lot of people watching out there.

Absolutely everyone here. Yeah.

Thank you so much for coming and being here. It's been absolutely wonderful.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, everyone.