Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
In 2001 Mo Gawdat realized that despite his incredible success, he was desperately unhappy. A lifelong learner, he attacked the problem as an engineer would: examining all the provable facts and scrupulously applying logic. Eventually, his countless hours of research and science proved successful, and he discovered the equation for permanent happiness.
Thirteen years later, Mo’s algorithm would be put to the ultimate test. After the sudden death of his son, Ali, Mo and his family turned to his equation—and it saved them from despair. In dealing with the horrible loss, Mo found his mission: he would pull off the type of “moonshot” goal that he and his colleagues were always aiming for—he would share his equation with the world and help as many people as possible become happier.
In Solve for Happy Mo questions some of the most fundamental aspects of our existence, shares the underlying reasons for suffering, and plots out a step-by-step process for achieving lifelong happiness and enduring contentment. He shows us how to view life through a clear lens, teaching us how to dispel the illusions that cloud our thinking; overcome the brain’s blind spots; and embrace five ultimate truths.
No matter what obstacles we face, what burdens we bear, what trials we’ve experienced, we can all be content with our present situation and optimistic about the future.
Mo Gawdat
Mo Gawdat is the Chief Business Officer at Google’s [X]. In the last ten years he has made happiness his primary topic of research, diving deeply into literature and conversing on the topic with thousands of people in more than a hundred countries. He is also a serial entrepreneur who has cofounded more than twenty businesses. He speaks Arabic, English, and German. In 2014, motivated by the tragic loss of his son, Ali, Mo began pouring his findings into his first book, Solve for Happy.
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Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5That Little Voice In Your Head: Adjust the Code that Runs Your Brain Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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Reviews for Solve for Happy
143 ratings15 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Awesome book. Most practical book for truly understanding the concept and achieving happiness. Very touching story!!
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A brilliant explanation of how happiness works. The most interesting thing about this book is that provides a solid argument on a topic that tends to be based just over people's experience and hearsay.
This book can be summarized in a single sentence: happiness is all about setting realistic expectations.1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very deep and thought provoking. Very happy I listened to this book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book amazed me. How could a father write a book to teach us about happiness after his son died? I was tearing when I heard his first chapter about his tragedy. Thank you so much for writing this book for us. I know several people who killed themselves due to suffering. I wish that they could have listened to this book to learn more from the author. This book is one of my favorite books to listen to over and over.
The more I read, the more I learned from Mo the new theories, intellectual way to look at life. Thank you, Mo, for teaching us the life lessons from your perspective. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful Thought Provoking Book, that will surely touch your heart and impact many many lives that comes across it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beautiful book. Wonderful tribute to MO’s son and to humanity. Thanks for all of the lessons.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fantastic in every way. What a wonderful and touching read!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great book.
Not sure why the algorithm insists on having 10 words before it is allowed to be posted! - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thank you Mo for sharing your story.
appreciate you!
- Adam Eidson - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I DON'T read self-help books about happiness because I have a prejudice against them, besides I already have my own definition of happiness, and I don't want anyone else's influence on it. I also find that most self-help books start off strong, but they get boring and repetitive towards the end.
For me, happiness is like Hawa in Arabic, which can mean inhale and exhale. Just like a breath, happiness must be experienced in both its positive and negative aspects. If you try to hold your breath, the consequences will be bad.
However, this book is DIFFERENT !!!. I love it so much! The more I read, the more interesting it gets. I read it because I'm a fan of Mo Gawdat's book Scary Smart and I wanted to know his perspective on happiness. I thought I would be disappointed, but in fact, I was blown away by how logical and well-thought-out his arguments are.
I hope I can meet the Author face to face to tell him how his books impact my daily life and become part of his team to run his mission to spread happiness. ??????????????????????❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Reasonably good for most of it then dissolved into a pseudoscience non-proof of the existence of God and support of so-called intelligent design. Without that I'd say the book was a solid 4 but that last but alone would've been a 1.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5‘There is no good and there is no bad. You are unimportant. Horrific trauma is simply a negative viewpoint. With the exception of feeling pain, no one ever suffers. Strive for wilful ignorance. How to be happy? JUST be happy.’The author cherry picks bits of information, twists them out of context, builds tenuous relationships between those bits and then calls them unshakable facts that support his narrative. I was both bored and annoyed by page 50 but kept going, thinking as it’s an international bestseller, it must get better. It didn’t. Waste of time, waste of money, waste of space. Would not recommend.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Mo Gawdat has an overall approach to maintaining a state of equanimous happiness through the many sorts of ups and downs of life that has a lot in common with Buddhism and Stoicism and which I think might be helpful to many. However, his approach to presenting his "happiness equation" to achieve this state is truly terrible and severely undermines the message and his credibility to deliver it.His introduction, largely built around the story of his son's tragic unexpected death, is, to me, the best part of the book: a touching story of context and motivation that might be worth a read by itself. And the next couple of chapters (part one), setting up some terms and concepts, aren't bad.But almost immediately into part two, his outline of the "grand illusions" that confuse us all on what we are and what happiness is, his approach starts to collapse for me. Misrepresenting the context and meaning of Rene Descarte's most famous quote to use as a strawman that he can "correct" to make his point was disingenuous, at the least. Many of his examples attempting to distinguish the self from the brain, mind, voice and other traits (e.g., your voice recorded and played back to you doesn't sound like you to you, so the voice clearly isn't you) sometimes border on the ridiculous and flout the reader's ability to think critically at all.To be fair, there are some good ideas in there. And even some good points—that one's expectations significantly affect one's happiness with outcomes, that ruminating on past events unnecessarily eats away at happiness, etc.—but nothing I haven't read and heard elsewhere and with much better exemplification.Also, to be fair, I only made it 35% of the way through the book before I couldn't take it anymore and stopped. (And I'm generally pretty stubborn about finishing any book I start.) Maybe it gets better later on. But I'm just not a fast enough reader to complete the rest without spending significant-to-me time doing so, and my confidence that the remaining read would be anywhere near worth the time was completely blown.I suspect that, if Mo took his touching introduction and most of the first two chapters, and then replaced each the remaining twelve chapters with just a couple sentences stating its main point and no more than a few paragraphs directly explaining it, he'd have a pretty good (if much shorter) book. But, as it is, the book definitely does not solve for my happy at all.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mo let's us in on the strategy he used to overcome the grief of loosing his son. Thanks ?
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I didn't get past the introduction so maybe it gets better.