Solve For Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy Paperback

Solve for Happy is a startlingly original book about creating and maintaining happiness written by a top Google executive with an engineer's training and fondness for thoroughly analyzing a problem. In 2001 Mo Gawdat a remarkable thinker whose gifts had landed him top positions in half a dozen companies and who - in his spare time - had created significant wealth realized that he was desperately unhappy. A lifelong learner he attacked the problem as an engineer would examining all the provable facts and scrupulously following logic. When he was finished he had discovered the equation for enduring happiness. Ten years later that research saved him from despair when his college-aged son Ali - also intellectually gifted - died during routine surgery. In dealing with the loss Mo found his mission: he would pull off the type of 'moonshot' that he and his Google X colleagues were always aiming for: he would help ten million people become happier by pouring his happiness principles into a book and spreading its message around the world. One of Solve for Happy's key premises is that happiness is a default state. If we shape expectations to acknowledge the full range of possible events unhappiness is on its way to being defeated. To steer clear of unhappiness traps we must dispel the six illusions that cloud our thinking (e.g. the illusion of time of control and of fear); overcome the brain's seven deadly defects (e.g. the tendency to exaggerate label and filter) and embrace five ultimate truths (e.g. change is real now is real unconditional love is real). By means of several highly original thought experiments Mo helps readers find enduring contentment by questioning some of the most fundamental aspects of their existence.