Name: Timeo Williams's review of Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat
Item: Solve for Happy
Rating: 4
Author: Timeo Williams

Mo Gawdat

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 horrible loss, Mo found his mission: he would share his equation with the world and help as many people as possible become happier. 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 how to dispel the illusions that cloud our thinking, overcome the brain's blind spots, and embrace five ultimate truths.--

Engineer Your Path to Joy

Solve for Happy

Timeo Williams

Mo gives us his equation for happiness, which, is equal to the absence of unhappiness. Mo shares how he lost his son and what he has learned since. topics range from religion, to his experience at Google, to the engineer side of the equation.

I'm not a fan of self-help or productivity books. Typically, its authors take a few good ideas, then drag them out over whatever number of pages required to justify publishing a book. Hearing Mo Gawdat share his views on happiness in a podcast, sparked my curiosity. So I overcame my hesitance for the genre, and decided to read the book. I shouldn't have. 

Frederik De Bosschere

Arturo Hernández

The author shares the way he interprets life after the death of his 21 year old son.

He shares a framework of illusions, ideas, fears and equations that try to challenge the view someone may have about living and about being “happy”. It’s quite thought provoking since he questions a lot of things that are known to be one way or the other, however the way he does it is enjoyable so you just go on a ride with him.

Near the end though, he attempts to lay out the idea of a great designer (AKA God) who created the world we live in. He shares interesting points however his proposal just didn’t seem complete to me by the time the book ended.

Overall, it’s an interesting read :)

Hugo Ahlberg

Interesting perspective but a bit uneven 

I might not agree with a lot in here but very interesting life perspective from the mind of a very intelligent engineer. Sometimes gut wrenching to read about his lost son..

'He explains how even in the face of the unthinkable, happiness is still possible' – Stylist Solve for Happy is the equation for happiness. This 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.

Solve For Happy

Chris G

Oddly insightful and uplifting from a story that is heartbreaking and relatable.

Artas Bartas

This book was inspired by a personal tragedy. As Mo Gawdat explains in the introduction, he was moved to write "Solve for Happy" as a way to deal with the loss of his teenage son. Losing one's child is a terrible experience, and I have a lot of sympathy with parents who have to live through it. But when it comes to the book itself, it reads more as a corporate deck hastily put together by the HR department than a genuine attempt to explain how to achieve happiness. 

At its core, "Solve for Happy" advances a simple thesis: happiness is a thought, and its origins lie in how a person perceives the world around him. If you keep your expectations in check and learn to find a silver lining in every cloud, you will become happy. Obviously, there are a lot of things out there preventing us from practicing this attitude, and Mo Gawdat makes it into a personal challenge to identify, document, and address these obstacles. 

Applying his engineering mind to the problem of the human condition, he suggests that our failure to achieve happiness has to do with social illusions, personal biases, and flawed goals we choose to pursue or tolerate in the daily life. The author goes on to supply a long list of thought experiments, pop science tidbits, folksy tales, and comparative matrices to illustrate this point. The unspoken assumption underlying this whole exercise is that once you recognize how your behavior is driven by cognitive biases and social pressures, you will be able to transition into the state of enlightened being. But would you? 

The argument that "Solve for Happy" advances is based on a very simplistic view of human nature, the one where concepts like addiction, denial, delusion, pathology, social oppression, conscious sacrifice, interpersonal dynamics do not exist. For Mo Gawdat all social relations and personal experiences consist of two, clearly defined components - external events and internal reactions. Happiness is just a mechanistic exercise in finding the right internal response to an external event. 

It's unfortunate that Mo Gawdat decided to treat the topic this way. As a native Egyptian who made a career at Google and later ran business ventures out of Dubai, he is in a position to offer a lot of interesting insights on the topic. He could have chosen to talk about happiness as a Muslim; self-made man; politically progressive Arab; someone who managed to achieve success in two very different societies. Alas, instead of drawing on his unique cultural context, he chose to sanitize the story he tells at every turn. Meaningful personal details are stripped away, controversial opinions are shunned in favor of bland (and politically palatable) truths, and genuine contradictions of human nature are swept under the rug. 

All this makes for a very superficial theory and even worse literature. If you really want to learn something new about happiness, there are much more interesting books out there. Irvin D. Yalom's "When Nietzsche Wept" addresses the relationship between suffering and happiness in a much deeper, more poetic, and illuminating way than "Solve for Happy" ever does. Alasdair McIntyre's monumental study "After Virtue" shows how culture and social context shapes our understanding of happiness in a way that will make you question the reductionist approach Mo Gawdat and a lot of other self-help authors take. The only area where "Solve for Happy" excels, unfortunately, is in marketing itself.

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