This blog post is about a book titled “Solve for Happy” written by Mo Gawdat

I had bought this book way back in 2017 and it has stayed on my book rack for almost 8 years. I think I did an impulse purchase and then never got a chance to even flip through the book.

This month, I happened to pick up this book randomly and read a few pages from the intro and I was hooked. Read the book cover to cover, listened to 6 hour lecture series that the author gave at Stanford

After reading the book back to back and having listened to 6 hours of lecture series, it is fair to say that the content in the book more than resonated with me.

Happiness is something we all seek either in our daily lives. We are also exposed to some kind of philosophy that either addresses it directly or indirectly. So, what does this book say differently. May be the way it is breaks down our daily life in a way that one can understand the illusions and blind spots. Also the fact that this book has been written by someone who is just like most of us, someone who has deal with the responsibilities of his family, his work place demands etc. In a way we can related quickly to the author and may be that could be a reason that I liked the book.

7-6-5 Model

This chapter is a prelude to what to expect from the book.

The author describes happiness model in the form of an equation and says that happiness is always greater than equal to the perception of events in your life minus the expectations of how your life should behave.

Well, I have been always told to have low expectations from life; that leads one to have a peaceful life. In that sense, I agree with one part of equation. About the perception part, i think it is another way of saying that it is how we react to situations that matter rather than the situation itself. I am not sure why the author has considered only these two parts in the happiness equation. Are these the only two components that fit in to the equation ?

The thing I like about this chapter is the way in which the author ties the content of the book to the various states that we can be. We could be in state of confusion, suffering, escape, happiness or joy. These states can be further categorized in rising below the clarity of thought, state of incessant thought, and rising above the clutter of thought

The content of the book is laid out in a form that helps us to move from the state of confusion to state of joy .The structure of the book is laid out in the form of a 6-7-5 model and the author describes the model as follows

It’s time to start your happiness training. As an engineer I’ll give it to you in shorthand—in nowhere near as colorful a tone as the happiness gurus of today speak. It’s not rocket science. All you need to do is remember three numbers: 6-7-5.

Here’s how this works. There are six grand illusions that keep you in confusion. When you use these illusions to try to make sense of life, nothing seems to compute. The suffering runs deep and lasts long.

Next, seven blind spots delude your judgment of the reality of life. The resulting distorted picture makes you unhappy.

Eliminate the six illusions, fix the seven blind spots—and stop trying to escape—and you’ll reach happiness more often than not.

But if you want your happiness to last, you must hang on to five ultimate truths.

Put it all together and you have the Happiness Model:

Six Illusions

Illusion of Self

The thing that resonated for me from this chapter is that there are multiple times when we relate to our body or self. If we put the body through the test of perception and test of persistence, then it becomes obvious that we are not our bodies, we are not our brains, we are not our infinite roles that we might assume in our daily lives. We all have at some point in life identified ourselves in body or specific body part - be it our appearance, skin color, hair, eyes etc. Are we truly our bodies ?

The key insight from this chapter is that you are nothing else but the observer. The observer of your actions, the observer of your thoughts, the observer of the drama around you.

We might think we are a ton of other things, thanks to our ego, the various roles we play in the world , the masquerades we wear. We might think we are the star of the movie but unfortunately there are 8 billion movies going on in each of the 8 billion individuals lives. Each individual thinks he or she is the star of the movie. In reality every one’s movie is interconnected with every one else. We live in a complex web of connections. Every single day, every step you take and every move you make impacts the life of everyone around you

I think once we strip ourselves and start observing everything around, our thoughts, our emotions, our roles, our professional roles, our family roles, our responsibilities, it will help us come to terms with our attachment to many things physical and non-physical things that are really not your core

The author also touches briefly on “Good” and “Bad”, the words we often use in our lives to label something. By peeling the cover over those words, we realize that the events themselves are never good or bad. It is how we develop an attitude towards them that makes us think that the event is good or bad.

Years ago, my sister-in-law gifted a book to my kids titled, Fortunately, by Remy Charlip. The book is a nice spin of how we label events as good or bad. The events are what they are and through a series of so called unfortunate and fortunate events that a boy goes through.

The author also talks about “Eraser Test” somewhere later in the book that I found to be immensely useful when my mind plays a trick on me and wishes things would not happened the way they have played out

Illusion of Thought

This chapter talks about the voice in your head that keeps telling you do one thing or the other, or is in incessant chatter about something that has happened or is about to happen. It is only when you are able to tone down the chatterbox and start observing the inner voice in your head, you can truly free yourself from the inner voice.

Inner voice can take shape in many forms but at the core it is your ego, a sum collection of thoughts that you assume about yourself. One crucial aspect to think in order to dislodge ourselves from this inner thoughts is to put the inner thought through the test of perception and test of permanence. Are you able to observe your inner dialogue ? If true, then you are are not the inner voice. Does inner voice changes and you do not, then you are not the inner voice

There are three hacks so as to not let the inner voice take you on a tangent:

• Observe the Dialogue
• Observe the Drama
• Get me a happy thought
• Shut the duck up

The problem is that we identify with our inner voice so much that we give far more importance than we really need to give. We often forget that it is you who give power to that inner voice. Also when things happen around you, the incessant chatter and thoughts affect you. The only way to get out of your suffering cycle is to take action.

Also, as I write these, there are some unnecessary incessant thoughts going on in my mind. I was peacefully reading and reflecting on this chapter when I had to intervene in some family issue, express my anger at the situation and ensure that the task gets done. Ideally I should not have never let my anger come in the way, but I could not find any other way to make the situation peaceful. It is not that I did not try to make situations peaceful but things went out of control and I let my anger take control of me. I am not sure whether the outburst was necessary but my mind is now full of those angry thoughts. I am not sure what should be the way I should handle these situations at home.

If I really follow the advice given in this chapter, I will just stop this suffering cycle by doing stuff.

In fact in one of the lectures, the author asks the audience to think of a very unpleasant experience, mull over it for a few minutes and then immediately start working on an anagram. Using this exercise, the author drives home the point that our mood or state of mind can oscillate between happiness and unhappiness. That has everything to do with the way we are thinking about it. Once you immerse in doing any task with full attention, as simple as cracking an anagram, your unhappiness feelings vanish. There is no way any one can disturb your state of immersion in an activity with unhappy thoughts.

Illusion of Knowledge

I have come across the main points mentioned in the chapter in several other books and blogs. I think the author deserves a praise for writing something we all know intuitively but we often forget. What is that we often forget ? We often forget that we don’t know a whole load of stuff. We don’t know many many aspects of the world around but we often assume that we know. Again this is related to the blind spots that are covered later in the chapter. But at a high level, the message from this chapter is that we must constantly remind ourselves of the ignorance which will then make us look at familiar situations with new eyes, new situations and events without the baggage from the past.

I think the one useful visual from this chapter is that of the arrogance cycle. By merely looking at the arrogance cycle and reminding ourselves of it on a regular basis will make us grounded.

Also if you look at yourself, most of us do not have the complete knowledge because we acquire knowledge through our senses(which have their own limitations) and we use words to describe our knowledge. The key to realize that life gives you a lot of nudges to highlight the knowledge gaps, highlight our tendency to over control things. One needs to pay attention to these nudges as they help us re-frame negative events as purposeful

Illusion of Time

One visual that stuck with me was the way we experience the number of years we have lived. If you take a random sample of people and ask their age in years and ask them whether they have truly felt like living those years, most likely they will say NO. We all feel that we have lived a specific time frame in our lives only if we are truly present. Time spent living in the past or future does not count as living. I can completely relate to this sense of time. Happiest moments where I have felt fully alive are the ones where I have lived in the present.

I liked the capsule experiment that is mentioned in this chapter.

Imagine being placed in a sealed capsule with no clocks, no windows, no external cues—no way to know if it’s been minutes, hours, or even days.

In such isolation, you’d quickly realize you can’t measure time without markers.

You might believe time is passing, but you have no reference to confirm it.

The capsule experiment shows that without external references, time loses its meaning. This supports Gawdat’s view that:

• Time is not objective or fixed.
• Our suffering often stems from living in past or future—both of which are mental illusions.
• Happiness lies in anchoring ourselves in the present moment, where the illusion collapses.

Illusion of Control

The author talks about our misconceptions with control. We think we have control on situations or we act as though we want to have full control on situations. Instead we end up realizing that we really don’t have control of situations and then we let unhappiness in to our lives.

The author says in many words that there are only two things that are in your control, your actions and your attitude. If you focus on these two things, you will get rid of your illusion of control.

Illusion of Fear

We all have some fear or the other. It is very unlikely that you are truly fearless. This fear is usually the result of some of the imagined circumstances and stems from the fact that we are not in a position to handle those imagined circumstances. These imagined circumstances can be job loss, loss of a child, loss of parent, divorce, loss of money. It can be anything

The author gives some hacks to face our fears with a few prompts that can aid one’s thinking

Seven Blindspots

Our brain has been equipped with seven incredible features that have helped us survive for thousands of years. However these features have turned in blindspots in our current modern world where we are all far more secured than our ancestors. These blindspots are

• Filters: We filter out a lot of stuff and most often we filter out the positives and focus on the negatives
• Assumptions: These bend our perceptions and reality way out of shape
• Predictions: We are predicting things more than necessary in our personal lives rather than being present in the moment and focusing on the actions that we can do in the current moment.
• Memories: Thoughts with a timestamp in the past robs us from being in the present which makes us go through life in a daze. Also memories are not the truth in any ways. Your brain tends to remember certain events pretty inaccurately
• Labels: By judging others, by judging situations, we are forcing ourselves not to look at the way things are. By labeling, we are choosing to cover up the truth
• Emotions: By letting our emotions be a part of decision will lead us to many issues. Also many of our emotions keep us in a state of unhappiness
• Exaggeration: We often exaggerate things when we should calmly accept the things as they are and act on them.

There is a massive tendency to be grumpy because of these blindspots. The author cites many interesting reasons behind our grumpiness:

• Ample research has shown that we tend to think negative—self-critical, pessimistic, and fearful—thoughts more often than positive thoughts.
• We also tend to give greater weight to negative thoughts when we make decisions. People are more likely to make choices based on the need to avoid a negative experience rather than the desire to attain positive outcomes
• We also dedicate more of our brain resources to negative information.
• We exhibit better incidental memory for the negative traits than they did for the positive ones, regardless of the ratio of negative to positive in the set.
• We also tend to underestimate how frequently we experience positives because we forget the positive emotional experiences more often than we do the negative one
• Socially, we tend to offer more respect to those who are negative than to positive folk.
• None of these negative biases is a coincidence. They’re clearly reflected in the design of the brain. For instance, the amygdala uses approximately two-thirds of its neurons to detect negative experiences, and once the brain starts looking for bad news, it stores it into the long-term memory immediately, while positive experiences have to be held in our awareness for more than twelve seconds in order for the transfer from short-term to long-term memory to occur.

Most of us tend to be negative most of the time.

The chapter walks through all the seven blindspots and urges the reader to ask one simple question repeatedly to get out of these blindspots

Is it True ?

Five Ultimate Truths

The last part of the book is about author sharing what he believes are five ultimate truths and these are something he invites the reader to consider in their lives. He says that each one of us an use these truths as cues to find out our own version of truths that enable us to be in a state of joy.

Quotes from the book

If we were to picture it, the times when you’re unhappy are like being buried under a pile of rocks made up of illusions, social pressures, and false beliefs. To reach happiness, you need to remove those rocks one by one, starting with some of your most fundamental beliefs.

The simplest way for an engineer to express this definition of happiness is in an equation—the Happiness Equation.

Happiness is greater than your perception of the events of your life - your expectations of how life should behave

Life doesn’t play tricks; it’s just hard sometimes. But even then we’re always given two choices: either do the best we can, take the pain, and drop the suffering, or suffer. Either way, life will still be hard.

• Allow your thoughts to be affected by illusions and you’ll be stuck in the state of confusion.

• Think negative thoughts and you’ll end up in the state of suffering (unhappiness).

• Suspend your thoughts by having fun and you’ll find yourself in the state of escape.

• Think positive thoughts and agree with the events of life and you’ll reach the state of happiness.

• Rise above the clutter of thought, grasp life for what it truly is, and you’ll perpetually live in a state of joy.

If there is one thing that will change your life forever, it is recognizing that the voice talking to you is not you!

Imagine what a waste it would be if you were given the fastest sports car in the world and the only part of it you used was its audio system. Or imagine if you took it off-road, where it got stuck because this is absolutely not where it’s built to go. Or, even worse, if you never received training as a racecar driver and drove like a maniac, so you hurt yourself and everyone around you.

We commit all three of these errors when using our brain. We use it for the wrong reasons; we don’t utilize the best of its abilities; and we allow it to spin out of control with our thoughts—letting it ruin our lives and those of others’. We can do better than this, but first we need to understand why we use our brains the way we do.

What follows are four techniques to achieve that. Each builds on the one before it, so master them in order. They’re simple but require discipline.

Observe the Dialogue

First, take your time to become very familiar with the beast you are taming. The best way to do that is to sit quietly and observe what is going on up there as often as you can. This technique is called “observing the dialogue.”

Observe the Drama

No one’s able to let go of every thought. Occasionally an idea will stick. You’ll recognize the signs: you’ll be fully absorbed in thought and less aware of the rest of the world around you. When you notice this happening, this is your chance to learn to observe the drama.

Start by acknowledging how you feel, the emotion triggered by the thought. Don’t resist it. Let it be. You may want to dig deeper, not in an attempt to solve the problem but to try to understand it better. Ask yourself why you became angry or agitated. Which thought led you here?

Bring Me a Better Thought

Once a negative thought takes hold, it can become hard to dispatch. An untamed brain needs a thought to cling to. And often enough, removing a thought leaves behind a vacuum that gets quickly filled by a thought from the same mood spectrum—another negative thought. This is why when you are in a dark place it can seem like the whole world is going to collapse. You tend to be consumed by one negative thought after another. If only you could manage to break the cycle! Filling that vacuum with a happy thought ensures that there is no room for another negative one to come in.

When you uncover these, first you’ll find out who you’re not. Then you’ll keep shedding layers until you reach the one that’s solid and real, the one that will withstand the tests of perception and permanence.

Your thoughts don’t survive the test of perception. If you are your thoughts—then how could you observe them?

Your body is the physical avatar that takes you through the physical world, a vehicle, a container. Nothing more. That vehicle, however, is not nothing. It’s important. If you were allowed to own only one vehicle your entire life, you obviously would take care of it, keep it healthy, in perfect working condition, and you’d make sure it didn’t break or cause you troubles on your long journey. You would keep it looking clean and shiny and be grateful for the years of service and lifelong relationship it offered you. Still, whatever you did with it and regardless of how often you were seen in it, you would never think of it as you.

Anything you ever observed isn’t you, and everything that has ever changed in your constant presence isn’t you either.

You are the one aware of all that is happening around you. I know it may sound disappointing, but you have never seen you. You are not to be seen.

Now take this concept to its extreme. Imagine that you lost 100 percent of your physical form and ask the interesting question: What happens to the real you when your whole body is lost? Does it stop existing? When your body dies and decays, where does the real “you” go?

In my personal belief, the answer is Nothing will happen to “you.” You will just stop connecting with your physical form. You will still be you, and you will say, “Wow. That was fun!”

In trying to establish who we are not, we uncovered a lot of masks that we wear to create an identity. Those masks represent the next layer of the Illusion of Self. They can all be summed up in one word that has tormented mankind since the day we became a society.

What would happen if we all took off the masks and did the best work we could without pretending to be something we are not? Would we close fewer deals or invent less? I don’t think so. The work we do, not the mask we wear, is what pushes us forward. In an egoless world where it doesn’t matter how we’re perceived, we would dedicate ourselves to doing our very best and aiming for the best results regardless of how others perceive us. While the ego of a professional is built on making the job look hard, often the best results are achieved by doing very little. The best managers, for example, hire talented people and manage sparingly. As the need to pretend is removed, the best professionals often turn out to be those who don’t play the role at all.

Arabic folk culture tells the story of an old teacher who’s visited by many of his students years after they left his class. They talk about how successful they’ve become in life and shower gratitude on their beloved teacher. Then they all start to talk of the pressures they’re facing, the stress they go through to keep up with expectations. Success is not making them happier.

The teacher gets up to prepare a large pot of coffee and comes back with a tray that contains a variety of cups. Some are made of crystal, some of silver, and some are cheap plastic cups. He asks the students to pour their own coffee. They all reach for the most beautiful and expensive cup available.

When they sit back down, the teacher acknowledges the most beautiful cups, but then points out that what they all really wanted was coffee. Regardless of the cup, the coffee was the same. If social status, fashion, image, possessions, and social acceptance are like the cup, he says, then life is the coffee. Why do we try so hard to drink from a fancy cup when all we want is good coffee? If you want to live a stress-free life, he says, ignore the cup and just:

Enjoy the coffee.

Many of us go down a sad path when we let our egos make us suffer. What happened to little Pooki, the only true identity you ever had? Calm, happy, totally in the moment, sitting naked in a diaper without a care in the world, no sense of self, uncluttered by the thoughts of “I.” No thoughts of how I look, what I represent, what people think of me, or even what I think of myself. Pooki was happy with whatever came, not possessive, ready to let go, and ready to move to the next toy without attachment.

Don’t you wish you could get that back?

Well, it never really left. You never left. The egoless child is still calmly sitting inside each of us. Buried in layers over layers of lies, egos, and personas. Happy nonetheless. Waiting to be found.

Let’s find your Pooki.

Trying constantly to get approval for your chosen image is a losing battle because the real you isn’t what the ego pretends to be. This makes us unhappy since we’re always searching for the next thing to make the image complete in the hope that people will believe that’s who we are. This will never work, for two reasons.

First, others will rarely ever approve of your ego because they are more concerned with their own ego than with yours. The survival of their ego depends on comparing it with yours. For them to be right, you should be seen as wrong; when you’re less, they become more. Disapproving of someone else is the easiest way to feel superior. It doesn’t require the hard work needed to become better. It just requires thinking less of someone else.

You’ll never please everyone. Find those who like the real you and invite them closer. All others don’t matter to you.

Ali’s wise mother often recited to him a line from Sting’s song “Englishman in New York”:

Be yourself no matter what they say.

More important, Love who you are. The real you is wonderful and calm, just like Pooki. The versions of you that you don’t like are actually those personas created by your ego. You are all you’ll ever need—and all you will ever have.

Good and bad are just labels we apply when our minds fail to grasp the comprehensive, never-ending movie spanning across the billions of lives and extending over all of time. If we could grasp the complexity of the web of perspectives that compose our experiences, we would realize that everything is just what it is, just another event in the endless flow of the big movie that features all of us.

Takeaway

Absolutely loved the ideas in the book. Most of these ideas are timeless and not new. But I am reasonably certain that the various thought experiments interspersed in the book will appeal to anyone. If not anything, the book will definitely make you pause, reflect and take action on whatever state of mind you are in. Definitely worth reading and re-reading.