Mo Gawdat was kind of a big deal, at IBM, Microsoft, and then Google. But he was unhappy, so he decided to take an engineering approach and try to systematically “solve for happy” and work out why adding more money, shiny objects, and adoration of others didn’t actually make him happy.
When I was walking in MemphisI was walking with my feet ten feet off of BealeWalking in MemphisBut do I really feel the way I feel?
— Walking in Memphis, Marc Cohn
Gawdat argues that much of the narrative we all experience in our heads is a biological function from long ago, designed to help us identify and avoid threats. In fact, he argues that it is now often counter productive. As a solution, he proposes four techniques to tame your inner monologue:
- Observe, but don’t participate in the dialog. That is, acknowledge thoughts that affect your happiness when they happen, but don’t participate in a dialog about the thought, just note it and move on.
- Sometimes a thought will “stick” and you’ll end up in a loop. In those cases, consider the cause of the drama — what is the underlying issue that is stopping you from moving on? What train of thought brought you to it now? That creates an opportunity to reframe the thought, perhaps not as a positive one but at least one you can acknowledge and move on from.
- Try to move on to thinking about something else. Gawdat describes a “priming technique” where you focus on something else for a few moments and it helps you break out of the cyclical thought. This is interesting to me, because I sometimes “get words stuck in my head” — the elogy for a friend; an important work email; and so forth. I find that writing those words down helps in those cases because I think they get stuck because I am worried I will forget them. The thought loop feels a bit like that too, the brain’s way of ensuring that we don’t forget something which seems very important.
- Calm your thoughts in general, that is, meditate. He has an interesting suggestion here — just stop and observe the world around you. What is notable and interesting at the moment? What is unusual?
Gawdat also makes the point that there is more to you than just your thoughts. He works through a series of questions around what defines you as a person, applying two tests — if you can observe a thing, then that thing is not you; and if a thing can change and leave you unchanged, then that thing is not you. He reaches an interesting conclusion there but I wont ruin it for you.
This however is one of the areas where Gawdat makes readers uncomfortable according to many of the reviews of this book that I have read. This is because he deviates from a relatively concrete and well referenced discussion of how to self manage your thought processes, into a discussion of whether or not an afterlife exists. He returns to this theme later in the book as well.
Gawdat then moves on to asking you to assess what is actually important to you. What are you doing because of how other people see you (or how you want other people to see you) versus things that actually make you happy. He also reminds us that while we might feel like the main character in the movies of our lives, we are only supporting actors in everyone else’s life movie.
To be honest, this is about the point where Gawdat loses me a bit — he enters into a discussion of the meaning of time. The point he’s trying to make is that time is arbitrary and we should choose to be more patient and to live in the moment, but its a meandering path to get there. This point is then reinforced by discussing how we don’t control the things around us — the only things in our control are our own actions and attitude, so if we let things ruin our day then we’ve let go of the one thing we control. Carpe Diem I suppose?
Gawdat also asserts that our memories of prior events taint our interpretation of current and future events, which seems fair to me, but that these memories are also summaries not completely accurate records and that the brain is more likely to record negative memories than positive ones. He also asserts that we have a tendency to exaggerate risks when considering options. While this might be true for some people, I have definitely met people who seem incapable of estimating risks at all so its certainly not true for everyone. Either way, he encourages the reader to try to be rational about the actual risks presented by your inner monolog.
We are encouraged to focus on those less fortunate that you when you’re unhappy, which seems like reasonable if sometimes unsafe advice. If you’re being abused, don’t look for reasons to be happy compared to others! So only consider this advice if your basic life needs — food, shelter, safety, et cetera are being met.
This book is largely an exploration of the process Gawdat went through when processing the unexpected loss of his son during routine surgery, which is a recurrent theme in the book. While that is sometimes a helpful checkpoint, it also causes Gawdat to veer off into a discussion of the metaphysical for the last couple of chapers of the book. This is a frequent source of complaints in other online reviews of the book, but I’d say just skip those chapters if they bother you.
Overall I’d say this book was ok, but not great. It makes some interesting points about how much we should trust our inner monologue to be right, but I feel it could have made those points in a much more terse manner without losing anything. While helpful, the book lacks sufficient supporting research for the field it plays in I suspect.
January 10, 2019
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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.