The Happiness Formula: Retrain Your Brain to Be Happy with Mo Gawdat

This episode is about understanding happiness through an engineering perspective, presented by Mo Gawdat, who uses his personal experiences and scientific approach to explain how to achieve and maintain happiness.

1. Happiness can be systematically understood and enhanced using an engineering approach to emotional management.
2. Personal tragedy, such as the loss of Gawdat's son, can lead to profound insights and methodologies for achieving happiness.
3. Managing expectations and reactions to life's events is crucial for maintaining emotional balance.
4. Happiness is described not just by the presence of positive events, but by the absence of negative reactions to neutral or negative events.
5. Systematic problem-solving and mindfulness can significantly improve one's emotional state and resilience.

1: Introduction

Mo Gawdat is introduced, sharing his background and the tragic story of his son's death, which profoundly shaped his understanding of happiness. Mo Gawdat: "Despite everything, I learned to find happiness through the systematic approach of an engineer."

2: The Happiness Equation

Gawdat explains his "happiness equation" and discusses how expectations affect our emotional state. Mo Gawdat: "Life is not about what happens to us, but about our reactions to what happens."

3: Practical Applications

Techniques and strategies for applying the happiness equation in daily life are discussed, with a focus on managing expectations and emotional reactions. Mo Gawdat: "We can train our brain to respond differently to the challenges life throws at us."

4: Overcoming Personal Tragedy

Gawdat discusses how personal loss led him to a deeper understanding of happiness and the development of strategies to help others. Mo Gawdat: "The pain of losing my son taught me the deepest lessons about happiness."

5: Q&A with Listeners

Listeners ask questions about implementing happiness strategies in various aspects of their lives, and Gawdat provides detailed answers. Mo Gawdat: "Each question from listeners provides a chance to deepen our understanding of practical happiness."

1. Recognize and Reset Expectations: Regularly assess and adjust your expectations to avoid disappointments.
2. Develop Mindfulness Practices: Implement daily mindfulness exercises to enhance focus and reduce negative emotional reactions.
3. Embrace Problem Solving: Approach emotional challenges with a problem-solving mindset, looking for actionable solutions.
4. Learn from Setbacks: Use setbacks as learning opportunities to strengthen your emotional resilience.
5. Spread Positivity: Share your learnings and positive experiences with others to enhance your own and others' happiness.

Is happiness a choice? And if so, can it be engineered? Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer of Google X and founder of One Billion Happy, believes this is true. In fact, he's used his three decades of success in the tech industry to engineer his very own "happiness algorithm" to help all of us achieve this mind frame.
Gawdat began his mission to conquer happiness after experiencing the ultimate tragedy. In 2014, Mo suddenly lost his beloved son, Ali, which thrust him into depression and an existential reckoning with life's fragility. Rather than succumbing to this ultimate despair, Gawdat turned his grief into a catalyst for transformation. He soon embarked on a profound journey of self-discovery and healing, driven by a newfound mission to spread happiness and well-being to the world.

Drawing from his personal experience and extensive research, Mo has authored the international bestseller "Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy” and continues to champion his message of happiness to millions worldwide. Via his writing, speaking engagements, and podcast, Gawdat offers practical tools and strategies for finding joy in the face of adversity.

Mo's commitment to spreading happiness has touched millions of lives. He continues to inspire people from all walks of life to embrace happiness as a fundamental choice, as well as empower them to engineer their own paths to fulfillment.

People

Mo Gawdat, Tony Robbins, Sage Robbins

Books

Unstressable by Mo Gawdat

Content Warnings:

None

Mo Gawdat

If something is wrong, it's okay to feel the pain. It's okay to feel alerted. What's not okay is the suffering. What's not okay is telling yourself the next morning to replay the pain. What's not okay is to add to the pain.

Sage Robbins

Hello, everyone, it's Sage. Welcome to the Tony Robbins podcast. Tony and I had the privilege to sit with a beautiful friend and brother. His name is Mo Gawdat, at a platinum partnership program that we did in Mexico. Gosh, the brilliance of this man's mind.

He's an engineer. He's got the most beautiful heart. He's used his life experiences, loss of his son, to create an algorithm for happiness and just practical, pragmatic ways to apply inquiries. He also came up with a new book called unstressable. It's one of my favorite episodes.

Please tune in and join us for a moment. Very quick introduction. I'm the luckiest man you will ever meet. Despite the harshness of my life. I'm so lucky.

Mo Gawdat

I was born and raised in Egypt. Public school, public university in Egypt, which basically means I'm almost uneducated. And I went so far in life, it really was unbelievable. It's just so strange that I could live a life that took me this far. And when I started my life, I lived literally two full lives so far.

One of them was the life that you saw with the big logos of Google and what have you, which there was a very defining moment. I graduated from university as an engineer. I'm a very serious math geek. I promise you, I speak mathematics and numbers better than I speak English by a very large distance. And I had to learn to sort of translate my view of life, which is highly algorithmic into words so that people can benefit from it.

In Egypt, where I was born and raised, this is really frowned upon. If you don't talk about football and all of the stuff that my other fellow friends were talking about, you're not in a good place to grow up being a geek at all. Okay? And so I struggled with that in my early life. But then somehow, as I finished my university, I was at a stage in life where I decided, you know what?

I'm just going to live whatever I like. And I was a very serious carpenter. So I started a workshop. I didn't care. Never really cared about money, to be honest, which is probably one of the reasons why it chases me in an interesting way.

I'm in that carpentry workshop, and I'm totally in love with the woman of my life. Now, my ex wife, but was still really one of the dearest people to me in the world. Stayed together for 27 years, but she was like, look, if we're going to get married, you're going to have to show up with something more than a carpenter to my dad. So do something through sheer luck. I worked at IBM, then I worked at Microsoft, then I worked at Google at the time where those companies were completely changing the world.

Qualifications, I promise you. No. Right? But somehow there must have been 50,000 people around the world that could do this job better than me. At the height of my career, I became chief business officer of Google X.

So it wasn't just Google, it wasn't just x, which is like the best part of Google. It was chief business officer of a place that was promising to change the world. Enormous, enormous privilege. That journey, on the other hand, was parallel to a very different journey.

I was the happiest moment you will have ever seen until age 25. Age 25. I married my college sweetheart, who I loved dearly, who is a gorgeous and wonderful and spiritual and smart woman, and she gives me this wonderful little child, Ali. And Ali, like any good father would do, I went to the operating the delivery room, and the minute this little crumbly thing shows up, they're really not pretty when they're born. Just let's be very clear about that.

At least fathers don't see that, even if they tell you that they are okay? And I look at that thing, and I promise you, my entire life flipped upside down. I was like, that's it. This thing is never going to need anything ever again. Okay?

And so I put my head down, used my mathematics, and from age 25, where all I had was my carpentry shop, just started working at IBM, I think I was paid $29 a month. Okay. Age 29, I promise you, I was printing money on demand. Like, literally, my lovely, wonderful wife then would tell me, we need to change the car. And I would say, so what would you like, honey?

And she would say, a Range Rover. And I'll say, that's going to have to be Wednesday, right? Because between Monday. I can't do it on Monday, right? And I somehow understood mathematics to the point where I could literally print money on demand in a market before automatic trading and all of the stuff that, you know, today.

And I was miserable. I had the most gorgeous woman in my life, two wonderful kids, a massive place to live, all of the cars that I was crazy about, fancy suits, everything you can think of, and I was clinically depressed. And the more life gave me, the more unhappy I became. Sounds familiar. You must know someone like that who's so blessed in life and totally miserable.

Until a defining moment where my wonderful little daughter. So I'm unhappy, I'm grumpy all the time. It doesn't feel great. But you know what? Middle eastern men, we don't cry.

So who cares? Who cares about happiness? Let's just go with it, right? My daughter walks in on a Saturday. I am looking at something, crunching numbers or looking at an email, and she's literally jumping up and down.

So Ali, my son, was born a tiny little Zen monk, okay? Constantly at peace. Aya, my daughter, was born as life itself. Enormous amounts of fun and energy and playfulness. Two beautiful gifts.

Aya's jumping up and down, saying, papa, we're going to do this and we're going to play that, and can we stop and get that ICE cream on the way? And I quote, I looked at her, so grumpy, and I said, can we please be serious for a minute? Okay? She was five, right? Where did that come from?

And I could see with my own eyes as my daughter's heart broke, okay? She literally wept, crying, ran out of the room. And for the first time, I suddenly realized, I don't like this person anymore. I made a vow that I will not be that person. Vows are not good enough.

I really struggled. So I remember vividly, I walked out of that place and did the only thing I know how to do. I read every book I watched, every documentary I went to, every event I could get access to, and I understood absolutely nothing. I couldn't get it. What are they talking about?

Why are they saying meditate? If someone said, say om, I would go mad. Like what? Om. Don't say om.

Right? I don't want that stuff. And it was crazy because it wasn't that what they were saying was wrong or difficult. It was actually very straightforward. And you put your mind to it.

It was that what they were telling me did not match my way of looking at things. And my way of looking at things was the way of an engineer. I'll come back to that in a minute, but let me just take you through the rest of the story. Somehow I found an engineering approach to happiness. You may have seen the equation in the video, and it really worked.

It was incredibly effective. Not because it's something genius, but because our world has moved from the heart to the head, okay? So when you start to talk to people through the head, somehow they get it. Even though when you just feel it, it's also the same, but it took me a very long time to get there. Twelve years later, I was the happiest person you'll ever meet.

At the time, it was post 911. And I'm a middle eastern. My actual name is Muhammad Ali. Like every second terrorist on the planet is Muhammad Ali, right? And I remember vividly at the time I worked at Microsoft.

And I had to travel from Dubai to Seattle every single month. I did that 37 times in a row. Every single time I would land in JFK and they would give me a big red envelope and a big guy with a big gun would come to me and say, sir, do not move. And they would walk me to the homeland security room as a criminal as I walk in. Because I worked at Microsoft at the time, the people behind the counter would look at me and say, oh, Mr.

Gates is back. Okay, come to the counter, answer the same ten questions you were asked last time. After lots of humiliation, an hour and a half of suffering, and so on and so forth, with a massive smile on my face, nothing could dent my happiness. It worked. The model worked.

Until 2014. I'm now chief business officer of Google X, right? It seems that life cannot be any better than this. I decided to take a vacation in July. I never ever did that in my life.

My daughter was coming to visit us from Canada. She studied in Montreal and Concordia. And then my son somehow, who was a very artistic, excellent bass guitar player, they had a tour. They were opening for a band here in the US. And he said, and I quote, he called us and said, I feel compelled to come and see you in the next couple of weeks.

When Ali said something, we knew he was serious. So we said, sure, habibi. We'd love to have you. Aya's here. It would be wonderful.

He arrives four days later. He has a belly pain. He goes to a hospital. They diagnose him with an inflamed appendix, which is really the simplest surgical procedure known to humanity. And somehow the surgeon does five mistakes in a row.

Every single one of them is preventable. Every single one of them is fixable. But when you do five and you fix them wrong. 4 hours later, Ali was gone. And I must have spoken about this probably thousands of times.

And it hurts. It's the most painful thing, I believe, that a human could ever feel. Losing a child is very unlike our nature as humans. And yet somehow, four days after Ali died, I decided I needed to do something. Okay.

My daughter walked in and she said, papa, Ali had a dream. And his dream, he only told her his dream and his dream was that he was going to be everywhere and part of everyone. And later I understood, by the way, that in some spiritual teachings, everywhere and part of everyone is the definition of death. But she said, he said that I felt so good that I didn't want to go back to my body. Now, remember, at the time, I'm chief business officer of Google X.

Before that, I was vice president of Google. I opened half of Google's offices globally and reached 4 billion people with the Internet. And so I heard this. She said, everywhere and part of everyone. In my blurry mind of the pain of a father losing his child, I heard it as if Ali was saying, here is your quota.

Here is your target. Okay. I promise you, Aya will tell me. You answered the weirdest answer. So I was standing in front of her.

I found myself falling on the living room couch sofa and basically saying, of course, habibi, consider it done. Okay. And in my brain, I was like, yeah, I know how to reach billions of people. I've done that before. I'm just going to have to take whatever he taught me about happiness and put it in a book.

And at the time, we had a very simple mission. 10 million happy. I said, through six degrees of separation in 70 years, if I reach 10 million in 70 years, a part of his essence will be everywhere and part of everyone. I'll come back to that at the end. But the idea here is what Tony mentioned a few times.

The idea of, if you have seen Ali once, I promise you, he was tall, handsome, so wise, so kind, so loving. At the peak of his, you know, if you hugged him, he had that amazing energy to, you know, if I had decided to spend the rest of my life crying, I don't think you would have blamed me. Honestly, nobody would have blamed me for that. But somehow in that situation, I actually found a way to make me happier by making others happy. And hopefully, if you believe, if you understand death the way I understand death, make him happy.

Okay, so let's go back to that happiness thing, because we spoke about this quite a lot. And as I said, I will probably not tell you anything new, but I'll try to organize it to you in a very, very logical way of the modern world. Any questions, by the way, midway, just jump in and we'll have a conversation. Okay. This happiness thing, as Tony and Sage actually said, everyone has a different definition for happiness.

I don't. I'm a freaking engineer. I don't take it that way. To me, if you give me a problem to solve. I need to know what the problem definition is.

Every engineer you'll ever meet will tell you, I can't solve it until you give me a problem definition. And so I'm struggling there, causing pain for my family, and very grumpy, very unhappy, and I need to solve that thing. And I then found myself asking, but I don't know what happiness is. I don't understand it. And I got stuck, really, for four years trying to understand what is it that I'm searching for.

Until one day I was in a cafe in Seattle. I remember the time, it was 04:00 p.m. I was in a cafe in Seattle, and I was playing music on the ten megabyte iPod. Do you remember those? We were so happy with them.

Like, they were amazing, right? And a band called Super Tramp. Anyone knows super Tramp? Oh, there you go. That's a good crowd.

What's wrong with the others? Hold on. So anyway, super Tramp is an old british band that played a song called the logical song. Okay? And the logical song starts with.

For those who remember it, when I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful. All the birds on the trees were singing so happily, right? Again, sage and Tony spoke about this, how a little child is always happy. I mean, of course, sometimes they fuss and cry, but that's because there is a reason to be unhappy. Do you understand that?

The idea is, if you give a child love, safety, care, feed them, make them warm, give them their basic needs for survival. What is their state? They're lying on their back, playing with their toes and giggling, right? If I give you your basic needs for survival, would you lie on your back and play with your toes and giggle? Probably not, right?

And I think that's the whole point. The whole point is, suddenly, when I heard that song, I started to ask myself, sorry, I started to ask myself, that's actually true. That's the story of my life. When I was young, everything was easy, everything was fun, everything was playful. Happiness did not seem to be a difficult thing to reach at all.

It was accessible all the time. And then the song continues to say, and then they sent me away to teach me how to be cynical, logical, responsible, practical, clinical, and so on and so forth. And that too is the story of your life, right? They send you to school, or you have a couple of demanding parents, or whatever that is, and your situation suddenly goes from, I'm happy all the time. All I need is to be given my basic needs for survival.

Two. No, hold on. I'm unhappy all the time. Everything seems to be wrong. Right?

Think about it. That whole idea, that difference, are two very important assumptions. Two very, very important things that they never talk to us when they talk about happiness. One of them is we're born happy. There's nothing to look for.

There's nowhere to go. There's nothing to seek, okay? It's actually already within us. And that completely flipped my mind because remember, at the time, I was printing money on demand, grumpy, like f, and literally bombarding myself with things. Like, every time I felt unhappy, I bought something or I went on a vacation, or I dressed in a more expensive way or whatever, right?

In my first book, if you read it, I mentioned a time where I was literally so empty that I was on eBay looking at two classic Rolls Royces. Didn't know which one of them is going to make me happier, so I literally clicked twice, bought two Rolls Royces. Tick, tick. Okay? Not even bidding.

It's like, what's your price? Tick, tick. Okay. They arrived two months later in Dubai. I promise you, I was happy for seven minutes.

I looked at them. I was like, oh, wow, that's amazing. What is this little scratch? Why is this? I should have bought a different color, but this one is.

No, whatever. Right? Seven minutes. And when you start to think about this, I was bombarding myself with what the world was telling me is going to make me happy. Sage spoke about this many times.

The idea of external things. We need external things to be in certain scenarios or setups to be happy, but they never work. They never work. Okay. When in reality, I was happy as a child.

I was happy until the moment, very openly, that Ali was born. Until that delivery room, when I decided, you know what? I'm going to tackle life head on. And as I started to tackle life head on, nothing made sense anymore. Everything I looked at was not as good as I wanted it to be.

The Rollsroyce Cornesh with beautiful silver and blue and what have you. Yeah. A tiny bit of the leather was not what I liked. Right. And then you look at that and you see that and you forget the whole thing.

You forget that you're healthy enough to actually look for a car, that you are wealthy enough to find the car, that you actually did get the car, and that the car has so many things that you love about it. You just remember the one thing that you hate right now. Let's go back to the assumptions. I am born happy as a child. I don't ask for Instagram likes.

I don't ask for xboxes. I don't ask for cars. I don't want anyone to like my crumbly little bum. Nobody cares, right? Children are happy, right?

Then the interesting second assumption, which truly blew me away was. The second one was the idea that happiness is the absence of unhappiness. So you look at a child, the child is unhappy. When there is a reason to be unhappy, a diaper gets wet, the child will cry. You change the diaper, the child goes back to happiness.

Tony Robbins

Okay? I promise you. This is the case for you, too. If you wake up tomorrow at 07:00 a.m. You're feeling nice and healthy, you're sitting on the beach.

Mo Gawdat

Your partner didn't say anything stupid so far. Life is no reason to be unhappy. Your state is happy. You're okay, right? If there is no reason for unhappiness, we feel happy.

Now, here's the challenge. There are so many things that piss us off in life, okay? It's like literally buying a new phone. You know that experience? You buy a new phone, the default state of the phone is happy, it's working really well, and then you start to install weird apps on it, all of that weird stuff that you install, right?

And then the phone doesn't work anymore. This is what we're doing to ourselves now. Any human being that gets to that conclusion, happiness is the absence of unhappiness, would simply do a list. But not engineers. Like, okay, I'm unhappy about this.

I'm going to change it. Unhappy about that? Going to change it. Not software engineers. At the time, crazy as it sounds, what I did is I decided, you know what?

There must be an algorithm, there must be a way where I can actually program that into my computer so that it spits out all of the possible situations that I will ever feel unhappy in the future, and then I can scratch them out once and for all, and we're done with that code. Okay, crazy. Yes. But it worked. And this actually really flipped my life.

When I was looking for the happiness algorithm, I was basically saying, what is common? You know how sometimes scientists will draw random points of an experiment on a chart, and they're trying to find a fitting line between them? If you find that fitting line, the equation that describes this line is how that machine behaves. Okay? So I simply did that.

I took all of the moments in my life that I felt happy, and I started to plot them against charts of my age, my weight, the amount of hair on my head, whatever my love life, trying to find a trend line couldn't find any until I found a very interesting one, which I believe is my definition of happiness. Okay. You may have another one, but I can promise you, if we agree this definition, I can deliver it for you. And my definition of happiness is very, very interesting. Do you remember when COVID happened?

And for some of us, it was a disaster. For the others, it was a celebration. Okay? Do you remember when COVID happened and they locked us down? For some of us, it was a disaster one day and a celebration the next, and then a disaster again.

It seems that no event ever has the consistency, the inherent happiness value in it. No, Rain doesn't always make you happy or unhappy. Do you understand that? Right? Rain makes you very happy.

If it rains on your ex boyfriend's wedding, it's amazing, right? We love it, right? If it rains when we're going to be outside on the pool tomorrow, it's going to make you very unhappy. Do you understand? Rain has no inherent happiness value in it.

Now, what makes us sometimes happy in rain or why are we always happy in nature is really the equation. Your happiness is not a result of the events of your life. As a matter of fact, the events of your life are almost irrelevant, okay? Your happiness is a result of a comparison that happens in your brain. Remember, it is in your brain.

It's not out there in the real world between what the event is and what you want the event to be. If it's your ex boyfriend's wedding, you want rain. And so when it rains, you're happy. Do you understand that? Why are we always happy in nature?

Actually, I woke up at 04:00 a.m.. Today. So anything I say now, by the way, shouldn't be taken against me. But I woke up at 04:00 a.m.. Today.

I sat on the beach and I was in such a calm state and I don't know why the waves were so loud, but I didn't complain about that. I didn't say, can I please keep the view and mute the sound? Nobody does that in nature, right? You go out in nature and nothing is really properly hedged. No tree is really properly vertical.

Tony Robbins

Okay? When you're out in nature, you don't expect nature to be that. You want nature to be chaotic. And so you look at a tree that is crooked and you go, oh my God, that's so beautiful. You're not a german engineer.

Mo Gawdat

You don't want this tree to be vertical, right? The idea of nature is it's always going to meet the happiness equation. Event. The event chaotic nature of nature always meets your expectation of. Chaotic nature of nature.

It's very simple. Everything in your life that you ever felt unhappy about, like Tony was saying, is an event that missed your expectation, okay? Now I'm going to say something that might make a few of us upset. So if you're upset, please raise your hand and let's discuss it. If it is happening as a comparison between your perception of the event and your hopes and wishes and expectations of how life should be, then happiness is 100% a choice.

Tony Robbins

Okay? It's 100% a choice because your perception of the event is informed by you. By the way, your brain, I'm sorry to say this, has never, ever once in your life ever told you the truth, ever. Take that from me as a brainiac, okay? Your brain tells you what it thinks is the truth.

Mo Gawdat

So we can go through an economic crisis in the next few years, and some of us will have their brains tell them, I'm going to be homeless. Okay? I'm going to be homeless is not the truth. All future looking statements are not the truth, okay? The only truth is it is difficult right now.

That's a truth, right? But if your brain doesn't tell you the truth, that event actually is your choice to see it in different ways. If your brain doesn't always set realistic expectations, then it's your choice to set realistic expectations. And if you do that right, I'll tell you something amazing. Are you okay with that?

Happiness is a choice. Life can take away your son and you can make a choice. Most people will tell you, when you lose a child, you have one choice, which is to grieve for the rest of your life. Okay? No, I had two.

I had one of them where I felt a lot of pain and I could grieve for the rest of my life, and the other where I felt a lot of pain and I could do something about it. I could do something to make my life better, okay? It doesn't bring him back. I'll come back to that at the end. Doesn't bring him back, but it's a choice.

Do we understand that? So the happiness equation is events minus expectations. Every moment in your life where you felt unhappy was a comparison in your head. Event minus expectations. If life meets or beats expectations, you're happy.

If life misses your expectations, you're unhappy. So let's have a few definitions. I told you I have a definition of happiness, okay? In that equation, the definition of happiness is very straightforward. It's a moment where you feel that life has met or beat your expectations, which means it's a moment where you are calm and peaceful and contented and okay with life as it is.

Doesn't mean life is amazing. It just means I'm okay with life as it is. Okay. If I'm okay with life as it is. I get that calm and peace in me that makes me want to spend the rest of my life in that moment, because I'm okay with it.

Tony Robbins

Okay. Physiologically, when you are in that state, you're getting a flood of serotonin in your body. Serotonin is a calmer. It's a calming hormone that basically is indicating to your body. I scanned the world around me.

Mo Gawdat

There doesn't seem to be any tigers. You can rest. You can digest your food. You can have a snack. You can close your eyes and reflect and sleep and replenish your muscles and so on.

Believe it or not, that state, which is rarely spoken about, is more important for your survival than the adrenaline rush of fight, flight, or freeze. Fight, flight, or freeze is the exceptional case that we need to run away from danger if there is a genuine danger. Okay. When you're in that state, you're literally depriving your liver, your kidneys, your digestive system, most of your vital organs are not being fed, okay? And serotonin is that hormone that comes in and says, hey, everything's okay.

Chill. Okay? Sit back, relax. Let's take care of our body. So that's happiness, calm and peaceful contentment.

When we're okay with life as it is, happiness in the modern world is badly mixed up with another state that is also very positive. Fun, elation, excitement, all positive emotions. Optimism, all positive emotions. Okay? But those emotions are not happiness.

And there is a very vital difference, okay? Those emotions. Let me give you an example. You have a tough week at work. It's very, very difficult.

So you go on Friday night to a few friends places, or you go to a party, a couple of drinks, loud music, you dance, right? What do you feel? You think you feel happy, but what you actually feel could be elated, could be joyful, could be other positive emotions. Now, those positive emotions, they sort of numb your brain long enough so that you don't actually analyze the situation that is annoying you. You're not solving your happiness equation.

So your default state as a child with nothing nagging in your head is happy. If your brain doesn't tell you, remember, we're born happy. As a default, we need a reason in our head to find unhappiness. Okay? So if your brain is not telling you that something is wrong.

You're happy, you think you're happy. The problem with this, by the way, nothing wrong with fun. So fun, pleasure, joy, all of those things, nothing wrong with them. I have more fun than all of you combined, okay? But here's the interesting thing.

When you're having a fun, joyful experience, a playful experience, what you get in your body is dopamine. And dopamine is normally mixed up on the Internet as another happiness hormone. Dopamine is a reward hormone, okay? It's basically telling your body, I like this so much, do more of it. When we're making love, we feel an amazing pleasure because that's very important for the species, right?

So your dopamine is basically saying, do more of this. I want more of this. When you win a deal, it's good for your business, good for your family. Your body tells you, your dopamine tells you, I want more of this. Now here's the problem with dopamine.

Dopamine is highly, highly, highly addictive, okay? So what happens is the more dopamine you have in your system, the more your brain receptors that detect dopamine down regulate. So if you have one unit of dopamine in your blood to feel the rush again and you get another one unit, your receptors don't feel it. You need 1.2 units. And then now it's 1.2.

Then you need 1.4 and 1.6. And so this is why you find that people who are addicted to fun, when they're unable to find their happiness in calm and peace and contentment, they go from a party to a wilder party, to a wilder party. They go from the gym to jumping out of aeroplanes to do whatever crazy stuff that we do. Why? Because you need enough dopamine to numb the brain.

So you stop thinking about your problems. Now, as I said, there is nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with that positivity if you found your happiness. First, let me try to make this very clear. If you're having fun to escape your unhAppiness, you're basically taking a painkiller. You're popping in a couple of panadol or advils or whatever, you have a headache.

You're not treating the reason for the headache, you're just taking a painkiller. The fun numbs your unhappiness for a while and then you go back 4 hours later and you need to pop in two more pills and two more. And then you go from normal strength to maximum strength and so on. Okay? So that's the addictive nature of dopamine, by the way.

One of the main reasons why people, when we were locked down, were so depressed in the first lockdown is that people depended so much on that external stimulation to find their happiness that when you deprived them of it, they could not produce serotonin that quickly. The right way to use dopamine is to find happiness already, to be calm and peaceful and contented, and then add fun in your life as a supplement. Okay? I'm already healthy, and I'm going to enjoy life on top of my state of happiness so that I can have that joy that makes life even better. So the game is very straightforward.

If you're escaping your unhappiness, don't revert to fun. If you're already calm and peaceful and contented, flood yourself with fun and joy and pleasure. Right? Now, these are two interesting definitions. The third definition is the definition that matters most.

And the most important definition. We said happiness is the absence of unhappiness. So what is unhappiness? Unhappiness in the happiness equation, events minus expectations means a moment in your life where an event missed your expectation. You know what that means?

It means that unhappiness is a survival mechanism. Okay? It's your brain telling you, I scanned the world around me, and there is something that doesn't seem right, okay? And because it doesn't seem right, and your brain is just chattering away all day and you never really listen, it needs to alert you in the form of an emotion, okay? Now, if it's a survival mechanism, then, quite interestingly, we should probably react to it as we react to other survival mechanisms.

Think about it. Cutting your finger. The pain is a survival mechanism. You wouldn't actually want to get rid of the pain even if you could, because that pain is what makes you pull your hand away and save your hand. Okay?

But here's an interesting thing. That pain of cutting your finger can only be felt in the state where your hand is at risk. You can never go back. If you want to try to do it now and close your eyes and say, I want to feel how it felt when I cut my finger two weeks ago. Can't do that.

You can't regenerate it on demand. Emotional pain, however you can. Your boyfriend says something annoying on Friday. What do you do on Saturday? You wake up and say, that clip from 04:00 p.m..

Yesterday. Play that again and torture me, right? It's like the Netflix of unhappiness. Unhappiness on demand. Like, I love that horror movie so much.

The event is over, okay? The words were harsh. They hurt you, but it's done. But you have the ability to play it over and over again. You also have the creativity to make it not really the truth.

So your boyfriend or the girlfriend said, hey, baby, can you leave me alone right now? That's the fact, okay? On Saturday it's not he said or she said, baby, can you leave me alone right now? It is, he or she doesn't love me anymore, okay? On Monday it is, because I'm not lovable.

On Wednesday it is, I'm going to spend the rest of my life alone. Right? We have that creativity through the Netflix of unhappiness to add our own scenarios of creativity to torture ourselves, which is quite interesting. Now, if, as I said, unhappiness is a survival mechanism, let's compare it to other survival mechanisms. The one that I like to compare it to most is a fire alarm.

If the fire alarm goes off in this place, what will we do? Anyone here will choose to sit and listen to it. No, right? Most of us will just walk out away from the noise. We will do something about it.

We will verify if there is a fire, and then we'll take action. That's not what we do with happiness, okay? That's not what we do with unhappiness. When we feel unhappy, we not only sit in the fire alarm, as a matter of fact, when the fire alarm switches off, we put a lighter next to it and light it again. Interesting, right?

Which actually means, and I'll finish with two techniques. And then we open for questions, which actually means there is a way to come out of unhappiness. Now, Tony asked the question, who here is happy all the time? I have a very, very successful podcast in the well being space, and I host tons of world renowned monks and practitioners and so on. One of them was Matthew Ricard.

Matthew was known in the media for a long time as the world's happiest man. He had 60,000 hours of lifetime meditation that reconfigured his brain in a way that basically allows him to always be happier than the rest of us. And I asked him, Matthew is a good friend. And I said, matthew, so they say you're the world's happiest man. Does that mean you're happy all the time?

And he laughed, like really out loud in his very french accent and said, me? What are you talking about? I'm always pissed off, okay? And that's the truth. The truth is, we are always pissed off.

Don't deny that, because it's a survival mechanism. If something is wrong, it's okay to feel the pain. It's okay to feel alerted. What's not okay is the suffering. What's not okay is telling yourself the next morning to replay the pain.

What's not okay is to add to the pain. So, happiness practitioners literally measure not if they're happy all the time, but how quickly, and I probably think this is what you meant, how quickly can you overcome that initial jolt of unhappiness? Okay, now I'm dedicating the rest of my life to making a billion people happy. So to do that, I need to be the olympic champion of the sport. But I am also an engineer.

So annoying like hell. So I measure. I actually measure how long it takes me to bounce back from unhappiness to happiness. And by the way, I feel unhappy hundreds of times a day. Okay.

I get stuck in traffic. There is a jolt of unhappiness. I get a little worried about me speaking to you when I'm jet lagged. A jolt of unhappiness. Right between that jolt and the time I get back to happiness.

I promise you, I'm not bragging. You can do it, too. Is 7 seconds. That's my average time from unhappy to happy, other than four or five times a year. Sometimes it gets to a day or an hour or whatever.

Tony Robbins

Okay. 7 seconds. Because I follow a flow chart. Engineers, right? So I follow a flow chart.

Mo Gawdat

I don't even think right when something happens in my heart and I feel unhappy, by the way, the first thing is acknowledge it. The first thing is, what is that feeling? That's not calm and peaceful contentment. Something is not right. Okay.

And if you don't acknowledge that, you're never going to do anything about it. So the first thing you do is acknowledge it. Okay. And then tell yourself, what's the trigger? What is triggering my unhappiness?

And what's triggering your unhappiness, by the way, is not an event. If you're unhappy about the current situation in the world, it's not the current situation because you're safe. You're okay. You're absolutely fine. Nothing is wrong with your life today as it is today.

Even with the Ukraine war, nothing is wrong with the food that you ate today as compared to yesterday with the economic crisis. You're still driving your same car. Nothing has changed. Right? Your now is absolutely perfect.

But when we are unhappy, what triggers our unhappiness is a thought, and the thought is not the event. It's a description of the event offered by your brain as modified by your conditioning and traumas and assumptions, and what your neighbor is telling you, and what the news media is telling you and so on. So if the thought is, we're going through tough times, we're going through winter, like Tony said, okay, it's a great thought. It's a great thought. If the thought is I'm going to be homeless, that's a worthless thought.

So the first step of the flowchart is I ask myself a question, which is, is this true? Is this true? Okay. I love my daughter to bits. I think you know that by now.

One day we had an argument. So I said, baby, I'm going to go out to a coffee shop, have a coffee, come down, and we come and talk about it again. The minute I walk out of her apartment, she had called me in in the morning, made me breakfast, hugged me when I came in. The minute I walk out, my brain says, aya doesn't love you anymore. It was in Montreal, I promise you.

I stopped in the middle of the street and I said, what the fuck did you just say? Okay, in Montreal, it's okay. We're Ali like that, right? But seriously, what the fuck did you just say? How can you give yourself the privilege to destroy my life by telling me that my daughter doesn't love me?

Where did you get that from? Do you have evidence of this? Okay, is that true? Number one, if it is true. Sorry, if it isn't true, drop it.

Why would you ever be unhappy about something that's not true? If you're not going to be homeless, or you're probably citizen number 7 billion in the world that's going to become homeless, there are 699 whatever that are going to become homeless before you then wait. Be unhappy then. Okay? Right.

But if it is true there is a winter coming, then question number two. What can I do about it? Okay, question number two is very straightforward. What can I do to fix this? By the way, there is nothing you can do about the winter coming.

There is nothing you can do. We'll come to that in question three. But if the thought in your head is my business is going to decline because of the winter that's coming, right? That's an easy question to ask. What can I do about it?

Can I cut expenses? Can I find new clients? Can I find new lines of business? Whatever, what can I do about it? And when you ask that question, two things happen.

One is you make the world better. You actually solve the problem instead of sitting in a corner and complaining about it. Okay? And the second most interesting thing is, you move the thought from your incessant part of the brain, the default mode network, as they call it, to the problem solving area of the brain. And interestingly, our brains cannot do two things at the same time.

So if you ask yourself the question, what can I do about it? Immediately your brain stops complaining. Your brain is now in the positive mode of what can I actually do to make things better? If there is something you can do about it, do it. If there is nothing you can do about it, then it's question number three.

And question number three is what I call the Jedi master level of happiness. Truly, this is the ultimate level of happiness. What can I do about the things that I cannot change, including a winter coming, including losing a child, including being stuck in traffic. Simple as that. If you're stuck in traffic, there is nothing you can do to change the layout of the city within a second so that the traffic starts to move again.

It's impossible. Okay. So question number three is, can I accept and commit? What can I do now to make my life better despite the presence of that problem? What can I do?

Will not fix the problem. But what can I do to make my life better despite the problem? Okay. And when you start to think about it this way, you suddenly realize that there are lots of things you can do. Like, I sat down and I wrote a book, and it's reached 600,000 people.

And then my videos are, like, hundreds of millions of people. And part of my wonderful son, Ali, is everywhere and part of everyone. At least it's heading there. Okay. It doesn't solve the problem.

Thank you.

It doesn't bring him back. Do you understand that? It does not bring him back. But it makes my life and the lives of tens of millions of people better, despite the pain that I continue to feel. The pain doesn't go away.

Understand that, right? And so what can I do? Can I accept life as it is, not as a sign of weakness, as a sign of absolute strength? The strongest of all of us are the ones that looks at adversity and say, okay, I get it. Don't like that move.

Life. It was really not my favorite move, but I can deal with this. Okay? What can I do to make life better despite its presence? So I summarize all of this in another agreement.

So, this, by the way, is, again a homework that I would ask you to do repeatedly the next time you feel something changing. Okay? Take your piece of paper out. Is it true? What can I do to fix it?

Can I accept and do something to make my life and the life of others better despite its presence? Okay, so this is the practice when you do this. Enough. I ended up signing a contract with my brain, okay? Literally in my third book.

It is a signed contract with, I call my brain Becky, for very interesting reasons, because it's a third party. It's not me. Do you understand that? You have to understand this. One of the biggest challenges in the modern world is that we think that the voice in your head talking to you is you.

It's not. If it was you talking to you, why would it need to talk? Okay. There was an MIT study, actually. It's really so intuitive.

But there was a study actually in MIT in 2007. They put people in MRI machines, they give them word puzzles, and they measure the activity in their brain. And the problem solving areas of the brain would light up for whatever as long as it is needed to solve the problem. And then when the answer is found, listen to this. The verbal association area of the brain, the same area I'm using to talk to you right now, starts to light up for up to 8 seconds, and then the participant would know the answer.

Your brain finds the answer, and then it's freaking talking to you, okay? It turns the answer into words so that you understand it. Your brain is a biological function, okay? Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I go to the bathroom, therefore I am. It's another biological function.

But for some reason, we say, I think, therefore I am. I don't understand that bit. So that brain, I have a deal with it. Becky signed an agreement, and the agreement is this. There are only two types of thoughts allowed in my brain.

This is going to be intermediary. So we're going to try that next week, okay? But the agreement is as follows. My brain is allowed a useful thought if it's going to hurt me, or a joyful thought. Simple as that.

So when Ali left the world, habibi, so one of the struggles of losing a child is that your ego as a father attacks you very heavily because your ego is to protect him, okay? And so my ego started to attack me severely, like viciously telling me, you should have driven him to another hospital. So the 4 hours after Ali left, the only thought in my head was, you should have driven him to another hospital constantly until I told my brain openly, I heard you. I can't go back in time and drive him to another hospital. Can you give me something I can do?

Tony Robbins

Right. A useful thought a useful thought, right? Until Aya came and said, hey, he had that dream. And then I had the idea of writing his model and so on and so forth. So that's a useful thought.

Mo Gawdat

I'm going to sit down, I'm going to write what he taught me. I'm going to share it with the world. It's a useful thought. The other part of the agreement. So I said two thoughts.

One is useful and the other is a joyful thought. And I'll close with this. And then we take questions. No lying. No lying.

Look at me. Beard, bald, manly, right? I cry once or twice a week. There is a specific pain right here, bottom right side of my heart that I always feel when I miss him. It just doesn't go away.

Doesn't go away. Every time I feel that pain, my brain is telling me, Ali died. Very painful thought. When I think Ali died, I think of what happened. I think how unfair.

I think of the last moment where I hugged him in the intensive care table and so on. And I learned very quickly to say, yeah, brain, you told me that around 16,700 times before, but Ali also lived. Okay. It's a thought from the same canvas. Ali, by the way, we didn't plan for Ali.

We didn't plan for Ali. I was given 21 and a half years of absolute bliss, a blessing that I didn't ask for. As a matter of fact, if I had been asked, I would have told my wife, let's delay a little bit, okay? And then shows up this beautiful angel in my life for 21 and a half years. That makes me the person that I am.

Tony Robbins

Right? And my brain chooses to say, ali died. No, brain. Ali absolutely lived. We played video games together.

Mo Gawdat

We laughed together, we hugged. He taught me things. We had an amazing journey. Okay? Amazing journey.

And that's what I choose to remember. A joyful thought. If it's not going to be useful, don't hurt me. That's the agreement with Becky. And believe it or not, every single one of us has that choice.

Every single one of us is able to stand firm with your Becky and say, that's it. That's it. Don't destroy my life. This is stupid. Don't waste my life.

Either give me something I can do or give me something I can think about with joy. I'm actually perfectly on time. We have 15 minutes for questions. Yes. First off, thank you.

Thank you, Adam. Thank you. That touched me very deeply. Very deeply. And my question is, how long did it take you to train your brain?

Great question to go to the 7 seconds. Great question. Great question. So my third book was an analogy between neuroscience and computer science. Geek.

Right. In neuroscience, the most important property of our brain for happiness is neuroplasticity. Okay? And neuroplasticity is actually a very interesting character of the brain. We didn't think that the brain changes until the 1970s, 1980s.

We thought that you get a brain, it grows until 24, and then it's what you're left with for the rest of your life. Not true at all. Your brain behaves exactly like your muscles behave when you go to the gym, right? If you go to the gym every day and lift weights, you're going to look like a triangle. If you go to the gym every day and squat, you're going to look like a pair.

Tony Robbins

Right? It's as simple as that. Right? And the truth is, your brain is exactly the same. If you wake up every morning and watch the news, you're going to become very good at believing that the world is going to end.

Mo Gawdat

You're literally training your brain for that. If you wake up every morning and say, oh, my God, I have so much amazing stuff in my life, you're going to be training your brain for gratitude. And so scientists will say that neurons that fire together wire together. So basically, think of it as the old times where you had the switchboard before the telecom industry became so automated. There was an operator where you dialed and said, I want to talk to Jonathan.

And so she would patch you to Jonathan. After a while, three days later, she realizes you only talk to Jonathan. So she basically keeps a permanent wire between you and Jonathan. That's neuroplasticity. If part of your brain is used frequently, it becomes a permanent configuration of your brain.

Unhappiness is the biggest training we've given ourselves in the modern world. We're so good at finding things to be unhappy about. Scientists will say it will take you 21 days to remove a bit of the wiring and to feel a difference. Okay? And then in my case, sometimes it took up to four and a half years, right?

But you have already made 80% of the progress to get to 100%. And I'll tell you my biggest trick. That idea of Becky, of my brain not being me, was a major, major game changer for me. I learned it from Eckhart Tolley, a new earth. Okay?

So he calls it that voice in your head, the thinker. And I don't know if you've heard of Eckhart Tolle's work. He's an incredible teacher, but he speaks very slowly. So I think a new earth was 17 hours long. I don't remember, but it definitely felt like 17 hours long.

Okay, so every time my brain would hijack me and try to convince me that it is me and I should listen to it, I promise you, what I did was I listened to a new earth again from start to finish, normal speed, okay? And about seven or eight times in my brain was like, that's it. I'm never going to do that again. I'm not you. I am Becky.

I am a horrible Becky. I'm never going to do that again. So the game is this. I always tell people it's an 80 20 rule. 80% of your unhappiness is probably due to one reason.

It could be the illusion of control. It could be ego. It could be ego is not in a bad way, not arrogance. It's the way you want to be seen in the world. It could be your fear.

It could be whatever, okay? And my advice to people is find that one thing and make it your next 21 days, okay? Find that one thing and consistently work on it until you rewire that thing. With 80% of the problems removed, the rest is so easy. So I've been having the time of my life for the last twelve years.

Like, every two and a half years, I find a new thing and I go like, wouldn't it be nice if we painted this metallic and did this and that in my brain? And because the major problems are no longer there. Now, again, I'm not bragging, but the incessant thoughts in our brain that make us unhappy are one of the biggest reasons why we're constantly thinking about the negative. When I was writing solve for happy, I spoke about the idea of incessant thinking and so on. And so my editor, which was a great editor, Peter Guzardi, basically texted me one day and said, you know this incessant thinking thing, that's really good.

The reader wants to know about this. Can you give us a few examples? And I promise you I'm not making this up. I couldn't come up with one. My brain had not thought incessantly for so long that I couldn't think of any.

I had to call my friends. And eventually the actual example in the book is about Peter's daughter, teenage daughter, and how his teenage daughter is causing him incessant thinking. Okay? That's how far neuroplasticity can go. And I don't think, by the way, I learned that as a happiness practitioner.

I learned that as a business executive when I was a business executive. 90% of my job was people walking in to complain, okay? So I basically learned very, very quickly to not allow the incessant complaint to take more than ten minutes of the meeting. So every time someone walked into the meeting and just complained, complained, complained, I would give them ten minutes. I would even pour some fuel on the fire so that they rage even more.

And then I would go like, okay, is there anything good about that relationship? For example, if they're complaining about the guys in legal, when they are in sales, I go like, is there anything good? So, trying to see the whole truth. Is this true? Question, okay, can we do something about it?

The last ten minutes? And that process very quickly made me learn to stop the incessant thought. It's like, let's not just ramble in our heads about shit that doesn't do anything, okay? Let's just literally, when we've heard the brain, let's put our heads down and just start to do something about that's how far neuroplasticity can go. More.

Yes.

Thank you for your presentation. It's been amazing. My question is about meditation. How do you use meditation to get to the happiness state? So, meditation is quite misunderstood in many ways.

So I have not missed a day for the last 828 days, and I measure, okay, not a day. Why? Because of neuroplasticity, by the way. Because neuroplasticity is not about meditating for 4 hours one day and then stopping the next day. It's about meditating every single day.

Now, meditation, if done right, will flip your life upside down. Upside down. Why? Because it's basically firing the correct neurons that allow you to take control of your own brain. So when your brain tries to wonder, you can bring it back and say, calm down.

We want to focus on our breathing, or we want to focus on this, or we want to focus on that. And that ability is incredibly valuable in times where your brain starts to chatter. Okay? You can then use that same ability, basically. Literally, people who meditate frequently, they have a bigger prefrontal cortex and a bigger insula.

So the brain literally reconfigures itself. Okay. With that ability, when your brain starts to wonder, you go like, hold on, hold on. Let's focus. We don't want to think about this.

We want to think about that. Now, the challenge with meditation and why it's not done correctly is twofold fold. Number one is that people do not do it regularly enough as we do going to the gym, okay? It has to be a regular practice that is constantly happening every single day, so that neuroplasticity starts to take place. The second is we think that meditation is about calming the brain.

One of my favorite guests on the podcast was a monk called Galeng Tupton. Galen Tupton is the top monk in the UK, and he basically was, no, no. It's all about your brain wandering. The idea is, if you go to the gym, your success is not to carry an empty bar 100 times. Your success is that the bar is difficult enough for you to actually practice, use the muscle.

And so that mind wandering, that idea of your brain actually going out of focus, and then you calling it back to silence, that calling it back to silence is what meditation is all about. And if your mind doesn't wonder, you wouldn't do that move that's so good for you. And so when people, most people who give up on meditation, they give up because they say, I can't do it, I can't focus, right? Yeah, you're doing it. That's the absolute best thing you can do, is to get out of it and then pull yourself back, even if it takes you five minutes to pull back, or you spend the whole day and you don't pull back, but tomorrow you pull back.

That pullback is the muscle movement that creates that neuroplasticity, that makes us more focused. Now, I'll say this with openness. I have a very loved person in my life, and again, in my work, in my third book, I talk about something I call deliberate attention. Deliberate attention is sort of not to upset the psychologists and psychiatrists and so on, is basically the idea of being able to take control of your brain. Now, the lack of deliberate attention, believe it or not, is highly associated with almost all mental illnesses.

Everything from add to substance abuse to addiction to depression and so on and so forth, is associated with a lack of ability to regulate the functions of the brain. That wandering brain, okay. And I had a very loved person in my life that was highly add, and as a result of that was constantly depressed. And my advice was simply, all I ask for is five minutes a day. I use a device to measure so that you can actually know how well you're doing.

And when your mind wandering, you can go back quicker. And I asked the person to use that, and in no time at all, like literally in four weeks, their life flipped upside down, ten minutes a day. That was all. Okay? So it's invaluable if you do it correctly.

If you don't do it as a regular practice, then you're fooling yourself because you feel amazing during the meditation and then you're not building the brain circuitry. So when you leave it, you're no longer able to use that. More questions, so I'll move quicker. Topics. One question is, first of all, I practice meditation.

I practice happiness. Everything that you're saying, it's really dear to my heart and it's very easy for me to get happy. Great. However, sit down. Okay.

Mo Gawdat

However, how do you. I don't want to say make somebody. Else happy, but somebody to become happy. Attend to yourself first before you help others. Remember when you go on the plane and they say, put the mask on yourself first.

So I write in a very strange way. I write like a software engineer. So my books are actually produced in a beta version and then I put them online. And literally I asked 300 people to go in and edit the book. So in my first book, 300 people filled a survey of their state of happiness.

8% of them were actually depressed. So they wrote openly, I'm suffering depression. Ali 8%. Without exception, every single one of them dropped out on page eleven. Okay.

Because on page eleven, I wrote, happiness is a choice. Right? And that's really, really eye opening. When someone has decided they want to be unhappy, all the tools in the world, all of your attention, all of your time, is not going to change a thing. The only thing that will change them, believe it or not.

And I know that to work really, really every single time, is to pour love on them. Okay? The only thing that worked is when someone is unhappy, don't tell them. Why are you like that? Don't tell them, I wish you were different.

Don't tell them. All of that is making them unhappier. Again. One of my favorite conversations at a point in time is a british psychologist and TV star that was called Ruby Wax. And Ruby suffered many episodes in her life of depression.

And she will tell you, I don't know when I am depressed. It's like someone cut my skull open and filled my entire head and body with concrete. Can't do anything. Okay? So if you tell me to be happy and you give me advice, I can't do anything about it.

Now, the trick here is give them a reason to want to be happy. And the only reason that always gets to every single one of us is love. Pour love on them and be very deliberate in it. So write down a list of memories you share with them. Write down a list of experience you'd like to share with them and text them every now and then and say, hey, by the way, I passed by this ICE cream shop.

It was so wonderful when we went here last time. I love you very much. Let's do it again. Okay. The next day you say, hey, by the way, I remember the time when you did this and that.

I'm so grateful for what you did for me. I love you very much. I hope to see you soon. Never bringing up that they're unhappy and never asking them to change until they come to you and say, I'm so upset with myself for you being so loving and kind, and I'm always grumpy. What can I do?

That's when you bombard them with advice, right. That's the time. All right, more questions? Yes.

So, first off, thank mean. This is absolutely all respect to Tony. We know what he brings. But if I came here just for mean. Oh, my God.

So, thank you. Thank you. So this is know very important for me. And I look at know what are your hierarchy of needs and that type of thing. Growth has always been my number one.

But it's a tricky thing, growth, because when you're always focused on growth, then. Happy with the present. Well, yeah. And then you can adjust your definition of growth. And that's what I've been doing.

But looking at those two questions that you're asking yourself, when you find yourself with those thoughts that you don't. So I sometimes get caught up in that number one where something useful. So, okay, maybe I'm trying to dissect a situation, or I'm trying to dissect what I could have done better, what I could do better next time. Or is it do I offer an apology or do I adjust this aspect, and then that becomes a thing that you can't get out of easily? And so my question is, when there's so many things that you can do, then how do you let go of that at some point?

Mo Gawdat

Okay, so there are two layers to this question. So I'm going to answer a layer you may not have asked. First, if you don't mind me saying. We are taught to be motivated by the negative. It's our schooling system, it's our parenting system.

It's everything that we've learned as young children is go to school so you don't fail in life or score a higher score in mathematics so that you don't miss the opportunity to go to university or whatever. We're always telling ourselves to do things so that we avoid the negative. And that's, by the way, again, Tony spoke about that very openly. It's the negativity bias of the brain. The brain doesn't want to talk about anything positive.

It just wants to talk about what could go wrong. It captures our attention when we tell our colleagues or employees or whatever, when we tell them, hey, if we don't achieve this, this is going to be the case. We are equally, equally as capable as humans to be motivated by the positive, okay? To be motivated by the positive allows us to say, I'm going to do this because achieving it is going to be amazing, right? It's not like to take the concept of growth.

Growth can be motivated by, I want to grow because now is not good enough, or it could be, now is amazing, but there is potential for more. So my advice to people is always find a way to motivate yourself with the positive. Love, by the way, as a motivator is a very positive thing to motivate us with. Now, when it comes to solutions and ideas that we can take in terms of what can I do about it?

It's not my best field to answer you, but my approach is I tend to do it like a software engineer. And software engineers never find the right answer. No code I have ever written in my life was perfect. There was never a way to make it perfect. And no code that you've ever used in your life, including things that are highly established like iOS or Android or whatever, is perfect.

It's never perfect. What we do as software engineers is what we call is basically an iterative approach with a B testing. So we try something and then we modify it and modify it and modify it and modify it. So my normal approach is I actually allow my brain, if I'm sitting down, to solve a problem, I will actually start an egg timer. So a lot of the things I do, I start a timer and I say within seven minutes or ten or 15, depending on the complexity of the problem and the analysis I need to do.

I'm going to identify the easiest, most effective solution I can find right now, and I'm going to put that into action. Okay? And then I'm going to review again in an hour, in a day, in five days, whatever that is, depending on the solution I found. And I'm going to do the process again. Now, most people will tell you that no decision ever will destroy your life.

The only thing that will destroy your life is indecision. Okay? So the idea of I'm going to find something that seems reasonable right now and review it again in a couple of hours time or in a week's time, is a very effective way because life as a matter of fact, is always going to make you do this. One of the things I always say is that life and every experience, and it is never a journey. You've never walked the same path twice.

Do you understand that? Even if you're commuting from home to work every single day, it was never the same path. It always changes. Okay? So the idea is I will go around.

Life is a quest. It's not a journey. A quest is I don't know what's going to happen in an hour's time. So I'm constantly taking one step and then looking left and right and then taking another step and then maybe going back a step and so on. So instead of wasting time trying to look for the perfect solution and the most optimum way of doing anything, just find the best and easiest.

Easiest, by the way, is not the means of a perfectionist. Okay? So sometimes we will tell ourselves there is solution a that's going to cost me 100 units of effort and going to get me to 110 units of success. And there is solution B that's going to cost me 10% of efforts and going to get me 80% of the way. Okay.

That 10% of effort, 80% of the way, even if it's not perfect, it's not 100%, is a much better choice because it saves your effort until you review later and maybe take it to 100%. So kind of making an agreement with your brain, so to speak. I'm going to sit here, I'm going to think about what is the most reasonable or solution or what I can put into practice for next time. But then once that's arrived at, then making the agreement with your brain. Okay, we're going to hook, we're absolutely going for it.

We're going to do it and we're going to review again in an hour's time if we need to, but it's going to be done right now. And if it comes back, you just. Remind better and better. The only thing I would caution you on this is the emotions of others. So if the decision you're taking is going to affect another, my only ask of you is find a way.

Put five minutes more to deliver what you're going to deliver kindly and lovingly. Okay. By the way, it doesn't matter what you're going to deliver. You can actually go and tell them we're going to break up with you, or we're going to fire you, or we're going to do this, or we're going to do that. As long as you do it respectfully, kindly and lovingly.

It's okay. It's a good solution and you can work on that. How are we doing on time? What's the time? One more.

One more. Yes. I listened to your book about 18 months ago and prescribed it for all of my employees to listen to. Thank you. And it really impacted the culture of our team.

And the question I have for you is, how do you suggest that we utilize what you're teaching with our youth? I have a twelve and a nine year old son, and I'm taking my twelve year old son to unleash the power thin. And he went last year. But I'm already noticing that the negative self talk with social media and just other things with school and such, I want to be able to influence them more as a young age. And if you have any suggestions or books or the formula knowing that they're so young, that would be really appreciative.

Mo Gawdat

So I'm actually finally ready with five children's books, but for younger children than that. But it's been a very difficult responsibility for me. Believe it or not, children know what I told you more than we do as adults because they're not as spoiled as we are. But our children of today, I can promise you, we have not seen suffering as compared to what they have to go through. They are constantly bombarded with choices, which is really crippling in a very interesting way.

More choices are more difficult. We've left them a horrible world with lots of issues, and lots of them are struggling with what's my life going to be like? And you can see that in the numbers, teen suicide is at an all time high. Now, there are two things I will say. One thing is your children will never do what you tell them.

They will do what you do. Okay? And I think that's the challenge that most parents don't actually think enough about is what can I teach them, what can I tell them? And so on. If you're a control freak and you're telling them to chill, they're going to be control freaks at chilling, right?

It's as simple as that. So the number one responsibility, if we want to change anyone around us, most importantly our kids, is to actually be the example we want them to be. And a really good parent would bond around those issues. I'll give you a very simple example. I had a very simple agreement with my kids, which again, goes back to pouring love on them.

I had two wonderful kids in many, many ways, but your kids are never perfect. If you're a parent like they always want them to be better. And so at age Aya was 13, Ali was 14. I sat them down and I said, I'm going to retire parenthood, okay? Of course.

Ali, in her very lively way, said, what does that mean? I don't have curfew anymore. Ali, of course, in his very wise way, said, can you elaborate on that? Right. And basically the conversation was about, there are a few things that I want you to pay attention to.

Literally three things. And everything else is, okay. I'm going to pour love on you unconditionally, whatever you do, other than those three things where I will still love you unconditionally, but we're going to have a very tough conversation. Okay? One of those three things, believe it or not, was I asked them to bring their friends over for a barbecue every single month.

Once a month, I was going to grill for ten friends of Ali's and ten friends of ayes. They overlapped quite often, okay. And my only thing was, when they showed up, I engaged in their reality. I actually understood what they were going through. And I promise you, the life of a teenager is so difficult.

When I heard it from their friends, oh, this person is doing this, and that happened, and that band said this, and you don't know all of that stuff. So if you manage to really engage. I actually became. I don't know if you guys know this, but if any of you are playing Halo, I'm the one that killed you yesterday, okay? So literally, I am an olympic champion level video gamer, okay?

Because I played with Ali, I had to sit next to him for hours and hours and hours playing with him, listening to him, the love of my life. Anytime me and Aya are in the same place, I will literally free up my entire. Okay, whatever. If the queen no more, but the king of England wants time with me, I'm not going to go if Aya wants me. And I think as parents, there's nothing you can teach them but giving them, again, pouring love on them and giving them a lot of your attention and showing them an example, an example that doesn't ask them to change, that doesn't minimize what they're going through, because they're going through a lot, okay?

But that simply goes. Sits next to them. And when they say, I don't believe in this, or this is not working for me or this is making me unhappy, hug them and stay there. Do nothing. Just be happy yourself that they're okay.

Tony Robbins

Right? And I think that constant process did one thing that flipped our relationship with our kids, which is they came back to us over and over and over when times were tough. There is absolutely no way I believe, in our current world where we can equip them for the challenges that they're coming up against. The only thing we can equip them with is a level of trust that they will come back to us when things are tough and say, papa, I dated a boy and he turned out to be a horrible boy, okay? And if I can be the one that she comes back to when that happens, I can be her sponge for unhappiness.

Mo Gawdat

I can take her unhappiness and pain in me and pour my love on her to heal her. That's what you want with your kids. And especially at teenage. You want them to consider you their best friend, no longer their parents. You retire.

Parenthood, you absolutely retire. You just hug them, say that you trust them, and be there for them in a way that makes them keep coming back to you. Okay? I'm here for the entire five days other than the last half a day. So if any question at all or any hugs, I'm available.

Thank you all so much. Let's give it up for Mo.

Sage Robbins

Tony Tony Tony Robbins podcast why inspired and directed by Tony Robbins and his teachings. It's produced by US team Tony Copyright Robbins Research International.