“We forget how grateful we should be for the magnificence we’ve had in our life before, and we forget that every harshness we’ve had before has passed.”
Elizabeth Day invites back a guest from a very popular episode, Mo Gawdat, in which he spoke of his search to find “an equation for happiness.” This search was given a new meaning when he was confronted with the death of his son. But instead of talking about grief, here he speaks mostly about how the pandemic for many of us may not be as bad as it may seem.
After devouring the first few seasons of the podcast when it first came out, I began to get slightly disillusioned with the set up. Guests were supposed to be discussing their biggest “failures” and how they learnt from them, helping them to “succeed better.” However, it started to feel more like rich celebrities praising each other for their hard-earned achievements. The final straw was when one interviewee named one of her failures as not getting into her preferred college at Cambridge.
I even commented on one of Elizabeth Day’s Instagram posts about the show, saying I loved it but had she considered interviewing a couple of normal, non-celebrities who were satisfied with their lives and had something interesting to say nonetheless. After all, most people will not become famous or achieve a prestigious job in the arts, and so are we saying that the majority of people are therefore failures? She pointed me to a couple of episodes she had done with working class celebrities. Not quite what I meant.
Mo Gawdat’s episode was something of a breath of fresh air. He spoke about the unfulfilling yet outwardly successful life he was leading as Chief Business Officer at Google X, leading him to search for a happiness algorithm, detailed in his book Solve for Happy. Instead of speaking of the failures which led to his socially revered success, he spoke of what he was deeply lacking from that place we make think of as an “end goal.”
I admit I’ve not read the book myself, but scrolling through Goodreads revealed that reviewers fell broadly into two camps: (1) completely enamoured by the philosophy, believing Gawdat was something of a happiness pioneer, or (2) thought it had a strong start but veered off into unsupported pseudoscientific and disjointed streams of thought. One user helpfully summed the whole thing up in a bullet-pointed 14-page Google doc, which you can find here.
In the podcast episode, Gawdat’s tips made sense, were practical, and quite familiar to those of us who have battled problems like anxiety. In the same vein as The Chimp Paradox, Gawdat proposes you separate yourself from your “monkey” brain in a way that allows you to exercise rational judgement and control over your own thoughts.
His central idea is that that happiness is simply greater than, or equal to, your perception of the events in your life minus your expectation of how life should be.
This notion reappears in his second interview, in which he talks about what he terms the “illusion of control.”
“Modern life has created the illusion that we can control everything,” he says. But this has never been the case.
Gawdat proposes that to combat the discomfort with uncertainty, we embrace “committed acceptance.”
“Sometimes there will be things we cannot fully steer in the direction we want them to steer,” he says.
To help with this, we should try to keep our focus on the two weeks ahead of us, instead of contemplating and worrying about uncertainties following that time.
He also refused Day’s request to talk about grief, stating that as he has already spoken about grief, and as at the moment the deaths from coronavirus in the UK are roughly similar to those from traffic accidents, he thinks it is more useful to focus on hopefulness.
One of my favourite parts was when he described the pandemic as like a tiger which has suddenly entered the room, focussing us solely on the present threat. Everything else is out the window. However, when things are mostly positive, we tend to worry about the past or the future instead.
Part of his remedy to this is his method of mindfulness, which is to sit down with his thoughts for at least 25 minutes every day. After a while, his brain grows quiet. I tried this myself and I think it’s somewhat useful meditation prep, but my mind doesn’t magically go silent unless I actively concentrate on my breath. But I’m sure this is probably a very useful exercise for a lot of people nevertheless.
Another part of his routine is that he allows his worrying brain, which he names Becky, to air its thoughts, while he writes them all down. However, he has one rule. For every negative thought, he must also write a positive one.
“We can assume that life is 50-50. It is probably mostly positive, because otherwise we wouldn’t be safe most of the time.”
Okay, granted, we understand that the highly successful serial entrepreneur isn’t passing the quarantine with restless toddlers climbing over him whilst he struggles to be on top of deadlines for a job which he may not be able to keep. But we do also know he has been through a profound amount of emotional turmoil and came out the other end.
As someone who has not been directly affected by the virus, but feels huge compassion for those who have, I found Gawdat’s sentiment refreshing, and my reasonable amount of positivity and hope for the end of hardship reaffirmed.
“Until then,” he says, speaking about scientists finding a cure or a vaccine, “what can I do, Mo, one human, to make my life better today.”
You can listen to the podcast episode here, and read more about One Billion Happy, Gawdat's mission to make one billion people happy, here.