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1-Page Summary of Solve For Happy
Overview
Mo Gawdat was at the top of his career, but he wasn’t happy. He tried to figure out why and learned that most people don’t know what makes them truly happy. So, he applied analytical thinking to this problem and examined many religious concepts until he discovered his own formula for happiness.
This passage is about the author’s ideas on happiness. He talks about his formula for it, how you can get rid of your fears, and why wu wei is important.
Big Idea #1: Happiness is the absence of unhappiness, caused by the misrepresentation and misunderstanding of reality.
We’ve all heard that money can’t buy you happiness, but many people still pursue financial success as their primary goal. It’s no wonder they’re unhappy even when they have everything. How do we fix this? The author of this book decided to use his engineering mind in order to figure out a formula for achieving happiness.
Let’s start by trying to understand what happiness is. Look at small children and toddlers, who are generally happy because they’re not hungry or in pain. You could say that happiness is merely a lack of unhappiness.
The author believes that unhappiness comes from not getting what you want. When life doesn’t work out the way we expect it to, then we get unhappy.
“Your happiness is equal to or greater than your perception of events minus your expectations of life.” This means that if you regard the twists and turns in life as meeting or exceeding what you expect, then you’ll be happy. However, if your expectations are greater than reality, they will subtract from your capacity for happiness.
It’s not as simple as being happy or sad. It depends on your thoughts, which can lead to confusion and negativity. To be positive, you have to allow yourself to feel joy. The goal is for you to reach a state of happiness by allowing only positive thoughts in your mind.
To prevent yourself from being confused and unhappy, you’ll need to discard the six grand illusions that leave you misinformed. They are:
Big Idea #2: You are not the voice in your head, but the observer of your life.
In the 1999 movie The Matrix, Neo breaks through the illusion and sees that everything is just a bunch of numbers. He’s able to take control of his life and be happy because he can see past the illusions.
In the 1930s, a Russian psychologist named Lev Vygotsky observed small muscular movements in the larynx accompanying inner thought. He suggested that the internal narrator was actually just the internalization of speech. This hypothesis has been confirmed by neuroscientists who have found that parts of the brain active while talking are also active during inner thought. Therefore, it’s not really you; it’s your brain speaking to you as it tries to understand and make decisions about what’s going on around you.
When listening to your negative thoughts, remember that they’re just the brain throwing out possibilities as it tries to understand the world. You don’t have to listen. Instead, try pushing back against those thoughts by minimizing them and replacing them with more positive ones!
So if the voice in your head isn’t you, then who are you? People spend their lives building physical identities and egos. However, they’re not real. These masks can bring about unhappiness due to unrealistic expectations; as with our happiness formula. They can also shift and change over time, yet the fundamental “you” remains. So who is that?
To find out who you are, think of yourself as a person standing in the middle of an empty field. The only thing that can be seen is everything around you: your possessions, family and even your body. But what about the person looking at all these things? Who or what is it exactly that’s seeing all this stuff? It’s like there’s a little man inside each one of us who observes but isn’t observed.
