Google’s Mo Gawdat: ‘Happiness is like keeping fit. You have to work out’

When the tech guru's son unexpectedly died, he turned to an equation they had devised together to get through the grief

Mo Gawdat is the chief business officer at Google X - the "moonshot factory" responsible for some of the company's more audacious projects, such as self-driving cars and a balloon-powered global internet. Before he joined Google, while working as stock trader and tech executive in Dubai and in response to a period of depression, he used his engineer's mindset to create an "equation for happiness". The equation says that happiness is greater than, or equal to, your perception of the events in your life minus your expectation of how life should be.

When his 21-year-old son Ali died during a routine operation, Gawdat turned to the equation, which they had worked on together, in an attempt to come to terms with his tragic loss. Gawdat's book, Solve for Happy, explains the theories underpinning the equation and how it helped him sustain his life after Ali's death.

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