Mar 21

Mar 21 BZ Book Review 20: <Solve for Happy> by Mo Gawdat

Key Takeaways

1. Happiness is the absence of unhappiness, caused by the misrepresentation and misunderstanding of reality. The happiness equation: Your happiness >= your perception of things - your expectation of life.

2. You are not the voice in your head, but the observer of your life. The voice in your is actually your brain trying to talk to you as it tries to understand the world around you and make the best possible decisions. But it isn’t you. To find out the real you, you should mentally strip away all the things that change over time including your possessions, your family and your body. You are the observer of the world, who sees life but can’t be seen. (God’s eye mode)

3. It is safer to presume that you really know nothing and if you accept your ignorance, you’ll alway be searching for, and open to, the truth.

4. Time is just a human invention. Instead of being slave to time, you should ignore the past the future and focus on the present. Focus on being instead of doing. e.g others may say they are doing more complicated things than you they know fancy machine learning. but if you improve your being, you will have this being, level and this aura others cannot achieve by doing. You have to find the balance of being and doing. Taoist idea of wuwei: where doing nothing can be the best course of action.

5. You don’t actually have much control over your life, and your fears are often unfounded. When events change beyond your control - and they will - keep control of yourself so that you too can move forward calmly.

6. Our minds tend to see the negative side of things, applying too many filters, assumptions and predictions.

7. Work and life balance - Focus too much on work, you’ll cease to enjoy living. Focus too much on trivial activities, you might feel like you’re worthless. Instead, try and balance the two: enough work to feel like you’re doing something but enough freedom to make it all worthwhile. As the old saying goes “if you are working hard to make a living, why do you want to kill yourself working?!”

8. Unconditional love is the most important emotion, as it has no expectations, and therefore no disappointment.

9. Death is a fundamental part of existence. Acceptance rather than fear will allow you to properly embrace life. Take the analogy into the food chain: to sustain the life of one thing, something else must die. Death brings life, and in turn, life dies to make way for the new.

10. It is easy to prove the existence of something, you just need the evidence. It is hard to prove something don’t exist.