The Resilient Mind - How To Maximize Your Happiness - Mo Gawdat

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

Mohammad "Mo" Gawdat is an Egyptian entrepreneur, author, and former Chief Business Officer of Google X. With a background in engineering and a passion for human happiness, he authored Solve for Happy, which explores the science of joy, and Scary Smart, which examines the future of AI. Through his books, talks, and initiatives, Mo advocates for a balanced, mindful approach to technology and personal fulfillment.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠Subscribe to Steven Bartlett for more inspiring videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to how to maximize your happiness with Mo Godat. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. And 2022, I decided it will also be a year of flow, but I called it the year of joy in flow, which is really interesting. So to me, believe it or not, as I worked through the years on empowering more of my feminine side, and, you know, creativity, paradoxical thinking, flow,

all of those sometimes appearingly not so disciplined traits are hyper feminine and they're very valuable in terms of enjoying life, but also seeing the full reality of life, if you want. I did very well in 2020 with my approach to flow. I went wherever life wanted me to go, but I was still the same mo, you know, very targeted, very, focused, very able to get the maximum out of everything. Around that, of course, there has been a lot of interesting repercussions of our conversation that basically allowed me to write more, to connect more.

I tend to be very personal when it comes to my presence on social media. So got in touch with so many wonderful people. And I think that created waves of flow, if you want, in my life, whereby, by, by end of April, I packed everything up that I had in Dubai, put it in a tiny little storage space. I've always been a minimalist anyway, so it wasn't much. And now I have no idea where I'm going from here, completely in flow. I'm in London because of my book publication until end of the month. And then we'll find out. I think we need both, right?

I think we need the balance. I think the story that most of us don't realize. is that every one of us wants an adventure and every one of us wants stability. Every one of us wants, at a point in time, a long-term committed, wonderful, connected relationship and at other times, once the parties and the fun and the, you know, Russian experience and so on. And I think context is a big part of what we miss as humans, that through life, context changes.

Okay. And I've been on an interesting journey because, of course, you can. imagine i have always been extreme in whichever stage i had been in my life when i when i became you know a business executive i was a very serious business executive you know that the 12 14 hour days the you know the constant hopping around the world and so on and so forth when i became an author i became a very serious author you know i started to really really spend a lot of hours writing and you know documenting my my thoughts and i write two or three books at the same time when you're extreme in those things,

you tend to be quite a bit blinded, if you want, by the pace, by the detail. You're swamped into it. And it does take challenging yourself, if you want, to get to a point where you say, perhaps this was wonderful for my last seven years of my life, but perhaps, you know, context has changed. perhaps I need to explore another part of my life to reach that point where I feel complete.

For most of us who rush really fast in life, we don't even recognize what we feel. We don't even even recognize what our hearts, what our souls, what our bodies are signaling to us. And I think there has been a very strong longing in my life to live that idea of, I call it half monk, which, you know, interestingly, again, the way we stack life is quite strange. So we work really, really, really hard for the first 30 or 40 years of our lives, and then we retire when we can't really enjoy life. You know, it's like when you retire, you're basically taking your stick and going to whatever, Florida or whatever.

When it's actually the way life should be is that you probably should take the 10 years of retirement, divide them across the 40 years, and perhaps takes three months off every year. If we were to redesign life, you know, it would be wonderful to work seven months of every year and take three months or nine months of every year and take three months off. Similarly, you know, if you look even at the spiritual path of some, some of the most renowned monks in the world, you go through a certain path through life and then you stop completely and then you co-become a monk, you know, for a while, and then, you know, you may come back to life or become something else. And I decided there would be an interesting ambition to investigate

the possibility of maybe 50% of your life as a monk and 50% as a modern day warrior, as I call it, right? And I took the number 50 because that's how mathematicians will work. I'll start from the midpoint and then, you know, irritate around it. Maybe I'll and that 60 or whatever. Okay. And it's actually interestingly possible. It's interestingly possible to spend 50% of your days in monk-like activities, which would be connection, reflection, you know, some stillness and silence,

some service to the world. And 50% completely engaged in, you know, writing, writing I consider as a service, but, you know, like, business and business conversations and, you know, coaching and whatever it is else that I do, being stuck in traffic and so on and so forth. Okay. And it was a stupid ambition, but then it started to become a lot more viable in my mind that actually I could do that 50% of every day, 50% of every week, 50% of every year could actually be spent that way. And the thing you need to make that happen is to step out of the mainstream of your steady life. Okay. So I had

a wonderful conversation with my manager, Munir, who, you know, really wants our success and the success of the mission, but that sometimes makes him push me very hard to add stuff in my calendar. And I said, can you allow me the life of a creative? So can you cram my Tuesdays and Wednesdays to the point where I start hating you, but then leave my rest of the week free with one day that is negotiable between us? Okay. And that basically is even better. than 50-50. So in those two days, I'm completely a modern-day warrior, completely engaged in, whatever the modern world wants from me. But then that allows me the rest of the week, if you want, to do the other things that may allow me to find and reflect and maybe figure something out

that is so much better for the days where I get engaged. Right. So if my work is to spread some ideas, then silence to find those ideas is actually useful for it. And so that was the feeling. You said, what was the signal? The feeling has been there for quite a bit of time. And then when the landlord said, hey, by the way, want the apartment back, I was like, great, let's do this. Let's leave the mainstream. Okay. Let's go somewhere and see where that takes us. See where serendipity will show us. I think that's an interesting place to be. I am single and not single. I think, oh, that may get a lot of people judging me.

So I, again, in an interesting way, found that my current lifestyle does not qualify me, if you want, for a committed relationship. Okay. But that a committed relationship is one specific definition of relationships that I think our world, has stuck to for a period of time that evolved, okay? There are multiple, multiple, multiple definitions of relationships today. I think if you look back 20 years, 30 years at most, you'd realize that that singular traditional model excluded all same-sex relationships, all bisexual relationships, all this and all of that. It also included, it also excluded relationships that were not till death do us part and so on and so forth.

I found, and I say that with worry that people will judge me, I found that what I'm doing is more important to me at the moment than a traditional committed relationship. Okay? Simply because I feel that an hour spent with one person could also be an hour that I spend helping a thousand people. Okay. And even though that hour for me is definitely enriching and fulfilling and so on and so forth, it becomes sometimes the commitment associated with it doesn't make it an hour,

normally makes it several hours, makes it a big chunk of your life that I lived for 27 years and loved. And I would say it's the absolute best way to live all together, right? But it's, definitely not something that from a current phase of my life where the focus of where I want to put my chips if you want my hours of my life is where I want to be and so I end up when in very very connected very deep very wonderful and loving relationships that are super honest but not lasting you know if my life will take me from here to somewhere else I will not not consider sticking around here as a prerequisite to find or, you know, being a prerequisite to find a relationship more important than my journey of finding where I need to be.

I learned that interestingly when I spoke to my dear friend Matthew Ricard on slow mo. So Matthew is probably one of the most renowned monks in the world. He was a PhD in molecular biology, if I remember. and he quit his life and went and became a monk. And he had 60,000 hours of lifetime meditation, which reconfigured his brain in a way that was publicly a very, very interesting science study. He was called the happiest man in the world because of that. And I asked him and I said, why, Matthew?

Why would you leave your life and your girlfriend and your, you know, he was French living in Paris and your PhD and go and become a monk? He said it would be very unfair to have someone in my life expect me to be there all the time when what I wanted was my pilgrimages and to be next to my teachers and my time of isolation and my alone time in my hermitage and so on and so forth. He basically said it's not a promise I can make.

If I make it, I would be lying. And I think that probably was a very enlightening moment for me because there are many things I give up on in my life that would make my life richer. But they're perhaps not on my path, at least not for the time being. Is this a, do you view that as a phase in your life? Or do you view that as?

Definitely. Everything is a phase in your life. Definitely. Definitely. I think that's the changing context, Steve, is probably the biggest failure of humanity. The changing context is we have a tendency because we are designed as survival machines to want things to remain exactly the same. If it's comfortable, if it's safe, let's keep it.

I want my same coffee machine every day because I know that machine. I know it's really where I can make amazing coffee with it. And so of course, when it's time to pack things, I needed to hug that machine and say, okay, baby, I'm not going to see you for a few months. But the truth is there are many places all of all, over the world that will make an amazing coffee too, right? That attachment is one of the biggest

reasons for unhappiness in life. It's the idea of, I want my glass of water. I don't want a glass of water. I want my mug. I want my glass of water. I want my streets. I want my commute every day. I want my job security and so on and so forth, which is beautiful. And by the way, every single one of us needs to live that for a phase of our life, for a season if you want. But the failure to recognize the changing seasons sometimes results in a narrowness of our life that makes us stick to one path. When we spoke about you, you started as a CEO of a marketing, very successful business, and now you're a podcast host,

you're an author, you're on Dragons Den and so on and so forth. That's a recognition within you that this phase has served its purpose and there is something else I need to do with my life. And by the way, you could go back to that same phase, right? You could become a CEO again at a point in time and it's that seasonal view of life.

And big part of flow, you know, where I'm trying to live my life now, is to recognize those seasons, is to say, look, I had an amazing, amazing woman for 27 years, right? And I had a family. I have been there. I have done that.

I've enjoyed it tremendously. It enriched my life. But it left gaps behind that need to be fulfilled or completed with other phases and other seasons. And I think the game here is to be able to allow yourself to rather than plan and say, my safety, my security, my everything, to allow yourself to sit back and say, what's life saying? Is life hinting that I should be in London?

I can be in London. Let me be in London, right? Let's see. Maybe at the end of that season, nothing's going to happen. You're going to go like, oh, it was just very good coffee and a conversation with Stephen, right?

And it could be that, you know, oh my God, it was the best coffee of my life and the best conversation I ever had. Right? And I think that wisdom, if you want, it depends on if you're, you're spiritual or not, if you believe that there is a part to you that is not physical, call it consciousness or call it a soul if you're spiritual,

that part is senses things that are a little bit beyond the limitations of the physical. It might sense a need for the rest of being, someone else somewhere that may benefit from my presence in London or maybe a need within me to get a little bit of rain, which I hadn't seen for a while. I don't know, right? And if the way, the way that other part of you communicates to you is through intuition. It cannot plant a text message in your head and say, by the way, by the 14s, you need to be in London.

It just gets you, gives you that feeling of something is missing from here and something needs to be attended to there. Do you want to investigate? And I found from the spiritual teachers and happiness teachers, and actually business teachers that I worked with in my life, that those who are able to go like, let me find out, okay? Let me find out. Let me check this out. Normally stumble upon some of the biggest changes to our lives, all of us,

not just their lives. And it's quite interesting because if you really look back at your life, really, most of the events that actually change, shaped you that actually changed your lives were not planned at all. You know, there probably were always those surprises and often were the surprises you didn't want. Okay. And then somehow you go through with them and you end up in a place that suddenly you recognize

and go like, ah, that's why I've been walking for the last 14 days. And by the way, the game in my view, I say life is a quest. It's not a journey. Okay. And the difference between a journey and a quest is when you're on. a journey, you've sort of plotted your path. Okay. I'm going to take that flight. I'm going to go to this place. I'm going to stay in that hotel. It's a journey, right? And it will eventually end up in a destination, right? A quest is very different. A quest is Christopher Columbus taking a crew on a ship

and in the middle of the, you know, fog, not knowing where the new world really is. Okay. That's a quest. You know, you don't really know where the destination is. You're basically taking a couple of steps forward and then stopping and then looking at the fog and then assessing and then reflecting and then saying, maybe I should take a step left and then you take one step left and then you say, okay, how does it feel now? Do I want to go forward again or do I want to go one step back? And by the way, there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking two steps forward, assessing, going to the left and then saying, left wasn't what I was supposed to do. I'll go back and take a step to the right and see what happens. But like Christopher Columbus,

you set off on your quest, and I'm sure as Christopher Columbus did, for a reason. You wouldn't load up the ship and put all those men on the ship and get a boat. And there has to be some kind of inspiration or some kind of reason why you set off. That's the question I want to ask, but I was also compelled by, you said, you were in the relationship for 28 years and eventually there's something missing. Yeah. There's always something missing. What was missing?

So let's talk about the big picture first, because I think people need to understand that. There's nothing wrong with having anything missing, okay? But we are a very complex being that is made up of so many emotions and so many reflections and so many traumas and so many stories and backgrounds and desires. And we live in a very, very, very, very unsimplifiable world. Okay.

And yet we try to simplify it. rather than try to enjoy it fully. When they tell you sweet and sour chicken in a Chinese restaurant, it's not just a little bit of sweet and a little bit of sour. There is a ton of flavor happening within all of this. There are layers of complexity that creates a life that's worth living.

And for every one of us, it's that attachment. It's the attachment of, but I like this. I don't want to change this that deprives us of all of it. the other flavors, right? Nibel and I, I believe Nibel made me, my ex-wife. We met when she was 18 in university. We fell in love madly. We got married the day she finished university. You know, we spent 22 years together with our beautiful children and then life changed. The context changed. Ali left our world, my son. And when Ali left,

our world, I hit the pedals and went double speed. When Ali left our world, Nibel, on the other hand, looked at her life and said, for the first time, I can now focus on me. My children left one, went to university in Canada, Aya, and Ali left the world to his next journey. And, you know, simply she looked at herself and said, okay, it's my time. I'm not going to define my life by you anymore. I can't travel the world with you because of your passion and your mission and what you've now assigned yourself as the new task. I'm going to find what I want to do with my life.

And I think that's wonderful. If you ask me, that's definitely what everyone should do. Now, with that contradiction, we became further and further apart. Remember, love and relationships are not ever taken for granted. I always say this openly. I fell in love with Nibel six times. I fell in love with that cute girl that I met in university. Then I fell in love again when she became my wife.

Because when your girlfriend and your wife, you're two different people. And by the way, I was her boyfriend and her husband. These are two different people too. And now suddenly we're left with those boyfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend, gone. And the husband and wife looking at each other and saying, where is my sweetheart? Right. And then suddenly, you know, most people would get into that stage in one of those constant changes and say, hey, you know, I don't like this. I want my sweetheart back. You know, it's an attachment. Or you can go like, okay, the sweetheart is gone, but oh my God, this one is so cute. Right. And when you actually see it that way, you fall in love again with a totally different person. And then again, and then again, I believe I counted six times. Okay. And then eventually,

when we wanted to have our different focuses in life, I would call that falling in love again, but slightly differently. Because you see, the thing that we mess in life is we define love. Love is too big, if you ask me, as a concept, to fit within romance. Okay, we've narrowed love down to that story

that Hollywood told us, which is love is just, romance, okay? It's a, it's a romantic relationship between two people. It has intimacy in it, and it has to be this and that, and they have to live that way. Okay. The truth is no, I believe there are 20 ways two partners can enjoy and benefit from the company of each other and grow together, two of which are sex and intimacy. And we've defined love as per sex and intimacy. Okay. So if she's not your woman, as in your sleeping together, does that end the love in any way? Okay.

You know, as a matter of fact, if it ends the love, then it was never love. If you really think about it. And so we define our relationships that way. And I think that's a recipe for disappointment. Because in reality, every relationship will always go through those changes. there will be times where sex won't be great and there will be other times when your spiritual connection is at its best

and you know it really is entirely around again the layers and the flavors and how you can choose each one of those and embrace it and grow it and make it a prominent live it as much as you can with that person and yeah if if one of them ends my feeling is that the rest should not end the rest should grow

I think we all make those choices all the time. It just suddenly becomes quite contentious when it's about love and relationship. But you know what? I left an apartment that I enjoyed because I needed to do something else, right? I am here in London when I could be in Silicon Valley, for example, because they wanted me to talk about innovation there because I need to be in London because I want my next book to succeed, right? So we all make those, you know, choices all the time.

And life, sadly, is a question of compromise. Because, you know, you often say that, the best of both worlds doesn't happen. You cannot have best of both words. You can either say, I'm living fully as my number one priority to achieve A and I'll achieve as much as I can of B, as long as it doesn't contradict A. Or you can say, I'll go for B and, you know,

I'll sacrifice a bit of A for that. And it's interesting because most people, especially the romantics, will say, how can you sacrifice love? You know, love is the most important. No, a billion happy is more important than love, in all honesty for me, to my personal love, okay? Because in my capacity to feel love for a billion people, okay, and actually try and dedicate my life to as many as I can reach with that,

I tend to believe that prioritizing my own comforts and my own life and my own settlement, if you want, being settled, is selfish, to be honest. It's a different phase. Hopefully it will happen in two, three years' time, but it's not the phase now. It's not the right time for it at all. Okay, and yes, I wish I could get A and B, and maybe I'll stumble upon that wonderful woman that is completely aligned and, you know, spends that my trips with me and, you know, supports this. And if I do, that's amazing.

But if I don't, what would I prioritize? Life is a question of choices. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes. Download the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show. notes.