The Resilient Mind - The 3 Reasons You Are Not Happy - Mo Gawdat

Episode Date: February 28, 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 The Three Reasons You Are Not Happy with Mo Godat. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. You could be doing anything with your time. You're clearly someone that is being very intentional about the use of your time and making sure that every hour of your time is allocated towards what you want, whether that is playing video games,

whether it is writing a book. So why did you choose to write a book called That Little Voice in Your Head? I feel that the top three reasons for unhappiness in the world without competition beyond that, like they are by far bigger than all of the others are ego, lack of self-love,

and actually in order it would be lack of self-love, ego and that little voice in your head. Okay? And the little voice in your head, as I say at the beginning of the book, that I would dare say that there has never been a moment in your life where any event had the power to make you unhappy until you turned it into a thought. Okay. So anything could happen. It's the story you tell yourself about it that makes you unhappy. It's not the event.

It's the story. Right. And so if I'm true to my commitment to try and make the world happier, then I need to talk about those three topics in three different books if you want or maybe some content of some form. But that's not the point. The point is what struck me and really, really puzzled me was that I realized when I wrote Scary Smart.

And Scary Smart was entirely about technology and where technology is going and so on. I realize that we humans have the ultimate technology in our heads, a brain that is so sophisticated, so capable of doing things that are really, really beyond the capacity of any supercomputer still today. And yet, we know how to use our smartphones and our devices better than we know how to use that brain. Most people get trained on how to use Excel, but they never really get trained on how to streamline the thoughts in their head. Okay. And that appeared to me to be a very interesting engineering problem. And so the idea was to create that analogy between neuroscience and computer science. So the book in my mind was if I can show people that those brains, the neuroscience of them, is actually similar, very analogous

to computer science and the devices you have in your hand, because people already know how to use those devices, then that knowledge would allow them to use the brain as good as they use the devices. The basics here, which is the title of the first chapter of your book. And it feels like the first chapter really kind of introduces some of the inspiration behind you, why you wrote the book. You talk a lot about your wife and the illusions that you live under. What are the illusions that you live under or you lived under? Again, let's think about the bigger picture first. everything that you haven't visited and investigated and arrived at a competent, confident,

conviction that this is your own view is probably an illusion, okay? Which is quite striking because for a man like me who spends a lot of his time reflecting, we're submerged in illusions, okay? Everything from the value of a, you know, a branded bag, the way to, you know, what the TV is telling us, what the government is supposed to do and all of that stuff. Unless you've reflected on it and said, okay, I'm being told this, I'm, you know,

behaving this way, which might be contradicting what I have been told, but I'm feeling that way, which might be a third contradiction. And where is my reality? It's safe to assume that this was an illusion. So a big part of that little voice in your head is an admission of all of the mistakes I made using that machine in my life, or not all, but many, not even many, but many mistakes that I've made using this machine. Not all of them, there are many more mistakes. One, I think the biggest of them was a conviction in my early years that my kids were a burden. My family was a responsibility, okay? Which does happen when they come to life when you're very young. I mean, I had Ali when I was 25. I was just turned 26.

and, you know, I got married when I was 25. So basically, you start to feel responsible. You start to prioritize work. You start to go out in that treadmill, you know, the hedonic treadmill and just run, run, run, run, run. Okay. And the pressure that you put on yourself when you do that makes you start to think, okay, they are the reason why I'm working so hard. They are the reason why I'm stressed.

Okay. When in reality, if you had asked them, they would have said, Papa, just come play with us. Right. We don't want more than what we have. It's me losing context and running like crazy that made me think that way. And the basics of the challenges we have with our brains is that we believe what our brains tell us. Okay. So when my brain tell me they are the burden, they are the challenge, my whole being responds to that. My whole being starts to behave that way. okay and and i think what the reality that we miss when we do those things becomes uh what you have seen in that if you if you like the movie inception um you know when she when his wife had that thought uh you know we're waiting for a train a train you know basically that kept playing

in her head over and over and over that convinced her that this is not the real world that they are in a dream and that the way to go out of it is to die, that actually led her to committing suicide. And, you know, big opening of the movie that my favorite movie line of all time is what is the most resilient parasite. And the most resilient parasite is not a bacteria, it's not a virus. It is a thought that you implant deep in your brain and believe in it over and over and over through your life. And it shapes everything. It shapes everything, interestingly, without you even knowing why you're doing what you're doing is because of that thought, because of that belief, because of that ideology.

And people do the weirdest things. I have a very, very dear friend who's a brilliant engineer, brilliant engineer who had that thought in his head, he's now in his early 60s, that if I tell my ideas to a businessman, he's going to steal it. So every startup he ever attempted, he wanted to be the engineer and the CEO. Okay?

And as a result, everything he started failed. Even though the ideas and the engineering, the rigor was incredible. But he just couldn't get that idea out of his mind. And you can go all the way to people who have ideas that lead to wars or to destruction or to terrorist acts or whatever. It's just one idea seeded deep enough in our head

that really leads us to become who we are. And digging out that, idea and finding it. That's the basic. The basic is to find those thoughts and how you can deal with them so that you eradicate them so that you can actually live true to who you are, not the thoughts that have been implanted in your brain. And how does one go about even knowing where to start that search for those sort of limiting or imprisoning thoughts that are, have become the satellite navigation of our lives? It is, it's a moment of truth. It's a moment of honesty. You know, I, I think, think you started with that very, I can't believe I spoke about that, about the very personal

question about my relationship choices, right? But that's a moment of truth. It's not that I don't want someone in my life, but it's that if that someone contradicts priority A, then priority A is actually what I stand for, right? And you get those by comparing what you're thinking to what you actually do and what you actually feel. And it's a very interesting exercise. If you're coherent in something, if you say, I am vegan, for example, okay? If you identify yourself as vegan, but you crave eating animal protein and you feel that you're pressured, then you're not a vegan, okay? You could be a striving vegan.

You're trying to be vegan. You could be an ideologist vegan. You believe in the ideology of veganism, but you're not, don't call yourself, I am a vegan. Okay, you can then change that thought and say, I want to be vegan. Okay, that's a different thought than I am vegan. And you can apply that to everything, to every part of your life. I am in that partnership.

I love her and I want to stay with her forever. But I'm looking at every other woman and I feel that I am in jail. Okay. Great. Have that conversation with yourself. Have that conversation with yourself because what you're feeling is contradicting what you're doing is contradicting what you're thinking. So much of my life is filled with contradicting.

What does that say? So I'm thinking about, you know, I say that I want to be in a committed relationship, but then what I do is work all the time and want to work all the time and choose work all the time. So what does that mean? What does that mean?

You can tell me, I don't care. I'm not going to cry. It is, it's, it's, It's really, it is, look, you're not alone. All of us are, and it's not on one topic. It's on every topic. So there are, as I always talk about, there are three compartments in our brains. One compartment is what I call compartment one, which are things that are true and we know are true.

Okay. The other is compartment three, which are things that are not true and we know they're not true. And the majority of what's happening inside us is what I call compartment two, which are things that are undecided. We either don't know them. or we know that they're not aligned, but we can live with them for now. We don't prioritize them.

What matters is not solving them. What matters is marking them as compartment two. If you mark them as compartment two in your head, you go like, okay, hold on, this topic is unresolved. It's not within my priority today, but I need to come back to that topic, just like my choice of relationships, right? You know, it takes a long time

and a lot of experimenting after my separation with my wife to try and get to a point where I actually know that I'm going to put in the time and investigate where I am in life. Throughout that time, I acknowledge to myself and I say, this is compartmental too. I don't know what I want.

I don't, right? And the point is, so many of those exist. If you live assuming that it's compartment one, you're completely messed up, right? Because your actions are not matching your feelings and your feelings are not matching your thoughts. Okay? You're not complete.

You're not full. You're not settled. You know, that idea of equilibrium. Most people, the easiest way to imagine it visually is to imagine a pendulum, right? If your life is in equilibrium, it's in total balance. That total balance is the point at which minimal effort is needed to live. If you're in balance, you're not struggling. just like the pendulum, the pendulum when it's at its equilibrium point,

you literally need zero force to keep it in the equilibrium point forever. You don't have to apply any force to it. You want to push it a little bit to the right. You have to apply a force and keep that force for as long as you want it to stay within that place. And that's what we do with our lives all the time. That our nature, our balance, our equilibrium is not exactly how we're living. And so we're constantly applying effort.

We're constantly trying to be in a place that is not our natural place to be. We want to be there, so we apply the effort. Is there anything wrong with that? Absolutely not, because life is cyclical, okay? And life is all compromises as we started. But the trick is to say, when I am in that place, I am aware that this place is not my natural tendency,

and I am okay with that because that place gives me A, B, and C, there is a utility to that place. at the same time, I want to tell myself openly that I'm heading from that place to that point of equilibrium. That could be by saying, in the next seven years, I'm not going to do anything about it, but in seven years' time, I'm going to start to head in that equilibrium. Or you could say, I'm going to take a step every day for the next seven years, whichever way you want. And or you, by the way, or you can also tell yourself, I don't care. I know it's not my equilibrium, but I'm going to do it anyway because that's what I believe in.

I think that's very much at the state I'm in. If you ask me, I'd like to be in, you know, 50% of the year doing absolutely nothing, okay, with someone I absolutely love, with a very simple life, but that's not my life every day. And I know that to be true, and I will do it for a while to go,

you know, because I have a, I have assigned myself something that I believe requires that effort. Okay? The other thing that humans do, most of us, is we leave a lot of pendulums out of equilibrium. So it's actually quite easy to tell yourself,

look, my number one pendulum is my work. I'm going to put that in equilibrium. Then my second, you know, pendulum in importance is relationship, or reverse them if you want. The third is my impact. The fourth is my friendships. The fifth is my health and so on. And then the game is,

if you want your work to actually benefit, put the others in equilibrium, okay? Or acknowledge to yourself that they're not, but don't complain about it. Don't feel bad about it. Okay? And if you do that, you manage to then simply focus yourself on the one that is your most priority, and then life is in an interesting way linear that way. In physics, it's basically, it's instead of the parallel processing of trying to fix all of them at the same time, you're simply saying, I'm going to process them in series.

I'm going to fix this work element pendulum first. And when it's done, I'll fix the next one. And then when it's done, I'll fix the next one. And it's a constant journey. So you're not alone. I'm exactly like you. Constantly, constantly searching and constantly reflecting and investigating and finding that equilibrium.

Just going back to something you said there about what you'd probably want. Is it a case that you don't believe you could live a life where you have priority of your mission, one billion happy? and a partner who is is not impeding on the mission? No, absolutely not. I believe it's 100% possible. Just not met the person yet. Absolutely.

Okay. Okay. The economics of love and romance are quite shocking. Most people don't understand how that works. You know, if you have one requirement in the, if you have zero requirements in the person that you need in your life, walk out of your door, the first person that you meet is that person, right?

because you have zero, anything that this person is, is okay for you. If you have one requirement and say one of every 10 people in the world has that requirement, okay? Brunette or something deeper, you know, let's start. You know, I am straight. So I need a woman, okay? That by definition removes 50% of the population. Yeah.

Okay. I, you know, I need a certain age bracket in my life that by itself removes, maybe 70% of the remaining population and so on. So every layer that you add to your requirements sadly follows the n squared problem. Okay. So the n squared problem is if you're looking for a person with one criteria and one in every 10 persons have that, if you add another layer of criteria, it's not one in 20. It's one in 100. If you add a third criteria, it's one in a thousand. If you add a fourth criteria, it's one in 10,000, right? So it's constantly 10 to the power of, right?

Now, if you take anything that you want, I'm looking for someone, for example, supportive of my mission and free to travel, da, da, da, da, da, whatever that is. If that person is, you know, is described by six criteria, you're now talking about one in a hundred thousand. Do they exist? Absolutely.

Absolutely, 100%. Do I have the time to spend looking for one in a hundred thousand? I don't. I do, but it's not my priority. Do you understand? And we do that with everything in life. You invest in your six-pack.

I invest in my little belly, right? Why? Because for you, the ability to prioritize the six-pack at your age with your current, you know, lifestyle and so on, is actually taking a certain amount of investment from you that's justifiable by the ROI.

Okay? For me, if I wanted to achieve your six-pack, I'd probably take double the time, maybe, double the effort, right? And at the same time, I would require a lifetime that has a lifestyle that has a consistency in it that I may not be able to achieve now. And you look at it and you go like, damn you, Steve, I want a six-pack, but then at the same time, I tell myself, but damn you, Mo, you're traveling everywhere. and you're really, really being true to yourself,

that's fine. It's a reasonable compromise. Okay? So the question, just to be very specific, everything exists, but the probabilities of them happening. If I'm the luckiest person on earth, okay? I would walk out of here and she's the first person I meet, right?

But if you count that and say, no, reasonable probability you would say, you would have to encounter 50,000 encounters for that person to show up. If you're unlucky, not unlucky and not lucky, right? Suddenly it starts to become interesting. You tell yourself, and I know this sounds really weird for the romantics, by the way. I am completely a love, you know, junkie.

But there is a reality to life that sometimes gets you to prioritize things differently. It's really interesting because I've never heard anybody describe it in like a mathematical way before. Yeah. So there is mathematics underlying everything. I mean, think about that idea of one in a hundred thousand, right? The mathematics of that, it's true. When you see the mathematics, it doesn't mean that you have to act in a way that's not human, but it just allows you to understand how the system is working so that you can fit in. So the example I gave is if you're into Shelby Cobra's, right?

If you want to sell that one car among a million other cars on a site, that million other, that car will have very little chance of being found on a, general side. But for the fans of a Shelby Cobra, if you go to a show of Shelby Cobra's, everyone there, 100% of the people there are interested in it. Okay? So the interesting bit is that you can actually increase your probability of being found quite a lot if you're true to yourself. If you start to advertise yourself exactly as who you are and mix with the people that you believe are the people that you want to be with, right? That's, it changes the probability drastic reaction. That's so very, very true. That's very, very true. Kind of goes back to what I was saying

when I did your podcast about my hairdresser who was dripping head to toe in material possessions, jewelry. He's advertising himself to a certain audience that he doesn't actually want to attract. And if he is successful in that advertisement, he'd attract something that makes him unhappy and gives him shitty relationships. So you get exactly what you advertise. And that's the interesting thing. You know, if a young lady wants to find a committed partner, but goes to the pub every Friday evening or the club every Friday evening to find that partner, you know, dressed in a certain way, acting in a certain way,

she's going to get the person because people are, you know, we don't see beyond what you're advertising. So if that's what you're advertising, the person who's interested in this will show up, right? If you're into tango dancing and you go to a tango class, the people there will be interested in tango. and those people will be the ones that you want to create that relationship with. And yeah, of course, there are not a million people in the city that are interested in Tango,

but 100% of the people that are in that class are. So I guess you get what your advertisement attracts. So be careful what you advertise. Absolutely. And to advertise correctly, the one thing you need most is to know actually who you are. What are you as a product? Right. Those people don't know that.

Absolutely. Absolutely. You don't know who you are. It's multiple layers of confusion. You don't know who you are. You don't love who you are. You know or love who you are, but you're advertising differently

because you think others are more interesting. Okay. Or, by the way, you don't know what you want. So one of the most eye-opening, one of the chapters, So I'm writing all of this in a book called Finding Love. One of the most interesting chapters is all the models of love. And it's so eye-opening today.

Someone in my generation only believe that the only way to be with someone is to have a traditional relationship. Look at all of the models that are available in today's world, you know, all the way from hookups to a lifetime commitment. Everything's available. And when you don't know what you're looking for, then you're advertising wrong. How do you find out what you're looking for, though?

Again, it's the triangle. What am I thinking? What am I feeling? And what am I doing? Okay? So openly, some of us will say, especially if you may say, say, for example, you're a woman in her 30s. Okay? And you want a child.

You want a child. You feel it in you. But you're so, you know, so when you look at that triangle, what you feel is I want a child. But your actions are you're dating people without talking about the topic. Okay. And then what you're thinking is maybe if I, if I tell them I want a child, they will not want to be with me. Which is quite interesting because, yes, if they don't want to be with you when you don't want a child, you don't want to be with them either. Right.

And accordingly, there is a contradiction. If you want a child, you want to advertise to the world openly to say, when you meet someone, before you get too involved, you say, what's your? your position on the topic. 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.