Bestselling Author Mo Gawdat On The Business Of Happiness

In the high-stakes world of business and entrepreneurship, the pursuit of success often blurs the line between lasting happiness and contentment, and, well, fleeting moments of pleasure. And according to Mo Gawdat, the author of the bestselling Solve For Happy, we need to be clear about the distinction between the two if we are to build truly fulfilling lives for ourselves.

Speaking to Inc. Arabia on the sidelines of the second edition of the Gladiator Summit staged in Dubai in November, Gawdat – a serial entrepreneur who was formerly the chief business officer at Google [X] (it’s now called X, “the moonshot factory” of Alphabet, Google’s parent company) – leaned into his scientific bent of mind to urge us to rethink equating happiness with ephemeral highs.

“Unfortunately, because you can’t sell anyone happiness, the modern world has convinced us that happiness is analogous to pleasure and that it’s analogous to the feelings of winning and reward and so on – but it’s not,” Gawdat explains. “All of those moments where you feel pleasure, your body reacts in a way that it gives you one of the ‘positive’ hormones that’s called dopamine. And dopamine has the role of making you think that what just happened is good for you, so you’ll want to do more of it, even though it’s not crucial to your survival."

"However, the problem with dopamine is that the more of it we have in our blood, the more we down-regulate, and so, our brain receptors will sense it less," Gawdat continues. "For instance, a 20-year-old might go out to seek dopamine – thinking that it’s happiness – at a party, but after a couple of weeks, that party will become ‘lame,’ and so, they will seek out a ‘wilder’ party… It thus becomes an endless quest for that rush, and I think that when you chase that rush, you are preventing yourself from the genuine feeling of happiness.”

So, wait – what should being happy actually feel like? “Happiness is a calm and peaceful contentment that you feel when you are okay with life as it is,” Gawdat replies. “Life is never perfect, but if you can find a way to feel okay with it, you are going to feel calm, and you feel okay. And that feeling that ‘I’m okay with life’ is interestingly the most valuable feeling we ever seek, because as humans, as survival machines, we want to know that life is okay. We want to know that we’re safe. And that happiness, when you feel that calm and peaceful contentment, you feel it because your body is flooded with another hormone called serotonin."

"Serotonin is a calmer," Gawdat explains. "It basically tells you that you don’t need to do anything, just stay where you are, and that’s it. The interesting thing here is that the only thing that down-regulates serotonin is dopamine. The more dopamine you have in your blood, the less likely you’ll be able to secrete serotonin, or to keep serotonin in your system. So, the more you depend on reward and pleasure for your fleeting, short-term, so-called happiness, the more you’re going to go back for more and more of it or more extreme forms of it, and the less you’ll be able to find calm and contentment.”

Here, Gawdat points toward the formula he explained in Solve For Happy, which is that happiness is equal to or greater than the difference between the events of your life, and your expectations of how life should be. “In the modern world, we very frequently fall short [on happiness], not because life is bad, but because our expectations are wrong – too high, too inflated,” he says. “But if you set your expectations away from the madness of the modern world, and into what life really is all about, then, most of the time, events meet expectations, and most of the time, we have every reason to be happy.”