E143 - Mo Gawdat: The infinite power of gratitude
The High Performance Podcast
High Performance
4.8 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2022
⏱️ 91 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mo Gawdat is an Egyptian author and entrepreneur. Previously he held the position of Chief Business Officer for Google X, he is now host of the popular podcast Slow Mo. Mo is known for creating the happiness equation. Mo has co-founded more than 20 businesses, and continues to mentor ten start-ups at one time.
In this episode Mo discusses how the death of his beloved son Ali, began his search for happiness and doing good. Although he has suffered tragedy within his life, Mo’s aim was to come through suffering and “make things better” for others. Mo discusses flow state, the importance of learning and how he achieves his highest performance whilst playing video games.
Mo shares the importance of not trying to cheat your way to high performance and “miss blocks”, stating we should be focusing on “looking under our feet, not at the target”.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, I'm Jake Humphrey and you're listening to High Performance, our conversation for you every single week. |
| 0:07.0 | This is the podcast that reminds you that it's within your ambition, your purpose, your story. |
| 0:13.0 | It's all within. We just help you unlock it by turning the lived experiences of the planet's highest performance into your life lessons. |
| 0:21.0 | So right now allow myself and Professor Damien Hughes to speak to the greatest leaders think as sports, dance and entrepreneurs on the planet |
| 0:28.0 | so they can be your teacher. Remember this podcast is not about high achievement or high success. |
| 0:34.0 | It's about high happiness, it's about high self-worth and taking you closer to a life of fulfillment, empathy and understanding. |
| 0:43.0 | Today, this is in store. |
| 0:47.0 | I don't know what to tell you, Jake. I have seen everything. I've seen everything. I've seen every pleasure, every joy, every pain, |
| 0:56.0 | every suffering, every test I've seen so much. And so after a while you somehow look at all of it and you go like, |
| 1:03.0 | yeah, so do I want one more of these? Should I spend a minute of my life chasing one more of these? |
| 1:12.0 | And the funny thing is when you stop chasing everything falls in place. |
| 1:16.0 | The experience of losing Ali was everything. Ali was my son but was also my teacher. |
| 1:24.0 | He was also my coach. He was also my best friend. And he was truly one of a kind. I mean, I feel that his loss is a loss to the world, not just for me. |
| 1:34.0 | We live in a world where that has been forgotten. |
| 1:37.0 | So sadly, what we do and we're very good at it is we build more products. |
| 1:43.0 | We sell them faster. We make them expire quicker so that you buy more of them. We package them really well. |
| 1:50.0 | We sell them all over the place and deliver them and in the process we're destroying our plant. |
| 1:57.0 | The game of life is we want those shortcuts. But those shortcuts for so many of us that got them end up with a disaster because you positioned yourself in a place that was bigger than where you are. |
| 2:10.0 | Consistent long term high performance cannot stand missing blocks on the way. He dreamt that he was everywhere and part of everyone. |
| 2:21.0 | Which yes, just kills my heart every time I remember it because some people say that this is the description of death. |
| 2:30.0 | So today we welcome Mo Gao that to the high performance podcast, the former chief business officer of Google X. Google X is the part of their business charge with coming up with the most crazy things you can imagine. |
| 2:41.0 | He's an incredibly smart guy. But he's also a guy who's changed and he's changed through tragedy. And you're going to hear him talk about that. |
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