Moment 153: Happiness Engineer Explains The Exact Formula For Happiness: Mo Gowdat

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

FlightStory

Society & Culture, Business, Education

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2024

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this moment, former chief business officer for Google X and bestselling author, Mo Gawdat, discusses the happiness equation. According to Mo, we don’t realise that happiness is actually very predictable, so much so that it can actually be put into a mathematical equation. Mo says the formula for happiness is: your perception of the events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be. This means, that it’s not specific events that cause happiness, but it is the comparison between the event and the expectation you have in your mind of how your life should be going. As a result happiness is all about perception, which means you have the ability to control your happiness and it becomes a choice that you decide. Listen to the full episode here Apple- https://g2ul0.app.link/wOrKoipLXHb Spotify- https://g2ul0.app.link/AUXUbRILXHb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Mo Gowdat: https://www.instagram.com/mo_gawdat/?hl=en Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Travel is a huge part of my life so it's an area that I'm always trying to improve and optimize and Uber who are a sponsor of this podcast are known for their convenient car rides.
0:08.6	However, did you know they also cover trains now too? Uber has a new feature where you can book trains on the app
0:16.0	which has been particularly useful for me when I'm doing talks up and down the
0:19.7	country in Manchester and Birmingham and so on.
0:21.8	Having all my travel options in one place in one app
0:25.0	is really, really convenient. There's no booking fee and you can also get 10% of your train
0:29.5	fare back as Uber credits to spend across the Uber suite, including Uber Eats,
0:34.4	rides and trains. It's win-win. So click on trains and coaches in the Uber
0:38.7	app right now to book your tickets. Terms and conditions apply. So check the Uber app for details and let me know how you get on.
0:44.7	So what is the cause of unhappiness as you see it, especially if you're building
0:51.1	sort of machine learning applications
0:52.5	that are gonna you know solve you know make people arrive at contentment or
0:57.1	happiness in a personalized way we must be able to know what's causing this
1:00.9	lack of. Allow me a bit of time to explain it because it's simple when we get it
1:06.5	but it's not simple to get to it.
1:08.8	So happiness is very predictable.
1:11.0	Okay?
1:11.5	If you look back at any point in your life where you ever felt happy,
1:14.8	there is one commonality across all of those moments that can actually be documented
1:19.7	in a mathematical equation. You've never felt happy because of a specific event in your life.
1:27.0	Take for example, Rain.
1:31.0	Rain doesn't make you happy or unhappy. There is no inherent value of
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