Failure Throwback: Mo Gawdat
About this episode
Mo Gawdat discusses his algorithm for happiness and the impact of grief on life.
This episode with Mo Gawdat originally went out in 2019, but its message feels as relevant as ever. We’re re-releasing it to celebrate the 500th episode of How to Fail. Just occasionally, you meet someone who changes the way you think about the world. That’s what happened when Elizabeth met Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X, who spent years trying to solve a problem that seemed impossible to quantify: how can one individual be happy? After 12 years of research, Gawdat developed an algorithm for happiness: happiness is greater than or equal to your perception of the events in your life, minus your expectations of how life should be. He wrote about it in his international bestseller Solve for Happy. But that algorithm was put to the ultimate test when his beloved 21-year-old son, Ali, died in tragic circumstances. Mo joins me to talk about grief and depression, happiness as a form of fitness, coping with break-ups, the isolating effects of social media, why life is like a computer game, the illusion of time - and why we should always be polite to Siri. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Intro 03:23 Success Yet Depressed 06:14 Chasing Stuff for Joy 07:22 Engineering Happiness…
More episodes of How To Fail With Elizabeth Day
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- Remembering Gloria Steinem
- David Sedaris - ‘My Father Said I Was A Bad Influence Because I Was Gay’
- Failure Throwback: Phoebe Waller Bridge
- Mel Giedroyc - I Lost My Biggest Fan When Mum Died
- Prime Minister Andy Burnham - ‘I’m a better politician for having failed.’
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