Mo Gawdat - That Little Voice In Your Head: Adjust the Code That Runs Your Brain

The gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace

A black and white portrait of Mos son, Ali. The picture shows a young man with shoulder length dreadlocks. He is not looking at the viewer, but gazes at something out of view.

For Ali

Its time to open my eyes and see that life is beautiful

I m trying to make a billion people happy. Crazy, I know, but I believe its the only goal worth spending the rest of my life trying to reach.

The story of OneBillionHappy began in 2014. The trigger, as it often is, was a tragedy. I lost my superhero my wonderful son and wise teacher, Ali. He left our world as a result of preventable human error during a routine surgical procedure and with him took a piece of my heart. Seventeen days after his death, I started to write, and I couldnt stop. My topic was happiness the most unlikely subject to choose after such a tragic event. What I wrote was what he had taught me; the gift he had given me which I wanted to share with the world.

The result was my first book, Solve for Happy, which challenged almost every false belief the modern world had taught me about happiness. It was a true eye-opener. After the tragic loss of Ali, I developed and shared the algorithm I had used to help me move forward. Your happiness is greater than or equal to the difference between the perception of the events of your life and your hopes and expectations of how life should behave. Although it was my hope that this would resonate with readers and they would benefit just as I had, I never expected it to take off the way it did. The book was translated into thirty languages, became an international bestseller and sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide. People from all over the world wrote to me daily, expressing their gratitude and asking me questions about happiness and my mission.

Losing a child must be the hardest thing a parent ever has to endure. Even today, after so many years, I still cant find the exact words to describe how it feels. Ali was my son and my sun. He lit up my life with his love and wisdom. He was my best friend and coach. He was always peaceful and always happy. Although the pain of losing him still lingers, its brought me so much joy to know that his loss was the trigger that enabled me to find my mission, which is dedicated to spreading his wisdom, celebrating his life of love and compassion.

Two weeks before Ali left our world, he had a dream that he only told to his sister, Aya. He said, I dreamed that I was everywhere and part of everyone. It was so incredible that when I woke up, I felt I didnt want to be confined in this physical body any more. Habibi, Aya said, he dreamed he was dying. He did. He was! Aya only told me about this dream a few days after his death. My highly trained, achievement-driven brain interpreted this as a target, handed down to me by my master. I have never missed a target and my work at Google meant I had to set big targets to reach billions of people so once Aya had spoken I burst into tears. I realized that Ali had come to teach us, to make us love him so much and then leave, so that his departure would become the spark that ignited what was yet to unfold. I cried so hard; my body was shaking. I knew exactly what it meant. My life was no longer mine, but rather belonged to his mission. The rest of my life was going to be dedicated to making his dream come true. I was going to take everything he had taught me and tell the whole world about it. I was going to spread his essence to humanity at large and in doing so, through six degrees of separation after many years, a bit of Ali-ness was going to be everywhere and part of everyone. The target was set, and I was not going to miss it. I stopped crying, got up and started the work.

As any businessman would, I set myself a measurable target. This was to share the happiness model I had devised with Alis help with ten million people. Once the target #10MillionHappy was set, the universe itself conspired to make it happen.

Only six months after the launch of the original mission, I had already reached tens of millions of people online. The message was helping to change many lives, and it was clear that we needed to keep moving forward. The inspiration for increasing this mission from ten million to OneBillionHappy came to me during a short meditation. It was a moment when I realized that technology, which I had helped build through my computing career, was shaping our future beyond recognition. I realized that unless we teach the upcoming artificial intelligence about the essence of what makes us human happiness, compassion and love we would be in deep trouble. This is the core message of my second book, Scary Smart. I realized that Alis target was real, that we could reach not just ten million but billions. We had the means to go everywhere and reach everyone.

Our small team kept making progress, and the content we created has now been viewed more than 120 million times online a big reason to celebrate. But also to keep going. To reach a billion people, we need a much more fundamental change.

We need to get real about where we are in the world. The more we succumb to our negative thoughts, the more our actions become negative, and the more people behave negatively. You get back what you put out. If more people focused on being kind and compassionate to others there would be a ripple effect. People would start mimicking that kind and compassionate behaviour. We would start a positive Ponzi scheme, with each newly happy person bringing in two more. This scheme would have the power to change the world, and it starts right inside you, with the very biggest reason for unhappiness negative thoughts.

I believe thought is the most immersive of all illusions. Theres a little voice in our head always, always telling us what to do. Its constantly there, like air, so we deal with it mechanically, just like our brains deal with our breathing. Year after year, we take that little voice for granted and it takes us for a ride to suffering.

In my research I found that thoughts, and only thoughts, have the single biggest impact on our state of happiness. That little voice in our heads affects our mood even more than some of the harshest circumstances we endure in life.

In this book, I will draw from my experience as a software engineer and my extensive study of spiritual teachings and neuroscience to take you on a journey through the hidden corridors of your brain. I will aim to show you that, although it is highly sophisticated, your brain, just like your computer, can be highly predictable. That if you give your brain specific inputs and run specific programmes on it, it will always give you the same output. The most undesirable of all possible outputs, I believe, is unhappiness. Our thoughts are a major reason why we become unhappy. My aim here will be to show you how to run your brain correctly to live happier. If you understand exactly how the code that runs your brain works, it will be easy to use it to consistently deliver your happiness. It is that predictable.

In fact, your brain is so predictable that I can summarize the way it operates in a clear and concise user manual . This book is that user manual. It will include step-by-step instructions on how to deal with your negative emotions, repetitive negative thoughts, stress and other conditions you may encounter in the operating environment of your computer your brain.