The Most EYE OPENING Speech On Why You're NOT HAPPY In Life... | Mo Gawdat

by 29 i had everything most beautiful woman on the planet agreed to marry me i could print money on demand i was trading in the stock market i had the big villa the swimming pool and i was miserable miserable miserable completely clinically depressed [Music] no if happiness is our default state as you think it is as i think it is why so many people unhappy basically we choose to sadly i don't know how to say it any other way we choose to live a life uh that leads us in different directions and we're very capable creatures if i told you that your task today was to make a thousand coffees you're going to find a way to make as many of them as you can if i told you your task today is to spend time with your kids you're going to find a way to make that happen and i think our modern world has started i believe there is no scientific proof of that but i believe post world war ii and the great depression our great grandparents started to feel that the most important thing to achieve in life is an insurance policy to make sure that they're okay so that they never suffer again that their kids are okay their grandkids are okay and so on and so we had a message cascading down over generations that basically told you the day you were born that you were supposed to go through life working really hard making money trying to be successful trying to be safe interestingly and uh and yeah and then when you're done with all of that and you've achieved all that we want you to achieve you're going to be then happy right yeah i mean have you really investigated this assumption the assumption of yes if you work really hard you're going to make a lot of money or be successful that's true but when you're successful will that make you happy i think people missed on the fact that there are so many of us who are rich and famous and swimming in in in money and being chased by paparazzis and clinically depressed the truth is you know hard work leads to success but success does not always lead to happiness we prioritized wrong and we got what we prioritized for i mean that's quite an interesting idea that humans are incredible like if we are given a set of priorities and goals we will achieve them well at least we'll get close to achieving them we'll go we'll move in the direction of achieving them yeah and if we are surrounded by the idea as we certainly are in the uk as we sit there in america that you need to do better you need to strive more work harder because then you can achieve more earn more do more with that money of course unless you're very conscious about the way you choose to live your life you're going to get swept up in that because that's the tide around you right and that really for me it speaks to something i've heard you say about before that at 25 you had nothing at 29 you had everything yeah can you speak about that a little bit yeah i mean it's not a it's not an unusual story it's just happened to me very very early i mean i i don't know how to say that i think i had my middle-aged crisis when i was 29. you know my definition a middle-aged crisis is when you've achieved everything you've set your mind to achieve and then you stop and you go like that's it that you know is that what it what it's all about and most people don't believe me when i say this but i i was born and raised in egypt public school public university in egypt so i promise you i you know my biggest dream when i started my first job at ibm egypt my biggest dream was that in 17 years time i'll be sales manager right and then life just took an incredible journey for me by 29 i had everything like i had my most beautiful woman on the planet agreed to marry me wise kind loving gave me two wonderful kids i have i could print money on demand i was trading in the stock market really before the tools that we have today were available so i i developed my own code and had found areas that i could make money literally when i wanted to i had the big villa the swimming pool and i was miserable miserable miserable completely clinically depressed and i think that's not unusual you graduate school and you go like okay i'm gonna work and make a hundred pounds a week and i'll be happy what what what happens when you make 100 pounds a week is you say oh i'm so sorry i wanted 200. uh you know and then you make 200 and then what do you say oh no i need a mortgage i need to make a thousand right and you keep you keep running you keep running and we never really stop we never really notice the change of context wrong and this is this is where it goes really wrong because yes of course at a young age when you're trying to establish yourself when you know you're trying to build what stephen bartlett calls your uh your your capital your skill capital you're you're you're supposed to work a little harder you're supposed to engage a little uh more you're supposed to try and find your place in life but as that context changes and for most of us it changes when you've reached your your basic needs right how how do you then become uh more interested in living than in earning okay and and i think the big big big big myth that people fail to notice is that you come to life a billionaire right that's how that's what what you you know if you live to be 80 let's say you have i don't know say uh um two billion heartbeats uh to live you you start your life with a credit of two billion okay and then and then you spend it say 60 beats per second just at an average so every second that passes you're spending from your credit exchanging it for other things in life so you know in the morning today i had an hour before we started recording i could have spent that credit swiping on instagram or i could spend it hugging you and sketching up and you know spending wonderful time with a friend which of those is a better use of your assets and so i spent my young years uh you know my heartbeats were going into exchanging my life my minutes my hours for money and i had the most beautiful wife most beautiful kids a comfortable life but i wasn't actually exchanging those heartbeats for time with them and so where do you end up you end up feeling empty you end up feeling deceived almost almost you know like you you a scam yeah i mean that word deception i think is really powerful many people i think get to a point in in their life where they do feel deceived man i i've done what i was told to do i've got the job i've got the mortgage i've got the car or whatever it might be yet there's something missing i mean you're right we this is a recurring theme i mean i don't know maybe five or six weeks ago johnny wilkerson was sitting in your chair yeah and you know like you he had his crisis very early in life you know at the age of 24 he'd got all of his dreams he played it was playing for england and he scored the winning goal in the world cup finals giving them the world cup don't do you don't do better than that you don't do better than that yes in that moment he felt empty the following morning he can't get out of bed he feels depressed he feels anxious he he struggles with anxiety and just lowness and indifference on the back of achieving what you would think any child in the country would say god if i could do that i'd be happy this is a common theme right so why is it do you think that many people yourself johnny wilkinson myself and many levels have to go through that process of reaching our dreams before we realize that our dreams haven't made us happy well i think to start with dreams will never make you happy right happiness is the absence of unhappiness you're born happy we both agree that we chatted about that all the time you look at any child when they're you know safe and fed and loved and you know there's nothing wrong with their life and they're happy right you know a nappy gets wet they feel discomfort they become unhappy they cry you change the nappy they go back to happiness right this is the reality of humanity is happiness by the way not defined as going to a party and jumping up and down that's excitement or elation or pleasure or fun these are different emotions happiness is that calm peaceful contentment i'm okay with my life okay i'm i'm happy i'm basically i'm peaceful with this i want this moment to to last right so so that definition of happy is within you you can only spoil it it's it's the opposite way you know you can only add to it crap you know you can cover it with with piles of stones and piles of loads and burdens and right and the more you cover it the more you cannot access it anymore it's the opposite that needs to happen you don't need to achieve anything to be happy you just need to stop being unhappy right now to get to where i got in life to to get to you know where anyone successful gets in life you make sacrifices so to become chief business officer of google x you travel i traveled during my professional career four of every five weeks now yeah there is joy in traveling four of every five weeks at the surface you know that's worldly lifestyle in reality i i had a friend of mine uh a mathematician like myself that came to me at the point in my life and said you know in a very geeky way he said i just was doing the math and i think you spent 62 percent of your life alone right and he was right rangan he was right if you counted the number of nights i spent in hotels the number of hours i spent on 16-hour flights the number of hours i spent in meetings where my relationship with the world was through a presentation and a spreadsheet what a waste of heartbeats what a waste of heartbeats right and and the truth is interestingly and i urge people to do that exercise look at your memories look at your memories your memories are the register of the moments you actually lived look at them and find which of them didn't have a human connection in it find which of them didn't have love find it which which of them didn't have aw and a new experience most of what have you do you have any memory of a slide deck that you observed when you were 23 you don't you know those things don't are not moments we live okay i don't know if you're a fan of pink floyd like i am but right and who isn't a good man uh and if they're not they probably just haven't heard enough yeah yeah they need to they need to listen to pink floyd but you remember the song called time yeah and in time pink floyd will say and then one day you find then 10 years have gone behind you no one told you when to run you missed the starting gun right and and i that really stopped me thinking to think because you know that it's now almost mid-2022 and you know in your mind that it doesn't feel like five or six months you know why because you didn't live five or six months you lived in the real world in those real moments maybe a month right if you're very good at it the rest you're living inside your head thinking about the past thinking about the future chasing for some money you know dreaming of a car that you don't need or a taller girlfriend that you you think is going to make you happy and then suddenly all of those moments all of those heartbeats you wasted don't register you haven't lived only the ones that you lived and if you really take stock of them they're beautiful moments that are really really simple that analogy with heartbeats i think it's very powerful um 62 percent of the time you were spending alone so you were taking those heartbeats by yourself there's something in that isn't there something quite beautiful that actually hearts heart beats that you were you were consuming individually by yourself stuck staring at your laptop in a hotel room trying to send a few emails right but heartbeats hearts heart-to-heart connection it's kind of like it's quite interesting that the heart is there to connect us with other people right so that means only 38 of your time where you're using the hearts absolutely and the way the hearts meant to be used abs you're so spot on and by the way it's not being alone that's the problem so so you know one of my future books one of the books i'm working on is called half monk and i i totally am fascinated by the idea of monk hood you know spending part of your life in uh you know in isolation really reflecting connecting but in that case your heart is connecting to you your heart is connecting to the rest of being not physically you don't have to be you know i don't have to be sitting in front of you to say hey i miss my friend i can have that feeling it enriches my art right but but the problem is what you said the problem is staring at the at the computer screen and wasting heartbeats on that you know sending emails that really don't require that much attention and spending time on that yeah that's where that's where we lose what makes us human yeah and and that again if you don't mind me just quickly saying we live in a hyper hyper hyper masculine world right sadly we've created a world that depends entirely on our left brains right and so most of our activities in life have become dependent on doing thinking analyzing and we've sort of almost demonized being which is a moment of silence or a moment next to someone you love what you don't say much at all or or or a moment of reflection or a moment of gratitude of admiration being it's just to be you don't do much being is also that incredible feeling of absorbing all of life sensing feeling playing flowing where life takes you and and and i think the challenge was this world we've created for ourselves which makes you end up being chief business officer and making a lot of money that you don't need that world is taxing you living being because you're only alive when you be when you're doing the only way by the way you can become uh uh you know alive when you do is to flow and flow is a mix of being and doing yeah right it's not just doing the task it's really living with the task let's just break down that for people because we are taught and i see this first time with my children who are at school i have real concerns over education absolutely i i feel we are untraining them from the default natural state of happiness which they have as children and i can even see it in my own kids they're starting to lose it because it's about doing it's about achieving it's about grades and it's not just the kids yeah it's the kids the parents the teachers everyone everyone's folding it because because we are swimming in the ocean where the tide is pushing everyone one way and i think this is fundamentally one of the big problems is that to actually do some of the things that you are inviting people to consider i'm inviting people to consider it actually often requires people to swim upstream and swim against the kind of prevailing tide and that's hard it's it's hard but so is everything worthwhile okay and i think the reality of the matter is you know we're not only depriving our kids of their happiness we're also depriving them of their talents and i i think there are many many things that can improve about our education systems everywhere in the world i think the one thing that we've done wrong is we because of the industrial revolution and capitalism have learned or have desired to um to put everyone in a mold right so my my late son was a math prodigy he was really really good at math he loved biology he loved you know certain sciences but he hated geography right i promise you when my son came back from school scoring a b in geography i would feel upset i tell him why ali why didn't you just score a seat you don't like this thing don't waste a minute of your time if i had a choice by the way i wouldn't have had him study geography at all but the system molds us in a way that makes us have to learn everything or try everything and that's the opposite of malcolm gladwell's ten thousand hour idea right the reason you and i write books and we enjoy it so much and you know they reach people and have impact is because we put in ours in writing if you if you and i were also told i mean we discussed this before if you have to practice for example that takes part of your hours so you become very good at it if you are recording this podcast it takes part of your hours but if i also add it to you that you need to become a good football player in the in the meanwhile and you have to put in the hours one of two things will happen either you'll fail at becoming a football player because you're not going to put in the hours or you are going to put in the hours and then you're going to become a less and less good podcaster right and i think what's happening is that when when i say you have to to you know swim against the tide you really have to look at your kids actually look at yourself as well if you don't have kids huh and tell yourself what am i passionate about what am i good at okay and and what how much of my hour how many of my hours are going behind that and then can i limit the remainder of that to the bare minimum so that i live a life that is true to what i actually want to be and and that thinking yeah it may take you a a a day or two to figure out it may take you a month or two to to decide and learn the skills of swimming against the tide but once you do you save yourself years of misery swimming with the tide in a very cold place and feeling empty yeah google x right chief business officer yeah that would be one of the things that people will say man if i could get there life would be great yeah and this is the kind of big myth that i think we're both trying to bust um it's i don't know it's this kind of idea that the way the way i articulated in my last what was this idea that we think we want to be tiger woods but we don't right what i mean by that is we just see one component of somebody's life so people would see you on stage in front of a thousand people chief business officer at google ads that's a cool job right so they they think i want to be mo right when i grow up or i want to get promotions so i can get mo's job one day right whatever but they don't see the heartache inside they don't see the fact that you spent 62 of your time alone in order to achieve that dream so they bust the gut thinking that when i get there or if i play golf 10 hours a day and i become tiger woods right we think we want it but what i think we've lost is we see one component of people's lives not the entirety and you can't want to be mo chief business officer google x without the without everything accessories yeah without them not seeing your children without them not seeing your wife you can't be tiger woods necessarily without the painkiller problems the the marital issues the the you know all kinds of things that come along with that so we kind of have to choose our heroes with care you know what what are we looking for in life who are we choosing to model right it's probably the biggest secret to a happy life if you ask me i mean to start with working at google x was amazing it really really was i mean i worked with such intelligent people okay it humbles you it really puts you in place and the original vision was we're gonna solve big problems that affect the life of a billion people or more okay and i promise you if that dream was happening as it should i would have dedicated my life to that right the challenge interestingly is several layers layer one is what you mentioned which is what's the other component of those lives in in solve for happy my first book i call that the snapshot right you you take a snapshot of someone on instagram and you know even if it's not fake if it's that true their true life and they've you know they're in a place you're dreaming of you don't know the other parts of the frame that are cut okay and you don't know the path they had to take to get there and you don't know what's going to happen after that frame right and you know you don't know what's inside them during that frame so i i'm friends with lots of influential people lots of billionaires lots of people who are incredibly effective in the world and behind closed doors when when we're alone you see the whole truth okay and the whole truth is nobody's living a perfect life that's that's number one take player two the idea of heroes in general is a marketing gimmick it truly is i mean you can watch spider-man and say i wanna be spider-man it's never gonna happen it's never going to happen you you can watch tiger woods and say i want to be tiger woods it's not going to happen and more interestingly you don't want it to happen yeah you want to be super wrong and that's what that's what you want to be right i want to be supermo that's what i want to be i don't want to be super someone else and and i think the the most interesting part of us is because of the massive advertising i call it advertising even though it's maybe comes to you from harvard business review or a magazine or a book or whatever or a podcast that you listen to we're constantly advertised to by what people believe we should become right so you know if if if you're elon musk you will tell the world that you should be a tech entrepreneur right because there is no way for any one of us regardless of how successful or failing big or small there's no any way any one of us can wake up in the morning and justify putting in the hours unless they've totally believed that what they're doing is the right thing to do okay and so accordingly everyone if you're uh you know looking for a committed relationship you go and tell all of your girlfriends or boyfriends you know that's the right thing to do we need committed relationships if you're at a stage in your life where you want to experiment and experience and and maybe try a different thread model than the traditional relationship model you're going to go around and tell everyone this is the right way to go you guys don't see you know you're missing this and this and that right everyone is trying to justify to you to behave like them not for you it's for them it's for their ego because if you behaved like them you start to reassure them that what they're doing is they're not wasting your their heartbeats right now because of that your only task in life is to define yes you need to be a superhero but what hero what what am i i spent my entire uh 30s and i said that publicly you could see it on the internet when people asked me as a senior executive at google what's your dream in life what's your life purpose which by the way is a big lie there is no life purpose but you know what's your life purpose i would say my life's purpose is to help startups in emerging markets of the world create technologies analogous to google okay and i spent because that was my view of my life's purpose i spent a disproportionate amount of my life doing it okay sitting with startups you know coaching entrepreneurs talking about investments understanding the cycle of money and yeah i mean some of them were trying to create things that will save the world and or change our health profiles or whatever most of them were thinking of another photo sharing app okay and and the truth is again context in that case is missing on many many levels the most important level is this is not me the fact that i'm so good at it doesn't make it me yeah the fact that i'm so good at it doesn't make it me that that i think that feeds i think into education as well actually oh yeah where there's a set amount of prioritized subjects right and i guess i could speak from from experience of the medical profession i've said this before there were many many doctors who i know who were not happy being doctors they simply went into medicine because they were straight a students at the you know the worshiped subjects at school and therefore because i can get a's in biology chemistry physics whatever oh therefore there's these three or four jobs i should probably do right the highest paying jobs yeah and so you get into the situation where again it's because what you're surrounded by i mean guess what you're really talking about here is an intentional life it's a life where you have decided or you have thought about actually what is it that makes me tick you know or when i spoke you know on your podcast recently about alignment one of you know my three legs of this core happiness store this idea that are we aligned and how we're living because it sounds like when you were at google x as great as that job was as great as the people were around you it sounds as though you weren't aligned in terms of who you really are i i was good at it i loved it i made a difference okay but is it really me i hosted uh just a couple of weeks ago on my podcast i hosted a lady called eleanor salman who basically was a very senior person in the unesco and suddenly woke up one morning decided to take 12 months off and go travel the world and learn a new dance every month okay ended up of course living basically a life she dreamt of and so she continued and learned 18 dances to to instructor level if you want and now her life is entirely around dance okay now the society will say are you mad i i mean you have a senior job in a senior organization and theoretically you're making a difference to the world and the question is so what right i mean i was good at being chief business officer at google x but i can guarantee you there are at least a hundred thousand people living in america alone where i where google x was that would do that job better than me okay but what i'm now doing by the way it doesn't matter if i'm good at it or or better at it than another person it is me it's what i love to do and by the way it pays for my four dollar t-shirts so where's the issue why why are we chasing what we don't need by paying with what we need and what when the only asset we have how stupid is it to live your life to make another dollar when you don't need that dollar by paying for a heart for it with a heartbeat that you need because you put it and it never comes back you you spend it and it never comes back and with your with your stress with your uh with your unhappiness with your disconnection with your loneliness when is it that people will sit down and say where's my dream what am i looking for and i i do that at so many levels that shock you okay you know my my definition of my relationship with my daughter my definition of my romantic relationships my definition with my uh you know with my podcast what i want to do with my podcast what i want to do with my books it's all it's all a moment of reflection followed by a definition of a dream a real dream not an implanted dream in my head yeah and then an attempt to achieve it that's life yeah there's so much thermo a moment of reflection reflection implies that you are considering your life you're being intentional about your life you're being conscious about the decisions you're making which i think is very very important but this other idea is sort of niggling away in the back of my head here which is this idea that this person you spoke to this lady on your podcast and she had this senior job and you were saying in theory she's making a difference to the world now i've never explored this in my head yet so bear with me as i try and articulate it if you're doing a job that is actually helping people let's say let's say you're doing a job that's making a difference yet it's not your true passion it's not something you enjoy right it's not something that is truly aligned with who you are are you actually contributing to the well-being of yourself and the wider world because you're not aligned yet you are on the surface helping people and that's a really interesting idea because ultimately and i want to talk about your son ellie very shortly but the things he said to you when he was 14 these these ideas that all you can ever make is that change in yourself and in your little world and that little will might become bigger it's kind of like if you're being disingenuous in terms of what you're doing even if you think it's helping in the totality of the human experience is that potentially problematic i know exactly where your heart is coming from you know our our common friend the wonderful rupee the doctor's kitchen right rupee is a medical doctor working he he he worked in emergencies yeah yeah so so he were he was really saving lives right and he's good at it and then he like you i think with a lot of what you do decides no i think preventing issues is much more interesting his passion i mean he's an amazing cook right and his passion is to say there is so much health there is so much wholesomeness in actually telling people to live differently so they don't have to end up in emergency do you know what i mean i think i think you're completely aligned because i know you're where your heart is huh what you're doing with this what i'm doing with slo-mo and as we reach millions of people at the prevention point not at the intervention point okay is that define help define helping because because that's this is the key the key is we think that there are defined uh molds in which you would be making a difference to the world like google x or building new technology or will your you know you're you're making a difference to the world yeah but if it it's not you and you are somewhere else you'll experience a very interesting curve you'll you'll be going from here this much difference to the world to not really effective at all because you're building now your new profile your new skill profile your new experiences and then if it's really you you zoom back up higher than where you were and and you have a much higher impact on the planet on the people around you because it's no longer you're no longer portraying a skill you're you're now portraying your soul okay and and when when you do what you do i promise you i know you're an amazing doctor but but part of your soul anger and which you and i feel when we have coffee is you're a human you're you connect you cannot you care right and you're so good at communicating very complex problems yeah there are many many doctors but how many of them are like that and if this is the truth of you my feeling is that by the way even if you don't have as much impact i think our highest purpose in life i said before there is no purpose not in the definition of you know a statement that you're trying to chase your highest purpose in life really is to live fully true to who you are because if you live fully true to who you are you fit properly where you where you are in as the gear in that big machine that we call life when you fit properly in there even if your movements are tiny the big movements of the machine will change the world some people might be thinking it's okay for you hey you must have earned pretty well when you were chief business officer at google x so you got there you've now seen it doesn't make you happy and you can do your passion and follow you know find your true value in life right they say wrong and all right for you to talk about this stuff you're a successful doctor successful author podcaster oh yeah cool great uh you can now talk about these things for that person who is struggling at the moment for that person who's in a job that they don't particularly like but it's their mechanism to feed themselves feed their family put a roof over their heads how does finding your true passion and i guess purpose in life how does that sit for them what would you say to them well to start with i think the beauty of life and the universe if you want is that what applies at one scale applies at a different scale right so if you if you take gravity newton's work for example around the projectiles or whatever you can you can you can apply it to this mug or you can apply it to the moon right uh you know of course in physics specifically quantum physics is different but everything that applies on sub-atomic level you know basically applies to all subatomic levels so so life has that repetitiveness rules of engagement to it and part of those rules believe it or not which most people don't realize is uh it doesn't get different when it comes to your happiness it doesn't come become different when it comes to your parenting it doesn't become different if you're a billionaire or you're just a fresh graduate trying to find your way in life now there was a professor in harvard michael norton who did a study on um i think several thousand participants asking them how happy are you from a scale on a scale of one to ten um um you know and what would you need to get to ten okay and with for all of them without exception they said i need two to three times more money than i have to get to ten okay that basically meant if they had ten pounds in the bank they needed 30 more right and if they had 10 billion pounds in the bank they needed 30 more it's really interesting the human condition absolutely it's that it's that constant striving i in in that little voice in your head uh my next book i call it the all-pervasive dissatisfaction okay that regardless of what you get you have that all pervasive dissatisfaction saying it's not good enough now i don't tell people uh you know believe me because i you know everyone will have to tread their own journey but the truth is i tell them just remember me a little earlier than when your life has gone by okay now a lot of people say but you have it all okay and i did have it all i had i had so much money i had no idea how much money i had believe it or not i gave it all away okay and i said that say that publicly in front of everyone i i have enough assets to generate enough money for my wonderful ex-wife and my wonderful daughter to feel safe i you and i we know you know i work reasonably okay i write a few books i do a few talks make enough money to live a reasonable life as i say i wear four dollar t-shirts that's a massive difference by the way huh because if you're dreaming of four thousand dollar t-shirts your life is going to be miserable chasing those t-shirts when you're actually not getting gonna feel any difference how much were your t-shirts and she showed everything when you were 29 at the peak of i tried everything i mean i i say this sadly ashamed of myself but it's okay to say that i've learned i i had 16 cars in my garage 16 cars right and of those 16 cars at any moment in time i could drive one do you understand and the other 15 were always a burden sitting there waiting to be driven so that they don't uh break down or actually breaking down or needing to be licensed renewed or whatever and the funny bit is that one that i would pick and drive i promise you this is true the minute you sit inside behind the steering wheel what are you looking at the road okay and i promise you i promise you it was so shocking for me when i was actually because i traveled so much so i would arrive in dubai and then pick a car and go out on a meeting and midway to the meeting when i'm not looking at the car i ask myself which car is it i don't even remember right and and you know what the more expensive they become the more annoying they are that's the truth now i uber okay i do have a car in dubai 2004 model love it dearly i have my son's car i decided to never sell it right but but that's the point the point is don't take my word for it take your micro life and ask yourself about your micro life ask yourself about that last thing that you saw on amazon and you were crazy and you're like i really need to buy it and you don't even remember where you put it okay look at that other pair of shoes that you saw in the windows and you said you know okay you know what i know it's expensive i really need it i really really need it and then you buy those pair of shoes and you've never worn them yeah isn't that the truth of all of us so so that that all pervasive dissatisfaction is not going to be cured by plugging more things in it the only thing that cures it is to recognize it and say what's wrong with this this is beautiful i love it yeah soft it's nice and you know i wear it for a long time and it's wonderful yeah but i couldn't agree more honestly there's so much in that i mean i i don't buy new clothes these are like literally i've had all of these for five six seven years and every book shoot i turned up two people if people watch because they illustrate but they're all the same clothes yeah yeah i i i that you saw five years ago i i they're the same clothes pretty much um and this thing about cars i think it's a really good one because i think i think we can unpick there i don't look just sort of full acknowledgement i'm not a car person right i never have been right so um you know you will see in my drive a ten and a half year old ford focus c-max that uh you're gonna you're gonna lose some listeners right now because you said this yeah but you're gonna win a few more but it's also not the car that people would expect someone who's successful to drive right but and you know the wing mirror the left wing mirror was uh my wife sort of bashed it somewhere about three years ago me and my son have got some tape on it it's been there it's been there for three years and people are like when are you gonna fix it i'm like i don't even notice it i honestly don't care because for me what car i drive has no value in terms of how i feel about myself it's simply a way of me getting from a to b now i guess i'm very influenced by my mum and dad by this cars were never a big thing at home for us either and i'd be thinking a lot about cars because i don't think having the nice car whatever that means to you is the problem it's your attachment to that there you go it's kind of if you feel that driving that car makes you someone and says something about who you are as a person that's why i think you are in a very dangerous place very vulnerable place because if you lose your job or you can't afford the down payment or whatever happens or you get divorced or whatever like what happens to your sense of self-worth so i'd love you to comment on that but i also want to talk to you about in the new book that little voice on your head which is just brilliant honestly it's wonderful and and i love the sectional giving at the end but there's a line the more things you have the more things have you and that's the whole that's it right that is it look i say this with a ton of respect and of course we all have our own journeys right but the the interesting side about fancy cars fancy fashion and so on is that you attached to them as long as you're not really capable of having them so fancy cars in my personal view unless i mean i'll say this openly i'm an engineer i built several cars with my own hands i love that thing it's a piece of art for me but to want to be seen in a in a fancy car is a form of insecurity it's a form of ego right it's basically saying i am not enough or i feel i can be more if my car is fancy right and and there's nothing wrong with ego by the way as long as you own it the minute your ego owns you that's when things become really dangerous right because we live in an ever-changing world your car will get scratched or your you know or it will you may lose it as you rightly said because of your job or whatever you're losing your job or whatever and and here's the game the game is if you define yourself with that car or that look or that body or that whatever title as long as you define yourself by that you're never gonna be happy for two reasons reason number one is you're trying to constantly convince people that uh that you are something that you're not right and when you're trying to do that there is a lot of effort and a lot of disappointment okay the more interesting challenge is if you actually manage to convince them if you actually manage to convince them that you're rich and famous because you're driving a bmw when you're not okay that's going to be more disappointment because the one they will like is not even you okay so deep inside you feel empty because they like your car but why why don't you like me and that attachment we spoke about all pervasive the dissatisfaction i you know i call them the three a's the reasons that our our uh our um uh logical brain makes us miserable is attachment aversion and all pervasive dissatisfaction right so the attachment issue is i need something to be within my life to continue to feel complete i need that boyfriend to not uh leave me i need that uh um you know cars that i can show up in and and that attachment is a absolute recipe for disaster now let's be realistic we live in a in a world where egos matter sadly if you if you have a vice president title on on linkedin you're likely to get vice president jobs okay and so of course for some reason when i was in the corporate world everyone was vice president right every cv which actually is quite interesting because people would sit in front of me in an interview and then minute and a half later i know like nah that's not true right okay or at least maybe your title is vice president but your skills are not there yet okay now there is a there is a value a utility to showing to the world that you are something i'll give you a simple example my books are written in in a highly engineered format okay i use uh very concise sentences facts science data to discuss topics that are very um you know maybe soft so so the the idea of telling people i'm an engineer okay or i'm a mathematician or i was the chief business officer of google x there is ego in that there is a definition i'm defining me as an engineer when in reality i'm just small right i have studied engineering but i'm not an engineer okay in terms of being now there is a utility in that to signal to people you know i like pink floyd there is you know if i wear a pink floyd t-shirt it signals to people hey if you're a pink floyd pen fan too let's come and talk about pink floyd as long as i do that and i don't care if people look at me and say but i hate pink floyd like you have such a horrible taste in music and i don't care about that then i i own my ego i own my my my identity but my identity doesn't own me if i start to become hyper protective and and and and touchy around that identity if people say you're not really an engineer you're a civil engineer like you know i want real engineering go to mechanical or electrical engineering and then i get offended and go like no and defend myself then i'm in trouble because if if my identity gets threatened i get hurt by it and here's the interesting thing and i want to leave people to think about this you only try to buy fancy cars and they take you over so much when you cannot afford them okay the minute you can afford them they become less attractive it's really interesting okay so as long as you're dreaming of that aston martin that means it's a bit of a stretch for you right most people unless you're really really rich and famous cannot buy that and so they dream of buying it when you can buy it you suddenly start to sit in it and go like should i buy the aston martin or the bentley or the toyota they're all the same right and as long as my need to prove to the world that i've made it goes away because i have made it okay suddenly i'm not interested in another object to prove to the world anything because i'm complete within myself and and suddenly you you i i said that when i was with stephen bartlett on his podcast i said look i mean if i go out on a date and she doesn't like my four dollar t-shirt then she's not the right person to me right i'm looking for someone that will look beyond the t-shirt and say hey you know there is a genuine good human in there and by the way if there was no genuine good human but still dressed in armani if she liked that then again she's the wrong person for me [Music] right at the start of this conversation when i asked you about the reason why so many people are struggling and unhappy you mentioned that's because they choose to be so the idea that happiness is a choice it's very provocative i know for many people so many people with me yeah no no i actually do agree with you firmly as you as you well know and i want to go here because there's always pushback at this point about this idea that we can choose happiness and for me when i look at your story mo and i think about your son ally who died because of medical error the way you responded to that and dealt with that is really quite incredible i said i don't want to go through that story a little bit because you for me on the outside looking at your life you were developing the skill of happiness you were training at happiness for many years before ali died therefore it appears to me that because of the realizations you had already had and the learnings you had already had you managed to deal with that situation in a particular way in in many ways you could say that you chose happiness in potentially one of the most harrowing experiences it's possible to have now i don't want to put words in your mouth perhaps you could explain to us when did you first start realizing what happiness was practicing the skill of happiness then maybe share with us what happened with ali and how it all fits together yeah i'm i'm grateful that you asked the second part of it before we go back to to you know the story of ali because some people may think that you know ali left our world and then i jumped and said hey let's celebrate we're very happy no that's not the definition of happy right the definition of happy to me is described by a very simple mathematical equation really i say happiness is your events minus your expectations right you look you look at life and events happen in your life and you compare those to how life how you want life to be if the event meets or beats expectations you're happy if the event misses the expectations you're unhappy and and that's really very straightforward so you could literally we were you know talking about aston martin's you can you could actually buy an aston martin sit in it and then suddenly go like ah there is a problem on the stitching on the you know and then feel unhappy right everyone else will look at you and say oh my god that's amazing but the events is there is a problem with the stitching and and then because what your expectation is that when i basically said martin it should be perfect yeah which by the way with all love for aston martins is never true okay they break down all the time ferraris break down all the time they break down more way more than your fourth focus okay now the the thing is the thing is happiness in that case is being okay with life i can bombard you with things and if you're not okay with them you're not going to be happy okay you know i speak to lots i have a very large number of friends i speak to lots of them that will have a wonderful human being in their life right and they'll that human being will be kind and loving and you know so many upsides but because of the world we live in uh you know there may be a little shorter than what the dreams of that person are or people will will go and say but i i want this and i don't want that and as long as that's your your way of looking at life you're never going to be happy okay regardless if i if i get you together with the most attractive person on the planet regardless you're still going to be unhappy because we're human there always is going to be something missing now if the expectation is the person i'm going to be with is going to be human okay he's going to be kind he's going to be this he's going to be that but he's going to be human which means you finally find happiness it's that calm and peaceful contentment of saying my partner is not perfect but i love them as they are this is why love is a question of acceptance now take that and apply it to everything including the loss of a child and i think that's where people really get shocked so as i said you know you lose a child it's the most difficult i swear to you i swear to you i wouldn't wish it on my enemies it is so painful even now i mean as i remember i i swear wrong and i have a pain right here it is physical i feel that a part of my heart is missing okay and it just surfaces every time i think about it and it's and i'm proud of it and i love it but the thing is it's pain and i think this is where people miss the point happiness let's talk about the opposite side there is there is pain and there is suffering okay there is a difference between them pain comes from outside you it comes because of the events of your life and that's not a choice that's unavoidable the design of the video game of life is that it will have challenges it will have harshness these are the moments like my son used to teach me these are the moments where you become a better gamer okay these are the moments when you actually strive and learn and stretch yourself and become better and these are the moments that most often you look back at and you say oh my god look at how far i've come because of that bully in school or look at how happy i am with my partner now because of that bad person i was with that taught me something that harshness makes us better so so this does happen the pain will happen and we will all have our fair share of pain in life suffering is a choice suffering is to feel the pain and then replay it over and over and over in your head we we were talking chatting over coffee about my dear friend uh dr gilberty taylor and angel is an incredible neuroscientist an amazing amazing contributor to our world and she did this research that will tell you that between the moment an event triggers a negative emotion and you say anger between the moments anger is triggered in you you get flooded with stress hormones you react and the hormones get flushed or you don't by the way and and the hormones get flushed out of your physiology is 90 seconds 90 seconds that's it you can only be angry for external stimuli for 90 seconds what happens then part of my next book is that stress cycle is repeated okay repeated how your your amygdala engaged and your you know your your stress hormone flooded your body and so on all of that is physiological and then the next cycle is that your your rational brain starts to look at the situation and assess if there is an actual threat if there is an actual reason to be angry and so on and so forth and for most of us what do we do we reinforce the reason so your partner says something hurtful on friday at 4 pm saturday morning you can wake up and say oh you remember that clip from 4 p.m yesterday let's play it again okay it's like that i i i openly call it the netflix of unhappiness it's unhappiness on demand right so so you simply you simply tell yourself okay i can make myself miserable again over and over by playing those thoughts in my head now that is a choice you know why because if you and i i know we're not but you know if you had a reason to be angry right before we started this recording and you sat down and you said okay i have now a guest i need to record the podcast you know what brain let's not think about the thing that made me unhappy let's focus on this conversation with mo you're capable of doing that you know you go to work you know for those who work in an office and you're obsessing about what your partner told you on friday and then your boss says hey by the way we have a very important meeting we need to discuss a b and c you'll tell your brain okay i'm going to come back to obsessing and being unhappy at 11 o'clock but between now and 11 let's focus on the meeting okay we all have that capability and yet we choose not to exercise it consciously or unconsciously definitely unconsciously and even when we become conscious about it i promise you there will be people that will resist right why because just like i said there is a utility to ego there is also a utility to becoming a victim okay there is a reason why we like to become victims which stems from the days you were two years old right you you were two years old your brother took something and you cried and became unhappy so mommy came and hugged you and say and said okay baby don't worry i'll get you ice cream right so we get programmed that be that showing unhappiness or feeling unhappiness or feeling victimized gets you a tap on the back so we want the tap on the back but hey you're not sick anymore okay and the reality and i tell a lot of people that i say honestly one of the easiest shortcuts to happiness is to realize you're not sex anymore i mean what your what you've just peacefully articulated there is actually for many people i would say a harsh uncomfortable truth truth it is a truth we we do have a choice in how we react and once you become aware of that fact you know i say you can practice it you can practice choosing differently you can practice to choose the happiness story in any situation most events actually they're really neutral it's this ah that's pure wisdom it's the story we attach to it pure wisdom that determines the outcome and so many of us and the truth this until about five or six years ago i was conditioned to taking a disempowering narrative and oh they i can't believe they acted like that if they acted differently life would be better but i've woken up from that i have been jolted out of that where i take radical responsibility now to go i own my emotions i am choosing this story right so now that i i know i have choice there i'm gonna practice choosing the empowering story different story and i think this is for me mo this is arguably one of the most important skills to develop for anyone in life is that understanding that we can choose this is pure wisdom i promise you events are neutral are you they're not neutral you can you can charge them negatively or positively oh and more importantly you can react to them even if they're negative you can react to them negatively or positively one guest i would suggest i don't know if you had him here arun gandhi the grand son of gandhi uh was on my podcast wrote a book called the gift of anger okay and and i i sat in front of him i said what are you talking about like how can anger be a gift and he said anger is pure energy right you can use it to punch someone in the face and you can use it to um you know stand up and change the world right it's your cho it's a choice it's really interesting more more interestingly again i guess that i really recommend is edith agar one of my favorite conversations in a lifetime okay yeah you met you hosted her yeah i mean look at that someone that is in the ultimate harshness of the world 16 year old beautiful ballet dancer you know drafted to auschwitz and it is i i i asked her i said so what did you think of the soldiers that that did that to you and she said i love them poor poor them i was like what yeah i cried i swear i cried in life i said i said what are you talking about and she said well mo if i was born in germany and told that it's now germany and then the world i would have shouted the same slogans too yeah look at that look at the choice yeah of how she looks at the story and now she's changing our world yeah she you know i'm in the middle of my uh book tour at the moment and as we were talking about over coffee before i've taken a very different approach i have nothing set yeah i want to get across i'm i'm genuinely feeling zero stress because i haven't created an idea in my head of what this needs to be because i've realized this is just self-generated if i think it has to be a certain way and i have to cover a certain amount of things then i'm creating a stress in my head and again it's this narrative that you know public speaking is stressful hold on a minute let's just question everything who says like when did that become a truth like a few nights ago i was in bristol and one of my best mates lives there jeremy and we were hanging in the afternoon i did my sound check and you know he said you need time to get ready i'm like no let's just hang out i haven't seen you in ages we went for dinner we brought it back to the dressing room and then it was like i'll make them on stage in five minutes and i just went on and then i just spoke from my heart that's it and it's gone incredibly well people are really resilient i feel it's less performative than ever before it's more authentic but the point i wanted to bring up was every night is different because i'm different every night my state of mind my state of being is different so therefore how i connect is going to be different but one story that comes up every single night is idiot and what i say to everyone is i was not the same person after that conversation as i was before i can't unknow what i know i can't unlearn what i've learned from her yeah and you know like the things you're sharing one of the things that i think about every day is this idea that she said that prongan i've lived in auschwitz and i can tell you the greatest prison you will ever live inside is the prison you create inside your minds yep and that's what we're talking about isn't it really at its core it's it's like what prison are we constructing in our own mind what disempowering story are we holding on to so tightly that's that's sending us down a certain pathway in life such that we then say no you know you don't understand you say happiness is a choice you don't understand my life so many of us we live in stories that we stay stuck in and those stories can be changed they can be restated you're not saying suddenly that the situation is not harrowing or there's no pain generated by it it's there's always a way to subtly reframe something so it's better than it was let's let's take it away from that to you because you have had your own harrowing experience right you've had an experience that um most people would say is about as harrowing as it gets right a lot of people would say let's say right so your beloved son ali died because of medical error yeah right so nobody would blame you if you when was that if you don't mind sharing 2014 2014 so eight years ago ish right no one in society would blame you at all if you were still devastated by that i'm not saying you're not okay you if you were um you gave up everything you just stayed inside all day you just watched box sets you drank whatever like you were numbing your pain it was completely justified absolutely perhaps you could explain what happened and then how you reacted to that because i think there's there's a lot of wisdom in there that i think will help people look i mean if if there is anything to be taken from you that would hurt it would be to take your son right and ali ali was um ali left our world because of a preventable very prevalent i mean he had an appendix inflammation this is simplest surgery known to humankind yeah i had it when i was seven yeah it's it's a few it's a it's not a long or a complex but the mistakes happened five to be specific and uh and valley left our world i mean preventable uh reversible fixable but they you know so many mistakes happened in a row and they were not fixed properly and four hours later ali was internally bleeding and his organs were failing and he left us right now again it's it's that pain it's that it's that outside world saying you know what your beautiful life as it was hugged him right before he went into the operating room most beautiful handsome wise loving man he used to call me fat hobbit okay i loved i loved it so much he was much taller and this is what you want for your kids to be bigger and smarter and and you know he was amazing and he hugged me and said okay i'll see you in a bit fat hobbit okay and then he got he went he left now you take the surprise you take the disappointment you take the anger and i looked at the surgeon and i'll tell you very openly i looked at the surgeon and my brother is a surgeon and i saw the panic in his eyes i promise you that surgeon ali went to the operating room at 10 pm at around 11 the surgeon came out and said something went wrong but we're working on it okay and i could see the panic in his eyes he literally i know that he's a father of children as well and he literally tried his best to save ali okay but you and i know you know mistakes happen humans make mistakes the question then becomes what choice do i have because a lot of people will look at this situation and say that's it you know the only choice i have is to grieve for the rest of my life there's no point living and i as you rightly said we shouldn't blame them okay but is that the only choice is it the only choice because there are other choices maybe not as appealing or as uh you know seemingly logical but there are other choices one other choice was what i did i i said to myself look i can never bring ali back and there is a finality to death that sadly just you know forces your hand there's nothing you can do but i can keep him alive by sharing what he taught me with the world right and it's a very strange idea because i i didn't i didn't think that way before but ali taught me everything i knew about happiness okay and in a very interesting way i could actually keep a tiny bit of his essence living in our world so that i believe that ali is still in our world somehow selfish by the way but i wrote soul for happy simply for my son okay i had a mission that was called 10 million happy and and 10 million happy may appear if you ask me as a mission that is trying to to help 10 million people no it was a very selfish very selfish objective of i wanted 10 million people to learn what my son taught me okay and in doing that i wanted to spread part of his essence to 10 million people one billion happy the current mission is about a billion people but at the time the griefing parent was basically saying i want i want i want a part of him to stay now that choice is not a logical choice but it is a choice nonetheless it's a choice to wake up 17 days after ali's death and sit down and write what he taught me okay and it was a frantic choice because i wanted to remember what he taught me before it disappeared from my being okay it's it's also a choice by the way to do too many so many things in life that might not be as extreme one you know a simple thing when you're when you're grieving is to is to choose to to to reflect on the positive can you believe there is a positive side to losing a child there is which is to have the child in the first place i had ali for 21 years okay we didn't plan for ali didn't expect ali and he became the biggest gift i have ever been given the biggest gift ever and now my brain suddenly takes that for granted and says hey he shouldn't die no he shouldn't have come in the first place if you really want life to be harsh if life really wanted to kill me it would have taken away my son before he even came now when he comes you take it for granted and you have that attachment i need my son i need him to be here all the time because i don't know if i will ever see him again because i don't know where he where he is right now and there is a lot of spiritual work that needs to happen for someone to accept death but you don't have to be spiritual to accept death because by the way you're going to accept it sooner or later it's going to happen to every single one of us and there is no way you can reject it sadly but you might as well tell yourself mathematically that i have absolute certainty that i will be where my son is sometime in the future i have 100 certainty more certainty than you know that i than i that i will walk out of here alive okay that's the truth this is the truth of life if you if you're alive then it's going to end up in death now take all of that and say okay so this is too logical moe you know where are your feelings i cried like a baby i still cry like a baby every day but that's pain that's pain that's the pain of missing him that's the pain of wanting to hug him that's the pain of wishing to have spent more time with him okay but i choose to be okay with the fact that he's no longer in our life in his physical form because he's now in my life in so many other ways first of all thank you for sharing that um you describe yourself as a happy person happiest i've ever been help people understand in your view because i think this may be confusing for people this idea that you can still have pain but your son isn't here yet you still describe yourself as the happiest you've ever been right that that may seem like a contradiction to some people yeah life is all contradictions huh you may love someone and want to rip their head off when you're upset at them right okay that's a contradiction you may love what you do but feel tired doing it okay you you know you may want to be in manchester but also want to be in london and life is full of those life is full of those as a matter of fact that's the only thing way that life is interestingly if you define happiness accurately it is that calm and peaceful contentment when you're okay with life as it is events minus expectations doesn't matter what life is if you're okay with it you're peaceful with it you feel that con and that calm is how i describe happiness okay you often go to the gym and your muscles are sore and they hurt but you're okay with it as a matter of fact you love it you understand it's pain but at the same time you're okay you're peaceful you're happy that you have that pain now ali's departure wasn't easy okay but there was a point in my life after ali left and solved for happy publish so sulfur happy published in 32 languages it became an international bestseller in i think 20 some of them you know it really really reached millions of people and not in in the book format but you and i know that books are not the only format right but but i sat down 2018 and i questioned this with my daughter i said hey i know this will make you very upset but i really you're my she's my best friend so i i asked her i said i need to ask you something if i had told you if i had told ali that if he died 10 20 30 million people are going to be happy as a result what do you think you he would have chosen and she without hesitation said he would say kill me right now okay that was the essence of ali ali just wanted to give himself to the world and perhaps that's what happened that he he if i if i show you my instagram feed and you see the number of people that send me messages that say they love ali okay if you wanted your son to be successful in the world what more success then thousands of people say i love ali i wish i could meet him now of course would it be nicer if that happened and he was right here next to me and we were having this conversation of course of course but life doesn't work that way life doesn't doesn't give you the paradox of being in manchester and london at the same time you have to make a choice okay and if you're forced to be in london you have to live fully in london do you understand yeah and and so there is you know in many many of the of the of the spiritual faith i think specifically in hinduism and islam it's actually most prominent is the idea of surrender not as a form of [Music] weakness okay but it's the ultimate form of strength is to tell yourself look if a train is coming on the track and if it hits me it's going to kill me it's absolutely stupid to tell yourself but i'm going to stand on the track anyway right the idea of surrendering to the nature of life that the train is more powerful than you that's the wise way to go through life and and you have to surrender to the idea that yeah it's very painful that ali left but he did okay and what good is it to obsess about it and live through the pain of it over and over and over for the next 50 years the happiness equation that you've come up with right that happiness sits in that space between events and our perception right i think it's a wonderful way that we can look at a lot of things so i don't know to make it super trivial and day-to-day um you know if you have to drive to work each day through traffic well if your expectation is that you're not going to get traffic and you're going to have a smooth route to work each day you're going to get pissed off every day good luck yeah right whereas if you go into it go hey i know that most of these journeys there's going to be someone pulling out in front of me um i'm going to be late sometimes there's going to be traffic then actually when that comes about you're like yeah i knew what's going to happen like i'm cool even even better you take a good podcast with you or a good music with you and you enjoy it exactly you you you change your expectation and therefore suddenly everything becomes easier right um you know i see this it's funny i was talking about this equation with my kids last night over dinner i was talking about my podcast guests and i say you know hey this is what you think of this equation kids love it by the way they got it straight away my daughter well both the kids but she has she's only nine but the wisdom in her oh yeah i'm like man she teaches me stuff absolutely i am my son to be fair that there's there is innate wisdom a lot for our children if we want to hear it and we were talking about this idea that many people get disappointed on their birthdays right and there's a few experiences in the family and friends and stuff where that happens and if you look at it through the lens of your equation kind of it says if you have an idea that on my birthday things are going to go like this and people are going to do this to me we're going to do that you are literally setting yourself up for an unhappy birthday 100 and this has happened you see this happening what people fall out or they didn't do that they didn't you know you know because you've you've created that by this expectation that you've created right so so i think the model is very practical very useful in those situations how would you apply that model to your son dying how does happiness work there or does it not quite fit so there are no there are two ways you look at it one one one way is to say what's the expectation of someone dying right the expectation is a hundred percent what's the expectation so everyone will die right what's the expectation of some parent losing a child or what's the expectation of an appendix uh you know appendoctomy going wrong and i'll tell you openly i spoke to my brother i say i told you he was a surgeon and i said khalid this happened is it even possible when when he when he called me after he heard that ali left and i said is this even possible and he cried and he said i'm sorry to tell you this but surgeons are humans too okay when you make a mistake in your business you lose a deal when we make up a mistake we lose a patient right and of course like every you know everything that has life in it we try and try and try and try and try and try to make it uh you know not go for mistakes like the f you know the faa will will have all of that those regulations for no aeroplanes to have accidents but because of the frequency of those things happening there is still a margin of error and i was surprised the the i think the second largest reason for death in the u.s is medical malpractice so so so for for if you want to be hypological and i only can say that now yeah losing a person in an operation is to be expected okay now but that's not that's not how the equation works the equation basically that when when you lose a loved one the struggles you have with are about your future not your past okay they're more about i'm gonna spend the rest of my life without him okay and if your expectation is this is not fair i want him in my life you're standing in front of the train you know the train is too life with us all its mighty wheels is not going to bring him back and so the expectation to set your expectation appropriately is to say he's not coming back deal with it right he's not coming back that's it okay and it could have happened in so many ways by the way it could have happened if i upset him and he never wanted to talk to me again and it would be a much much much worse torture yeah okay it could have happened uh you know uh when he was in boston instead of in dubai next to us and it would have hurt even more right and when you really start to think about it in you know in in in an interesting way setting a realistic expectation as you compare anything that you desire from life is step number one also you can look at this expectation by saying so one of the most torturing questions i had is we have the ego of a father right you and i we are fathers we love our children so the ego the the the persona of a father is supposed to protect their children okay and i draw valley to that hospital and i will tell you the first four days of my torture where how could you do that you should have driven him to another hospital okay and that basically sets the expectation of the father is the superhero that will protect all the time in a place that's not realistic the real the reality is i drove my my child to the closest quite significant size well-known hospital okay he was in agony and what the reality is as a father i tried to take him and to the nearest place to the right place to take away his pain that surgeon that did this operation before i think did it several hundred times in his life okay so i i verified that and yes he did now you set your expectations every time you feel that you're unhappy or sad or or angry or any negative emotion you look at those two sides events and expectations is my perception of the event real and is my expectation realistic right and yeah you know when my when i looked at that feeling of you should have driven him to another hospital is that realistic okay yeah i mean a father with his son in agony and the hospital around the corner and the surgeon has done it several hundred times before right what more do you expect from me i'm not a psychic i'm not an oracle yeah right and so my brain is torturing me but the expectation should be set right i tried the best i could and sometimes we try the best we can and life decides differently you know the last few minutes has she been describing this a thought pops into my head smo which is there may be a there may be a childless couple or a childless there you go that's person who desperately wants to have children so many would dream of having a wonderful child in their life i sat down to reflect at a point in time and i said okay with the amount of pain i have in my heart for losing him would i have ever chosen not to have him no i'll take the pain ten times for the gift of having him did you sue the doctor no no again expectations because which surgeon wakes up in the morning and and says i'm gonna kill someone today and destroy my career i i get that but the thing is i feel a lot of people that initial thing would be right i'm gonna sue the doctor i'm going to i'm going to i'm going to spend the night in two years on legal fees i'm going to get this i'm going to get justice i got justice okay so no i didn't i so so what mattered to me is was that no other father or at least if fewer other fathers go through the same pain okay so yes we took the right steps to investigate the mistakes that happened so that they don't happen again you know i i was very very senior at google at the time i lived between california and dubai and so i knew very senior people in the dubai government got calls that basically said we're going to come into this right away we'll find out what's happening but but but but the idea here was not to destroy the doctors how how did you not have that emotion because i think a lot of humans would have had that emotion is that because you've i i as i say you you talk about this um when you realized early on you know when you had everything the money the cars the clothes you know anything that anyone could possibly want to buy you had and you you said you were clinically depressed so you learnt i know ali taught you a lot about what happiness truly is is is it for me it feels as though you had been in the arena of learning happiness and then you get you get put into this into the harrowing situation this real-life scenario and you were able to apply a lot of what you'd learnt maybe more quickly than many other people because of that is that a fair reflection it is it's you never really learn for everything but you get closer and closer right and and you know i write in a very unusual way i write the last sentence of every book first yeah and the last sentence of soul for happy was happiness is found in the truth it really is that simple okay and that takes a lot of explanation you have to read the full book to understand yes but but if you want to uh to live in your fantasy story that you get that you told yourself and expect that life will come will conform you're never going to find happiness ever okay happiness is found when you acknowledge the story that is actually happening and deal with it right so the the the truth uh is that doctor and i know that for certain was trying to alleviate the pain of my son he didn't walk into that operating room with the intention of i'm going to kill that child he didn't okay now interestingly though there are mistakes that happen and the mistakes need to be corrected and i said you know we took the right measures so that nobody has to suffer this again but interestingly and i don't know how many of our listeners will agree with me on this but there is a definition of death that i think is the core of the issue right the core of the issue is if this surgeon ended my son's life yeah that would be a major major issue that surgeon ended my son's journey into this physical form for this life okay and if you have a a real understanding i don't talk about this from a spiritual point of view by the way chapters 13 and 14 and solve for happy and and i also touch on it in in that little voice in your head are trying to address that metaphysical part of of us which is very frequently ignored in the world we live in the highly material world we live in but the truth is there are many many many things that let me say this way the scientific method that is so ingrained in our approach to life in the modern world says if something cannot be seen and observed and measured it doesn't exist okay but that statement gave us the civilization that we're in but but at the same time that statement is wrong okay that statement should be if something cannot be seen and observed and measured then it's not the concern of the scientific method but it can exist yeah right i mean i cannot measure love but i know i felt it right i cannot you know i cannot tell you exactly what disconnected from my son's body when he died but that body that was left behind was not ali the essence of ali was something not physical yeah now i took that in solve for happy and i spoke about it from a very scientific point of view okay and the problem with science is that it's so complex that it's multi-disciplined and unless you bring the disciplines together you don't see the full truth and nobody's capable of bringing the disciplines together but let me give you two very simple examples and if you if you understand the theory of relativity and the idea of the space-time continuum and that the fact that all of space and time has already happened you realize that for us to be able to perceive the arrow of time to be to be able to perceive the the advancement of time we have to reside outside time you cannot perceive this studio when you're inside it for us to perceive this studio you have to stand outside and look at it okay for up for for a human to perceive planet earth they need to become an astronaut and go outside and look back at planet earth you can't perceive something when you're within it okay now that object subject relationship also applies to time the only way you can perceive the arrow of time is to exist outside the arrow of time okay and that basically means that the part of you that is aware is non-physical it's not within it's not contained within the physical world now call that la that part of you that is aware life let's not call it soul let's call it spirit not let's just call it life okay that life seems to be in a science that is not related to physics or chemistry or any of the sciences other than in one intersection point in the copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and in the copenhagen interpretation interpretation of quantum physics to simplify it we basically say that nothing really exists in material format until observed by a form of life if it's not observed it remains to be a probability of occurrence when it's observed it collapses we call it the probability wave function collapses and it becomes real okay this is why for example the the saying of if a tree falls in a forest and no one was there to observe it would it make a sound would it actually fall at all would there be a tree if it wasn't observed and quantum physics will say no there wouldn't be there would be the probability of a tree until it's observed take that and look at the big bang and uh and and and on quantum physics together and you would realize that this life form of life that is us that makes us animates us actually is what creates the physical it's not the other way around so basically if for the big the big bang is one big mass that gets condensed and then explodes right if it explodes uh you know to form planet earth you know 4.3 billion years ago to to form life you know if we the two three million years ago and so on and so forth it needed to be observed through those years to exist if if there was no life to observe the universe collapsing you know the the matter collapsing and expanding exploding 13.7 billion years ago there wouldn't be that expansion at all right so so the the game is life existed before the physical life is always outside the physical so so that if you really look at the i hope it's this wasn't too complex but if you really look at the big picture you would realize that life is not the opposite of death death is the opposite of birth okay life exists during before or after i mean let me say this again you realize that death is not the opposite of life death is the opposite opposite of birth you come you come to this world through a portal called birth you leave this physical world through a porter called death okay and life exists all through before during and after you know if life exists outside space-time then who was born first who lived first was it me or ali right no both me and ali lived eternally in another format ali's physical form was born after me and ali's physical form decayed before me okay but the reality is the essence of ali the consciousness of ali the life of ali you want to call it soul spirit whatever it is exists despite regardless of the physical now with that understanding suddenly something very different happens okay suddenly you realize that you know what my essence is right there next to my son right now and and i you i don't know if people will will understand this but i i speak to him very frequently yeah in very very very predictable ways okay with messages that are i mean let me not go go into that because it might appear to be woo and as i am a scientist right but but no there is a connection between us and the rest of being between there is a connection between my true essence and his essence and your essence okay at so many levels that our uh hyper focus on the physical world as humans has lost us the ability to connect to sorry interrupts if you are enjoying this content there's loads more just like it on my channel so please do take a moment to press subscribe hit the notification bell and now back to the conversation yeah i was i mean there's so much there um this allows you to continue to have a relationship with ali it's just that he's no longer here not in a physical form in the video and this is a realization i've had in the last couple years with my own dads who who died just over nine years ago certainly not the same thing uh your parent dying as as a son dying i i absolutely recognize and acknowledge that but i realize oh my dad's still here i can still communicate with dad i can still have a relationship with dad he's just not in the physical form with which i experienced him for i don't know 30 35 years or so but you know literally there's a picture of my dad just behind you on the wall um i think about dad and his ideas and his life and it infuses what i do you know it's it's a different way of looking at things it's like life is there before and after i i really love that i i think if you have a deep understanding of physics which i think is not easy for a lot of people physics specifically you would realize that the definition of here is quite elusive the definition of now is quite abusive right because in reality that concept of space-time basically allows us as beings not as humans not in this physical form but in our true essence like my son dreamed before he died to be everywhere and part of everyone that's the truth it was what two weeks before he died i think two weeks before he died he had that dream that he was everywhere and part of everyone and and and in an interesting way that's in many spiritual teachings the definition of death it is to is to be relieved of this physical burden and basically return to the source if you want the way we've been brought up the way society has taught us what we see around us clearly it clearly defines and shapes how we view the world and once you start to question that you can go down a deep rabbit hole right i see you you'd listen to me well what if that isn't true in the first place and i guess something quite tangible that i've been reading about recently is this african tribe who have nine senses right they consider they have nine senses we consider ourselves to have five senses right so you know whatever touch taste sights sound smell you know and so we see the world through the lens of those five senses but to this tribe not one of those nine senses is the same as r5 interesting like one of their senses for example is balance right balance embody balance in mind balance and spirits and it really i love things like this because they question everything you thought you knew like well who says there are only five senses who says that these are the right five cents this is there's a there's a section in the book i think it's in the new one where you or maybe it's in solver happy where you write about the word yeah and how limiting words are because we can only describe our experience through the words that we have absolutely and if and they're so limiting that's so limiting and you know what one of the things you were talking about before is one of my big frustrations with much of the way we practice medicine these days is it's all come down to what we can measure if we can't measure it it's not real but there is so much in someone's life and their experience that we can't measure that really truly matters absolutely and the science i i think i think science has actually become a cult in many places where if science can't explain it it doesn't exist it's like no no no science for me at least is helpful to um improve my understanding enhance my understanding but science is not all-encompassing that it can as of yet explain everything you're spot-on i mean i i say openly science is a religion yeah it is a faith it is a foreign it has become yeah right and and no it is the scientific method it's one of the methods yeah okay by the way spirituality is another method okay and you cannot exist without all of them to be to to see a full perspective you need a bit of science a bit of philosophy a bit of you know mathematics a bit of spirituality a bit of biology to understand this very very complex very complex world that we live in and by the way you're never gonna fully understand it there's no way right and and i think the most interesting part of this is how we attach to those concepts so much yeah and believe them to be true one of my favorite books of all time uh is free economics if you've uh i've not read that oh my god it is so eye-opening okay and free economics is basically using economics i love economics so it uses economics to tell you the truth is not what you see at all that your real estate agent is not actually interested in getting you the best deal they're just interested in getting their commission okay and if you do the mathematics their commissions are higher if they don't get you the best deal their only target is to convince you right if they can convince you with a bad deal great right and so this is why you know in terms of pricing between the seller and the buyer or the renter you know the landlord and the and the one leasing and so on there are so many interesting dynamics right and you know when when you really think about it how many doctors uh go to work every day because they want to save lives or how many are there because they want to make money right and and it's quite interesting and we take it for granted that the government is there to serve us not at all the government is doing most of what it's doing for votes right then the real driver the real objective is they need to be re-elected perhaps to be able to serve us but if they cannot be elected they can't service and and i think that idea of questioning again in that little voice in your head chapter two i speak about uh context okay and context is so interesting so one of the benefits of growing up learning the arabic language is arabic is so complex because every word has multiple meanings and every meaning has multiple words so you know there is a wikipedia page for example with 500 words on it that mean the word lion okay and and it could be from uh from uh you know it's so wide-ranging because the word assad is also the the name of uh uh of uh of uh you know of a person okay the word radom far is also it also means a man that's very good in bed uh and the word uh um ghanafis is actually the beatles but it can also be used as lion right and and so interestingly you start to use that in a language and suddenly the language becomes extremely contextual you have to look at the context and most of us don't revisit contexts of things that we were told to actually live a life that is true because we're so badly marketed it too yeah i mean there's so many things there um you know my parents from calcutta and india and bengali is or was the spoken language at home when i grew up and there's no real [Music] you know that no one really uses the word thank you in bengali and you know i grew up in um you know in england i was born and brought up in england so you know you learn it's important you say please and thank you um but actually that doesn't really exist in the bengali language at least not the way it's commonly spoken and it's inferred with the way you say it the way you say something infers the thanks and then just broaden things out to kind of perception and the stories we create it's easy therefore for someone to think oh they're rude they didn't say thank you interesting i love that yes and it's like well wait a minute but through the lens that they speak actually that that isn't part of it and it's something you have to oh in english or you say please and thank you that's it's and i think that perspective that context it really it goes back to even edith eager in this idea that we create these prisons inside our minds we have these perceptions of how people should act expectation right and therefore when the event doesn't meet that expectation we create this unhappiness absolutely you know the interesting opposite side of that is that the british culture in general being so formal sometimes is actually considered rude in other places right so so so you know you the the british culture will say it's very rude not to say thank you but being so formal and reserved sometimes in those other cultures like okay does they do they think they're better than me yeah right and it's so interesting i've experienced that when you you come into things or it's like no i don't want to be of trouble to you i don't want to you know oh no i don't want to put you out and it's almost insulting something no no i've invited you in i've invited you in for a meal you know absolutely what's all this noise around it it's kind of like exactly what i've done wrong it's yeah and and i think we'd be we'd have a happier more compassionate world if we could all understand that not everyone sees events not everyone sees the world through the same lens yeah um i i once was given a a a translation a dictionary of uh the british words and meanings and you know if you're not british you don't realize it but when you're when you say something like it's not too bad we think that it means it's good right but it's actually in the right it doesn't right it's not what you mean it was like you know there were so many of them it's so eye-opening but you mean something and we think of it very differently yeah well just to finish off um this quite wonderful conversation you know the broad theme has been happiness and relationships are clearly one of the most important ingredients for us to live a happy and contented life relationships with other people relationships with ourselves relationship with the world around us i think there's a lot of emotional immaturity in relationships i think a lot of the time and i've been very guilty of this myself um [Music] i think in the early years of my marriage i think i was very immature about what a marriage really is there is a perception of what love is that typically comes to us from hollywood's romance basically yeah yeah and i know you've got some interesting thoughts on this i wonder if you could just share um where does love and relationships fit into happiness what does that mean what are the different types of love and i know on stephen's podcast you mentioned that with the mother of your children you think that you've had six different relationships i felt i fallen in love six times i fell in love yeah and i think there's something really interesting here for people to learn about so i want if you share some of your thoughts yeah so let's begin by saying relationships are a lot more than just romantic relationships and i think love is way too grand to be fit within the word romance to to to begin i think that's really the most important understanding we need to have the narrative we've been given around love is a narrative that is more um a legal contract if you don't mind me saying this which is not true at all you know it's a it's almost like an engineered process followed by a legal contract so so it's basically we're going to go out and then i'm going to check those things and then i'm going to like you and then we're going to kiss and then we're going to do this and then all right that process is interestingly uh you know is sort of like if it doesn't happen that way then it's basically maybe not the right story or something like that um and there are you know some journeys that are favorable you know it's like oh if if we meet uh you know serendipitously and then this happens and i can tell that that story to our kids uh you know it's gonna be more wonderful while you and i know in my you know in in in parts of the world where arranged marriage for example used to be quite big for a very long time uh that that there are other stories and other narratives that are actually much more successful there has you know there there was a very good book uh 10 years ago called the paradox of choice which basically statistically measured the success of arranged marriages versus the success of falling in love marriages uh and it was like 4x um more you know more more successful in terms of longevity and so on now so here's the issue the issue is we tell ourselves that there is a story and that story is love okay if that is your expectation then sadly events will consistently miss expectations for the simple reason that we constantly change so the the woman i met as my college suite sweetheart when she was 18 was not the moment i married the minute we got married there was a difference in everything that we did both of us right which when we had our kids uh she moved from being a woman to being a mother and that's actually in my view a very different kind of being where her priorities change her psychology changes her you know her actions change her attention changes and the pressures she gets in her life are so different if i expected her to be in my life like the college sweetheart that wanted to go out and have fun and so on that wouldn't happen and and that continues to happen changes happen on my side too as i become successful in my career as i make more money as i get hit on quite frequently and so on and so forth now you take those and you suddenly realize that a relationship is a timeline okay and that that and i you know i hate to say this but it's just it's important to understand the facts so that we can actually set the right expectations every relationship follows a chart that looks like this it goes rip up okay butterflies and excitement and honeymoon likes you know experiences and then it declines and like the product adoption curve if you remember it just that s curve you need to ignite it again or end it okay or or live the rest of your life as a vegetable basically you know no excitement no fun no no life and so on and to ex to for us for me and nibel basically every time we changed both of us changed i was like where is where is my college sweetheart okay and then looked at the new one and said oh my god but this one is so cute okay it was writ really like falling in love with another woman right it was literally like breaking up and finding a different one but the different one was still her different version of her for a different version of me right now if if if this is acceptable by people then i think the reality of love and relationships the expectation that should be set about love and relationship is this love is different than relationship okay love is different than romance that's that's rule number one rule number two which i think is really important is relationship and romance will decline love will last so me and nibel are no longer together i love i love her dearly in slightly different ways every time but i love her dearly she's a prominent part of my art right my son is no longer alive but i love him dearly okay and i love you i love everyone that's listening to me unless they give me a very good reason why not to like them and by the way even then i will love them i will just try to avoid them okay but you know so so let's keep love out of the equation this this is a highly glorified way to sell romance love is there all the time now romance itself as i said will decline and as it declines you can deal with that as the truth you can either choose and and i think this is what's happening in our modern world today you and i come from a generation that's very different than gen z for example who define relationships very differently okay you and i came from a generation that was so stupid that they didn't accept same-sex relationships and and and and romance as you know as as as the world finally have woken up to accept that everyone's free to do what they want right now when you start to see it that way you start to say perhaps there are different models of relationship one of which is that traditional story that hollywood sold to us but that there is an infinite number of other models infinite i i promise you so i'm working on this as you know it's going to be my my book for for april 2023 i hope it's called finding love and one of the most important chapters of finding love is all the different models all the different models of you know when it comes to the scale of hook up to commitment where do you stand when it comes from on the scale of freedom to to confinement where you where do you stand when it you know and there are so many scales if you define that it goes back to our original conversation if you define that and know where you are in life suddenly your choices might be so different than the choices you're actually making okay you know i i had an experience once with a wonderful wonderful person i i travel all the time and you know i i lived in the dominican republic for around six months okay and at the beginning we really got very very attracted to each other and i said but that's wrong you know i'm not going to be here for long i'm here for a few months and it's going to end after that and it's going to be painful for the both of us and then eventually we ended we ended up in a place where she said but wouldn't it be wonderful to to be with each other for the few months right very different model than the original model that will say no it has to be this way or it doesn't work okay so start with knowing yourself second start with loving yourself loving yourself is is is is probably the most the biggest missing thing in the world today because if you don't value that self of yours you you don't you accept the wrong person and the most interesting thing by the way is whatever it is that you are tall short you know curvy skinny whatever there is someone that's crazy about this right absolutely so if if you manage to say i love me as i am and i'm gonna advertise me as i am advertise me as i am meaning this is who i am by the way if you don't like this go find what you like okay i'm just waiting for someone that that likes this yeah now and the third and i and i'll i'll i i this is where most people get upset with me is understand the economics of love and relationships and and this is a very very interesting thing there must be a hundred thousand models of cars that have been you know created in the world okay and there must be billions and billions of people that look at cars every day if you're a i don't know um a shelby uh cobra from 1960 some okay and you market yourself among all of the toyotas and hyundais and fords out there you're one in a billion okay and there is no value for you for most people who are not interested in the shelby cobra right but there are a few people that will think of that car as the most amazing car that ever existed okay if you're with those people you're likely to find someone that wants to buy it okay and you're likely to find that this someone will want to keep it forever and i think this is the problem we have in our world today the work the problem we have in our world today is when we go through relationships we try to market to everyone okay so we try to be available for every possible mate and as a result our value becomes diminished i tell everyone man or woman gay or straight whatever model of relationship they're looking for if you're true to who you are and you ensure that who you are is advertised as who you are so you don't pretend to be anything else 99 of the 14 000 people who who you're going through on the app will completely say ah that's not what i want right but around a thousand people will go like oh my god that's my dream yeah she exists or he exists and for them your value will go through the roof so embrace that don't absolutely embrace that so to find love love yourself and do what you love simple as that this netsport sounds fascinating you have an open invitation to come back on the show any time you want to talk about anything you want you make coffee i come yeah well we'll do that we'll definitely go deeper in relationships next time for that next book um look i i've really enjoyed speaking to you i still feel we haven't even scratched the surface of the things we could talk about um [Music] i think your words have been incredibly powerful poignant provocative for some people at times but in a good way this podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we're going to get more out of life i wonder if right at the end here mo you could share some final thoughts of wisdom you know there's people at the moment in the world who are really struggling they don't feel happy they feel challenged with this idea that happiness is a choice for people who want a little bit more out of their life than they currently have what would you say to them i'd say invest in that happiness approach so invest in that happiness approach rather than investing cycles about complaining about what's wrong in life or investing cycles about in success okay by that i mean um if i told you that if you do something for seven days you're more likely to get the next job wouldn't you do it if i told you that if you go to the gym you know four times a week uh you know you'll you'll have a a more attractive you know physical form would you do it okay if that's what what you wanted and i think the question is can i tell people that if you actually went to the happiness gym several times a week you will actually have a happier life right and the happiness gym is very straightforward it's a set of skills that you need to practice so yeah right it's a set of group it's a group of people around you that encourage you to work out on your happiness a little harder okay it's a set of beliefs that you need to learn if you wanted to actually if you wanted to accept a life of happiness and so i tell people openly just if you want to live a a happier life go to the gym four times a week right spend an hour a day listening to a podcast or you know reading a book uh watching a movie a documentary or something like that surround yourself by people who understand happiness are and are happy all the time or more most of the time switch off your your news feed that is killing you and scaring you about the about the world choose to feel differently about things like i posted on instagram um very successful post a couple of days ago about ukraine and i basically said look i am angry i feel angry that i don't i don't approve of the violence i don't approve of the of the injustice but i can also i mean the question is what good is angry doing for for ukraine is it changing anything is making them their life better huh and and my my question is can i choose to be compassionate can i choose to be loving can i choose to be kind can i choose to be generous can i take the same event and trigger a different feeling okay because if i can choose to be kind then i can actually make a difference i can send the donation i can do something you know and i think those choices those choices are the exact point of the happiness is to make a choice that says this might not deliver my success it might not deliver my relationship it might not deliver this or that but it will make me happier and i think when we do that we start to go on that track and we get there yeah really powerful really empowering um i'd encourage everyone to pick up your books that they're wonderful you know sulfur happy of course one from a few years back but the new one that little voice in your heads adjusts the code that runs your brain uh so much wisdom in there mo just final question for me for this conversation at least i feel that i have an idea of who ali is through the words in your book through the words that have come out of your mouth today and other times i've seen you speak it feels that ali is here in many ways uh his voice his his essence is being shared with the world through what you do if ali was sitting here in a physical form right now what would you think he'd say to you well done fat hobbit ali didn't speak much at all it was really really really unbelievable he you know like a wise sage ali would listen for hours and hours and hours and then say four words four words uh before he died uh he told me four you know eight words really and and they changed my life he said i never want you to stop working but i want you to count on your heart a little more often okay and i promise you that flipped my life upside down if if he was sitting here he would have said you got it fat hobbit because in reality i put endless hours of my life building technologies that nobody needed okay in reality i put countless hours of my life making money that i don't need okay that only gave me joy when i gave it away and i think the reality is that for each and every one of us the choice that we started with of where do you put your heartbeats and i don't have many of them left where do you put them so good i love him he was amazing he was the best in everything and i'm grateful that he by leaving us gave me the chance to get to know you and to speak to to others thank you ma'am thank you if you enjoyed that conversation on happiness i think you are really going to enjoy this one on why so many people feel lost and unmotivated it's not as hard as you think to make a change i know that you feel lost from time to time and you struggle with motivation but these practices will really make a difference

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 287,962

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: GaRha3H2xFE

Length: 123min 26sec (7406 seconds)

Published: Wed May 25 2022