One of the great teachers of mind of our time, Mo Gawdats story is quite an unusual one.

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Mo Gawdat is a former chief business officer of Google X, also known as 'the moonshot factory of Google', a place of great innovation. He is also known as an author, a podcaster, a founder of various businesses, and an extraordinay human being in general. His story of how he learned to be happy and how he found meaning even in the most difficult of period of his life, is inspiring beyond words. He made it his misson to share his formula for happiness with the world, and we are glad to bring our small contribution, sharing his story and the life lessons he learned, as an example to us all.

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Mo was born in Egypt, in a middle-class family. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was an English professor. He was fascinated by technology from a young age, and loved reading. But there was not so much available to read, so he would wait for a book event to purchase those books which interested him most. He taught himself how to code when he was 12, and later studied computer engineering at Cairo University.

His career started at IBM Egypt, and his biggest ambition at the time was to someday become a manager at IBM. Early in his career, there was a big natural disaster in Egypt, and a lot of foreign aid poured in. As a result, there were many big contracts for rebuilding what was lost, and Mo managed to secure one with the government. But it did not sit right. He knew some of the IBM solutions were not ideal. Here something amazing happened. He decided to go to the ministry, clearly explaining which solutions would work and for which solutions they would better assign the order to someone else. In other words, he followed his principles rather than just his ambitions, fully expecting to get fired. But that is not what happened. Instead, his boss gave him a pass, only remarking that he would have preferred Mo to talk to him first.  More amazing, the ministry later came back to him, offering a much bigger contract, as he had gained their trust.

Later, he joined Google, and was entrusted with expanding Googles activities in new regions. This had a deep meaning to Mo, who as a child had trouble to find the books he wanted to read, as it meant he was helping to provide access to information to everyone who craved it. 

In 2013, he was invited to join Google X, the  division of Google that works on radical innovations, not starting from a solution which then had to be marketed and sold, but trying to solve problems for humanity and searching for any solution that could help fix them. Mo became the chief business officer, turning these crazy ideas into viable businesses.

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Somewhere on this journey, despite his obvious success and wealth, he found he was not at all happy. He had always believed the story that was told to him: become successful, and then you will become happy. But that turned out to be false. On the outside he had everything. A great job, several nice cqrs which he absolutely loved, a beautiful and great wife and amazing children. In those days, he said, he was so good with algorithms, he could literally print money on demand by playing on the stock market.

But even so, he found himself stressed, anxious, and dissatisfied, even clinically depressed.

One day he lashed out at his daughter, and could not stand the person he had become.

He understood something was missing in his life, that something was deeply wrong.

He had been very happy before, when he was younger, but noticed that over the years, and despite his apparent success, he had become deeply unhappy.

As an engineer, he figured that this was the main problem that needed solving in his life and took his own special engineering approach to solving 'the happiness problem'. 

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Mo realized that happiness is not a function of external factors, but of how we perceive them. He decided to apply his engineering skills to solve the problem of happiness, developing a mathematical formula, based on logic and science, to achieve happiness. For years he read everything he could on the subject, figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it. 

Whenever he felt he had discovered something valuable through his study, he discussed it with his son Ali. He describes Ali as his best friend, a little buddhist monk, always calm, always content and perfectly able to sense through the heart what his father struggled to comprehend through the mind. The result of this cooperation was a formula for happiness, which he felt could help anyone achieve happiness, regardless of their circumstances.

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Then disaster struck.

Ali, his son, who was a brilliant, kind, and joyful young man, who shared his passion for technology, innovation and games, who Mo considered not only as his son but also as his best friend and coach, died unexpectedly in 2014. This was the ultimate test.

Ali died after a routine surgery went wrong. He was only 21 years old. And for Mo it was the most devastating event of his life. He felt like he lost everything.

But he also realized that he had a choice: to succumb to grief and despair, or to honor his sons memory and legacy by living the way he did: with happiness, gratitude, and love.

His daughter Aya told Mo about a dream Ali had shortly before he passed away. In the dream Ali felt he was everywhere and part of everything. Those words triggered something, and Mo took it upon himself to spread Ali's legacy, spread his joy, love, wisdom and his happiness to the world.

As his friends noticed how he handled his immense grief, and heard about his view, they were so impressed that several of them told him to write a book about it and share it to the world. 

The result was called 'Solve for Happy: Engineering Your Path to Joy.' It was dedicated to his son, Ali, who was his best friend and his inspiration. Rather than to succumb to grief and despair, Mo chose to  honor his memory and legacy, using the formula for hapiness to cope with his loss and to find meaning in his pain. 

As a result, he founded a movement, called One Billion Happy, with the mission of spreading happiness to one billion people around the world. He believes that if we can make ourselves and others happy, we can create a more peaceful, harmonious, and sustainable world. His message is that happiness is not something that happens to you, but something that you can create for yourself. And when you do, it will change the world -  you can change the world​.