M+E Daily

HITS Spring Keynoter Pushes Attendees to Be Happier

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — Mo Gawdat had it all. Successful career, wonderful family, all the “keep-up-with-the-Joneses” material possessions you might want.

But the former chief business officer of Google X wasn’t happy. Not at all.

“I had everything life could give me, and I was clinically depressed,” he said May 17 during a well-received afternoon keynote — “Find Your Moonshot and Engineer Your Path to Joy” — at HITS Spring: The Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit. Gawdat was “drowning” in everything that’s supposed to result in happiness.

In 2001 Gawdat began applying pure logic and problem-solving skills toward discovering why even the most successful of people are unhappy. And his engineer approach, using provable facts and applying formula, to discover a path to happiness, became even more focused after the death of his son several years ago.

“If I had cried for the rest of my life, nobody would have blamed me,” he said. “But we went on with our lives.”

Not only did Gawdat go on with his life, his focus on finding happiness — using an algorithm based on the Google X strategy of delivering a radical, ten-fold improvement — resulted in the “Solve for Happy” initiative, which questions the fundamental aspects of our existence, examines the underlying reasons for suffering, and plots out a step-by-step process for achieving lifelong happiness. And when he published a best-selling book under the same “Solve for Happy” name, his goal was to get his message out to 10 million people. That happened in just six weeks … so he revised that figure to a billion.

“Happiness is a choice, and it’s our default setting,” he said. “We were all born happy. No baby ever asked for an Xbox to be happy. They didn’t need to be told ‘You look great today’ to feel happy. That happy child is still in there.”

Speaking to a packed house of Hollywood tech professionals and studio executives, his message around putting less emphasis on your career, when it comes to being happy, was still very well received, with repeated applause and plenty of laughs. “The promise the modern world made to us is that success is more important than happiness. It’s one of the greatest lies ever told,” he said.

Gawdat asked those in attendance to spend just a few seconds thinking of something that makes them unhappy. And then he immediately walked everyone through a quick numbers exercise, to show how easily those unhappy thoughts can be dismissed.

“It’s not the event that makes you unhappy, it’s the power you give to that event,” he said. “It’s the thought that makes you unhappy. And we hang onto things for as long as we can. Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.”

Gawdat’s overall message: happiness is predictable and can be produced through pragmatic logic and relatively simple thought steps. And if people in attendance walked away happier, with a better feeling of what it takes to stay happy, he doesn’t want them to shill his book, but to simply share the message with anyone else who could use it.

HITS Spring was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH); the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and the Smart Content Council. The event is being presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by Expert System, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, Ooyala, Veritone, Amazon Web Services, Avanade, Avid, IBM Security, MarkLogic, Aspera, Light Point Security, MicroStrategy, SAS, Scaeva Technologies, Western Digital, Brainstorm, Zaszou IT Consulting and Bob Gold & Associates.