How One Google Engineer Turned Tragedy into a Moonshot

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

For years, [Mohammad] “Mo” Gawdat was successful but not always happy. An engineer by training, he started at IBM Egypt, later worked for Microsoft and then Google in emerging markets. In 2013 he became the chief business officer at Google X. That’s the famous “moonshot factory” where world-changing projects that seem nearly impossible still get funded.

Then a personal tragedy made Gawdat channel his experience and energy into something else: happiness.

MO GAWDAT: There is so much humanity in this place it makes me cry how we forget it. We forget it because we don’t stop. Seriously, seriously! Enough of pretending, enough of thinking that unless I appear to be exactly what they want I will fail. If you appear to be exactly what you are, I promise you, you will succeed.

CURT NICKISCH: Last year [2018], Mo Gawdat left Google to launch a new moonshot: a startup with the goal of helping one billion people find happiness. He also wrote a book about it, called Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy. I spoke with him in front of a live audience at INBOUND, a conference of sales and marketing professionals.

[ON STAGE] So I want to talk to you about moonshots and operationalizing moonshots, which seems like such a contradiction in terms. And you’re the perfect person to talk to for this because you were the chief business officer at Google X, now just “X.” You also launched your own startup with a very audacious kind of moonshot-type goal. So just attacking this idea of moonshots from a big company and from a startup I think is super intriguing. And thanks so much for talking about this. If we can start with Google?

MO GAWDAT: Yeah, so the concept of a moonshot is truly at the heart of Google. It’s why I love Google and it’s why I joined Google. The idea of a moonshot requires that you bet on the problem, you tell yourself there is a big problem that affects humanity and it needs to be solved.

And so if it hasn’t been solved so far, that’s probably because all of the legacy solutions are not really good enough to solve it. And so you have to stay away from incremental innovation and go for a radical form of innovation, which sometimes it sounds like science fiction. And this is why I think Google X became what it is because we wouldn’t settle for a 10%, 20%, 100% improvement on something, but we would shoot for a 10x [1000%] improvement.

CURT NICKISCH: I’m fascinated by this because it seems like you’re in a little different universe. Like if you are a chief business officer at Google X, how is your job different from being the chief business officer at some other place? Is it the same job, but you make decisions differently? Or do you do actually do the job differently?

MO GAWDAT: It’s not the job at all.

CURT NICKISCH: It’s not a job at all. That sounds like a great job.

MO GAWDAT: You’re on the wrong side of this. You know, when you wake up in the morning and you really feel that you can change the world and you’re working with some of the smartest human beings alive and you can actually see that you’re making a difference, it’s not a job at all.

And actually, I think until today, of the hundreds, maybe thousands of brilliant people I worked with at that place who absolutely changed our world as we know it – even if you may never know their names – because they invented a tiny little thing on search that changes your life forever. Of all of those people, none of them actually worked for the job. They just had the passion to do something amazing.

And I would tell everyone in this room that if you’re not doing that, quit. And I mean that totally from my heart. Don’t quit tomorrow, that would be stupid. Okay? But, but take a six-month plan, an 11-month plan, a 16-month plan — even if it requires you to learn new skills. But don’t spend your life doing something that annoys you every day. There is no point. Don’t spend your life just making another photo sharing app. We don’t need another one honestly. So the idea of Google X was to solve big problems that affect the lives of billions of people. We would get hundreds, hundreds of those problems to solve. Our world is full of problems.

CURT NICKISCH: I looked down the list and it’s incredible, from the things like Waymo that were eventually spun out, separated out; power generation for your house using molten salts – like crazy, cool technologies there. To very tiny, tiny things. It was kind of amazing. How, though, if you’re the CFO of Google X, do you assess the financial risk, risk assessment, all that stuff for this stuff that’s just not conventional?

MO GAWDAT: You do them at the right time. Okay? So the problem with capitalism is that we start with the business plan. So X starts with the problem, right? If there is a problem that needs to be solved, there is eventually going to be a way to make money. Now at the beginning of – and Google in general, I believe.

If you know if there is going to be an expense on the way that expense is going to be tiny at the beginning. Tiny, of course, is compared to the scale of Google. To have two engineers on a problem for four weeks doesn’t kill Google, right? To have six people from the executive board reviewing a business plan 16 times to approve the two engineers sit on it for four weeks is stupid. Right?

And the idea is can you actually realize that? Can you just go out there and give it what it needs? And hopefully, if it is worth it, we will double down on it. If it’s not worth that, we will kill it.

CURT NICKISCH: How did you decide when something wasn’t worth it?

MO GAWDAT: Normally the teams themselves decided. You know, by giving people that assurance in them that, you know, your job is not dependent on pretending that this is working, that you can actually enjoy another challenge immediately if you just tell us that this one is not working. They came out and said, “I was hoping that this would work, that breakthrough technology is not ready yet. It might take a little longer.” And so we ended up saying, “Okay, what do you want to do next?”

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. When something fails, how do you manage people’s emotions around that?

MO GAWDAT: Astro, our CEO, used to – Astro Teller – Astro used to have celebrations where people would celebrate the end of a project in our biweekly get together in front of everybody. And it was deemed to be the brave thing to do to admit that something didn’t work, not because you didn’t do your job, but because sometimes physics is against you. It’s like, you know, it just is not possible to get something to fly longer than a certain amount of time without enough gas in it or whatever.

It literally is a cultural thing, right? If the culture is, I need to pretend that everything’s fine all the time – which is a very American thing, if I say. Then you’re going to do that and nothing is going to ever be fine.

If the culture is, “Hey, by the way, this is messed up. Can anyone help? No one can help? Okay. Let’s close it.”

CURT NICKISCH: What were those celebrations like?

MO GAWDAT: People would get bonuses and we would open Champagne.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

CURT NICKISCH: That sounds great.

MO GAWDAT: There’s nothing wrong with failure. Isn’t that what we always read in Harvard Business Review? I think if you even take it to your personal life, that’s really where it becomes interesting.

CURT NICKISCH: How so?

MO GAWDAT: I would say openly that we live our modern lives impacted so heavily by illusions that are not at all true. One of the biggest illusions – I always say publicly in my talks about happiness, that the second biggest reason for unhappiness in our modern world today is ego. It’s that constant attempt to pretend that you’re something that you’re not – which is if you understand game theory is doomed for failure whichever way you play.

Because if people approve of your ego, they’re approving of something that is not you, and if they reject your ego, you’re wasting endless cycles to prove something that is not your reality at all. It’s so much effort and so much disappointment. And so to realize you without your ego, without the masks that you wear, is good enough.

You know, sometimes you may think that in a certain management style that people should show up at nine and get things done in a very specific way and end up at 7:00 PM and that’s the right way to do it. And you know that could be horrible if you’re in a design firm. We tend to position certain things as good as other things are bad.

Now that’s a herd mentality. There is no good or bad. There is a fit of who you are to something and if you drop your ego and focus on who you really are and what you can do with that person that you are, there’s going to be something that is amazing that you can uniquely achieve that no one else can achieve. And you know, it wouldn’t only be more successful, but I would say it would be a lot more happy doing it.

CURT NICKISCH: When did you learn to drop your ego?

MO GAWDAT: I still am learning every single day of my life. Believe it or not. It’s my biggest project today for the last four and a half years to attack my egos one by one.

CURT NICKISCH: It’s not the moonshot though.

MO GAWDAT: It’s a massive moonshot. It is the biggest thing that you ever have to do. So as you can see, I always wear, I hope you think, cool T-shirts, $19 T-shirts. And you may think that this is no ego. It’s like, oh, he’s so simple. Nope, it is an ego. I’m giving you an ego that I’m simple. And there is a big difference between telling yourself, “Hey, hey, I’m easygoing. You know, Silicon Valley look” No, that’s an ego. It is.

The truth is we will always have egos. The point is, can I not associate with it? Can I own my ego and not let it own me? Can I not believe it? Okay, and when we do that, it really, you know, the Sufis call that “to die before you die.” You know, if you really take the definition of death, death is to leave everything physical behind, to leave the physical world and all of the illusions of the physical world.

And is there a way where you can actually leave it in your heart first before you’re forced to leave it through death. And that is an exercise of self-reflection and introspection that will take you ages to actually view your egos and then let them go one by one, mask after mask.

CURT NICKISCH: So there was a death in your life that launched you regrettably – I don’t know what the right adverb is – on your personal moonshot. can you tell us about that?

MO GAWDAT: Yeah, I lost. I regrettably lost my son, Ali, but I don’t regret being launched on the moonshot. These are two very different sides to the same coin. My wonderful son and best friend was diagnosed with a simple appendix inflammation that prescribed an appendectomy and the simplest operation known to mankind, and five things in a row went wrong, and we lost him

And even today, four and a half years later, it hurts. Like, I can’t even describe how much it hurts.

CURT NICKISCH:  I’m sorry, and we all are.

MO GAWDAT: Don’t be. Ali is in an amazing place and I’m absolutely certain I can guarantee you that, that I’m going to die too. And so I’m absolutely okay too. And there is a very interesting way for us to start seeing the truth.

And when you see the truth, you suddenly realize what’s the fuss all about. I mean, I could live here for 20 more years or I could go tonight, right? And there is absolutely zero guarantee that I would stay until tomorrow. Where will I go? I will go where Ali is. Ali is fine. The issue with losing a child is you, it’s not your child. It’s how your heart aches from missing him. It’s how your heart aches from feeling that you somehow should have protected him, which is an absolute illusion.

Anyway, Ali left. And so instead of me you know, closing my door and crying for the next 27 years, I decided to do the most unexpected thing ever. I decided to write down his model. So we worked on a model of happiness for 12 years together, and you know, it’s an engineer’s view of happiness that is informed by a gentleman that had happiness innate in him.

So I wrote it down with an objective – businessman-like. I told myself I have a target of making 10 million people happy. If 10 million people sew Ali’s model of happiness, then I’ve honored him and hopefully, somehow, you know, it feels a little better that, you know, it wasn’t for nothing that he left.

CURT NICKISCH: I’m just curious like how, you know, it was different than just sort of seeing a need and then writing a business plan or coming up with a technology for it. Right? It’s like a mix of both your personal experience and your professional acumen that you’ve developed over a long time at amazing places. So how were you thinking about that at that time?

MO GAWDAT: There is a way, a method that you can follow to meditate and actually find peace. You know, in the Buddhist practice, it’s like 17 years of meditation. And then you do three years of I don’t know what. None of us has the time for that. Okay?

And so there is an interesting way of saying in the modern world that we live in, is there a different way, where I can find my happiness through the skills I have acquired in the modern world? And the reality is three of every four people you will meet in the U.S., learned to prioritize their logic and analytical thinking over their EQ, over their emotional intelligence.

And so my approach has been the result of 12 years of research myself as a person who had learned to prioritize his IQ and basically communicated in a language that fits the modern world. So instead of saying meditation, I speak about how you can be present in your meeting rooms, how you can be present when you’re with your children, how can you do this? How can you do that? In a way that I may think allows me to be meditating 16 hours a day instead of ten minutes in the morning? Right?

And when you start to use this approach of, you know I’m going to use a different tool, I’m going to use a different technology. It actually starts to work. Happiness is hyper predictable. In Solve for Happy, I use an equation to describe to you exactly how your brain works to deliver happiness and unhappiness. If it’s that predictable, then perhaps there is a way for you to understand why the equation breaks and remove those reasons for the malfunction of our physical form that leads us to unhappiness.

But it does require an investment of your time. Just like, you know, so many of us would go to the gym three to four times a week to stay fit. How many of us spend an hour a day, three to four times a week, watching a video about happiness or discussing the topic or spending time with people who are clearly happy to learn from them? We don’t invest in it, and yet we expect that somehow magically, the world is going to provide for us and we’re going to find happiness. That’s not how it works at all.

CURT NICKISCH: So is this what you consider your personal moonshot now?

MO GAWDAT: So my personal moonshot is to get a billion people on that road, on that path. I know some of you may think I’m crazy. A billion is not crazy at all in today’s world. So we used to joke at a point in time and say that it took Jesus, you know, 2000 years to reach a billion people and it took Larry Page 15, right?

The internet really is empowering. Somehow I already have close to 200 million views, right? And so the trick is this, there are three steps to 1 billion happy, and those three steps are actually not that complicated at all. I try to tell people that happiness is your birthright. You were born happy. It’s predictable to the point that it can be in an equation. And if you invest in it, you will reach it. Step number two is I ask people to actually invest in it. And then when you do, and really that’s the key. This is almost the businessman in me. We need to have compassion in our heart to want others to be happy because our world is not going to succeed otherwise. We need to feel inside of us that it’s not only about me feeling happy, it’s about me telling my sister and my best friend.

If each of us, if every one of us tells two people who tell two people you can work the math. This is the absolute definition of the exponential function. It scales, right? And in my mathematics from where we are today, it will take us five years to get to a billion people.

CURT NICKISCH: How do you operationalize this? Is this just a startup? Measuring things and data and all that kind of stuff?  Is it just a boring business?

MO GAWDAT: This is not a startup, it’s a not-for-profit, right? If I get to a billion people at the end of this and go totally bankrupt, I think that would be a very good investment of my life, honestly. I actually also say that success is that we reach a billion people and I completely get forgotten.

So how do I operationalize it? There is so much more than books to the way you can spread the information in the world today. So I only left Google in March [2018], but until then I was trying to produce as much video content and podcasts content as I could, which are definitely much more effective ways of delivering knowledge today. As we speak I’m working on so many angles of the topic of happiness that extend from apps and technology to searchable teachers contents, you know, and spiritual teacher content around the world, all the way to a way to value happiness on the blockchain.

And so if we put all of this together, the concept is can I give you the spark so that you actually decide to prioritize your happiness and then give you the tools in your own local language to take charge? I’m not going to hold your hand because the mission is 1 billion happy, not 6 billion happy, not 7 billion happy. So by definition, I’m looking for those who will prioritize their happiness and take charge – sort of the entrepreneurs of happiness, right?

When they take charge, then they’re able to become the ambassadors that push this forward so they can take not only charge of themselves, but they can own their part of the Ponzi scheme, the positive Ponzi scheme, and have a million people affected by their happiness.

CURT NICKISCH: When you do this job, that isn’t a job, how much does it remind you of working at Google X?

MO GAWDAT: I use everything I’ve ever learned at Google and Google X here. So the whole idea of understanding the web and understanding how the web works are really – you’ll never get it as good as you understand it when you’re inside Google. But it’s also that idea that, you know, it’s really not about the money.

So I have, part of what I’m working on is I’m trying to build an economic value-add so that some people can take happiness as their economic source of income. I’m trying to get people to understand that just like knowledge was so important to us that Google became part of our life on an everyday basis, that happiness is so important to us. It’s our default mode of operation.

It’s being healthy, it’s 12% more productive than unhappy and so on. And so when we understand that I want people to integrate happiness not as part of their day, but as their number-one priority of their life. Most people who are driven – graduates of Harvard or entrepreneurs or professionals – will go like, “What are you talking about? This is, you know, this is lazy.” No, no, it’s not at all. I’m not saying happiness, like go surfing every morning.

I’m saying happiness, like find the peace in you when everything that you’re doing on a daily basis is something that you are supposed to be doing on a daily basis to that it makes you happy. Right? And if we make that choice, if we make that choice as individuals, every single one of us, it’s basically like we prioritized knowledge when we used Google.

We prioritize happiness when we look for our next job, we prioritize happiness when we assign time to our families, and so on. And think about the impact of that. This is not trivial at all. If you make money your priority for your next job, you’re going to interview for $100 more. If you make happiness your priority for the next job, you’re going to be doing something totally different.

Now, so few of us, intelligent as we are, never make that choice. We always, always, always prioritize other things because the promise our parents told us is, “Hey, go to school, study hard score an A, go to Harvard, do an MBA, do this, do that, and then work hard and then do this.

And then 15 years later you may be successful and when you’re successful, you’re going to be happy. What? How many people do you see around you that are successful and miserable? The theory of hard work leads to success is true, but the theory that success leads to happiness is false. The most successful people on earth today are people who absolutely love what they’re doing. If you’ll find that you’re going to be successful and as a bonus, you’re going to be happy doing it, not waiting for happiness when you get there.

CURT NICKISCH: Mo, thanks so much for talking with the HBR IdeaCast. It’s been really cool.

MO GAWDAT: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Mo Gawdat. He’s the former chief business officer at Google’s “X” and the founder of the startup One Billion Happy. He’s also the author of Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We got technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager.

Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Curt Nickisch.