Happiness

A2 + B2 = C2 (Pythagoras)
E = mc2 (Einstein)
6-7-5 = 😀 (Gawdat)

—  I’ve always had a complicated relationship with math. However tortuous the path to the answer, I can do baseball batting-average calculations in my head; if Mookie Betts of the Boston Red Sox went 47 for his next 111, would he be hitting .400 for the season?* But I lasted about three seconds as a math major in college, about as long as it took to open up a calculus textbook and then run down to the ’Skeller for a beer.

I suppose this is “inside baseball,” as it were. But what if the math I am trying to wrap my head around was a different kind of equation, like “6-7-5,” the only three numbers you have to remember as you begin to grasp Mo Gawdat’s Happiness Model. Or as Gawdat, formerly head of Google X, now the author of the book Solve for Happy, puts it, you need to “Bust the 6 Grand Illusions, Fix the 7 Blind Spots, and Hang on to the 5 Ultimate Truths” (page 45, paperback edition) to achieve happiness.

Gawdat came to his solution the hard way, as so many people do. Cursed with depression but blessed with an incredibly analytical mind and a dogged determination to make the math of happiness work, Gawdat spent years trying to perfect a model that would lead to something that most of us probably assume is unquantifiable. That he reached his nirvana only after his son’s death laid him low buttresses the argument for his equation. But let’s let him tell the story of how he busted his six illusions (thought; self; knowledge; time; control; and fear), fixed his seven blind spots (filters; assumptions; predictions; memories; labels; emotions; and exaggeration), and hung on to his five ultimate truths (now; change; love; death; design):

Creativity

—  There is a school of thought in Corporate America, and perhaps in corporations everywhere, that clumping (or maybe lumping is a better word) employees together in a big room with small desks somehow leads to incredible sparks of creativity (along with savings on rent). And maybe it does—if you’re someone who doesn’t do anything creative for a living. For creatives, however, especially those who focus on words, modern office-space planning can be something akin to death. Take a walk through many of these work environments, and what you really see are people hopelessly distracted by their neighbors’ conversations, if the batteries have run out on their noise-cancelling headphones and they’ve left their chargers at home, where they’d really prefer to work. But at least their lack of productivity isn’t from doing the laundry on company time.

This disconnect is oceanic in size, and it makes one wonder how much creativity is being left behind when corporations need that energy more than ever. Winning may depend more on how you put your ideas together and communicate them to your worldwide customers than on machine learning. And that’s just the business case. There’s also the moral one: We have seemingly intractable social problems that could benefit from corporate creativity and leadership. So, whether you’re sitting in the C-Suite, the mailroom or somewhere in-between, it’s an almost-criminal development in organizational thinking.

Speaking of creatives and leaving things behind, James Victore, a legendary graphic artist, pulled up stakes a few years ago, exiting New York after a zillion years for greener pastures, deep in the heart of Texas. While based in New York, Victore succeeded at a level most of us can only dream of: two exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art, an Emmy Award. His work is in the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., and the Louvre in Paris. He’s been a professor, and now he’s an author who teaches you how to move past your fears, obfuscations and quirky pod mates to reach your destiny, one you might not even know you have.