Mo Gawdat: How Losing My Son Led Me To A Formula for Happiness

Summary

Podcast Summary: The High Performance Podcast

Episode: Mo Gawdat: How Losing My Son Led Me To A Formula for Happiness
Release Date: March 6, 2026
Hosts: Jake Humphrey & Damian Hughes
Guest: Mo Gawdat

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Episode Overview

This episode welcomes Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X, author, and global happiness advocate, whose life was profoundly changed by the sudden and preventable death of his son, Ali. Mo’s journey pivots from traditional notions of success and achievement—high-powered roles and material wealth—towards a deeper exploration of grief, acceptance, and the true nature of happiness. The conversation blends personal tragedy with practical philosophy as Mo discusses his “formula for happiness,” how to process grief, and the importance of focusing on what really matters.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Losing Ali & The Shift From Control to Acceptance

[01:36 – 05:44]

• Mo reflects on Ali's passing: Ali, not just his son but his teacher and best friend, died due to a preventable surgical error. As someone used to control and results, Mo was forced to confront the finality of death and the ultimate lack of control over life’s most meaningful aspects.
  • Mo: “As an executive...make sure that everything's under control. But then you lose a loved one and you suddenly realize that you have zero control.” ([03:39])
• The experience prompted a rapid, almost "serendipitous" jump to the fifth stage of grief: acceptance.
• Logical responses (comforting family, legal steps) were necessary, but truly transformative was the emotional acceptance and decision to spread Ali’s insights to the world—a mission to make Ali "everywhere and part of everyone." ([05:02])

The Futility of Chasing & The Nature of Happiness

[07:30 – 10:21]

• Mo’s life before loss: Material success and fleeting pleasures, but ultimately unfulfilling.
  • “There was a point...I had 16 cars in my garage...you can only drive one.” ([07:57])
• Differentiates between serotonin-based contentment (happiness) and dopamine-driven joys (pleasures/excitement).
  • “Dopamine is addictive...So yeah, you get the first car...and the fourth is like, what am I doing with my life?” ([08:41])
• Key realization: “When you stop chasing, everything falls in place.” ([10:15])

Inverting the Success-Happiness Paradigm

[10:21 – 14:48]

• We’ve been taught to work hard, become successful, and only then get happiness. Mo suggests the order works in reverse: “If you're happy doing what you're doing, you're likely going to be very successful at it.” ([11:24])
• Happiness is defined as a “calm and peaceful contentment when you're okay with life as it is.”
• Healthy, happy people are empirically more productive (citing studies showing a 12–37% productivity boost).
• Happiness is a duty, not a privilege, as it places you in the best state for life’s challenges ([12:59]).

The “Happiness Flowchart”: A Practical Approach to Emotional Resilience

[14:52 – 19:57]

• The 90-Second Rule (via Jill Bolte Taylor): Negative emotions flush from the body in 90 seconds, but we often renew negative feelings by revisiting the thought. ([15:01])
  • “You cannot be angry for more than 90 seconds...what you get after those 90 seconds is a buffer where you can stop and say, now what am I going to do?” ([15:43])
• Mo’s flowchart for bouncing back:
  1. Is it true? (90% of unhappiness is based on imagined scenarios, not facts)
  2. Can I do something about it? (If yes: act. If no: practice “committed acceptance”)
  3. Can I accept it and still move forward?
• Example: With the irreversible loss of Ali, Mo chooses to share his son’s wisdom with the world. ([18:35])

Ali's Biggest Lesson: Start With Your Own Little World

[20:02 – 23:11]

• Ali’s wisdom: “You're never going to fix the world. You may impact it a little if you learn to first fix your little world.” ([20:30])
  • If you consistently better your surroundings, your world expands and you gain more influence.
  • Consistent, long-term high performance depends on building “blocks”—mastering small steps, not chasing shortcuts.

Living in the Moment & The Power of Flow

[23:11 – 33:35]

• “Look under your feet, not at the target.” Focus on immediate, actionable blocks on the path instead of fixating on distant goals ([23:18]).
• Life is more like a quest than a journey: you don’t know the path, only the next step.
• Parenting lesson: Mo recounts the transformation from a driven, always-working father to someone present and emotionally available. A pivotal moment involved realizing he'd broken his daughter's spirit by dismissing her joy. ([27:25])
• Playfulness and flow: High performers enter “flow”—complete presence and attunement to the moment—by being playful, not just strategic.

Flow in Practice & Guarding Against Modern Distraction

[33:35 – 37:10]

• Four rules for achieving flow:
  1. Let go of long-term objectives.
  2. Task difficulty should slightly exceed current skill.
  3. Focus on each component, not the total result.
  4. Remove all distractions.
• Everyday flow doesn’t require athletic or artistic mastery—possible in daily life, relationships, and conversation.
• Distraction often stems from discomfort or pain, not true desire. (Reference to Nir Eyal’s "Indistractible"). ([36:12])

Personal Philosophy, Spirituality, and Perspective

[37:27 – 42:17]

• Continual learning: Mo invests an hour a day in learning ("learn how to learn")—this compounds into significant expertise over years.
• Personal spirituality: Not inherited or dictated by organized religion—each person should explore and define their own approach to non-physical phenomena like love, consciousness, and connection.
• Gaining optimism and perspective:
  • “Your worst nightmares have never happened. Just remember that.” ([40:48])
  • 99.9% of life is positive; our brains are programmed for negativity by evolutionary forces, but reality is overwhelmingly safe and good. ([41:14])

The Power of Perspective & Empathy

[42:17 – 45:39]

• Shares a story about a broken friendship where misunderstanding led to years of distance. Realizing his own blindness to the full story re-emphasized importance of seeing beyond our limited perspectives.

Mo Gawdat’s Non-negotiables, Quickfire Lessons, and Golden Rule

[45:42 – 48:34]

• Three non-negotiables: Honesty, love, and doing good. ([45:51])
• A moment to return to: “I’d go back to the moment he [Ali] left and hug him one more time.” ([45:58])
• On legacy: “Nothing. As a matter of fact, it’s distracting. What legacy? I’ll be dead. I don’t care.” ([46:04])
  • Legacy is in each moment, not some posthumous achievement.
• Advice to teenage self: “Life is a video game... it’s not about winning, it’s about the gameplay.” ([47:01])
• Biggest life lesson from the Dalai Lama: The wisest people combine childlike joy with deep wisdom. ([47:49])
• One golden rule for high performance: “Choose what it is that you want to perform. If you perform adequately at something that matters, it’s much better than performing brilliantly at something that doesn’t.” ([48:24])

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Notable Quotes

• Mo Gawdat:

  • “When you stop chasing, everything falls in place.” ([10:15])
  • “Happiness is a calm and peaceful contentment when you're okay with life as it is.” ([12:20])
  • “90% of the things that make us unhappy are not even true.” ([17:57])
  • “If you fix your little world, life will trust you enough to make your little world a little bigger.” ([20:30])
  • “Look under your feet, not at the target.” ([23:18])
  • “Playfulness, remember, is on the feminine side and our hyper masculine world deprioritizes that.” ([29:52])
  • “Flow is the only state where you get dopamine and serotonin at the same time.” ([33:35])
  • “Your worst nightmares have never happened. Just remember that.” ([40:48])
  • “Legacy is this moment. Like I'm going to do this minute right, and then the next minute has its own legacy.” ([46:23])

• Jake:

  • “You only hold anger for 90 seconds. Johnny Wilkinson won the Rugby World Cup and felt joy for 30 seconds. Everything passes. So actually all you can do is be in the moment.” ([51:08])

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Memorable Moments & Practical Frameworks

Mo’s Happiness Flowchart ([14:52 – 19:57]):

1. Is it true? (Address the objective reality.)
2. Can I do something about it? (If yes, act.)
3. If not, can I accept it and still move forward? (“Committed acceptance.”)

On Legacy:
Rejects conventional views—insists that the only meaningful legacy is in the present moment, not in far-off future recognition.

Childhood and Play:
Stories around parenting and play illustrate how both personal happiness and high performance depend on presence, joy, and reflecting on the small things that matter.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:36] — Mo shares Ali’s impact and the experience of loss
• [07:30] — The futility of chasing success and material pleasure
• [11:05] — Inverting the success → happiness myth
• [14:52] — The 90-second rule and flowchart for emotional resilience
• [20:02] — Ali’s biggest lesson: start by fixing your own world
• [23:11] — Living in the moment, focus on the next right step
• [27:25] — On parenting, presence, and transformation
• [33:35] — Principles of flow
• [37:27] — Spirituality and continual learning
• [40:48] — Developing optimism and perspective
• [42:17] — A cautionary tale on perspective, empathy, and relationships
• [45:42] — Quickfire: non-negotiables, advice to teenage self, golden rule
• [48:24] — “Choose what you want to perform. It’s better to perform adequately at something that matters than brilliantly at something that doesn’t.”

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Takeaways

• Happiness precedes and enables high performance—not the other way around.
• Suffering and grief, when met with acceptance and reflection, can spark new purpose.
• Question your negative emotions—most are based on untruths or stories, and can be processed through objective inquiry and acceptance.
• Live in the moment: Strive to do the next right thing, and don’t be consumed by distant goals or legacy.
• Flow, presence, and playfulness are high performance states—accessible in all areas of life.
• Consistent, incremental improvement and personal responsibility matter more than grand gestures.
• Perspective and empathy are crucial in leadership, relationships, and personal happiness.

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This episode is a reflection on what truly matters, challenging listeners to rethink not only success and happiness but also their day-to-day responses to life’s inevitable challenges.

Transcript

[Mo Gaudat]

I don't know what to tell you, Jake. I have seen everything. I've seen everything. I've seen every pleasure, every joy, every pain, every suffering, every test. I've seen so much. And so after a while, you somehow look at all of it and you go like, yeah, should I spend a minute of my life chasing one more of these? And the funny thing is, when you stop chasing, everything falls in place.

[Jake]

What if everything you've been told until this point in your life about happiness is wrong? And that it's not a destination, it's actually a default? Our guest today is Mo Gaudat. An engineer by training, he rose to become chief business officer of Google X, the moonshot factory tasked with solving the world's biggest problems. He sold millions of books, reached hundreds of millions of people. And by any conventional measure, this is a guy who's already won. But it was actually the worst moment of his life that changed everything. For him, it was the death of his beloved son, Ali, a preventable surgical mistake, and his 21 year old son was gone in just four hours. That trauma would be the catalyst for his life's real work. In this conversation, Mo Gaudat challenges how you think about performance, how you deal with success, with anger, what it actually means to live well. And we're going to drop you straight into the heart of the conversation, I promise you. You don't want to miss a second of this one. So listen in carefully as we welcome to high performance Mo Gaoudat.

[Mo Gaudat]

I'm a very logical person, but also reasonably high on eq. And you know, I've attempted in my life over the years to shift from the hyper masculine approach to life that took us through, you know, that took me very far to being chief business officer of Google X or whatever, to also internalizing my own being, my own feelings and emotions. The experience of losing Ali. Ali was everything. Ali was my son, but was also my teacher. He was also my coach, he was also my best friend. And he was truly one of a kind. I mean, I feel that his loss is a loss to the world, not just for me. But then he left our world because of a preventable surgical mistake that, you know, was fixable. But they did five of them in a row and they fixed three of them wrong. And so in four hours, my wonderful, handsome, wise son left our world. Now, you can take this through logic and you can take this through emotions. You can take it through literally to hit the ground either way, or you can take it to try and make things better. Okay? And I Think what happened at the time, which I think was a very Maybe, you know, I don't want to call it serendipitous, but maybe the universe wanted it this way. A series of events highlighted to me very quickly that I needed to be at the fifth stage of grief. So normally we struggle with grief through five stages, and the last one of them is called acceptance, which for some of us takes weeks or months, and for some of us takes a lifetime. To accept that this is what life has given you and that you cannot reverse it. And there is a finality to death that just cripples you. As an executive who's known to run everything and make sure that everything happens exactly as you want it to happen. This is what I was paid for my whole life, to make sure that everything's under control. But then you lose a loved one and you suddenly realize that you have zero control. Like that is nothing within your life is really the stuff that really matters is not really within your control. And so my logical side, of course, did the right things. You know, I reported the case so that the, you know, Ministry of Health did the right things and, you know, the hospital was alerted or penalized the right way so that this mistake doesn't happen again. I comforted my family, I took care of them, and so on and so forth. These are the logical steps that you need to do. It's the emotional, I think, that really, really got me to be with you today. So I describe death as a way to disconnect from space, time, if you want, and that basically allows you to be everywhere all the time. The minute I heard this, as a business executive, all that happened in my head was, was I heard a quota, a target. Okay, my master, my son, my best friend, and my coach is giving me a target. He's saying, make me everywhere and part of everyone. And I just heard myself saying, okay, habibi, consider it done. At the time I ran Google for eight, nine years, I knew how to reach billions. This was my skill. I said done. And I basically started in my mind to accept immediately that he's gone and he's not coming back and that the only way I can keep him part of our world is to take the essence of what he taught me about happiness, about wisdom, and just share it with the world so that in my mathematical calculation, seven years later, through six degrees of separation, he's everywhere and part of everyone.

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[Mo Gaudat]

Parle tu francais Hablas espanol par Liano

[Jake]

if you've used Babbel, you would Babbel's conversation based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the RIP real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com acast spelled B-A B-B-E-L.com acast rules and restrictions may apply. This constant chase for thinking that the big house or the new car or the hyper masculine world is what's going to give us happiness. Are you chasing something that you think will give you happiness? Is this is the story we're discussing today and the conversation on this podcast. Do you feel it's helping you to process and grieve?

[Mo Gaudat]

I'm chasing nothing at all. I know that's the worst thing I can say on a high performance podcast. I'm chasing nothing at all. I'm performing really well at the tasks that come at hand, but I'm chasing nothing at all. There is such an interesting side, and it's not just because of losing Ali. Of course losing a loved one puts things in perspective, right? Losing a child is probably the it's the hardest experience ever. And also I think it puts everything in perspective more than anything I could think of. But that's not the issue. The issue is that I've been so successful. There was a point and I am ashamed to say it. I swear I'm not bragging. There was a point where I had 16 cars in my garage, right? And you know you can only drive one. I lived in a nine bedroom place. You can only sleep in one bedroom. The reality is, and somehow when you go along The Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You realize that what makes you happy becomes less and less of an ingredient for your happiness the more you've experienced it. Interestingly, most of what we were told makes us happy. I differentiate heavily between happiness, which is serotonin in your blood. You know, calm and peaceful contentment when you're okay with life as it is and excitement and elation and fun and pleasure and all of those other replacements that are dopamine in your blood. Dopamine basically is a reward, jolt of reward in your blood. Basically your body saying, oh my God, that feels amazing. I want more of it. Now when you differentiate between the two, you see that dopamine is addictive. So the more of it you have in your life, the more you down regulate for it, you don't feel it anymore. And so, yeah, you get the first car and you think that you're the king of the world. And yeah, the second car is not really that big of a deal. And the third is like a disappointment and the fourth is like, what am I doing with my life? But then you continue, right? We're all deluded in that way. And I think what happens in reality after, maybe not just because of the loss of Ali, but perhaps because of age and because. I don't know what to tell you, Jake. I have seen everything. I've seen everything. I've seen every pleasure, every joy, every pain, every suffering, every test. I've seen so much. And so after a while, you somehow look at all of it and you go like, yeah, so do I want one more of these? I mean, should I spend a minute of my life chasing one more of these? And the funny thing is, when you stop chasing, everything falls in place.

[Jake]

And you are now trying to help by spreading a message about happiness before we talk about happiness and how we can all find it and why we don't have enough of it and why it is this kind of ethereal thing that we're all trying to grasp hold of. I want to ask you, why happiness? Because what was it that Ali told his sister again before he passed away?

[Mo Gaudat]

He said, I felt everywhere and part of everyone.

[Jake]

I was everywhere and I was part of everyone. There's lots of different things that could have been everywhere and part of everyone. But happiness is the thing that is now being spread everywhere and part of everyone. When you think back to Ali as a. As a young boy and even as a teenager. Teenager, why happiness? Why was that?

[Mo Gaudat]

We had a very wrong message delivered to us by our parents and our teachers, our Parents and our teachers told us, work really hard for a very long time, make a lot of money, buy a lot of things, and then you'll find happiness. And half of the promise worked, right? You know, you work really hard for a long time, you buy a lot of things and make a lot of money, but that doesn't necessarily mean you become happy. You know, of so many people that are swimming in money, that are famous and rich and that are committing suicide. Right. The truth is, we were told that we're supposed to be successful as a prerequisite to happiness. The reality is that if you're happy doing what you're doing, you're likely going to be very successful at it. So it's interestingly the other way around. Best football players in the world. My fellow countryman, Mo Salah loves to play football. If you had forced him to become a mathematician, he would have been mediocre at it at best, right? If you'd forced me to play football, good luck with that. So the idea is, can we actually reverse that? Now people will say, oh, come on, you know, toughen up. What? Happiness, like work hard work, is what gets us somewhere. No, it depends on how you define happiness. If happiness is to go surfing, you know, on the coast of Australia, then you have the wrong definition. Happiness, in my view, is a calm and peaceful contentment when you're okay with life as it is. Best quality of an entrepreneur ever is to be okay with the challenges that you're going to meet. You know, you start the business and the first thing that happens is the business goes wrong and you have to pivot, okay? And unless you're okay with the reality that, yes, force majeure will happen, yes, things will go unlike what you expect them, otherwise why would you be the one that created the amazing breakthrough when you're okay that way, when you're peaceful and calm and contented, you succeed more. Now, what does that mean? It interestingly means that happiness is a lot like health. If you get a tiny bit of a sore throat, you stop, you go like, okay, no, no, no, no, hold on. I need vitamin C. I need to drink warm liquids. I need some, you know, and so on. Because you know instinctively that without your health, you're not in the optimum form of you to succeed in life, to survive and succeed in life. Tons of studies will tell you that without your happiness, you're likely not going to go very far. Why? Because you're going to be wasting lots of your brain cycles, you know, thinking about what's stressing you or making you unhappy. You're going to be grumpy and all of your colleagues and customers will hate you and not want to work with you. You're going to not a wonderful mate in your life because you're upsetting everyone and no one wants to live with you. And so you're going to be even grumpier. You're going to. And so on. You're going to report more sick leaves. You'll always be disgruntled with the job that you have, so you don't want to give anything to it, and so on and so forth. People who are happy are between 12 and 37% more productive at anything that they do. So when you really think about it this way, happiness, your default state when you were born as a child, is also your optimum mode of survival and performance. And if you see it that way, then suddenly your happiness doesn't become a privilege. It's your duty. It's your duty to find that calm and peaceful contentment as you navigate life, right? So that when challenges come your way, you simply look at them calmly, wisely, and do the right thing. If you're unhappy and constantly complaining and constantly, you know, disgruntled with life, you're wasting too much effort.

[Damien]

So take us into that pause then, that moment of choice.

[Mo Gaudat]

Yeah.

[Damien]

And give us, and for our listeners especially, what are some of the hacks into that moment that allow us to then access.

[Mo Gaudat]

Biggest hack I was ever told was when I hosted my best, one of my dear, dear friends, Jill Balte Taylor. If you know her, then neuroscientist, you absolutely have to get her over here. She's brilliant and she basically studied our behavior when we are negative. And she says from the second you are triggered on the negative side. So say an event makes you angry to the second that you're filled with stress hormones, to the second that you took an action and those you didn't, but those hormones were flushed out of your body is 90 seconds. That's it. You cannot be angry for more than 90 seconds.

[Damien]

Wow.

[Mo Gaudat]

Okay. But then what happens is you run the thought in your head again and you renew your 90 seconds and then you run it again unconsciously and you renew your 90 seconds. While in reality, what you get after those 90 seconds is a buffer where you can stop and say, I lost my phone. Right? You get a mix, a cocktail of weird emotions, right? One is, how stupid am I? You know, I hate those guys that took it. You know, what will I do with the photos? I wish I had you can have a cocktail of those emotions. And if you actually observe, you get those emotions. And then there is that tiny buffer, right? And that tiny buffer allows you to go and say, now what am I going to do? I can be angry at the world, or I can go buy another phone, or I can go, you know, cancel my sim, or I can, you know, go to my computer and block the phone or. Right. And once you get into that buffer, suddenly you move in the right direction. Now, I basically put that buffer in a flowchart. It's a very, very simple way for me, because I always say, if I were to teach the world happiness, I'm not qualified. I try my best, but I'm not like the big teachers. I need to be the Olympic champion of the sport. I need to be someone that lives what I preach. And so I basically measure how quickly I bounce back to happiness from unhappiness. We all feel unhappy every now and then because events miss our expectations. It's a survival mechanism. But how quickly can you take an event that missed your expectations and then bounce back to, I can deal with this. For me, on average, it's seven seconds. Other than a few times a year where it might be an hour or a day, but regularly, the little things that upset us, all the time, they last seven seconds. Okay? And seven seconds. Because I go through a flowchart, and the flowchart is very straightforward. Is it true? Can I do something about it? Can I accept it and do something despite its presence? And it's really not that intelligent when you think back about it.

[Damien]

So go for it. Is it true?

[Mo Gaudat]

Is it true? 90% of the things that make us unhappy are not even true. Like your boyfriend or girlfriend says something hurtful on Friday. Your brain is telling you he or she doesn't love you anymore. That's not true. That's your brain's magical work on making a scenario that can win the Oscar, right? The truth is, he or she said something hurtful. You want to get to the point of, they don't love me anymore. There is a lot more analysis that needs to be done around that, okay? And most of the time, if you actually just ask the question, is it true? Most of the time, you know, you find that it isn't.

[Damien]

So you go to the second.

[Mo Gaudat]

If it. If it is not true, drop it. If it is true, you go to the second. And the second is very straightforward. You know, can I do something about it? Can I do something about. Is the answer to high performance all the time. It's the Right way to handle a problem. So can I do something about it is simply do it. If there is something you can do about it, do, do it. Don't sit in the corner and cry like a baby. It's not gonna fix anything. You're not six year old anymore, right? So if there is something you can do about it, do it. The Jedi Master level of happiness, however, is if there is isn't something you can do about it, losing Ali, you can't do anything about it. He's gone. There's nothing, nothing you can do to bring him back. And that is what I call. This is, you know, basically what I call committed acceptance. Committed acceptance is to say, not the best scenario life. I would have preferred if you'd had taken us in another scenario, but I have to acknowledge that this has happened. And so if it has happened, can I accept it, accept it as a reality, the new baseline of my life, and do something despite its presence to make my life better or the life of others better? Can I, you know, do I want to sit in a corner and hit my head against the wall because Ali left? Yes, I do. But how? What difference will that make to life? What makes a difference to life is I sit down in a corner, write what he taught me about happiness, share it with the world. So he's remembered and the world is a little happier.

[Jake]

What was the single most important thing relating to happiness that Ali taught you?

[Mo Gaudat]

Ali taught me so many things. I think the biggest one that completely flipped me upside down was, remember, I am a very, very high performing executive most of my years. And then I went to Google, became head of emerging markets, vice president of emerging markets. So I started half of Google's operations globally. And then I went to Google X, which is this moonshot factory that's building innovations. You know, I was chief business officer with the objective of really solving big problems that affect a billion people or more. So I'm in that TED Talk mentality, you know, most of my life. I'm like, okay, we're going to do something amazing and that's going to change the world. And it's going to be worthy of 18 minutes on stage. And then, you know, we'll set the next thing. And he comes and sits next to me and says, papa, I have to tell you something. He was 16, I think, at the time, papa, I have to tell you something, but it's going to upset you. I was like, I learned, I swear to you, this boy was so wise when he said, I want to tell you something, I Listened. Okay? So I said, no, no, habibi. Tell me, what do you have in mind? He said, but you're going to be upset. No, just please tell me. And he said, papa, you're never going to fix the world. I was like, why, Ali? Why don't you have that spark, you know? Why are you not dreaming of the TED Talk sort of in my head. And he said, papa, the world will always have people that are suffering, okay? The truth is, you're never going to fix it. You're never going to fix it. You may impact it a little bit if you learn to first fix your little world. Damn you, Ali. That was totally the opposite of what I did in my life. He basically said, look, if you fix your little world, life will trust you enough to make your little world a little bigger. If you fix that, it will be a little bigger and a little bigger. So if you really want to change the world, you fix yourself. And if you fix yourself, we will trust you diplomatically saying, we don't yet. Okay? And then you'll change us, Me, my sister and my mother. And then if you do that, well, then maybe your department at work and then maybe your company and then maybe your country, right? As long as you keep doing it right. And he directed me to a documentary on Netflix, Gyro something, the sushi maker. Basically, when you're a sushi chef, first they start you off fanning the rice. For years and years, you fanned the rice, okay? Until you really fan the rice really well. Then they'll have you wash the dishes or something else, and then they'll have you wrap the first one. Years and years later, when you consistently did the right thing, you become the master chef, right? And that's the game. The game of life is we want those shortcuts, but those shortcuts for so many of us that got them end up with a disaster because you positioned yourself in a place that was bigger than where you are. Consistent long term high performance cannot stand missing blocks on the way.

[Jake]

So how do we not miss the blocks? And how do we start? By doing the small things that are not particularly sexy or exciting.

[Mo Gaudat]

But look under your feet, not at the target. That's the way not to miss a block. So the idea is, I know on my next startup that if I did the right things, the startup will shine, right? But if I start my next business focusing on the startup shining, I don't get all of the blocks ticked on the way, right? What I need to do is I need to say, this is where we're heading, and these are the blocks I need to step on. At least that's how I see it. Now I will look at those blocks and do them to the best of my abilities until they're as perfect as they can be. And I will stop every day and reflect if those next three blocks are still my next three blocks. By the way, most of us don't realize this. Most of us don't realize that life is a quest. It's not a journey. Okay? The difference between a journey and a quest is a journey is a trip that you've done before. Okay? You know, the path I'm gonna go here, and then I'm gonna turn left, and then I'm gonna right. Most of our life is a quest. We've not done that before. You take a couple of steps, and it's almost a quest in deep fog. You take a couple of steps forward, and then you stop and you reflect and you say, is this really still the right direction? Or maybe should I go left a little bit? And then you take one step to the left and stop and assess and say, should I continue? That's how life is when it comes to our relationships. First you fall in love with someone, and then you go like, hold on. Not the right thing. And then you go a little bit to the right and say, no, I want a taller one. And then, oh, no, no, hold on. Taller is like, a little too much for me. I need one that is smarter. And you just keep going through that quest until eventually you say, aha, Now I know right now. I found out how to tread that journey. And then you go fall in love with the right person that fits you, and then go along that journey ticking those boxes. 1. Buy one. And then end up in the right place, right? And applies to everything. To your business, to your, you know, to. To your finances, to your happiness.

[Damien]

I'm intrigued about how that same thing applies to your family, because you're describing, like, the. Like the wisdom that Ali was sharing with you at 16 years of. Of age is. Is breathtaking. And I'm interested in what sort of father you were when you think about just looking under your feet rather than at the target.

[Mo Gaudat]

I did some good things and some horrible things. I was very, very, very, very driven. Very driven again in that little voice in your head. That's the opening introduction. The minute Ali came into the world, I became a different person. Okay? And I'm. You know, I'm. I don't know how to say this diplomat. I'm not really into Kids. I don't like kids. I mean, I love my kids. I don't hate the other ones, but if you keep them at a bit of a distance, I'm more comfortable. Kids and little puppies. I'm very cute. But not mine, right? So if you're a dog lover, I apologize. But anyway, that's how I feel. But the minute I saw Ali, I promise you, something in me shifted, okay? And my entire being shifted into no longer the one that was focused on me, but a father that meant to put everything I can into making sure that this little pruny creature never needs anything, okay? And like all of us, once I put myself on that path, I ran a sprint for years and years and years and years and years, never stopping to review the context until actually they were maybe seven, eight or so. I was just running like a maniac, making so much money that they don't need, okay? But still running because they will never need anything in their life, right? And the challenge for me was I actually realized that what they actually needed was me to be there beyond the point where you can provide. What they actually needed was for me to be there. What they actually needed was for me to not to snap.

[Damien]

What made you realize that?

[Mo Gaudat]

Habib Ti and my daughter, remember, early 30s. I was an executive at Microsoft, reasonably senior. I was a very, very serious trader in the stock market at the time. The tools were not very sophisticated, and I was very mathematical, and I was a developer. So I wrote my own code to actually create my own trading strategy. And I sort of printed money on demand, and everything was going well, but I was totally stressed, totally grumpy. And Saturday morning, I'm looking at something, reading an email or reviewing a stock performance or whatever, and Aya walks in and she's jumping up and down from excitement. You know, we're gonna go to this place and we're gonna do this and then we're gonna do that, and can we go have ice cream afterwards? And I'm like, can we please be serious for a minute? She was five. She was five. What was I talking about? Okay? And I could see with my own eyes, with my own eyes, I could see my daughter's heartbreak, okay? It was so clear. See, she suddenly, from that elation, she looked down and burst crying and ran away, okay? And I just suddenly realized I don't like me that way. I really don't like that person. And I made it my commitment that from that moment on, I'm going to change. Took me 12 years to master it, right? Four and a half years to even begin to see results. But I made it my number one choice to stop being that grumpy, annoying, rich bastard, sorry to say, and become a human that actually prioritizes things properly.

[Jake]

It's a great story and there's a great lesson as well in life there that when do we stop being the ones that are excited about ice cream? I'm my kid the other day, went to school, okay, and he said to me, he said, I'd love you. He said that I love a. I'd love a water slide. I said, I'll tell you what, then while you're at school, I'll build you a water slide and it'll take you to the beach. He's six years old and when he came home, he ran around the side of that. So I thought, where's he going? And he came back crestfallen. Where's the water?

[Mo Gaudat]

Where's the water slide?

[Jake]

What I love though is that at six years old, he genuinely believes his dad can build a water slide while he's at school. From our house to the beach, 40 miles away. It's a shame that we lose that in life, isn't it? And we no longer believe that anything can be possible. There's a real joy in that.

[Mo Gaudat]

You know, playfulness, remember, is on the feminine side and our hyper masculine world deprioritizes that. But some of the most, some of the wisest masters I have learned from or became friends with will tell you that the absolute best path through life, the most efficient, high performance path through life is to play. And I know this sounds really weird, so I am a very, very serious video gamer. Very serious. Like I never say my gamer's name in public because I'm the one that killed you yesterday. It's as simple as that, right? And the way I play, I promise you, is the highest performance I have ever achieved in life, is the ability to tune into a game and move from the analytical, strategic, clever player to total flow. Total flow is to blend with the game of life, is to literally let life tell you in microsecond intervals. Take a little left, go this way, do that. And believe it or not, that is the skill. If you've ever worked with very senior business leaders or very senior coaches or they no longer analyze, they're in flow. They're completely, they're, they're part of the flow of the game, part as the, as, as life ticks along, they're able to see and respond, not see and analyze and, and work and push.

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[Damien]

And we've had some amazing guests on this podcast that have described that state of flow, that state of grace. How do you get there?

[Mo Gaudat]

Actually in my next book I realized while I was researching it that flow is the only state where you get dopamine and serotonin at the same time in your body. So you're very excited but you're very calm at the same time. And interestingly what happens is first of all you have to let go of the long term objective. You have to be here now. Okay, if you tell me our objective of today is to do an hour of conversation and I focus on the Hour, then my performance sucks for 50 minutes. And then the last 10 minutes are okay, right. I need to focus on minute by minute as I go along. Focus on every question rather than the last question, if you know what I mean. So the first approach to flow is stop focusing on the result. Focus on the performance. That's number one. Number two is you only flow when the task is slightly more difficult than your skills, but not difficult enough to distract you and not easy enough for you to lose interest or not focus on it entirely. So if you're able to play a song at a certain speed, then flow is to just. To flow, you just have to take the speed up a tiny bit. Okay. And then now you're really. Not really struggling, but you're challenged if you want. And then the third is you focus on the components. Each component of the task, not, you know, so basically, you're perfecting every strum on your guitar, not the entire solo. You're just looking at every strum individually and saying, if I get that strum right, then I'll focus on the next one, and then on the next one. And so being in the present moment completely, and to be able to do that, you have to remove all distractions. So these are my four rules. Again, part of my work in that little voice in your head is to say, your four rules are you have to do that. And once you remove distractions and your task is challenging you a little bit and you're focusing on bit by bit of it, not on the final end destination, you get into flow. And by the way, flow seems to have been reserved in life to athletes and pianists and so on who are at the top level of execution. Not true at all. You can flow when you're playing with your daughter. You can flow when you're talking to your son. Right. It's basically that idea of, I'm gonna do a little better than last time, and I'm gonna focus on every single word, every single action, rather than the big picture. And I'm gonna switch off my phone, switch off all other distractions so that I'm completely in that space.

[Jake]

And distractions in the modern world is another whole conversation.

[Mo Gaudat]

Oh, absolutely. And we're probably more distracted every day, Jake, than we are actually focusing. It's quite interesting how we shifted. I hosted Nir Eyal, if you absolutely should host. Him here, wrote a book called Indistractible. He basically would describe to you how all of the distractions we have in our life are not the result of desires, but they are Actually, the results of pains and discomforts that you reach out to your phone constantly because you're uncomfortable. You feel a discomfort that you don't know what's happening or that you may miss something out. You're constantly looking at Instagram to see if you got a like because you're. You know, you feel the discomfort of, do they like me? You know, all of those things are driven by discomforts, not by actual desires. And because we have so much on our minds now, the discomforts are more prominent than actual comforts in life.

[Jake]

Can I just take you back to something you mentioned about learnings and leaders and things that you've picked up from people? What is a single most important piece of learning from a spiritual guide that you have picked up in your life? That is something that you would regularly come back to.

[Mo Gaudat]

My favorite piece of learning was to learn how to learn. When I finished uni, one of the most profound decisions I ever made was, I'm gonna invest an hour a day in my brain. And so I consistently, most days in my life would spend an hour either reading a book or watching a documentary or doing something useful on YouTub, whatever, and you'll be blown away. You know, if Malcolm Gladwell's theory of 10,000 hours is true, I've done 10,000 hours more of learning than my peers who didn't do that when they stopped university. And that really flips everything upside down when you think about it. You know, over the years, it just keeps adding up. On the spiritual side, I would say maybe the freshest on my mind is I'm working. My following book in November is called Unstressable. And I'm working with a wonderful British young lady, Alice Law, who's a stress management expert. And Alice and I were working on a chapter called Spiritually Stressed Today with the context of helping people understand that spirituality is actually not what religion told you at all, that most of us have abandoned our right to spirituality. And I say right to spirituality because those who claimed the spirituality brand misbehaved. And so, interestingly, we were driving to the point that while the scientific method is concerned with everything that's physical, with analyzing everything that's physical. If you want to analyze anything that's beyond physical, the philosophy you use for that is spirituality. And I use philosophy because it's not science. You cannot prove what's not physical. I think the most interesting part of this conversation in the chapter is that spirituality is very personal, which most people didn't understand, because the typical approach to spirituality is we're going to follow a cult or a religion or a guru or someone is going to tell us to unify around one approach to it, when in reality, there could be 7.3 billion approaches to spirituality. It's your own personal spirituality as long as you choose to say, I think there are things that I cannot measure with the scientific method that do exist, and I need to ponder those things. Like love, for example. We all have felt love, but we've never managed to measure it with a love o meter in physics or in science, right? So once you realize that there are things that are not physical that do exist, consciousness, love, or maybe the existence of a oneness between us or a soul or something else, you don't have to agree or disagree, but you have to ponder those. And when you ponder them, because there are so many of them, you'd end up in a configuration that's your own. You know, if you ask me what spirituality do I, you know, do I believe in? I believe in what Mo believes in. Doesn't have to align to, you know, Christianity or Islam or whatever. It just. It's the result of my own investigation, my own exploration. If you want, I'd love you to

[Jake]

teach us the kind of messages that we need to get better at regarding the following. The first one is, how do we get better at being more optimistic?

[Mo Gaudat]

Your. Your worst nightmares have never happened. Just remember that, okay? Remember that you're still here with a beautiful electronic device in your hand, watching a podcast that's recorded on a very fascinating piece of technology. Life is okay.

[Damien]

It's a great saying. You've survived 100% of your worst days.

[Mo Gaudat]

Exactly.

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[Jake]

Yeah. Finding highlights.

[Mo Gaudat]

Finding highlights. 6 to 7 of every 10 thoughts in the adult brain are negative simply because this is research at Stanford University. Simply because your brain is a survival machine. Your brain is supposed to find what's wrong because what's wrong is more important for your survival. If a tiger shows up in this room, my brain has no benefit whatsoever to say, look at the beautiful patterns, right? It has every benefit to say, shit, we're gonna die. Right? It does that with everything. The reality, however, if you're into math and facts, is that 99.9% of life is positive. When you see it that way, you realize that 99.9% of life is okay, right? And so if you're not seeing the highlights, you're lying to yourself. And what good does it give you to actually analyze life based on the wrong information? The correct information is that 99.9% of life is okay.

[Jake]

And the last one I wanted you to talk to us about is gaining perspective. But I guess the two are linked, actually.

[Mo Gaudat]

Oh, it's just so fresh on my mind. I don't know if I should share this. One of my best friends, a gentleman called Sahm Saham is a real. He has chivalry. He's a good man. Helped me so much when Ali left our world. But we also did a lot of business together. And back in 2018, life was very stressful for me. The book was out and I was rushing around and so on. And anyway, somehow I told Sahim Sam, maybe I should get out of the business parts of things, you know, and reconcile our businesses for now. And then we had a meeting and we agreed on a few things, and I felt that he treated me unfairly. Okay. And so when that happened, I simply sort of felt bad about it and maybe was less in touch with Sa until a couple of months ago, I called him and I said, come on, man, we're good friends, you know, let's leave our heart, you know, hard feelings behind and just meet. Sat in front of him and he said, what happened? And I said, it's okay, Mossa Khalas. Forget it. And he was like, no, I can't forget it. It hurts me so much. I was like, what are you talking about? And he said, well, when we had that business meeting, you wrote me a check to reconcile our business for a significant sum of money. The check bounced, okay? And I never got that amount of money. I called you and you ignored me. And then I sent you a message on WhatsApp. You didn't answer. I sent you a message on Facebook. You didn't even open it. And then both my father and my mother died with two weeks apart. And you never called me. And I can tell you the rest of the story, but in my mind, the perspective of the situation was Sam was unfair to me when we reconciled the business, when in reality I was an asshole, almost bordering on criminal, to give him a check that bounces when we're reconciling our business. And that's probably the biggest reason why we do bad in life. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, hey, I'm gonna hurt someone today, or I'm going to do something horrible that makes everyone dislike me. Right? Everyone is informed by a perspective, okay? By a vantage point, if you want. That is so limited because none of us knows everything. And then we build our entire stories in our heads on top of that. And those stories destroy us, destroy our best Friendships destroy our relationships, our love and romantic relationships. They destroy everything. And I wonder, I mean, this story with Sam's probably was very shocking for me because I'm not like that. But so many of us go through this on daily basis. My boss is this, the government is that, you know, the NHS is that. Or whatever, I don't know. And it's so shocking when you actually stop and say, could I be blind? Maybe I'm not seeing the full picture. What is it that I'm missing? What excuses do the others have? What is their story?

[Jake]

Empathy, once again at the fore.

[Mo Gaudat]

Absolutely.

[Jake]

Let's move on to our quick fire questions. Mo.

[Mo Gaudat]

Yeah.

[Jake]

Your three non negotiables for life, honesty,

[Mo Gaudat]

love and doing good.

[Damien]

If you could go back to one moment of your life, what would it be and why?

[Mo Gaudat]

I'd go back to the moment he left and hug him one more time.

[Jake]

How important is legacy to you?

[Mo Gaudat]

Nothing. As a matter of fact, it's distracting. What legacy? I'll be dead. I don't care. Seriously, why do people think about that?

[Jake]

To take it away from Quickfire, then legacy means nothing to you. But is there an element of you that sees what the work you're doing now as the legacy of Ali?

[Mo Gaudat]

No. No. The work I started was the legacy of Ali. So 10 million happy was for Ali. 1 billion happy is for the rest of us. I don't know how to say this, but if you're chasing legacy, you're driven by your ego and you're driven by your ego even before you die, even after you die. It's like, how stupid is that? I know, sounds really weird, but isn't what matters the legacy of this minute? Isn't this what matters? Like, I'm going to do this minute right, and then the next minute has its own legacy.

[Damien]

What advice would you give to a teenage M.O. just starting out?

[Mo Gaudat]

I say life is a video game. Absolutely is a video game, you game. And so, you know, when I, when I played with Ali, Ali was much better than I was when he was alive. I think I would beat him now, but when he was alive, he was so much better than me and I was very strategic. I would actually go and try to finish the game. Ali would try to play the game very different. He would go to the difficult parts of the game where there are explosions and smoke and I would ask him, why? Why would you go there? And he says, this is where all the fun is. This is where you learn, you develop and you become a better gamer. Right? Think about that. If life was A game. It's an infinite game. It's not about winning, it's not about the destination, it's about the gameplay. Okay. It's about enjoying every minute of the game.

[Jake]

And have you learned to do that in life, to chase?

[Mo Gaudat]

Nobody ever learns to do that fully. But I think the most perfect example I had, and I had the honor of spending an hour and a half with him is his Holiness the Dalai Lama, where truly he comes across as one of the wisest men on earth, but also the biggest kid you can ever meet. And it's such a wonderful combination because we were really talking about very deep topic and important projects and we were laughing our heads off and just all over the place. And it was wonderful in every possible way.

[Damien]

And finally, your one golden rule for listeners to live a high performance life.

[Mo Gaudat]

Choose what it is that you want to perform. If you perform adequately at something that matters, it's much better than performing brilliantly at something that doesn't.

[Jake]

Wonderful. Thank you so much.

[Mo Gaudat]

Thanks for having me. It's been wonderful.

[Jake]

Damien Jake. What a bright man.

[Damien]

Amazing, wasn't it? That was a real eye opener.

[Jake]

I'm a very simple guy and sometimes I found myself really happy. It was quite hard. You might have noticed a few of my questions. The question wasn't quite ready because I'm still processing the answer he's just given to the previous question. And you know, I think it's a good reminder that sometimes it is good to go deep, like to go really deep and just to go a bit extra with things rather than just float through on the surface. Like I want to listen now to that conversation two, three, four times over because I know that every time I listen to it, I will get something more from it.

[Damien]

Yeah. What I was intrigued about was that, you know, he was a guy that's been phenomenally successful in his life and then he's had the almost the unimaginable trauma of losing his son to preventable mistakes that were made. And I think what he's offering us is the quest that he's been on. He made that distinction between a quest and a journey to understand the importance of happiness. And I think what he was sharing with us was invaluable. That flowchart, for example, of asking is it true then can I do anything about it? And then what can I do with this presence in my life was an incredible, just a three step process that any of us can adopt at any stage.

[Jake]

I really liked it when he was talking about that as well, when, when he was kind of saying that, you know, you've got the facts, like the thing. Everything else is kind of added on, made up, your interpretation, your opinion of what else might be there. And it's like, actually, how often do I spend my days taking into consideration things that actually don't exist? Yeah, shitloads. All the time. I'm all the time thinking about things that don't exist. You know, does it mean this? Does it mean that? Did they actually want to tell me this? Or everything has double meaning or deeper meaning or has some kind of other element that isn't actually there when I consider it. And maybe like, I'm overthinking things because I've been taught that I need to look into it and really sort of investigate things that people are saying or what's going on. Because you think that's a strength or a superpower, but actually, sometimes it can be the one thing that derails you. Maybe.

[Damien]

Yeah, it's the Occam's razor that the simplest solution is actually the one that we miss out on. I think another thing that strove me, I'd be interested in your view on it, Jake, is that 90 second rule about how you can only hold anger in your system for 90 seconds and

[Jake]

then you rethink it again and reprocess it. Yeah, I absolutely think that's right. And I think that's a good learning curve, actually, for everyone that listens to this podcast. You only hold anger for 90 seconds. Johnny Wilkinson won the rugby World cup and felt joy for 30 seconds. You know, everything is fleeting, everything passes. So actually all you can do is be in the moment. Like, it really doesn't matter what happened 30 seconds ago or in 30 seconds time. I liked it when he. When we spoke about legacy and he said, the legacy is this moment. Like right now. This is this moment right now. You, me, and the people listening to this podcast will never get it back. So just enjoy this moment. Who knows what happens in five minutes? One of us might not be around anymore, but right now, this is it. This is the moment. And I think that is a powerful way to live your life.

[Damien]

Yeah. And again, I think it's a real challenge to this idea of the traditional view of high performance that we constantly strive in for the next thing and the next thing. Whereas sometimes high performance is just being happy in this moment where we are.

[Jake]

Lovely way to finish. Thanks, Damo.

[Damien]

Thanks, mate.

[Jake]

I can't tell you how much I love that conversation. A man who has genuinely seen everything and walked away from all of it. With just one conclusion. Nothing moves the needle on what actually matters. What struck me most today was the simplicity of his framework. When life knocks you sideways, you've got to ask yourself, is it actually true? Can I do something about it? If not, can I just accept it and still move forward anyway? And this isn't about being passive with your life. It's about probably understanding that the hardest, most courageous thing any of us can do is just accept what's happening to us. I'd love you to read a bit more about the concept of amor fati. It's incredible. And you know, Moaz had to live at the sharpest possible end of life. His mission? Make a billion people happy. It sounds enormous, but the way that he describes it, it starts in this very moment. It starts with you from listening to me talking right now, choosing life to be different. And if this one conversation resonated with you, please share it with just one person that you feel needs to hear the wisdom of Mo. Please hit follow for more conversations like this from high performance and we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.

[Mo Gaudat]

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[Mo Gaudat]

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