Mo Gawdat’s Moonshot for Humanity: How to Save 500,000,000 Men 

At age 34, Mo Gawdat was at the top of his game. He had what most men only dream of having. As a tech entrepreneur he had founded numerous companies and his work for IBM, Microsoft, and later Google, had given him success, recognition, and wealth. He could buy whatever a man might want, including two vintage Rolls-Royces which he purchased on-line and had delivered to his home and parked in his 16-car garage.

Yet, all was not well with Mo. Like many men and women seeking success, more was never enough. I know, it happened to me. I became increasingly irritable and depressed. Like me, Mo became more demanding of colleagues and increasingly impatient with his wife and two children, who he loved deeply. In 2001 he hit bottom. “The relentless pace and the emptiness had led me into a very dark place,” he said. “At that point I knew I couldn’t go on ignoring the problem. This pushy, unhappy person staring back at me in the mirror wasn’t really me and I was tired of trudging along in this tired, miserable, aggressive-looking guy’s shoes.”

He didn’t go to a psychiatrist or get a prescription for anti-depressants. He did something unexpected. “I decided to take on my unhappiness as a challenge. I would apply my geek’s approach to self-study, along with my engineer’s analytic mind, to digging my own way out.” It took Mo nearly a decade to discover the answer. “By 2010 I’d developed an equation and a well-engineered, simple, and replicable model of happiness and how to sustain it that fit together perfectly.” Even the death of his son, Aly, didn’t pull him back into anger, blame, and depression.

In response to many people’s request to understand Mo’s unusual approach of moving from depression to happiness and joy, he wrote a book, Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy, which was published in 2017. Mo set an ambitious mission: To help ten million people become happier.

However, the goal was quickly surpassed, the book has been translated into 28 languages, videos of Mo’s talks have gone viral, and he’s now reached more than 100,000,000 people with his message of hope, happiness, and joy. Now Mo has set an even more ambitious mission: To help one billion people become happier (that’s a thousand million for those like me who have trouble conceiving of big numbers). Check it out at #OneBillionHappy.

For more than 40 years, I have been helping men, and the women to love them, to move from depression to happiness. My own father become depressed at mid-life and took an overdose of sleeping pills in an attempt to escape the pain of failure in his life. When my own son, Jemal, was born in 1969, I made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where men were able to heal their wounds and families could find joy and happiness.

When I reached out to Mo I told him I wanted to partner with him to use my experience and skills to help the 500 million men (1/2 a billion) who were part of his commitment to reach one billion and teach them the skills we know can help men move from depression to happiness. Mo’s reply was heart-warming. “Oh Jed. I cannot tell you how wonderful and kind of you to help. Your work and network are spot on and your help would take us far.”

Both women and men can benefit from this knowledge, but there’s a special benefit for men. According to Thomas Joiner, Ph.D., author of Lonely at the Top: The High Cost of Men’s Success, “Males experience higher mortality rates than females at all stages of life from conception to old age.” Based on research findings reported by Will Courtenay, Ph.D. in his book, Dying to Be Men, the suicide rate, men’s ultimate expression of unhappiness, is 1.8 to 17.5 times higher for males than it is for females, and men become more unhappy as they age.

So, if we can help to reduce male unhappiness, we can do great good in the world. How much good? “Over 375,000 lives would be saved in a single year in the U.S. alone if men’s risk of dying was as low as women’s,” says University of Michigan researcher, Daniel J. Kruger, PhD.  “Being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death,” says Kruger’s colleague, Randolph M. Nesse, M.D., and he goes on to say, “If you could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer.”

If you’d like to help us you can contact Mo, at https://www.onebillionhappy.org/. If you feel moved by what we’re doing there are three things you can do:

1. Make happiness your first priority and recognize that happiness is your birthright.
2. Invest in your own happiness by taking action to have more joy in your life.
3. Tell two people about the message that you have learned, who will tell two people, who will tell two people.

Together we can create a world where 500,000,000 men and 500,000,000 women will be truly happy. Imagine what kind of a tipping point that would be.