Overview

Seventeen days after the death of my wonderful son, Ali, I began to write and couldn’t stop. My topic was happiness, an unlikely topic given the circumstances. Less than 6 month later I was ready with the full draft of the book. Losing a child, they say, is the hardest experience ever. It certainly shakes every parent to the core. Losing a loving, kind, caring child is even harder; losing him at his prime is harder still; and losing him unexpectedly to preventable human error may be the hardest thing of all. Ali was truly an angel. He made everything he touched better, and everyone he met happier. He was not just my son but my best friend. At age eighteen he was noticeably wiser than any man I ever knew and so I sought his advice whenever I faced a big decision. He was my support and my confidant. I found myself thinking, “When I grow up, I want to be just like Ali.” The day he left us, there was every reason to be sad, even depressed for many years to come. Yet, In the face of the tragedy, I and my family maintained a state of steady, peaceful happiness that I came to call "joy". To reach that stage we applied a rigorous model based on "the Happiness Equation". The equation and the model took me a full decade of research to develop and are founded on solid logic and engineering principles. Those represent a different view of happiness that has rarely been discussed but has since opened the eyes of many to concepts such as: What the true reasons behind our suffering are and what steps are needed to reach a state of uninterrupted happiness. Working at Google [X] has trained me to think in terms of ambitious targets that positively affect the lives of billions of people. We call them moonshots. Solve For Happy is not just a book. It is my own personal moonshot. The target I had set for myself is to help 10 million people become happier, which we achieved. Major publishers all over the world have committed to join the mission and publish ‪SolveForHappy.com‬ on January 12, 2017.