The Chief Business Officer at Google, Gawdat is clearly a brilliant mind and superb writer/communicator.  He takes the death of his 21 year old son due to a medical error during a simple appendectomy and turns that tragedy into a multi-year exploration of the human condition, using his skills as an engineer, mathematician, and computer expert to turn this philosophical exploration into a series of equations for happiness.  Gawdat doesn’t plow new ground, but he takes the usual landscape of meditation and mindfulness and organizes it into a logical and simple approach.  His 6-7-5 approach (Six Grand Illusions:  thought, self, knowledge, time, control, and fear; Seven Blind Spots:  filters, assumptions, predictions, memories, labels, emotions, and exaggeration; and Five Ultimate Truths:  Now, change, love, death, and design) are all combined into the Happiness Equation:  Happiness>your perception of Events minus your Expectations of how life should behave.  This is what I’ve been telling my daughters for decades:  the delta between what you want and what you have is what determines how happy you will be.  On the other hand, his rational, thoughtful, straightforward, and solid approach goes completely off the rails in the final chapter on intelligent design.  He constructs a straw man that shows how statistically improbable it is that randomness, evolution, and natural selection would result in our world and goes from that false equation to his argument for a Design.  Ugh!  The probability of our current world is not one in trillions as he claims, but 1.0 since this is the world we have.  It would be one in trillions should we be starting 13.5 billion years ago and asking what is the likelihood of ending up with Donald Trump, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Mona Lisa.  What a shame that he ruined a fine book with a bogus ending, but given the tragedy that entered his life when his son was suddenly gone, I can’t be too negative.  Worth reading