“The four hours between my wife Nibal, daughter Aya and I hearing something had gone wrong and the moment we lost Ali was the hardest I’ve ever known,” conveys Mo, 54.
“The anticipation — not knowing if he would live or die — was insanely difficult. We were so fragile, weeping. For hours I kept hoping, pleading, praying he would recover.”
Hooked up to machines, Ali’s essential organs began failing, one by one. Ultimately, the couple had to make the awful decision to have his life-support switched off. “We were allowed into intensive care to say our goodbyes. I kissed his beautiful face. It was impossibly painful to comprehend this amazing person had been healthy one minute and a few hours later he was gone.”
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Over the following days, Mo was consumed with rage both at the doctor who’d made these lethal errors and at himself for taking Ali to that particular hospital in Dubai, where the family was then living. His voice cracks and he dabs tears from his eyes. ‘The role of the parent is to protect your child. My brain attacked me viciously every minute saying, “That doctor murdered your son and you drove him to his death.” I was tormented by the desire for revenge, for justice. I couldn’t see the point of living without him.”
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But after a few days of these agonizing recriminations, Mo began to speak back to the voice in his head. “I said almost out loud, ‘Yes, Brain, but I can’t change anything now, so why are you torturing me?’”
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“Because before Ali died, I’d made a contract with my brain that it should only be allowed to bring painful thoughts if they’re useful. If they’re not useful, then at least they should bring joy. I asked, ‘Do you have a better idea we can act upon?’ A few days later, my brain came back and said, ‘Maybe you should share what Ali taught you with the world?’”
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So was born One Billion Happy, Mo’s project which has since engulfed him — a plan initially to teach a million people the secrets of happiness, something he and Ali had dreamed of working on. The hope is each convert brings in two more, ‘like a positive Ponzi scheme’ — until eventually, a billion people benefit.
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As the chief business officer at Google, who had already made wealth from the stock market by his late 20s, Mo’s life appeared perfect — a loving wife, two children, a vast house, and more money than he could ever spend. He had personally started close to half of Google’s worldwide operations and was worth, at a guess, hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet he was ‘completely depressed’, insisting with colleagues, snappy with his family. “I was so driven, putting all this energy into the business, things that honestly don’t matter.”
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A confessed ‘geek and nerd’, he chose to turn things around by analyzing the components of happiness. Ali — ‘such a wise man’ — was both his role model and sounding board. Together, they computed a mathematical formula that instantly transformed Mo’s outlook and was to prove incalculable when tragedy struck. “I can’t imagine how I’d have handled his loss without it.”
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