Dan Gilbert is a Harvard psychology professor who studies and teaches about happiness. What he’s discovered is that a lot of us have no idea how it works. What we think will make us happy does not.

Many of us live an “if only” life…. thinking that if only a certain thing would happen, then we’d feel happy. But that’s not how it works at all, from a psychological or scientific perspective. In fact, there’s a lot more to it.

So if you live your life thinking circumstances are what makes you feel a certain way, and you have thoughts like “if only I had a great job, I would be happy” or “if only I could meet the right person and fall in love, then I’d be happy, then you have to watch this talk.

It’s well worth the jam-packed 22-minutes that it takes. You can see it here.