This Is the Secret of Happiness, According to Einstein (It’s Just 17 Words Long)

Albert Einstein is famous for discovering the theory of relativity, among other world-changing insights. But the great physicist didn’t concern himself just with the rules governing space and time. He was also interested in the rules of our internal state of mind.

As Psychology Today has noted, Einstein spoke regularly about the search for happiness. “It’s happiness we’re after,” he told an interviewer who asked him what humans desired most in 1931. “Will any student of history agree that the inhabitants of an American city are, on the whole, happier than those of a Greek or a Babylonian city of the past?” he mused at a symposium that same year.

Clearly the great genius was as intrigued as the rest of us by the question of what constitutes a truly happy life. Did he find an equation that solved this eternal riddle? Yes, and he even scribbled it down in all of 17 words.

17 words worth $1.56 million

In 1922, one year after he won the Nobel Prize, Einstein traveled to Japan for a lecture series and found himself continually surrounded by curious admirers. Apparently even back then, he was turning over the question of happiness in his mind, because one day when a bellboy came to make a delivery to his hotel room…