Be ambitious; find everlasting love; look after your health—there are countless stories about how we ought to live our lives. These narratives can sometimes make us happier too, but they can also trap us. Here, happiness expert Paul Dolan draws on a wealth of evidence to bust the common myths about our sources of happiness and shows that there can be many unexpected paths to lasting happiness. By freeing ourselves from the myth of the perfect life, we might each find a life worth living. Paul Dolan is a professor and department head at London School of Economics and Political Science, has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University, and is on the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Panel on measuring national well-being. He is the author of Happiness by Design.