"Happiness is the only consensual emotion; we can make others feel unhappy or angry without their consent, but we can never make them happy without their cooperation.
Making people I care about happy is deeply important to me, and even in my work, my main aim is not to inform or to provide or to serve but to delight. My only real unhappiness is when I fail, or when someone refuses to take delivery of joy, which happens more than you’d expect.
Having the delight of others as a primary goal turns out to be more subversive than it might seem. We live in a society in which we are often told that the soul of courage is synonymous with not giving a shit what anyone else thinks; we are all to be rebels, iconoclasts…yet in a way that has us all buying the same jeans and driving the same cars.
But delighting others has its own risks; one, you must get to know the minds of others, and if you know your own mind, you can be sure that theirs is just as bad a neighborhood as your own. But you must go further than knowing what others truly want; you must care about what they want, and once you care, you risk — you risk their rejection, you risk taking on their pain as your own.
Not caring has its own courage; so does caring."
