Today I want to talk to you about why you can't make people happy, and how happiness ultimately belongs to each of us. Understanding that can actually make you better at contributing to other people's happiness.

Two people can receive exactly the same kindness and respond completely differently. You can love somebody, support them, comfort them, give them time and make sacrifices for them. But you can’t reach inside their mind and switch happiness on.

There’s an important distinction between creating favourable circumstances for happiness and creating happiness itself. This doesn't mean you have no influence. But there's a difference between making someone happy in a moment and making someone a happy person.

The first is possible. The second is beyond your control. Yet their happiness can genuinely become yours. If someone you love succeeds, their excitement can become your excitement.

Here are some examples:

1. A parent who tries to remove every disappointment from a child's life may actually make their long-term happiness harder. Sometimes allowing frustration and consequences helps a child develop the resilience that they will need in life.
2. A person who worries constantly about whether everyone around them is happy may just feel guilty, or try to fix things that aren't theirs to fix. That's the difference between caring about someone's happiness and feeling responsible for it.
3. Telling someone who is going through difficult circumstances that only you can make yourself happy may feel deeply unfair. Personal agency matters, but so do the circumstances that people may find themselves in through no choice of their own.

All that said, the concept that another person’s happiness can become part of yours also needs careful handling, as there's an important difference between being happy because someone you love is happy and only being able to be happy if they are happy.

So, today, try to remember that you're not responsible for manufacturing other people's happiness, but you can still contribute to it, encourage it and take genuine pleasure in seeing it. Remember though that you can't make other people happy!