Elaborations: serving

The most obvious reason for saying to serve others is the religion behind it.  I hope your religion is a choice, not a blind following; and I hope you follow your religion emphatically.  More than that though, I hope your greatest source of happiness comes from serving others.  Some may argue this may not be possible without some sort of religious beliefs, without some degree of believing there is something out there greater than you.

Going back to one of my main responsibilities as your father, it's my duty to give you the tools to help you be the happiest you can be; I believe the richest form of happiness comes from serving others, seeing someone else get what they want, even in the face of you not getting what you want.  I want you to get true joy when someone else is blessed, even if you were hoping to get that very blessing.  I want you to be happy for someone who "wins," even if you feel like they don't deserve it.  I myself fail frequently at that last one, but I'm never jealous.

I'm glad you got the job instead of me... even though you spend half
the day in the bathroom doing Idon'twanttoknow what.

Someone may argue that having this mentality is actually selfish; if your main source of happiness is making other people happy, then you're not making others happy for altruistic reasons, you're just making yourself happy, which just happens to also make others happy.  One retort to that may be, "Who cares;" other people are happy, does it really matter the reason behind it?  I'll leave the philosophizing up to the philosophers, but I will say this: one way to test if you're doing it for the right reasons or not is to make sure you're not doing anything to make sure someone else knows what you've done.  Do you gain just as much happiness regardless if the other person knows you did the good deed or not?  Are you trying to make sure the other person knows it was you?  Saying things like, "Hey, did you see I cleaned your room for you without you telling me to," might point to you actually being selfish in your actions.  But, if you don't say anything and someone asks you, "Hey, did you clean my room," then you can say yes, or you can even be coy about it and let them wonder.  Happiness should come from seeing other people being happy, not you knowing that they know you did it.

I do fear you truly will be this way.  The reason I fear this is because I know that, when your main source of happiness comes from others being happy, that also means when others are unhappy, you're unhappy; and when you're the source of said unhappiness, that just really tears you up.  The problem is, sometimes you have no control over whether your actions will upset someone else or not.

As a child, there's a good chance you ended up doing something for myself or for your mom (that you did out of 100% love for no other reason than because you wanted to bring joy to someone else) that you probably shouldn't have.  Maybe you took your mother's purse and cut decorative holes in it because you thought it was pretty; of course you just ruined your mother's purse, but it was OK because you didn't know any better and you had good intentions.  As you've gotten older, you now know better for the most part, but you'll always do things that will inadvertently upset someone; sometimes it'll be out of the blue ("I didn't know I wasn't suppose to put that in the dish washer"), sometimes it'll go against your intentions ("That program was suppose to make your computer run faster... sorry I formatted your hard drive").  Sometimes though... sometimes other people will get upset when it's completely out of your control; they take something you did the wrong way, maybe they read into something you say, finding meaning where there was none.  Maybe you'll ask if someone has picked up the mail for today so you'll know whether you should go check or not, but they read into it and feel like you're pointing out their laziness (of which there may be none) so now you've upset them, all from a very innocent inquiry.

We seem to live in a world where we say, "It doesn't hurt to ask," but I can assure you it does. More often than not, the chance of becoming the source of negativity in someone else is not worth the knowledge gained.  But, that's because my main source of happiness is others' happiness, so being the source of others' negativity is more painful to me than the average person.  We also seem to live in a world where this concept seems so very foreign, even though almost every single religion, of which at least 80% of the world believes in some form of a higher power, teaches this way of living, that this would just be yet another trait that you feel distances yourself from others.

So, I believe the greatest happiness you can experience is in making other people happy, but I also know it can be a great source of unhappiness.