Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

by Tony Hsieh

First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

I failed my way to success.

I was only allowed to watch one hour of TV every week.

that presentation of the truth was just as important as the truth.

necessity is the mother of invention.

This wasn’t about the money, it was about not being bored.

as we grew beyond twenty-five people, we made the mistake of hiring people who were joining the company for other reasons.

I made a list of the happiest periods in my life, and I realized that none of them involved money.

ultimately happiness is really just about enjoying life.

I had decided to stop chasing the money, and start chasing the passion.

they were clearly passionate and willing to place big bets.

not confusing the right decision with the individual outcome

I finally learned that the game started even before I sat down in a seat.

one of the most important decisions for an entrepreneur or a CEO to make is what business to be in.

I made a note to myself to make sure I never lost sight of the value of a tribe where people truly felt connected and cared about the well-being of one another.

Things happened that we could not have possibly predicted, but they were the result of relationships that we had started building 2–3 years earlier.

“Envision, create, and believe in your own universe, and the universe will form around you,”

great companies have a greater purpose and bigger vision beyond just making money or being number one in a market.

To keep our culture strong, we wanted to make sure that we only hired people who we would also enjoy hanging out with outside the office. As it turned out, many of the best ideas came about while having drinks at a local bar.

But what we’ve found is that on average, every customer contacts us at least once sometime during his or her lifetime, and we just need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory.

Let your employees take risks and try new things.

“What was the best mistake you made on the job? Why was it the best?”

Yet no matter how much better we get, we’ll always have hard work to do, we’ll never be done, and we’ll never get it right.”

The best leaders are those that lead by example and are both team followers as well as team leaders.

the best ideas and decisions are made from the bottom up, meaning by those on the front lines that are closest to the issues and/or the customers.

There’s never one way to do things, but an incredible amount of ways to get things done.

take care of the customers, grow the business, and be profitable.

things are never as bad as they seem or as good as they seem.

Remember, this is not my company, and this is not our investors’ company. This company is all of ours, and it’s up to all of us where we go from here.

Our goal at Zappos is for our employees to think of their work not as a job or career, but as a calling.

“If you have more than 3 priorities then you don’t have any.”

When you walk with purpose, you collide with destiny.