I recently finished the book, Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. Tony is the CEO of Zappos. Because of that yippy and self-resonating sounding title, I’ve been eyeing this book for years but like most of what I read, it’s taken me way too long to get to it.
Overall, it was a good read and definitely worth a reflection and recommendation. I honestly did find myself feeling a bit skeptical about how ideal Zappos culture and morale was described, it made me wonder if there are some blindspots he might not see as CEO and by simply being worth so much money. it just sounds too positive to be true. But then again I’m interested in learning more about the company and taking an office tour which I learned is available to the public. While it inspired me to want to start a business and build one with a resilient culture that benefits it’s people, this book also made me think about past mistakes I made when I tried to start a tee shirt company.
Like how I pretty much devastated the hopes of the company when I trusted a small dry cleaner to sew on all of our signature red labels to the shirts. The dry cleaner lady then entrusted her daughter who could care even less about what we were starting and the result of her apathetic labor left us with holes in shirts and every single tag sewed on crooked. This then prompted me to learn how to sew, but it was too late. My business partner was deflated and every piece of valuable product we had was worthless. Thousands of dollars we pumped into starting this was ripped up and torn apart. That was a painful thing to go through. And the lesson learned was summed up when Tony says, “Don’t outsource your core competency.”
The other thing is that you need to work with people who are in alignment. Tony harps on his own career mistakes when was lacking this alignment within the culture of his first company Linkshare or in the case of Zappos with his investors. He emphasizes that creating a culture of shared beliefs and shared ambition is crucial. While I’m not a big fan of casinos or card games, I did appreciate how Tony shares a lot of great poker analogies like, “Just because you lose a hand doesn’t mean you’re losing — you have to play the long game.” Because if you know what you’re doing in a game like poker (and business), it’ll work out in your favor. But sometimes you’re simply sitting at the wrong table. And in the wrong business.
I was also inspired by the Jeff Bezos soundbite at the end. This was from the video message Jeff created when Zappos was bought by Amazon. It’s the things that Jeff knows. He knows that his success comes from obsessing over the customer. He also knows he needs to invent. Invent things that the customer might not be able to see, but they’ll intuitively want. The third is thinking long term. Being able to see beyond and manage a vision through the initial rough patches. The final thought is his famous line, it’s always Day One. I took a second to relate this to what I know: Customer obsession simply relates to the people I serve whether that’s creative clients or an audience for art and humor. Invent is to keep creating: keep inventing stories and new ideas to fuel my work. Thinking long-term, means having a solid vision and staying with it. And it’s always Day One feels like it doesn’t even need another explanation. But here’s one anyway — no matter how many times I’ve failed, there’s always today to learn and invent the future.
This also led me down the rabbit hole to watch more Jeff Bezos classics like his electricity metaphor for the internet industry. It’s a rather stirring idea — that we’ve just begun realizing the potential of the internet and how it helps us connect. The things we’ve invented for it are still primitive and evolving. He’s a great storyteller, a wealth of historic knowledge and it’s a joy to watch him speak so passionately in the early days.
Tony and I can also agree on another thing and that’s the value of happiness. Happiness is worth spreading, it’s worth delivering and it’s worth creating in your world. You can have a company that sells shoes or food or everything you can imagine and make billions… but if it’s not providing happiness or contributing something to the overall well-being of humanity than of how much real value is it? Check out Delivering Happiness here.