Delivering Happiness via Tony Hsieh
The late Tony Hsieh is an incredible inspiration. Most people know his story as the founder of the online shoe retailer, Zappos, and how he sold the business to Amazon back in 2009 for a cool $1.2 billion. As I was listening to this throwback episode of the We Study Billionaires podcast, it reminded me of some great lessons that Hsieh has taught all of us through his book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.
Start with Values
Tony Hsieh built up Zappos and its powerhouse culture by first designing and focusing on the values he wanted to serve as the DNA of the company. Everyone knows about the customer-obsessed culture they built at Zappos — on the podcast Preston calls out the famous example of being able to call up their customer service number and ask them anything — even if it’s not related to their products — and they will just be great humans and try their best to solve your problem. The example in the book is where Tony is travelling and calls Zappos customer service to find the best pizza near him, and the agent happily obliges!
This is in such stark contrast to how all other e-commerce shops operate, where customer service is seen as a cost centre and leadership does everything possible to reduce costs. Hsieh flipped the script on this completely and made great customer service into a competitive advantage. He knew that if he could instill a willingness to help anyone with a problem, he would create a loyal customer base for life. And he did it by infusing this value throughout the entire organization — by hiring good, empathetic people who wanted to help others. And the knock-on effects were tremendous: he didn’t only create that loyal customer base, he created an engaged workforce who felt like their mission at work was to genuinely help people solve their problems.
Starting with the right values allows you to first live it, then spread it inside your organization, and hire like-minded people to continue to build and amplify the culture around these values. I’ve been bitten by working for companies that didn’t share my values, and it always led to a negative experience. But I’d also say that I was never intentional about knowing my own values and searching intentionally for opportunities based on that. I’m sure on any venture I start on, including designing a future for a purposeful life, I’ll start by carefully understanding my values so that they will inform every part of what I choose to do.
Finding Enduring Happiness
Hsieh also has some great thoughts on how money factors into happiness. He looked at studies of lotto jackpot winners, and he found that jackpot winners say their happiness spikes after they win a life changing amount of money. No surprises there. However over time, the happiness attributed to the winnings slowly waned, often dropping back down to their original happiness level before they had the lotto winnings.
Hsieh’s lesson here is that money and material things can definitely give you short term happiness, but long term enduring happiness needs to be found elsewhere, and that’s from finding real purpose that one can work towards fulfilling. Hsieh boils it down to 4 factors that he applied to his own life, and even infused in Zappos to ensure he had a happy workforce:
Perceived control - that you feel like you’re in control of your own destiny
Perceived progress - that you feel like you’re growing and learning
Indebtedness - on building deep relationships that you can lean on
Vision - that you’re contributing to something greater than yourself
I love these — sounds a lot like Cal Newport’s model of the Buckets of a Deep Life, right? These similarities are clearly not coincidental. And it’s a good reminder to not count on lottery winnings to turn your life around. You can interpolate that to the hedonic treadmill too — will that promotion or bonus make you happy? If it’s just down to the money, sure it will — but only for short period of time. After that you’ll be looking for your next hit, unless you have the foundation for enduring happiness in place. If you don’t you’ll continue spinning the treadmill, looking for the next source of short-term happiness.
Queued Up on the Reading List
There are so many other lessons in this book that this podcast reminded me of — I plan on another read of it in the near future. If you haven’t already or perhaps read it a long time ago, I urge you to pick it up and do the same.
