Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
An Important Point in A Great Book
When reading books, I find that most great books have important insights following the power law distribution. Namely, that a great book will have one or two points that are incredibly important/interesting/ insightful that captures a large amount of that author’s view point. Think of this like the 80/20 rule for non-fiction: 80% of the value can be capture in 20% of the narrative.
For these types of posts, I will go over some of my favorite books I’ve read and give one point that I think is incredibly important. These won’t be reviews, nor will they be summaries of the books. Instead I want to focus on some point the author made and how it contributes to a better understanding of business, strategy and success.
For this week, I want to discuss Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. Tony is most notable for being the chief investor and CEO of Zappos, which got bought out by Amazon and was able to keeps its amazing culture. Before Zappos, though, Tony started an advertising company, LinkExchange, that that grew to epic proportions during the .com bubble. It was when Tony was describing this period of his life that he put to words a phenomenon that most super rich people often go through.
Onto Super Wealth
The year was 1998. LinkExchange had just been bought out by Microsoft for ~$250 million dollars. Tony ends up walking away with somewhere between $15-$25 million. He then goes on to describe this what he does with this money. (I’m paraphrasing, as I listened to the audio version)
There was a list of thing’s that Tony said he would buy if he was fabulously rich: A nice Apartment in San Francisco, All Expense Paid Trip for his Friends to a fancy place and a Giant Ass Television for His Living Room. So once he became flush with cash, he set out to buy everything on his hit list. He went out and got that nice apartment in SF. He took all his friend on a plane and partied like crazy. And then he bought that big ass television for his apartment. And after all of that… he still had 97% of the money from his sale. He had so much money left over that he actually left LinkExchange early and lost $X million due to a contractual break. In his words, that additional money just wasn’t worth the time or energy.
Now, this isn’t to say that Tony then went out and took a vow of poverty. After this point, he bought a lot of apartments, took some nice vacations and eventually funded a bunch of early stage ventures, including what became Zappos. But his relationship with money changed after that point.
After Money Buys You Everything
The point that gets illustrated so well here is that many people strive to have a certain amount of money and the money ‘goal’ becomes the only goal. The way I’ve always imagined it is this was: You get the big payout, everyone is happy, you won!… credits roll.
But the truth is… you still have a life to live. The manner of which you live your life is going to change, certainly, but your life continues. You still have to decide what work you want to do (or what things are going to replace work). You have to decide what relationships you want to pursue and what things give you meaning an happiness. There are still problems that need to be solved.
It’s true that not everything is cheap and you need a lot of money to those work for you(for example, you can’t fly a private jet for anything less than $300,000 annually). But there is a point where you have enough money and it’s likely not as much as you think. Everyone has their saturation point:
For Tony, that was buying his apartment and taking his friends on vacation.
For Bill Gates, it was his Porsche.
For Steve Jobs, it was also his apartment in the Bay Area.
Regardless of how expensive your thing is, at some amount of money, you’ll be able to get it. And at that point, you now have a nice car/apartment/vacation and enough money to sit around and do nothing. And yet there’s still a life to live.
In Tony’s case, he took all of his money (and I do mean everything, including the safety money…) and invested it in order to keep Zappos from going under. When listening to the book, you really get the sense that the money was worth less to him than making sure that Zappos survived.
So in the end, that age old question is still relevant: If money was no object, what would you do with your life?
If you’re interested in reading Delivering Happiness, I would highly recommend the audio version. Tony narrates the book himself and the passion is undeniable. He even goes into a section about how much he loves Red Bull and how it helped make Zappos the company it is. If you have a few hours, this one is worth the read.
