Tony Hsieh Quotes - Page 3

A bigger business is like a cruise ship: There are lots of amenities and you can go a lot further, but it's harder to turn quickly.

Money alone isn't enough to bring happiness... happiness is when you're actually truly ok with losing everything you have.

If you're focused on the friendship as its own reward, serendipitous stuff just happens. I know that sounds weird, but I can tell you for our 12 years of existence, it's actually how a lot of stuff happens.

We asked ourselves what we wanted this company to stand for. We didn't want to just sell shoes. I wasn't even into shoes - but I was passionate about customer service.

Usually my 'a-ha' moments are when I'm not trying to think of how to solve a particular problem.

If there are too many competitors, even if you're the best it's a lot harder to win.

Launching a business is kind of like a motorboat: You can go very quickly and turn fast.

What’s the best way to build a brand for the long term? In a word: culture.

If someone is self-aware, then they can always continue to grow. If they're not self-aware, I think it's harder for them to evolve or adapt beyond who they already are.

Help shape the stories that people are telling about you.

Rather than focus on trying to get a lot of customers to market yourself, really focus more on the actual product or service itself and existing users to, like, what would make them happier, what would make them come back more and more times or in our case buy more often.

Having a higher purpose is more than just about profits. You actually end up making more profits in the long run because employees really are a lot more engaged and customers see the higher purpose in the company.

If I was going to go into an office I wanted it to be with people I would choose to be around even if we didn't have to work together and so that was one of the major reasons why I decided out of all the different companies we invested in to work with Zappos.

Instead of getting an iPad, I now use my iPhone with a giant magnifying glass attached to my face.

Ask yourself: would you be comfortable printing everything your employees, customers & partners have to say about your culture?

I think everyone should get a little exposure to computer science because it really forces you to think in a slightly different way, and it's a skill that you can apply in life in general, whether you end up in computer science or not.

Your brand is your culture.

Hopefully 10 years from now people won't even realize we started out selling shoes. They will just think about Zappos as a place to get the best customer service.

Our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff, like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand or empowering passionate employees and customers, will happen on its own.

The brand is just a lagging indicator of a company's culture.

Service Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth. Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

We decided that if we get the culture right, most of the stuff, like building a brand around delivering the very best customer service, will just take care of itself.

I made a list of the happiest periods of my life & I realized that none of them involve money.

After what seemed like an eternity, we finally reached the summit just as the sun was rising. I couldn't believe that we had actually done it. We were standing at the highest point in all of Africa, looking down at the clouds below us, with the sun directly in front of us, its rays welcoming us to the beginning of a new day. It didn't seem like this was something that humans were meant to experience, yet here we were

Twitter is like hugging. Just because it's hard to measure the return on investment doesn't mean there isn't value there.