Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos has a book coming out on June 7th called Delivering Happiness, A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose. I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of the book from Tony while in Vegas last month.

The book is about Tony’s entrepreneurial spirit  from the time he was a kid to present day. I really enjoyed the parts about his childhood. It chronicles his business life when he was a kid including Lemonade Stands, Garage Sales, Worm Farming, Newspaper Delivery and even Button Making.

Then it moves to his business life in college and has some classic stories about owning a restaurant, selling burgers and pizza. Then moves onto his business career after college, when he got bored at his desk job working for Oracle, and eventually starting his own company.

I don’t want to spoil the entire book, but it is a must read for anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit. It gets especially good when he talks about lessons learned and happiness. The book dives into what really makes him happy and how as soon as he figured that out, his life changed forever. Now his mission in business and life is to just be happy and create happiness around him instead of creating wealth.

Here is a quote from the book “I made a list of the happiest periods in my life, and I realized that none of them involved money. I realized that building stuff and being creative and inventive made me happy. Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose made me happy.” “Trick or Treating in middle school… made me happy. Pickles made me happy… “ I really enjoyed the real life stories throughout the book.

I am sure most of you know the end of story about how Tony started and sold his company called Link Exchange to Microsoft for 265 Million, then eventually became the CEO of Zappos which was sold to Amazon in a deal valued at over 1.2 Billion.

My take away from the Delivering Happienss Book was how to use happiness and passion to produce profits and purpose in not only life, but business. Strive to be happy and passionate about what you do first and then money will follow.

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