Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose
A personal Reflection Paper
November 4th 2017
Title: A personal Reflection Paper
Having ventured in different businesses that range from earthworm breeding, garage sales, selling newspaper ads in the pizza business, Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos recounts his journey to success, money and profits. The book “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose” humorously explores Hsieh’s different entrepreneurial ventures along his path to success, sharing his personal life experiences in great detail. The book provides a glimpse into Hsieh’s learning insights which have significantly shaped his business philosophy. Through this paper, I reflect and highlight some of the most captivating themes of the book.
A notable highlight in “Delivering Happiness” is Hsieh’s co-founding of link exchange, an internet advertising company. The co-founders hired friends to help run the company simply based on fun and excitement. As a result, LinkExchange was diverse, dynamic and close knit, experiencing rapid growth that surpassed 25 employees. Due to this rapid growth, LinkExchange embarked on hiring employees who were motivated by a paycheck and career growth. At this particular point, Hsieh states that the company culture started shifting. He attributes this sudden change in corporate culture to hiring people who were basically chasing money. When LinkExchange was finally sold to Microsoft at US$265 million, Hsieh opines that he no longer enjoyed what he did even though he had co-founded LinkExchange (p. 48). It’s at this point that he learned the importance of organizational culture. I agree with Hsieh that once passion and fulfillment are replaced by the quest for financial rewards, a culture shift is likely to occur. When he and his colleague co-founded LinkExchange, they were both passionate about the business. It’s the passion and fulfillment that brought them enjoyment. They hired friends who too were passionate and enjoyed what they did. As a result, link exchange was a team of passionate, motivated and happy people whom were not just after money, but happiness. However, when this changed, the culture changed and people no-longer chased happiness but money.
Through a series of real life experiences, Hsieh realized the true meaning and passion in his life. To demonstrate the importance of happiness, he quit his $40,000 job at Oracle after just a few months to embark on web development. However, he also quit web development after realizing that it dint give him fulfillment, to start LinkExchange, which he again sold to Microsoft. Hsieh’s experiences have taught me that it’s not really what you do that counts, but passion for what you do. He says, “I was getting bored with the investment business, so I started looking for something else to fill my time” (p. 62). I have learned that it makes sense to make sacrifices just to ensure that you get to do what actually gives you pleasure and fulfillment. When you do what you’re passionate about, and are happy, money comes automatically. For instance, Hsieh sacrificed huge sums of money at Microsoft because the passion for LinkExchange was ...