Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Danielle Morrill
While it may be relatively simple to start a business,especially when the only member of the company is yourself, finding lastinghappiness in your business and creating happiness for your customers andemployees is a greater challenge.
Tony Hsieh from Zappos spoke today at LeWeb about building acorporate culture to be proud of, as he has done at Zappos. This was my second time hearing many ofhis stories, he gave the talk at Startup2Startup in Palo Alto a few months ago,but the content is still just as fresh and relevant. One quote from his talk that particularly jumped out at mewent something like this:
“The one and only use case for business is happiness”
Customer Service is the New Marketing
Anyone who interacts with your customers has the opportunity to impact their impression of your company and make them happy. Whether it is someone explicitly performing customer service, or simply one of your employees jumping in to respond to a comment on Twitter, each conversation is a chance to change or improve upon the relationship between your business and the people who keep that business alive. Honor these opportunities, and set your company up for success by building a culture where everyone is a representative of what you do – not just the “evangelist”.
Chris Pirillo echoed this sentiment in his talk yesterday on building community when he questioned whether the title of evangelist was even appropriate, pointing out that the best people for that role often emerge from other areas of the company and are rarely hired well from the outside.
Do It For Love, Not Money
It’s more important to work on something you’re passionate about, than something you think will make a whole lot of money.
Don’t get me wrong, I love money – making it, spending is, saving it, sharing it, and so on – but it isn’t a very good motivation because it is unlikely to sustain you through the darkest hours when your mission seems hopeless. Doing something you are deeply in love with will sustain you, having a mission beyond money and with a long term vision, will make it possible for you to dig deeper and stick it out.
You Will Cry in the Shower
This connects with doing it for the love of it, and not the money. Sometimes you will be unhappy, but it is important to recognize the difference between short term cognitive dissonance and long term unhappiness.
I remember when I was 19, I took my first corporate job as an intern at a Fortune 500 logistics company. The culture was demanding, and often the work was stressful since we were handling single shipments worth millions of dollars. Early on a coworker who I respected said to me in a reassuring voice, “don’t worry, we all cry in the shower sometimes”. I didn’t know what she meant until six months later, but her words rang in my head as I let the hot water wash away the stress and strain after receiving word that millions of dollars of uninsured customer merchandise was sent to the bottom of the ocean in a storm.
Accepting and processing pain and sadness, instead of locking them away as emotions that are not allowed because you are the tough and stoic startup founder (you can still be this to the outside world), is the key to finding long term happiness. It isn’t wrong to be devastated by failure, but it is wrong to wallow in it. Since entrepreneurs will fail and be rejected constantly, it’s a good idea to become as efficient as possible when it comes to processing the emotions that come along with these experiences.
What Makes You Happy?
With New Years fast approaching now is as good a time as any to start considering what some of your resolutions will be for 2010. Why not take some time to evaluate what makes you happy, both in life and in business, and make sure to have more of it in the coming year? Tony’s talk ends with several book recommendations and other resources for furthering your knowledge in the science of happiness.
