dennis yang dot com

I’ve been fascinated with the field of “happiness research” lately, and yes, though it sounds made-up, it’s actually a bona fide field of study. In general, I’m a happy person, so I think that’s actually why I am curious as to *why* that is the case. The Atlantic (yes, my favorite magazine) published a fantastic story last year about “What Makes Us Happy?” that you should read.

In any case, this week, Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, published his new book, Delivering Happiness, which kind of approaches happiness research from his personal angle. I met Tony this year when he came to my birthday party at SOM with my friend Jenn. He’s super cool and we ended up all hanging out together at SXSW in Austin (including one night with Ashton Kutcher). So, yes, full disclosure, I know Tony, and he gave me a copy of his new book, and now I’m writing up a review about it.

The book itself is a fast, entertaining read, and details Tony’s entrepreneurial path from selling worms to buttons to LinkExchange to Zappos. What’s the saying? Once, you’re lucky — twice you’re good?

The story is a fascinating study of how to build successful businesses and not be an asshole in the process, so that’s a little refreshing. That said, Tony isn’t just a “nice guy” — but rather, his genuine, honest, open approach to running a business (and life) is really cool. For example, he spoke very frankly about the reasons why he sold Zappos to Amazon.

And I can’t help draw personal parallels between Tony’s background and my own, which was kind of cool.. Taiwanese parents? Yup! Played musical instruments? Uh, yah, we’re asians. As a kid, loved Boy’s Life and the Johnson Smith catalog? uh.. yah. Ok. Getting eery now.

Anyway, one of my favorite passages was this one on “networking”:

So my advice is to stop trying to “network” in the traditional business sense, and instead just try to build up the number and depth of your friendships, where the friendship itself is its own reward. The more diverse your set of friendships are, the more likely you’ll derive both personal and business benefits from your friendships later down the road. You won’t know exactly what those benefits will be, but if your friendships are genuine, those benefits will magically appear 2-3 years later down the road.

On my roadtrip through Utah over memorial day, I chatted with my friend Paul at length about “work people” vs. “friends.” Paul mentioned how there was a clear division between the two, whereas for me, there really isn’t a distinction. Throughout my entire career, I’ve kind of just blurred that line — at mySimon and now at Techdirt, some of my closest friends are the people I work with every day. I mean, you spend TONS of time with the people you work with.. shouldn’t they be people you enjoy hanging out with?

Everyone can tell when people are “networking” — eew.. It’s much, much nicer when people are just genuinely hanging out and getting to know each other. Cuz, if you don’t want to hang out with me to be with me — rather, you want something? Then, uh, yah.. that’s not cool. They have a word for that. It’s called fake. Or shallow. Hm, I guess that’s two words.

Anyway, go check out Tony’s book. I really enjoyed reading it, and for me, I have a lot of things that I’m thinking about right now, so it was actually quite helpful in putting my life in perspective. (Whoa, Dennis is getting all serious and stuff.)

You can buy it on Amazon. Or you can borrow my copy if you like.

Congrats Tony & Jenn the book! Cheers!