Delivering Happiness

Tweets to Live By
• “Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on
this earth to climb.”
—Hugh Macleod
• “If you have more than 3 priorities then you don’t have any.”
—Jim Collins
• “If the person you’re talking to isn’t listening, be patient. Maybe he
has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”
—Winnie-the-Pooh
• “In the pursuit of knowledge, something is added every day. In the
pursuit of enlightenment, something is dropped every day.”

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—Lao-tzu
• “Someone broke into my car last night. Nothing worth taking, car is
actually less of a mess now. I should schedule this monthly.”

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SECTION III
PROFITS, PASSION, AND PURPOSE

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6
Taking It to the Next Level
PR and Public Speaking
In the two years leading up to the announcement of the Amazon acquisition,
Zappos started getting more and more media coverage. A lot of people
assumed that we must have stepped up our PR efforts, but that wasn’t the
case at all. We simply continued doing what we had always done:
constantly improving the customer experience while simultaneously
strengthening our culture.
The funny thing is that a lot of the press we got was for things we had
first done several years earlier, such as paying employees to quit during
their new hire training or occasionally sending flowers to customers. We
didn’t intend for any of the things we were doing to end up in the news or
on blogs. But every once in a while, a reporter or popular blogger would
pick up on something that we were doing, and the story would spread like
wildfire. We were as surprised as anyone else by the publicity because it
was never planned for on our end.
We learned a great lesson: If you just focus on making sure that your
product or service continually WOWs people, eventually the press will find
out about it. You don’t need to put a lot of effort into reaching out to the
press if your company naturally creates interesting stories as a by-product
of delivering a great product or experience.

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A
s our media coverage increased, I started receiving more and more
speaking requests for different conferences and industry events. One of my
first speeches was at the Footwear News CEO Summit in 2005. I remember
I was a nervous wreck, because I hadn’t really done much public speaking
before. At the time, I agreed to do it because it would be a good opportunity
to tell the Zappos story to a lot of footwear vendors we were still trying to
establish relationships with.
I wrote out my entire speech beforehand, and then spent a month
memorizing it and rehearsing it. I couldn’t sleep the night before my
speech. It ended up going okay, and I was relieved when it was finally over
so I could catch up on my sleep. Even though I didn’t really enjoy the
whole experience, it had a very positive impact on our business, so I was
glad I had done it.
Over the next year, a few more speaking requests started trickling in. I
agreed to all of them with a feeling of dread, but I knew they would help
build our business and our brand. I also thought that, as uncomfortable as I
was with doing them, they were opportunities for me to grow both
personally and professionally. Like anything else in life, I figured that
public speaking was just a skill that required practice on a regular basis.
Each speech I gave was just another practice session.
During my first year of public speaking, I was diligent about writing out
my speeches beforehand and memorizing them. It took a lot of time to do,
and I would never sleep well the night before my talks. Sometimes, while
giving the speech, I would accidentally skip over or forget a sentence or an
entire paragraph, which would leave me temporarily flustered on stage as I
racked my brain trying to remember the lines I had practiced the night
before.
With each speech, I found myself slowly improving. But I still didn’t
enjoy the actual speaking itself. Even though my speaking was helping
build the Zappos brand, I thought that maybe I just wasn’t meant to be a
public speaker because I was so uncomfortable with the process, even after
having done it for a year.
And then one day, I had an epiphany.
I realized that nobody knew what I had written down beforehand.
Nobody would ever know if I skipped a sentence, a paragraph, or even an

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entire section.
I had also noticed that while people appreciated the content of my
speeches, they generally commented about two things afterward. They told
me they really enjoyed the personal stories, and they said that, even though
many of them had already read about Zappos in the press, it made a huge
difference to actually hear it come from me. They told me they could really
feel my passion for company culture, customer service, and Zappos in
general.
So, for my next speech, I tried a completely different approach.
I decided not to memorize or rehearse anything. I would just wing it and
see what happened. I knew I had a lot of stories I could choose from on the
fly to tell, and I knew that as long as I stuck to topics I was passionate and
knowledgeable about—customer service and company culture—that I
would have plenty of material to draw from to fill the time.
When I finally got on stage, I still had some jitters for the first minute or
two as I adjusted to the audience and the room. After that, the time just flew
by. The audience was more engaged than they had been in my previous
talks. I even managed to get some unexpected laughs from moments in my
stories when I was just trying to tell a story instead of trying to recite lines
from a script I’d written.
I would later learn that I had achieved the state of flow. In his book by
the same name, researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a
type of happiness, in which someone loses sense of time, self-
consciousness, and even self. That’s exactly what happened to me.
From that point forward, I used the same formula for all of my speeches
and found that most of the rest of the stuff that I used to worry about usually
just fell into place. I just went by three basic rules for my talks:
1) Be passionate.
2) Tell personal stories.
3) Be real.
I made the mistake once of agreeing to speak at a conference about a
topic that I wasn’t actually passionate about. Even though I knew all the
content inside and out, I wasn’t able to speak passionately, so my

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performance turned out to be only okay. But it was a good learning
experience.
Today, whenever I’m invited to speak somewhere, I let them know that I
will only speak about certain subjects, which may or may not match the
overall theme of the conference. I then leave it up to the conference
organizers to decide whether they are okay with that or not. Usually they
are fine with it, but occasionally not.
In those instances, no matter how much money the conference is
offering to pay Zappos and no matter how good an opportunity it would be
for Zappos to be exposed to that audience, I always do the same thing.
I politely decline.