A Hard One to Write

This week’s newsletter is hard for me to write. It’s about Tony Hsieh, who I didn’t know personally but I always admired from afar. If you don’t know Tony, he was a wildly successful entrepreneur who appeared to have the world on a string.

But he didn’t. And maybe in the wild scree that was his life there are lessons to be learned.

One of his credos (and the title of his book) was ‘Delivering Happiness.’ His obsessiveness with customer service and making it right is legendary, He instilled in his workplace the credo of Caring More, which might be the best business and life plan of them all.

Caring more though is different than happiness. Caring more is about being accountable for the shape of our world and owning the outcome. It’s the hard work we should all be doing.

Tony was very good at that. He rebuilt downtown Las Vegas and billion dollar businesses by asking a singular question again and again: how can I help?

Right now especially this is a good question to ask. During these strange times with the expectations of the holidays upon us, people might be quietly struggling. These four words are one small answer. For family, for friends, for strangers.

We’re not going to know exactly what got Tony in the end. All I know for sure is it makes me incredibly sad.

How Can I Help? There’s a lot of magic in those words - and Tony understood that far better than most.