“Most innovation comes from outside your industry applied to your own”

Money alone isn’t enough to bring happiness… happiness is when you’re actually truly ok with losing everything you have.

The problem when someone feels burned out, bored, unchallenged, or stifled by their work is not the job itself but rather the environment and playground rules given to them to do the job at hand.

Customer service shouldn’t just be A department, it should be the entire company.

We decided that if we get the culture right, most of the stuff, like building a brand around delivering the very best customer service, will just take care of itself.

Whatever you are thinking, think bigger.

Don’t play games that you don’t understand, even if you see lots of other people making money from them.

The ultimate definition of success is: you could lose everything that you have and truly be okay with it. Your happiness isn’t based on external factors.

If you’re focused on the friendship as its own reward, serendipitous stuff just happens. I know that sounds weird, but I can tell you for our 12 years of existence, it’s actually how a lot of stuff happens.

Our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff, like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand or empowering passionate employees and customers, will happen on its own.

Good businesses generate missions to drive their profits. Great businesses generate profits to drive their missions.

Our customers call and e-mail us to say that’s how it feels when a Zappos box arrives. And that’s how we view this company.

Open, honest communication is the best foundation for any relationship, but remember that at the end of the day it’s not what you say or what you do, but how you make people feel that matters the most.

I believe that there’s something interesting about anyone and everyone – you just have to figure out what that something is.

Hopefully 10 years from now people won’t even realize we started out selling shoes. They will just think about Zappos as a place to get the best customer service.

Never accept or be too comfortable with the status quo, because the companies that get into trouble are historically the ones that aren’t able to adapt to change and respond quickly enough.

To never forget that the most important thing in life is the quality of life we lead.

At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.

It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worthhearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own business.

Your income right now is a result of your standards, it is not the industry, it is not the economy.

Please don’t get hung up on this question of whether you need to have experience in an industry before you launch your startup.

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

There are many sides to me to who I am and my personality. I think the only thing that is rebellious about me is that I don’t really have a lot of fears, as far as film industry is concerned.

Every new change forces all the companies in an industry to adapt their strategies to that change.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.