“Be true to yourself. If you follow that principle, a lot of decisions are actually pretty easy.”

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.

Success is getting to a point where you’d be truly OK with losing everything you have and starting over.

Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself).

I thought about how easily we are all brainwashed by our society and culture to stop thinking and just assume by default that more money equals more success and more happiness, when ultimately happiness is really just about enjoying life.

Chase the vision, not the money, the money will end up following you.

Help shape the stories that people are telling about you.

If there are too many competitors, even if you’re the best it’s a lot harder to win.

After a number of years dating, we decided we were good partners.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

You can’t have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That’s a recipe for disaster. And I don’t mean just whether a politician is scientifically literate, but people who vote politicians into office.

As a woman finds economic opportunity, even if she’s only earning a couple of dollars a day, if she can save it on her phone, she then makes different decisions for her household than her husband might.

Not making a decision is actually a decision. It’s the decision to stay the same.

How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

When Allah decides a matter, it is done.

If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.