“[Our employees] do it not because we pay them more, but because they want to be part of something.”

The most important things are actually the easiest to obtain: great friends, good food, and a decent bottle of wine.

Dancing is like making love. It has to be a harmony; it has to be about two bodies. When one is like, “I am the good one,” it doesn’t work.

Love isn’t supposed to torment you. If it does, there’s probably something wrong.

We have arguments [with my father] and we had a lot of arguments in the years when I was at Michigan.

No matter how convenient it is for us to reach out to people remotely, sometimes the most important task is to show up in person.

Your backpack is a part of your identity as a student.

When you’re buying a pair of TOMS, if you don’t feel like you’re part of a community, then I’ve failed.

I am a big believer in the value of traveling while you are young. The experiences you have in other countries can inspire greatness.

When you incorporate giving into your business, you attract the most amazing partners.

A leader can create a company, but a community creates a movement.

When you incorporate giving into your business in an authentic and transparent way, your customers become your best marketers.

I surround myself with inspirational quotations.

Complicated lives and heaps of possessions don’t necessarily bring happiness; in fact, they can bring the opposite.

Vogue Magazine does something really interesting here: They make it look like I know exactly what I’m doing. Because Vogue made it look like I knew exactly what I’m doing, stores from all over started calling.

Make the most out of every single day you have on earth and be thankful for them.

When people start serving together, they forgot about all their stress, […] all their own problems. They start focusing on someone else’s.

If we face recession, we should not lay off employees; the company should sacrifice a profit. It’s management’s risk and management’s responsibility.

We want to keep the company healthy and its employees happy, and we want to keep them on the job and productive.

I established the rule that once we hire an employee, his school records are a matter of the past and are no longer used to evaluate his work or decide on his promotion.

We treat employees as a member of the family.

We define a true culture of quality as an environment in which employees not only follow quality guidelines but also consistently see others taking quality-focused actions, hear others talking about quality, and feel quality all around them.

Domestic employees are at the whim of their employers.

A boss who interrupts an employee a lot is called an extrovert, whereas an employee who interrupts a boss too often is called an ex-employee.

I have certain beliefs about how people should treat employees and how companies should be run, but I was really surprised though this process to learn that those beliefs are actually good business.