“Your culture is your brand.”

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.

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 you sell what you do, you’re a vendor. If you sell why you do it, you’re a brand.

Your business, and your brand must first let people know what you care about and that you care about them.

Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.

Don’t wait till you are big before you begin building your brand. Build a brand from scratch alongside your business.

Your brand name is only as good as your reputation.

Figure out how to build a brand and stick by it so people know what to expect.

I don’t care. I’m just gonna smoke. I’m just gonna totally smoke. I’ll finish these, go to the store and get a brand new pack, smoke the shit out of that one.

Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.