Ok, maybe they're not spies, maybe he has an army of fantastic little elves, or ninjas. happiness ninjas. Regardless of how he did it, Tony from @zappos made my day yesterday, in a way that completely fits into his personal narrative of 'Delivering Happiness'. The thing is, there's no way he could have possibly done it on purpose.

I'll explain:

I'm currently right in the middle of trying to make some pretty heavy life-decisions. I'm at a bit of a crossroads, both personally and professionally, and I'm trying to figure out what's next.

• Do I move, or stay in Seattle?
• What kind of work situation would I enjoy the most?
• Do I take some time off work, or do I dive right in to something new? (there's a fair bit of opportunity out there for UX designers at the moment)
• What kinds of changes will make me the happiest? How do I start to figure out what that even means?

So many questions! I was a kinda frozen, with no clue where to start, and it was really starting to stress me out.

So bad, in fact, that I ended up with a migraine yesterday. The way my migraines work, the headache is annoying, but it's not that bad. The part that really gets me is that I go FREAKIN' BLIND for about 30-45 minutes. Then I get my sight back and I have a kinda nasty headache for the rest of the day. (Silver lining, It's a fantastic way of making me take a break from whatever I'm doing that's stressed me out in the first place.)

Anyways, I bailed out of work early to go sleep it off. I half-blindedly stumbled home, and as I'm walking in the front-door, I literally trip over a copy of Tony Hsieh's book, Delivering Happiness. I had requested a copy 2 months ago in response to this tweet, and kinda felt bad about it afterwords, because I figured I probably wasn't going to like it that much. If he's gonna be giving them away to anyone, it should probably be to people that are psyched about it. See, I'm not a big fan of "business-y" books. I find the vast majority of them to be fairly smarmy. But, I had seen Tony Hsieh speak at SXSW a couple years ago, and he was pretty entertaining. Plus, when I saw that tweet, it was a really slow day at work, and what else was I gonna do?

It ended up being the best possible timing for a book delivery in history.

It's pretty hilarious that a book about happiness in the professional context shows up on my door at the exact moment that I'm thinking about it so much that it's making my brain hurt. I figured I could use something to take my mind off things, I started flipping through it. I figured it's the least I could do for a guy who sent me a copy of his book that I didn't pay for, and only sorta, half-heartedly, asked for.

Fast forward 24 hours later, and I've read it cover-to-cover.

Well, mostly. I ended up skimming a little bit in the middle. (Sorry, Tony. There's only so much of a big company's core-values document that I can take at 1am, given my general aversion to big companies.) But it was pretty good, as far as those type of books go. I feel like way too many business / personal development books are written from a slant of "follow your passion and profit Profit PROFIT!!!", and that just feels sorta gross to me. Delivering Happiness, on the other hand, seems to come from a much more personal place. Tony Hsieh seems like a guy who, while obviously very financially-successful, is more psyched because he learned along the way that there are, in fact, much more meaningful things than money, and he just wants to share.

Also, I really appreciate that he spends two pages breaking down his loving relationship with Red Bull, and that he thinks pickles make him happy because "they are obviously delicious and I enjoy saying 'Pickles'."

I'll spare the book report, other than to say I got a lot out of it. You should check it out, if that sort of thing sounds at all interesting to you. The main point of this post is that it was EXACTLY what I needed at that point in time. I totally got lost in it, and that got my mind off all the hemming and hawing I was doing that wasn't helping anyway. It also gave me some nuggets to think about that help put some stuff in perspective. And, dude is just a pretty good storyteller. You can tell he's stoked to be talking about the stuff that he does (something I noticed when I saw him at the SXSW 09 keynote, too).

So, Tony, however you did it, be it by pure serendipity (most likely what happened), or some skynet-esque computer that monitors the entire world's tweets and foursquare checkins (what I'd like to think happened), you nailed the timing on that one.

Good job, sir.