Tony Hsieh is one of the most fascinating entrepreneurs in recent years. This Taiwanese-born American soon created his first company. At just nine years old, he started a business selling silkworms, but he failed. While in elementary school, he embarked on another business: personalized badges by mail. It was a family business that he later passed on to his younger siblings and reported $ 200 (177 euros) a month. While studying Computer Science at Harvard, he dedicated himself to selling pizza to the students of his high school. A few years later, when he finished his degree, he worked at Oracle and Microsoft. He left both companies despite having a good salary. Hsieh was not excited, although he did earn a large financial sum. He says he discovered it thanks to the alarm on his alarm clock: one morning he had to ring up to six times to realize that he did not want to continue where he was.
His last successful project was Zappos, an online shoe sales company . The company was bankrupt when he bought it, but Hsieh identified something very difficult to find: passion. That was the reason that led him to transform Zappos and make it an icon. Even the prestigious Fortune magazine included her at the top of its list of the 100 best companies to work for. In 2009, Amazon bought the online shoe sales company for a whopping $ 1.2 billion. (1,006 million euros)
Hsieh narrated his history and philosophy of life in the book Delivering Happiness. How to make your employees happy and double your benefits? (Editorial Profit). In his pages, the entrepreneur recognizes that “life is not the search for oneself. Life is rather the creation of oneself ”. To do this, Hsieh proposes that, regardless of where we are, we try to grow professionally, but without forgetting to help the organization to grow as well. "It is important that you question and demand of yourself and not be stuck in a job where you feel like you are not growing or learning," Hsieh insists.
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When the options to change jobs are not easy, we have to change our attitude or start getting involved in projects that allow us to continue learning. Hsieh suggests that we ask ourselves some of the following questions to inquire into ourselves and thus make decisions in our professional life:
1. Do you grow professionally?
2. Are you a better person now than you were yesterday?
3. What do you do so that your coworkers and those under your command grow personally?
4. How do you challenge and demand of yourself?
5. Are you learning something new every day?
6. What is your vision of where you want to go?
7. How do you make the whole company grow?
8. Are you doing everything you can to promote the growth of the company and, at the same time, are you helping others to understand the growth?
9. Do you understand (and share) the company's vision?
10. Do you believe in what you do?
11. Do you share the values of the company?
If we reflect on the previous questions, we will realize that constant learning is the engine to advance and to reinvent ourselves in difficult times. We cannot stop learning at any time. That will be our passport to improve our employability, advance as professionals and, by the way, feel more fulfilled and happy.
Pilar Jericó is an entrepreneur, writer, lecturer, PhD in Business Organization and disseminator of research on human behavior. www.pilarjerico.com
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