Bliss

Live more heroically by following your bliss.

Down the Rabbit Hole


Let us guess, you’re here because you know that Tony is, by current socio-economic standards, successful and you want to peek behind the curtain to see what you can learn.  What you may not know, is that Tony’s definition of success has little to do with socio-economic status, or any other status. What you may learn by going down the rabbit hole with us is not only what success looks like to Tony, but more importantly, what it looks like to you. Each person’s path will be different, a choose-your-own adventure of sorts. Travel at your own pace and enjoy the journey.

Where to start?

We believe you should start with the book Delivering Happiness,
while this sounds a little self-serving, it’s probably good that you get to know the curator of the rabbit hole. 

As a response to the increasing violence in our culture, the widening ideological divides, and the growing gap in economic well-being, there is greater awareness that a deeper sense of community is de
Author : Peter Block
Book URL : Amazon
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Community: The Structure of Belonging
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so t
Author : Malcolm Gladwell
Book URL : Amazon
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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the questi
Author : Malcolm Gladwell
Book URL : Amazon
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Outliers: The Story of Success
  Robin Hood meets the Rat Pack when the best and the brightest of M.I.T.’s math students and engineers take up blackjack under the guidance of an eccentric mastermind. Their small blackjack
Author : Ben Mezrich
Book URL : Amazon
Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
In Delivering Happiness, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh shares the different lessons he has learned in business and life, from starting a worm farm to running a pizza business, through LinkExchange, Zappos, an
Author : Tony Hsieh
Book URL : Amazon
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

Business

So, you want to get down to business? Tony has read almost every business book you can find. He has a few that top his list, you can read them in any order of course, as this is your unfolding adventure, but we would start with, start with, start with…
Start With Why

Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaac
Author : Walter Isaacson
Book URL : Amazon
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Steve Jobs
The printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery — these are all great ideas. But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? This book was an exploration of environm
Author : Steven Johnson
Book URL : Amazon
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Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
In his work with organizations around the world, Simon Sinek noticed that some teams trust each other so deeply that they would literally put their lives on the line for each other. Other teams, no ma
Author : Simon Sinek
Book URL : Amazon
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Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
Originals is about how to champion new ideas and fight groupthink. Using surprising studies and stories spanning business, politics, sports, and entertainment, Grant explores how to recognize a goo
Author : Adam Grant
Book URL : Amazon
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Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
This book addresses a single question: can a good company become a great company, and if so, how? Based on a five-year research project comparing companies that made the leap to those that did not, Go
Author : Jim Collins
Book URL : Amazon
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Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
You know your company's culture is valuable culture-important. But can you define it, measure it, or change it? For many leaders, culture is important, but it just doesn’t seem tangible. It’s not
Author : David Logan
Book URL : Amazon
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Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization
Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a ski
Author : Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool
Book URL : Amazon
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Peak: The secret from the New Science of Expertise
Simon starts with a fundamental question: Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers a
Author : Simon Sinek
Book URL : Amazon
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Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Happiness

Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan–there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escapi
Author : Timothy Ferriss
Book URL : Amazon
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Four Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
The Happiness Hypothesis is a book about ten Great Ideas. Each chapter is an attempt to savor one idea that has been discovered by several of the world's civilizations -- to question it in light of wh
Author : Jonathan Haidt
Book URL : Amazon
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Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
In Delivering Happiness, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh shares the different lessons he has learned in business and life, from starting a worm farm to running a pizza business, through LinkExchange, Zappos, an
Author : Tony Hsieh
Book URL : Amazon
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

Productivity

David Allen’s Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business books of its era, and the ultimate book on personal organization. “GTD” is now shorthand for an entire way of ap
Author : David Allen
Book URL : Amazon
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Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity

Self Organization

Martin Nowak, one of the world’s experts on evolution and game theory, working here with bestselling science writer Roger Highfield, turns an important aspect of evolutionary theory on its head to e
Author : Martin Nowak & Roger Highfield
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SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed
Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term complexity can be misleading, however, because what makes West
Author : Geoffrey West
Book URL : Amazon
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Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies
Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem-solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this es
Author : Donella H. Meadows
Book URL : Amazon
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Thinking in Systems: A Primer
This is a business book unlike others. It is concise and incredibly to the point. It is fully illustrated and fully colored. It is “practically theoretic”, featuring cutting-edge insight. It propo
Author : Niels Pflaeging
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Organize for Complexity: How to Get Life Back Into Work to Build the High-Performance Organization
The uplifting message of Reinventing Organizations has resonated with readers all over the world, and they have turned it, one conversation at a time, into a word-of-mouth phenomenon. The book has hel
Author : Frederic Laloux
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Reinventing Organizations: An Illustrated Invitation to Join the Conversation on Next-Stage Organizations
Over 6.4 billion people participate in a $36.5 trillion global economy, designed and overseen by no one. How did this marvel of self-organized complexity evolve? How is wealth created within this syst
Author : Eric D. Beinhocker
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The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society

Body/Mind Hacking

A public figure since winning his first National Chess Championship at the age of nine, Waitzkin was catapulted into a media whirlwind as a teenager when his father's book Searching for Bobby Fischer
Author : Josh Waitzkin
Book URL : Amazon
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The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal
It’s the biggest revolution you’ve never heard of, and it’s hiding in plain sight. Over the past decade, Silicon Valley executives like Eric Schmidt and Elon Musk, Special Operators like the Nav
Author : Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal
Book URL : Amazon
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Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
What if there were no limits? Thrive or die: That’s the rule of evolution. Despite this brutal logic, some species have learned to survive in even the most hostile conditions. Others couldn’t
Author : Scott Carney
Book URL : Amazon
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The Wedge: Evolution, Consciousness, Stress, and the Key to Human Resilience.
Our ancestors crossed deserts, mountains, and oceans without even a whisper of what anyone today might consider modern technology. Those feats of endurance now seem impossible in an age where we take
Author : Scott Carney
Book URL : Amazon
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What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength