Tony Hsieh used to ask Zappos a really weird question, and it’s definitely worth remembering

I hadn’t even got out of bed on Saturday when I learned that Tony Hsieh, the former CEO and driving force of Zappos, had passed away.

I had two immediate thoughts:

First of all, the sadness. Hsieh was only 46, and it’s just too young.

Second, bewilderment, as only one word occurred to me, and I realized it was probably neurologically associated with her name forever.

Part of it comes from a question Hsieh used to ask during job interviews at Zappos: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird are you?”

He explained his reasoning ten years ago. “If you’re a 1 you’re probably a little too tight for us,” Hsieh told Adam Grant. “If you’re a 10, you might be too psychotic for us. It’s not so much the number, it’s more seeing how candidates react to a question.”

Hsieh has had a lot of influence on aspiring entrepreneurs and leaders, especially for someone taken at a fairly early age. And as I was spending my day on Saturday, he kept coming back.

I took my daughter to the playground and chatted with another 40 year old dad. Our conversation turned to Hsieh, and this other dad reminded me that Zappos had a policy that offered new employees $ 1,000 to quit.

It was about finding form, culture, and happiness: I mean, if you’re willing to take $ 1000 to quit a new job, it’s probably best for everyone involved to do so.

As someone who quit a job after a day and went viral for it, it resonated with me. So I wrote about politics in two words, as part of Hsieh’s legacy.

Almost a million people have read it and many have written to me about it. It is gratifying to have contributed a little to his memory and to have highlighted this heritage.

But still, I want to hold out “weirdness”.

Hsieh was pretty much my contemporary – again, probably in part why his death at 46 struck me so hard. And when we were growing up, “weird” wasn’t much of a compliment. It was the G-rated version of the slurs the elementary school bullies used on the children they tormented.

Hsieh wasn’t the only one redeeming “the weirdness,” but it was really part of the culture he sought to create at Zappos.

It was right up there in the core values ​​of the company: “Core Value # 3: Create fun and a little weirdness.”

When Amazon bought Zappos in 2010, Hsieh wrote reassuring employees that Amazon wanted to “continue to build the Zappos culture our way,” and added, “I think ‘unique’ was their way of saying ‘fun and a little weird “. 🙂 ”

(By the way, when Amazon bought Zappos, Hsieh wrote a very interesting first-person account of his experience in the process of Inc.)

But “weird” is still the word. This is how his friend, investor Chris Sacca paid tribute to him on Saturday: “beautifully bizarre. “

And it comes down to how other friends and admirers have remembered him: “eccentric” and “man of contradictions” – a near billionaire who built and lived in a trailer park in Las Vegas, and who kept a pet alpaca and wore a “very tall mohawk” at times.

“He loved to make people happy, but I think he also always tried to solve this puzzle on his own,” his friend, journalist turned entrepreneur Sarah Lacy, told a newspaper. “I don’t know how successful he was, to be honest.”

There is a poignant irony to this observation, since Hsieh was very interested in what he called “the science of happiness”, and literally called his best-selling book of 2010, Offer happiness.

Frankly, this is a problem for many entrepreneurs, especially the more successful.

The strangeness that causes you to look at the world in a different way and see the possibilities can make it difficult to find contentment.

Many entrepreneurs wouldn’t trade it, but there is a cost. So you embrace whatever makes you a little weird, and you look for it in other people. Hope you will use it to build something and to leave a legacy.

Someone once said that people die three times: when their bodies stop functioning, when they are buried, and after the last time someone says their name.

I thought about it on the anniversary of the death of a good friend. And I thought about it when I realized that two middle aged guys who had never met Hsieh were sitting in a New Jersey park on Saturday, talking about some of his heritage.

So here’s Tony Hsieh, the “beautifully weird” CEO, and to emulate the best parts of what he left behind.