--This isn't like Visio, (caveat: I have my own personal demons with Visio), but in short, you won't be making mock-ups in minutes. Sure Visio is good for architectural stuff, but the insight architectural diagrams offer are generally high level and I would argue, quite fiercely, pen, paper, and cell phone camera, would be a better/faster/cool in a hip start-up kind of way, solution to Visio...I digress...but seriously Visio is terrible.

At 7 years old, many questions are offered to be answered by adults who have more “wisdom.” One of their favorites is, “What do you want to be when you grow up.” Arguably, at this point in your life is when you offer up the job you think will give you the purest form of happiness.

As we get older things get a bit more convoluted. We have dreams of what we want to be, how much we want to have, and often through the wear down of life, we adjust and know life will go on for us whether we achieve them or not. The primary question is will the things we want and pursue bring us happiness if they are achieved. Additionaly, in the pursuit of them will we lose out on some good life. We all know the line “the only thing in life you can’t get back is time.” Money, status, carrier, relationships come and go, you can lose them and gain them back, time however, not even God’s or God offers to give that back...if you’re into that.

This being said, time is the only constraint to happiness. Now finding it? Tony Hsieh’s book “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose,” does a wonderful job at explaining on how, even after he had achieved “enough” at 24, enough is not what brought him happiness.* He does a great job at exploring his journey to the CEO of a prosperous Zappos. Tony later dicloses of investing all his money into Zappos; what he learned along the way and what really brought him happiness, hoping that what he learned will benefit you.

This asian persuasion business man gone New York Times Best Seller does a wonderful job at giving you the tools to help you exactly pinpoint what makes you happy. For the nerds out there Tony gives you charts and graphs to use in your pursuit of happiness. For the more socially inclined Tony describes the path to happiness through personal stories, and what to look for in yourself.

The book at times is a bit cheesy and over the top, but Tony is unquestionably on to something. My words of wisdom I generated from this book: The only definitive proof we have in this life is you get one of them. With this knowledge a successful life should be defined in spending more than half of it happy, because when it’s over there’s no getting the time back!

*Tony was promised 40 million, when he sold his company LinkExchange. 20 million was paid up front and the other 20 million was paid to him if he stayed one more year. Tony left 20 million on the table in that last year because he was not happy.

“We wandered through the parking lot for one more look at the bikes before we headed to bed. I was admiring one bike, obviously well loved and well ridden. It had a leather bound rod about 18 inches long, hanging from the throttle. I wondered what it was for, and thought it may be some kind of cool tool that I should have. The owner of the bike had ambled over, he was a grizzled, scary looking guy, but I have learned a long time ago that looks can be deceiving, so instead of being intimidated by him, I asked him what the cool leather thing was. He told me it was for smashing windshields when someone on the road pissed him off. I learned two things; sometimes looks are not deceiving; and I had no use for the cool tool. Someday, I’m going to have a patch embroidered and sewn to my riding jacket that reads 99 %er.”

I embarked on the journey of reading Andrew Carnegie’s (AC) autobiography. It was unquestionably one of the better I’ve read (Miles Davis, John Nash, Michael Milken, Jenna Jameson, Jack Welch). The first half of the book has him describing his life starting in Scotland, moving to America and his progression to wealth. You can see from the very beginning he was able to recognize a skill that would be marketable and not only master it, but let the opportunities this skill brought him be the segue into his next venture. The second half is him giving away his money and his interaction with American politics.

AC had no real skeletons in his closet, nothing entertaining from the perspective of drama, drugs or sex scandals. His biggest fault viewed by some may have been his labor practices to his employees. I view this as one sided. He was very generous for his time to his employees; he made more than 20 of them millionaires in the later 1800’s. Just to make this clear, these are people that had no financial risk in the company itself, but he valued their work so much he made them partners and gave them stock options in a time when doing that for employees was simply unheard of. He was one of the first to set up a grocery type store for his employees. He gave them the opportunity to run the store and set the prices ensuring the cheapest cost to the employee shoppers possible and he sold the store supplies at the same discounted prices he received for them when he bought them in bulk for his companies. An example of this was his ability to provide coal at a fraction of the rate the employees where paying outside of the company store. The coal was so cheap they could not only afford proper amounts now the employees were able to have it delivered to their homes. He was also one of the first to set up a type of credit union for his employees, in which he offered more secure backing of the money than the government at the time and he would loan out this money to employees so they could attain houses at interest rates they could afford.

When AC had reached a point he felt he had amassed enough wealth, roughly around 300 billion in today’s dollars he started on his journey of giving away around 95% of it. To put this in perspective, if Bill Gates and Warren Buffet gave away every last dollar they earned it still would not amount to half of what AC gave away.

One of my favorite points about this autobiography was how many iconic people he was casually friends with: Mr. Twain, Mr. Morgan (as in JP), Mr. Roosevelt among many others.

I was disappointed to finish the book. I had become accustom to hearing the nightly stories AC was offering. It felt as if he came back for a short bit to speak with me and upon finishing the book it was his time to leave again. Cheesy I know, but it really is how I felt.