We don’t need carrots and sticks to incentivise people. We need those with a deep understanding of our values - that is what guides us. And if we’ve got people who are not living the values, they might have to work elsewhere.

The Greeks called it eudaimonia, which sounds like a cleaning product but which actually means “the fullest and purest expression of you in your most elevated state.” Their idea was that each of us had a spirit, or daimon, that embodied our greatest and most unique possibilities—our natural strengths or talents—and that the state we should all seek was one where, because of the happy intersection of our role, our skills, our team, and our context, we turned these possibilities into contribution, and thus liberated our good spirit.

This means we don’t just obsess upon our financial results; we look at our long-term impact on the communities we serve and we adapt policies and programs to be a positive force. And, given there’s much less cofounders’ drama than most other companies, our employees can focus on how this start-up, which became one of the world’s most valuable hospitality companies nearly overnight, can live its mission helping our customers ‘belong anywhere.

I’m always interested in what others, and not just the esteemed critic from The New York Times, think about what we’re doing. If your business involves making people happy, then you can’t be good at it if you don’t care what people think. The day you stop reading your criticism is the day you grow complacent, and irrelevance won’t be far behind.

More than two thousand years ago Aristotle used a term that is still in wide use in psychology today: eudaimonia. It refers to a state of deep wellbeing in which a person feels that their life has meaning and purpose. It is often contrasted with hedonia (the origin of the word hedonism), which refers to the fleeting happiness of various pleasures. To put it another way, if hedonic happiness is what you mean when you say you’re having a good

time, then eudaimonic happiness is what we mean when we say life is good. It is a sense that, outside of this moment, regardless of how pleasurable or miserable it is, your life is worth something, and valuable to you. It is the kind of well-being that can endure through both the ups and the downs.