The Pursuit of Happiness (in an Internet-Clocked, Overnight-Billionaired, 500-Times-Earnings World)

What happens when a small-business owner starts making decisions based not on growth potential and market positioning, but on achieving balance, peace of mind, and happiness? Paul Eichen, founder of Rokenbok Toy Co., is trying to find out.

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The Pursuit of Happiness

A second-time CEO starts over, searching for the good small-business life

Like all experiments, this one began with a question.

How was your day? was the question. As thin and unpromising as that. A question no one really answers.

But it was the question Paul Eichen asked himself and did answer. He stopped what he was doing and stared at his work. At his life. Could you do that? Would you? Try it now.

How was your day?

Was work good? Not its results, not the payoffs down some line, but the moment-to-moment doing of it. Did it please you? Were the ideas exciting? Did you make anything you were proud of?

Was your day fun? Does the job you have foster the life you want? Did you get some exercise, see friends, laugh with your children, share dinner with anyone who mattered to you?

Is work working for you? Is life working?

Ask yourself.

Because that's what Paul Eichen did awhile back -- Eichen the company builder who had helped grow a business to more than $100 million -- and the answer he arrived at was not happy. Work was everything, and work was eating him alive. And so what Eichen did was decide to walk away and do things over. To build a new kind of company whose whole point would be to set up a different kind of life. A balanced, healthful, soulful life. A humane one.

And at some other time in our economic history, Eichen's quest for that life might have been less complicated. Today, though, it thrusts him head-on into conflict with a vast tide of our moment -- the rush toward never-before-dreamed-of money and until-now-inaccessible status. Toward glamour. Toward a world where people really do become billionaires and dot-com founders really are photographed for fashion magazines. Where people sacrifice their personal lives for that.

And how do you reconcile the hunger for soul and health with the hunger for success as our age defines it -- our age that seduces us like no other, that dangles wealth and status so close it can seem foolish not to reach for them? Who hasn't felt that pull? Who hasn't wished, like Paul Eichen, that he could just walk away from it?

So, can you build a company whose only reason for being is to make life good? Eichen would see. And if you can build that company, will the world -- the ever-judging, seductive, doubt-inducing audience of your imagined peers -- let you feel as if the life you've achieved is enough? Eichen would find out.

What Eichen did was decide to try an experiment.

This is that experiment's story.

Gradually and all at once
For a long time Paul Eichen tried it the other way. The path of unquestioned striving. "I was driven to succeed," is what he'll tell you now about all those years, his voice leaning on driven more heavily than italics can convey. He was the classic entrepreneur -- a bit of a misfit, a whip-smart college dropout just a few degrees out of mainstream economic sync. He had the classic energy, plus the classic monomania, plus maybe some other manias, too, but only of the kind we Americans so muscularly admire. He was the sort of person about whom others say, "He's willing to pay the price." And you get what you pay for, don't you?

Born in 1955, Eichen grew up in Greater San Diego during the brash days of the electronics industry, the son of a father who throughout the 1960s and 1970s was one of the industry's local entrepreneurial shakers. Myron Eichen started his first company when Paul was five; he has since started or helped fund dozens of other ventures. The father's hours were long; he traveled a lot. Once he brought Paul a toy from Europe that hadn't yet made it to the States: LEGOs. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven," Paul says.

Can you build a company whose only reason for being is to make life good? Paul Eichen would see.

As a child Paul Eichen was small -- he's only five-foot-five today -- and soft-bodied. When John F. Kennedy pushed a nationwide physical-fitness campaign that brought athletic-skills tests to Eichen's grade school, Eichen finished dead last. Partly to patch those failings, "in high school I became a rock climber, really wiry and strong," Eichen says. But there were few other rock climbers, of course; it was mostly Eichen on his own.

He went to college for a year, but he wanted to work, not just prepare to work. "All I wanted was to work and have a family. Even back then," he says. So at 19 he took a job clerking in a housewares store, where he rose to become manager. Four years later he took a bigger job, selling commercial food-service equipment. He sold reach-in freezers, exhaust hoods, eight-burner stoves. In 1981 he got married, to Amy. Soon she was pregnant with Noah, their first child. And in 1982, when he was 27, Eichen was finishing his second year as the equipment distributor's top producer. Every sales record the company had was his.

It was during those years that Eichen began establishing the pattern he would follow for the first two decades of his vocational life. He worked hard. He learned by doing. He persevered.

What he wanted from work then -- this is what he'll tell you today -- was to earn more than he spent and "show my parents I could accomplish something." He didn't think much more about it. "It was just how I was wired, to work like that," he says.

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