Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
Reading notes of “Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur” by Derek Sivers
I feel a little bit lost in life before I encountered this book.
Holy crap! This book blew my mind! I almost cry reading some of the chapters.
Yesterday I didn’t have a mentor, now I have one — Derek Sivers.
This book tells you his story and philosophy about entrepreneurship, business, helping people, money, happiness and life.
I learnt so much of it and am so glad I read this book when I am still young with lots of possibilities in front of my path.
Book info:
ISBN: 9780698409026
Date read: 2021–01–30
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
Derek Sivers’s philosophy:
- Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
- Making a company is a great way to improve the world while improving yourself.
- When you make a company, you make a utopia. It’s where you design your perfect world.
- Never do anything just for the money.
- Don’t pursue business just for your own gain. Only answer the calls for help.
- Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working.
- Your business plan is moot. You don’t know what people really want until you start doing it.
- Starting with no money is an advantage. You don’t need money to start helping people.
- You can’t please everyone, so proudly exclude people.
- Make yourself unnecessary to the running of your business.
- The real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do only what makes you happy.
My notes:
1. Ten years of experience in one hour
My approach is just one way, and I could argue against it as well. So what works for me might not work for others.
2. What’s your compass?
You need to know your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what’s worth doing.
3. Make a dream come true.
When you make it a dream come true for yourself, it’ll be a dream come true for someone else, too.
When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.
4. A business model with only two numbers.
A business plan should never take more than a few hours of work — hopefully no more than a few minutes. The best plans start simple.
A quick glance and common sense should tell you if the numbers will work. The rest are details.
5. This ain’t no revolution
Revolution is a term that people use only when you’re successful. Before that, you’re just a quirky person who does things differently.
When you’re onto something great, it won’t feel like revolution. It’ll feel like uncommon sense.
6. If it’s not a hit, switch
A songwriter can write a hundred songs; then suddenly one of them really resonates with people and becomes a hit. Who knows why? It’s not that it’s necessarily better. But through some random set of circumstances or magic combination of ingredients, people love it. Once you’ve got a hit, suddenly all the locked doors open wide. People love the hit so much that it seems to promote itself. Instead of trying to create demand, you’re managing the huge demand.
We’ve all heard about the importance of persistence. Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.
When you present one to the world and it’s not a hit, don’t keep pushing it as is. Instead, get back to improving and inventing.
Present each new idea or improvement to the world. If multiple people are saying, “Wow! Yes! I need this! I’d be happy to pay you to do this!” then you should probably do it. But if the response is anything less, don’t pursue it.
7. No “yes.” Either “Hell yeah!” or “no.”
If you’re not saying, “Hell yeah!” about something, say no.
If you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” then say no.
When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say, “Hell yeah!”
For every event you get invited to, every request to start a new project, if you’re not saying, “Hell yeah!” about it, say no.
We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.
8. Your business plan is moot. You don’t know what people really want until you start doing it.
A store? Oh! Interesting. He thinks I’m a store! I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe if I set it up like a store, I’d actually be doing my friends a bigger favor, by getting total strangers to buy their music, too.
Anytime you think you know what your new business will be doing, remember this quote from serial entrepreneur Steve Blank: “No business plan survives first contact with customers.”
9. Starting with no money is an advantage. You don’t need money to start helping people.
Having no funding was a huge advantage for me.
I’m so glad I didn’t have investors. I didn’t have to please anybody but my customers and myself. No effort was spent on anything but my customers.
Since I couldn’t afford a programmer, I went to the bookstore and got a $25 book on PHP and MySQL programming. Then I sat down and learned it, with no programming experience. Necessity is a great teacher.
Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision — even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone — according to what’s best for your customers. If you’re ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, “How can I best help you now?” Then focus on satisfying those requests.
The way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.
Watch out when anyone (including you) says he wants to do something big, but can’t until he raises money. It usually means the person is more in love with the idea of being big-big-big than with actually doing something useful
For an idea to get big-big-big, it has to be useful. And being useful doesn’t need funding.
If you want to be useful, you can always start now, with only 1 percent of what you have in your grand vision. It’ll be a humble prototype version of your grand vision, but you’ll be in the game. You’ll be ahead of the rest, because you actually started, while others are waiting for the finish line to magically appear at the starting line
For example, let’s say you have a vision of making an international chain of enlightened modern schools. But instead of waiting for that, you start by teaching somebody something this week. Find someone who will pay to learn something, meet her anywhere, and begin. It will be nothing but you, a student, and a notebook, but you’ll be in business, and you can grow it from there
If you want to make a movie recommendation service, start by telling friends to call you for movie recommendations. When you find a movie your friends like, they buy you a drink. Keep track of what you recommended and how your friends liked it, and improve from there.
Want to start a new airline? Next time you’re at the airport when a flight is canceled, tell everyone at the gate that you’ll lease a small plane to fly to their destination if they will split the costs. (This is how Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic Airways.)
Starting small puts 100 percent of your energy into actually solving real problems for real people. It gives you a stronger foundation to grow from. It eliminates the friction of big infrastructure and gets right to the point. And it will let you change your plan in an instant, as you’re working closely with those first customers telling you what they really need.
So no, your idea doesn’t need funding to start. (You also don’t need an MBA, a particular big client, a certain person’s endorsement, a lucky break, or any other common excuse not to start.)
10. Ideas are just a multiplier of execution
It’s so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas (especially people who want me to sign a non-disclosure agreement before they tell me about the simplest ideas).
To me, ideas are worth nothing unless they are executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
Awful idea = -1 Weak idea = 1 So-so idea = 5 Good idea = 10 Great idea = 15 Brilliant idea = 20
No execution = $1 Weak execution = $1,000 So-so execution = $10,000 Good execution = $100,000 Great execution = $1,000,000 Brilliant execution = $10,000,000
To make a business, you need to multiply the two components. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $200,000,000.
That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas. I’m not interested until I see their execution.
11. Formalities play on fear. Bravely refuse.
I said, “Then no stupid footnote legalese would protect me anyway, so I’ll worry about it if it happens.” Do you passionately love the “Terms & Conditions” and “Privacy Policy” pages on other websites? Have you even read them? If not, then why would you go putting that garbage on your website?
All this corporate crap. I got such joy out of saying no to all of it.
Never forget that there are thousands of businesses, like Jim’s Fish Bait Shop in a shack on a beach somewhere, that are doing just fine without corporate formalities
As your business grows, don’t let the leeches sucker you into all that stuff they pretend you need. They’ll play on your fears, saying that you need this stuff to protect yourself against lawsuits. They’ll scare you with horrible worst-case scenarios. But those are just sales tactics. You don’t need any of it.
By trying so hard to please the big client, you will lose touch with what the rest of the world wants.
12. You can’t please everyone, so proudly exclude people.
You need to confidently exclude people, and proudly say what you’re not. By doing so, you will win the hearts of the people you want.
It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it.
Have the confidence to know that when your target 1 percent hears you excluding the other 99 percent, the people in that 1 percent will come to you because you’ve shown how much you value them.
13. Why no advertising?
This goes back to the utopian perfect-world ideal of why we’re doing what we’re doing in the first place. In a perfect world, would your website be covered with advertising? When you’ve asked your customers what would improve your service, has anyone said, “Please fill your website with more advertising”?
Nope. So don’t do it.
14. This is just one of many options
I don’t care! Do it anyway! Go! One, two, three, four.”
Doesn’t matter! Go! One, two, three, four.
The way the song went was really just one of an infinite number of options.
- “OK — make a plan that only requires $1000. Go!”
- “Now make a plan for 10-times as many customers. Go!”
- “Now do it without a website. Go!”
- “Now make all your initial assumptions wrong, and have it work anyway. Go!”
- “Now show how you would franchise it. Go!”
You can’t pretend there’s only one way to do it. Your first idea is just one of many options. No business goes as planned, so make ten radically different plans.
Same thing with your current path in life:
- Now you’re living in New York City, obsessed with success. Go!
- Now you’re a free spirit, backpacking around Thailand. Go!
- Now you’re a confident extrovert and everyone loves you. Go!
- Now you’re married and your kids are your life. Go!
- Now you spend a few years in relative seclusion, reading and walking. Go!
15. You don’t need a plan or a vision
Do you have a big visionary master plan for how the world will work in twenty years? Do you have massive ambitions to revolutionize your industry? Don’t feel bad if you don’t. I never did.
“I think there’s a chance that this thing might be huge one day, so we better start preparing for that now. I mean someday, we might have ONE THOUSAND artists on CD Baby. We might need a third employee! That would mean we’d need three computers here in the office, which would mean we’d need to figure out how to network them together. We might even need to start moving CDs into the garage, since eventually they might fill up the living room. Yes, I know it sounds grandiose, but I think things are headed that way.”
Journalists would ask, “What’s your long-term goal for CD Baby?” I’d say, “I don’t have one. I surpassed my goals long ago. I’m just trying to help musicians with whatever they need today.”
So please don’t think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people today.
16. I miss the mob
Sometimes MBA types would ask me, “What’s your growth rate? What’s your retained earnings rate as a percentage of gross? What are your projections?” I’d just say, “I have no idea. I don’t even know what some of that means. I started this as a hobby to help my friends, and that’s the only reason it exists. There’s money in the bank and I’m doing fine, so no worries.”
Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?
17. How do you grade yourself?
For some people, it’s as simple as how much money they make. When their net worth is going up, they know they’re doing well.
For others, it’s how much money they give. For some, it’s how many people’s lives they can influence for the better. For others, it’s how deeply they can influence just a few people’s lives.
For me, it’s how many useful things I create, whether songs, companies, articles, websites or anything else. If I create something that’s not useful to others, it doesn’t count. But I’m also not interested in doing something useful unless it needs my creative input.
How do you grade yourself? It’s important to know in advance, to make sure you’re staying focused on what’s honestly important to you, instead of doing what others think you should.
18. Care about your customers more than about yourself
Honestly, I don’t care about CD Baby. I only care about the musicians. If someday, musicians don’t need CD Baby anymore, that’s great! I’ll just shut it down and get back to making music.
To me, it was just common sense. Of course you should care about your customers more than you care about yourself! Isn’t that Rule №1 of providing a good service? It’s all about them, not about you.
But even well-meaning companies accidentally get trapped in survival mode. A business is started to solve a problem. But if the problem were truly solved, that business would no longer be needed! So the business accidentally or unconsciously keeps the problem around so that they can keep solving it for a fee.
Just say that any business that’s in business to sell you a cure is motivated not to focus on prevention.
It’s kind of like the grand tales in which the hero needs to be prepared to die to save the day. Your company should be willing to die for your customers.
Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well.
19. Act like you don’t need the money
Banks love to lend money to those who don’t need it. Record labels love to sign musicians who don’t need their help. People fall in love with people who won’t give them the time of day. It’s a strange law of human behavior. It’s pretty universal.
If you set up your business like you don’t need the money, people are happier to pay you. When someone’s doing something for the money, people can sense it, like they sense a desperate lover. It’s a turnoff. When someone’s doing something for love, being generous instead of stingy, trusting instead of fearful, it triggers this law: We want to give to those who give.
Set up your business like you don’t need the money, and it’ll likely come your way.
20. A real person, a lot like you
So when we yell at a website or a company, using our computer or our phone, we forget that it’s not an appliance but a person that’s affected.
It’s dehumanizing to have thousands of people passing through our computer screens, so we do things we’d never do if those people were sitting next to us.
It’s too overwhelming to remember that at the end of every computer is a real person, a lot like you,
21. You should feel pain when you’re unclear
I see new websites trying to look impressive, filled with hundreds of puffy, unnecessary sentences. I feel bad that the people behind those sites haven’t felt the pain of trying to e-mail that text to thousands of people, to directly see how misunderstood or ignored it is.
22. The most successful e-mail I ever wrote
When you make a business, you’re making a little world where you control the laws. It doesn’t matter how things are done everywhere else. In your little world, you can make it like it should be.
When you’re thinking of how to make your business bigger, it’s tempting to try to think all the big thoughts and come up with world-changing massive-action plans. But please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you.
23. Little things make all the difference
If you find even the smallest way to make people smile, they’ll remember you more for that smile than for all your other fancy business-model stuff
“If you bought us a pizza, we’d do any favor you wanted” I’d often hear from musicians later that this was the moment they fell in love with us.
Even if you want to be big someday, remember that you never need to act like a big boring company. Over ten years, it seemed like every time someone raved about how much he loved CD Baby, it was because of one of these little fun human touches.
24. It’s OK to be casual
Don’t try to impress an invisible jury of MBA professors. It’s OK to be casual.
25. Naive quitting
Partially because I was too happy there! I was scared that if I didn’t force myself to quit, I’d never leave. I was too comfortable.
There’s a benefit to being naive about the norms of the world — deciding from scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others do.
26. Prepare to double
But no matter what business you’re in, it’s good to prepare for what would happen if business doubled. Have ten clients now? How would it look if you had twenty at once? Serving eighty customers for lunch each day? What would happen if 160 showed up?
if your internal processes are always designed to handle twice your existing load, it sends an attractive “come on in, we’ve got plenty of room” message.
27. It’s about being, not having
Now it’s something I know how to do, and it feels great. It was the slow road, but I loved it.
But for an Internet business, outsourcing the programming would be like a band outsourcing the songwriting! This wasn’t just my business — this was my creation
Being, not having: When you want to learn how to do something yourself, most people won’t understand. They’ll assume the only reason we do anything is to get it done, and doing it yourself is not the most efficient way.
But that’s forgetting about the joy of learning and doing. Yes, it may take longer. Yes, it may be inefficient. Yes, it may even cost you millions of dollars in lost opportunities because your business is growing slower because you’re insisting on doing something yourself. But the whole point of doing anything is because it makes you happy! That’s it! You might get bigger faster and make millions if you outsource everything to the experts. But what’s the point of getting bigger and making millions? To be happy, right
In the end, it’s about what you want to be, not what you want to have. To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. To be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point
When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line
28. The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote
But I never again promised a customer that I could do something that was beyond my full control.
29. My $3.3 million mistake
It was my fault for not reading what I signed.
30. Delegate or die: The self-employment trap
I hit my breaking point. I stopped going to the office and shut off my phone. Then I realized I was running from my problems instead of solving them. I had to fix this, or I’d be ruined.
“Yes, refund his money in full. We’ll take a little loss. It’s important to always do whatever would make the customer happiest, as long as it’s not outrageous. A little gesture like this goes a long way toward him telling his friends we’re a great company. Everyone always remembers that helping musicians is our first goal, and profit is second
Do what makes the musicians happiest. Make sure everyone who deals with us leaves with a smile.”
There’s a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Being self-employed feels like freedom until you realize that if you take time off, your business crumbles. To be a true business owner, make it so that you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left.
31. Make it anything you want
Never forget that you can make your role anything you want it to be. Anything you hate to do, someone else loves. So find that person and let her do it.
I loved sitting alone and programming, writing, planning, and inventing — thinking of ideas and making them happen. This makes me happy, not business deals or management. So I found someone who liked doing business deals and put him in charge of all that.
If you do this, you’ll encounter a lot of pushback and misunderstanding, but who cares? You can’t live someone else’s expectation of a traditional business. You have to just do whatever you love the most, or you’ll lose interest in the whole thing.
On a similar note, people also assume that you want to be big-big-big — as big as can be. But do you, really? Huge growth means lots of meetings, investors, bankers, media, and answering to others. It’s quite far from the real core of the business.
Happiness is the real reason you’re doing anything, right? Even if you say it’s for the money, the money is just a means to happiness, isn’t it?
When I had twenty employees, I vowed to keep it that small, but customer demand kept growing, and I had to keep the customers happy
When people would ask, “What are you doing to grow your company?” I’d say, “Nothing! I’m trying to get it to stop growing! I don’t like this. It’s too big.” They thought that was the weirdest thing. Doesn’t every business want to be as big as possible? No. Make sure you know what makes you happy, and don’t forget it.
32. Trust, but verify
This job was so crucial to the company’s survival that I decided to do it myself for a while — not just do it, but build a system that wouldn’t let mistakes go unnoticed again. So for the next six months, I lived at the warehouse in Portland, and my sole job was digital deliveries
I learned a hard lesson in hindsight: Trust, but verify. Remember it when delegating. You have to do both.
33. Delegate, but don’t abdicate
So I considered firing everyone and hiring a whole new crew. I also considered shutting down the company entirely, since I wasn’t enjoying this anymore. I even thought about a Willy Wonka movie, in which I’d put five golden tickets into five CDs and then give the whole company to some lucky finder. I never saw or spoke to my employees again, never saw the office again
34. How I knew I was done
In 2007 I did a ground-up rewrite of the website from scratch. And man, it was beautiful code
“If you care, sell.” (I think his point was that my lack of enthusiastic vision was doing a disservice to my clients. It’d be better for everyone if I put the company in more motivated hands that could help them all grow.)
I let two companies bid, and ended up choosing the one that bid lower but understood my clients better.
35. Why I gave my company to charity
Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were at a party at a billionaire’s extravagant estate. Kurt said, “Wow! Look at this place! This guy has everything!” Joseph said, “Yes, but I have something he’ll never have. . . . Enough”
When I decided to sell CD Baby, I already had enough. I live simply. I don’t own a house, a car, or even a TV. The less I own, the happier I am. The lack of stuff gives me the priceless freedom to live anywhere anytime.
So I didn’t need or even want the money from the sale of the company. I just wanted to make sure I had enough for a simple, comfortable life. The rest should go to music education because that’s what made such a difference in my life.
It’s not that I’m altruistic. I’m sacrificing nothing. I’ve just learned what makes me happy. And doing it this way made me the happiest.
But most of all, I get the constant priceless reminder that I have enough.
36. You make your perfect world
I started CD Baby focused on the importance of making a dream-come-true perfect world for musicians. Along the way, I learned the importance of making my business a dream come true for myself, too.
Business is as creative as the fine arts. You can be as unconventional, unique, and quirky as you want. A business is a reflection of the creator
No matter which goal you choose, there will be lots of people telling you you’re wrong.
Just pay close attention to what excites you and what drains you. Pay close attention to when you’re being the real you and when you’re trying to impress an invisible jury.
Even if what you’re doing is slowing the growth of your business — if it makes you happy, that’s OK. It’s your choice to remain small.
You’ll notice that as my company got bigger, my stories about it were less happy. That was my lesson learned. I’m happier with five employees than with eighty-five, and happiest working alone.
Whatever you make, it’s your creation, so make it your personal dream come true.
