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Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

Overview

💡 How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.

Quotes

“Don't be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams.” ― Derek Sivers, Anything You Want

“When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.” ― Derek Sivers, Anything You Want

“When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.” ― Derek Sivers, Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

“No business plan survives first contact with customers.” - Derek Sivers, Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

“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.” - Derek Sivers, Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

Notes

What’s your compass?

Don’t be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams. You need to know your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what’s worth doing.

In the following stories, you’ll notice some common themes. These are my philosophies from the ten years I spent starting and growing a small business.

  • 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.
  • 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.

If it’s not a hit, switch

We’ve all heard about the importance of persistence. But I had misunderstood. Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.

We all have lots of ideas, creations, and projects. 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.

Don’t waste years fighting uphill battles against locked doors. Improve or invent until you get that huge response.

Steve Blank: “No business plan survives first contact with customers.”

The advantage of no funding

By not having any money to waste, you never waste money. 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.

Even years later, the desks were just planks of wood on cinder blocks from the hardware store. I made the office computers myself from parts. My well-funded friends would spend $100,000 to buy something that I made myself for $1,000. They did it saying, “We need the very best,” but it didn’t improve anything for the customers.

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.

None of your customers will ask you to turn your attention to expanding. They want you to keep your attention focused on them. It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.

Start now. No funding needed.

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.

Delegate or die: The self-employment trap

Most self-employed people get caught in the delegation trap. You’re so busy, doing everything yourself. You know you need help, but to find and train someone would take more time than you have. So you keep working harder, until you break.

Because my team was running the business, I was free to actually improve the business! I moved to California, just to make it clear that the running of things was up to the employees. I was still working twelve-hour days, but now I was spending all my time on improvements, optimizations, and innovations. To me, this was the fun stuff. This was play, not work.

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.

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.