Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

by Derek Sivers

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.

When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.

A business plan should never take more than a few hours of work—hopefully no more than a few minutes.

But if you think true love looks like Romeo and Juliet, you’ll overlook a great relationship that grows slowly. If you think your life’s purpose needs to hit you like a lightning bolt, you’ll overlook the little day-to-day things that fascinate you. If you think revolution needs to feel like war, you’ll overlook the importance of simply serving people better.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.

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

They did it saying, “We need the very best,” but it didn’t improve anything for the customers.

“How can I best help you now?” Then focus on satisfying those requests.

Starting small puts 100 percent of your energy into actually solving real problems for real people.

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless they are executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it.

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:

So please don’t think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people today.

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?

Of course you should care about your customers more than you care about yourself! Isn’t that Rule No. 1 of providing a good service? It’s all about them, not about you.

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.

Tao of business: Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well.

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

It’s important to resist that simplistic, angry, reactionary urge to punish everyone, and step back to look at the big picture. In the moment, you’re angry, focusing only on that one awful person who did you wrong. Your thinking is clouded. You start believing everyone is awful and the whole world is against you. This is a horrible time to make a new policy.

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.

But I never again promised a customer that I could do something that was beyond my full control.