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

by Derek Sivers

I’m pretty unusual, so what works for me might not work for others.

Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers.

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.

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.

Instead, imagine that you have designed your business to have no big clients, just lots of little clients.

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?

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.

A business is started to solve a problem. But if the problem were truly solved, that business would no longer be needed!

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

If you set up your business like you don’t need the money, people are happier to pay you.

When one customer wrongs you, remember the hundred thousand who did not. You’re lucky to own your own business. Life is good. You can’t prevent bad things from happening. Learn to shrug. Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person’s mistake.

it’s often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you.

With one line of code, I made it so that every outgoing e-mail customized the “From:” field to be “CD Baby loves [first name].” So if the customer’s name was Susan, every e-mail she got from us would say it was from “CD Baby loves Susan.” Customers loved this!

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.