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

by Derek Sivers

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:

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.

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

They’d tell me that if I analyzed the business better, I could maximize profitability. Then I’d tell them about the taxi driver in Vegas.

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?

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.

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.

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.

But even well-meaning companies accidentally get trapped in survival mode.

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

When someone’s doing something for the money, people can sense it, like they sense a desperate lover. It’s a turnoff.

another Tao of business: Set up your business like you don’t need the money, and it’ll likely come your way.

One employee can’t focus and spends his time surfing the Web. Instead of just firing or reassigning that person to more challenging work, the company installs an expensive content-approving firewall so that nobody can go to unapproved sites ever again.

It’s important to resist that simplistic, angry, reactionary urge to punish everyone, and step back to look at the big picture.

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.

Yet another reason not to take decisions when angry

You can’t prevent bad things from happening. Learn to shrug. Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person’s mistake.

It’s too overwhelming to remember that at the end of every computer is a real person, a lot like you, whose birthday was last week, who has three best friends but nobody to spoon at night, and who is personally affected by what you say. Even if you remember it right now, will you remember it next time you’re overwhelmed, or perhaps never forget it again?

You should feel pain when you’re unclear

When writing an e-mail to everyone, if I wasn’t perfectly clear, I’d get twenty thousand confused replies, which would take my staff all week to reply to, costing me at least $5,000 plus lost morale. Even if I was very clear but took more than a few sentences to explain something, I’d get thousands of replies from people who never read past the first few sentences.

Writing lessons

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

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.

All employees knew that as long as we weren’t completely swamped, they should take a minute and get to know the caller a bit. Ask about her music. Ask how it’s going. Yes, it would lead to twenty-minute conversations sometimes, but those people became lifelong fans.

“We’ll do anything for a pizza.”

I’d often hear from musicians later that this was the moment they fell in love with us.

The musicians absolutely loved getting this information, and it always led to the customer and musician getting in touch directly. This is something that big stores like Amazon would never do.

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.

I’d just ask my current employees if they had any friends who needed work. Someone always did, so I’d say, “Tell them to start tomorrow morning. Ten dollars an hour. Show them what to do.” And that was that.

Networking

The thought was that it’s almost impossible to tell what someone’s going to be like on the job until he’s actually on the job for a few weeks.

But I also took this same casual approach when I needed an important high-tech systems administrator: “Anyone have a friend who’s good with Linux? Yeah? Is he cool? OK, tell him to start tomorrow.”

Same. Networking