40 lessons for a new kind of entrepreneur
Entrepreneurs often lose sight of what matters. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn't that enough? Derek Sivers accidentally started a business by helping musicians sell their music. It became the largest online seller of independent music with over 150,000 musicians and $100M in sales. After ten years, he sold the company for $22 million and gave all the money to charity. In “Anything You Want” he shares 40 powerful lessons and some of his horrible mistakes (like why saving ten minutes cost him $3.3 million dollars, and how he was attacked by Steve Jobs) in a surprisingly humanist approach to business.
Here are some of our favorite quotes from this book:
“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”.
“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”.
“Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working”.
“When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than ‘Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!’—then say ‘no.’”
“Any time you think you know what your new business will be doing, remember this quote from Steve Blank: No plan survives first contact with customers”.
“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”.
“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”.
“Starting small puts 100 percent of your energy on actually solving real problems for real people”.
“Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing”.
“Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well”.
“Set up your business like you don’t need the money, and it’ll likely come your way”.
“When one customer wrongs you, remember the hundred thousand who did not”.
“Please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you”.
“There’s a benefit to being naïve about the norms of the world— deciding from scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others do”.
“In the end, it’s about what you want to be, not what you want to have”.
“To be a true business owner, make sure you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left”
“Trust, but verify. Remember it when delegating. You have to do both”.