My Kindle notes from the little book you haven’t heard of- ‘Anything you want’
Most chances you’ve never heard of Derek Sivers, it still doesn’t change the fact that he is inspiring, at least in my opinion and many others.
Let me introduce him to you:
Derek founded ‘CD baby’(https://www.cdbaby.com/) — an online marketplace for music artists to sell their work and get paid on a weekly basis. This thing wasn’t casual as it sounds in 1997 when he had founded the company. That happened before iTunes has even existed. Along the way, Derek has followed his heart, making business decisions based on his gut, without following the conventional roads. This may sound pretty normal to follow your gut for making decisions, but sometimes the outside world’s way of operating has got into us so badly, and our own gut decisions become other’s thoughts that we’ve been affected by. This way of building a business has discovered to be a wonderful thing which made the whole business itself to work beautifully. CD Baby went on to become the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients.
After reading “Anything you want” I have adopted the thinking method of being irregular as my way of operating, without stopping being open to taking criticism (which is essential for anyone who wants to be successful). One of the reasons I became to like Derek is the fact that he’s way of thinking is so different than the conventional businessman’s thinking these days. In my opinion, Derek appears to be a special man and I highly recommend you to get to know him by reading his book(I listened to it on Audible in just one afternoon), It’s a short and fun one to read. And without further do, I’d like to share my notes from this book as a form of guideline for operating your own business(please refer the notes as equally important, with no specific order):
- Be passion about servicing your customers.
- Make your customers happy is your number one goal.
- Goal number 2, is the money.
- If you’re making your customers happy, your profitable, and HAPPY, all the rest doesn’t matter.
- Make 10 business plans, not one.
- Every business plan changes towards the way.
- Be irregular.
- Always think on how to put a smile on your customer’s faces.
- In your company, you do only what YOU WANT, not anyone else.
- Love your products and don’t get tempted to change some of its values for more money.
- The World is big enough for everyone. Pick your favorite customer and give him all of your focus. Focusing on everyone means no one.
- If it’s not a hell yeah, it’s a no.
- In your business, you do only what you want. If you don’t want to do privacy policy agreement on your website, then don’t do it.
- Always share your values with your employees. Give them responsibilities to take action when needed.
- Know your goals and always be prepared for the moment they’ll happen. Think forward to what’s going to happen if the business is expanding.
- When you’re on a revolution, it’ll still feel like an uncommon sense.
Please feel free to capture these notes and use them, although I still highly recommend reading this book to get a deeper sense of what these notes actually mean.
Related links:
Derek Sivers — https://sivers.org/
His book “Anything you want — 40 lessons for a new kind of entrepreneur”
