Anything You Want:40 Lessons for a new kind of entrepreneur 

By Derek Sivers 

What’s Your Compass?

Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own.

They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won’t make them happy.

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.

You need to know your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what’s worth doing.

In the following stories, you’ll notice some common themes. These are my philosophies from the ten years I spent starting and growing a small business.

• 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.

 

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

 

NO YES.  EITHER HELL YEAH! OR NO.

• Use this rule if you’re often over-committed or too scattered.
• If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, say no.
• When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing!
• Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then say no.
• When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!”
• Every event you get invited to. Every request to start a new I project. If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about it, say no.
• We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.

 

No plan survives first contact with the customer.

 

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. 

 

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

AWFUL IDEA = -1

WEAK IDEA = 1

SO-SO IDEA = 5

GOOD IDEA = 10

GREAT IDEA = 15

BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

 

NO EXECUTION = $1

WEAK EXECUTION = $1000

SO-SO EXECUTION = $10,000

GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000

GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000

BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

 

It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99% 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. Realizing the initial choice you made was just one of many brings all kinds of weathered wisdom and insight into your business.

Same thing with your current path in life.

 

How do you grade yourself?

• We all grade ourselves by different measures:
• For some people, it’s as simple as how much money they make. When their net worth is going up, they know they’re doing well.
• For others, it’s how much money they give.
• For some people, it’s how many people’s lives they can influence for the better.
• For others, it’s how deeply they can influence just a few people’s lives.
• 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.

 

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.

 

Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing…

 

All bad service comes from a mindset of scarcity. They act like they’ll go out of business if they don’t fiercely guard their bottom line. The short-term thinking of desperate survival blocks the long-term thinking of smart strategy.

• If you really feel secure and abundant – that you have plenty to share – then this feeling of generosity will flow down into all of your interactions with customers. Give refunds. Give them attention. Take a little loss. You can afford it.

 

EVERY INTERACTION IS YOUR MOMENT TO SHINE

• Probably only 1% of your potential customers ever bother to contact you. So when they do, it’s your time to shine.
• Three minutes spent talking with them is going to shape their impression of your company more than your name, price, design, or features all combined. This is your shining moment to be the best you can be – to blow them away with how cool it was to contact you.
• If your customer service is taught to be efficient, it sends the message, “I don’t really want to talk with you. Let’s make this quick.” Do the opposite. Take a few inefficient minutes to get to know anyone who contacts you.
• When a musician would call to sell their music, we’d take a few minutes up-front to get to know them. Like, “What’s your name? Hi Reza. Got a website? Is that you on the home page? Cool. Is that a real Les Paul? Sweet! Here, let me listen to a bit of the music. Nice, I like what you’re doing. Very syncopated. Great groove. Anyway… what would you like to know?” Musicians find it very hard to get anyone to listen to their music. So when someone takes even a couple minutes to listen to it, it’s so touching that they remember it for life.
• Imagine what you’d do if your favorite rock star called.
• You’d drop everything, and give them all the time in the world. So that’s how you should treat everyone that contacts your company. Why not? You don’t have time?
• Make time. It’s how everyone deserves to be treated. It makes life better. It makes work more fun. And it’s the right thing to do.

 

When one of your customer wrongs you, remember the thousands that did not. 

 

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

 

Just 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. 

 

In the end, it’s about what you want to be, not what you want to have.