cover image for Anything You Want

Anything You Want

Derek Sivers

8/10
Love the writing style as always, lots of interesting philosophy
  • Know what makes you happy and what's worth doing
  • Business is not about money but making dreams come true for yourself and others
  • Help others
  • Persistently improve and invent, don't just promote what isn't working
  • You don't really know what people want until you start
  • You can't make everyone happy, so proudly excludeb people. Shows your small audience you care and that you are they're player not someone else's (corporation or the mainstream whomever that may be)
  • Make yourself unnecessary to running the business
  • The real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do only what makes you happy
  • Define how your platform or business or tool or whatever will be uniquely perfect to you relative to what's currently offered. Make it hyper public and stay with it. (No payed promotion by sellers, forwards buyer details, never kicks distributers off for not selling etc)
  • Keep making new things and inventing until you find one people are begging to buy. Otherwise, don't try and push it and promote it
  • Be willing to pivot, no plan survives first contact with the customer and they might want or perceive slightly different things than you imagined, which is great as long as you lean in.
  • Everything should be with the customer best interests in mind. Just thrill your existing customers and you'll spread like wildfire
  • Your idea doesn't need funding, just do the smallest thing you can to help someone in the way your product would this week
  • Sharing business model. If you have information on how you've completed a hard process (after finding only unclear guide and information). Share it for free. If you have a resource start sharing it for free (internet hosting, barcodes, merchant accounts). Until you have to many people asking and you need to charge a bit so you can keep giving.
  • Ideas aren't worth much vs executionz most of the value is in the later
  • You don't need any of the corporate non sense, terms and conditions and privacy policys. Other people will try and use fear to sell you a service. Ignore them
  • Think of your customers as lots of tiny individuals, the opinion or loss of any individual one is no big deal. Focus on the majority and keep them happy
  • No advertisement, it's not about the money and it kills the user experience (not sure if I agree)
  • How do you grade yourself, what are you goals and metrics for success (helping people, money, influencing a few people deeply, influencing a lot of people shallow)
  • Are you helping people, are you happy are they happy, are you profitable, is that enough?
  • Be generous and take minor losses for good customer opinion. Better in the long run anyways.
  • Customer service is good, focus on getting the most out of current customers over getting new ones. If you can't handle all requests hire another personz it's worth it.
  • Don't punish everyone for one person's mistakes
  • Often it's the tiny details that thrill customers the most. (Tiny goofy end letter example)
  • Delegation mindset. Have a core philosophy, (like it's fine to take x amount of loss on a request so long as it's not completely unreasonable, just make sure they're happy) then have a Q&A doc and document answers to all questions (reviewed by you the business owner once a week for new questions and answers),
  • Document essential processes and teach them to at least a few members and have those members teach the others.
  • Now you can focus on improvements, innovations and optimization.
  • If you couldn't take a month off from your business, you didn't do it right.
  • Be careful about adding your opinion as the boss, in that it can steal ownership from team members
  • Your processes should be able to handle twice the number of people you currently serve at any time (necessitates streamlining processes at various points and re thinking others)
  • Trust but verify (with regards to delegated people doing their tasks, have a system to make sure the work is getting done but trust them to do it beyond that)
  • You can be unconventional and quirky as you like
  • Pay close attention to what excited you and what drains you, when you're being the real you vs trying to impress an invisible jury
  • Slowing growth to be happy is good
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