ANYTHING YOU WANT by Derek Sivers

• Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing.
• Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
• Never do anything just for the money.
• Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working.
• 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.
• A business plan should never take more than a few hours of work—hopefully no more than a few minutes. The best plans start simple. A quick glance and common sense should tell you if the numbers will work. The rest are details.
• When you’re onto something great, it won’t feel like revolution. It’ll feel like uncommon sense.
• Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.
• Present each new idea or improvement to the world. If multiple people are saying, “Wow! Yes! I need this! I’d be happy to pay you to do this!” then you should probably do it. But if the response is anything less, don’t pursue it.
• Don’t waste years fighting uphill battles against locked doors. Improve or invent until you get that huge response.
• 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 throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say, “Hell yeah!”
• Anytime you think you know what your new business will be doing, remember this quote from serial entrepreneur Steve Blank: “No business plan survives first contact with customers.”
• By not having any money to waste, you never waste money.
• 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.
• Watch out when anyone (including you) says he wants to do something big, but can’t until he raises money. It usually means the person is more in love with the idea of being big-big-big than with actually doing something useful.
• For an idea to get big-big-big, it has to be useful. And being useful doesn’t need funding.
• If you want to be useful, you can always start now, with only 1 percent of what you have in your grand vision.
• Starting small puts 100 percent of your energy into actually solving real problems for real people.
• To me, ideas are worth nothing unless they are executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
• The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $200,000,000.
• Never forget that there are thousands of businesses, like Jim’s Fish Bait Shop in a shack on a beach somewhere, that are doing just fine without corporate formalities.
• As your business grows, don’t let the leeches sucker you into all that stuff they pretend you need.
• You need to confidently exclude people, and proudly say what you’re not. By doing so, you will win the hearts of the people you want.
• It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it.
• Have the confidence to know that when your target 1 percent hears you excluding the other 99 percent, the people in that 1 percent will come to you because you’ve shown how much you value them.
• 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.
• Just stay focused on helping people today.
• Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing.
• A business is started to solve a problem.
• That’s the Tao of business: Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well.
• It’s another Tao of business: Set up your business like you don’t need the money, and it’ll likely come your way.
• Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person’s mistake.
• When you’re thinking of how to make your business bigger, it’s tempting to try to think all the big thoughts and come up with world-changing massive-action plans. But please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you.
• 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.
• Even if you want to be big someday, remember that you never need to act like a big boring company.
• Don’t try to impress an invisible jury of MBA professors. It’s OK to be casual.
• There’s a benefit to being naive about the norms of the world—deciding from scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others do.
• Never be the typical tragic small business that gets frazzled and freaked out when business is doing well.
• When you want to learn how to do something yourself, most people won’t understand. They’ll assume the only reason we do anything is to get it done, and doing it yourself is not the most efficient way.
• Most self-employed people get caught in the delegation trap.
• There’s a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Being self-employed feels like freedom until you realize that if you take time off, your business crumbles. To be a true business owner, make it so that you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left.
• Never forget that you can make your role anything you want it to be. Anything you hate to do, someone else loves. So find that person and let her do it.
• You can’t live someone else’s expectation of a traditional business. You have to just do whatever you love the most, or you’ll lose interest in the whole thing.
• I learned a hard lesson in hindsight: Trust, but verify. Remember it when delegating. You have to do both.
• Delegate, but don’t abdicate.
• A business is a reflection of the creator.
• Pay close attention to when you’re being the real you and when you’re trying to impress an invisible jury.