Genius Network
host: Joe Polish
success strategies for entrepreneurs, importance of customer service, beliefs, “How to Live”
listen: (download)
watch: (download)
Transcript:
Joe
Welcome Derek, can you see everybody here?
Derek Sivers
It’s really weird to be video again because I would have loved to been there. I don’t know if you know the situation in New Zealand, we’re allowed to leave, but then we’re not allowed to come back if we leave.
Joe
I really appreciate you taking the time and I’ve loved Derek’s work for so many years. He is an incredible writer, I believe an incredible thinker. He’s very succinct. I wish I had the ability to be as succinct as Derek is in his writings. I bought everyone a copy of his books and sent them to you. Those of you that read it know, it’s great stuff. How did you turn CD Baby into a company with a $100 million in sales?
Derek Sivers
I got six things for you guys. Number six, no competition. There was literally not a single business doing what I was doing. It’s hard to imagine these days, but this was 1997. I was just a musician trying to sell my CD there was literally not a single company that would sell independent musicians’ music. After I started this little thing to sell my CD and I helped out some of my friends. The situation in 1997/8 was if you were a musician that wanted to sell your music online. The only way to do it was a guy named Derek in New York, and that was me. Independent musicians were a market that didn’t seem to be anyone’s effort or investment. I wasn’t looking at it that way, I needed to sell my CD and I knew a bunch of musicians that needed the same thing. By the time the competition came in, about a year later, I had already built a strong foundation. I was entrenched and the musicians knew about me. Even Amazon competed directly against me, I thought that I was going to be toast when they entered my market. Musicians still preferred me for reasons I’ll talk about next. Number five, no investors. I think having no investors was a huge advantage because shortly after I started CD Baby, the dotcom boom began in full swing. Everyone with a vague business plan was given millions of dollars.
Derek Sivers
I refused all of it. I stayed true to my mission to serve the musicians. You can feel a difference in a business that is trying to please investors versus trying to please their clients. I think of it like these new superhero movies that are almost entirely CGI, where the villain is made from all CGI, and for some reason you’re just not feeling a real feeling of threat. You’re not feeling affected, you’re not feeling freaked out or spooked by that villain because they’re all just CGI. The fight scenes don’t feel real. Characters jump around, but you’re not feeling the weight of it. To me, companies that are trying to please investors are kind of like that. They’re not quite connecting with the audience for some reason, their DNA is a little off. When you don’t have investors, you can make better decisions based on what’s the right thing to do, the moral thing or the fun thing, which is not always the profitable thing. It’s making decisions from a different place, not just the big decisions, but the thousand small daily decisions, like how you talk to customers, how you answer the phone and what you shipped them when they sign up.
Derek Sivers
Years ago I bought a font. There was a guy named Chank in Minneapolis that makes fonts, I wanted to buy one of his fonts, so I did. As a backup, he mailed a disc of the font to your home address, and received it saying it was wrapped in wrapping paper that was a bunch of penises. No company with an investor would ever do this. Here we are 20 years later, and I remember this font that I bought from Chank.com because of this ridiculous offensive wrapping paper. It’s counterintuitive that by doing these many things to thrill your clients instead of watching the profits. It is the Tao of business. By not focusing on profit, you can ultimately profit more. Your customers will love you. They’ll loudly tell everyone how awesome you are. They’ll tell stories like this 20 years later about offensive wrapping paper, then more people come your way because of it. By not focusing on profit, you can ultimately profit more, leading to number four, being frugal. I didn’t have money to waste, I never wasted money. A lot of my friends took investor money and then they would spend so much on advertising and technology that they didn’t need.
Derek Sivers
They would brag about their massive database server or their super security system, then their money ran out quickly because they were spending it recklessly. I started CD Baby with $500 and I earned $300 the first month, $700 the second month, it was profitable every month after that. I always refused investors, my expenses were only ever a small percentage of my net profit because that’s all I had. I only had 500 bucks to start with. If you’re frugal, you can continue indefinitely. Leading to number three, patience. People who start businesses often ask my advice when their business isn’t going as well as they thought it would. I often say, “how long has it been?”. Their answer is often like weeks or months. CD Baby took about four years to really get rolling. I could tell I was onto something good right away because the people that were using it loved it, but it was like a slow birth. You can tell when you’re on the right track, when people are thrilled to open their wallets for you and they’re thanking you for how much you’ve helped, then it’s just a matter of patience and focus.
Derek Sivers
Leading to number two, saying no. Hence the title of my yellow book. The company CD Baby was doubling in size every year, I never spent that much effort trying to grow it. My biggest effort was keeping it focused. People will always ask you to add features, you need to be the curator of what’s worth doing. I ended up saying no to everything thousands of times and said yes to maybe only one thing every year or two. We’ve all loved an app, a service, a product or a software that keeps getting more and more bloated. They keep adding features, but 1% of people like that new feature and 99% are annoyed that this thing that they loved is getting cluttered and bloated. For CD Baby during our biggest growth time, I didn’t add a single feature for four years. Not a single line of code, the website and the business grew by 800% in clients, in profit and in everything. I didn’t add a single feature. Somebody even teased me after three or four years said, “dude, do you know your site has stayed exactly the same for four years”. Number one.
Derek Sivers
The number one reason musicians told new musicians they should sign up was because they said, “you can reach a real person. You call them and they answer the phone. That’s why I love these guys”. That’s what Amazon couldn’t do. That’s why even when Amazon went head to head directly against CD Baby, musicians stayed with CD Baby because you call us and we’d pick up the phone on the second ring, that just gave them this feeling of trust that they felt that they couldn’t trust Amazon. They could call us to deal with situations. When people would call, we would always take a few minutes up front to get to know them. A musician would call up and say, “Hey my name is Jeff, and I’m thinking of selling my CD with you guys”. I’d say, “oh, cool. Jeff, what’s your full name?”. They’d say, “Jeff Wilkins”. “You got a website?”. “Oh, yeah, it’s theangryfrogs.com”.
Derek Sivers
I say, “okay, hold on a second”.Angry Frogs dot com. The point is that all the customer service staff, whoever was answering the phone, would take a couple of minutes up front to get to know the person that was calling. They read their bio for a second, listen to a minute of their music. This meant the world to people because they could tell that they were getting a real personal connection. hhen we would tell them, “hey, my name is Derek. If you ever need anything, just call. We’re here. Just ask. We’re happy to help”. We’d answer every phone call. No automated menu, there was a phone in the warehouse so that even if everybody in customer service was busy, if the phone is ringing, the guys in the warehouse would pick it up and say “CD Baby”. Even if they didn’t know how to help people, knowing that you could get somebody on the phone that would pick up and answer, was the number one reason people chose us over others.
Derek Sivers
I had 85 employees and out of those 85, 28 were full time customer service. People really underestimate the profitability of customer service because it’s harder to measure. It’s human, it’s soft, it’s reputation, it’s word of mouth. I want to spread the message that customer service is not an expense, it’s a profit center. When somebody contacts your company, that one interaction, even if they’ve been a quiet customer for years and they need to call you once. That one interaction with you will shape their opinion of your company more than everything else you’ve ever done combined. More than your name, your price, your features, your design. Nothing can compare to the effect you’ll have on one minute of interaction with people. I have a lot more to say about this in the new third edition of my book called Anything You Want about how I started, grew and sold CD Baby. The book was released in 2011 and I did like a 10th edition rewrite of it and add a lot more to it. I talk a lot more about that.
Joe
I love that book too. You’ve expanded it because it’s a small book, as are many of your books. They’re really succinct and you pack a lot into a book. You’re a great write in your blog too. One thing I want to touch on that you just said so 85 employees, you said 28 of them were customer service. More than a third of your entire team was all devoted to customer service? In my company, we still strive. Answer the phone. In the world of connecting, there’s this thing called talk to a real person. It’s not complicated, it’s so undervalued how the importance of what you just said there. That piece of advice, if everyone just incorporated that by 10% improvement, it would have a dramatic impact. A lot of people would literally double their revenue with just a 10% improvement in customer service. Thank you. The Hell Yes or No philosophy. I love the philosophy you have of things being either a hell yeah or a no. Can you share the history of that with everyone here? I think so many people say it now, but you’re the originator of this,let’s speak to that.
Derek Sivers
I love this idea. It’s like I invented those four words.
Joe
You popularized it.
Derek Sivers
I was in an açai bowl shop in Singapore, somebody walked in with a bag that said, “HELL YEAH OR NO”. I did a double take and got a quiet nod out of that. The history is that I was living in New York City, and I was invited to speak at a conference in Australia. I was weighing the pros and cons. I was like, “maybe I should. Maybe that would be good. Maybe I know, maybe not. Oh, God, that’s a lot of time. I don’t know”. Then I made a change in my thinking where I decided to raise the bar all the way up. I realized what would happen if I did that, if I raised the bar all the way up. If I said no to almost everything and said yes to almost nothing, then what would happen is I would be less scattered. I would be more focused. Most importantly, I would have free time so that when that occasional rare thing came along that made me go, “oh hell, hallelujah, that’s a great experience. That’s so worth doing”. I’d be able to throw myself into it all the way like this conference. People change the world with only one endeavor, one invention and you change the world. One Nobel Prize. One problem solved in your lifetime is what you will be legendary for. If we try to do it all, we end up doing nothing great because we’re spread too thin. It would be better to do almost nothing and then throw yourself entirely into the occasional rare thing that comes up.
Joe
You sent out an email. I love reading emails that come from you. You don’t hammer people with stuff, it always has a bit of a cliffhanger feeling about it. It evokes curiosity. I had read your other books and your newest one came out and you said, “this is the best thing I’ve ever done”. So the question You released something that you said “is the best thing I’ve ever written. I’ve poured my entire life into this”. It’s your book, How to Live and the subtitle is 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion. When I first read the book, I did not like it because I was like, “I’m confused here. This is all contradictory”. Then I look at the title, “oh, this is on purpose 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion”. Talk about this book because I truly think it is amazing. This book is so profound in so many ways.
Derek Sivers
Thank you. I’m still kind of in awe of it. It’s a little weird thing to talk about your own creation like that. The background is, there’s a brilliant book by David Eagleman called Sum. It’s subtitle is 40 Tales from the Afterlives. I love this book so much. If I had to pick one single book to say, this is my favorite book of all time, I would probably pick this book because of the format. It’s 40 little short stories, little fictional short stories, 2 to 4 pages each about what happens when you die. The format is like, chapter 3: when you die, you’re surrounded by a bunch of thuggish little creatures looking at you with a furrowed brow, saying, “what does answer? What does answer?” You find out that what you know of as your life was an artificial intelligence program. You are an artificial artificial intelligence program. The program has stopped running now and it’s your job to tell them the meaning of life. That’s why you were written. You do your best to tell them what you’ve learned in life. But no matter what you say, they just look at you and say, “what does answer?. You realize that if we were to write an artificial intelligence program smarter than us, we would be too dumb to understand its answers. End of story. Then the next one, chapter four: when you die, you’re greeted by somebody who tells you that in your last life you chose to be a human but in the next life, you could choose to be any animal you want, just like you did last time.
Derek Sivers
You think about the day that you enjoyed watching a horse grazing in the grass. What a nice simple life a horse has. You say, “you know what? If I do get to choose again, I’m choosing a horse this time”. No sooner said than done. You start to feel yourself changing into a horse. Your hands turn into hooves your neck is lengthening. Then you start to feel your brain turn into a horse’s brain and you’re starting to forget what a man is. You realize, “oh no, I’ve made a huge mistake. What I loved being was a complex man appreciating the simple horse. If I’m just a horse and I don’t know what a man is anymore. I won’t be able to appreciate it”. You try to say wait, but all that comes out is a sound and at the last minute before you become a horse, you have a horrible thought, which is, “I wonder what kind of complex, beautiful creature I must have been before. That shows the simple life of a man”. These beautiful little three page long stories but what I loved most of all is how they all conflict with each other. Every chapter is saying here’s what happens when you die, and it just conflicts with what they said two pages ago. I love this book. I read it twice over a couple of years.
Derek Sivers
One day I went, “oh, I want to write a book called How to Live in this same format”. I’ve read a lot of self-help books that are all convinced that they have the answer. Like Zero to One by Peter Thiel will tell you one thing, and then Atomic Habits will completely conflict it. Then you’ll read a book about the power of how you must give a fuck. Then Mark Manson will say, “no here’s the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Then there’s a book called Getting Things Done and they all conflict, but they’re all correct. I love that juxtapositions. Each chapter gives a philosophy thoroughly convinced that it has the answer for how to live. Then the next chapter contradicts it with its own philosophy of how to live. Each one is correct. Each one contradicts the rest. It’s like reading a bunch of these self-help books, because of this, it ends up kind of destroying the genre. It uses the genre to destroy the genre. It kind of mocks the entire genre. Yet along the way in writing it, I put everything I’ve ever learned in my life into this one book. The original first draft was over 1300 pages, it took me two more years to edit that down to 112 pages. It’s really succinct. It’s almost like poetry. It’s really unique and very powerful, and I think everyone should read it. It’s my masterpiece.
Joe
Thank you. Now those of you that have not read it yet, you’re bad people. That is not the right way to live, you need to go read this book immediately. One of the reasons that I resonated with it after it occurred to me that this is kind of conflicting. I often thought, “boy, it’d be interesting to live this way for a month, for 27 months straight and explore all these different ways to live”. What are you most proud of and most excited for in your life right now?
Derek Sivers
If How to Live was the only thing I ever created and I was on my deathbed that would be a life well-lived. What am I most excited for? Honestly? You sent me this question in advance, and I sat there thinking a long time, my honest answer is my relationship with my wife and my kid is the most exciting thing in my life. It keeps getting better every week. It’s really amazing.
Joe
How old do you know, Derek?
Derek Sivers
52.
Joe
Wow. I just turned 54 last week. How old is your child?
Derek Sivers
Just turned ten.
Joe
Awesome. How many different places have you lived in the last 20 years?
Derek Sivers
I’m going to say ten off the top of my head, something around ten.
Joe
How many of those were different countries?
Derek Sivers
Eight.
Joe
You’ll see more if you read Derek, I think a lot of how you’ve developed your thinking and your perspective is you’ve expanded yourself in so many different ways on how you’ve lived. What recommendations would you give to the entrepreneurs in this room and Genius Network on how to live out of all the ones you’ve written, which is the best one?
Derek Sivers
That’s two different questions. Do you want to know what I think is the best chapter and then we’ll do my recommendation for the entrepreneur.
Joe
That’d be great.
Derek Sivers
I had to think about this that I think that the it depends on the purpose, the time of life and the context. Anybody wants to nerd out about this next subject I’m about to talk about, please email me because I’m currently fascinated with this idea that beliefs are useful. Not true. Many times when I’m talking about a belief that I hold intentionally say, if I choose to believe that I’m below average, that’s a useful thing for me to believe. I don’t care if it’s true or not. Whenever I state a belief some people try to challenge me on whether that belief is true, but I don’t think that any beliefs can ever be true. Beliefs are only useful, not true. We choose a belief to be useful. Say that you’re 20 years old right now and you want to get stronger in your resilience. You should believe in a philosophy that tells you that you should pursue pain and always choose the most difficult option. Taking on greater and greater challenges, avoid comfort. Now let’s say that you’re 30, your challenge is you want to be more present, you want to live a more present focused life. Say you have a kid and you want to not be thinking about work. You want to be present. Then you should believe a philosophy that emphasizes the power of now, the physical senses where anything in the past is just a memory, in the future is just your imagination. The present is the only real thing there is. That’s a good thing to believe if you want to help yourself, be present in the moment. It’s useful, not true.
Derek Sivers
Now, let’s say that you’re 50 your goal is, you want to leave a legacy. In that case, you should believe in the importance of thinking of everything super long term. Think in terms of decades. Forget the present moment, reduce your current indulgence about going sailing today. What you need to focus on is things that will matter in 30 years to serve the future. Different philosophies can either make you famous, improve your relationships, make you rich, or help you explore the world. They’re beliefs that you take on because they have a use to you to believe that. Is one of these philosophies true and another is false, is one right and another one is wrong. Of course not. They use them for different purposes. That’s what the How to Live book is trying to communicate between the lines. That’s why I can’t answer which chapter is my favorite. Despite everything I just said while I was writing the book, I would keep becoming convinced that the chapter I was writing in that moment was actually true. I’m writing this whole book, but actually this is the one. This is the one I actually believe the strongest. All the other chapters are okay, but this is the one that I think is actually true, right and correct. Then I’d work on the next chapter the next day, and I’d feel the same thing about that chapter. That was kind of a fun mind fuck about writing the book.
Joe
Yeah, totally. I wanted to say that made me think of this quote I heard a long time ago. “A belief means you’re just not sure”. If someone says, “I believe in God” they’re really saying, I’m just not sure or I believe this is the right thing. It really causes you§ to really evaluate what you believe in the moment. Look at politics, even when I see people that have a completely different belief than I do, what I try to do is put myself in the position of if I had to argue for their belief, how would I defend it? How would I stand for that? To try to give myself perspective of why this person believes what it is they believe. So I can get better understanding of it and hopefully be more empathetic and not let my own distortions of what I believe to be true get in the way of hopefully connection and progress. That’s how I think about it. The question of what advice would you give to the entrepreneurs in the room on how to live, because you certainly have done well. It seems that you may have figured out how to not have as much angst as so many entrepreneurs. I think you have lived your life thinking about how to avoid quicksand and landmines.
Derek Sivers
Maybe I got lucky with the DNA of the early days, I was pursuing things for a different reason. That kind of ties into my suggestion for the room is, I think it’s crucial to know the nuances of what kind of success you want. Anybody can say, “I want to be successful”, but we don’t all agree on what that means. If you know the nuance of what kind of success helps you sort through the noise and advice. Maybe you really want to be like a huge Amazon sized company, but maybe you just want to be a really profitable, small three person company or solo. Maybe you want to be really rich above all else, but maybe you really want to be famous above all else. Maybe in your heart of hearts, what matters to you most is to be well known. You don’t care so much about how much money it brings you. The thing is, you not only need to know it yourself and admit it to yourself, but you need to admit it to others as well. Be prepared because no matter which one is true to you, it. There’s always going to be people telling you that you’re wrong.
Derek Sivers
If you actually want to be rich, there’s going to be people saying, “you’re a jerk, you should really be giving away all that money”. If what really matters to you is how much you give away, somebody’s going to say, “you’re an idiot, you should be keeping that for yourself”. No matter what you choose people are going to tell you wrong. If you know it and admit it, then you can just filter the incoming advice accordingly. Peter Thiel’s Zero to One book, the advice in that book is great if you want to be a big Facebook sized company, but it won’t help you be a small, profitable company. Advice I write in my books won’t help you be the next Facebook. It’s about being a small, happy, profitable company. Know what you want, know why you want it. I highly recommend writing it down in advance. Even just on the fly, if you’re in some kind of interview and somebody saying, “well, why did you do that? Why did you give the money away?”. You need to just know with like a simple declarative statement, this is what I’m doing. This is why I’m after this. I might not be like the other entrepreneurs you’re used to, but this is what I’m pursuing.
Derek Sivers
Lastly, you should know that your answer will probably change over the years. Please don’t feel any need to be congruent with your past self. You need to accept that your needs change over time and do not have any loyalty to your old proclamations. No matter how many people you told in the past that your beliefs are such. Feel free to let that go and say I’m doing something else now. I have a different goal now. I’m pursuing this. There’s a beautiful book I hope you will get the chance to read, since I imagine that most of you in this room are in a position of leadership in some way. It’s called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. It’s an amazing book on business leadership, saying the skills it took for you to climb your way up from nothing to the heights of where you are now are a different set of skills than you’ll need to go to the next place you’re going in life. It’s such a great point about how you need to change your strategy along the way to keep going. Don’t forget that.
Joe
I love that. So we have Dan Sullivan, the founder of strategy coach in the room here, and he has a great line, “the skills that get you out of Egypt are not the same skills that get you to the promised land”. Ben has a question.
Ben
I quoted you twice in the book I just wrote. I love your work.
Derek Sivers
What’s your new book called?
Ben
It’s called Be Your Future Self Now.
Joe
Let me say this first bit. Derek, in terms of fellow writers, Ben at one point was the number one writer in the world on Medium.com. Millions of people, hundreds of millions have read his writings, and he’s got multiple books in him and Dan Sullivan just did a couple of new books. I just wanted to give some context.
Ben
I’ll send you the book. You were talking about how belief systems are are useful but not necessarily true. What I’ve gotten from most of your writing, the main thing that’s driving all of this is whatever you want in the moment. Not maybe in the moment, but overall, whatever you’re truly committed to at this stage. Whatever you’re committed to at this point. How they define identity in psychology is basically it’s whatever you’re most committed to right now. You may have been committed to something five years ago, but you’re not committed to that now. Do you believe that the intention or the goal is the driver of the belief system then? Because you said each belief system has a purpose. If it has a purpose, there must be an intention.
Derek Sivers
I think I was really influenced by Tony Robbins in a way I didn’t even realize until years later. I read his books Awaken The Giant Within and Unlimited Power, when I was 18, again when I was 20, when I was 22 and again when I was 24. I read them so many times and I listened to all his power talk interviews. His way of thinking got into my mind so much that I didn’t even realize it. The way that if somebody grows up Catholic, you don’t realize till years later how much that’s just in your worldview. I think that idea came up in Tony Robbins stuff a lot. Which is believing something that gets you what you want. This is what I want, I want a great relationship. I want to travel the world. I want to leave a legacy, whatever the thing is you want, you need to have certain beliefs that support that goal. Your beliefs have to support that goal.
Ben
Have you ever heard of teleology? The concept of teleology. Look it up. I think you will like it.
Joe
What the hell? You just can’t say that. What the hell is teleology?
Ben
I’m sorry. That was for Derek, not for you guys.
Joe
It’s like having this one on one conversation secretly with Derek.
Ben
No, basically what Aristotle said was that, what makes humans different from other species is that we can have intention, or that is what intelligence is. Intelligence is the ability to have an intention. He called it final cause. Basically what teleology is, it’s a school of philosophy that says every behavior is driven by a goal. Even me talking to you right now and you being here with us to fulfill it. I think you will like it.
Joe
Thank you. By the way, Derek, because according to the time up here, we’ve got 3 minutes and 8 seconds left. Do you can you go a few more minutes? I’ve got people standing.
Derek Sivers
I’m thrilled with this. I love this. You guys are wonderful.
Julia
Hi, Derek. My name is Julie La Rocha. I’m a medical doctor and I do energy work and I’m able to clear believe, I love this framework of that beliefs are useful and not true. I’m in this place in my life where I do this work a lot on myself with affirmations. I say I am this, I am that, and I’m able to do it in such a way where I can create different versions of myself, even within days, within weeks. It’s gotten me to this curious place where I’m questioning if I can become this person in a week, and then that person the next week, and then that person the next week, then who is really me? Who is the character that is made up of all these beliefs? If I’m able to create new beliefs and then also equally as important uncreate old beliefs. In this exploration, I’m curious what your thoughts are. People say that there is this soul, this essence, this energy that is at the core of it all. I’m not convinced that’s true, even though in our direct experience it’s like you do feel that and that there is no real self. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that.
Derek Sivers
I have never talked about this publicly, but in the very last page of How to Live, I decided to leave it with like a really mysterious artistic ending. There’s just a picture of an orchestra, and I’ve never explained why. It is actually the answer to your question, which is I think of the different parts of our self as like the instruments in an orchestra that these are all inside of you. I love the way that you put that like I am this. A week later I am also this. You are all of those things like an orchestra, you are a clarinet, you are also a timpani, and you are also a cello. Then I think of the conductor as being the ego, the kind of more superego. The self that’s kind of on top conducting this brings in the instruments at a certain time. When you watch an orchestra and the conductor’s up there, or maybe we can even think of it like as if the conductor and composer were combined to say “now I’m going to need more violins. Now wait, Violin, stop. Just give me a little bit of that flute. Now. That’s what I need right now. More or less this. Now you all stop drum solo”. That’s the different parts of yourself need to be called out at different times in your life to make this music that you want to make with your life.
Julia
So beautiful. Love that. The symphony of life. Thank you.
Joe
Awesome. Thank you.
Craig
How are you? I’m Craig Handley. First thing I wanted to do is say thank you for being authentic. A lot of people don’t know, but last week I was emailing back and forth with him and he was as authentic as he is on the screen. He replied, he asked to listen to some of my music. He commented on the music, said it sounded great. I liked him for that.
Joe
Derek, I thought you were a sincere guy.
Craig
Listen, I’m writing with this guy Reese over here, and this 19 year old who’s going to make Paul McCartney look like an idiot in about ten years. We got some good stuff.
Derek Sivers
Craig, for what it’s worth, I actually don’t like listening to people’s music. It’s really amazing to me that was the only time in like two or three weeks that I’ve said, “oh, let me listen to your music” to somebody. I don’t talk with as many musicians as I used to, and now you’re here as well.
Craig
My question to you is, you built this amazing company in CD baby, so what are you doing today and how can we help you? Are you still interested in helping musicians and maybe doing something different or creative? How can we help you is the question. Everybody here loves doing that.
Derek Sivers
Thank you. You ask a real question to get a real answer. I’m not sure what to do with my little self publishing business. I’m just assuming this is a closed room where we’re all speaking vulnerably. My first book in 2011 called Anything You Want was published on Penguin that was just because Seth Godin is one of my heroes and I never intended to write a book. Then Seth Godin emailed me and said, “I’m starting a publishing company and I want you to be my first author. So what do you say?”. So he published it. Then he sold his little imprint to Penguin. Suddenly my book is on Penguin. While I was a little flattered, I like the “do it yourself” thing. I like having control. I like doing things in my own quirky way. I decided to self-publish even though Penguin was offering to happily publish whatever I did next, I said, “thank you, but I’m going to self publish”. Now I’ve got four self published books and I built my own little storefront and I love doing all that, but I’m wondering what to do next with it, whether to strengthen it or to delegate out to others.
Derek Sivers
If anybody wants to play armchair consultant and email me about what you think I should do with my self publishing business, that’s the real answer to your question. Helping musicians, that was your the first half of your question. I had to start to deliberate unlearning. I got my head up my own ass a bit when I was running CD Baby because I was in my own little world of CD Baby and everybody I knew was on CD Baby. I was just selling CDs all the time I realized I had lost perspective. New things came along, whether it’s Spotify streaming or people doing music for YouTube or Tik Tok, and it didn’t fit into my little CD Baby bubble. It was hard for me to fathom it. When I sold CD Baby, I had to do a deliberate unlearning, like looking away and getting to the point where I feel I know nothing about the music industry. I think I’ve successfully done it. I know nothing about the music industry at all anymore. Now I feel that I’m in no position at all to help musicians. I thought that maybe the unlearning would give me a new perspective where I could help, but now I think the unlearning has given me the realization that I can’t really help.
Craig
You develop so much trust with musicians that I look at the NFT space today where every artist that launches a record should have a painting describing the song with VIP tickets, things like that. You have such a unique, trusted relationship that I think if you came out with anything, you would have an audience that would listen. That’s why I asked the question, there’s a lot of change going on in music. A lot of people like Rockefeller way back changed the frequency of music to 524 and now musicians are fighting to change it back to a more harmonious energy. When I record, I’m always trying to make sure it’s in the right energy for positive change as opposed to negative. There are so many things that happened in the space that people are trying to overcome today. I know with your trust and the relationships you have, there’s probably a good opportunity that if you put your toe back in the water, people flock to whatever you were talking about because of the trust you earned by answering the phone and replying to your email. Thank you for who you are.
Derek Sivers
Thank you.
Joe
Neal.
Neil
This is more of a testimonial than a question. I got an email from you, it must have been 20 years ago. It was signed by you, but I think it was probably your team. I want to share it with everyone, when Derek was talking before about the value of people and the importance of creating relationship, this is the email I got. Typically we place an order and we get a confirmation email and it’s got the price, taxation, the delivery date and the tracking number. This is the email I got from Derek. “Neil your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing them to you. Our packaging specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved bon voyage to your package on its way to you in our private CD Baby Jet. On this day, Thursday, August the 28th, I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as customer of the year. We’re all exhausted, but can’t wait for you to come back to CD Baby.com”. When you talk about the value of customer experience, I can’t tell you how many people I have shared this with. I’ve shared this with groups of people, with individuals. I know they have shared it. I want to thank you for the experience that I was left with, was one of profound authenticity, playfulness, humor and trust. Thank you very much for bringing those qualities to the professional organization that you built. Deeply appreciated.
Derek Sivers
Thank you for reading that. It means so much more to have you reading that instead of me.
Joe
How many how many people other than Neil received that email? Any idea? No, no, I was asking Derek.
Derek Sivers
Oh, sorry. You’re asking me?
Joe
It’s a whole bunch of people are raising their hand in the audience.
Derek Sivers
I wrote that email in 10 minutes in 1999 and went out with every order for the next ten years that I was with CD Baby. Probably 4 million people got it. If you search any of those phrases, if you put in quotes into a search engine, you put search “packaging specialists from Japan”, you’ll find thousands of people that have posted it on their blogs they liked it. It was an amazing word of mouth for the company. All because of little 10 minutes I wrote in a silly mood in 1999.
Joe
There’s a giant lesson just now, what can you do in 10 minutes of an idea that actually you might see? Dan Sullivan again, I’ll quote him. He has a quote that says “make it up, make it real then make it reoccur”. Neil has the best voice of reading, if any of you need shit narrated. Before we go to Barry, who’s a great musician, he does pretty much all of Joe dispenses music.
Barry
Hey, Derek, how are you? So I want to thank you and acknowledge you for the positive impact you had and have on the music industry. I greatly appreciate what you said about beliefs and how they shift. I know over 30 years I’ve had to diversify and a lot of change has occurred in my musical path as well. My question rewinds to 30 years ago, I was in your songwriter class in New York City before you started CD Baby with a gentleman named Robert Cutarella. I remember that you were a really great songwriter as well. You were in my weekly class in this circle where we would critique you.
Derek Sivers
Those classes were awesome, weren’t they? I love that. I wish that now one of those little ideas that I’ve had that I’ve never launched is songtest.com. I missed that thing where you could bring in a song that you know was bad and you needed work and he would bring it into a trust, a little group that would tell you what’s bad about it and give you suggestions for how to improve it that’s so needed and so rare.
Barry
Bob and I went on to do a lot of productions together. We ended up producing Les Paul in 2005. We won a Grammy and a lot of different things. But my question really is, how has your musical path changed and the role of music as you’ve diversified? I know you started CD Baby because no one else was doing what you needed to do. How has that shifted for you when your visions have changed on your musical path?
Derek Sivers
Maybe you can relate to this with producing. Think of somebody who’s been a basketball player in the spotlight on the courts for 12 years , and now they’re a basketball coach. They have no desire to be out on the court under the spotlight. It’s like, “no, I had my day in the spotlight. Now it’s your turn and I’m going to help all you have your day in the spotlight”. That’s how I felt about music really right away. I made my full time living from music from 1985 through 1998. For 14 years of my life, it was my full time living. I did relatively well by my own. I bought a house in Woodstock with the money I made just from touring, which to me was like living the dream. That felt like enough to me. When I started CD Baby I ceased making music entirely, not even deliberately. Every waking hour was just spent serving other musicians and I was really happy about it. I had been doing the same thing for 14 or 15 years straight. I always felt like an uphill battle and helping other musicians suddenly felt like a downhill battle, whatever the opposite of battle is. Suddenly all the locked doors were opened wide and everybody was saying thank you every day. Whereas when you’re a struggling musician you never hear thank you. That was the role of my music in that. By the way, I realized I got a little teary eyed when you were mentioning like Bob Cutarella. That was like such a great memory. Thanks for that.
Barry
You haven’t lost your beautiful lyrics, it’s translating in your books. Your words still sing. I wanted to share that with you. Thank you for all you’ve done.
Joe
Thank you. Alright. Last question.
Derek Sivers
Thanks.
Audience
Thank you. Derek, this has been a lot of fun. You are a clever guy. I do exit planning, I’m a big picture thinker. I’m a lawyer by training. I just want to follow up with a question here. Your statement, is something to the effect that your beliefs are useful not true. I’m wondering, do you see that as a statement that is a belief or is it truth?
Derek Sivers
Good one. I’m so glad you asked that. I never thought about that. I think believing that beliefs are useful is useful because you realize that the beliefs that you’re subscribed to, even the ones that you might have unconsciously subscribed to. You either have done it for a reason because it’s serving something you want, maybe serving your public image or something like that. Then maybe it helps you judge the beliefs you hold. Instead of asking “is this true or not” , saying “is this serving me or not?”. Is this is this useful to what I want or not? It helps you. Thanks for asking that. I hadn’t actually thought about that, I do believe that believing that beliefs are useful is useful.
Audience
Thank you though I did love the time with you that I really did.
Joe
Thank you. Derek, thank you for for taking the time and this has been really great and we bought copies for every Genius Network member. You’ve been to Tim Ferris a couple of times, there’s always the question he asked people. He asks “what’s the book you recommend the most?”. What about you? What book do you give away the most to people? What have been some of those books?
Derek Sivers
I actually need a page on my website just to answer this question. If you go to my website, sive.rs/book. I list all the books I’ve read since 1997. Most importantly,I put my most recommended ones up top. There’s some books while I read them, I thought, “wow, that’s really good”. Then I find myself thinking about them for years and years afterwards, telling other people that they should read them or buying copies for friends. There’s a pretty obscure book called The Time Paradox by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo. It’s kind of a one point book about how we talk about the spectrum of introvert versus extrovert. He talks about this other spectrum that we never talk about, which is present focused, future focused, past focused and dives into that. I found that so enlightening and fascinating, it helped me understand the world because people who were very present focused seemed insane to me. That book helped me understand them. The point is, if you go to that page on my website, sive.rs/book. You’ll see my top recommended books up top. I sort them in order of how often I recommend them and how much I would recommend them to others.
Joe
Perfect. Well, any final words of wisdom.
Derek Sivers
Not wisdom, I want to say thanks,I don’t dig these kind of things. Like, hardly ever. This is actually like my first video call I’ve done in over a year and a half. I’m actually sitting in my kid’s bedroom right now because this is where the modem is. I just say no to these things every single week, at least often every day. Then you asked, I was like, “oh yeah, for Joe hell yeah”. I’m not just saying that this is rare. I never do this kind of thing. Thank you. Absolutely love what you do. I admire you and I’m so happy that you asked me to be here. Thank you.
Joe
Thank you so much, man. Well, have a great day. If you want to hang out with us online. You’re welcome to, and I will appreciate it. If we can do anything for you, please just ask. I appreciate it. Thank you. Give it up for Derek Sivers.