28 books that reference me

Any missing? Please let me know.

Never Enough by Andrew Wilkinson

In the coming days, I kept thinking back to a conversation that I’d had a week earlier. When Zoe and I had first arrived in New Zealand, we’d landed in Wellington, the country’s windswept, hilly capital, and I had looked up who I knew in the area. I came across an old friend, Derek Sivers, who had moved to New Zealand a few years earlier, and whom I had emailed and asked to meet.

I hadn’t seen Derek in person for over a decade and I was looking forward to catching up.

We met at August, a hip little café on Taranaki Street. I showed up early to check my emails and get some work done, and when Derek walked in, his blue eyes sparkled with intensity. He was wearing a beautiful tailored gray suit with a turtleneck. He had this way about him that seemed to constantly exude a level of calm, and no matter who he spoke to, he made them feel like they were the only person in the world worth talking to.

While a decade had passed, he was just how I remembered, with perhaps an extra line or two of aging now showing across his forehead.

I had mostly kept up with Derek via the occasional email conversation, and by reading his books and newsletters. He was a fascinating contrarian who seemed to live his life how he pleased, and he’d spent the past several years focused on writing and philosophizing to his hundreds of thousands of readers. He had written a book called How to Live, a treatise on living the best possible life by avoiding things like dependence on others, owning too many things, and, counterintuitively, pushing yourself to experience painful things.

Despite all his success and fame, I had always appreciated how down to earth he was.

Derek and I had met at the TED conference in 2009, and while you could count all the employees at my company on one hand at the time, and he had already sold a business for tens of millions, he still treated me as an equal and took an interest. Back then, he had taken me out for lunch and introduced me to his friends, even though I was a twenty-something dork who had just started his company and he was a well-known entrepreneur. The way he had treated me, despite our disparate success and status, all those years ago, had always inspired me to pay it forward. Now, nearly a decade and a half later, he treated me the same way as a successful entrepreneur as he had when I wasn’t one: talking to me with respect and kindness. He didn’t need anything. He just wanted to catch up.

“So, tell me about your life,” he said, with a warm smile as we sat with our coffees.

I launched into a monologue that would exhaust even the most seasoned Shakespearean actor. I verbally vomited every thought, worry, stress, and existential debate I had been having with myself over the past few years, telling him everything I’d been through since we last caught up. Through sips of coffee, and him listening intently and patiently as I told him about starting all the companies, about nearly losing it all to Brian, about my strained relationships with my brothers, and about where I was now, the anxious billionaire, he just listened. When he thought I was done, I rattled on about all the money I had made, and how unsatisfying it was to be at the top of the business mountaintop. “I feel like I have no idea what to do,” I concluded.

“Wow. That’s a lot…” he told me, calmly nodding along, like a horse tamer trying to quell a spooked mustang. After a beat, he then said: “But I’ve been there. I went through a lot of this after I sold my company.”

“You did?” I replied, leaning forward.

I realized that despite having followed Derek for years, I actually didn’t really know much about his backstory. Sure, I knew that he had founded a company called CD Baby, an independent music company that was often referred to as the “anti-music label.” I also remembered a mutual friend whispering to me once that he’d sold it for “a shitload,” but I mostly just knew him from his writing and enjoyed spending time with him.

Derek told me he had never intended to become an entrepreneur. He had a difficult childhood and grew up in a dysfunctional family. He had dropped out of high school at sixteen years old. He later joined the circus as a clown (yes, a clown), which led him to become a professional musician, playing in bands and touring the world. It wasn’t until 1998 that he stumbled upon an idea that would change the music industry forever. While trying to sell his own CDs online, he realized that there was no easy way for other independent musicians to sell their music on the internet. Thus, CD Baby was born. He clearly found an audience, because his site quickly became the biggest seller of independent music online, with $100 million in sales and over 150,000 musicians using the service. This got the attention of everyone in the industry, including Disc Makers, a CD and DVD manufacturer, who offered to buy the company in 2008.

“I was about to sell the business for $22 million and yet I was more miserable than ever,” he told me as I listened intently. “It felt like a huge burden. And I felt this weird itch to do it all over again.”

“Never enough,” I thought.

He went on: “I started thinking, ‘Now I need to prove that this wasn’t just luck — I need to build a new company, just bigger and better.’ I started dreaming up all these business ideas before realizing that this was just insecurity. I was scratching the same itch, trying to do the same thing I’d just done. And it wasn’t about me. It was about proving myself to other people.”

“So, what did you do?” I asked him.

“I decided to let go of business and try something new,” he said. “To focus on music and writing.”

“Right, but what about the money? Now you have all this money to manage and grow. Did you invest it or what?” I asked.

“I burned the boats,” he responded, sounding like a Viking.

“What do you mean?”

“In war, when you burn the boats, you’re giving yourself no option for retreat. You have to follow through on your mission,” he explained. “I knew that, left to my own devices, I would stay trapped in the business world, solving the same problem over and over. I was an addict, so, like an addict who wanted to quit, I had to remove all the drugs from my house.”

“So how did you quit?” I asked, ready to hear that he literally burned $22 million — thankfully, he had not.

“When I really thought about it, I didn’t need or even want the money from the sale of the company. I just wanted to make sure I had enough for a comfortable life. It was never the money that did it for me; it was the freedom and the fun of building something.”

“So did you give it away?” I asked.

“Kind of,” he said. “A few months before the sale, I transferred the ownership of my company into a trust. My entire net worth was irreversibly and irrevocably gone. It was no longer mine. It all belonged to the charitable trust. When I die, all of its assets will go to music education, but while I’m alive, it pays out 5 percent of its value per year to me. On paper, my net worth is next to nothing. It was my way of opting out of the burden of the big pile of money and accepting that I had enough. That I was done with the game.”

I took this and thought about it. I’d been where he was a hundred times by now, and I couldn’t do it. I wanted to know he had pulled off the impossible. “Isn’t that a huge hit to your ego? How do you feel when you’re hanging out with other wealthy people?” I asked him.

“I feel like I went to rehab and got clean, and I’m hanging out with a bunch of addicts. Their lives revolve around drugs, but, for me, having space from it now, it seems insane.”

I felt my cheeks flush. I was one of those addicts he was talking about.

“I have a conversation with someone like you about this about once a month now. A lot of people talk about doing what I did, opting out, but not many people end up doing it. It’s like the whole tiny house thing. Everyone loves the idea of a tiny house in theory — the simplicity of the humble life — but very few people actually go do it. I did the business equivalent. Except I burned down my mansion,” he said with a chuckle.

“Okay, so now what? It’s been, what, thirteen years since you sold the company?”

He told me how he started writing books and blogs, and how he focuses his time on making music and writing an email newsletter, which has hundreds of thousands of subscribers around the world. “I think. I write. I travel. I hang out with my son. I play music. I just got back from India, where I spent three days just meeting interesting strangers who read my newsletter and just learning about their lives. I go on a lot of hikes. I don’t know — I’m busy.”

He told me about a heuristic he uses to decide whether to do something: “Either it’s ‘hell yeah!’ or it’s ‘no.’ Life is too short for ‘nos.’ This is the ultimate freedom.”

I laughed. I often groaned when looking at my calendar and badly needed to implement the same strategy.

“Okay, so now everything is perfect?” I asked.

“Of course not!” he said as he laughed at the seeming absurdity of my question. “I get stressed out. I got divorced. My family is complicated. I have the occasional existential crisis. It’s not like I cracked life. It’s hard and complicated, but the one thing I did that’s different from so many of my friends in business is that I started solving different problems and opted out of the money game.”

I sat there somewhat stunned. I kept turning around the idea of burning the boats over and over in my head. I felt like I had grown up in some sort of cult, and now, in this cute Wellington café, I was being deprogrammed by a former cult member. My brain instantly hated this idea. Akin to someone suggesting Gollum from Lord of the Rings throw away his precious ring. Inconceivable.

“Don’t you miss it?” I asked.

“Miss what?”

“Business. Having a yardstick to measure yourself by. Money. Status,” I replied.

“I have enough money, and I’ve proven myself to the world once. I don’t know why I need to do it again. Does anyone roll their eyes at the guy who won Olympic gold once, wondering, ‘Why didn’t they do it twice?’ No. The yardstick is no longer useful. Think about it: Why do you love business so much?” he asked.

“Well, I like making stuff better. I’ve always had ideas for how things should work or problems in the world I’d like solved or ideas I’d like to make happen. For me, that’s the fun part,” I responded.

“I still do that; I just don’t do it for money,” he said, talking about some of the recent digital projects he’d been working on, but with no financial upside. “Instead of money, I got the joy of manifesting an idea and then interacting with all these interesting people in the process,” he said.

“How do you feel around businesspeople? Do you feel judged?”

“Well, two things. One, they are mostly jealous of the fact that I quit and they dream about doing the same thing. And if they get weird about that, then, well, I don’t think I want to be friends with them. Two, I bought a few very nice, very expensive suits last time I was in London. I wear them every day, like a uniform,” he said, gesturing to his beautifully tailored gray suit. “It’s amazing how wearing nice clothing changes people’s perception of you,” he went on with a shrug.

I laughed and sat in silence for a moment. As we looked out the window of the café, contemplating what Derek had told me, I realized he had hacked life.

He had enough, and I wanted the same.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

Derek Sivers is a Control Freak

Not long into his 2010 TED talk on creativity and leadership, Derek Sivers plays a video clip of a crowd at an outdoor concert. A young man without a shirt starts dancing by himself. The audience members seated nearby look on curiously.

“A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous,” Derek says. Soon, however, a second young man joins the first and starts dancing.

“Now comes the first follower with a crucial role… the first follower transforms the lone nut into a leader.” As the video continues, a few more dancers join the group. Then several more. Around the two-minute mark, the dancers have grown into a crowd.

“And ladies and gentlemen, that’s how a movement is made.”

The TED audience gives Derek a standing ovation. He bows, then does a little dance himself on stage.

No one can accuse Derek Sivers of being a conformist. During his career, he has repeatedly played the role of the first dancer. He starts with a risky move, designed to maximize his control over what he does and how he does it. By doing so, he’s at risk of looking like the “lone nut” dancing alone. Throughout Derek’s career, however, there always ended up being a second dancer who validated his decision, and then eventually a crowd arrived, defining the move as successful.

His first risky move occurred in 1992 when he quit a good job at Warner Bros. to pursue music full-time. He played guitar and toured with the Japanese musician and producer Ryuichi Sakamoto, and by all accounts was pretty good at it. His next big move was in 1997, when he started CD Baby, a company that helped independent artists sell their CDs online. In an age before iTunes, this company filled a crucial need for independent musicians, and the company grew. In 2008, he sold it to Disc Makers for $22 million.

At this point in his career, conventional wisdom dictated that Derek should move to a large house outside of San Francisco and become an angel investor. But Derek was never interested in conventional wisdom. Instead, he put all of the proceeds from the sale into a charitable trust to support music education, living off the smallest possible amount of interest allowed by law. He then sold his possessions and began traveling the world in search of an interesting place to live. When I spoke with him, he was in Singapore. “I love that the country has so little gravity, it doesn’t try to hold you here, it’s instead a base from which you can go explore,” he said. When I asked him why he’s living overseas, he replied, “I follow a rule with my life that if something is scary, do it. I’ve lived everywhere in America, and for me, a big scary thing was living outside the country.”

After taking time off to read, learn Mandarin, and travel the world, Derek has recently turned his sights on a new company: MuckWork. This service allows musicians to outsource boring tasks so they can spend more time on the creative things that matter. He started the company because he thought the idea sounded fun.

Here’s what interests me about Derek: He loves control. His whole career has been about making big moves, often in the face of resistance, to gain more control over what he does and how he does it. And not only does he love control, but he’s fantastically successful at achieving it. This is why I got him on the phone from Singapore: I wanted to find out how he achieved this feat. In more detail, I asked what criteria he uses to decide which projects to pursue and which to abandon—in essence, I wanted his map for navigating the control traps described in the last two chapters.

Fortunately for us, he had a simple but surprisingly effective answer to my question….

The Law of Financial Viability

When I explained what I was after, Derek got it right away.

“You mean, the type of mental algorithm that prevents the lawyer, who has had this successful career for twenty years, from suddenly saying, ‘You know, I love massages, I’m going to become a masseuse’?” he asked.

“That’s it,” I replied.

Derek thought for a moment.

“I have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules,” he said. “Do what people are willing to pay for.”

Derek made it clear that this is different from pursuing money for the sake of having money. Remember, this is someone who gave away $22 million and sold his possessions after his company was acquired. Instead, as he explained: “Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.”

He also emphasized that hobbies are clearly exempt from this rule. “If I want to learn to scuba dive, for example, because I think it’s fun, and people won’t pay me to do that, I don’t care, I’m going to do it anyway,” he said. But when it comes to decisions affecting your core career, money remains an effective judge of value. “If you’re struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea.”

At first encounter, Derek’s career, which orbits around creative pursuits, might seem divorced from matters as prosaic and crass as money. But when he renarrated his path from the perspective of this mental algorithm, it suddenly made more sense.

His first big move, for example, was to become a professional musician in 1992. As Derek explained to me, he started by pursuing music at night and on the weekend. “I didn’t quit my day job until I was making more money with my music.”

His second big move was to start CD Baby. Again, he didn’t turn his attention full-time to this pursuit until after he had built up a profitable client base. “People ask me how I funded my business,” he said. “I tell them first I sold one CD, which gave me enough money to sell two.” It grew from there.

In hindsight, Derek’s bids for control remain big and non-conformist, but given his mental algorithm on only doing what people are paying for, they now also seem much less risky. This idea is powerful enough that I should give it its own official-sounding title: “The Law of Financial Viability”: When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.

Let’s say you have an idea for pursuing more control in your career and you’re encountering resistance. How can you tell if this resistance is useful (for example, it’s helping you avoid the first control trap) or something to ignore (for example, it’s the result of the second control trap)?

To help navigate this control conundrum, I turned to Derek Sivers. Derek is a successful entrepreneur who has lived a life dedicated to control. I asked him his advice for sifting through potential control-boosting pursuits and he responded with a simple rule: “Do what people are willing to pay for.” This isn’t about making money (Derek, for example, is more or less indifferent to money, having given away to charity the millions he made from selling his first company). Instead, it’s about using money as a “neutral indicator of value”—a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded that it’s a critical tool for navigating your own acquisition of control. This holds whether you are pondering an entrepreneurial venture or a new role within an established company. Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after.

Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick

Simply deleting everything that comes before the first big piece of value. One of my favorite examples of this is from Derek Sivers’ “Your Music and People: Creative and Considerate Fame”.

Here’s the book’s full introduction. Notice how it shares the bare minimum information required to establish basic credibility and context, and then gets out of the way:

“This book is entirely about you and your music. But I use some of my stories as examples.

So here’s my context, as short as can be, to set the stage for the book.

Since I was 14, all I wanted was to be a successful musician.

First I graduated from Berklee College of Music in Boston. Then I got a job at Warner/Chappell Music Publishing in New York City. There I learned a ton about how the traditional music industry works. I’ll tell you about that soon.

Then I quit my job and became a full-time professional musician. I played over a thousand shows of all types. I was also a session guitarist and side-man, then I ran a recording studio, booking agency, record label, and more.

I started to see the music business from the other side. I found out what it was like to be on the receiving end of musicians’ music. I became friends with successful people inside the music industry, and heard their perspective.

I saw thousands of musicians succeed. So I paid attention to how they did it.

That’s when I started writing my observations in this book. I felt like a spy, giving you the report from the inside, telling you how to get in. Now listen up, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”

Upon reading that introduction, I knew I was holding something written by an empathetic author who was putting the reader first.

When I asked Derek about it, he said, “It’s funny, I felt bad that my intro was even that long! I kinda wished I had none at all.”

If you’re not a natural with public speaking and interviews, compensate with extra prep. Here’s Derek Sivers on how he excels — against his natural inclinations — as a podcast guest:

“I’m a disappointing person to try to debate or attack. I just have nothing to say in the moment, except maybe, “Good point.” Then a few days later, after thinking about it a lot, I have a response. I’ll tell you a secret. When someone wants to interview me for their show, I ask them to send me some questions a week in advance. I spend hours writing down answers from different perspectives, before choosing the most interesting one. Then when we’re in a live conversation, I try to make my answers sound spontaneous. People say that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.”

I’ve listened to many of Derek Sivers’s appearances, and I deeply appreciate the extra effort he invests in preparation. Because it ensures that my time, as a listener, is rewarded with dense and thoughtful value. Sivers describes himself as a “slow thinker.” But with time to reflect, he’s a deep thinker, and he’s found a way to use that. Play to your strengths.

Any Language You Want by Fabio Cerpelloni

“Whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, the opposite may also be true.”
- Derek Sivers

I first came up with the idea of writing this book in 2021. I had just finished reading “Anything You Want” — a book by Derek Sivers, an American entrepreneur, musician, and author who accidentally started a multimillion business selling CDs online in 1998. In every chapter, Sivers shares his insights, personal stories and lessons he learned while starting, growing, and ultimately selling his company for $22 million. He also gives practical advice and inspiration to anyone looking to build their own business.

I loved the format of the book and thought I could write a similar one. Not about building a multimillion company – I’m still miles away from that – but about how I mastered English, my second language. I thought I would write my stories on how I did it, share lessons learned while becoming a proficient English speaker, and give practical advice and inspiration to other language learners. This was just a wild idea I had but, like most of the ideas I have, I did nothing with it.

One year later I read another book by Sivers called “How to Live: 27 Conflicting Answers and One Weird Conclusion”. Each chapter of “How to Live” answers the same question: What’s the best way to live? Every chapter persuades you to adopt a certain life philosophy. But each philosophy disagrees with the next.

For example, one chapter tells you that the best way to live is to seek novelty and live in the world of tomorrow. The next one encourages you to ignore everything new and value only what has endured. All chapters make sense. But which one is correct? Sivers believes that all of them are. Life is complex so there’s no one right answer to the question, “What’s the best way to live?" Contrary to “Anything You Want”, though, Derek never tells personal stories in the book and never uses the subject pronoun “I”.

I started thinking about language learning, my field of expertise, and I realized that asking “What’s the best way to live?” is like asking “What’s the best way to learn a language?” There’s no one right answer to this question.

So I came up with another wild book idea, which I emailed directly to Derek Sivers. I wrote:
 
“Hi Derek. I’m writing to you from Cogliate, a little Italian town you’ve never heard of in your life before receiving this email, to ask you a quick question about ‘How to Live’. Do you think the format you used could work for any question that doesn’t have a straightforward answer? I’m asking you because I’m an English as a foreign language teacher and I’d like to write a similar book called ‘How to Learn English: X conflicting answers and 1 universal truth.’ What do you think? Thanks Derek.”
 
Derek replied, “Hi Fabio. That would be AMAZING! You should do that! - Derek”
 
That was all I needed to hear.
 

The Long Game by Dorie Clark

Changing Our Perspective

The reclamation may start with Derek Sivers.

Sivers began his career as a musician and morphed into an entrepreneur when he created an online independent music company called CD Baby, which he successfully sold in 2008. But unlike many entrepreneurs, who plow headfirst into another startup or angel investing, Sivers took a different path, moving abroad (Singapore; New Zealand; Oxford, England) and devoting most of his time to writing.

To him, being busy isn’t a mark of status: it’s a mark of servitude. “I have a very negative impression of the stereotypical frazzled, freaked-out, ‘Oh my God, I’m so busy!’ type,” he told me. “They seem out of control—not in control of their life. But I’ve met a few super-successful people that are calm, collected, unbothered, and give you their full attention. They seem to have everything under control. So, I’d rather be like that.”

Hell Yeah or No

One strategy comes from Derek Sivers, the music entrepreneur-turned-author mentioned in chapter 1, who eschewed the “out of control” busyness of so many professionals around him.

Years ago, he picked up a tip from a friend of his: “When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than ‘Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!’—then say ‘no.’” This binary might sound extreme, and it is. As Sivers told me, “I’m too good at it. I say no to almost everything! Maybe to a fault.” But as a result, he says, “my life is extremely simple and easy,” and he spends most of every day focused on projects that are meaningful to him.

As Derek Sivers, the music entrepreneur of “hell yeah or no” fame, described in one podcast interview, his company “didn’t really take off for four years…. Very often I meet people who start their dream idea, and they’re a few months into it and they say, ‘It’s just not going well!’ I’m like, ‘It’s been a few months! Come on!’ When I was three years into CD Baby, it was just me and a guy in my house.” By year ten, he had sold the company for $22 million.

Company Of One by Paul Jarvis

Derek Sivers, the former CEO of CDBaby, says that we should proudly exclude people, because we can’t please everyone. That way, when someone hears our message directed specifically at them and no one else, they’ll be drawn toward our message (and will pay attention). It’s like creating messaging for pistachio ice cream lovers while poking fun at boring vanilla.

Capital Isn’t Always Required

Sometimes, if your idea for a business or product requires a substantial influx of funds to start, it could be that your idea is too large or too complex. And sometimes you should start a business only when people are asking you for something and are willing to give you money for it.

Derek Sivers began CDBaby—which sold for $22 million in 2008, while it was doing approximately $250,000 a month in net profit—by accident when he began selling his own band’s CDs on the internet. Friends asked if he could sell their albums for them as well, and as more people asked, a revenue model began to form and Derek’s CDBaby business was born. But in the beginning, it required no capital to start—just an idea and the time it took to execute it well.

CDBaby never took on investors, even though there were weekly offers from outsiders who wanted to invest. Derek didn’t need CDBaby to expand quickly because it was profitable from the start and it focused on serving its audience, not expanding its own profit margins. He didn’t have to please anyone but his customers and himself. Every decision, he feels, whether it’s to raise money, to expand a business, or to run promotions, should be done according to what’s best for your customers. Derek spent $500 to start CDBaby, made $300 in his first month and $700 in the second, and was profitable from that point on.

Customers typically don’t ask a business to grow or expand. If growth isn’t what’s best for them, maybe it should be reconsidered. Because when you do focus primarily on your customers and their satisfaction, they’ll tell everyone about you.

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt

A few years ago we were both captivated by a TED talk by entrepreneur and musician Derek Sivers. He showed a video of a seemingly crazy man dancing all by himself at an outdoor concert. The man stands on the side of a hill, shirtless and barefoot, gesticulating wildly and having the time of his life. At first, no one goes within twenty feet of him. But then, one venturesome person joins him, and then another and another, and then the floodgates open. Dozens of people rush, creating a mosh pit of dancing fools where once there had been only one. Derek calls this the “first follower” principle: When creating a movement, attracting the first follower is the most crucial step. “The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.”

The primordial ooze of innovation needs to encourage the people who want to be innovative—the lone dancing fool on the side of the hill—to do their thing. But just as important, it also needs to encourage the people who want to join something that is innovative—dancing fools two through two hundred—to do their thing as well. This is why innovation needs to be integrated into the fabric of the company, across every function and region. When you isolate it under a particular group, you may attract innovators to that group, but you won’t have enough first followers.

Kevin Gibbs’ prototype drew the interest of several other engineers, who joined Kevin’s project. (Derek Sivers would call these engineers Kevin’s first followers.) This feature, now called Google Suggest, is why, when you type “we”, Google suggests that you are looking for the weather forecast and provides you with a drop-down menu to click on the full query without needing to type the whole thing out yourself.

Fortune Cookie Principle by Bernadette Jiwa

The best confirmation email ever written:

When Derek Sivers first built his business CDbaby.com, he set up a standard confirmation email to let customers know their order had been shipped. After a few months, Derek felt that this email wasn’t aligned with his mission—to make people smile. So he sat down and wrote a better one:

“Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed on a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD 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, Friday, June 6th. 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 CDBABY.COM!!”
—Derek Sivers, “Anything You Want”

The result wasn’t just delighted customers. That one email brought thousands of new customers to CD Baby. The people who got it couldn’t help sharing it with their friends. Try Googling “private CD Baby jet”. You’ll find over 900,000 search results to date. Derek’s email has been cited by business blogs the world over as an example of how to authentically put your words to work for your business.

Purple Cow by Seth Godin

Everyone knows that the record business is dying, that no smart entrepreneur would start a real business trying to make money in music. Don’t tell that to Micah Solomon, David Glasser or Derek Sivers. Micah runs Oasis CD Duplication, which is obsessed with making CDs for independent musicians. One example of his remarkable behavior: He regularly sends a sampler CD to every important radio station in the country — and the CD only includes music from his customers.

David Glasser and his partners run Airshow Mastering, which creates cutting edge CD masters for Sony — and for individual musicians as well. He does an amazing job in helping musicians realize their dreams.

And where do both companies send these musicians when the records are ready to be sold? To CDBaby.com, the best record store on the web. Derek sells the work of literally thousands of independent acts, doing it with such success (and treating his partners with such respect) that word of mouth is the only advertising he needs to attract new musicians and new customers.

A quick visit to CDBaby.com, oasiscd.com and airshowmastering.com will make it clear just how remarkable these three companies are. They understand that they have a choice between distinct or extinct.

Will any business that targets a dying business succeed? Of course not. But these three prove that targeting a thriving niche in a slow-moving industry can work — if you’re prepared to invest what it takes to be remarkable.

The Laws of Subtraction by Matthew May

Let’s say you’re a musician.
I say to you, “Write me a piece of music. Anything at all. Go.”
“Umm … anything?” you say. “What kind of mood are you looking for? What genre?”
There are too many possibilities. The blank page problem.
How do you begin with infinity?
Now imagine I say, “Write me a piece of music, using only a xylophone, a flute, and a shoe box. You can only use four notes: B, C, E, F, and only two notes at a time. It has to be in 3/4 time, start quiet, get loud, then get quiet by the end. Make it sound like a ladybug dancing with an acorn. Go.”
Ah … your imagination has already begun writing the music as soon as it hears the limitations. This is easy!
Those of us in developed countries — on fast Internet connections, reading books on subtraction just for fun — have a blank page. We can do anything. Anything we want. No restrictions.
And that’s the problem. We’re paralyzed by the infinite possibilities.
Give yourself some intentional restrictions in life and you’ll finally get inspired to act.
Restrictions will set you free.

- Derek Sivers is a musician and the creator of CD Baby, which became the largest online seller of independent music, and the author of the bestselling book “Anything You Want”.

$100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

First Say Yes, Then Say “Hell Yeah”

Other business books will tell you about saying no: how you should guard your time, “only do what you’re good at,” and turn down far more requests than you accept. As a business grows over time and options for growth become more selective, that may indeed be useful advice.

But what if you took the opposite approach, especially at first? What if you deliberately said yes to every request unless you had a good reason not to? The next time someone asks for something, try saying yes and see what it leads to. Whatever success I’ve had in my own work thus far has always come from saying yes, not from saying no.

Derek Sivers, who founded a business he later sold for $22 million (he then donated the money to a charitable trust), offers an alternative strategy: As things get busy, evaluate your options according to the “hell yeah” test. When you’re presented with an opportunity, don’t just think about its merits or how busy you are. Instead, think about how it makes you feel. If you feel only so-so about it, turn it down and move on. But if the opportunity would be exciting and meaningful—so much so that you can say “hell yeah” when you think about it—find a way to say yes.

Essentialism by Greg Mckeown

The Power of Extreme Criteria

In a piece called “No More Yes. It’s Either HELL YEAH! Or No,” the popular TED speaker Derek Sivers describes a simple technique for becoming more selective in the choices we make. The key is to put the decision to an extreme test: if we feel total and utter conviction to do something, then we say yes, Derek-style. Anything less gets a thumbs down. Or as a leader at Twitter once put it to me, “If the answer isn’t a definite yes then it should be a no.” It is a succinct summary of a core Essentialist principle, and one that is critical to the process of exploration.

Derek lives this principle himself. When he wasn’t blown away by any of the candidates he interviewed for a job, he said no to all of them. Eventually he found exactly the right person. When he realized he had signed up for several conferences around the world that he wasn’t really stoked about, he decided to stay home and skip all of them, and in turn earned twelve days he used to more productive ends. When he was trying to decide where to live, he ruled out places that seemed pretty good (Sydney and Vancouver) until he visited New York and knew instantly it was exactly the right place for him.

Die Empty by Todd Henry

Do the obvious

Derek Sivers is the founder of CD Baby, an online retailer that helps independent musicians sell their music, and the author of “Anything You Want”. In an article on his website, he shared that one of the struggles he’s experienced over the course of his career is that other people’s work always seems to be intricate and innovative compared with his. “I never would have thought of that. How do they even come up with that? It’s genius!”

Sivers said that in spite of his inclinations, he continued quietly going about his work and making the things that he felt compelled to make, even though most of them seemed too obvious to him. Sivers was surprised when other people began contacting him and remarking about how inventive his work is and how they never could have come up with such ideas.

Ideas that seem obvious to you may be incredibly profound to others, but you may be inclined not to share them because of a fear that they will be perceived as too shallow. Are you holding back insights or actions because they seem too obvious to you? Brilliant work doesn’t need to be complex. Sometimes the deepest truths are hiding in plain sight.

This Is Strategy by Seth Godin

The Day I Met Derek Sivers

On June 10, 2009, I posted a riff about Guy #3, the person who starts a movement.

Guy #1 is the crazy dude who starts dancing, alone, at the outdoor concert. He’s on the hillside, doing his thing.

Guy #2 is brave and supportive. He joins in and starts dancing.

But it’s Guy #3 that changes the dynamic. His presence makes it safe for people 4, 5, 6, and 7 to join in.

And now, sitting still is more socially risky than getting up.

So people 8 through 20 arrive.

And now it’s a movement.

We spend a lot of time glorifying Guy #1.

But the real work is to see time. To acknowledge that nothing happens all at once.

Guy #3 is the one we need to focus on.

Halfway across the world, an entrepreneur named Derek Sivers posted something about the same video on the same day. We ended up becoming friends and I published his first book. Since then, his TED talk on this topic has been seen millions of times.

But not all at once. That’s the point.

Anchored by Lucas Skrobot

Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, gave a TED talk about how to start a movement. The focus of his talk was a video of a shirtless dancing man in the middle of a crowd at an outdoor music festival. The film starts with the man dancing in a ridiculous manner. People look at him as if he is a crazed, lone nut—which he is!

Moments later though, a second man enters the frame and begins dancing. The first man acknowledges him, gives him some goofy dance pointers, and then they rock out together. The second dancing man, whom Sivers calls the “First Follower,” calls someone to join him. He leaves the screen for a moment and then returns with several others. Momentum builds. Those who were on the fence now feel it is safe to join in. No longer is it a lone nut—it is now a movement. Within thirty seconds, the tables have turned completely. People rush to join the fray, more afraid of being the odd one out than dancing like a fool.

The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco

The owner of an idea is not he who imagines it, but he who executes it.

According to entrepreneur Derek Sivers, ideas are just multipliers while execution represents actual money.

Within our Fastlane chess game, ideas (pawns) are potential speed, while execution (the king) is the pressure applied to the accelerator. This relationship demonstrates how the coupling of a great idea (potential speed/strong pawns) is worthless when attached to weak execution (no acceleration pressure/weak king).

The Pawn: Idea (Potential Top Speed)
Awful idea = 1 mph
Weak idea = 5 mph
So-so idea = 35 mph
Good idea = 65 mph
Great idea = 100 mph
Brilliant idea = 200 mph

The King: Execution (Accelerator Pressure)
No execution = $1
Weak execution = $1,000
So-so execution = $10,000
Good execution = $100,000
Great execution = $1,000,000
Brilliant execution = $10,000,000

Think Like a Rocket Scientist by Ozan Varol

The press release, once written, isn’t shelved. It guides the team throughout the entire development process. At each stage, the team asks, “Are we building what’s in the release?” If the answer is no, it’s time to pause and reflect. Any significant deviation from the initial trajectory may mean that a course correction is necessary.

Yet, it’s equally important not to treat the press release as a bible. As entrepreneur and author Derek Sivers writes, “Detailed dreams blind you to new means.” The initial specifics in your press release may have a short half-life as the world around you changes. These outdated details shouldn’t smother the overall vision. In other words, don’t stay the course just for the sake of staying the course.

The Floundering Founder by Raman Sehgal

In Derek Sivers’s most recent book, “How to Live”, he says, “We overestimate what we can do in one year. We underestimate what we can do in ten years.” The sensational Mr. Sivers is absolutely right.

Don’t chase the opportunities that are not right for your business. You don’t need to get every client. You just need the ones who get you. I will leave you with a line from the wonderful Derek Sivers that sums this up perfectly: “If it’s not a hell yeah, it’s a no.”

Special thanks to Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, and Derek Sivers who have mentored me without ever knowing it. Your words have been an inspiration to me and impacted more people than you will ever realise.

Never Play It Safe by Chase Jarvis

Notice your spontaneous thoughts or feelings and contrast them with the slower, analytical process of conscious reasoning. For me, Derek Sivers’s “It’s a hell yes, or it’s a no” decision making framework always comes to mind and is easily leveraged when I’m tuned in and seeking a sense of where I stand on a topic. At its core, this approach encourages me to only lean in or commit to the things that truly resonate with me, rather than spreading myself too thin by accepting lukewarm or mediocre opportunities. I use this for everything from attending dinner parties to accepting speaking gigs to deciding what creative project to tackle next.

Ikigai by Sebastian Marshall

“Sprezzatura” is an Italian word that means “to hide conscious effort and appear to accomplish difficult actions with casual nonchalance.”

As Derek Sivers wrote: “But when you find out they’re amazing only because of unglamorous persistent sweaty hard work, you can be double-inspired, thinking, ‘Wow! I could do that!’”

Derek Sivers’ book reviews - sive.rs/book - are all excellent. That’s probably a good place to start if you’re looking for business/social psychology/motivation/execution books.

The good news is, you’re probably better than you think. Read Derek Sivers’ “Obvious to you. Amazing to others” post for a shot of inspiration.

The Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia

Methodically creating this manual valuable process and recording the steps you take to complete it will help you figure out what’s working and what isn’t. It will also help you discover if you’re making something that people actually need or will buy.

In his book “Anything You Want”, CD Baby founder Derek Sivers writes, “If you want to make a movie recommendation service, start by telling friends to call you for movie recommendations. When you find a movie your friends like, they buy you a drink. Keep track of what you recommended and how your friends liked it, and improve from there.”

Thank & Grow Rich by Pam Grout

Our overblown consumer culture is a massive exercise in missing the point. What the current financial paradigm offers us is not natural. It’s not what we really want. The best things in life, as the old saying goes, are not things.

Derek Sivers — the brilliant entrepreneur who started CD Baby and sold it for $22 million, 95 percent of which he gave to charity — said he’d love to buy trained parrots to fly around every mall in America squawking, “It won’t make you happy. It won’t make you happy. It’s not what you really want.”

What’s in It for Them? by Joe Polish

Always saying yes:

When you’re in opportunity mode, a Not To Do List is more important than a To Do List. Early in life, it’s good to be eager and jump at opportunities, but doing that too much or for too long takes you far off track. Knowing ahead what you won’t do saves time, reduces energy spent making decisions, and allows you to focus on what’s most important in life. Work toward saying no to more and more. My friend Derek Sivers says, “If you’re not feeling ‘Hell yeah, that would be awesome!’ about something, say no.”

The Gap and The Gain by Benjamin Hardy

Use Your Filtering System to Go Further, Faster

“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.’”
—Derek Sivers

Be My Best Boss by Florian Borgeat

I am actually quite confident that you could run your company by working half a day per week only. Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, the biggest online music store, spent the last six months of his CEO job working only 30 minutes per month, remotely. Nice job.

The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss

Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
This is one of the best books on mental models, how to use them, and how not to make a fool of yourself.
I was introduced to this manual for critical thinking by Derek Sivers, who sold his company CD Baby for $22 million.

The Practice by Seth Godin

I rarely answer an email while giving a speech or when I’m deep in the middle of a new workshop or idea. Because in those moments, I’ve committed to what writer Derek Sivers calls the “hell yeah.”

Show Your Work by Austin Kleon

“Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it.”
—Derek Sivers