How to Apply Anything You Want
Ten years of accidental success and honest mistakes distilled into the entrepreneurial philosophy of Derek Sivers
About This Book
A musician with fifteen hundred CDs and no way to sell them online built a favor for friends into a company that sold for twenty-two million dollars, then walked away and gave the money to charity. Derek Sivers, who started CD Baby as a side project in 1998 and ran it for ten years, shares the blunt, sometimes contradictory philosophies he developed along the way, from a four-point wish list that became his whole business plan to the two opposite mistakes that nearly cost him his company. He isn't offering a formula. He's offering what he actually did wrong, and what he'd do differently.About the Author
Derek Sivers spent ten years, from 1998 to 2008, building CD Baby, an online store that started as a way to sell his own music and grew into a service for over a hundred thousand independent musicians. He taught himself programming from a twenty-five dollar book, ran the company his own unconventional way, and eventually sold it for twenty-two million dollars, moving the proceeds into a charitable trust for music education before the sale closed. He describes himself not as a guru with answers but as a student sharing what he learned, including plenty of mistakes.
Biggest Takeaway
You'll stop waiting for funding, a perfect plan, or permission before starting something, and start with whatever tiny version of it you can offer one real person this week. You'll get sharper at saying a clean no to obligations that never earned a genuine yes, freeing real attention for the few things that do. You'll catch yourself either over-controlling or quietly abandoning responsibility when you hand work to others, and adjust before it costs you. And you'll define, in concrete terms, what enough actually looks like for you, instead of drifting toward whatever number is largest.
Key Insights from This Book
Explore the most important ideas and learn how to apply them in your life.
Four wishes Derek Sivers wrote down before CD Baby existed
Why saying maybe is quietly costing you your best year
How one canceled flight turned into an airline
A brilliant idea is worth only twenty dollars alone
A nightclub that got famous by kicking half its audience out
Two opposite mistakes nearly destroyed the same company
Why Derek Sivers spent fifteen years failing at singing on purpose
The billionaire's party where one guest had something money couldn't buy
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