Name: Anything you want
ISBN: 9781936719112

Anything you want

Best known for creating CD Baby, the most popular music site for independent artists, founder Derek Sivers chronicles his "accidental" success and failures into this concise and inspiring book on how to create a multimillion-dollar company by following your passion. Sivers details his journey and the lessons learned along the way of creating and building a business close to his heart. In 1997, Sivers was a musician who taught himself to code a Buy Now button onto his band's website. Shortly thereafter he began selling his friends' CDs on his website. As CD Baby grew, Sivers faced numerous obstacles on his way to success. Within six years he had been publicly criticized by Steve Jobs and had to pay his father $3.3 million to buy back 90 percent of his company, but he had also built a company of more than 50 employees and had profited $10 million. Anything You Want is must reading for every person who is an entrepreneur, wants to be one, wants to understand one, or cares even a little about what it means to be human.

What Hacker News says

surprisetalkApr 2023

I highly recommend reading Anything You Want by Derek Sivers.

It's a 90-minute read about his strange journey of starting and selling his business.

[1] https://sive.rs/a

Shoot me an email hello@taylor.town and I'll purchase a copy for you.

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I can't give you answers, but here are a few questions that might be helpful:

• Will you regret it more if you sell and fail or don't sell and fail?

• Do you view selling out your customers as amoral? If so, do your morals have a dollar amount?

• Do you think selling would positively affect your employees?

• What does a perfect day look like to you? Which decision will fill your life with more "perfect" days?

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surprisetalkMar 2023

Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

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surprisetalkMar 2023

I tend to obsess over ideas too. Ideas are so much fun!

Don't feel ashamed over dreaming about Changing the World or Becoming a Billionaire. Dreams are delightful.

But you have to keep your dreams at arms-length. I wrote the following essay as a playful reminder to myself to stop taking my ideas so seriously:

[1] https://taylor.town/brilliant-app-idea

I highly recommend Derek Sivers's book on entrepreneurship, Anything You Want.

As I'm on my own business journey, this tiny book keeps me grounded to a mission of truly helping people and enjoying the process.

[2] https://sive.rs/a

You might also need to change how you interact with people. How to Win Friends and Influence People is the magic guide on talking to people:

[3] https://www.amazon.com/How-win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/8...

Another possibility is that you need to find fewer people to talk about your "ideas" with. Not everybody is interested in this stuff. But I am!

Feel free to schedule a chat with me anytime:

[4] https://calendly.com/taylor-town/30min

If you're coming up with ideas to avoiding doing work, remember that "Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don't nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weights".

Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur too.

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UlgXIL0-3g

Above all else, you are not your success. If you're 30 years old right now, you've only got ~2,500 weekends left. Spend that time intentionally.

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surprisetalkMar 2023

I highly recommend Derek Sivers's book on entrepreneurship, Anything You Want.

This tiny book keeps me grounded to a mission of truly helping people and enjoying the process:

[1] https://sive.rs/a

For mental frameworks, I personally maintain a few different lists.

My bucket list contains stuff that I think would be fun to do before I die:

[2] https://taylor.town/bucket-list

My unbucket list tracks stuff that I am trying to avoid:

[3] https://taylor.town/unbucket-list

My now page lists my short-term projects and goals:

[4] https://taylor.town/now

I think it's really important to think about the life that you want and try to work backwards from there. What do you want an average day in your life to look like in 10 years? What can you do over the next month or year to inch you closer to that lifestyle?

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kablamoJul 2020

Leadership:

- Turn The Ship Around (Marquet) - make everyone a leader - The Effective Engineer (Lau) - leadership for engineers - Leadership, Strategy, and Tactics (Jocko) - leadership in military/business - Good To Great (Collins) - good companies vs great ones

How to get better at everything:

- Mindset (Dwek) - growth vs fixed mindset - Atomic Habits (Clear) - automate good decisions w/habits - Change Your Habits, Change your life (Corley) - data driven selection of which habits matter - Ultralearning (Young) - how to learn anything faster - Anything You Want (Sivers)

How to talk to humans

- Difficult Conversations (Stone) - how to talk to humans - Never Split the Difference (Voss) - every conversation is a negotiation - Death By Meeting (Lencioni) - short fable - anything else by Patrick Lencioni

Prioritization and focus:

- The One Thing (Keller) - prioritization - Deep Work (Calport) - focus - Indistractable (Li) - focus

See also anything by: Jason Friedman, Jim Collins, Patrick Lencioni, Peter Drucker and biographies in general

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ArubisDec 2016

Necessarily an incomplete list, because I haven't kept close track. 2016 was busy and much of what I read was programming language related, which I will exclude here.

In no particular order...

Cixin Liu -- The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest. Good read, as you'll see on everyone else's list.

Neal Stephenson -- Seveneves. Really good but arguably his weakest in some time; I wish the first three-quarters of the book were shorter and the final quarter a book in and of itself.

Cal Newport -- So Good They Can't Ignore You. I found this longer than necessary but an excellent kick in the pants.

Marcus Aurelius -- Meditations. Feels like a good "life reference" rather than a straight-through read.

Roald Dahl -- Boy, Going Solo. These were fun when I first went through them years ago, and they still _are_ fun, but the lens through which I view live has become one increasingly allergic to entitlement, and boy, if you want entitlement, look to the Brits at the end of the imperialist era.

Ed Catmull -- Creativity, Inc. Read this for work. Enjoyable but ehh.

Peter Tompkins -- The Secret Life of Plants (unfinished). I tried but couldn't get past the rampant bad science.

Steve Martin -- Born Standing Up. This was a fun profile of a comic that I appreciate; if you're already a fan it's worthwhile, otherwise skip it.

Derek Sivers -- Anything You Want. You can blow through this in a day and you should.

Worth highlighting, my most influential read this year:

Tara Brach -- Radical Acceptance. I loved this. No: I _needed_ this. Rather than the many philosophy-influenced books you'll find in this thread that are really business books with new buzzwords, this is just about loving yourself and building on that to live life fully. This will not (at least directly) help you build a startup. This will (directly) help you build important relationships.

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