Derek is an interesting entrepreneur. He achieved success and then was able to walk away! What a concept!
Derek gets right to the point – his TED talks are short:
His podcasts are short as well.
His book “Anything You Want” is a short read – simple, profound. I read it in an hour after work yesterday. Here are some excerpts:
- Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own. They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won’t make them happy.
- When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.
- A business plan should never take more than a few hours of work—hopefully no more than a few minutes. The best plans start simple. A quick glance and common sense should tell you if the numbers will work. The rest are details.
- Revolution is a term that people use only when you’re successful. Before that, you’re just a quirky person who does things differently.
- Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.
- Don’t waste years fighting uphill battles against locked doors.
- If you’re not saying, “Hell yeah!” about something, say no.
- It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.
- I don’t want to hear people’s ideas. I’m not interested until I see their execution.
- It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it. Have the confidence to know that when your target 1 percent hears you excluding the other 99 percent, the people in that 1 percent will come to you because you’ve shown how much you value them.
- I got a call from an advertising salesman saying he’d like to run banner ads at the top and bottom of cdbaby.com. I said, “No way. Out of the question. That would be like putting a Coke machine in a monastery. I’m not doing this to make money.”
- Don’t think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people today.
- Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?
- But even well-meaning companies accidentally get trapped in survival mode. A business is started to solve a problem. But if the problem were truly solved, that business would no longer be needed! So the business accidentally or unconsciously keeps the problem around so that they can keep solving it for a fee.
- Any business that’s in business to sell you a cure is motivated not to focus on prevention.
- Banks love to lend money to those who don’t need it. Record labels love to sign musicians who don’t need their help. People fall in love with people who won’t give them the time of day. It’s a strange law of human behavior. It’s pretty universal. If you set up your business like you don’t need the money, people are happier to pay you. When someone’s doing something for the money, people can sense it, like they sense a desperate lover.
- When you’re thinking of how to make your business bigger, it’s tempting to try to think all the big thoughts and come up with world-changing massive-action plans. But please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you. If you find even the smallest way to make people smile, they’ll remember you more for that smile than for all your other fancy business-model stuff.
- Being, not having: When you want to learn how to do something yourself, most people won’t understand. They’ll assume the only reason we do anything is to get it done, and doing it yourself is not the most efficient way. But that’s forgetting about the joy of learning and doing. Yes, it may take longer. Yes, it may be inefficient. Yes, it may even cost you millions of dollars in lost opportunities because your business is growing slower because you’re insisting on doing something yourself. But the whole point of doing anything is because it makes you happy! That’s it! When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.
- There’s a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Being self-employed feels like freedom until you realize that if you take time off, your business crumbles. To be a true business owner, make it so that you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left.
- Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were at a party at a billionaire’s extravagant estate. Kurt said, “Wow! Look at this place! This guy has everything!” Joseph said, “Yes, but I have something he’ll never have. . . . Enough.”