Book - Anything you want by Derek Sivers

For the second time, I completed reading a book in a day. Agree, its small and meant to be completed in 1hr :).

In this book Derek Sivers shares his experience of starting, running and donating a million dollar company. Interestingly he started his “CD Baby” without realizing he has started a business. Yeah, its true - he just wanted to help himself and then his musician friends to try sell their independent work. It gained popularity initially - just by word of mouth - friends telling their friends; and eventually turned into a million dollar business…

There are lots of details in this book Derek walks us through - my key take aways:

Dont punish everyone for one person:

Don’t bring in rules just because one of your hundred(s) customer or employee did a single mistake.

Delegate or Die:

I could personally relate to this and its something I sincerly want to follow i.e. it should be business as usual irrespective of - I am avaiable or not in office

Delegate, but dont abdicate:

You need to be careful what and how much you are delegating esp when you have the responsiblity and ownership. Have a process checkpoint like review and ensure critical decisions are in control.

Programmer Himself:

This was my favourite part. Derek is a musician by profession. He started this website as it was a necessity just for himself. Later when the business grew, he wanted more than plain HTML on his website. Since he couldn’t afford to hire a programmer - he went to the bookstore and got a book on PHP and MYSQL programming. Until the day he sold his company - he was the sole software programmer of the company’s website… A business purely based on an online website making millions of dollars WoW!!!!. One of the points he mentioned - he liked doing it as it was creative, but he only had to learn just enough to get the things done - #LightBulb moment for me :)

Interseting Quotes

Anything you hate to do, someone else loves. So find that person and let he or she do it

Making money was never an objective for “CD Baby” and that was the reason it grew faster than he thought.

Do things which make you happy, you might do it better than you would like to !

Highly Recommended!