Derek Sivers podcast

My unwritten condition for when to exercise was this: When it’s a nice day, and I’ve finished my work, and I haven’t just eaten, and I’m feeling energetic. But of course that rarely happens, so I wasn’t exercising enough. My coach suggested I change “and” to “or”. When it’s a nice day, or I’ve finished my work, or I haven’t just eaten, or I’m feeling energetic. Now I exercise quite often. Do you h...

I started CD Baby focused on the importance of making a dream-come-true perfect world for musicians. Along the way I learned the importance of making my business a dream come true for myself, too. Business is as creative as the fine arts. You can be as unconventional, unique, and quirky as you want. A business is a reflection of the creator. Some people want to be billionaires with thousands of em...

Delegation doesn’t come naturally to any of us. But I was trying really hard to be good at it. I knew how important it was to get into the delegation mindset. I was trying to empower my employees — to let them know they could make decisions on their own, without me. When they asked, “How should we organize all the rooms in the new office?” I said, “Any way you want to do it is fine.” When they ask...

After your business has been up and running a while, you’ll hit an interesting crossroads. Everyone assumes that as the owner of the company, you’ll be the traditional CEO, having fancy lunches with other high-powered CEOs and doing all the big business deals. But what if you don’t like doing that? What if what you love the most is the solitude of the craft? Or talking to customers? Never forget t...

Since I was 14, I was determined to be a great singer. But my pitch was bad, my tone was bad, and everyone said I was just not a singer. For 11 years, I took voice lessons, and practiced at least an hour a day. I was always the lead singer of my band, doing a few shows a week, getting as much real-world experience as possible. The whole time, people kept telling me I was just not a singer — that I...

CD Baby doubled in size every year for the first six years. Both customers and profit, almost exactly 100 percent growth each year. Because the business needed a warehouse for the CDs, I always had to buy more shelving. Each time I did, I’d buy twice as much as I had before. It always filled up fast, even when it got warehouse-sized. When I had filled a 5000-square-foot warehouse, I rented 10,000...

My hiring policy was ridiculous. Because I was too busy to bother, I’d just ask my current employees if they had any friends who needed work. Someone always did, so I’d say, “Tell them to start tomorrow morning. Ten dollars an hour. Show them what to do.” And that was that. The thought was that it’s almost impossible to tell what someone’s going to be like on the job until he’s actually on the job...

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. Here are some things that made a huge difference on the CD Baby website: Because we shipped FedEx at 5 p.m. each day, customers would often call and ask, “What time is it there? Do I still have time to get it sent today?” So I added two little lines o...

When you make a business, you’re making a little world where you control the laws. It doesn’t matter how things are done everywhere else. In your little world, you can make it like it should be. When I first built CD Baby in 1998, every order resulted in an automated email that let the customer know when the CD was actually shipped. At first this note was just the normal “Your order has shipped to...

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...

At a conference in Los Angeles, someone in the audience asked me, “What if every musician just set up their own store on their own website? Since that’d be the death of CD Baby, how do you plan to stop that?” I said, “Honestly, I don’t care about CD Baby. I only care about the musicians. If some day, musicians don’t need CD Baby anymore, that’s great! I’ll just shut it down and get back to making...

Do you have a big visionary master plan for how the world will work in twenty years? Do you have massive ambitions to revolutionize your industry? Don’t feel bad if you don’t. I never did. A year and a half after starting CD Baby, it was just me and John, my first employee, running it out of my house. One night, I decided I should think more about the long-term future of this thing. I sat with my...

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.” He asked, “But you’re a business. What do you mean you’re not trying to make money?” I said, “I’m just trying to help musicians. CD Baby has to charge mon...

You know you can’t please everyone, right? But notice that most businesses are trying to be everything to everybody. And they wonder why they can’t get people’s attention! You need to confidently exclude people, and proudly say what you’re not. By doing so, you will win the hearts of the people you want. When CD Baby got popular, I’d get calls from record labels wanting to feature their newest, ho...

A year after starting CD Baby, when it was going pretty well, I got a call from a friend who was setting up his own similar web-based business. He said, “Do you have any advice about how to do our ‘Terms and Conditions’ and ‘Privacy Policy’ on the website? Which lawyer did you use for that?” I said, “Huh? I don’t have any of that legalese stuff. I’ve never hired a lawyer.” Shocked, he said, “That’...

Watch out when anyone (including you) says they want to do something big, but can’t until they raise money. It usually means they’re more in love with the idea of being big big big than with actually doing something useful. For an idea to get big big big, it has to be useful. And being useful doesn’t need funding. If you want to be useful, you can always start now, with only 1% of what you have in...

Having no funding was a huge advantage for me. A year after I started CD Baby, the dot-com boom happened. Anyone with a little hot air and a vague plan was given millions of dollars by investors. It was ridiculous. Most business owners I knew would tell you about their businesses by talking about their second round of funding, their fancy encrypted replicated load-balancing database server, their...

When I first started CD Baby, I thought it was just a credit card processing service. It was supposed to be a website that musicians would use to say, “Go here to buy my CD.” Just click to buy, charge your card, and then go back to the musician’s website. Kind of like PayPal, but this was two years before PayPal was invented. The day I launched cdbaby.com, my second customer was a guy in the Nethe...

For the first time in my life, I had made something that people really wanted. Before that, I had spent twelve years trying to promote my various projects. Trying every marketing approach. Networking, pitching, pushing. It always felt like an uphill battle, trying to open locked or slamming doors. I made progress, but only with massive effort. But now... Wow! It was like I had written a hit song....

Five years after I started CD Baby, when it was a big success, the media said I had revolutionized the music business. But “revolution” is a term that people use only when you’re successful. Before that, you’re just a quirky person who does things differently. People think revolution needs to involve loud provocations, fists in the air, and bloodshed. But if you think true love looks like Romeo an...

Like most people, I had no idea what to charge. So I went to the local record store in Woodstock, where they had some local musicians’ CDs on the counter. I asked the woman at the store, “How does it work if I sell my CD here?” She said, “You set the selling price at whatever you want. We keep a flat $4 cut. And we pay you every week.” So I went home and wrote, on my new cdbaby.com website, “You s...

Selling my friends’ CDs was starting to take up a lot of my time. I realized I had accidentally started a business. But I didn’t want to start a business! I was already living my dream life as a full-time musician. I didn’t want anything to distract me from that. So, I thought that by taking an unrealistically utopian approach, I could keep the business from growing too much. Instead of trying to...

This story begins in 1997. I was a professional musician, age 27. I was making a full-time living just playing music — playing lots of gigs around the U.S. and Europe, producing people’s records, playing on people’s records, and running a little recording studio. I was even the musician and MC for a circus. My bank account was always low, but never empty. I made enough money to buy a house in Wood...

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. Don’t be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little...

From 1998 to 2008, I had this wild experience of starting a little hobby, accidentally growing it into a big business, and then selling it for $22 million. So now people want to hear my thoughts. People ask me about that experience, so I tell stories about how it went for me. Many of them are about all the things I did wrong. I made some horrible mistakes. People ask my advice on how to approach s...