Anything You Want

What if your business wasn’t just a job, but a way to design your perfect world? In Anything You Want, Derek Sivers invites you to rethink what entrepreneurship means—not as a path to wealth or fame, but as a creative act of freedom. He argues that business is fundamentally about making dreams come true, for yourself and for others. Every company, large or small, is a blank canvas where you can paint your version of utopia. By building CD Baby, a website that accidentally became a multimillion-dollar empire helping musicians sell their CDs, Sivers learned that success isn’t about growth, funding, or hustle—it’s about happiness, purpose, and staying true to your compass.

At its heart, the book is a love letter to unconventional, self-designed business. Sivers reveals how he transformed a simple personal project into a thriving enterprise by following his instinct, ignoring business clichés, and delighting customers through sincere human connection. He contends that anyone can create a successful business by starting small, focusing entirely on real people’s needs, and creating with joy instead of greed.

Rethinking Success and Motivation

Sivers begins with a simple yet radical idea: never do anything just for money. His own story starts when he was a musician selling his CDs online and decided to help friends do the same. What began as a hobby—helping a few friends sell their albums—grew into CD Baby, a massive distribution platform serving indie artists globally. Yet even at its peak, he resisted the pressure to maximize profits. Unlike Silicon Valley founders chasing valuation, Sivers built CD Baby around joy, simplicity, and fairness: paying artists weekly, showing them who bought their music, and refusing paid placement. The result? A business that felt human and ethical—and millions in revenue were merely a byproduct of doing what felt right.

The Compass: Happiness Over Ambition

One of the first lessons he offers is to find your personal compass—the deeper reason you do what you do. Many people spend their lives chasing someone else's definition of success. They imitate others, follow trends, and get trapped in cycles of ambition that don’t make them happy. Instead, Sivers says, define success by what truly makes you happy, whether that means working alone, staying small, or giving away your profits. For him, happiness came not from expansion but from simplification. When journalists asked about CD Baby’s long-term vision, he laughed—he had none. He simply aimed to help people today. This clarity, he insists, is the antidote to burnout and distraction.

Freedom Through Simplicity

Unlike the typical startup narrative, Sivers shows how less really is more. He scoffs at the obsession with funding, corporate policies, and formalities. When friends asked what lawyer wrote his Terms and Conditions page, he said none—because those pages don’t make people happy or solve real problems. When investors tried to buy in, he refused, choosing freedom over scale. Each time growth demanded compromises—more employees, bureaucracy, meetings—he felt less joy. And joy was his north star. (This echoes similar philosophies from authors like Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson in Rework.)

Building Through Love, Not Fear

The hallmark of Sivers’s approach is genuine human care. He demonstrates that if you act like you don’t need the money, people trust you more. When businesses operate from fear—trying to prevent every mistake or squeeze every dollar—they become cold and bureaucratic. When they operate from love—trusting customers, welcoming errors as lessons—they become magnets for loyalty. His goofy shipping confirmation email (describing gold-lined boxes and a private CD Baby jet) thrilled thousands, showing how humor and authenticity scale better than ornate marketing campaigns.

The Power of Letting Go

After ten years of growth, Sivers realized his biggest challenge wasn’t another product—it was knowing when to stop. When he lost his enthusiasm for the work, he saw that holding on would hurt everyone involved. Encouraged by Seth Godin’s advice (“If you care, sell”), he sold the company in one introspective day and gave its $22 million proceeds to charity. The decision embodied the essence of his message: you already have enough. The real magic of entrepreneurship isn’t accumulation—it’s liberation. In the end, Anything You Want teaches that your business, like your life, should be a dream come true—not for status or survival, but for happiness and meaning.

Sivers insists you don’t need funding, credentials, or a grand plan to begin. You just need to solve a real problem for real people. Starting small forces focus. It helps you make something useful instead of getting lost in abstractions. His own journey began when online music distributors refused to sell his CD. Rather than complain, he built his own e-commerce page. Soon, friends asked if he could do the same for their albums, and CD Baby was born.

Start Now, With What You Have

Sivers emphasizes that being useful doesn’t require a perfect setup. If your idea is to teach, start by teaching one person. If you dream of running schools worldwide, teach a single student today. The principle applies universally: beginnings don’t need grandeur. He spent only $500 launching CD Baby and made it back within a month. The simplicity kept him nimble, responsive, and grounded. (Richard Branson’s first airline flight from a canceled trip inspired Sivers’s belief that improvisation beats planning.)

No Need for Vision or Formality

Most entrepreneurs celebrate visionary plans, but Sivers laughs at them. Plans don’t survive first contact with customers, he notes (building on Steve Blank’s insight). His changing course—from building a payment site to running an online store—shows that listening matters more than predicting. Likewise, he avoided corporate templates like Terms & Conditions. A shack that sells fish bait without policies is proof that real service doesn’t require fancy paperwork. Start helping, learn, then respond.

Stay Focused on the Problem

CD Baby existed to help musicians sell their music—not to make Derek Sivers rich. He reminds you that many companies confuse persistence with stubbornness. Persistently improve and invent, yes—but never persist in what doesn’t work. Once Sivers found the right hit combination (independent artists desperately needed fair distribution), growth came effortlessly. These lessons can transform your perspective: business becomes an act of generosity, not conquest. Starting small isn’t humility—it’s mastery.

When Sivers built CD Baby’s pricing model, he used only two numbers: a $35 setup fee and a $4 commission per sale. That simplicity lasted six years and generated $10 million. He argues that your business model should be graspable in minutes—if it takes longer, you’re hiding confusion behind complexity. Simplicity isn’t naive; it’s liberation.

The Danger of Formality

Too many entrepreneurs drown in formalities driven by fear—legal jargon, corporate structures, endless policies. Sivers refused to play that game. These conventions don’t protect you; they distract you. When people promote complicated setups, they’re usually selling fear. Courage means ignoring pretentious rituals and just doing the work. This clarity keeps you free to focus on what matters most: your customers.

Minimalism in Business Design

Simple models, no funding, no advertising—these were deliberate choices. He compared ads on his site to a Coke machine in a monastery: profane distractions from purpose. Simplicity wasn’t just aesthetic; it was moral. Doing less opened space for sincerity. (Tim Ferriss echoes this principle: “Focus on elimination to multiply results.”) Sivers’s approach was to strip away everything that didn’t serve musicians directly, creating a business whose core was pure intention.

Proudly Exclude and Focus

Sivers encourages you to proudly exclude people. The Hotel Café in Los Angeles bans talking—this exclusivity makes it beloved among listeners. CD Baby accepted only independent artists, rejecting major labels. By defining exactly who he served, he created meaning and loyalty. Simplicity is clarity; clarity is power. If your idea or offer can’t be explained in two sentences, you might not understand it yet.

In the age of algorithms and ads, Sivers found success in something rare: delighting people through tiny human gestures. He learned that small touches create devotion more than big strategy ever could. His now-famous shipping email turned a mundane transaction into a moment of wonder.

Little Human Moments

The goofy CD Baby confirmation note, describing candles and satin pillows, was written in twenty minutes—and became a viral legend. People loved it so much they posted it all over the internet. It wasn’t advertising; it was authenticity. Sivers’s website also showed countdowns to shipment times and answered phones live. These gestures reminded customers they were dealing with real people, not algorithms.

Empathy Over Efficiency

He encouraged employees to spend extra minutes talking to musicians, even if it meant less efficiency. That time created fans for life. Real communication, he says, outweighs polished automation. His pizza-for-favors policy—sending pizza to employees in exchange for extra help—combined humor with goodwill. It was his way of showing warmth instead of bureaucracy.

Pain as Feedback

Eventually, he noticed that unclear communication caused immediate pain—thousands of customer replies and lost time. That taught him the power of precise writing. Clarity isn’t a virtue; it’s survival. You should feel pain when you’re unclear, he says, because misunderstanding costs trust. The lesson? Make customers smile with clarity and care—it’s the simplest engine of growth.

Sivers’s most transformative decision was selling CD Baby after realizing his enthusiasm was gone. For ten years, he had lived and breathed the company, but now every new plan felt dull. His diary revealed the truth: he didn’t want to grow the business anymore. He wanted freedom. Seth Godin told him, “If you care, sell.” That advice led him to a single day of writing, reflection, and inner clarity.

Knowing When You’re Done

He explains that you’ll simply know when to move on. It feels like a graduation or breakup—an emotional disconnection signaling readiness to leave. Fighting that feeling only prolongs discomfort. True entrepreneurs understand the rhythm of creation: begin, build, let go. Each phase serves its purpose. (Elizabeth Gilbert’s transition in Big Magic mirrors this—creative cycles require surrender.)

Giving Away Success

Instead of pocketing the $22 million sale, Sivers transferred ownership to a charitable trust supporting music education. His reasoning was simple: he had enough. Minimalism gave him genuine happiness. Having less meant ultimate freedom—mobility, clarity, and peace. It wasn’t altruism; it was alignment with his values. He reminds you that wealth doesn’t guarantee joy, but enough does.

Being, Not Having

He contrasts the desire to have things with the joy of becoming something. He spent fifteen years learning to sing, not for fame but to be a singer. He learned production, programming, and entrepreneurship for the same reason. Outsourcing his creativity would have made him richer but not happier. The work itself is the reward. In life and business alike, being fully immersed in your craft is worth more than shortcuts to ownership.

Sivers’s leadership model evolved painfully. At first, he did everything himself—working nonstop, answering endless employee questions. Then he discovered the art of delegation, not by handing off tasks but by teaching philosophy. He gathered his team around each time a problem arose and explained both the solution and his reasoning. This process built autonomy and a company manual full of shared wisdom.

Delegate or Die

Most self-employed people fall into what Sivers calls the self-employment trap: if you stop working, your business collapses. The cure is delegation driven by principles, not just orders. Empower employees to think, decide, and act in line with your values. Once he had trained his staff to do so, he could leave for a year, and CD Baby kept thriving.

Trust, But Verify

In another lesson, he shows why blind trust fails. One employee neglected crucial deliveries for months, damaging CD Baby’s reputation. Sivers’s conclusion was simple yet vital: “Trust, but verify.” Delegate responsibility—but never abandon oversight. Accountability sustains trust. Leaders must watch systems, not micromanage people.

Don’t Abdicate Power

Over time, Sivers went too far the other way. By giving his employees total control, they redistributed all company profits to themselves. He realized delegation isn’t abdication. Leadership requires balance: empower others without erasing your role. That experience—both liberating and painful—taught him that ownership of values must remain at the top. Freedom in teams grows from clear boundaries, not absence of guidance.