Anything You Want summary

by Derek Sivers · 2011 · 7 key ideas · 17-minute read

A tiny, generous book about building a business as a way to help people, stay small on purpose, and design a life you actually want.

Why read it

For anyone starting something who feels pressure to raise money, grow fast and act 'like a real company'. Sivers shows another way, in lessons short enough to read in an hour.

Anything You Want in brief

Derek Sivers never planned to start a company. In 1997 he wanted to sell his own CD online, which was surprisingly hard for an independent musician at the time, so he built a simple way to do it. Musician friends asked if he could sell theirs too. That favour became CD Baby, which went on to sell CDs and downloads for well over a hundred thousand independent artists.

The book is a series of short lessons from that journey. Its central claim is that a business is not mainly about money. It is a way to make people's dreams come true, including your own, and you are free to design it however you like, as your own small utopia.

Sivers argues you rarely need investment to start: you need to be useful to someone right now. He kept CD Baby deliberately simple, said no to most opportunities, and obsessed over small things that made customers smile, like a famously silly order-confirmation email.

He is also honest about his mistakes, especially how he handled staff and delegation as the company grew. The book ends where it began: build the thing you want to exist, in the way you want to live, because anything you want is possible if you stop copying everyone else's idea of success.

The 7 key ideas

1. A business is a way to make dreams come true

Make dreams come true; money is how you keep doing it.

2. Start now, with what you have

Don't wait for funding. Start by being useful.

3. Proudly small

A tiny vision is easy to follow and hard to betray.

4. Delight is in the details

Customers remember how small moments made them feel.

5. If it's not 'hell yeah', it's no

Not a hell yeah? Then it's a no.

6. Delegate, but don't abdicate

Give away the work, not the care.

7. Don't punish everyone for one person's mistake

Fix the one; don't fence in the many.

Key takeaways

• Judge decisions by what would make your customers happiest, not by short-term revenue.
• Start by helping one real customer with what you have, before seeking money.
• Write a small, clear vision and use it to say no to distractions.
• Rewrite one routine customer touchpoint to make people smile.
• Only say yes to things you're genuinely excited about.
• When you delegate, explain why things are done, and keep paying attention.

Our take

The book's strength is its honesty and brevity: practical, humane lessons from someone who built and sold a successful company without investors. It is a welcome counterweight to growth-at-all-costs advice. Its limits come from the same source. It is drawn from one founder's experience with one kind of business, so it offers principles and anecdotes rather than evidence, and some lessons, like staying small or turning down opportunities, are easier to follow once a business is already working. Read it as a philosophy to borrow from, not a step-by-step manual.

About Derek Sivers

Derek Sivers is a musician who founded CD Baby, an online shop for independent musicians, in 1998 and sold it in 2008 for $22 million. Before the sale he placed ownership in a charitable trust for music education.

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