Derek Sivers podcast

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Education
**Derek Sivers podcast**

Derek Sivers very short articles and audiobook chapters, read by Derek Sivers. Transcripts at https://sive.rs/blog

Latest Episodes:

Procrastination hack: change “and” to “or” Oct 24, 2011

Show notes

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 have a list of conditions you need to have met before you do something?

Try changing “and” to “or.”

You make your perfect world Jul 24, 2011

Show notes

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 employees. Some people want to work alone.

Some want to be famous in Silicon Valley. Some want to be anonymous.

No matter which goal you choose, there will be lots of people telling you you’re wrong.

Just pay close attention to what excites you and what drains you. Pay close attention to when you’re being the real you and when you’re trying to impress an invisible jury.

Even if what you’re doing is slowing the growth of your business — if it makes you happy, that’s OK. It’s your choice to remain small.

You’ll notice that as my company got bigger, my stories about it were less happy. That was my lesson learned. I’m happier with 5 employees than with 85, and happiest working alone.

Whatever you make, it’s your creation, so make it your personal dream come true.

Delegate, but don’t abdicate Jul 23, 2011

Show notes

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 asked, “Which health-care plan should we go with?” I said, “Whichever one you choose, I’ll pay for.”

When they asked, “Which profit-sharing plan should we go with?” I said, “Whatever you think is best.”

A local magazine voted CD Baby “Best Place to Work” in the state of Oregon.

Six months later, my accountant called me and said, “Did you know that your employees set up a profit-sharing program?”

I said, “Yeah. Why?”

He said, “Did you know that they’re giving all of the profits of the company back to themselves?”

Oops.

When I cancelled the profit-sharing program, I became a very unpopular guy. In our weekly company meetings, the general message from the employees was, “We need to get Derek out of here, so he stops telling us what to do. We don’t need to answer to him! He needs to answer to us!”

Then I realized that there’s such a thing as over-delegation. I had empowered my employees so much that I gave them all the power. After a complete communication breakdown, it was 85 people (my employees) against one (me). I became the scapegoat for all of their dissatisfactions.

I thought of trying to repair relationships with each of the 85 employees, over hundreds of hours of talking. But if you’ve ever had a romance break up, you know that sometimes it’s beyond repair.

So I considered firing everyone and hiring a whole new crew. I also considered shutting down the company entirely, since I wasn’t enjoying this anymore. I even considered a Willy Wonka move, where I’d put five golden tickets into five CDs and then give the whole company to some lucky finder.

In the end, I did what was best for my clients and me: I retreated into solitude, staying at a friend’s house in London, and focused entirely on programming some major new software features for CD Baby.

I never saw or spoke to my employees again. Never saw the office again.

I learned an important word: abdicate. To abdicate means to surrender or relinquish power or responsibility. This word is usually used when a king abdicates the throne or crown.

Lesson learned too late: Delegate, but don’t abdicate.

Make it anything you want Jul 22, 2011

Show notes

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 that you can make your role anything you want it to be.

Anything you hate to do, someone else loves. So find those people and let them do it.

For me, I loved sitting alone and programming, writing, planning, and inventing. Thinking of ideas and making them happen. This makes me happy, not business deals or management. So I found someone who liked doing business deals and put him in charge of all that.

If you do this, you’ll encounter a lot of pushback and misunderstanding, but who cares? You can’t just live someone else’s expectation of a traditional business. You have to just do whatever you love the most, or you’ll lose interest in the whole thing.

On a similar note, people also assume that you want to be big big big — as big as can be. But do you, really?

Huge growth means lots of meetings, investors, bankers, media, and answering to others. It’s quite far from the real core of the business.

Happiness is the real reason you’re doing anything, right? Even if you say it’s for the money, the money is just a means to happiness, right? But what if it’s proven that after a certain point, money doesn’t create any happiness at all, but only headaches? You may be much happier as a $1 million business than a $1 billion business.

Funny thing is, I didn’t want CD Baby to grow at all. Even from the start, I didn’t want this website hobby to take away from my career as a musician, but it did. I didn’t want it to have more than a couple employees or outgrow my house, but it did. When I had twenty employees, I vowed to keep it that small, but customer demand kept growing, and I had to keep the customers happy. When I had fifty employees, I swore that was enough, and we needed to curb this growth, but the business kept growing.

When people would ask, “What are you doing to grow your company?” I’d say, “Nothing! I’m trying to get it to stop growing! I don’t like this. It’s too big.”

They thought that was the weirdest thing. Doesn’t every business want to be as big as possible?

No. Make sure you know what makes you happy, and don’t forget it.

It’s about being, not having Jul 21, 2011

Show notes

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 should give it up and find a real singer.

When I was 25, I recorded my first album. My mentor heard it and said, “Derek, you’re just not a singer. You really need to stop trying. Admit you’re a songwriter, and find a real singer.” But I was unfazed. I knew I just had more work to do.

At 28, I started noticing that my voice was getting good! I recorded a few new songs, and for the first time, I really liked the vocals!

At 29, I had done it. After 15 years of practice, and about a thousand live shows, I was finally a very good singer, at least by my own standards. (Someone who heard me for the first time then said, “Singing is a gift you’re either born with or you’re not. You’re lucky. You were born with it!”)

Point is: It’s not that I wanted to get it done and have good vocals. It’s that I wanted to be a great singer.

Same with being a producer: I wanted to record my album myself, to learn recording-studio engineering and production, because I thought that would be a really rewarding and empowering thing to know how to do — like building your own house.

Friends and mentors said that was ridiculous, that I should just hire a great engineer, producer, and studio. Doing everything myself might take years, whereas I could have it all done in a few weeks if I just hired someone good.

I took the few years to learn it myself, and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. For the next few years, I did all the production and engineering on a few friends’ albums, too. Now it’s something I know how to do, and it feels great.

Same with being a programmer: When I started CD Baby, I knew only some basic HTML, no programming. But as the site grew, basic HTML wouldn’t do it anymore. My tech friends told me I had to make a server-side database-driven automated system.

Since I couldn’t afford to hire a programmer, that meant I had to learn it myself. I went to the bookstore and got a book on PHP and MySQL programming. It was the slow road, but I loved it! Like being in the recording studio, it was wonderful to learn how to make the technology do what I wanted and not be a mystery. And it was nice to be self-sufficient.

As the company grew, everyone was surprised that I still did all the programming myself. But for an online business, outsourcing the programming would be like a band outsourcing the songwriting!

This wasn’t just my business — this was my creation! This wasn’t like mowing lawns — this was like writing songs!

In the last few years, my employees were mad that new features were not being added as fast as they wanted, because I insisted on doing all the programming myself. They said we were losing millions of dollars in business because we didn’t have certain features.

But that was OK with me. I loved the process. I was happy.

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!

You might get bigger faster and make millions if you outsourced everything to the experts. But what’s the point of getting bigger and making millions? To be happy, right?

In the end, it’s about what you want to be, not what you want to have.

To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end.

To be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point.

When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.

Prepare to double Jul 20, 2011

Show notes

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 square feet. When I filled up 10,000 square feet, I rented 20,000 square feet. Even that filled up fast.

But no matter what business you’re in, it’s good to prepare for what would happen if business doubled.

Have 10 clients now? How would it look if you had 20 at once? Serving 80 customers for lunch each day? What would happen if 160 showed up?

“More of the same” is never the answer. You have to do things in a new way to handle twice as much business. Processes have to be streamlined.

Never be the typical tragic small business that gets frazzled and freaked out when business is doing well. It sends a repulsive “I can’t handle this!” message to everyone.

Instead, if your internal processes are always designed to handle twice your existing load, it sends an attractive “come on in, we’ve got plenty of room” message to everyone.

It’s OK to be casual Jul 19, 2011

Show notes

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 for a few weeks. So I’d hire lightly and fire lightly. Luckily we didn’t need to fire that often.

But maybe the fact that the new hires were friends of friends helped with the trust part.

To be fair, this was a mail-order CD store, so most of my employees were in the warehouse. But I also took this same casual approach when I needed an important high-tech systems administrator.

“Anyone have a friend who’s good with Linux? Yeah? Is he cool? OK, tell him to start tomorrow.”

The first time I did that I found Ryan. The second time, I found Jason. Both guys were amazing and important at CD Baby for many years.

Don’t try to impress an invisible jury of MBA professors. It’s OK to be casual.

Little things make all the difference Jul 18, 2011

Show notes

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 of programming code that counted how many hours and minutes remained until 5 p.m. and then showed the result by the shipping options. “You have 5 hours, 18 minutes until our next FedEx shipment.” Customers loved this!

We answered our phone within two rings, always — 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week. Phones were everywhere, so even if the customer service rep was busy, someone in the warehouse could pick up. All anyone had to do was say “CD Baby!” Customers loved this! Someone actually picking up the phone at a company is so rare that musicians would often tell me later at conferences that it was the main reason they decided to go with CD Baby — they could always talk to a real person immediately. All employees knew that as long as we weren’t completely swamped, they should take a minute and get to know the caller a bit. Ask about her music. Ask how it’s going. Yes, it would lead to twenty-minute conversations sometimes, but those people became lifelong fans.

Every outgoing email has a “From:” name, right? Why not use that to make people smile, too? With one line of code, I made it so that every outgoing email customized the “From:” field to be “CD Baby loves {firstname}.” So if the customer’s name was Susan, every email she got from us would say it was from “CD Baby loves Susan.” Customers loved this!

Sometimes, after we had done the forty-five minutes of work to add a new album to the store, the musician would change his mind and ask us to do it over again with a different album cover or different audio clips. I wanted to say yes but let him know that this was really hard to do, so I made a policy that made us both smile: “We’ll do anything for a pizza.” If you needed a big special favor, we’d give you the number of our local pizza delivery place. If you bought us a pizza, we’d do any favor you wanted. When we’d tell people about this on the phone, they’d often laugh, not believing we were serious. But we’d get a pizza every few weeks. I’d often hear from musicians later that this was the moment they fell in love with us.

At the end of each order, the last page of the website would ask, “Where did you hear of this artist? We’ll pass them any message you write here.” Customers would often take the time to write things like, “Heard your song on WBEZ radio last night. Searched the web. Found it here. I’d love to have you play at our school!” The musicians absolutely loved getting this information, and it always led to the customer and musician getting in touch directly. This is something that big stores like Amazon would never do.

Also at the end of each order, there was a box that would ask, “Any special requests?” One time, someone said, “I’d love some cinnamon gum.” Since one of the guys in the warehouse was going to the store anyway, he picked up some cinnamon gum and included it in the package.

One time, someone said, “If you could include a small, rubber squid, I would appreciate it. If this is unobtainable, a real squid would do.” Just by chance, a customer from Korea had sent us a packaged filet of squid. So the shipping guys included it in the box with the other customer’s CDs.

Even if you want to be big someday, remember that you never need to act like a big boring company.

Over ten years, it seemed like every time someone raved about how much he loved CD Baby, it was because of one of these little fun human touches.

The most successful email I ever wrote Jul 17, 2011

Show notes

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 today. Please let us know if it doesn’t arrive. Thank you for your business.”

After a few months, that felt really incongruent with my mission to make people smile. I knew I could do better. So I took twenty minutes and wrote this goofy little thing:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

That one silly email, sent out with every order, has been so loved that if you search the web for “private CD Baby jet,” you’ll get thousands of results. Each one is somebody who got the email and loved it enough to post it on his website and tell all his friends.

That one goofy email created thousands of new customers.

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.

Like you don’t need the money Jul 16, 2011

Show notes

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 a desperate lover. It’s a turn-off.

When someone’s doing something for love, being generous instead of stingy, trusting instead of fearful, it triggers this law: We want to give to those who give.

It’s another Tao of business: Set up your business like you don’t need the money, and it’ll likely come your way.

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