Anything You Want: Derek Sivers's Book Overview

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Anything You Want" by Derek Sivers. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here.

Looking for an overview of Anything You Want by Derek Sivers? What is his advice for starting and running a successful business?

In Anything You Want, Derek Sivers gives recommendations for building a business that meets customers’ needs while still fulfilling your passions. Sivers argues that to run a successful business, you have to know yourself, what you love, and what you want in life.

Read on for an overview of Anything You Want—Derek Sivers’s best-selling book for hopeful entrepreneurs.

Anything You Want Overview

In Anything You Want, Derek Sivers shares 40 lessons he learned from being an accidental entrepreneur whose hobby turned into a $22 million business. Sivers’s non-traditional approach to business ownership—centering on honesty, creativity, and humanity—is a model for burgeoning entrepreneurs who want to stay true to themselves and do right by others while building their dream.

A professional musician, Sivers founded CD Baby in 1998 to sell his CDs online when major music companies wouldn’t. What began as an endeavor to address his own unmet need quickly led to Sivers helping friends and other independent musicians sell their CDs online. After growing CD Baby successfully through trial and error, Sivers sold the company in 2008 and put the proceeds into a trust dedicated to music education. Published in 2011, this book presents the lessons he learned along the way.

Know What You Love to Know What You Want

In Anything You Want, Derek Sivers argues that to run a successful business you have to know yourself, what you love, and what you want in life. He asserts that the point of owning your own business and pursuing your dreams is to make you happy, so your passions should always be your guiding light and the benchmark against which you measure yourself.

Your role matters: Sivers says that as the owner of your own business, you can make your role anything you want, so you should pay attention to which tasks make you happy and only do the ones you love, which will fuel you. Therefore, he recommends delegating parts of your work that you don’t like because doing things you don’t feel passionate about will drain you.

(Shortform note: In addition to enjoying your business and keeping the passion alive, understanding yourself and your priorities as a company head also builds confidence, makes you a more effective leader and decision-maker, and maximizes your performance.)

Size also matters: Sivers warns against growing your business bigger than you truly want it to be, even if your company is successful. This is because pursuing superficial goals, like making money for the sake of making money, will eventually dampen your interest in your business.

(Shortform note: Sivers doesn’t specify how you get to know yourself and your interests better, but you can illuminate your inner workings by asking yourself a range of questions, such as: What are my short- and long-term goals? What am I passionate about? and What new activities am I interested in or willing to try?)

Stay the course: Sivers asserts that once you’ve homed in on what you love, you should keep doing it—even if people tell you that others can do what you’re doing better, faster, and more profitably. He argues that you should measure yourself only against what matters most to you, not what matters most to others because their end goal is not your end goal and it won’t make you happy. He recommends that you ignore naysayers and continue to actively develop the skills you need to do the thing you love. Continue until these skills are so ingrained that they become part of who you are: It’s the act of doing that will make you what you want to be.

Lesson illustrated: Sivers says he was a terrible singer as a teenager—and people told him so—but he continued singing because, more than anything, he wanted to be a singer. Fifteen years of singing later, Sivers found that he actually liked the sound of his voice—and others did too, suddenly praising him for his “natural” talent. He’s been a professional musician ever since.

In Anything You Want, Derek Sivers asserts that knowing what you love to do should drive what tasks you take on and the role you play in your business. However, Michael Gerber contends in The E-Myth Revisited that new owners of small businesses don’t have the luxury of freely choosing what role they’d like to play. Instead, they must assume and balance three:

1. Entrepreneur (a creative, future-focused visionary)
2. Manager (a pragmatic system implementer and enforcer)
3. Technician (an individualist who prefers to do things on his own, in his own way)

Gerber argues that your business will reflect the role you naturally lean into most, so you must master and learn to keep all three roles in check.

Develop Your Business Plan

In the previous section, we discussed the importance of identifying and pursuing the things you love. Now, we’ll discuss Sivers’s suggestions for developing a business plan that can help you put your passions into action.

First, Get Going

Sivers says that great ideas are meaningless if you don’t do something with them and that the best thing you can do to make them a reality is just get started. It’s okay if you don’t have a clear plan or vision: Sivers had neither when he started CD Baby—he just had a desire to address an unmet need.

Sivers says the most important thing is to not get hung up on everything that could prevent you from pursuing your dream, like a lack of money or fear of something going wrong. Don’t worry about developing the perfect business plan with terms and conditions and legal projections for scenarios that may never unfold. Just keep it simple, don’t overthink, and get started—because taking small steps toward your goal is always better than doing nothing.

Plan Early and Often

In Anything You Want, Derek Sivers discusses the importance of getting your business started right away so you can put your ideas into action, recommending that you keep things simple and not get bogged down by the details. But some argue that a well-laid-out plan can help you get off on the right foot. Here are a few things you can prepare for before beginning:

1. Research your industry and competitors.
2. Identify your audience and mission.
3. Map out your finances.
4. Put together a business plan.
5. Identify mentors and professional support.

In addition, it can help to begin with a clear financial strategy, which you can develop by determining whether you plan to self-fund your company, approach investors, or seek loans to get it off the ground.

Anything You Want: Derek Sivers’s Book Overview