#15: Anything You Want
Hey friends,
I’ve read many of Derek Siver’s articles sporadically. They’re treats that sweeten my day and nourish my mind. Reading his first book Anything You Want from start to finish felt like a feast! Such a journey with him.
It’s a book about his entrepreneurial stories of starting, building, and selling CD Baby. Throughout the book I find these three themes:
Helping others is the priority. Serve your customers well. Make them happy.
It’s your business, your utopia, do anything you want.
Make yourself happy. Don’t worry about money, growth, or other stuff. The reason you started your business, even if it was to make money, is to make yourself happy ultimately.
These sound so simple and obvious, but very rare and hard to do.
In the creator’s world for example, people are all talking about growing your audience, building multiple income streams, or getting rich with some simple steps.
Nobody talks about how to figure out what your audience actually want, how to improve your work so more people resonate, or how to make yourself happy by doing what you love to do.
What are the more important things?
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.
I don’t have answers. I can only remind myself of those basic principles.
I think we talk about money so much because money is scarce. As Nat Eliason writes, seeing something as scarce necessitates optimization. And optimization breeds discontent.
But money is not scarce. It just feels scarce.
What is scarce?
Time is scarce. Remind yourself: “You can always make more money, but you can't make more time.”
Thanks for reading this short update! I got COVID (the first time 🥲) this week and actually quite proud of myself putting this one out after some struggles 😳
Take care & have a wonderful week,
Weichen