In one sentence: Anything You Want is Derek Sivers’s short, punchy account of how he accidentally built the music-distribution company CD Baby and eventually sold it for millions, distilled into forty contrarian lessons that reject the usual growth-and-money playbook in favor of building a business as a dream come true, serving customers obsessively, staying small if you like, and doing only what makes you genuinely happy.
At a Glance
Author: Derek Sivers
First published: 2011 (The Domino Project / Portfolio)
Category: Business / Entrepreneurship
Length: 96 pages, about 16,000 words (Portfolio hardcover)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59184-826-4 (Portfolio hardcover)
Summary reading time: about 8 minutes
Book reading time: about 1 hour
Notable adaptations: none, though it grew out of Sivers’s popular blog and talks
Derek Sivers is a musician turned entrepreneur turned writer, best known for founding CD Baby, an online store that helped independent musicians sell their music at a time when no one else would. After selling the company, he became a widely read blogger and speaker on business and life philosophy. Anything You Want is his first book, deliberately tiny, written in his characteristically plain, direct, aphoristic style, and framed as the lessons he wishes someone had told him.
Read it if you want a quick, refreshing counterpoint to conventional startup advice, delivered through the memorable story of one unusual company. It is very short and light on detail, more a set of provocations than a manual, and best treated as a burst of perspective rather than a comprehensive guide.
The Big Idea
Sivers’s core message is that business does not have to be about maximizing money and growth. It can instead be about making a dream come true, for yourself and for the people you serve. He built CD Baby not to get rich but to solve his own problem as a musician who wanted to sell his CD online, and he grew it by relentlessly delighting a niche of customers everyone else ignored. Along the way he refused outside investment, kept the company answerable only to its customers, and treated the whole thing as a creative act, a kind of personal utopia he got to design however he liked.
The book’s deeper argument is that the point of any of this is happiness, and that money is only a means to it. Sivers repeatedly chose the path that made him happy over the path that made the most money, staying small when he wanted to, keeping the work he loved and handing off the rest, and ultimately giving the company away to a charitable trust because he already had enough. His forty lessons all circle back to this: figure out what actually makes you happy and what you honestly value, then build a business, and a life, around that rather than around what everyone assumes you should want.
Key Ideas
1. A business is a dream come true
Sivers frames a company as a utopia you get to design. When you make a business, you make a small world exactly as you think it should be, and the way to build a great one is to make a dream come true, first for yourself and then for your customers. CD Baby began as the service he personally wished existed, built on absurdly generous, musician-friendly terms he wrote from the artist’s point of view. The lesson is that the most useful businesses often come from solving your own problem in the way you wish someone would solve it.
2. Start now, with no money
Starting broke, Sivers argues, was a huge advantage. Having no funding forced him to learn to code from a cheap book, build his own computers, and keep everything lean, and because he took no investment, he answered only to customers rather than to investors. His maxim is that by not having any money to waste, you never waste money. You do not need capital, a grand plan, or permission to begin, just a first small step toward the thing you want to exist.
3. The plan changes the moment you start
Sivers is dismissive of elaborate business plans, insisting that no plan survives contact with real customers. CD Baby transformed from a simple payment service into a full store because a single customer asked a question he had not anticipated, and it changed again when a bigger opportunity arrived. A business plan, he says, should take hours, not months, and you should hold your first idea loosely, since it is only one option among many. Reality, not the plan, tells you what your business should become.
4. Execution matters, not ideas
One of his sharpest points is that ideas are essentially worthless without execution. An idea, he argues, is just a multiplier: a brilliant idea with no execution is worth almost nothing, while a modest idea executed superbly can be worth a fortune. This is why he refuses to sign nondisclosure agreements or get excited about people’s ideas, and cares only about what they actually build. The takeaway is to stop guarding and agonizing over ideas and start doing.
5. Obsess over customers, not growth
For Sivers, absolutely everything a business does is for its customers, and the counterintuitive route to growth is to ignore growth and simply thrill the customers you already have until they tell everyone. He filled CD Baby with small delights, playful emails, personal touches, a phone answered in two rings, that turned buyers into fans and marketers. He also proudly excluded the ninety-nine percent of the market that was not his niche, arguing that it is a big world and you can loudly leave most of it out to serve your people better.
6. Delegate, but do not abdicate
As the company grew, Sivers hit a wall answering every question himself, and freed himself by teaching his staff the philosophy behind decisions and writing it into a manual, making himself unnecessary to daily operations. But he also learned the limits of letting go: over-delegating without oversight led to a costly betrayal, teaching him to trust but verify and to delegate without abdicating responsibility. Empower people by sharing your reasoning, he concludes, but stay genuinely involved rather than checking out.
7. Know what makes you happy, and what is enough
Underneath all the tactics is a philosophy of happiness. Sivers insists that the whole point of doing anything is that it makes you happy, so you should make your role in your own company anything you want, keep the parts you love, and hand off the rest to people who love them. He stayed small by choice, sold CD Baby when none of his plans excited him anymore, and gave the proceeds to a charitable trust because he had learned the value of the word enough. Success, he argues, is whatever measure you honestly choose for yourself, not the one others assume.
Context and Analysis
Anything You Want succeeds precisely because of its brevity and voice. In an hour of reading, Sivers delivers a bracing, contrarian antidote to the growth-at-all-costs, venture-funded startup gospel, and his lessons land because they are grounded in the concrete, charming story of a real and unusual company. His plainspoken honesty, his willingness to say that staying small or walking away can be the right choice, and his insistence on happiness over money are genuinely refreshing, and the book is quotable, memorable, and kind. For anyone feeling that business must mean hustle and endless scaling, it offers permission to do things differently.
The fair criticisms follow from the same brevity. The book is thin, offering inspiration and principles rather than detailed how-to guidance, so a reader looking for practical steps on building or running a company will need to go elsewhere. Sivers’s experience is a single, somewhat lucky case, a business he stumbled into at the right moment in a specific niche, which makes his lessons more suggestive than proven, and his anti-growth, give-it-away philosophy, while admirable, is easier to adopt from a position of financial security than from real precarity. Some of the advice is idiosyncratic to his temperament. Taken as a short, wise, perspective-shifting read rather than a complete business education, though, it delivers real value.
On this site it pairs naturally with Zero to One, whose contrarian insistence on doing what others are not doing shares Sivers’s spirit while aiming at a very different, monopoly-building scale, and with The 4-Hour Workweek, which likewise questions the assumption that bigger and busier is better and prizes freedom and life design over maximizing income.
How to Apply It
Sivers’s lessons translate into a distinctive approach to building something:
1. Build the business you personally wish existed, treating it as a utopia you design on your own generous terms rather than a money machine. 2. Start now with what you have and no outside funding if you can, staying lean and answerable to customers rather than investors. 3. Hold your plans loosely and let real customer behavior reshape your business, since no plan survives first contact and execution matters far more than the original idea. 4. Grow by obsessively delighting the customers you already have, and proudly focus on your niche while ignoring the rest of the market. 5. Decide honestly what makes you happy and what counts as enough, shape your role and your company’s size around that, and be willing to stay small or walk away.
Memorable Lines
“Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true.” (Derek Sivers)
“When you make a company, you make a utopia.” (Derek Sivers)
“Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.” (Derek Sivers)
“To me, ideas are worth nothing unless they are executed.” (Derek Sivers)
“It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it.” (Derek Sivers)
“Make sure you know what makes you happy, and don’t forget it.” (Derek Sivers)
Should You Read the Full Book?
Verdict: Summary is enough
This summary captures nearly all of what Anything You Want has to offer, its central philosophy that business is about making dreams come true rather than money, and its key lessons on starting lean, holding plans loosely, valuing execution over ideas, obsessing over customers, delegating without abdicating, and building around your own happiness and sense of enough. Because the book is so short and its value lies in its principles rather than in detailed instruction, a good summary conveys the substance of it faithfully. That said, the full book is a delightful one-hour read, and the charm of Sivers’s voice and the specifics of the CD Baby story, the utopian distribution deal, the playful customer emails, the decision to give the company away, add warmth and memorability that a summary cannot fully reproduce. Read the whole thing if you want the pleasure of his storytelling and a burst of encouragement to do business your own way, but if you simply want the ideas, this summary gives you what matters most. As a quick, wise, perspective-shifting little book, it is worth the hour if the philosophy appeals to you.
You can find the Anything You Want book page here, with the full list of people who recommend it.