Anything You Want: Part 2

 This is part 2 of the book review of Anything You Want by Derek Sivers.

The strength of many little customers

I touched on this in more detail in .When you build your business on serving thousands of customers, not dozens, you don’t have to worry about any one customer leaving or making special demands. If most of your customers love what you do, but one doesn’t, you can just say good-bye and wish him the best, with no hard feelings.

Proudly exclude people

"It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it. Have the confidence to know that when your target 1 percent hears you excluding the other 99 percent, the people in that 1 percent will come to you because you’ve shown how much you value them." - D. Sivers

Have the confidence to proclaim what you are and proudly say what you're not. You cannot please everybody. You must be specific with whom you business caters for.

Act like you don’t need the money

I think the author sums the point well precisely when he says:

“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 they sense a desperate lover. It’s a turnoff. 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”. - D. Sivers

Prepare to Double

“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.” - D.Sivers

But no matter what business you’re in, it’s good to prepare for what would happen if business doubled. Have ten clients now? How would it look if you had twenty at once? Serving eighty customers for lunch each day? What would happen if 160 showed up?

It's About Being and not having

We all want to be happy in whatever we do. So we should focus on the process and not the end result. By doing things albeit a slow process, it will be a rewarding experience as you would have built something using your own hands and that skill is something no one can take from you. You can have a car, house etc those things can bring momentary happiness and they can still be taken away from you but a hard earned skill is with you for life and the joy of producing works with your hands is profound

Delegate or die: The self-employment trap

You can't do everything by yourself, you will burn out very fast!

There’s a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Being self employed feels like freedom until you realize that if you take time off, your business crumbles. To be a true business owner, make it so that you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please leave them in the comment section. See you next time.