Anything You Want

Highlights

• The key point is that I wasn’t trying to make a big business. I was just daydreaming about how one little thing would look in a perfect world.
• When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.
• Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.
• Anytime you think you know what your new business will be doing, remember this quote from serial entrepreneur Steve Blank: “No business plan survives first contact with customers.”
• Even years later, the desks were just planks of wood on cinder blocks from the hardware store. I made the office computers myself from parts. My well-funded friends would spend $100,000 to buy something that I made myself for $1,000. They did it saying, “We need the very best,” but it didn’t improve anything for the customers.
• Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers.
• None of your customers will ask you to turn your attention to expanding. They want you to keep your attention focused on them.
• Starting small puts 100 percent of your energy into actually solving real problems for real people.
• Never forget that there are thousands of businesses, like Jim’s Fish Bait Shop in a shack on a beach somewhere, that are doing just fine without corporate formalities.
• In a perfect world, would your website be covered with advertising? When you’ve asked your customers what would improve your service, has anyone said, “Please fill your website with more advertising”? Nope. So don’t do it.
• Your first idea is just one of many options. No business goes as planned, so make ten radically different plans.
• Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?
• That’s the Tao of business: Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well.
• It’s another Tao of business: Set up your business like you don’t need the money, and it’ll likely come your way.
• 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.
• Never forget that you can make your role anything you want it to be. Anything you hate to do, someone else loves. So find that person and let her do it.
• Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were at a party at a billionaire’s extravagant estate. Kurt said, “Wow! Look at this place! This guy has everything!” Joseph said, “Yes, but I have something he’ll never have. . . . Enough.”
• I created a charitable trust called the Independent Musicians Charitable Remainder Unitrust. When I die, all of its assets will go to music education. But while I’m alive, it pays out 5 percent of its value per year to me.