Anything You Want

Anything You Want is Derek Sivers’s unconventional guide to building a business based entirely on intuition, creativity, and personal fulfillment. What makes the book striking is that Sivers’s success story was never driven by ambition or financial hunger. He became an entrepreneur accidentally, through a desire to solve a problem for himself and fellow musicians. In the late 1990s, independent artists had no meaningful way to sell their music online. Major distribution companies were uninterested in unsigned bands and small-scale artists, and online stores like Amazon were inaccessible to individuals without record label support. To address this gap, Sivers built a simple website to help sell his own CDs. When friends saw what he had built, they asked him to handle their sales, and he agreed. One artist turned into dozens, then hundreds, and eventually hundreds of thousands. The project that began as a personal convenience evolved into CD Baby, an online platform that revolutionized independent music distribution.

Over the next decade, CD Baby became a beloved resource for musicians who previously had no path to share their work on a global scale. Rather than adopting traditional business norms, Sivers built the company around a philosophy of helping others and removing barriers for artists. He kept operations small, trusted creativity more than corporate strategy, and made decisions according to what made life meaningful rather than what maximized profit. Eventually, he sold the company for $22 million and donated the proceeds to a charitable trust supporting music education, believing that he already had everything he needed and that giving away the money created more happiness than keeping it. The lessons he teaches come from direct experience, including mistakes that cost millions, experiments that shaped company culture, and philosophical realizations that challenge the typical definitions of success.

The Importance of Building a Business Around Joy

A central theme throughout Anything You Want is that the purpose of a business is to create a life you enjoy. Sivers rejects the idea that entrepreneurs must obsess over revenue, scale, and competition. Instead, he argues that fulfillment should be the guiding principle in every decision. If an activity or responsibility consistently drains energy, it will eventually destroy the enthusiasm that once made the idea exciting. He explains that many founders unintentionally build prisons for themselves by expanding beyond what they truly want. Instead of freedom and creativity, they inherit stress, pressure, and expectations that suffocate the original excitement of the project. Sivers insists that the success of a business cannot be judged from the outside. No one else can determine whether a company is successful because only the founder knows whether the business brings joy or misery.

He encourages entrepreneurs to regularly ask themselves whether they would choose their business again today if they were starting from scratch. If the answer is no, something needs to change. This perspective challenges the glorification of endless growth, raising the idea that growth is only desirable if it increases happiness. Sometimes the most successful choice is to remain small, nimble, intimate, and ...