Anything You Want

Don’t be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams. You need to know your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what’s worth doing.

A business plan should never take more than a few hours of work. Hopefully no more than a few minutes. The best plans start simple. A quick glance and common sense should tell you if the numbers will work. The rest are details.

If you think your life’s purpose needs to hit you like a lightning bolt, you’ll overlook the little day-to-day things that fascinate you.

If you think revolution needs to feel like war, you’ll overlook the importance of simply serving people better. When you’re on to something great, it won’t feel like revolution. It’ll feel like uncommon sense.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.

Present each new idea or improvement to the world. If multiple people are saying, “Wow! Yes! I need this! I’d be happy to pay you to do this!” then you should probably do it. But if the response is anything less, don’t pursue it. Don’t waste years fighting uphill battles against locked doors. Improve or invent until you get that huge response.

When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” — then say no. When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!”

Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision — even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone — according to what’s best for your customers. If you’re ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, “How can I best help you now?” Then focus on satisfying those requests.

It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.

Watch out when anyone (including you) says they want to do something big, but can’t until they raise money. It usually means they’re more in love with the idea of being big big big than with actually doing something useful. For an idea to get big big big, it has to be useful. And being useful doesn’t need funding. If you want to be useful, you can always start now, with only 1% of what you have in your grand vision. It’ll be a humble prototype version of your grand vision, but you’ll be in the game. You’ll be ahead of the rest, because you actually started, while others are waiting

You have something that people want. It might be something you own, something you’ve learned how to do, or access to resources, space, or people.

Find a way to share it with everyone who needs it. Not necessarily for profit, but just because it’s what you’d do for friends, and it’s the right thing to do. If it takes some effort for you to share it, charge a little something for your effort, to ensure that this giving can continue.

Start by sharing whatever you’ve got.

Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

You can’t pretend there’s only one way to do it. Your first idea is just one of many options. No business goes as planned, so make ten radically different plans. Realizing the initial choice you made was just one of many brings all kinds of weathered wisdom and insight into your business.

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?

All bad service comes from a mindset of scarcity. They act like they’ll go out of business if they don’t fiercely guard their bottom line. The short-term thinking of desperate survival blocks the long-term thinking of smart strategy.

If you really feel secure and abundant — that you have plenty to share — then this feeling of generosity will flow down into all of your interactions with customers.

Of course you should care about your customers more than you care about yourself! Isn’t that rule #1 of providing a good service? It’s all about them, not you.

When someone’s doing something for the money, people can sense it, like a desperate lover. It’s a turn-off. 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. It’s another Tao of business: Set up your business like you don’t need the money, and it’ll likely come your way.

Customer service is not an expense to be minimized. It’s a core profit center, like sales. It’s where you should put your best people.

Companies focus so much on getting new customers, but keeping existing customers thrilled is a better investment

Three minutes spent talking with them is going to shape their impression of your company more than your name, price, design, or features all combined. This is your shining moment to be the best you can be — to blow them away with how cool it was to contact you. If your customer service is taught to be efficient, it sends the message, “I don’t really want to talk with you. Let’s make this quick.” Do the opposite. Take a few inefficient minutes to get to know anyone who contacts you.

Customer service often starts when someone has a problem, and is upset. When you feel attacked, it’s hard not to fight back, especially when you know they’re wrong. But the best thing to do is to lose the fight. Let them know that they were right, and the company was wrong. Tell them you’re prepared to do whatever it takes to make them happy again.

When one customer wrongs you, remember the thousands that did not. Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person’s mistake.

It’s dehumanizing to have thousands of people passing through our computer screens, so we say things we’d never say if those people were sitting next to us.

If you find even the smallest way to make people smile, they’ll remember you more for that smile than for all your other fancy business-model stuff.

To be a true business owner, make sure you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left. 

There’s a benefit to being naïve to the norms of the world — deciding from scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others do.

When you want to learn how to do something yourself, most people won’t understand. They’ll assume the only reason we do anything is to get it done, and doing it yourself is not the most efficient way. But that’s forgetting about the joy of learning and doing.

Never forget that you can make your role anything you want it to be. Anything you hate to do, someone else loves. So find those people and let them do it.

Make sure you know what makes you happy, and don’t forget it.

Those of us with business ideas? We need a company. Not for the money, but because it’s our place to experiment, create, and turn thoughts into reality. We need to pursue our intrinsic motivation.

The happiest people are not lounging on beaches. They’re engaged in interesting work! Following curiosity is much more fun than being idle. Even if you never have to work a day in your life.

That’s the best reason to have a company. It’s your playground, your instrument, your laboratory. It’s your place to play! Get the ideas out of your head and into the world.

Just pay close attention to what excites you and what drains you. Pay close attention to when you’re being the real you and when you’re trying to impress an invisible jury.

Whatever you make, it’s your creation, so make it your personal dream come true.