Big Winner

Tim Ferriss, the author of the bestselling book The Four Hour Work Week, recently had a conversation with the founder of CD Baby at the SF MusicTech Summit. As I mentioned before, this is one of my favorite interview formats – where multiple successful people come together to ask each other questions.

For a bit of background information, here are some stats on CD Baby:
- 242,846 artists sell their music at CD Baby
- 4,574,622 CDs sold online to customers
- $83,590,381 paid directly to the artists

Some great points from the interview:
Derek:
* everyone reading this has something they’d like to be doing if they didn’t have to do anything. For most of us, the fountain of creativity that would come from that would change your life.
* A friend of mine is neighbors with Steve Jobs, and said that as much as Apple seems to mysteriously pop out with an invention, Steve Jobs is relentless about asking everybody he knows, “What do you think of this? What’s your opinion on that?” Because he wants to keep some secrecy instead of putting it out to the world, he just does this constant testing among his circle of friends, constantly getting feedback on everything he’s doing along the way.
* When friends talk about starting a business I say if you’ve got idea you want to do, don’t sit there for a whole year trying to raise funding or whatever before you can put it out in the world. Just give yourself a 10-day deadline. If there’s something you think the world wants, try it within 10 days.
* I heard this beautiful bit of advice once that said, “If you’ve got a list of 20 things you should be doing, pick the most important one or two and then just let go of the rest.
* [David Allen's book Ready for Anything] said “The world throws opportunities your way every single week. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed already, you’re not going to be able to embrace them. Keep your mind clear of these feelings of obligations so you can be open to receiving new opportunities.” I thought that was such a beautiful way of putting it.
* I used to admire people that would say things like, “I haven’t taken a day off in 17 years!” But your book made me look at that stuff in a new way. Now when somebody says that they work all the time, they never have a minute off, and they’re constantly checking their Blackberry, I think, “You’re really not in control of your life, are you?”
* Getting specific can turn vague desire into concrete action.

Tim:
* ask yourself what would happen if, say in a 48 hour period, you eliminated x or did the opposite of x?
* you can test-drive and micro-test things over brief periods of time
* if I’m not getting the result I want, what are my assumptions?
* I ran a dozen different ads with a dozen different potential titles as the advertising headline… I was only concerned with the click through rate – which of those dozen [potential titles for the book] was most popular.
* If you have something that you would like to make and you just don’t know how to test it, make sure you’re scratching your own itch.
* it’s very important to experiment with redistributing retirement throughout life, in the form of mini-retirements
* One of the questions I always ask, whether it’s in language or tango or publishing is, “What were the one or two biggest wastes of time?”
* Polarizing is very important. Don’t try to make everyone your customer and don’t try to make everyone happy. Be very, very honest. Don’t be offensive for the sake of being offensive. Don’t start problems for the sake of starting problems. Be honest, like three glasses in with a group of friends. If most people presented their opinions as they do in that environment to the public they would be much more successful in everything they do, because they’ll polarize people. People will say, “Damn that guy’s a riot.” So few people are honest and direct.
* it’s important not to spend your time online defending yourself. Give other people a chance to join into the melee
* Maybe the people who have popular commercial blogs also have personal blogs. Don’t contact engadget. Forget it, you’re never going to hear from them. Comment on their personal blog. By taking that indirect approach it makes it easy for the traffic leaders to link to you because you’re cited or covered or mentioned on this thought leader’s blog.

Sources:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/08/08/the-philosophies-of-work-a-conversation-with-derek-sivers-of-cd-baby/
http://sivers.org/tim-ferriss

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