Derek Sivers

It seems I’m a ridiculous walking stereotype of an entrepreneur. The Wikipedia page about entrepreneurship says entrepreneurs are…

• mercurial, that is, prone to insights, brainstorms, deceptions, ingeniousness and resourcefulness. cunning, opportunistic, creative, and unsentimental
• extremely optimistic in their decision-making processes
• prone to overconfidence and over generalisations
• tough, pragmatic people driven by needs of independence and achievement. They seldom are willing to submit to authority.
• primarily motivated by an overwhelming need for achievement and strong urge to build

Like one of those astrology or cultural moments where some generalization actually describes you exactly, I’ve realized I’m a type. A total stereotype. Oh well.

Oh and just to rub it in, I was born in Silicon Valley, California. Sheesh.

The southern-most big island in Japan is Kyushu. At the southern tip of that is a city called Kagoshima, which overlooks a huge active volcano in the water called Sakurajima, accessible by a 15-minute ferry ride.

One road leads around the base of the volcano. At the southern-most part of the volcano is a hot springs, right on the ocean, with a little hotel called Furusato Kanko. And that’s where I’ve been the last couple days, soaking in the mineral water, right where that guy is in the photo, below. (Just 10 feet behind the camera is the Pacific ocean.)

Of course I’m SO relaxed now, that I’m DONE relaxing, and damn ready to start a new business to help musicians. But more on that later. For now I just had to post an “I am here” as a bookmark reminder of one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been.

I often hear musicians say they want to do advance promotion - telling people about their new album before it’s available for purchase (whether digital or physical).

Though the plan may be to generate excitement, I think the opposite happens. Imaginary dialog:

Check out my new music!

Where is it? Can I buy it?

Not yet - but soon!

Why are you telling me now?

So you can be ready for the announcement!

(… 2 months pass …)

Check out my new music! It’s ready!

I think I already heard of this. Not new. Delete.

Or, as Cory Doctorow says, “Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation — the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book — is very brief. That’s because ‘I should buy a copy of this book’ is inevitably followed by, ‘Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!’ and the moment, as they say, is gone.”

(Next time you think a song you wrote deserves 5 minutes of someone’s attention, look at what this guy did to compete for that same 5 minutes of someone’s attention.)

So, the best plan goes like this:

1. Record your music.
2. Start conversations with bloggers and other biz-people you’ll want to turn on to your music later. Nothing to pitch them now, just get to know them.
3. Prepare your marketing/promotion plan, but don’t do it yet.
4. Get your music up for sale (on iTunes, CD Baby, Amazon, etc).
5. Once it’s available at every store (and you’ve tested it by buying one copy yourself) - update your websites (including MySpace, etc) to make it obvious everywhere and easy to buy.
6. NOW do your promotion. Tell fans and friends repeatedly. Contact people you’ve come to know from past conversations, let them know it’s available, and ask if they’d like to hear it.

NOTE: the exception to this rule is when you’re raising money by letting hardcore fans buy the album before it’s released.

Great quotes from Robert Rauschenberg obituary in the New York Times:

“Fear in life is the fear of change. Nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by their adaptability to change.”

… and …

“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop.”

Last February (2008) I went to India for a whole month with nothing but a little backpack.

Since returning, everyone has asked the same three-word question : “How was India?”

Impossible to sum up in a few sentences, so my smart-ass answer has been “scrappy”.

Here I’ll try to explain my real thoughts about India (so far).

This was my first visit to India, and I’m going to return many times, so this time I went only to meet with some companies, in the cities of Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kolkata. No tourist sights or countryside. Just meetings and cities. So of course I saw India from a business and urban point of view. Everything I say, below, is just my observation from visiting these 3 cities.

Rubble and Garbage

In India, there is rubble and garbage everywhere.

• walk over rubble on every sidewalk
• walk around rubble to enter an office building
• walk past huge piles of garbage on nice residential streets
• even bigger piles of rubble between every building
• and garbage lines everything, almost everywhere

Rubble right in front of stores:


Rubble in front of multi-million-dollar buildings:


Rubble in every available space:

I found myself thinking, “They’re so often announcing how many billions of people are here. I see hundreds just standing around right now. Couldn’t someone just pick up that rubble/garbage and be done in a couple hours?”. Then it reminded me of British teeth….

In England, I asked a good friend who grew up there why the Brits have a reputation for bad teeth. She said, “Really? We do? From our point of view, we wonder why Americans are so fanatic about having unreasonably perfect teeth.”

Aha! Just as the casual dresser might look at the ultra-primped over-perfect hours-to-get-ready type and think, “What a freak!” - maybe all the rubble and garbage is just the norm to someone growing up in India. It’s not a problem to be solved any more than my wrinkled t-shirt and day-old jeans are a clothing problem I should solve.

Someone posted these photos on their blog, intending to show how disgusting the beaches of India are:







But when I see those photos, I smile nostalgic, thinking, “Yeah - that’s India!” I miss that garbage smell, a bit.

Noise

The sound of the city is the sound of hundreds of drivers honking constantly, every few seconds, all the time. Watch my videos from India to hear what I mean.

It’s just considered safe driving. To honk your horn is to say, “I’m here”, which you’re supposed to tell everyone every few seconds, partially because of the way they drive, which I’ll explain later.

A 25-year-old programmer from Bangalore just went to the U.S. for his first time, to Chicago, and I asked his impression. His eyes got wide and he said, “It’s SO quiet! Many people but so strangely silent. It was hard for me to sleep, at first.”

Again, like the rubbble : no right and wrong. They’re not messy - we’re just neat-freaks. They’re not noisy - we’re just strangely silent. A great reminder no matter what cultures you’re comparing.

Scrappy (opportunistic)

The dictionary defines “scrappy” as both “consisting of disorganized, untidy, or incomplete parts” and “determined, argumentative, or pugnacious”. Exactly! It’s the combination of both definitions that struck me about India.

It’s most obvious in the driving. I don’t know if you can tell from my videos, but everyone fills every available space. The little vehicles wind in the gaps between the bigger ones. All lanes are ignored. My friend Steve, who lives there now, described it as, “This is their ad-hoc solution to fitting twice as many people onto the road.” It makes a lot of sense!

Watch this video of a typical intersection. It’s self-organizing in a very effective way. (Watch for the white car near the end that goes the wrong way down the street, from the top of the screen to the bottom.)

Someone sent me this photo of phone wires as an example of how disorganized India is:

But to me, that’s a great example of the scrappy, opportunistic, self-organizing that I love about India. It reminds me of the movies that portray New York City in the post-depression 1930s.

Everybody seems to be using whatever they’ve got to do what they need to do, which really inspired me in a very purely entrepreneuristic way.

That’s all I have to say for now, but I’m sure I’ll go back again later this year and have an entirely different perspective on it.

Check out this writeup on 13 Rule-Breaking Films.

How can you NOT be inspired to write a rule-breaking song after reading that?

I guess it’s not as big of a deal to write a rule-breaking song, since a song can be written and recorded in mere hours for no money, whereas a movie involves hundreds of people and millions of dollars.

But that being said… what are your favorite rule-breaking songs?

Feel free to include a link to your own rule-breaking song, here, in comments.

One of my favorite artists of all time is Fela Kuti from Nigeria.

At Berklee, I was in an Afropop ensemble that would play a lot of Fela Kuti arrangements.

The teacher/bandleader explained that what we know as the “1” - the downbeat, the start of a phrase - in West African music is considered the end of a phrase.

Instead of “How you get to main street?”, it’s “You get to main street, how?”

Instead of “ONE two three four, ONE two three four”, it’s “two three four ONE, two three four ONE”.

Later I found out that Fela Kuti never performed songs after he had already recorded them.

I couldn’t help but notice the similarity. As if to him, the recording was the end of the life of a song, instead of the beginning. Makes just as much sense if you think about it that way.

Which of course makes me wonder about all the other beginnings and endings and things we just take for granted as fact, but make just as much sense in their opposite.

Hannah from Kite Club sent me this great email:

I am an artist/musician/educator/mother and all the rest.

I was living in Chicago and raising my kids, teaching art, and playing out with my beloved band. And I just couldn’t stand our situation any further. The gunshots, the schools, the crumbling infrastructure, the leased SUVs, G. Bush, and on and on.

Don’t get me wrong - Chicago is filled with ethical, educated, creative movers and shakers. But I was visualizing something else for me and my family.

I found online teaching jobs, my husband got our house shored up and entirely rentable, and in 2005 we four moved to a little stone house on the banks of the Seine just 40 minutes south of Paris, France.

Where we live is 360 degrees beautiful. The schools are excellent. Guns are banned. The culture is not propped up by credit. Our kids are fluent in French. We have learned so much.

I miss my band and the Chicago scene, but have had to switch gears and my songwriting has taken off, and now I am working on guitar technique and singing, and recording at home. And along the way I have found people around here to play with, and we’ve played out at a few parties. This is not what I was up to in Chicago, but I am grateful just to stay in motion.

I was just hired to teach design at Parson’s Paris, which is a top art school, and a major feather in my cap. Last year we bought a house here. My husband and I are both painting a lot and exhibiting our work here.

Who knew? It worked.

Moving to France is a small thing, but it was a leap for us. The details have one by one settled into place. The quality of our life as a family is so much higher than what we had crafted for ourselves in Chicago. Our creative and professional lives are on track and thriving. And we work less, and spend much more time together. I am grateful daily.

First thing I thought is, “You can just DO that? Just up and move from Chicago to France, family and all?” Maybe this is more of an American mindset I’m stuck in, where moving out of the country feels like such a big deal. (Versus the European mindset where it’s probably no big deal to move from Sweden to Germany.)

Moving to a new place is such a great way to force good change.

I had been thinking about moving to London for a while, then one day just went online and booked a flight, 2 months in advance, with a return date 7 months later. I didn’t know the details yet, but forcing this action just got me over the hurdle of doing it. Same with India. Just booked it, impulsively. It can be that easy. (Frequent flyer miles help.)

My friend Nikki was a promoter in Las Vegas, then just used some frequent flyer miles to book a trip to China to study karate. She loved it and now lives there, working in Xi’an. My friend Karla, a journalist, moved to Argentina and now does her freelance journalist work online. Since the cost of living in Argentina is so much less, she only has to work part-time, and can spend the rest of her time writing a book.

Any other stories of a big move being the best thing you ever did? Please leave a reply in comments. I love these stories.

An amazing shift has happened in the last 10 years, as an artist.

You now have a better chance of being successful by being remarkably unusual, than by being normal and mainstream.

Songwriters constantly search for that universal theme, aiming to write the next “Yesterday” that will resonate with millions of people for decades to come.

But what good is the next “Yesterday” if nobody hears it because your music is too normal?

(See my article called “Well-Rounded Doesn’t Cut”.)

You already know we’re moving to a niche-driven culture, probably permanently. In 1948, Milton Berle’s TV show had 80% of all viewers, because it was one of only three choices! When the Beatles played on Ed Sullivan, they had 60% of all viewers. The biggest American Idol episode gets 30% now. There won’t be another Michael Jackson Thriller or Fleetwood Mac Rumours.

With unlimited options online, music fans don’t wait for mainstream media to tell them what to do - they explore, click, follow links, and can immediately listen to absolutely anything they’ve heard people talk about. Because of this, tastes are more spread-out than ever.

Your goal should be to attract and excite the people who have headed to the edges. They’re the ones who are looking for something new, and more likely to rave about it if you impress them.

I think of this like an archery range metaphor:

In the old music business (before 1997) it felt like hit-single-or-nothing. The only way you could be successful was to hit a tiny 1-inch target on the other side of a field. If you missed by an inch, you get nothing.

Now it’s like the target is huge, and you can aim for the edges, and hit something pretty easily - BUT - there’s a catch : someone cut out the middle.

If you’re still aiming for the middle of the target, there’s nothing there. They’re all out exploring niches.

Aim for the edges.

Some things I’ve learned this year that turned my world upside-down and I’m still trying to wrap my head around:

Unlimited servers with unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth : for 10 cents an hour - only when you need it, and not when you don’t.

It used to be, when I decided that I wanted to do a whole new project that needed a new server, that I would…

• Buy all the parts online (1 hour + $3000)
• Assemble it when it arrives (1-2 hours)
• Install Linux on it (1 hour)
• Install it in our server rack, assign an IP address, and make sure it’s live. (1 hour)

… then that server would be there forever, until I decided to repurpose it, upgrade it, or abandon it. If it got overloaded, I would need to spend another $3000 and another 4 hours to set up a 2nd server.

But now, thanks to Amazon EC2 and S3, I type a few commands on my laptop, and somewhere in Seattle a powerful server jumps to life one minute later, just for me. I can play with it for as long as I’d like, then shut it down or replace it with something else anytime I want.

This changes everything! I’ll never need to buy or set up another webserver again. The first time I saw it work, my mouth hung open, and I couldn’t stop laughing for a couple minutes.

It’s a total base philosophy switch from needing to own something to just having it appear when you need it, and not when you don’t.

(Imagine if any guitar you ever wanted could appear in your hands, in your home studio, for just the few hours you needed it to record, for 10 cents an hour.)

Letting Google be the mailserver for my own domain, for free.

I’ve spent so many hours setting up Qmail, tweaking it, upgrading spam filters, and all that fun stuff. But Google lets you use their mailservers for free, even for your own domain. (No “@gmail.com” needed. No need to use their webmail. Just set them as your POP and SMTP server in your mail program.) Their spam filters are amazing. The only downside is you can only send 1000 emails a day through their server, so it wouldn’t work for CD Baby, but the huge upside is their permanent archive of incoming and outgoing email.

A business doesn’t need employees.

Own your own small business? Read The Obsolete Employee (but only after you read E-Myth Revisited).

Currently providing a service to an employer? Read some Tom Peters, who suggests you think of yourself as a 1-person company (“Me, Inc.”), whose current biggest client is your employer, but hone your service so that it can be hired by other clients as well.

Put these two together, and you have a world of service-providers and clients, with everyone as their own boss. The whole concept of employee mainly came from the factory age, but there are less reasons these days for the traditional employee-employer relationship.

From a small business point of view, I’m better off hiring independent specialists to do what needs to be done, and not need someone to be doing that in my office, 40 hours a week, from 9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday, etc.

(Note how similar this is to using Amazon’s servers instead of needing to own your own.)

Diverse independent groups of people are smarter than any one person.

The Wisdom of Crowds and Wikinomics blow apart the notion of experts, proving that a diverse collection of independent outside opinions will almost always be smarter than any expert. And no matter what your organization (whether you’re Google or Sony), the brains and labor outside your organization is always better than anything you’ve got in-house. So learn to open up your organization to outside contributions.

I could talk for hours about how this changed everything for me, and I’m looking forward to trying some hands-on examples of this myself over the next few years.

The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read applies this same truism to investing, showing that active financial managers (aka “experts”) on average perform worse than the market average. (In November 2000, Fortune magazine released the “top picks” from its panelists of “top” stock analysts. Those picks ended up under-performing the market average by 400%! He gives many of these examples, and encourages you to ignore ALL experts, and only invest in broad indexes of the entire market. In other words : trust the wisdom of crowds.)

Music subscription service devices

The Sansa Connect changed the way I think about music. (More recent recommendation: the Ibiza Rhapsody).

No computer needed. It connects by wifi directly to Rhapsody, which has almost everything you’d ever want to hear, available any time you want to hear it, without needing to buy.

Go to Pitchfork, look at their top-rated albums, and download them all from Rhapsody to your device to listen to any time over the next few weeks. Doesn’t cost you anything, so there’s no risk.

Tell it to play you a radio station. Hear something you like? Click [GET THIS SONG] or [GET THIS ALBUM] or [MAKE A MIX LIKE THIS SONG].

I got turned on to more music from my little Sansa Connect than I have by any other means in years. I have a massive music collection but I haven’t accessed it in months, since anything I want to hear is available instantly any time I want to hear it. Why maintain my huge collection anymore?

The 4-Hour Workweek

Let go of 80% of your actions, to concentrate on the most effective 20%. Shorten the deadlines for getting all actions done. Go on a low-information diet, realizing you don’t need to know all that stuff you spend hours a day ingesting. Have remote assistants take care of everything that can be done by anyone else. And voila : you have the 4-Hour Workweek. Again : I could talk for hours about how this changed everything for me, so I’ll stop here and talk about that stuff in future posts.

We are happier with restrictions, and trusting others’ experiences.

A combination of Stumbling on Happiness and Paradox of Choice. We’re bad at predicting how we’ll feel about something in the future, so we’re better off trusting other people’s experiences.

People are surprisingly similar in much of their experiences, even though they think they’re more unique. (90% of motorists consider themselves to be better-than-average drivers.)

With more choices, we may make better decisions, but we feel worse about them. (Note how this ties into the Wisdom of Crowds, above : others, collectively, know better than you do.)

I’ve started trusting the collective reviews from Amazon and Rotten Tomatoes. And I’ve intentionally decided to limit my options in other ways I’ll describe soon, trusting (from others’ experience) that will make me happier.

Each one of these things probably deserves its own longer article here, but I just wanted to list them in one place, because it’s amazing how differently I see the world now than I did even one year ago.

I’m sure there are more I’ll think of after posting this, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear any of yours:

Any things you’ve learned recently that “change everything” for you?