Derek Sivers Quotes

You don’t need marriage to feel security.
Marriage doesn’t make you secure.
You don’t need recognition to feel pride.
Recognition doesn’t give you pride.
You don’t need a beach to feel tranquility.

Nothing twice.
Never eat the same food twice.
Never go to the same place twice.
Never hear the same thing twice.
Everything only once.

Learning without doing is wasted. If I don’t use what I learn, then it was pointless! How horrible to waste those hundreds of hours I spent learning, and not turn it into action.

There’s a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Being self-employed feels like freedom until you realize that if you take time off, your business crumbles. 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.

The real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do only what makes you happy.

Busy is what happens when you’re at the mercy of someone else’s schedule.

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.

Delegate but don't abdicate

It’s so important to separate the real goal from the old mental associations. We have old dreams. We have images we want to re-create. They’re hard to untangle from the result we really want. They become excuses, and reasons to procrastinate.

The biggest obstacle to learning is assuming you already know.
Confidence is usually ignorance.

Trust, but verify. Remember it when delegating. You have to do both.

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

Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it.

Life can be improved by adding, or by subtracting. The world pushes us to add, because that benefits them. But the secret is to focus on subtracting.

I hope you find these ideas useful for your own life or business. I also hope you disagree with some of them. Then I hope you e-mail me to tell me about your different point of view, because that’s my favorite part of all. (I’m a student, not a guru.)