Derek Sivers

Me in 10 seconds

I’m a musician, programmer, writer, entrepreneur, and student — though not in that order.

I’m fascinated with the usable psychology of self-improvement, business, philosophy, and intercultural relativism. I love finding a different point of view.

Total introvert (INTJ). I thrive in solitude.

Minimalist. I prefer giving to getting.

California native. I now live in Singapore and New Zealand.

Deeply happy and anti-drama, my favorite fable is 塞翁失马.

CURRENT UPDATE: Here’s what I’m doing now.

Official Bragging Bio

Originally a professional musician and circus clown, Derek Sivers created CD Baby in 1998.

It became the largest seller of independent music online, with $100M in sales for 150,000 musicians.

In 2008, Derek sold CD Baby for $22M, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education.

He is a frequent speaker at the TED Conference, with over 5 million views of his talks.

Since 2011 he has published 34 books, including “Anything You Want” which shot to #1 on all of its Amazon categories.

Newest Articles see all

Interviews

NEW: I get personal and pour my heart into 40 hours of interviews.

Each one has an MP3 you can download, or a transcript if you prefer to read.

Projects see all projects

Book Notes: detailed notes from the last 200+ books I’ve read
Now Now Now: a collection of sites that have a “what I’m doing now” page
MusicThoughts: inspiring quotes about music, translated into Español, Français, Deutsch, Italiano, Português, Русский, العربية, 日本語, and 中文
Wood Egg: my book publishing company
sivers.org: the hand-crafted Ruby code that runs this site

Books

Anything You Want: Tales from my CD Baby experience: Entrepreneur lessons learned from starting, building, and selling CD Baby.
Marketing Your Music: Free e-book for musicians about promoting your music and navigating the music industry.
Wood Egg Startup Guides: 20 books about starting a business in Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Videos

TED (ted.com): 3 short talks from the TED Conference.
Anything You Want: 7 short animations from my book “Anything You Want”.
Uncommon Sense: Entrepreneur lessons learned from starting, building, and selling CD Baby.
Conference Presentations: Talks from other conferences, all subjects.

Photos (click for big)

Tweets see all tweets

April 27: Possible futures : https://sivers.org/futures (with bonus in comments)
April 27: SQL awesomeness gets me so damn inspired: https://blog.jooq.org/2016/04/25/10-sql-tricks-that-you-didnt-think-were-possible/
April 22: My 200+ book notes & reviews, now with updated ratings. Top recommendations up top: https://sivers.org/book
April 21: I sound strange because I’m singing the counter-melody : https://sivers.org/counter
April 20: I split https://sivers.org/d1 into separate pages because people were not noticing the category names.
April 18: Do this. Directives - part 1 : https://sivers.org/d1

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Contact

Please email me at [email protected] for any reason. I reply to all, and much prefer email over social networks.

Get on my private email list, here: