Derek Sivers
For a full bio, check out Derek’s about page. The top highlight:
Me in 10 seconds:
I’ve been a musician, producer, circus performer, entrepreneur, TED speaker, and book publisher.
Monomaniac, introvert, slow thinker, and love finding a different point of view.
California native, I now live in New Zealand.
Time line for context:
- 1969: born in California
- 1976: started playing piano, viola, and clarinet
- 1979: got a TRS-80 computer and dove deep into programming in BASIC
- 1983: started playing guitar, decided I wanted to be a successful musician
- 1987: started Berklee College of Music in Boston
- 1988: joined a circus, as ringleader/MC musician
- 1990: graduated college, moved to New York City, got a job at Warner/Chappell Music
- 1992: quit my job, and toured Japan as Ryuichi Sakamoto’s guitarist
- 1993: lived alone on the Oregon coast for 7 months, writing and recording music full-time, in a town with a population of 2
- 1994: played around New York and universities with my band “Hit Me”, and the Professional Pests
- 1995: started a record label, booking agency, and recording studio
- 1996: recorded and released my album
- 1997: started CD Baby
- 1998: quit the circus, after 10 years and about 1000 shows
- 1999: started HostBaby
- 2000: moved to Portland, Oregon
- 2002: moved to Santa Monica, California
- 2007: rough year, moved to London, decided to quit my company
- 2008: moved to San Francisco, sold CD Baby and HostBaby
- 2009: moved to New York City, started writing and speaking more
- 2010: spoke at TED three times in a year, moved to Singapore
- 2011: published “Anything You Want” book about my CD Baby days, started Wood Egg
- 2012: had a baby
- 2013: moved to New Zealand to raise him in nature and be a mostly-full-time dad
- 2014 to 2018: sabbatical, but answered 92,354 emails from 33,776 people
- 2017: started writing “How to Live”
- 2019: moved to Oxford, England
- 2020: moved back New Zealand, released “Your Music and People” and “Hell Yeah or No”
- 2021: finished and released the best thing I’ve ever written: “How to Live”
From TED.com:
Derek Sivers is best known as the founder of CD Baby. A professional musician since 1987, he started CD Baby by accident in 1998 when he was selling his own CD on his website, and friends asked if he could sell theirs, too. CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients. In 2008, Sivers sold CD Baby to focus on his new ventures to benefit musicians.
675: Derek Sivers, part 1: Leading versus Exploring Frontiers
I bring leaders from all areas to sustainability. The challenges to changing culture to sustainability aren’t in technology, science, journalism, activism, or politics, though all those fields are relevant. Their practitioners generally aren’t skilled in what changes culture: the social and emotional skills of leadership. Most people don’t know that living more sustainably improves their lives, not the reversion to the Stone Age or Mad Max apocalypse our culture teaches us to fear.
From the start of the conversation, Derek distinguished that he sees himself as an explorer, not a leader. He’s exploring the frontiers of life following his whim or what he finds around him. He suggests that leaders give more direction to others to help them follow. He acknowledged with a “touché” that he does have a lot of followers, one of my main measures of a leader.
The next day, he posted to his page some related thoughts in, Explorers are bad leaders, which sparked lively debate in his comments. Many suggested more overlap than you might think.
His distinction led me to consider my role. I hadn’t thought about seeing myself as exploring the frontier, but I have been. When I’ve had the option of leading others and exploring more frontier, I’ve generally chosen to explore more frontier.
Some examples: avoiding packaged food seemed impossible and took me six months to start. When I succeeded, instead of helping others follow that difficult challenge, sharing recipes and how I did it, I then chose not flying. Avoiding flying seemed harder than avoiding packaged food. When I succeeded in making a better life without it, instead of helping people along, I unplugged my fridge, then my apartment.
Maybe I’m exploring the frontier of sustainability more than leading. Still, it’s funny to call a frontier territory where all humans lived for 300,000 years. I’m working on developing leadership skills and techniques that work.
Anyway, listen to the episode to hear how Derek got me thinking about my role and what’s next for sustainability. We geek out on emacs, vi, and such things. I think I can safely say he sounded intrigued and will likely be back.