Make Gifts and This Will Happen
What makes someone feel compelled to share your work with all their friends? A spirit of generosity.
And when it comes to generosity, Derek Sivers is legendary.
After a career as a professional musician, Sivers’s company CD Baby made it possible for thousands of independent bands, including mine, to sell our CDs in the early 2000s.
When he sold CD Baby for $22 million, he gave it all away, putting the proceeds in a charitable trust to benefit musicians.
He has posted extensive notes and ratings for 376 books on his personal website. You can read them all for free.
He has written four books containing hard-won wisdom, all of which you can read for free on his website as well.
Sivers has made headlines throughout his career for doling out gifts of joy to his customers, including perhaps the most beloved purchase confirmation email in history.
The result of all this generosity? There are thousands of people who have received a gift from Derek Sivers, and who feel intense gratitude and affection for him.
There are thousands of people who can’t wait to tell all their friends about what Derek Sivers just did for them.
Quincy Jones once said that “God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money.” What do you think He does when you start trying to give away as much as you can?
Last year, I wrote Derek Sivers an email. I wanted to thank him for writing Your Music and People (a must-read book for every professional musician, and every professional creator, for that matter).
He wrote me back and, unprompted, offered to send me free copies for each student in the Arts and Entrepreneurship class I was teaching that term at my university. I said that would be awesome, I have 18 students in my class.
He wrote back and said, I’ll send you 40 copies, one for this year, and one for next year, and a couple extras.
A week or so later, I received a box with 43 copies of the book, and my very own experience of Derek Sivers’s generosity. And each one of my students received a copy of Your Music and People.
Not everything has to be a side-hustle. “Where there is no gift, there is no art,” Austin Kleon writes in his book Keep Going. You can leave money on the table. You can stop watching the numbers.
What can you give away simply to delight your friends and fans? Follow Derek’s lead, and cultivate a spirit of generosity in your art.
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