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You can't please everyone, so proudly exclude people.

We've all heard about the importance of persistence. But I had misunderstood. Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what's not working.

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.)

Ten years later, I was running CD Baby, and for the first time, an employee told me he needed to quit. I said, "Drag. Well. OK. I wish you the best! Who's your replacement?" He looked confused. I said, "Have you found and trained a replacement yet?" He looked a little stunned, then said, "No ... . I think that's your job." Now I was stunned. I asked a few friends and found out he was right. People can just quit a job without finding and training their replacements. I had no idea. All these years, I just assumed what I had done was normal. There's a benefit to being naive about the norms of the world--deciding from scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others do.

When I decided to sell CD Baby, I already had enough. I live simply. I don't own a house, a car, or even a TV. The less I own, the happier I am. The lack of stuff gives me the priceless freedom to live anywhere anytime.

Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision--even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone--according to what's best for your customers. If you're ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, "How can I best help you now?" Then focus on satisfying those requests.

Gather everybody around. Answer the question and explain the philosophy. Make sure everyone understands the thought process. Ask one person to write it in the manual. Let everybody know they can decide this without me next time.

Don't be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams. You need to know your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what's worth doing.

Every outgoing e-mail has a "From:" name, right? Why not use that to make people smile, too? With one line of code, I made it so that every outgoing e-mail customized the "From:" field to be "CD Baby loves [first name]." So if the customer's name was Susan, every e-mail she got from us would say it was from "CD Baby loves Susan." Customers loved this!

"Yes, refund his money in full. We'll take a little loss. It's important to always do whatever would make the customer happiest, as long as it's not outrageous. A little gesture like this goes a long way toward him telling his friends we're a great company. Everyone always remember that helping musicians is our first goal, and profit is second. You have my full permission to use that guideline to make these decisions yourself in the future. Do what makes the musicians happiest. Make sure everyone who deals with us leaves with a smile."

Sometimes, after we had done the forty-five minutes of work to add a new album to the store, the musician would change his mind and ask us to do it over again with a different album cover or different audio clips. I wanted to say yes but let him know that this was really hard to do, so I made a policy that made us both smile: "We'll do anything for a pizza." If you needed a big special favor, we'd give you the number of our local pizza delivery place. If you bought us a pizza, we'd do any favor you wanted. When we'd tell people about this on the phone, they'd often laugh, not believing we were serious. But we'd get a pizza every few weeks. I'd often hear from musicians later that this was the moment they fell in love with us.

Making a company is a great way to improve the world while improving yourself.

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless they are executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. Explanation: Awful idea = -1 Weak idea = 1 So-so idea = 5 Good idea = 10 Great idea = 15 Brilliant idea = 20 No execution = $1 Weak execution = $1,000 So-so execution = $10,000 Good execution = $100,000 Great execution = $1,000,000 Brilliant execution = $10,000,000 To make a business, you need to multiply the two components.