Derek Sivers reminded me of something. In Anything You Want, he writes, “Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.” 

That’s exactly why I started doing business, and somewhere in the day-to-day operations—the grind of it all—I lost this sense. A friend recently told me something ambitious that I’d wanted our project to do, and I felt embarrassed because I’d fallen so far short of it. But from Derek’s perspective, that is totally fine, because I was just articulating a dream I wanted to make come true.

While I personally dislike the word “content,” because I have seen many people use it to cheapen the craft of writing—or pretty much any other art form—most other people don’t have this type of baggage with it. That’s actually the reason why one survey reports that YouTuber has become a more popular job than astronaut: when you’re a YouTuber, you are free to pursue any dream that you want. After he went to space, Chris Hadfield became a leading thinker—effectively a YouTuber of his generation.

When Derek started his company for musicians to distribute music over the internet, he describes how painful it was for a musician to work with a distributor. Getting a deal was very hard, you had to pay for promotion, you’d get kicked out of the system if you didn’t sell, and you’d get paid a year after—if ever.

So Derek wrote down four points that described his dream distributor collaboration, and those points became his mission statement for CD Baby. He writes, “When you make it a dream come true for yourself, it’ll be a dream come true for someone else, too.”