Lars Pind

I’m working with a number of different lawyers right now, because I’m both selling and buying property, dealing with various business contracts.

It seems to me there’s two kinds of lawyers.

There are the lawyers that listen carefully to your concern and give a relevant and useful answer.

And there are those that just give generic boiler-plate answers, and when you asked more specific questions, they repeat the same boiler-plate answer, possible in a slightly patronizing tone, as if saying “why didn’t you pay attention the first time”.

I’m sure it’s true of a number of different professions, but lawyers is the profession where I’ve noticed this the most.

There’s an element of intelligence going on. A good lawyer understands that his client is a completely capable, intelligent individual, he just doesn’t have the detailed legal knowledge, which is why, surprise, he turned to a lawyer.

The bad lawyer seems to think that people have a hearing impediment and just need the answer repeated, when in fact the reverse is true: It’s the lawyer that can’t hear what the client is asking.

At the end of the day, I think the intelligence question is reversed as well: The lawyer who can’t take a step back, see where the disconnect or lack of knowledge is, and fill that gap, is the one that doesn’t have as firm a grasp of his profession.

Literally. Okay, in the apartment.

It’s a boy. 3,800 grams, 53 cms. Viggo, in all likelihood.

Welcome, son. Looking forward to getting to know you.

I recently got the Nokia N95 – and I promptly went out and bought more stock in Apple.

For a flagship product, it’s nothing short of embarrassing. It’s got nice features on paper, but they plain doesn’t work.

The camera has a great lens and great resolution, but it takes literally 5 seconds to get ready for a shoot, by which time your motive is long gone. 5 seconds doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re just idling, waiting for the fucking phone to get its act together, it feels like eons.

The GPS has not yet been able to pick out my position, despite having had plenty of attempts. I was in Barcelona for a week when it was all fresh, and I’d been looking forward to trying the GPS on navigating a foreign city. I could see the maps alright, but the core GPS feature of picking out which spot on that map I was currently on plain never worked for me.

The build quality feels cheap, and the double-slider mechanism is worse than useless. The only thing it does for me is accidentally slide out the wrong way every other time I pull the phone out of my pocket, with the result that the music player, which I neither use nor want, opens up, and I now have to wait another 3-5 seconds before the phone is ready to respond to what I pulled it up for.

I could go on and on, but the harsh reality is that it’s an amazingly poor product. When you add to that the price tag, it’s a disgrace. The iPhone is currently $399 without the plan, while the N95 is double that and up.

And Apple has just gotten started. If you look at how they introduced the iPod, they’re guaranteed to introduce new models pretty fast – new colors, new features, smaller phones, cheaper phones. They’re going to own a huge chunk of the mobile phone market, and who’s going to challenge them? Nokia? SonyEricsson? Samsung? Hardly.

When you’re in doubt about whether to do something or not, often it will be because you haven’t taken a detailed and honest look at the pros and cons and reduced it to something your brain can handle.

But sometimes, you intuitively know what the right choice for you is, and your doubt is this voice in your head saying “ah, but I really should”, or “I can’t let her down”, or whatever it’s saying.

When that’s the case, try this simple trick: Ignore the doubt, and follow your heart.

Fear is a powerful feeling. But despite its power, it can be very hard to detect.

Fear comes in many forms. Fear of dying, fear of missing a deadline, fear of getting fired, fear of losing a loved one, fear of some accident happening, fear of a startup failing, fear of rejection, fear of being hurt, fear of what other people might think. There’s all kinds of fears, and you’re almost always better off without it.

Some fears are even more insidious. If you’re afraid of hurting other people’s feelings, that’s an open invitation to anyone to export their fears to you. So not only do you have your own fears, you’re also going to have to deal with the fears of others. That’s just asking for trouble.

This has been the case with me. My wife is afraid of many things. I’m hardly afraid of anything, except letting her down. So when she’s afraid of just about anything, she needs me to do stuff to ease her fear, and so, bam, her fear was mine.

When you’re in fear, you’re reacting to the fear, you’re not thinking clearly. Your body is in a state of alert, trying to get away from whatever it is fearing. It’s not a very resourceful, creative state. It’s a state of stress. You’re not likely to find the best solution to whatever problem you’re facing.

There will of course be situations where fear is the right response, such as when a car is about to hit you. But it’s probably fair to say that 99% of all the fear people in the western hemisphere face is not of that kind. It’s of the unproductive kind.

The solution is to experience the fear directly. There’s always a direct sensory input to any emotion, including fear. It could be a vibrating feeling in your stomach. A pit in your chest. A tingling in the feet. Whatever it is, that’s what fear feels like for you.

So now that you know what it feels like, you’ll be able to recognize it next time. You can even become friends with it. It turns out that it’s not terribly dangerous. It’s just a feeling, a sensory input, it can’t really harm you.

Next, realize that the fear isn’t helping you. You may be afraid of failing, but it’s probably better to try than not try. And it’s definitely better to try without the fear.

A common reason to hold onto the fear is be the idea that your fear is helping you prevent whatever it is that you fear. For example that being afraid of failing is good, because it’s going to make you study harder to make sure you pass.

But that’s not true. So long as you’re in the grip of fear, you’re less likely to come up with the best course of action to prevent what you fear. You, you may study hard. But you will have part of your mental capacity occupied by the fear, which makes you less capable of study. And you’ll be less likely to see other opportunities, like perhaps whatever you’re studying is really the wrong thing for you to do.

You can’t make the fear go away. But you can give it space to just be, without reacting to it, without acting out of fear, just getting honest about the fear. The simple act of introducing this space between yourself and the feeling, this pause, is all it really takes to get back to consciousness and get out of the grip of fear. And slowly, over time, if you nurture it, it may reveal to you what it needs to let go of you, and you can be free of fear. But that’s a topic for another day.

One thing you can always do is feel gratitude for the life you have. Really take time to think about all the things you have: Your health, your family, your experiences, yourself. When you’re grateful, it’s humanly impossible to feel fear at the same time.

So your challenge for the next week is to try and notice each time you’re reacting out of fear. There’s usually a change in energy, maybe people are responding to you in a different way. And then take the opportunity to step back and familiarize yourself with your fear, and see if you can get conscious about it, instead of reacting to it. The more you do it, the easier it gets.

Let me know how it goes.

I need a t-shirt printed with type, just letters, on a high-quality shirt, and with only the letters printed on.

You know how some of the t-shirt printers will put like a sheet of paper on top of the t-shirt, and you can see the whole outline of that “paper” as a textured layer on top of the t-shirt itself? That’s what I don’t want.

I want just the letters that I want to print to be what’s added to the t-shirt.

And I want to be able to choose the color of the shirt, and the color and the face of the type.

Does anyone know who can do that? And in small quantities, too, like maybe just 5?