Lars Pind

For way too long I had way too much cash sitting in the bank, simply because I didn’t know what to invest it in. And it wasn’t because I didn’t do any research – I read a bunch of books, I asked around, and I even took a class, but I still didn’t know what I was doing. But now I do, and I’m writing this post to share what I’ve learned in the hope that others can save some trouble and blind alleys.

What I learned from Peter Lynch was that in the long term, investing in the stock market beats bonds hands-down, even if you were unlucky enough to invest at the peak right before the crash in 1929, you’d be back in the black in just a few years. Also, he encourages you to use your personal knowledge of companies and businesses when investing.

What I learned from William O’Neil was that that kind of speculation and trying to spot patterns in the movements of stock prices is something I don’t have the patience for. And the whole thing felt scammy – you’re encouraged to get his Investor’s Business Daily paper and software to really follow the system. No thank you.

But it wasn’t until I read the essays of Warren Buffet that things started to make sense. I didn’t even have to read the whole thing, his philosophy is so clear and simple. That’s what I’ve adopted. If you’re going to take advice from someone, Warren Buffet is not a bad mentor to choose.

Basically the idea is this:

First, invest only in good stocks, with good stocks being companies whose business you understand, ideally whose products you use, with competent and honest management, and with good long-term prospects, and buy at a good price. But if you have to give up on one of them, give up on low price. You should think of it as buying a part of the underlying company, as if you were a large corporation buying a subsidiary company.

Second, buy to hold at least 10 years. If a stock is not worth keeping for 10 years, it’s not worth owning for 10 seconds.

Third, ignore Mr. Market. Mr. Market is this character who comes to your door each day saying “I’ll buy your stock or sell you mine at so-and-so price.” Mr. Market is way too emotional. Some bad news, and he’s willing to sell at a ridiculously low price. A piece of good news, and his prices shoot up.

Markets fluctuate, and nobody can predict those fluctuations. And I certainly don’t have the time or patience to try. But in the long term, the stock price will tend to approximate the real value of the company. So if you buy shares in a company that has great long-term prospects and hold them for a long time, then the market’s price for the stock is almost guaranteed to increase.

One thing that happens when you realize that the stock’s worth is not its market price, and that is you get happy when the price of your stock drops. Why? Because that means you can get more of this wonderful stock even cheaper. It’s just like if you really enjoy a good wine, and the price drops. Great, I can get more for less money! Stocks are the same in the short term.

The final piece of the puzzle for me was that I was entering so late in the market cycle. What if I bought just as the market peaked? Is it just about to peak now? Someone must know! So I asked a friend who’s a professional stock broker, and she told me that – duh! – nobody knows. And nobody can know what’s going to happen tomorrow or in the next 6 months. I had this belief that everyone else knew, and I was the only one left out. But if she really had no clue, then no-one does.

So don’t try to time the market. At the end of the day, you have the cash when you have it, and unless you want to keep it in the bank as cash and let inflation and fees eat it up, you have to invest it in the market that is. And if you’re investing for at least 10 years, then you’re always better off putting it in stocks than bonds.

So I let go of trying to time my purchase, and just went for it. I picked 6 companies, half US, half Danish, that I like and admire and want to own part of. I’d prefer to narrow it down to even fewer, but there’s a silly law here that you can’t have more than 20% of your retirement funds in one stock. And now, when I have cash, I buy one of those, whatever the market price.

Okay, one thing I do do to time my buys. Whenever the stock price drops because Wall Street gets nervous over something that I think is bogus, I’ll check if I have spare cash lying around and go buy.

The nice thing about a long-term strategy like this is that you don’t have to watch the stock price on a daily basis. And when you do check up on the stock price, it’s without the emotional roller-coaster. Price dropped? Great! Let’s buy! Price went up? Great.

I got to test this lack of fear back in August during the subprime crisis, when my portfolio was down 5% from the purchase price, and it looked like I had indeed bought at the peak. And I really was completely calm. And after explaining a few things, my wife was, too :)

Et lille reklameindslag for Ole Meldgaard, en ualmindelig tekstforfatter.

Han har skrevet TV-serier (Taxa, Forsvar, og andre), noveller, og en hel del reklametekster. Mest af alt er han bredt begavet. Hofnar, kalder han sig. Se dig omkring på sitet, det giver en god fornemmelse af hans stil. Giv ham et kald, hvis du har en værdig opgave.

(Full disclosure: Ole er min kones onkel og jeg har hjulpet med hjemmesiden.)

A friend points out that this Myers-Briggs Type Indicator business is “pseudoscientific junk”, and “completely bogus”. And that that goes for similar personality tests like the one our coach, Rachel, had us do back then in LA.

I’m thankful he did, so I can get a chance to respond and explain how I’m using it.

Whether or not it’s generally a correct tool yielding true results is not terribly relevant to me. What is relevant is that Rachel’s test made me realize something that I knew to be true. And similarly, finding out my own MBTI helped me see some strengths in me that I’d tucked away and that when pointed out, I knew to be true that I had.

The point is, only things that we believe to be true will cause a reaction. If the test had said I was a woman or had pink hair, I would just have shrugged and ignored it, because I know I’m not and I don’t.

Now, it might be that you react because you have a belief, but the belief is false. Many people, for example, get upset when someone tells them or indicates to them they’re not okay. That’s because they themselves believe they might not be okay. If instead they had a belief that they were completely okay, then they’d just shrug and ignore it. A belief that you’re not okay is obviously false, but the belief still causes the reaction.

So it might be that these two tests expose false beliefs rather than true ones. But that is useful, too. If they’re there, and they’re false, getting them exposed so you can look at them and realize they’re not true is a good thing. If they’re untrue, you should find out what’s true instead, so you can replace the false belief with what you know to be true.

There’s another, equally important value of MBTI, which is to expose the differences in people. I frequently use the four MBTI letters as a way to quickly take stock of another person. Is he introvert or extrovert? Intuitive or sensing? Thinking or feeling? Judging or perceiving?

It’s not about boxing people in, but in exposing real differences. If you’re an N (intuitive) and an S (sensing) discussing something, you can get really sidetracked unless you recognize what’s going on. Similarly with the others – thinking vs. feeling. Or J (judging) vs P (perceiving). My wife’s more on the judging side, she wants to make a decision quickly, and she wants me to, too. I’m strongly on the perceiving side, I want to avoid making a decision till the last minute.

These are not set in stone. You can change your behavior, or you may act differently in different situations. And I know people that are almost impossible to classify along these dimensions.

I also know there are some specific beliefs underlying both my wife’s J and my P, and those may change over time. But it’s still a useful tool for simply naming what’s going on, so you can step out of the argument and resolve it at a different level. And there’s many other ways to do that, and you don’t need a specific tool to do it, but the MBTI is just so darn convenient and easy to remember.

So I would agree that one shouldn’t put much faith in the MBTI, but that doesn’t mean you have to throw it out completely. It’s still valuable as a tool when used with common sense.

One specific technique I’ve learned from my coach Bruce is really simple and very powerful: Simply notice where your thoughts come from.

First, quiet your mind and body by closing your eyes and taking a few deep breaths. Think of something that happened in your childhood, and notice where the thought appears. Physically, in your brain.

Now think of something that’s going to happen in the future. Your daughter’s first day of school, or something else big and far into the future. Notice where that thought appears.

Think of what others might say if you did something that would upset someone, and notice where that thought or voice comes from.

Now pay attention to your heart. Notice how that feels.

If you can actually feel it, it’s very powerful. It may take some practice. The sensation may be quite weak. It may require that you meditate first to really quiet your mind.

For me, it was quite clear where the different thoughts came from, and it came in handy last week when I wanted to get better at trusting my intuition and ignoring useless worry about what other people might think or say.

It turns out that my intuition comes from my heart, and the concerns over what other people might think sit smack in the middle of my right ear. So it’s as simple as listening to my heart and ignoring the voice in the right ear.

No need to make things more complicated when they really aren’t. :)

It’s common for the rewrite of a piece of software or the redesign of a device to have unintended side-effects. It’s all the little things that the original team learned through trial-and-error, and that were probably never documented well that get lost. It may be an intricate bug that was fixed and now reappears, or it may be some corner case that is no longer covered.

But sometimes what gets lost is something as central as the user experience. Maybe the new design team simply forgot to test the device with actual users, and they forgot to quizz the old team for what they knew.

Case in point, the credit card terminals at most stores were recently replaced with a new device to accommodate new chip cards, because they’re supposedly more secure. So the gain was security, but what was lost was the user experience.

It used to be that you could swipe your card, enter your pin, at which point the amount would be ready for your confirmation, so you hit “Confirm”, put the card back in your pocket, and you were done. It was all one smooth movement, a natural flow.

Now, a number of pauses have been inserted at arbitrary points, which breaks the flow. First you insert your card, then wait. Then you get to enter your pin, then wait. Then the amount shows up, and you can hit Confirm, and you wait. Then it says it’s ready, and you get to take your card back. If you take it too soon, the process is interrupted, and you have to start from scratch. If you take it too late, the machine starts an annoyed and impatient beeping.

It’s gone from a flow with no pauses, to a process interrupted by three pauses of varying lengths.

From a technical perspective it would seem like it should be possible for the device to start accepting my pin code and simply buffer it somewhere until it’s ready to process it, thus eliminating the first pause. And it should be possible to have the amount ready immediately as well. That would eliminate another pause.

The only inherent difference between the old and the new system is that the chip requires that you leave the card in the machine rather than keeping it in your hand. That means one pause is required, the final pause. But the rest are superfluous.

Three possible explanations come to mind.

The first is that there’s some technical reason that I’m not aware of that makes those first two pauses unavoidable or the cost of doing so prohibitive. Perhaps there are many card types that don’t require a pin, and determining whether the card is of such a type takes at least 2-3 seconds?

The second is the conspiracy theory. Perhaps the banks have a financial interest in having fewer but larger transactions because they’re costly. By degrading the user experience people are encouraged to swipe their card less often.

But maybe the team simply has a disregard for the user experience, and the banks have a monopoly, so nobody can do anything about it.

Does anyone know?

There’s many ways to use a coach, and whatever’s right for you is right for you. But this is how I am and have been using my coaches.

Right now, I have a coach named Bruce that I talk to once a week, at the same time each week. That may seem like a lot, but so far, in just 9 sessions, I have:

• Gotten rid of the feeling of being not okay
• Learned how not to feel sorry for myself
• Gotten completely comfortable meditating
• Spontaneously broken into laughter out of the sheer joy of being a few times
• Learned to trust my intuition and ignore the voices that quip about what others might think
• Learned to notice where, physically, the various voices in me come from, eg. right ear, top left back part of my brain, my heart, etc.
• Learned when and how to say no when other people ask things from me
• Learned to accept reality and drop the shoulds, the ought tos, and the judgment
• Resolved some specific issues in my relationship with my wife, my daughter, and my mother.

Not bad, if you ask me.

I see the weekly sessions as an anchor that prevents me from drifting too far away. When I’m on my own, it’s easy to get caught up in habitual thinking, in reacting to whatever happens to me, to just let the days pass without really being present. Having a weekly call with my coach ensures that I won’t.

The whole day up to the call, which is always in the evening because Bruce lives in California, I have it in the back of my mind that I’m going to talk to him tonight. I pause every once in a while to reflect on what’s happened during the week, when I was present, and when I was not so present. I think about what’s preventing me from being present right now.

Some sessions I’ll bring up something specific, but other sessions I’ll just call and have nothing in particular to talk about. Both have their charm. Sometimes the issues I might bring up would just be minor distractions. Sometimes not brining them up would cause them to be a distraction. But it’s always easy to fill the time.

After the call I feel relieved, peaceful, present, joyful, and generous. And usually there’ll be something to practice during the week, most often something to do in the morning as part of a meditation, and I’ll take that with me all through the week.

It’s an odd and subtle process, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like much happened, but when I look back at what has changed for me over those 9 sessions, it’s pretty amazing.

I’ve used other coaches, at other times. One was through my employer, and was a weekly call, but when I left the job, it ended. And another was on a need-basis, where I’d call to make an appointment whenever something specific came up. Both worked fine and caused some major shifts in my life.

But this is how I’m doing it at the moment, and I wanted to share it with you, since I know that how to best use your coach is something that’s on a lot of people’s minds.

This weekend marked a turning point for me. What happened? We cleaned the attic. It’s the canonical mental hygiene act, and it worked. I hadn’t anticipated that this would happen, but it did.

I got rid of a whole bunch of programming books. All sorts of deep, theoretical, analytical stuff. Out went Gang of Four, Domain Driven Design, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and the entire Don Knuth collection. I didn’t burn them, I gave them to a friend who’s more into that stuff than me these days. But it marks an important shift for me.

Back in 2001, Richard Buck, my then boss at ArsDigita, hired a coach to do a one-day workshop with the 16-person core development team. The coach gave us a test, which produced two personality type for each of us: One was the type we were naturally, the other was the style we had adopted.

Mine showed that I was naturally highly intuitive, but had adopted a strongly analytical style. The rest of the engineering team were very analytical by nature, except for my boss and one other team member.

That hit me like a brick. I knew it to be true, yet I had no idea what to do about it. It isn’t until today that I feel like I’ve resolved this. It’s not that I can never be analytical again – I don’t plan on losing the skill – it’s just that I don’t have to quite as much.

This actually represents a deeper shift that’s happened over the summer: I no longer have a need to fix myself.

I used to have this belief that I was broken in some way, and that I needed to learn what was in those books in order to be whole, to be okay, to be a success. And I had to watch myself, or others might find out that I was broken.

That feeling has served me well. I’ve learned a ton of stuff, and before that, it kept the getting beaten up at school to a minimum. But it’s no longer serving me, so it was time to let it go. And I can’t tell you how good that feels.

Now when I look at those books, I couldn’t care less what’s in them.

It’s not that I stopped reading. I still do, but a lot less than I used to, and I get more pleasure out of the ones I do read. Most of the books I used to swallow raw now bore me to tears to even look at.

Instead I do yoga, i coach, I work, and I just enjoy being who I am, no need to fix anything. And that’s not too bad for cleaning out the attic.

Decisions can be tough. We see good and bad stuff with any of the choices in front of us, and we can’t seem to get our heads around them all and balance them and find out what the right thing to do is.

Well, help is on the way. As part of my coaching education, I’ve learned a specific tool for making decisions, and now I’m looking to get a little practice doing it.

Like all of coaching, It’s simple, but effective. It’s helps you get clear on the pros and cons of the decision, and to reduce it to what’s truly important, so you can make the decision and be at peace with the consequences, good or bad, so you don’t have to revisit or second-guess your decision later on, and so you can explain it to others with integrity.

So if you have a decision you want to make, get in touch and I’ll be happy to help you, either in person, or over the phone or Skype. For free.

I’m glad Tim Ferriss brought up the generalist issue today, as it’s something that’s been on my mind lately.

It started last weekend when my wife’s uncle looked at me and said “you’re a generalist”. He went on to explain that being the generalist was the approach he took in his work as a copywriter. He’s a better writer, because he’s a generalist. Everyone claims to be a generalist, but most are really not.

And I’d have to agree that I am a generalist. Writing, programming, playing classical and jazz piano, photography, yoga, coaching, design, food and cooking, entrepreneurship. These are all things I care deeply about, and spend time on. And I’ve long been fascinated with renaissance people, like James Dyson, who does both engineering and art/design as one integrated act of creation.

But somewhere inside of me, the belief lived on that being a generalist was bad. That in order to be successful I had to put all the other things aside – music, photo, food, etc. – and just focus on a few of them – programming and entrepreneurship, but that once I had achieved success though that, I’d spend more time on these other things. So I did that for about 5 years, and guess what? It didn’t work so well.

I can trace the belief back to at least one specific experience. When I first arrived in New York in 1999, I looked for jobs with the generalist hat on. I told potential employers that I could do database programming, HTML, design, and photography, but they didn’t buy it. One potential employer even had me replicate a stupid HTML table using Notepad, which showed how grossly they’d “misunderestimated” my capabilities. Then I met Philip Greenspun, who saw my potential as a programmer and hired me. So I learned the lesson that I needed to sell my skills as a programmer, and keep the other things to myself. It worked at the time, but its utility has certainly dropped.

It’s been a great relief for me these past few months to just let go of that, and indulge a little. For the first time in 5 years, I’m not in 100% “I must make this business a success” mode. I’m doing some programming to pay the bills, with a client I’ve had for 5 years and really like and enjoy working with, and then I spend my free time doing lots of photography, coaching, yoga, reading, writing, supporting my wife with her startup, and just enjoy being and learning and loving. It’s awesome.

So I’m glad that both Ole and Tim brought it out into the open, and clarified that the “jack of all trades, master of none” is a false association, because it has shattered the last thread that made me hold on to the notion that there was somehow something wrong with this approach to life. There’s not.

Stay open. Master different things. Trust that what you enjoy doing will benefit you somehow. Don’t stay with something just because you think it’s probably the right thing to do. Beware of the “when I … then I” pattern of thinking that says when I’ve achieved this, then I can get to do that thing I really want. Find a way to go do it now.

Strange name.

We went to see some friends today with their first child, born just three days ago. It was a great preparation for our number two in just two months, but it also reminded me of what you could call the post-partum bubble, that is, the happy and blissful bubble most couples with a newborn find themselves in for the first few weeks.

And I realized what that bubble is about. The pleasant feeling arises because future and past ceases to exist, or at least to matter. You simply don’t care about your career or your future or your stocks or anything else. It’s just you, your partner, and your baby. The outside world can go to hell, and you simply don’t care.

In a sense, it’s enlightenment, awakening, the power of now. It’s the state you’re in when you’re fully present in this moment right now, enjoying it, scared, confused, tired, sure, but fully there to live it.

Call it what you will, it’s the state we all long to be in.

As a side note, our friends have a copy of the below photo hanging on the wall, and I’ve always been very fascinated with it. Only now did I realize that it’s the highest-priced photo in the world. I didn’t realize it was quite at that level, but it is an amazing photo when it’s printed in a large size.

It’s both surprising and not so surprising that David Lynch, the film maker, would be a strong believer in meditation. Surprising because of the violence in his films. Not surprising because of the depth and sometimes weird dream-like atmosphere of the films.

But according to What is enlightenment? magazine, he’s been meditating twice a day since 1977, and he’s even written a book on meditation.

How’s that for dedication?

Woa, new, cleaner look for Amazon.com. Interesting hover-effect on the logo linking to the home page. I’ve never seen that done anywhere before. It’ll be interesting to see whether their A/B testing causes it to stay or go, and whether it spreads to other sites and becomes a new convention.

Does this also happen to you?

You open up your computer to do some specific task, only to completely forget about that task as soon as you open up your computer?

30 minutes, 5 emails, a few RSS feeds, and perhaps a blog post later, you get up to fetch a cup of tea, notice the paper on the desk that says what you were supposed to do, and go – oops, I forgot about that.

Do you know the feeling?

It happens to me all the time ;->

A brilliant project by photographer Ellen Ugelstad depicting people and their shoes. I love how well it works to see the upper torso and face, and then a closeup of their shoes beneath.

Via Kottke (welcome back, Jason).

I’m fascinated with people who worked for their achievements. When I’m caught up in the fixed mind-set, I tend to think that those whose work I admire had it easy, they had the talent, they didn’t need to struggle, or at least not as much as I would have to.

So it’s a helpful reminder to come across quotes like this, from Image Makers Image Takers’s interview with Alec Soth:

How did you overcome your fear of photographing people?

I knew that the most powerful thing in photography is photographing people, specifically the face. Diane Arbus, August Sander … I just responded to those pictures and to avoid it would just be sad, so I had to confront it. I started out with kids because that was less threatening. I eventually worked my way up to every type of person. At first, I trembled every time I took a picture. My confidence grew, but it took a long time. I still get nervous today. When I shoot for assignments I’m notorious amongst my assistants for sweating. It’s very embarrassing. I did a picture for The New Yorker recently and I was drenched in sweat by the end and it was the middle of winter. It’s ridiculous.

There’s something very sweet and humbling about it. I find it difficult to photograph people, but somehow I always thought it was just me. To realize that someone as accomplished as Alec can have what appears to be an even harder time photographing people is uplifting. It means there’s hope.

It means, perhaps the growth mind-set theory is true, after all, and we can learn what we choose to work on.

Mark Hurst mentions how he sends a personal welcome message to each subscriber to his newsletter, asking what they do and how they learned about the newsletter. What a good idea to do that. It starts building a relationship instantly. It’s the little things.

Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico launches A Brief Message, a new design opinion site.

It’s looking really sharp and might be just the thing that I, an interested non-designer, might get around to actually reading and getting some value out of. Nice work, Khoi and Liz.

(Disclaimer: I had a tiny teensy hand in its creation for a few hours last night.)