pinds.com

Pinds.com, Coach TV, Conscious Startups, Larspind.com.

Is that normal? :)

Seriously, though, while I’m totally committed to the concept I’m getting going with Conscious Startups, I’m considering whether I should just host it all right here on pinds.com, and have my personal brand be the umbrella for everything.

What are your thoughts?

Andre Agassi:

I feel an overpowering urge to forgive, because I realize that my father can’t help himself. My father is what he is, and always will be. And though he can’t tell the difference between loving me and loving tennis, it’s love all the same. Few of us are granted the grace to know ourselves, and until we do, maybe the best we can do is be consistent. My father is nothing, if not consistent.

Hey, if you’re following me here, but not over at Fearless Entrepreneurs, I just wanted to say that:

* You should – grab the RSS feed, and even better, subscribe and Like on Facebook.

* And you should come join us for the live broadcast tomorrow Friday April 8th 2011 at 10.30am PST.

Cheers!

//Lars

I was reading DHH’s tweets about Twitter’s new plans for making money (ads) and their crackdown on third-party apps, which prevent them from showing their own ads.

Twitter, just be honest: “The only way we can figure out how to make money is same ol’ display ads and we need to own the client for that”.

All these social apps pushing off making money so they can lure investors with “new monitization” seem to end up with 1995 display ads.

You can tell that Twitter wasn’t proud of admitting that they’re no different than any other eyeball engine out there by way of announcement

The reason it’s so hard to invent new clever monetization strategies is that there really isn’t an advertising problem anymore.

Here’s why.

What does it take to succeed today?

1. Get noticed
2. Get people to try your product
3. Get them to keep using your product
4. Get them to tell about your product to their friends

If you do that successfully, everything about the internet, social media, and the connectedness of people today work to your advantage, and you don’t need traditional advertising at all.

Just get your story out there, and it will spread. People will want to hear your story, and they’ll help you spread it. That’s how you reach people who aren’t actively looking for a solution.

And Google has pretty effectively solved the problem of reaching people who are actively looking for a solution to their problem.

So if you’re trying to connect with people who aren’t actively looking, and you don’t have those four things in place, then you’re in trouble, and now you need to rely on good old TV-style interrupt marketing, where you inconvenience and bother people who are actually trying to do something else – like reading a story, watching video, chatting with their friends, etc. – with your message, which they’re almost guaranteed to find to be a nuisance.

Of course, there’s no shortage of people who would rather throw money than ingenuity and creative thinking at the problem of reaching customers, so there’ll always be a market for interrupt-driven advertising.

But its effectiveness is dropping fast, and the annoyance your potential customers feel is increasing equally fast.

Smart businesses don’t have an advertising problem. Traditional advertising is like a tax on dumb businesses.

I’m watching the Daily Show from Wednesday where they discuss Obama’s State of the Union address, and in particular his “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment” analogy.

And they joke about his visions. As opposed to Kennedy’s let’s put a man on the moon and get him back safely before this decade is over, Obama’s vision is (not just, but also), as Jon Stewart puts it, that in 25 years 80% of us should live near somewhat faster trains.

It made me thinking that most of us actually want big, inspiring visions (that we can believe in, not those that are forced upon us as a way of extracting slave labor).

But most of us are also terribly afraid of staking out a vision that’s too big. What if we fail? That would be embarrassing. Make us look stupid, because we even for a second believed it was possible. Better to play it safe and make the vision smaller.

That may logically seem to make it more obtainable, but at the same time it also loses all its power to motivate, and then it ends up being even less obtainable than the bigger vision.

Shoot for the stars and you might miss and hit the moon, as the saying goes.

Also reminds me of Larry Page’s commencement address from two years ago, where he says:

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name. They all travel as if they are pack dogs and stick to each other like glue. The best people want to work the big challenges. That is what happened with Google. Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. How can that not get you excited? But we almost didn’t start Google because my co-founder Sergey and I were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program. You are probably on the right track if you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm! That is about how we felt after we maxed out three credit cards buying hard disks off the back of a truck. That was the first hardware for Google. Parents and friends: more credit cards always help. What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!

Mega-ambitious dreams. Uncomfortably exciting.

Words to live by.

But it takes much more courage than you’d think it does.

As you may know I’m in the process of moving to San Francisco in order to create a movement of fearless internet entrepreneurs.

I’ve always been inspired by the Basecamp Manifesto, and so I’ve been wanting to do something similar for a while.

Check out the Fearless Entrpeneur’s Manifesto now, and let me know what you think.

It’s a first draft, so there’s room for improvement.

And make sure you Like it on Facebook, join the mailing list, and follow on Twitter, if you don’t already.

Thanks for your support.

I’m looking forward to hearing what you think.

A while ago I read a story about a guy who just learned that he was going to win the multi-million jackpot in the state lottery.

As soon as he knew, but before anyone else knew, he made a list of all of his friends and maybe-friends.

And then he rang up each and every one of them, telling them a story of how he was in a huge pinch, and if they could loan him $2,000. Right now.

Everyone who declined were crossed off the list.

Armed with that knowledge, in the future, should anyone of them come begging, he’d know whom to trust and whom to lend money to.

There’s a ruthlessness to this, but there’s also a level of honesty that really speaks to me.

Right now, I’m going through some rough patches, and it’s oh so easy to call me out as the bad guy.

And everyone who does so, without consulting with me to hear my side of the story, gets crossed off the list. Without recourse.

It’s simple. It’s ruthless.

And you know what? It’s also intensely liberating. It’s a great feeling of relief, a release of pent-up energy.

Life’s too short to waste it on fake friends.

I mean, it’s okay to hang out with people who aren’t friends, so long as you don’t pretend they _are_ your friends.

But for the people you consider your friends, give them a chance to show their true colors, and then choose to spend your time with the people who truly care about you and let go of the rest.

I know others disagree and find the Kindle app on the iPad superior to the iBooks app, but I disagree.

And there are signs that Apple is declaring war on the Kindle app. That may be. I still wish that Amazon would step up their efforts with the Kindle app on the iPad. It’s pretty clear Amazon is not a software company, and it’s a shame, because I really want them to succeed with this.

Here’s my list of things that annoys me about the iPad Kindle app:

• Page turning is just too slow and jagged
• When you want to highlight or otherwise select a chunk of text, you Have to hold too still for way too long in order to get the selection going. Way too often, it misinterprets my gesture.
• It’s way too easy to accidentally turn a page when you want to select something near the edges of the page.
• It doesn’t show number of pages left in chapter. I really like this feature from iBooks. There’s an important clue here, in deciding when to stop reading and go to sleep.
• Going back then forward is not going to get you back to the same spot. This is a real bummer. iBooks seems to calculate page numbers and the start of each page when you change orientation or font size. Kindle insists on being fluing all the time and talk in terms of ‘location’ rather than page numbers. But the fact that going back a page, then forward a page very often won’t land you in the same place you started is super-annoying to me.
• Location numbers are completely meaningless to me. I much prefer iBooks’ page numbers, even if they’re not consistent between orientation or font size cahnges. They’re still more meaningful than location numbers, which are way too big to be remmebered, and have no meaning to me at all.
• If you want to select to the end of a paragraph you have to move your finger to the end of the last word on the last line, you can’t just drag it down the right edge, which is usually more natural. This is just weird. Shouldn’t be this way.
• When selecting from an emdash it considers the word before and the dash and the word after as one word. It ought to be smarter about this.

I really wish Amazon would take this platform just a bit more seriously.

Right now there are books that I have purchased for Kindle that I’ve re-purchased for iBooks, just because I much prefer the iBooks interface.

I also prefer how the iBooks library looks and works, the bookshelf view, but I didn’t put it in the list, because to me this is not in the same category of the other issues.

Steve Jobs is in my mind still the greatest entrepreneur alive. And the biggest inspiration I can think of.

I’m obsessed with entrepreneurs who seem to be connected to a higher source, who have found themselves and are truly being themselves, who follow a strong vision, who create with their entire beings, including mind, spirit, heart, and intuition.

And Steve Jobs is a prime example of that.

But it seems like something’s gone awry.

I find it terribly disappointing that Apple and News Corp have decided to collaborate on The Daily. I find Rupert Murdoch and News Corp to be pretty much as close to condensed evil as you can get. Yes, Rupert is a visionary and a great entrepreneur, but he’s using his powers for evil rather than good. He’s using them to manipulate and distort and destroy. His qualities are admirable, his intentions are disgusting.

And I find Apples’ recent supposed war on Kindle and competing e-readers more than a bit disturbing, too.

The whole issue about App Store rejections sometimes seeming so random, and without any opportunity for recourse or appeal is disturbing.

That said, though, while the criticism has been mounting over the past 2-3 years, almost all of the way, I’ve sided with Steve and Apple.

When it comes to their tight control over the App Store, I buy their argument about control over what comes out, in order to avoid apps that steal your personal data, will break on iOS updates because it uses private APIs, or infringes on other companies trademarks.

Regarding Flash, I wholeheartedly support their choices and buy their arguments. Flash seems to be a despicable piece of crap, especially on the Mac.

I absolutely love that Apple products going mainstream and the company making an absolute killing in the marketplace. They deserve it so much, and it’s proof that following your heart and intuition and sticking with your convictions actually pays off big time in the world of dollars and cents.

I think Apple is winning because their products are so much better, and I think they’re in their good rights to, and also objectively right to, exercise tight control over their platform. That’s what makes for the best product in the end.

But the success seems to have gone to their heads and corrupted some folks over at Apple, and the tight control over the iOS platform smells of monopolistic behavior and greed. Me no like.

I like platform owners to behave in the best interest of the customers going forward, allowing innovation and allowing others to make a nice living on top of their platform. With this kind of power comes an obligation let yourself be held to a higher standard.

Honestly, I don’t know where this is actually at, but I think the disturbing signs are increasing in strength, and it worries me, because I care so much about both the company and the man.

I’m believe that all illnesses are physical manifestations of emotional or psychological issues, and so I can’t help but wonder whether His Steveness’s health problems have anything to do with this, or if it’s something else entirely.

But it sure seems like something’s not in alignment with the Jobs I used to love and respect. And that’s very sad indeed.

What do you think?

Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, in fear.less magazine:

It’s like that famous cartoon from the new Yorker where a perplexed-looking person is standing in front of two closed doors. One door says “heaven” and the other says “Books about heaven.” It’s so much easier to read the books about heaven because you know, if I open that door and go to heaven, holy cow. I think we’re all terrified of that, to be what we’re meant to be. Because then all the responsibility lays on us and we can’t hide behind anything.

I love that metaphor, “Books about Heaven”.

But it’s true. It takes real courage to go through the door named Heaven.

It’s much less scary to just do what you’re trained to do, to do what someone else has done before you, to do what you already know how to do, than it is to go out and do your own thing, to create your art, to live your personal legend, to follow your personal calling.

What if you fail? What if you’re rejected?

If you haven’t done it yet, there’s probably a reason why, and that reason is fear.