I really believe that. It’s something I learned both viscerally and intellectually many years ago. While doing a lot of reading and thinking about myself and my mindset, I came across the story of Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor who wrote about his experience and developed a philosophy around it. His ability to maintain mental strength and optimism in the most dire of situations put things in perspective for me. His focus on controlling his mental state, even when the rest of his life was dictated to him, was inspirational. It clarified months of thinking and reflection and I don’t think I’ve ever been the same since.

On the 4th, I headed out on a run and got to thinking about the 4th of July and what it means to me, as an American. I thought a lot about what I want for myself and my ability to achieve those goals. I dwelled on the fact that freedom of the mind, in a country that fosters such freedom, changes how I think about life and its possibilities. Our good fortune in the United States comes from the fact that the right mindset, in conjunction with the structure of our legal and economic systems, promotes innovation, creation and constant renewal. 

However, that freedom and structure comes with a price: self-motivation. In an environment where so much is left free and unregulated, success is not guaranteed. Arguably, “success” becomes an always out of reach target because the process of definition becomes more challenging. When your peers are constantly re-defining success using their own imaginations and your vision of success morphs over time, freedom of the mind can often feel like a burden.

I think that most of us have times in our lives when we forget what it takes to make the most of our freedom. We forget that with the opportunity of a free mind and a society that supports it, we have to work to focus that mind and achieve. With all that we have around us, we forget that we have to go earn what we want out of life.

As I ran and thought about my own ideas of success, I pondered a question: With my idea of success inevitably in flux, how can I be confident that I’m utilizing my freedoms?

Our mental boundaries define us.

If freedom is typified by a lack of limitations on your actions, thoughts and outcomes, your own boundaries are the primary limitations. When your mind is the largest determinant of your happiness, your imagination an engine of possibility and your society a loosely organized support structure for the fulfillment of imaginations, YOU are the only one really holding yourself back.

When our thinking is small and narrow, so are our goals. The freedom to define ourselves and our ideas of success is also the freedom to limit ourselves with our thinking. When we set goals and seek to achieve them, it’s important to know that we’re both drawing lines of accomplishment and lines of limitation. Our true freedom is highlighted when we outperform against our own goals. When we regularly remind ourselves of the fact that we set limitations that can and should be broken, I think we embrace our freedom by recognizing the role we play in actualizing it. Through the process of regularly resetting the boundaries in our mind, we change our view of our limitations.

Which is how my target run of 9 miles became an 11.5 miler. On the 4th of July, I needed to remind myself to set goals and to outperform them when possible, because that’s part of what it means to me to be an American. 

The way in which Nick Vujicic faces his challenges inspires me, I hope it inspires you as well.

I do a lot of thinking about the economy, the stock market and how to build great businesses. Like Howard Lindzon says, Twitter’s killed my blog too, but I need to remedy that. Let’s combine some humor (not mine) and insights (hopefully mine ). Here are some interrelated observations in my head right now:

• As I work on building ideas & companies of my own while watching politicians, media pundits and anal-ysts (they charge people for predictions they don’t follow or stand behind, WTF is going on here??) futilely attempt to make sense of what’s going on in the midst of our globe’s financial tornado I think to myself: these guys are talking too damned much.
• Credit was built on trust. When credit was invented it was highly controversial for a lot of reasons, but one was because of something we seem to have forgotten: money is based on trust as well.
• I don’t think any of us should trust a single bank until they can prove to us that they’re trustworthy again, individually and in aggregate. The Government’s actions aren’t fucking helping make us trust them any more, so their involvement is mostly absurd. The trust we’re talking about isn’t trust that they’ll lose all our money, it’s that they don’t know what the hell they’re doing it and are COSTING US ALL MONEY. I don’t trust them to not gamble all of our aggregate profits away.
• Profitable companies that have massive amounts of cash, no debt and high margins should be getting reamed for hoarding their cash unintelligently, as many of them are doing. Profits are to re-invest in your business, your ideas and your future.
• Assets and people are on a fire sale right now, why aren’t winner companies investing? Microsoft, Google, eBay, Yahoo, et al are announcing layoffs and basically indicating that they’re either: a) afraid of using the word “fire” and lying about layoffs or b) making decisions in reaction to the stock market, as opposed to making decisions based on plans and opportunity. To which I say: you all need to step up to the plate and be leaders right now.
• If you’re pissed off, bummed out, frustrated or just plain confused, remember one thing: you can work harder. Step up and be a leader in your own life.
  

Last night’s South Park episode was funny and unrelenting in pointing out the stupid pyramid of lies we see around us. I recommend watching it and thinking about it in the context of our ongoing credit crisis.

South Park - “The Pinewood Derby”

A few choice quotes:

Dedicated to Iceland’s defunct economy: “Hey guys, Finland’s dead…. Hey guys, somebody better break the news to Norway, they were pretty close.”

To all of the politicians and bankers who think they should talk about transparency but not actually provide it: “And if I’m not honest now, I’ll have to keep this lie going on forever and it’ll just grow and grow.”

To anyone who thinks that “solving” the credit problems facing our globe isn’t within our power: “There is no space jail and space cash is only worth what YOU decide it’s worth. I mean, come on, how stupid is your species?”

I’ve been following Gary V. for about a year now, seeing how he markets himself and his business. I’ve been impressed with his energy, enthusiasm and his really impressive grasp of how to use the Internet to communicate with people and build an audience. The theories in my head often play out, in the real world, through his actions. Watching him gets me fired up to go get more real shit done, so hopefully watching this interview might have the same impact on you

(PS: By the way, he’s not bullshitting about his work ethic and getting through his email. I emailed him recently and heard back within a day, it was pretty shocking.)

• Facebook/Twitter/Ning/LinkedIn and what it means to be socially connected in today’s digital environment
• Why Andy Grove and Jeff Bezos are alike
• Why Marc praises Bill Gates, rather than badmouthing him
• What it means for newspapers that they continue to get 90% of their revenues from print (hint, it’s a big obstacle)

Marc’s a very smart guy who’s been part of much of the Internet’s development and evolution. If you’re at all involved in online business and innovation, I highly recommend the 54 minutes.

Hat tip to Brad Feld, who said the same thing a while back and introduced me to the video

That’s right, they should support Windows – for developers.

What Apple is doing with its App Store and the iPhone OS revisions is creating the market for developers who create and sell mobile apps… on Apple’s platform of course. Learning from the PC battles, they’ve quite obviously focused on the idea that more apps = more ways to meet consumer needs and therefore, it should result in more revenue for Apple from their primary customers: Consumers.

Given that dynamic, it makes very little sense that only those with Apple machines (and yes, some folks on Unix/Linux..) can develop iPhone applications. Since the predominant operating system is Windows, doesn’t it make sense that you should support all of the developers who are on Windows? (I know, I know, since when does Apple make sense to anyone but themselves?)

In all of the blogs and reporting covering the lead-up to today’s announcement, I’ve been pretty shocked that this issue hasn’t been turned into a larger piece of the conversation. Apple’s addressable developer market is MUCH smaller than it could be. Ultimately, the other players in the market are all going to be competing for developers alongside Apple.  Although Apple’s device and platform might be much better, if they’re not supporting Windows developers, they won’t be tapping into the largest pool of developers.

What’s really interesting about this glaring lack of Windows support is how easily we can draw parallels between this situation and previous Apple products and their associated growth. If we just pull up the unit sales charts for the iPod and for Mac computers over the past several years we can point to inflection points that coincided with providing support for Windows.

Here, take a look at the iPod sales chart:

On October 16, 2003, Apple announced the release of iTunes for Windows, which meant that Windows PC owners could now purchase and manage their iPods (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/oct/16itms.html).  I’ve highlighted that quarter above and while I won’t say it was the ONLY thing that led to a change in the iPod’s sales trajectory, it certainly would appear to have coincided with a new sales trend. Up until that point in time, the iPod was really just a blip on the MP3 market radar.

Next, let’s take a look at the sale of Mac Computers:

During the first week of April, 2006, Apple announced that it would release a piece of software it called “Bootcamp” on its Intel-powered computers. Bootcamp was meant to enable the use of Microsoft Windows on Macs, a pretty wild idea at the time. I decided to purchase some Apple stock, based on that announcement, hypothesizing that it would increase the addressable market for Apple computers and boost their sales. Taking a look at the absolute growth in units sold, that hypothesis has been proven out nicely ☺ (note, I no longer own that stock).

I want to be clear: I don’t think it’s fair to attribute either iPod or Mac sales growth solely to Windows-related accessibility. Instead, I’d like to suggest that being accessible via Windows is clearly beneficial and could prove to be transformative to Apple’s ultimate goal: iPhone and iPhone-related sales.

As an investor, an iPhone owner and someone who’s working on mobile app development, I look forward to the day when Apple looks at these realities and agrees with me :-).

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