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Last summer I was selected to be a beta tester for a new course that Ramit Sethi is launching at IWT. The course is called "Zero to Launch" and it is all about how to start your own online business from absolute scratch. I learned a lot and it was a really intense experience. I made a ton of mistakes. In this post I want to give my review of the ZTL course. (Five word review: awesome, but not for everyone).
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Before I even start, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. This is not an advertisement. Nobody is paying me to post this or to write it. If you feel like I am trying to sell you into this course, or if it feels scammy or scummy, then just close this browser tab and move on.

Let me repeat that. If you feel like I am trying to get you to buy into Zero to Launch, and you start feeling a little creepy, like this is a sales pitch or something, I want you to stop reading, close this browser window and DON'T SIGN UP FOR THE COURSE. This is not an ad, I am not trying to sell you anything. Please read the full disclosure at the bottom of the page as well.

If you have ever thought of starting an online business, you probably fall into one or two camps:

1. You know exactly what you want to do, what service you want to provide, and how you want to make and market your products.

2. You love the idea of having your own business, but you really aren't clear on how to start one or how to make it successful.

If you are in camp #1 then ZTL may or may not the right course for you. If you already have very strong ideas about what you want your online business to look like, then you are operating at a serious disadvantage. The very first lesson in ZTL is about how to find and pick the right idea for your business. And then, how to refine it, and get it exactly right. Expect to spend several days just exploring the ramifications of your idea, what is good about it, what is terrible about it, what are all of the things you NEVER thought of in a million years, yet will completely sink you before you even start.

If you have a very rigid idea of what you want your online business to be.... well, wait. Before I even get into that, for one thing, your idea is probably very dumb. ZTL is not some magic fairy dust you can sprinkle on a crummy idea and make it successful. Let me repeat that and make it really clear: if you think this course will let you take any idea you have and turn it into a successful online business, then you have it all wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are a TON of online business ideas out there that are terrible and will never make a dime.

Conversely, if you are flexible about your idea, or if you aren't even sure exactly what your idea should be, then that is a very good place to start from.

Hey, what if you already have an online information product business that is doing okay, but just not doing as well as you would like? In that case I would say you should seriously look ZTL. I mean, you might be one or two small tweaks away from massive success. After all, you are getting people to pay you money. That is a huge first step! I've seen some of the other students in the course go from being dead in the water to skyrocketing after making just a few critical messaging tweaks.

Next, let's talk about motivation. Why do you want to start an online business?

Let me put it this way. Zero to Launch is extremely focused on creating a successful online business. Successful, to Ramit, means you are making a lot of money. I think if you come into this course ready to work, and ready to pay attention, and ready to follow the ZTL system, then I think you will probably make quite a bit of money, hand over fist. But if you are motivated to create an online business for some other reason, like, you just want a nice hobby, and money is not a primary consideration for you, then ZTL probably isn't right for you.

Also, this is very important: this course is not for you if you want to start up your own electronic kit biz, or any other type of e-commerce site dealing with physical goods. What you need to do to create a successful kit biz is different than what you need to do for a successful business selling online courses, there's no way around that.

Overall, my experience with the course was great. I learned quite a bit, yes, but even more importantly, I learned what not to do. Seriously, I've saved myself MONTHS of effort and THOUSANDS of dollars by NOT wasting my time on a bunch of nonsense.

Sadly, I had to pull back from the beta test due to some health related issues in my family. So I don't have any amazing stories of awesome success with happy customers paying me a hefty income stream.

But if you want to see a successful case study, check out my friend James. I helped him create his videos with some technical advice and a little encouragement. (And he got me interested in Organic Chemistry! I call that a win-win!)

Here's the bottom line. Ramit gives away a lot of his material for free. Here, check out this post Ramit made about how to come up with a good online business idea. Check out the main Zero To Launch website. Read the case studies. Watch the videos. Go to the Youtube channel and check out the ZTL videos Ramit has posted. You can get a very good sense of what the course is all about just from what Ramit puts out there, for free. USE YOUR HEAD. Take notes and think about how you can apply anything you've learned to your own situation. Don't just watch it, put some work into it!

Once you have your notes, and you've given it all some good thought, and you put some work into it, ask yourself: how critical is it for me to learn more? When you know that, you'll know if this course is right for you.

[Full disclosure: although I was not paid for beta testing his course or writing this review, as a part of the whole beta testing process I received all of the material for free, and I am getting free access to the final version of the course.]

My mom taught my brother and I how to knit when we were little. It's been about 7-8 years since I picked up a set of needles, and I never was very good at casting on, so I went to Youtube (as one does) to find an instructional video.

I found this one.

It's great, the lady sounds just a smidge cranky that she has to go so slow. BUT it's perfect. I related to this method of casting on because it's very similar to a straight knit stitch (which is really, to be honest, what I do best.)

I used to be able to do all kinds of fun crazy patterns but hooooo that's been 20-25 years since I did anything like that. I started a washcloth just to get back in the swing of things, and I thought I would do a knit two purl two pattern to get things going. OH WOW did I mess it up so bad, I should have taken a picture. My coworker who knows nothing about knitting took a look and said "Oh, that's real bad man." But I just kept plowing through and now I have this big wad of cotton yarn that is, if you squint at it, vaguely rectangular.

Great interview with one of the founders of modern biology on how the culture of modern academia distorts and impedes scientific progress:

SB: Today the Americans have developed a new culture in science based on the slavery of graduate students. Now graduate students of American institutions are afraid. He just performs. He’s got to perform. The post-doc is an indentured labourer. We now have labs that don’t work in the same way as the early labs where people were independent, where they could have their own ideas and could pursue them.

The most important thing today is for young people to take responsibility, to actually know how to formulate an idea and how to work on it. Not to buy into the so-called apprenticeship. I think you can only foster that by having sort of deviant studies. That is, you go on and do something really different. Then I think you will be able to foster it.

But today there is no way to do this without money. That’s the difficulty. In order to do science you have to have it supported. The supporters now, the bureaucrats of science, do not wish to take any risks. So in order to get it supported, they want to know from the start that it will work. This means you have to have preliminary information, which means that you are bound to follow the straight and narrow.

There’s no exploration any more except in a very few places. You know like someone going off to study Neanderthal bones. Can you see this happening anywhere else? No, you see, because he would need to do something that’s important to advance the aims of the people who fund science.

I think I’ve often divided people into two classes: Catholics and Methodists. Catholics are people who sit on committees and devise huge schemes in order to try to change things, but nothing’s happened. Nothing happens because the committee is a regression to the mean, and the mean is mediocre. Now what you’ve got to do is good works in your own parish. That’s a Methodist.

You may have heard of Resting Bitchface Syndrome. If you aren't familiar with RBS, some people, when their facial muscles are completely relaxed, look like they are angry, frustrated, or depressed, even when they are relatively happy and content.

When I'm thinking deeply, I have a strong look of disdain on my face. In the more racially mixed areas of Minneapolis, while stopped at a light, when people walk across the crosswalk and make eye contact with me, this becomes a problem. Once I was afraid I was going to get my car smashed up.

A group of black teenagers was crossing the street. I was staring off into the distance thinking about some programming problem from work. I had a slight headache, which only makes the look on my face worse. Suddenly they just stopped in the crosswalk, just staring at me, angry. I didn't really notice at first, because, you know, I'm trying to figure out whether I need to add some additional methods to this data structure or if I can solve my problem without that extra work.

Suddenly I noticed what was going on. Instantly I froze my face. At this point I was making the squinty eyed look of pure disdain, looking right into the eyes of some seriously pissed off black teenagers, who have "can you believe this white motherfucker?" looks on their faces.

They are in front of my car. The light is green. I can't move until they do.

I rolled down my window and leaned out. "Can I help you?" I said in a slightly shaky voice, keeping my eyes squinted and face frozen. The two guys off to the side muttered something I couldn't quite hear. But the guy in the middle is just staring at me, slightly leaning on my car, still pissed.

"You would not believe how bad this fucking headache is." I said, entirely, in retrospect, truthfully.

Puzzlement, then smirks, then huge grins. They all looked at each other and shook their heads. "Take it easy man," the guy in the middle said, and they finished walking across the street.

I have a theory entirely of my own making. It goes like this:

The older you get, the weirder you get. (I want to pause here to note that by "weirder", I mean, generally, non-mainstream. "Weird" is not a pejorative in this essay, it's a simple descriptive term which means "not like everyone else.")

This is because the older you are, the more you have read, the more you have read, the more you know about all kinds of issues facing the world. Environmental issues, economic issues, labor injustices, gay rights, women's rights, men's rights, human rights, animal rights, food safety and nutrition, ocean pollution and overfishing, factory farms, there are so many things to be weird about! And when we read about all of these problems, naturally, we change our minds and attitudes toward the world we live in, giving up this kind of food or that kind of lifestyle, trying desperately to avoid being "part of the problem."

But, here's the key: everyone reads different things. Nobody has time to read it all! And much of it is contradictory anyway. So everyone gets weird in different ways.

For instance, my mom has really bought heavily into the Germ Theory of Disease. So much so, that when she eats french fries, she eats everything except the last bit that touched her hands. She refuses to eat the fry ends! Whereas I am the exact opposite. I think we need to eat lots harmless bacteria to stay healthy. As you can imagine, there are some slight incompatibilities in our approach toward food.

We're both weird about food in completely different, incompatible ways!

But like I said above, because there are so many causes and issues and scientific studies out there, there's far too much bad news to even glance at it all as it comes in, let alone internalize it and let change us. We all pick our battles in the war for Attention. And yet, it's very hard to remember that. Because there are so many things to be weird, non-mainstream, or even neurotic about, I think sometimes that the important thing is to remember that other people are weird and believe different things than you do, and that's okay.

For instance, we were at the state fair a few weeks ago, and my mom got a medium sized cup of french fries. It wasn't until she was almost done with the cup that I looked down and saw all of the fry ends -- piled up on my son's stroller tray, where he was happily chowing down! That, to me, was a real gesture of empathy and respect. "I believe this fry end is harmful, so harmful I will not even put it in my own body and yet, I will feed it to your two year old, because I know that you believe differently."

So now, when I am tempted to say something to someone else, like "Ocean overfishing is such an enormous problem facing the world today, how can you possibly eat that piece of cod?!", I try to remember to pause, stop, and ask the other person what kinds of issues they care about.

Maybe the key to solving some of these big problems isn't to convert everyone over to our own particular kind of weirdness. Maybe the key is finding other people whose weirdness is compatible with our own.

I have wanted to learn how to play the bass for quite a while. But I've never done anything about it because it all seems too intimidating. I'm afraid of messing up, so I don't start, so I don't get past the "I mess up everything!" phase.

Let me tell you about my ridiculous goal: I want to be able to play like James Jamerson. Some of you reading this, right now, are laughing at me, either hysterically, or derisively, or both at the same time (although I am not quite sure what that would sound like.) When I say "I want to be able to play like James Jamerson" I don't mean I want to play all of the Motown classics, note for note, so that I can play the bass exactly like he does. (Although I do have a partiality to I Was Made to Love Her, so I am probably going to have to learn that one at some point.)

No, what I mean when I say "I want to be able to play like James Jamerson" is I want to be able to improvise a bass line over a set of chords. This is still ridiculously ambitious, for a fella who would have a real hard time picking out a C# on the fretboard in under 6 seconds. But still, I'm not going to get anywhere sitting on my ass complaining about how hard something is that I want to learn.

I used to think that improvising was just, getting the notes in my head out of my head and on to the instrument. Maybe that is all it is, but something happens between my head and my hands. I mean, I know the notes in my head and what they sound like, but I have no idea how to make those notes with an actual, real, honest-to-God, made-out-of-wood-and-not-air bass.

I know for sure that I can play the root of the chord on the bass, that is the easy part. During the chord, I can also play the other notes in the chord. And, I have since come to learn (after googling a bit) that another thing you can do is figure out a few scales, and then you can apply those scales to certain chords. So for a certain set of chords in a major key, you can play the pentatonic scale starting on the root of the chord you are playing, and all those notes will sound good (most of the time.)

So I have made baby steps with learning scales. Chord theory. Things like that. One of the realizations I came to a few weeks ago is this:

There's 12 notes. That's all you got. That's all anyone's got. Everyone has got to form their own relationship with the chromatic scale. How you break it down, how you split it up, where you live in those 12 tones is entirely up to you and the scale.

So think about that. Let it really soak in. Because if all you are doing with your musical life is trying to play exactly like Mr. Awesome, and learn all of their solos note for note, and try to copy their relationship to the scale, man, I don't know, it seems to me like the only thing you're going to get good at is copying. I've done the slavish copying thing with other instruments, and it's a lot less useful than it looks.

Don't get me wrong, it's good to learn things from other people. One of the ways you can do that is to learn how they see the world through the music they create. You just have to balance the note-for-note copying with learning the fundamentals. That's a lesson I wish I would have learned a long time ago.

So that is where I am at right now. Figurin' out these notes. Tryin' to get to the point where I can know them all individually, and call them all by name, get to know their favorite ice cream flavors. Maybe someday we can be good friends instead of awkward acquaintances.

Man, I didn't even mean to tell you all that. Tonight I realized I have an even more fundamental problem with the bass, and I am going to have to tell you about that later, because it is already way past my bedtime.

2yo: "Thomas... robot?"
Me: "You want to know if Thomas the train is a robot?"
2yo: "Uh-huh."
Me (after thinking a bit): "No honey, Thomas can't be a robot, he doesn't obey the three laws of robotics."

This is an ancient Michigan Tech elixir for keeping warm when you have to spend all day outside. You can get everything you need at the local co-op.

1 quart of water
1 rounded tsp cloves
1 rounded tsp peppercorns
1/2 to 1 full stick cinnamon
A fair sized chunk of ginger (about thumb sized)
2 rounded tsp. peppermint
Milk
Maple syrup (REAL maple syrup!) or agave syrup

Crack the cinnamon into chunks with a hammer. Simmer cinnamon, cloves, and peppercorns in the water for about ten minutes. Thinly slice ginger and add it in. Simmer for another 5-10 minutes. Remove from heat, add peppermint. Steep for 5-10 minutes.

Strain out everything, return to pan, add milk and syrup to taste. You will probably have to add around half a cup to a full cup of milk, but add as much as you like. Real maple syrup is the traditional flavoring, but agave syrup will do in a pinch.

Put in a thermos and drink for as long as you are outside. It will keep you nice and warm. It's also absolutely wonderful when you are sick. The cinnamon really helps with throat problems.

Alternate directions: do not strain. Let cool, put in fridge overnight, and strain in the morning. It will be much stronger and more bitter. You will have to add more milk and syrup, to counteract the bitterness, but the final product is a little heartier.

Alternate alternate directions: Crack 1 rounded tsp cardamom pods, put them in with the cloves and peppercorns. Do not add ginger. Instead of mint tea, steep 2-4 tsp black tea for the recommended time for your particular tea. Strain, add milk and syrup as above. Now you have chai!

On Monday night I got to hang out with Ian and Dave of Down and Above. I made a couple of amps for them as Christmas presents and, well, between their schedules and my schedule, it took a while to come up with a mutually agreed upon time to hang out.

Here's Ian trying it out for the first time:

It was a lot of fun to hang out and get feedback on the Stella. Ian and Dave both really liked how it sounded at maximum volume levels. If you crank all the knobs, the Stella starts self-oscillating and sounding weird. But if you play a power chord through it, you get a super thick, fat fuzz. When you hold the sustain and let the chord naturally die out, the sound starts swelling and breaking up in a unique way that is hard to describe.

As a harmonica player, I don't crank it that high, since these kinds of volume levels lead to feedback problems. But for the guitar, it sounds awesome.

The nice thing is, the Stella doesn't start oscillating right away if you cut the note off, so you can get away with a little syncopation.

A little caveat: this is how it sounds if you power the Stella Amp with anything from 4.5-6 volts. At higher power supply levels, like 9 volts or so, it cuts out more instead of giving a nice sustained fuzz when playing it cranked. In the video above, the amp is running at 6 volts (4 AA batteries).

So I have been working like a madman getting ready for the Minne Faire. It's coming up in a week! April 13 and 14 at the Hack Factory.

I will have a booth again this year. If you are in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area you should come by and check it out. Last year I had a solar powered amplifier, this year I still don't know what I'm going to bring because I don't know what I'll have time to finish. One thing I am 99 percent done with is my prototype optical theramin:

It's a ton of fun. $8.00 if you buy a ticket online, $10.00 at the door. Kids under 15 get in free.