Chris "Mr. Moneyfingers" Haddad... Jeff Walker-Trained Product Launch Manager, Results-based marketing consultant, frankly-awesome direct response copywriter, strangely good dancer, capitalist hippie and all around great guy. On this site he shares all sorts of tips and tricks on how to make good money in bad times... opines fiercely on things that matter to him and occasionally goes a tad bit nuts. Plus he can do that thing with his eyebrow.
Steve Jobs will bite off your face if you mess with his iPhone Launch
Quick quiz: You walk up to Steve Jobs. You look him straight in the eye (aren’t you brave) and you say, with a lot of confidence and bravado in your voice, “Steve, you’ve got two choices:
Choice one is we cut off your left hand right here, right now, cauterize the wound on a hot car engine, add some nice seasoning and make you watch as we use your digits to feed our particularly carnivorous and hungry goldfish pet goldfish.
Choice two is we break Apple’s vaunted secrecy and security and actually let a fully-featured iPhone 4G prototype out into the wild MONTHS before you’re ready to launch the thing . . .
It was pretty to look at, sure. But in that vacuous, crazy way Hollywood seems to prefer these days. Pretty like an ice sculpture. Pretty like a punch in the face.
But bloodless in the purest sense. It lacked anything resembling life.
I saw it at the Imax. My girlfriend and I got there late and had to stand up and dance around in the back of the theater at first. Then we saw seats way down in front of the screen. We snuck like sneaky rabbits, hunched down in our seats and stared up at the God-sized face of Johnny Depp.
I rolled back into Seattle on Saturday night after a whirlwind (and drama-packed) trip to Stamford, Connecticut to speak at Ryan Lee’s “Continuity Summit” event . . .
This was my first “official” speaking engagement in the IM space (I’ve been a guest and on panels a bunch) and I gotta admit I was a little nervous about it.
Got lots of feedback saying I was the best presenter on Thurs (and one of the best of the weekend) . . .
Here’s some of the exhausting (and awesome) lessons I learned along the way . . .
In fact, in the next month I’m flying to Miami for a closed door internet marketing event with a bunch of big muckity mucks, am dashing off to Conneticut to speak at Ryan Lee’s “Continuity Summit” and am spending a few days in DC for Yanik Silver’s Underground.
And while I’m sure there will be a bunch of great content at these seminars, the real reason I’m wracking up the miles is for the networking.
As a mentor of mine told me early on in my career “The real business gets done at the bar.”
My friend Martin Howey just put up a post talking about one of the profound re-connections he made at Jeff Walker’s PLM event a few weeks back.
If you’re wondering what going to seminars can do for you and your business, I’d give it a read:
Let me be your Cyrano. (I really wanted to put a pic of Steve Martin from "Roxanne" but couldn't find a good one.
(Update: Check out the comments from this post for the love notes I wrote and responses.)
OK, THIS should be fun (and more than a little scary.)
As a special “Valentine’s Day Gift” I’m doing something WEIRD . . .
In fact, I’m giving you the chance to have Chris “Mr. Moneyfingers” Haddad himself (that’s me!) “be your virtual Cyrano.”
What’s that mean?
It means that if you’re fast and lucky and smart and brave you can get ME to ghost-write a love note/poem/rap song/short play/video whatever I really feel like in your stead . . .
Basically you get to put my LOVE FINGERS into action on your behalf . . .
Here’s all you have to do to enter:
1. Put a comment under this post telling me:
The name of your Valentine/wanna be Valentine. (Pet names or nicknames are also acceptable.)
Your relationship with them (Lover/Spouse/SO/NSO/Stalker)
3 Things you ADORE about them.
1 Thing about them that kind of drives you NUTS (your interpretation).
The place you first met.
The basic idea of what you REALLY want to say to them on Valentine’s day. (Don’t work too hard. Let the pro writer do the heavy lifting.)
The RESULT you’re looking for on Valentine’s day. I’m a marketer, dammit. What’s my conversion metric?
2. PROMISE that WHATEVER I write for you you will actually GIVE to your Valentine. You can email it to them, print it up and deliver it or even copy the whole thing out by hand. But you can’t change a word.
3. PROMISE to report back to the Moneyfingersinc.com readership on what kind of reaction you get.
4. PROMISE to let me SHARE what we come up with right here on the Moneyfingersinc.com blog, probably in about a week or so after the Valentine’s hooplah has died down. If you’d like we can “anonymize” the whole thing before it goes up. But it’s more fun if we don’t.
Got it?
Great.
This is an awesome opportunity, but you’ve got to be FAST . . .
Valentine’s day is only a couple days away. I’m going to be selecting the “winners” tomorrow (probably 3 but maybe 5) morning and holing up in a coffee shop in the AM in order to crank these suckers out so you can have them ready for my favorite corporate holiday.
Happy VD =-0
P.S. What qualifies me to do this? I’m a high fallutin professional copywriter, dammit. Plus I’m renowned the world over for my sense of WEIRD romance, ability to make women quiver with a text message alone and general badassery.
You don’t get this kind of shiz for FREE very often.
P.P.S. My own Valentine is in CANADA right now so I gotta get my romance jollies off somehow.
What is my purpose? The Last Thing I Want To Do Is Hurt People
This is Part 3 in my “I Quit” Series of Blog Posts. You can find the previous two entries (“I Quit, Part 1″ and “Death of the Infoslut” by clicking here.
In my last post (the tantalizingly named “Death of The Info Slut”) I laid out the drastic steps I’ve been taking to cut down my nasty addiction to useless information (did you know Cher had $145,000.00 in plastic surgery? I DID. How messed up is that?)
Now that I’ve (mostly) got my crazy info addiction and “chicken with no head” tendencies under control, it’s time to really focus on what I want to be doing, who I want to be doing it with and what I ultimately want to be known for.
If you’ve read my “Death of the Info Slut” article (and according to my blog stats a lot of you have) then you know I’m doing some major changes to the way I structure my day and live my life.
My good friend Kim says that I’m “Living with a startling amount of intention.”
Currently I’m working on a new “Mantra” . . . something I can mumble to myself or speak clearly in my mind anytime I feel overwhelmed, like I need to rush or otherwise stressed. (I hate that feeling.)
Here are the options. Tell me which one you like best and why:
1. “There are plenty of hours in the day.”
Pretty straightforward. Nice counterpoint to the standard “there aren’t enough hours in the day” bit.
2. “There are more than enough hours in the day.”
My gut tells me this might be the better option. It’s a more literal reaction to the “Not enough” line and somehow feels more “abundant” and “calm” than the “plenty” line.
3. There are too manyhours in the day. Heh. Probably not. But it sounds pretty amazing to have that problem.
4-6. Basically the same as 1-3 but append “(To do what’s important)” on the end.
So “There are plenty of hours in the day (to do what’s important.),” “There are more than enough hours in the day (to do what’s important)” and (strangely) “There are too many hours in the day (to do what’s important.)”
There’s a certain strange brilliance to that last one, but I don’t think it’s what I’m going for.
