Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and brilliant misfits build companies and partnerships they’re deeply proud of.
Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and brilliant misfits build companies and partnerships they’re deeply proud of.
The heights by great men reached and kept / Were not attained by sudden flight, / But they, while their companions slept, / Were toiling upward in the night
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There was a period in his career when Seth Rogen would feel terrible after watching a great movie. A writer, actor, and director himself, he’d burn with envy, measuring his writing, acting, and directing against the writing, acting, and directing of whatever brilliant thing he’d just watched. Then he’d go back to his own work and start twisting and
... See moreDifferent does not mean worse
Self efficacy comes from
Mastery / direct experience
Role modeling / vicarious experience
Encouragement / self talk
Emotional / physiological states
Imagined performance / mental rehearsal
John Wick and Cancel Culture
Media mogul. Suppose you were really wealthy, or otherwise you maybe inherited your dream sort of media studio or production house. What would it be? A film studio? Record label? Magazine? If you were guaranteed of succeeding, what kind of media mogul would you be? Followup: what sort of movies, or books, or artists, etc would you be looking to make, showcase? (I have a lot of followup questions about what the whole operation would look and feel like.)
Bank Heist. What role would you play in a “bank heist”? Feel free to modify the heist so that it’s not a bank, maybe you’re retrieving a stolen diamond from an evil dictator and returning it to a museum or something. Safecracker? Getaway driver? Hacker? Mastermind? Brute? Conman? Fixer? Inside man? Wild card?
Theme park. You’ve been given a plot of land in a surprisingly accessible location and all the resources you need to build “some kind of theme park”. What would it be like? It doesn’t have to have rides, it can be literally any kind of festival or event you dream up.
Golden ticket. What would be the most incredible thing that could happen to your project/business/operation? Why? How could we make that more likely? What are some intermediate steps we could define?”
/// 100 QUESTIONS /// to gain clarity via Alex Morris:
Why are we doing this?
Ask that of yourself and the team with regularity.
What’s the simplest explanation?
What reaction should all the creative achieve?
What’s your most controversial opinion?
What little frictions exist that might bleed out the work if allowed to compound?
Are you solving a
How to sharpen your ideas