Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
To be effective, we must act decisively on decisions we disagree with. This may seem obvious, but it remains one of the most challenging tasks.
Cedric Chin • Decisiveness is Just as Important as Deliberation
It is often better to be aligned in any direction than not at all
it was my daughter’s love that freed me from my delusions of grandeur. It liberated me from the tyranny of trying to prove myself. Since her birth, I feel calmer and more secure. I have a sense of security I haven’t felt since I was a young child, living with parents who unconditionally loved me. Now, I care less about what other people think of... See more
Meaning & satisfaction is often found in doing doing what is needed
Are you familiar with the midwit meme? So, it’s this bell curve with a guy who doesn’t think very much, then someone who has average intelligence but thinks it’s superior, and then the guy who’s kind of transcended everything and is very intelligent and actually thinks in the same way as the guy who doesn’t think very much. So for me, I think I
... See moreMichelle Huang • "AI for wonder": An interview with Michelle Huang, artist
Second, because genius isn’t linear . You can’t create something world-changing by simply following steps 1 through 10. You need chaos. You need disorder. But it has to be tethered chaos 1 —chaos that’s guided by a deep sense of purpose and vision. It’s about engaging with the unknown while keeping one foot grounded in reality.
Lane Watson • Critical Creative Genius at the Intersection of Order, Disorder, and Chaos
Really good playlist of viral hooks with examples
1. RESULT
Result thumbnails feature a visualized result
Whether it's a physical product or a skill, the curiosity is driven by the questions:
"How did they do it?" and commonly, "How can I do it, too?"
The more sought-after the... See more
Each example is also a great way to think about how to hook someone into a story:
Result—how did they get that?
Transformation—how did they go from this to that?
Comparison—what’s different between experience A and B?
Novelty—I’ve never thought about that thing before
Story—I need to know what happened with that
Moment—I need to know exactly what happened next
Microessay about how things take time by Justin Duke
https://x.com/jmduke/status/1788307295526338883
Things take time.
Nintendo fairly famously was born in 1889, and the modern incarnation - Yamamuchi Nintendo & Co., LTD - was established nearly fifty years later, in 1933. They spent forty years selling playing cards, then another decade operating merely as a distributor of electronics before coming out with their first piece of electronic hardware.
The Lego Group began in a Danish workshop in 1932; it took them 26 years until a confluence of technology, iteration, and luck led them to what we now refer to as a Lego. (Er, sorry - a Lego brick.)
Nike spent eight years merely re-selling (literally, not figuratively) Onitsuka shoes to a U.S. audience.
Gates and Allen ran Microsoft as what was essentially a freelance firm for eight years, too, before scoring a contract with IBM (and even that took an additional two years to be parlayed into MSDOS.)
(There are, of course, some companies that like Athena sprout fully-formed from the head of their creators - Amazon and TSMC come to mind.)
When we build hagiographies of the companies we love (or at least find most interesting), it can be tempting to draw clean, neat, satisfying arcs and fast forward through the boring eras that do not inform our modern understanding of those organizations.
But neither the Nike Cortez nor the Lego System 236 Garage with Automatic Door came from the first decade of either company's existence.
Part of success is staying alive long enough to have the right kinds of things happen to you all at once.