Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
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.
If you’ve ever wondered what Lord of the Rings would look like as a Cyberpunk themed film, wonder no more
Like girls, boys openly express their desire for genuine connections with others, including with boys. They reveal the human capacity for mutual understanding, care, and empathy and demonstrate remarkably astute abilities to read the human world. Yet as they reach middle to late adolescence and as expectations of manhood intensify, they begin to... See more
From A Crisis of Connection
Heritage Library | Free Vintage Illustration | Heritage Type Co
heritagetype.com
Good resource for free vintage images
More recently I’ve kept repeating to myself, don’t abandon your vision . Decisiveness is knowing myself well enough to take the plunge, then the rest is all faith.
Peak Decisiveness
It’s easy to be brave, briefly. What’s hard is to keep going.
The ostrich really needed a carrot
2 Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
Black Swan author's rules for living - Boing Boing
Nassim Taleb on leveraging serendipity of social gatherings
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