Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.
"In addition, there are problems that humans rather than computers will have to solve for purely practical reasons. It isn’t because computers couldn’t eventually solve them. It’s because in real life, and especially in organizational life, we keep changing our conception of what the problem is and what our goals are."
— Geoff Colvin, Humans Are
... See moreReally good playlist of viral hooks with examples
/// 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
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.
What it’s like to be fully dialed in to your role
I want you to act as a novelist. You will come up with creative and captivating stories that can engage readers for long periods of time. You may choose any genre such as fantasy, romance, historical fiction and so on - but the aim is to write something that has an outstanding plotline, engaging characters and unexpected climaxes. My first request
... See moreWe often struggle to articulate what we are really good at