Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and brilliant misfits build companies and partnerships they’re deeply proud of.
Jason Shen
jasonshen.com
People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world
... See moreMalcolm Gladwell • Outliers
when we first started @readwise, all i did for the first summer was write personalized cold emails to anyone who'd expressed pain around their Kindle highlights online
it was grueling, rejection-laden work, but in July 2017 we celebrated our first "best day ever":
the inimitable @craigmod... See more
Things that don’t scale for Readwise growth
if you want a relationship to last a long time, somehow you have to keep the scar tissue from building up. And that's really hard. So, when there's an issue, you somehow have to resolve it where there is zero lingering animosity. Nobody is even a little bit upset. Because even a little upset, that scar tissue that accumulates, that never goes away
Talk Given by John Ousterhout About Sustaining Relationships
You have to clear out any lingering resentment if you want something to last
“I’m 76 years old and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life.”
Review: Curb Your Enthusiasm, “No Lessons Learned” | Season 12, Episode 10
Larry David had a rule of “no hugging and no learning” to describe Seinfeld. Sometimes that attitude is necessary
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
The Ladder of St. Augustine
/// 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
Generative AI and
In his 1905 essay “On Reading,” Marcel Proust puts it nicely: “With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we... See more
Ceridwen Dovey • Can Reading Make You Happier? | the New Yorker
Books were like early version of AI therapist / friends
You can’t escape work
You can escape the employment system. But if you think you’ve left work behind there will be a reckoning
The desire to contribute is human.
Paul Millerdx.comPaul Millerd on the need for human contribution