Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
When I graduated high school I had zero direction… I was a ...
threads.net
Encouraging a reluctant young person to learn skills and break into IT
When you meet your baby Pluto for the first time
Why Did We (The English) Start Using Surnames?
youtube.comWe only have surnames because of the Black Death
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.
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.*
Malcolm Gladwell • Outliers
Redefine Your Ambition and Storytelling / Narrative
Choosing your ambition is not easy. The power of cultural context is strong.
The iterative process of recording a great track — patience, good ear, encouragement
Your ads are saying, “look, I’m don’t have Porsche’s speed or Chevrolet’s muscles. I’m not as sexy as Mercedes-Benz and I’m not as classy as Cadillac. I’ll never be as patriotic as Ford because I’m German to the core. I know what I am…and I’m proud of it. I’m not made to be shown off, I’m made to be functional: my purpose is to get you from point A... See more
Embrace your weaknesses
A recent article in The Military Times revealed that there are already autistic leaders in senior positions in the intelligence community, and how matters of national security are too important and challenging to leave only to people who see the world in typical ways. Autistic workers, for example, have been shown to detect sensitive geospatial... See more
There’s power in neurodiverse people if you can harness their strengths