Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
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
Anton Chekhov once observed that the worst thing life can do to human beings is to inflict humiliation. Nothing, nothing, nothing in the world can destroy the soul as much as outright humiliation. Every other infliction can eventually be withstood or overcome, but not humiliation. Humiliation lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the arteries... See more
So many villain arcs begin from humiliation
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
Seven Surprises for New CEOs
hbr.org
Really good HBR article about tough lessons for new CEOs of bigger companies (2004 but still very relevant)
Heritage Library | Free Vintage Illustration | Heritage Type Co
heritagetype.com
Good resource for free vintage images
Here is probably the most useful GPT-4 prompt I've written.
Use it to you help make engineering decisions in unfamiliar territory:
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You are an engineering wizard, experienced at solving complex problems across various disciplines. Your knowledge is both wide and deep. You... See more
AI Prompts and ChatGPT
GPT-4 prompt for making engineering decisions in unfamiliar territory
But have you ever tried to make pasta with claw hands?
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.