Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
The ostrich really needed a carrot
Where rare esoteric wisdom comes from
In using standards, it is important to ask for precedents. “Have you ever done this before?” and “Have you ever made an exception?” should be part of your everyday vocabulary.
Stuart Diamond • Getting More
Negotiation and Getting Your Way
Think like a judge when negotiating—look for precedents and exceptions
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.
You know crossing spears as a guard felt gooood
Sometimes I worry I’m the fast thinker / responder and don’t have deep follow on wisdom.
Jason Shenx.comNo matter if you are fast or slow. Make it work for you.
As a first point, the Hook, we get to know Harry Potter and the story’s context. He lives with his aunt and uncle in a basement. He later discovers that he is a wizard and that his destiny is to go to Hogwarts, the school of magic. This phase is Plot Turn 1, i.e., the first turning point in the plot.
The antagonist begins to be recognized. A troll... See more
The antagonist begins to be recognized. A troll... See more
The 7-Point Story Structure
The 7 Point Story Structure
closeness creates room for greater conflict
Chasing scale seems to be a kind of early life affliction. The more you chase it, the bigger the thing you chase gets. Perhaps it’s a natural desire to see how important we can be or at least how important our creations can be to the world (and hence how important we can be by proxy …). A desire to take on a seemingly insurmountable challenge, perhaps a noble one (though not always), and see if we can conquer it.