Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and brilliant misfits build companies and partnerships they’re deeply proud of.
Jason Shen
jasonshen.com
Does a coach need to have done my job before in order to be effective?
This is a contentious question. Research demonstrates that executives (and organisations who hire coaches) do want business experience – 85% of executives selected “Business Experience” as important to their selection process. However, the criteria relating to coaching expertise rated higher:
“Ability to build rapport, trust and comfort with coach” (100%)
“Experience and skills as a coach” (96%)
“Experience dealing with specific leadership challenges” (85%)
The research concluded that coaching expertise trumps executive experience. Executive experience can help improve rapport-building and empathy but is not a replacement for coaching expertise.
Writer and programmer Simon Sarris on the value of effort:
"If you make lists of lofty goals, it can be easy to leave them to accumulate, as happens sometimes, into a mountain of to-do's and notes and half-forgotten plans. Dreaming alone is seductive, even a little sweet, since it lacks the pain of trying. So it feels proper to prize attempts more... See more
"If you make lists of lofty goals, it can be easy to leave them to accumulate, as happens sometimes, into a mountain of to-do's and notes and half-forgotten plans. Dreaming alone is seductive, even a little sweet, since it lacks the pain of trying. So it feels proper to prize attempts more... See more
Jim Simons on luck: "People underestimate its importance except when things go badly. Then they’re very happy to ascribe it to bad luck, which it may be, of course.
One has to recognize that luck plays a meaningful role in everyone’s lives. You get born to decent parents in a good part of the world, and you’re way ahead of the game.... See more
Frederik Christopher Gieschenx.comA remarkable investor comments on the importance of luck (versus skill)
Dean Simonton, a psychologist, has spent his career studying creative productivity. He has found that even creative geniuses, what some may call David Guetta, have a hard time recognizing when they have a hit. Simonton spent some time studying Beethoven and spoke about him,
“Beethoven’s own favorites among his symphonies, sonatas, and quartets are... See more
“Beethoven’s own favorites among his symphonies, sonatas, and quartets are... See more
You truly never know
As a result of these much larger outcomes we've built a movie-making system that is focused on big hits because the business model can't really absorb too many massive flops. So you get sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. Established IP and bankable stars. No big risks. And you don't get nearly as much experimentation, innovation, or creativity.
Kyle Harrison • The Death of a Venture Fund
milking existing IP over new stuff
I took off all of 2023. Focused on health, family, travel… yada yada yada it was great. But during that time my brain atrophied, my work ethic diminished, and it got harder to focus. Despite a deep desire to build again, I've found that getting back to a grindset has been hard...
It’s slowly getting better now, and I... See more
Brandon Chux.comFormer Shopify VP on getting back to peak performance
Third, I'm trying to learn more about how these Generative AI systems work more deeply and uncover their creative potential. You've seen my explorations with Midjourney through the cover images of many of the last few newsletters, including this one.
Jason Shen • 131: How to Be Human in the Age of Generative AI
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.