Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
When your Dad trolls you so hard you have to reincarnate
A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened.
Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and... See more
Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and... See more
Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.
Joshua Bell’s performance in the Metro
That gives me the power #drinking #fast
tiktok.comWhen you are really thirsty and want to show off
Gladwell: I get attracted to stories that strike me as having potential. Outliers began, for example, with the chapter on the Jewish lawyers. I was talking to someone whose father was one of those lawyers, and she made this observation: “They are all like my dad. They are all from the Bronx, and their parents were all in the garment industry. They... See more
A Conversation with Outlier Malcolm Gladwell
Ironic that Gladwell thought about groups for a book about outliers
Marc Andreessen explains why the “curse of the entrepreneur” is being too early
“My experience is the great founders almost always feel like they’re too late, and you’re almost always too early.”
The reason is because the idea seems obvious to the... See more
Startup Archivex.comMarc earns founders against being too early versus too late
Don't flash owls!
tiktok.comWanna know how they get birds to stop chirping on movie sets?
#doflamingo
tiktok.comWhen you’re totally ok but they keep pouring
If you’re totally lost on what to focus on getting better at, focus on braiding.
Narrative-style writing (fiction and nonfiction) has four major components:
And you... See more
Narrative-style writing (fiction and nonfiction) has four major components:
- Action: Things happening
- Dialogue: What people are saying
- Description: The environment around the people and events
- Interiority: The characters internal reactions to the place and action
And you... See more
On Writing Better: 43 Things I Learned from My Insane 2 Years of Study
Nat Eliason on how to improve your narrative-style writing
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.