Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
How to have more productive conversations
Media mogul. Suppose you were really wealthy, or otherwise you maybe inherited your dream sort of media studio or production house. What would it be? A film studio? Record label? Magazine? If you were guaranteed of succeeding, what kind of media mogul would you be? Followup: what sort of movies, or books, or artists, etc would you be looking to make, showcase? (I have a lot of followup questions about what the whole operation would look and feel like.)
Bank Heist. What role would you play in a “bank heist”? Feel free to modify the heist so that it’s not a bank, maybe you’re retrieving a stolen diamond from an evil dictator and returning it to a museum or something. Safecracker? Getaway driver? Hacker? Mastermind? Brute? Conman? Fixer? Inside man? Wild card?
Theme park. You’ve been given a plot of land in a surprisingly accessible location and all the resources you need to build “some kind of theme park”. What would it be like? It doesn’t have to have rides, it can be literally any kind of festival or event you dream up.
Golden ticket. What would be the most incredible thing that could happen to your project/business/operation? Why? How could we make that more likely? What are some intermediate steps we could define?”
The iterative process of recording a great track — patience, good ear, encouragement
You probably aren’t—and don’t want to appear in any case—perfect. As long as the quirks you display are irrelevant to the core of your reputation and why people select you—in the case of Summers, for his brilliance in the field of economics—the flaws and foibles can actually strengthen people’s commitment to you.
Accentuate certain flaws to underscore your strengths
First off, I realize I can continue refining my humanity and my empathy skills. I hope to take more listening, relationship, and communication courses in 2023 to sharpen this critical skillset.

Each example is also a great way to think about how to hook someone into a story:
Result—how did they get that?
Transformation—how did they go from this to that?
Comparison—what’s different between experience A and B?
Novelty—I’ve never thought about that thing before
Story—I need to know what happened with that
Moment—I need to know exactly what happened next
I remember after GPT-3 came out, I was with my tech-obsessed friends and we were like, hey, let’s read the GPT-3 research paper together. That provoked so many interesting ideas for me. And then when I went back to my parents’ house during the holidays — this was December 2020 — I started thinking about the diaries again. And I actually tweeted
... See moreIn the summer of 2004, Dell, a full two years retired from the league, was fully available to teach his eldest son the ways of the jump shot. Ground zero was the half-court adjacent to their Charlotte home, and the two spent hours each day forging a new kind of jumper—a more traditional style that depended on the top-of-the-jump wrist flick most
... See moreSometimes a single summer you can learn a skill that sets you up for a lifetime
Larry David had a rule of “no hugging and no learning” to describe Seinfeld. Sometimes that attitude is necessary