Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
To be effective, we must act decisively on decisions we disagree with. This may seem obvious, but it remains one of the most challenging tasks.
Cedric Chin • Decisiveness is Just as Important as Deliberation
It is often better to be aligned in any direction than not at all
- The argument is that accountings of history are not accurate, and can never be accurate, thanks to the narrative fallacy . By its nature, narrative necessarily compresses reality into some coherent tale, meaning that accountings of history tend to overemphasise intention and action, instead of the more plausible ‘random actions by actors in a compl
Cedric Chin • Don't Read History for Lessons
Read history for examples of concepts, not direct lessons
🚀 1. You don't need permission to go after wild dreams
Life is short and it's more fun when you're doing something bold. So if you have a grand vision you'd like to pursue, you already have permission to go after it.
As the child of immigrants, I felt like I had to play it safe to honor my parents' sacrifice, but now I see it in reverse: by swinging... See more
Life is short and it's more fun when you're doing something bold. So if you have a grand vision you'd like to pursue, you already have permission to go after it.
As the child of immigrants, I felt like I had to play it safe to honor my parents' sacrifice, but now I see it in reverse: by swinging... See more
177: Contagious Beliefs
Where rare esoteric wisdom comes from
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.
91% of “Great Funds” returns come from 14% of their investments. This is the Power Law in venture
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.
Jeffrey Pfeffer • Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don't
Accentuate certain flaws to underscore your strengths
Like girls, boys openly express their desire for genuine connections with others, including with boys. They reveal the human capacity for mutual understanding, care, and empathy and demonstrate remarkably astute abilities to read the human world. Yet as they reach middle to late adolescence and as expectations of manhood intensify, they begin to... See more
From A Crisis of Connection