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Jason Yue Shen: When to Push Through and When to Quit
49 Plays8 years ago
Jason is a product manager at Etsy and a partner of a online side project bootcamp called Ship Your Side Project. He is the creator of the Asian American Man Study, which has been cited by NBC’s Asian America and The Atlantic. He served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow under President Obama and co-founded a Y Combinator startup called Ridejoy, which built a nationwide city-to-city ridesharing network.
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Transcript
Introduction of Jason Shen
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to this week's episode of the Art of Authenticity. Today we have Jason Shen joining us. Jason is the product manager at Etsy and the partner at Ship Your Side Project, which was his side project that he created so that you could ship him projects that you're doing on the side. Kind of a cute idea.
00:00:40
Speaker
Jason also co-founded a venture called Ride Joy, and he served as the Presidential Innovation Fellow under the Obama administration.
Jason's Athletic Achievements
00:00:50
Speaker
Jason came on the show and once again, somebody who's had a ton of success. He's only 30. He set a world record for the most numbers of Aztec pushups. Didn't know what that is. You'll hear about that on the show. He's also done a lot of different business things and he has won the national championship. He was part of that with Stanford University.
Deciding When to Quit or Continue
00:01:12
Speaker
But what was really cool about our conversation and what I think you'll really enjoy was this deep dive into when to quit, when to continue. Jason was a national champion at Stanford, as I mentioned, but he suffered a massive injury. He damaged his knee, had five surgeries. When do you get back up? When do you stop? He had a business, it was backed, and it wasn't going where they wanted it to go. When do you quit? When do you push through?
00:01:41
Speaker
I think this is such an important conversation for people who are out there who are trying to get something going or frustrated, not knowing when they're kind of at the low point and they need to push through and when they need to let it go. It's just not coming together. How do you make those decisions?
00:01:58
Speaker
We don't have all the answers, but it was a great discussion. I hope you enjoyed today's show. If you want to find out more about Jason, you can check him out at JasonShen.com. As always, we have all the information about our guests on my site at LauraCo.com under podcasts. Thanks for tuning in. Welcome to this week's episode of the Art of Authenticity. Today we have Jason Shen joining us. Hey, Jason, how are
Jason's Gymnastics Journey
00:02:24
Speaker
you?
00:02:24
Speaker
Hey, Laura, how's it going? It's great. Actually, Jason and I were just chatting before the show and I literally just said three minutes ago, we've got to stop talking. We're covering too much fun ground. We can't lose all the good stuff before you even get started. Right? Yeah, we're just we haven't met before. Yeah, we just had great
00:02:45
Speaker
I'm like, let's just get this on the air. I just heard briefly, obviously, I've been checking you out since you're coming on, but if you could take the listeners back a little bit into your story, you've definitely done a bunch of cool things to date, co-founding a company, holding a world record for Aztec pushups, which I got to hear even what that is, I'm not even totally sure.
00:03:11
Speaker
But you actually started off in gymnastics when you were a little kid. Can you walk us through a little bit of your story with that? It was pretty impressive, amazing. Thanks, Laura. And thanks so much for having me on the show. This is a real treat. Thank you. I started doing gymnastics when I was about six years old. I moved to the United States from China when I was three. My mom was actually a gymnast in China and became a gymnastics coach
00:03:39
Speaker
here in the States. I grew up outside of Boston and I was a very active kid. Lots of kids are active, but I had a ton of energy. I was always running around. My mom was always worried about me running into the street because I was just kind of that kind of attitude, fairly short attention span. It became very obvious that we needed an outlet for the
00:04:03
Speaker
energy and my mom actually didn't really want me to do gymnastics at first because she felt like that life would be too difficult. She had trained in China under very sort of tough coaches and a very like strict regimen and you know, she just didn't necessarily want that for me, but it kind of inevitably happened. I was like watching other kids who were learning gymnastics and trying to do backflips.
00:04:26
Speaker
in recess or back handsprings and watching them do it and doing it poorly, but trying and my mom said, look, if you're going to do this terribly, you might as well learn how to do it right. That's so funny. And by the way, you're talking to, I think one of the only women that I've ever met that is so inflexible, I can barely do a cartwheel. So anything you say from this point forward is impressive to me. Well, you know, I think everyone has their skills and certainly, gymnastics is this, I mean, I love
00:04:56
Speaker
gymnastics such a wonderful sport and I wasn't terribly good but I really enjoyed it you know and and I think what I got out of gymnastics was seeing you go to a gym and you in your this little kid and you see people doing things that you know even now when you I watch the Olympics and I'm like how are they doing that that's insane you know you see 12 year old kids doing skills that you had spent your entire life
00:05:25
Speaker
getting up to be able to do and they're doing it, you know, before they even had puberty and just insane, but what it teaches you is that with discipline and conditioning and courage and good coaching and practice and time, you can develop the ability to do things that you couldn't have possibly even imagined, you know, and yeah.
Overcoming Injuries and Comeback
00:05:51
Speaker
You know, it took me a couple of years to really start competing. And I wasn't in the top of the sort of leaderboard in those early days. But I remember my coaches telling me like, look, if you just keep sticking around at the sport, a lot of those kids who are number one or number two, they're going to get injured. They're going to get demotivated and they're going to quit, you know, or things are going to get hard and then they don't like it. And then they're going to quit. And he was right, you know, and I got better over time. I qualified for my first national competition when I was 11.
00:06:21
Speaker
And then when I was 15, I changed gyms and I started working with this really hardcore Armenian coach who was very young. He had just sort of recently retired. He was scary, you know, traditional sort of East European, like aggressive coaching tactics, but I respected him a lot because he never bullshitted me. Sorry, can we swear on this show? Sure.
00:06:46
Speaker
I'll be careful. And he really cared, even though he was very tough on me. And I qualified onto the junior national team my sophomore year in high school. And it was an incredible honor to do that. And I just recently gained my US passport and become a citizen. So it sort of was all up until then kind of abstract. I was competing almost as a, it was considered exhibition gymnastics because I wasn't a citizen.
00:07:14
Speaker
Yeah. And this question of like quitting and not quitting and sticking and staying the course and obviously like doing a sport as energetic as you want to, my son is 10 so for sure there are those kids that have an incredible amount of energy and the parents are always talking about what to do with this abundant energy. But at some point, school kicks in, there's plenty of stuff to do, high school, college.
00:07:39
Speaker
Like staying the course, not quitting, knowing when to quit. I think this is like one of those conversations in all facets of life that is complicated. And I heard you talking about it a little that there's a time when there's a diminishing return on on efforts. And that's when people start to think about alternatives. Can you talk to that a little bit and how that manifested for you first in gymnastics? Yeah, I mean, I think quitting is a four letter word in many sports.
00:08:08
Speaker
but gymnastics in particular, you know, I think it's, there are no prodigies, you know,
From Gymnastics to Entrepreneurship
00:08:15
Speaker
there are no people who just wake up one day and they try doing gymnastics and they're good. It just doesn't happen, right? Like there are, I don't know, I think Usain Bolt, right? For instance, like wasn't even training the hundred meter for a long time. He was doing other things and, and, you know, it was, it was in track and field and someone sort of said to him, like,
00:08:35
Speaker
you should try running the 100 meter. And, you know, obviously Usain is incredible for a lot of reasons, but the fact that it's even possible to, you know, I don't care how skilled you are, physically gifted you are, there's no way you can pick up the sport of gymnastics, especially when you're older and just in a couple years become world class. It's just, it's never happened. Yeah. So it's like that talent has to meet like dedication, commitment to an incredible degree.
00:09:05
Speaker
Yeah, there's just a huge layering of skill and strength and coordination that needs to happen for you to be able to achieve it at those levels. And so I think, you know, I never really felt like I wanted to quit. I recognize that gymnastics was a sport that I only had a limited amount of time to do once I became aware that you could do college gymnastics and that, you know, being a college athlete was sort of, you know, gymnastics was an important avenue for me and getting into a good college.
00:09:35
Speaker
It was became clear that this was something that I needed to do. I was good at it. And, you know, there was nothing that I could really switch to now at any given time that would have paid higher dividends. Right. I wasn't even thinking in that way, but you know, reflecting now it's clear like that was, that was my thing. It was, it was my identity. And, and I was the gymnast and almost any group, anytime like someone would introduce me and be like, Oh gee,
00:10:02
Speaker
That's Jason. Yeah, he does mass, you know, like that's right. Yeah, that's your bio.
Drive and Motivation
00:10:07
Speaker
Yeah, but then you have like five surgeries. Yeah, so I got into college, right? And I loved college gymnastics. And because you're finally competing in a team, because previously you're competing as an individual. And there's just, there's so different.
00:10:24
Speaker
When you compete for yourself, it's very self-centered, right? It's like, what score did I get? What do I need to do? Yes, I'm here with the other people in my gym who I train with, but I'm competing with them as much as I'm competing with anybody else. And in college gymnastics, yes, you get an individual score, but no one's really tracking that. You win or lose as a team. They don't give individual awards in most competitions, only at the national championships. Every other competition, it's just
00:10:53
Speaker
Either your team won or your team lost. And so there's a lot more sense of camaraderie. I loved it. My junior year, this is the injury I had. I was training a new vault. So I was doing a one and a half twisting vault, which is.
00:11:07
Speaker
Tough to do because there's a blind landing because you're kind of turning and then you see the ground at the very end. So it can be hard to land. The good side of that is if you are short as in if you don't have enough power, you just sit down. You kind of like your feet kind of land in front of you and then you just kind of sit on your butt. No, not too big of a deal. And I was learning a double twist and I trained for and I learned the double twist.
00:11:33
Speaker
you need a lot, it's a stepwise increase. It's not just like, oh, it's a half twist more. It's how much harder is it? It's like, well, if you land short, you could twist your ankle, you could do something else. And so it was the second meet of the competition of the season. And this is the only the second time I'd ever competed at the vault. I ran down the runway and I, when I was coming onto the board, onto the horse, I could tell that I was a little off
Challenges with Ridejoy
00:12:00
Speaker
But what you learn is to not bail. Like bailing is even more dangerous to be like, Oh, I'm just kidding. I'm only going to do a full twist, not a double twist. That's where you really hurt yourself. And so the recommendation is to stay the course, just go for it, commit, don't hesitate. And you know, it'll be a tough landing, but you'll just, you'll get over it. And so I kept going for it and I basically landed a one and three quarters twist with most of my weight on my left leg. So I was continuing to twist.
00:12:30
Speaker
And all my weight was on my left leg. And so my knee kind of collapsed. I suffered a knee dislocation. I tore my ACL, my PCL, my NCL, my LCL, my meniscus. Oh my God. I didn't even know there was that many Ls in a knee. Oh my God. Yeah, there were four because there's two on the inside and then two on the outside. And I just, you know, it was just jello in there. It was really bad. It was by far the worst injury I've ever had. Most painful experience I've ever had.
00:12:59
Speaker
And I had to, I had two reconstructive surgeries to kind of get it back in order. I was training to get back into a competition. I eventually returned to competition. I tore it again, you know, and had to get reconstructive surgery after my final season. And then I tore it one more time, even post gymnastics. I was not no longer competing, but it was just.
00:13:24
Speaker
just happened. And so that's been knock on wood, you know, six years since the last surgery. That's intense. And so here you are, like you've put 10 years in. And at this point, there's really no option but to, to step down. I mean, your knee is clearly, you can't, you can't sustain that many injuries, right?
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I ever even at during the point of the injury, my some of the doctors are saying, Look, you need to recognize that you might not ever go back to gymnastics competition. If you run again, might be it will be, you know, a great feat. And in my mind, I mean, as naive as I was, I mean, I was like, this is I'm coming back, you know, this is this is that moment in the sports movie, where it's like, everything's terrible. And you have to make that moment, you have to make that decision to
00:14:13
Speaker
to come back. And I did come back. I was never able to compete on vault again or floor again. I had a much more limited number of events that I could compete without doing more damage to my knee. But I did compete again. And there's a bit of a fairy tale ending here. We won the 2009 NCAA National Championship for Stanford. And it was the first time we had
00:14:39
Speaker
won the championship in 14 years. So we had had a good string of runs in the nineties and then nothing until 2009. So, you know, I'm very proud of the fact that I was able to, I was selected as one of the team captains for that.
00:14:55
Speaker
season and while I didn't, I sort of tweaked my knee right the, the week before the NCAA championship. So I did not set foot on the competition floor as a competitor for the meet that we won. You know, I feel that I had been a contributor and a leader to that process and to that into the program. So, you know, I, it's the whole silver lining thing. I mean, injuring my knee, I got to red shirt a season. And so.
00:15:25
Speaker
I got to compete a fifth year. And so it was my fifth year as a super senior that we won. And lots of my teammates who started the same time as me, who were very good, who helped build the program, retired. You know, they had four years of college gymnastics and they had to move on.
00:15:40
Speaker
And I got to stay on a fifth year and, you know, win a title. That's awesome. That's awesome. I mean, that's amazing to come back from such a huge injury. And I want to kind of like pin that conversation for a second because then you've kind of go on and you you co-found a company, Ridejoy. Yeah. You have a Guinness World Record. You've been selected by the White House to serve as a Presidential Innovation Fellow.
00:16:06
Speaker
You go on to do, I mean, look, I'm 45. You didn't even finish school until 2009, right? So this is like, just a couple years here. I just want everybody who's listening to wrap their mind around because on top of that, you also wrote a book called How to Get What You Want. Having written a book, I mean, that nearly killed me. And then on the side, you're working. You also have a project called Side Project We'll Get To.
00:16:28
Speaker
So do you feel that like this spirit, this kind of commitment and ethic, work ethic and also probably all this energy that you had since you were a child just continued to play out in the next several years of your life and in being able to do this many things in such a short window of time?
00:16:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's always hard to get to try to unpack why you do what you do. And you tell yourself a variety of things. I think I turned 30 this year. And, you know, I think, frankly, there was a big part of me that was scared of turning 30. And I thought that I had to, you know, make it whatever that means, right. And I spent most of my 20s, like, working hard trying to
00:17:18
Speaker
do big things in part because I was really wanted to be in a place where I made it, whatever that, you know, and make it. Yeah. I'm sure you've heard that.
00:17:30
Speaker
concept before. I've heard it and the more successful people are like yourself where things on a resume look a certain way. This is what I'm a little obsessed with on this podcast is what does that mean? I think so many people have either come out of the gate and they've taken on something harder or the success has been a little bit slower to happen or they're changing careers or they didn't do the thing they love and now they're stepping out into it, whatever.
00:17:58
Speaker
whatever your story is, there is really no make it point is there? Yeah, I think people can look at somebody else and say, Oh, they've made it. And they're thinking like, Oh, man, there's so many things that I want to do. I haven't been able to do. I started a startup, right? You go to Stanford, you live in Silicon Valley. You that's what you do. You know, not that that's the only reason why I did that. I enjoy the process of creating things from
00:18:28
Speaker
scratch and I love the freedom and the flexibility and the ambition about that. Honestly, I was seeking for in my startup the same feeling that I had when I was on my gymnastics team, which is a small group of people getting together to do something ambitious, working really hard as a team to achieve a shared goal. You know, that's part of what I was looking for was just like, I loved that I want to get that feeling.
00:18:54
Speaker
And hold on because I want to just unpack that for half a second because when you said I was seeking a feeling I was waiting for you to say like happiness or like one of the right you're like I was thinking of feeling ambition team shared goal It's actually a whole experience. Yeah, like that's a that's an entire ecosystem almost there's no way that I wish there was a word for
00:19:19
Speaker
working really hard to do something that you believe in with people that you respect and admire. Right. It's called like awesome entrepreneurship or something. It's like a perfect entrepreneurial moment. Yeah, I and so had a good the good fortune of starting this company ride joy with my two roommates. So I mean, talk about good luck. You know, you happen to live with the two other people who you think could make for a great
00:19:47
Speaker
company together. And that's not a coincidence, obviously, because we got to know each other. But we did that for two years. We went through the Y Combinator program, which is like an amazing program.
Transition to Presidential Innovation Fellow
00:19:58
Speaker
We'd been reading Paul Graham, who had started the program, his essays for years. And so it's like a dream come true. I mean, there was a moment there where I was like, we did make it. Look at us. We're in this program. It's awesome.
00:20:11
Speaker
We raised a million dollars, like $1.3 million. Like this is crazy. We're, you know, getting written up and pressed like, you know, we're, and I'm like 25 years old, like this is so cool and we're going to change the world. And, you know, we, we did that business for two years. It was a long distance ride sharing company. So it was focused on helping people find drivers, find passenger passengers, find drivers who would take them from like San Francisco to Seattle or Portland.
00:20:40
Speaker
into Vancouver, a lot of West Coast, but also into the East Coast and other parts of the United States. We got to a certain point and we realized we weren't growing fast enough. This was not going to be sustainable as a venture back to business, which lots of people told us when we got started. We were like, yeah, whatever. Of course, people are going to tell us we're wrong. It's easy to say we can't do it, but we're going to prove you wrong.
00:21:04
Speaker
and then instead we're wrong. So how did you decide you know to come back at this is why I wanted to pin this so how did you decide after coming back from five surgeries and you're still going to do this anyways and you push your way through and but in this situation you recognized wait a minute this isn't going to get me where I want to go
00:21:22
Speaker
So many people out there are faced with these decisions, right? And this is what kind of struck me when I was looking at your story. How do you decide when to push forward and when to quit and when to, you know, not even call it quit, right? Like recognize this isn't for me and I'm moving forward. Yeah, I mean, in our case, we realized the business
00:21:45
Speaker
the current business of Ride Joy's ride sharing platform wasn't going to work. And we still had a decent amount of cash in the bank. And what we did was we tried to reboot the business and we said, we gave all our amazing employees generous severance package, help them get new jobs. And we sort of like huddled down and said, we're going to start from scratch. And we spent six months trying to incubate new businesses, new business ideas, you know,
00:22:14
Speaker
We it was it was a tough time because we realized that the ride joy as a platform wasn't making sense. We were working on new ideas, but we couldn't get to an agreement about what we wanted to do next. Like it was like we had tried. We couldn't find something that we all thought was a good idea of viable business and something that we would personally be interested in doing, you know, like
00:22:39
Speaker
we realized that each of our motivations were a little different. One of my co-founders really wanted to do something that had positive impact on the world. He saw that ride sharing was an example of doing that, saving the environment, helping people transport each other. One of my
00:22:56
Speaker
Co-founders wanted to do something that he personally would use and this is a guy who literally had a mattress on the floor and a couple of shelves of clothes and that's it you know it's been like four months backpacking through Asia and like anything i'm like you don't buy stuff.
00:23:12
Speaker
you don't use stuff like how are we gonna get to something that you personally use when you don't use it you know and you know I was probably the most I call it mercenary versus missionary some entrepreneurs have something that they just like they want to do and this is their vision this is like what they feel like this is what they were
00:23:33
Speaker
I hate that idea of like, you're put on this earth to do that. But some people I think they feel that way. They do. And there are some people who are more mercenary now was the most mercenary of the three of us not to say I was particularly that
Entrepreneurial Insights and Intuition
00:23:45
Speaker
But I was like, can we just do something that will be successful? I'm flexible. Let's just do something that will work. And they were like, so what? So that we could get acquired by Google in two years or in three years? And I'm like, what's wrong with that? And they're like, we didn't start doing this to get a job at Google. We could get a job at Google right now if we wanted to. And I'm like, well, I can.
00:24:09
Speaker
They're both engineers and I have a biology degree and I was the business guy. I'm like, I can't just automatically, must be nice. Right. This went on for a couple of months.
00:24:23
Speaker
Yeah, for six months. And and then I didn't kill each other. You actually stayed friends and moved on. Stay friends. We were still living together, which is depressing when you have an office and you're going to an office and then you're like, actually, we're gonna like cut our expenses, we're gonna like have someone else lease the office and we're gonna move back to our apartment. So it's like, I was going to start crazy. Yes. Yeah. I so I kind of cheated, right? Like I saw this thing called the Presidential Innovation Fellowship.
00:24:51
Speaker
It was posted on TechCrunch and I rang a bunch of bells, right? Like one six to 12 month program. So it's short duration. I don't know what I want to do with my life at this point. And this looks like interesting, right? Get out of town. You're in DC. Okay. Like I was feeling weird. I didn't want to like all my friends are in technology or in startups and it was hard enough to like do this and then to admit that we quit.
00:25:18
Speaker
And try to find a new job in the town. It just felt weird. So I was like, I can get out of town. And it was like, solve real problems. And do something good for your country. I feel a huge sense of gratitude to be in the United States. I think this country
00:25:36
Speaker
has been so good to me and has allowed me to be successful where I don't think I would have been as successful if I had continued to grow up in China and the idea of solving more problems. I mean, we were brainstorming like not Blue Apron, but like whatever, Maple, one of these like meal delivery kind of concepts we were talking about, like
00:25:58
Speaker
laundry as a service we were talking about like valet parking as a service and it's like an episode of shark tank in there just like shark tank Silicon Valley a lot of you know ridiculous it just almost a parody it's like these 20 something year old guys who have money and and you know it was embarrassing because it's like oh it's so hard we can't think of an idea we have like several hundred thousand dollars in the bank and we don't know what to do it's like
00:26:24
Speaker
Are you kidding me? You know, it's so hard. I mean, this is what I think the myth of entrepreneurship is. It's so hard to get a good idea, the right team, and then, you know, find yourself positioned in a place to to get to that, you know, next level success. It's really complicated. You know, like part of me still is hurts from one having to shut that thing down, because I eventually, you know, I applied to this thing. And I was like, oh, it's a long shot, probably won't even get it, but just
00:26:52
Speaker
just gonna do it. And I told them that I was doing it just, you know, I didn't want to lie. And then I got it. And then it's like, Oh, crap. Okay, well, I guess I should I talked to some friends who worked in DC and knew me and the startup and they're like, this isn't gonna work. Your startup isn't gonna work. You'll get a lot out of this program. You should do it. I was like, shoot. But
00:27:13
Speaker
I have conversations with younger entrepreneurs who have been working on their business for like a year and a half and they don't know if they should keep working on it or they're like trying to deal with whether or not they should, you know, fold and, you know, one of them said to me, it's like, well, I don't, you know, if I quit now, I don't want to be, I don't want it to be like so many years before I start another company, like, I mean, no offense, but kind of like you. And I was like, oh,
00:27:38
Speaker
This guy, he's like 25 and he's looking at me, he's like, you're 30, you did your startup and you're 25 and look at you now, you're still not doing another startup, like you're working a corporate job. It's like, wow. Yeah. But on like a granular level, because I again, like think so many people who are listening who are doing their own thing and then went back to corporate and
00:28:05
Speaker
There's these like pain points. Do you have a mentor? Like you get all this guidance, you hear all these pieces of advice. Like how do you ultimately make the decision to, you know, move on and do the Presidential Innovation Fellowship? Yeah. I mean, I think I'm a gut person and I rely on what I would consider peer mentors. I feel like, you know, I do have certain people who are older who have given me advice and who I respect.
00:28:34
Speaker
and admire, but ultimately, I feel like I trust the people. I'm more willing to trust someone who I feel knows me well and is looking out for my best interests than someone who is experienced, but maybe doesn't know me as well, or maybe doesn't care as much about my interests. So, you know, this person that I knew was someone I'd known from school, we'd all worked together on this nonprofit in college and
00:29:01
Speaker
I had a lot of respect for what he had to say, and he called it. He just said what I knew was kind of true, but wasn't willing to admit. For me, it's an intuitive choice.
00:29:17
Speaker
I don't always journal, but I do sometimes journal and I think we had done a variety of exercises. We've been talking a lot within our own group and it became more and more clear that it was going to be unlikely for the three of us to come up with something that we all believed in and we were dragging out the inevitable.
00:29:37
Speaker
mercenary enough to be like, well, screw you guys, I'm gonna go and do my own thing. If you guys want to do it, that's your problem. Just leave. You know, I care too much about these two guys to do that. So the easiest thing for me to do was to bow out. And I mean, that obviously triggered the two of them deciding to hold the business and return money back to our investors.
Authenticity and Personal Limits
00:30:04
Speaker
But
00:30:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's how I made that decision.
00:30:23
Speaker
you know, white knuckled it to death or like heads down just to the point of like spending all of that cash and losing two more years. You know, there's so many ways in which I believe we're taught to stay the course and our gut is telling us otherwise, even though sometimes you don't know where you're going, but you just know it's somewhere different. Well, it's interesting. I'll say one thing about the gut is just that I think the reason why it's important to go with your gut is
00:30:50
Speaker
because your gut, when you go against your gut, you lose energy because you're like anxious and you're kind of like second guessing yourself and you're like, not sure. When you go with your gut, you go in with your full enthusiasm, sort of there is no like resistance to yourself and like kind of
00:31:10
Speaker
trying to force yourself to do something you kind of don't want to do. You're totally aligned like when I after the DC thing and I moved to New York I said to myself my number one asset is my energy enthusiasm and like creativity and like maintaining that protecting that by sleeping eating well you know being with people that I
00:31:32
Speaker
like is paramount. You know, I think being with your going with your gut is part of that. It totally is. And I love how you you phrase that resistance to self, right? Totally aligned. I mean, everybody has heard the mind body spirit alignment stuff, but you kind of go, huh, if you're if you're not living in alignment, but when you are because I was living out of alignment for a very long time, I was convincing myself to do a bunch of things because it just made sense. And, you know, you you lose touch with
00:32:02
Speaker
that deeper self, but the value of aligning yourself with your deeper instincts. And I just love how you said that if you don't resist yourself, right, but often we confuse ourselves with our heads. And so that's, that's the disclaimer. Interesting. Like I think in many ways, entrepreneurs and people who have created their own course are simply people who have a harder time dealing with BS. You know, like I have classmate, a teammate who went on to work
00:32:32
Speaker
at Goldman Sachs, and he said he didn't love it. He had to wear this suit that's uncomfortable every day. He had to stay really late. He didn't like his coworkers that much. He obviously made a lot of money, but to me, he put up with it for two or three years. I was like, I would not be able to cope for all the discipline, for all the
00:32:58
Speaker
stuff that I do and you look and maybe some people would say like, oh, I don't have the discipline to do that. It's like I do those things because I like them. You just couldn't pay me enough money to be in an office all day long wearing a suit, being with people you don't like. I just could not do that and I think that forces you to find something else and I think that I don't know if it's possible that there are people who just have a higher tolerance for that.
00:33:28
Speaker
you know, like some people are more comfortable being cold or being hot or whatever. And I was just like, I am not comfortable. I can't do this. And I love the distinction between discipline and this because you're obviously right, you're very disciplined. So it's not about one's ability to push through. It's just the ability to really railroad over your deeper self. So tell me about this as tech push up. Like what are we talking about here? Is that
00:33:53
Speaker
Guinness World Record. I just before we move on to your side project, which I want to talk about little side note here. What what inspired this? What is it? Yeah, so I hold the Guinness World Record for most number of Aztec push ups completed in one minute. And Aztec push up is a push up is a you start in a push up position. So you can imagine like a clapping push up is when you like
00:34:19
Speaker
push off the ground with your hands and your chest goes into the air and you clap in the air and then you go back down and you land. So your hands are airborne. Your feet are still on the ground, your hands are airborne. So an Aztec push-up is you push off the ground with both your hands and your feet, you touch your toes in the air and then you land, so you're fully off the ground, hands and feet off the ground, and then you land back in a push-up position.
00:34:48
Speaker
Oh my God. Dude, seriously, like I was on the varsity tennis team and soccer. You're, you're just shaming though. Like, I don't know. There are 40,000 Guinness world records. I promise if we sat down and looked at all of them.
00:35:03
Speaker
You can probably find one that, you know, with some training you could, you could set. No, I'm playing with you. It's amazing. I mean, you're just like off the ground having flight in a, in a pushup. And so you decided to push through this and try to get the world record because the story behind this was like.
00:35:19
Speaker
In 2012, I'd done a lot of running, 2011, 2012, I'd done a lot of running, which culminated with running the SF marathon. And it was a really hard race and I didn't do it as well as I wanted to, but I was kind of burnt out on running and I didn't do much running that year, the rest of that year. And I said, 2013, I want to do something different. I want a new physical challenge that's not running. And so I decided that I would commit to doing a fitness
00:35:48
Speaker
challenge every month. So I would pick a physical activity, I would have a series of videos that I were in the beginning of the month, I do as many as I can. So maybe it's like sit ups in one minute, or pull ups, or, you know, a one mile run. And I would do it in the beginning of the month. And I would see how what I got and then I would train all month for it. And then I would do it again. And I would see how much I improved. So that was like a personal project for myself.
00:36:17
Speaker
You know, I did a bunch of different things. And then in August, I was like, I want to do something that's kind of like pushups, not just straight pushups. That's boring. But so I Googled like pushup variations and I saw a video that was like hardest pushup variations.
Ship Your Side Project Bootcamp
00:36:31
Speaker
And the one that they decided it was the hardest was the Aztec pushup. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do that. How was the first 10 of those? Well, the first time around I did like, I think like 15 in one minute.
00:36:46
Speaker
So that was where I started. And then I remember when I was doing the sit-ups, there was some material online about like how to do more sit-ups, do sit-ups faster, do better sit-ups. So I started searching for, you know, maybe someone had written a similar article for Aztec push-ups so I could learn and improve my training.
00:37:06
Speaker
And it turned out there, there was this Guinness world record for it. And some college student had said it as a way to raise money for charity. And he had done 31 as tech pushups in one minute. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. And by the end of the month, I had tied that record. And so I said, well, I can probably be, you know, I can beat this, you know, and it's just special how much I'm going to beat it by. So I started looking into the record and.
00:37:35
Speaker
In January of 2014, I went back to Stanford in a gymnastics competition and they let me do a little bit of an intermission. And so the whole crowd was there and they were cheering for me as an alumni trying to set this world record. And so I was super fired up and I did 50 in one minute. And so Oh my God, dude, that's crazy. Wow. Yeah, I mean, it was just right. This is like the thing. I mean, this is this ties into
00:38:04
Speaker
side project, but it's just like, I like to like explore and try stuff. And this turned out like you never know. It's it's like fastening where these things go. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. So so let's talk about it side project, which is your side project. Tell everybody what this is, what that means. It's that's kind of an adorable wrapper and a wrapper. Yeah. So I created something called ship your side project.
00:38:29
Speaker
It's an online bootcamp that helps tech professionals launch their personal projects. And we've run through two cohorts of folks from, you know, it's an international program. We've had people from Canada, Venezuela, Switzerland, Brazil, as well as all over the United States. People use it to, you know, one person recently launched like a platform for sharing great podcast episodes.
00:38:57
Speaker
Another person's created a iPhone application that reminds you to stay in touch with people that you care about or want to stay in touch with. And you can set different like intervals. Someone else created a website that allows you to compare APIs and sort of helps developers choose like, which is the best mapping API that I should use for my new software project. And so, you know, these people are people who, I think there are a lot of people out there who
00:39:24
Speaker
love their job and do well at their job. And but they also have other ideas and have creativity that isn't expressed through their work. And they want to do a side project. And, you know, I've loved doing side projects, but I recognize that not everyone can is able to find the way to create the space in their life to do it, even though they could. And so super side project is basically putting a little bit of structure, putting a little bit of community, giving
00:39:52
Speaker
folks some tips and ideas and sort of mentorship towards making that a real thing to them. That's awesome. That's awesome. And if people are interested in hearing more about that, where can they find it? ShipYourSideProject.com. That's awesome. And so that's something that you're doing on the side. And how long have you been up to this? I started in November of 2015 and the first cohort was in January of 2020.
00:40:17
Speaker
15, 16. And then we just had a fall cohort that just concluded like two weeks ago. And we'll be doing another one in January again of 2017. That's awesome. That's it's such a great idea. Because I mean, yeah, a lot of people don't have the time, space bandwidth or organizational system set up to to do this. Well, in college, I did a student initiated course called the psychology of personal change.
00:40:45
Speaker
And it was supposed to be a theory and practice course together. So I, you know, got together a bunch of papers from behavioral psychology, social psychology, looking at how people change, how people make personal, you know, you know, modify the way they behave, they, you know, break addictions, things like that. And, you know, the other half of the class, the first half of the class is reading the paper, second half of the class is doing your own change project. I remember someone telling me in their final paper that
00:41:15
Speaker
The real benefit of the program wasn't necessarily even the tips, but it was just being able to tell somebody, like one of the students wanted to go to bed earlier, right? Get more sleep, but she had to, you know, it's awkward to tell your friends that you're hanging out with like, Hey, I got to leave. He's like, why? It's like, well, I should go to sleep. It's like, Oh, come on. Like just hang out a little longer with us. Like don't be lame. And
00:41:40
Speaker
You know, she could now say like, I'm doing this program, this class, and my project is to get to sleep earlier. So it's not you. It's this thing. I have to do it. So it allowed them to deflect, you know, put it onto an external place.
00:41:57
Speaker
Right. And, and so that's what we're doing, you know, like for myself, I just, I can do that on my own and, but not, I recognize that that that's not for everybody and that's okay. You know, that's awesome. And so who do you feel like this, like this ship, your side project is best designed to
Pursuing an Authentic Life
00:42:14
Speaker
suit? What kind of person? I think a lot of people who are in the technology field have done well with it. Often these people are developers or engineers, but also designers, you know,
00:42:27
Speaker
A lot of the, you know, as you know, so much of our world today are things that you don't need fancy equipment to do. You don't even necessarily need to hire staff to do that. Like if you have an internet connection and a sturdy computer, there are so many things that you can create and you can learn how to create just through the internet. And, you know, so it's really for anyone who feels like
00:42:56
Speaker
comfortable learning new skills, but I think developers and designers have done very well with that.
00:43:02
Speaker
That's awesome. Very cool. I love the name specifically. It's a, it's such a fun idea to, to package it in there. So everybody comes on the show. I asked them a couple questions. If you don't mind, I'd love to hit you up. So, you know, you've, you mentioned that you've done all these projects, you've done all this, these different types of things with your life and trusting your gut is such a huge piece of that. So what does an authentic life mean to you? An authentic life is.
00:43:31
Speaker
one where you're clear about what's meaningful and important to you and you can understand how the way you're living your life today and the work that you're doing and
00:43:44
Speaker
is in line with and supports the values and the goals that you've embraced for yourself and that you're surrounded by people who maybe don't, it's not that they have to share all those goals or share all those values, but they are aligned with you doing that and that you care and trust and respect those people around you.
00:44:06
Speaker
And was having authentic life something that you have always had? We didn't talk about that. Or did you feel like there was a turning point moment where you, you felt like you trusted that gut instinct and, and follow those steps more consistently? Yeah, I think, I think there, I, like I mentioned to you before the call that when I was 13, I read the book, seven habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey. And his second habit is begin with the end in mind, which is,
00:44:35
Speaker
involves asking you to think about what you'd like people to say during your funeral. And I think that's been a real sort of guiding point. It's not morbid to me. It's like it's empowering. So, you know, I started thinking about this at a young age. I would say that, you know, maybe a couple of years ago, I had a period where I was working at a job that I didn't
00:44:57
Speaker
necessarily feel like I was growing and able to be my full self in, and I was in a relationship that wasn't probably so healthy. And, but I was kind of like trying to gut it out. You know, I was trying to just like, I was, I was railroading my gut and I was railroading my, you know, intuition. So that was a kind of tough period. And, and I, I like.
00:45:23
Speaker
kind of snapped at one point. I was like, I like quit my job, got a new job, you know, got out of that relationship and resolved a bunch of things. And, you know, I'm very happy I did all those things. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny you say gutted out. I mean, I never really thought about that, but right. It's it is the opposite of following your instincts. And it's funny that that phrase is what it is. Yeah. And so you just you hit a you hit a brick wall and turned a different direction.
00:45:51
Speaker
Yeah, it felt like I was holding my breath for like months. And then, you know, when it was finally all over, I was like, I could take I could breathe again. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's not a good thing. And, you know, it's it's it was a, you could tell I could tell physically that things are a lot better when when we had made those changes.
00:46:15
Speaker
And so you had mentioned that you journal art. Are there any other habits or daily practices that you do to stay in a life that's authentic for you? Yeah. So, you know, I try to be physically active almost every day. That's like my meditation. I've tried many times to develop a meditative practice and I've never been able to commit to that. And I'm trying to, I believe that it is not because I'm undisciplined, but because I just
00:46:44
Speaker
Haven't yet seen the results of doing that. Whereas I immediately feel the effects of being physically active, either running or lifting weights or, you know, going to boxing. So I really try to do that every day. You know, I, I do, I do both daily journaling where I also record what happened to me that day. I'll do, and then I do a quarterly email update. That's sort of like a personal reflection.
00:47:12
Speaker
Right. I think more on a broader scale. And then, you know, I typically do something annually where I think about like, what's the year ahead and you know, what am I hoping to do? What changes do I want to make? And even if I don't always stick to that, I think that's really powerful and important.
00:47:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. And I can like so many people have come on this show this year. We're almost rounding a hundred thousand downloads actually. And, uh, there's so many consistencies to, you know, staying in an authentic life. And I think journaling has just, uh, it's surface for, for so many people. Well, Jason, I can't tell you how fun it has been to meet you, to chat with you today. If people are looking for more information about you, where can they find you?
00:47:59
Speaker
Sure. I mean, I'm on Twitter. I'm very chatty. It's just at Jason Shen. And also my website, The Art of Ass Kicking is JasonShen.com. Awesome. And that's S-H-E-N, and it'll be on the show notes. And on my site, Jason, thank you again for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure getting to chat with you. Laura, this was so fun. Thanks so much.