190: The Silicon Valley Mindset – Leveraging Failure to Find Career Success with Jason Crawford
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With the proper mindset, it’s never too late or too risky to make a career shift. On this episode of The TalentGrow Show, tech entrepreneur and author of the blog The Roots of Progress Jason Crawford joins me to discuss the motivation and mindset that allowed him to make a major career shift after 20 years in the tech industry. Jason elaborates on the lessons he learned about success and failure from the culture of Silicon Valley, why a career failure doesn’t have to be a life failure, how to know if it’s the right time to go with your ‘gut feeling,’ and more. Plus, get Jason’s perspective on how to take advice from mentors without ignoring or compromising your own judgement. Tune in and be sure to share this episode with others in your network!
ABOUT JASON CRAWFORD:
Jason Crawford is an independent researcher who writes about the history of technology and industry on the blog The Roots of Progress. Previously he spent 18 years in the tech industry, including as co-founder & CEO of Fieldbook, and as an engineering manager at Amazon, Flexport and Groupon.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
Jason and Halelly discuss the attitude or mindset required to pursue your ambitions and take risks (5:47)
A career failure doesn’t have to be a life failure (8:17)
Jason describes in more depth how he became a self-learner and self-motivator (9:35)
How to balance taking advice from mentors with using your own judgement (12:11)
Understanding that people have different levels of communicating confidence (14:12)
Halelly and Jason refine what ‘going with your gut feeling’ should mean (16:25)
What made Jason decide to make a major career-shift after 20 years? What was his thought process? (19:20)
Envisioning short-term goals and long-term goals, and why it’s okay for your long-term goals to be higher-level and not so concrete (23:11)
What’s new and exciting on Jason’s horizon? (25:49)
One specific action you take to ratchet up your own career success (28:03)
RESOURCES:
Check out Jason’s website
Check out the Roots of Progress project
Donate to Jason’s non-profit Free Objectivist Books
Follow Jason on Twitter
For more on mentorship, check out Episode 39 of The TalentGrow Show featuring Don Watkins
And also check out Episode 176 where I talked about how to pursue big scary decisions and life a life of no regrets using some of my personal examples.
Episode 190 Jason Crawford
SOUNDBITE CLIP: Making this decision, I didn’t have the whole long-term plan all figured out. All I really had, relatively confident on, was kind of the first step. I knew I could go at least three months, probably about a year, and beyond that I kind of had no idea. But the further out you get, the fuzzier everything gets. I’m okay with that and maybe learning to be comfortable with that kind of thing, where you can see the next step very clearly but the long-term only at very high level and not in too much detail. I think that’s an important attitude to be able to take as well.
INTRO
Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.
Hey there TalentGrowers. Welcome back to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, the company that sponsors the TalentGrow Show so that it is free for you every Tuesday. As you know, the focus of the TalentGrow Show is on developing your leadership skills, and part of leadership is also self leadership – how do you manage your own career? How do you navigate your decisions and how you apply lessons to changing your career or to really focusing on your passions and pursuing what you were meant to do or what you really want to do? I always, always have my eyes open and I’m on the lookout for role models. When I see them, I try to bring them to you. Today is one of those episodes where I’m going to share with you a cool guy, a friend of mine Jason Crawford, who has been doing very interesting things in his career and I think that there’s lots of lessons he shares with you that are actionable in your career and that also help you of course as a leader develop others because you can become a better mentor and coach to the people that you lead. So, I hope you enjoy this episode. A little bit different than actionable “how to be a leader” or “how to give feedback,” that kind of stuff, and maybe a little bit more philosophical or a little more self introspection, so I think you’re going to love it.
Let’s dig in.
TalentGrowers, so glad to introduce you to Jason Crawford. He’s an independent researcher who writes about the history of technology and industry on the blog The Roots of Progress. Previously, he spent 18 years in the tech industry, including as co-founder and CEO of Fieldbook, and as an engineering manager at Amazon, Flexsports and Groupon. Jason, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.
Thanks so much for having me.
I’m really glad you’ve come by. I engaged you in a conversation – you and I know each other personally and I thought that your journey, your career journey, has been a very interesting one and that’s a topic we do bring up here on the TalentGrow Show and also some of the changes that you’ve made recently and lessons that everyone can learn from. Before we get started talking about that, I always ask my guests to introduce themselves. Briefly, telling us their professional journey in a short version. Where did you start and how did you end up where you are today?
I studied computer science in school and was always interested in computers and technology. I was also always interested in entrepreneurship. That interest in me probably goes back even earlier than computers. I was starting businesses as a kid before I was programming. Went into the tech industry. I was lucky enough to get to work for Amazon for a few years and then at some technology startups. Moved to the San Francisco Bay area about 10 years ago to co-found my first startup, and in that time ended up starting two different companies. One was sort of an iPhone company, we made iPhone apps related to shopping and retail, and then the second one was more of an information tool that was Fieldbook, which you mentioned. That was kind of a cross between a spreadsheet and a database, much like if people are familiar with a recent tool called Air Table, it was very similar. Neither of those startups really worked out very well and both of them got acquired in very early stages in what is known as a talent acquisition where basically your company is not getting bought for the product but for the team.
Then about three to six months ago, I decided to make a 90-degree turn in my career and pursue something quite different from what I was trained to do but that I had become quite passionate about, which is researching the history of technology and industry, and sort of more broadly, the story of human progress. This was something that began as a hobby and then became an obsession and then when I quit my last job and asked myself what did I really want to do, I decided to see if I could find a way to do it full-time. And now here I am.
So your goal is to work as a blogger and monetize that somehow?
Yes. I mean, the long-term goal ultimately would be to become some sort of public intellectual. Something where I’m probably writing books. My mid-term goal is to write a book in the next few years and where I’m getting the ideas out there, and I if can do that in some way and be influential and fund myself doing my own thing, then that’s the goal.
That’s awesome. I definitely wish you lots of success and it’s been interesting to watch your journey, since we know each other personally and we’re connected on social media and you share things that you’re doing and I was able to be, for example, one of the people who helped you test something on Fieldbook. I don’t even remember what it was, but kind of looking at some mockups of screens and changes and I remember giving feedback about that. It was cool. I was sad to see it go. You wrote a postmortem which people who are not in Silicon Valley probably aren’t familiar with the fact that Silicon Valley is littered with dead startups. It’s really hard to make it, there are so many people trying, and so a postmortem kind of captures your lessons learned and how things went. And in there, I’ll quote a sentence I pulled out from there. You wrote, “You can’t A/B test your life, and will never know how things would have turned out differently if we’d made different choices or just had a different roll of the dice. There are other hypothesis about what happened and an infinite list of what-ifs.” So in your opinion, is there an attitude that a person needs in order to pursue an ambitious, creative goal?
Absolutely. The biggest thing is that you have to be willing to do something that might not work. You have to be willing to take that risk. It’s funny. People talk about risk taking when it comes to career and startups in particular, but I think people would maybe make better choices if they thought carefully about what kind of risk they’re taking. A lot of times, when you take a risk in your career – whether it’s to take a new job or move to a new city or even do a startup – there is a certain risk. You’re taking a risk that a big move you made and a big sort of investment won’t work out. You’re usually not, hopefully not, taking a risk of personal financial ruin. If you’re going that far, you’re probably making a mistake. There are plenty of ways to take career risks or even do a startup without kind of putting your entire livelihood on the line. One thing that’s great about the San Francisco area and the Silicon Valley culture is they’re very forgiving of this kind of failure. The face that you did a startup and failed doesn’t mean you’ll never get a job or everybody is going to look down on you, because people know it happens all the time. So I think the risk you’re taking is, you’re taking the risk that you made this kind of big, emotional and career investment and then it doesn’t work out, and that’s almost more of a psychological risk than any sort of an existential or practical risk. I think it would help if people were aware of that and realized that the psychological risks you can mitigate a lot through your attitude. The right attitude of taking a big risk like this is, “Am I going to be happy that I tried it, even if it doesn't work out?” If you’re going to look back on the failure and say, “I’m glad I tried and I’m glad I’m not wondering.” The bigger failure in a certain sense is to not try it and then at the end of your life or decades later, when it’s too late, to look back and say, “What if I’d given it a try?”
Yes. This is funny because just recently, we released episode 176 – it’s a solo episode where I talk about how to make big, scary decisions so that you can live a life of no regrets – and that’s exactly what I describe. Later if you say, “I tried it and it didn’t work but now I know,” or, “I wish I tried it. I was too scared because I was too unsure if it was going to work or not,” but then you always live with that what if and the regret of not trying. Which can you live with and which can you not live with? And that’s so clarifying and so many people are just so scared of it, but what’s the worst that can happen?
I think one thing that helps is to remember that you are not your career. Not to say your career isn’t extremely important to you and a part of your identity – it should be – but a career failure is not necessarily, usually not, a moral failure. And a career failure doesn’t have to be a life failure. You can always recover and move on.
So what are some of the ways you’re applying lessons you learned from that, failure if you want to call it, to the current endeavors you’re undertaking? I think all the life experience of the last 20 years or so is helping me in launching something completely new and different. Probably the biggest thing I’m taking with me is just the ability to learn. I think one of my biggest strengths is the ability to ramp up on new areas and to learn quickly and I’m definitely having to do that now because in many ways, I’m kind of going, like I’m going back to school. In a certain sense what I’m doing now is almost putting myself through grad school. The training I never had in a whole area of research, and even how to do research, and as I watch myself, I’m making rookie mistakes at research. Again, the type that probably like a first-year grad student would make, and I don’t even have the network. I’m not in an institution where I’m surrounded by people who are training how to do this and have advisors. So I’ve had to build that. That’s actually probably one skill that I’ve taken, ever since – and this is a part of my life history you might not know – I actually dropped out of high school in order to be a home schooler/self schooler/auto-didact and my last two years of high school I was actually outside of any formal institution and mostly reading books at home. From that point onward in my life, I’ve always had to be relatively independent, be self disciplined, come up with a structure for myself and kind of make something work and hit a goal without any external structure. I’ve definitely had to do that as a startup founder and I’m having to do it again now. Part of how you do that is by bringing your own discipline to the task. Another part of how you do it is by explicitly building the support structure around you, finding advisors, meeting with people regularly. Even if that structure isn’t given to you, you can sort of build it for yourself.
That’s amazing. Kudos to you and to your parents – I actually know your parents, who were friends with my parents back many years ago in the same community – but that they let you, that they supported you, in doing such a thing. I really admire that. It’s actually also related to the story I told in that same episode I talked about, when my son asked to come out of school and do independent study so he can pursue his passion. Probably informed by the decision your parents made and knowing about it. It definitely means you’re a person who is disciplined and a self-starter and that you’re curious. You guide yourself to learn things that you don’t know and that you don’t see that as something that’s an obstacle. You just see that as part of the journey.
Exactly.
Okay, you’re talking about mentors and that’s something I wanted to talk to you more about. Do you want to talk about mentors now or do you want to tell us any other lessons you think we can pull out of the transition you’re making right now?
Let’s go ahead and talk about mentors.
Good. You mentioned when we talked before this that mentors and advisors are super important, and I agree. One of our common friends, Don Watkins, talked to me about the importance of mentors way back in episode 39, so that might be one we link to in the show notes for people to check out next. You say there is an important lesson to learn about maintaining your independence and balance when you’re listening to smart advisors so that you can get information from them that you can use, but also knowing how to go with your own judgment. Why is this important? Why is it so hard to do?
For whatever reason, I’ve generally never felt very uncomfortable being a little bit of a contrarian or having opinions that disagreed with the majority. Maybe I just grew up being in some sort of a minority and that’s always been relatively easy and comfortable for me. But what I found is that there were certain people and certainly the people who ended up being my mentors or advisors in this category, there were people who I really looked up to. They were older, wiser, I thought. They were certainly more experienced. They were absolutely more accomplished. They had seen more, done more, and what I found was that there were times when they would give me advice that I didn’t agree with or it didn’t resonate with me or it didn’t feel quite right. But I would actually be quite influenced by it. Or maybe I didn’t even have a strong opinion on my own, but I would get this advice and I would feel that they knew better than me and they’ve got to be right. I would sort of doubt my own judgment and second-guess myself a lot. In retrospect a lot, I think I just did that too much. So I guess the tough thing to learn was, even the smartest, wisest, most experienced, most accomplished, oldest people don’t get everything right. That seems really obvious when you say it in retrospect, but it’s hard to remember when they’re literally giving you advice on a thing you’re facing and they sound so smart and often they sound so confident.
I guess as a side note, one thing I’ve learned is that people have very different communication styles around communicating levels of confidence. Some people even when they’re relatively sure of something will hedge a little bit, and other people, even if they’re 70 percent sure, they’ll just throw out an idea as if they’re 100 percent sure. If you don’t realize that and kind of calibrate everybody to your personal level of expressing those things, it can cause a lot of friction between people and cause a lot of mistakes and misunderstandings. So, one thing I encourage everybody to do is to try and clearly communicate your level of certainty. Even if you’re the type of person who just tosses out casual opinion very confidently, you might want to tack on the end, “By the way, I’m only like 80 percent sure that is correct or 30 percent sure!”
Yes. That seems like a kind and fair thing to do. And by the way, it goes the other way too – if you’re the type of person who hedges things a whole lot, you should realize to some other people, that comes across as if you just have no idea what you’re talking about and you’re completely lacking confidence, when actually you might be like 90 percent confident. But you are very cautious about that difference between 90 percent and 100 percent. You just want to put that hedge out there. It’s a lesson for people who err on both sides.
But to come back to the advisors, I just ultimately had to learn that first off, all these super smart people don’t even all agree with each other. I had this experience, it’s very enlightening, of taking an issue to multiple smart advisors and getting opposite advice. That sort of made me realize, “Oh, wait a second, they don’t all agree with each other, so they can’t all possibly be right.” What I finally, ultimately had to lean through making some mistakes and looking back on it was honestly to give – sort of I hate saying this – but to trust my own gut. Trust my own intuition and really to trust my own judgment. And to realize that no matter how smart and accomplished those other people are, I’m the one in the thick of the problem. I’m the one who knows the most details about it and I’m the one who understands my own values and priorities the best. No matter what happens, it’s just that you should listen carefully to all your advisors, try to really understand the reasons for what they’re saying, and at the end of the day, “forget” all of it and just make your own judgment.
You know, there’s a lot I read about decision making and the way that we process information and if I understand it correctly, what ends up happening is that you seeking input is a good thing. You researching and asking different advisors is really good, because what it does is it goes into your knowledge base, it goes into your subconscious, and your subconscious is using that information along with all of the other information, along with things you may be perceiving about the situation that you’re not consciously aware of, that you’ve picked up subconsciously. All of that goes into that kind of stew and cooks together and then when your intuition serves you something, some people say, “Go with the gut.” If you’re just going with a knee jerk reaction that is uniformed, then maybe that’s not as smart. But if you’ve done your due diligence, then if you’ve allowed it to brew around and then you listen to your intuition, you’re very likely to make a pretty good decision because that stuff has been brewing in there and your subconscious has been working on it with all of those inputs into the final output of what it’s giving you as a gut feel.
Yes. That’s a good distinction. Go with your gut should not mean just go with your first reaction.
Like impulse.
Right. What it does mean to me is, if you have looked over everything and sort of carefully, systematically looked at it, looked at all the evidence and looked at different arguments and kind of been that systematic about that, then if you have a strong intuition about what the right answer is, you should usually go with that even if you kind of can’t rationalize it. Sometimes one choice looks good on paper, kind of if you add it up or tally it or you have some kind of completely conscious, logical explanation for why one thing is the right answer, but you’ve got this intuition that something is wrong there and the other thing is the right answer. In my experience, the intuition has been right more often. Usually there was just something I was missing in the on paper analysis or there was something I was just not weighting properly.
And that’s why people say, “Sleep on it.” That’s pretty good advice. If you give yourself some distance between when you got input and when you’re making the decision, your internal process has a chance to crunch through all that data and to serve you up something that’s probably going to guide you in the best possible way, knowing that there’s no guarantees and there may be things that are out of your control or out of your perception that can get in the way. That’s okay.
Although it’s funny – literally sleeping on it, as in go to bed and think about it the next morning, has never changed anything for me I don’t think. I agree with the sort of getting some distance from it. Maybe that’s just because by the time I’ve come to a decision, I’ve already looked at it so thoroughly. Some of that common advice does not work for me. That’s another lesson. Even if you hear things a lot, you’ve got to figure out what works for you personally.
Makes a lot of sense. So, you made a major career shift about 20 years in. You’re moving in a completely different direction. You told me right now you feel like you’re getting a graduate education. How did you decide to make that kind of a move and what are some of the things you’re seeing as barriers you still need to overcome?
How did I decide to make the move? In a certain sense, the decision was easy. In another sense, it was kind of difficult. It was easy because it was very clear to me, this was the thing I was obsessed with. This was the thing I could not stop thinking about. This was the thing I had a big vision for, and I guess maybe one of my basic rules in life is to always follow that. Whenever you’re lucky enough to have that, you should find some way to follow it and do it full time. Another way to look at it is, this was the thing that I couldn’t see myself not doing. As in, if I had taken any other job, I would have felt that I would have needed to continue doing this as a side project or else something would have been incomplete about me. But I knew if I went into this as my full-time work, I wouldn’t need any other projects.
I bet you had that decision, right? To choose whether to pursue it as a side hustle, sort of while you’re ramping up and to have another income-producing job in the meantime, or to go full in? I mean, is that a decision you grappled with? How did you choose?
Certainly. I went through about a month – I left the previous job – and went through about a month where I pursued two paths in parallel. I did a regular job search in the tech industry, looking for software engineering management type positions with early to mid-stage startups, and I ended up with a couple of offers there that I was excited about those offers. They were great companies. But then at the same time I was pursuing this alternate path of, well, could I just write the blog full time and what would that look like and how would I support myself and so forth? I was fortunate enough to get, to actually have two things together. I got some grants from some independent foundations.
That’s cool.
One of those has been announced so far and it’s from Emergent Ventures, which is a fund run by Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. And then the other thing that happened around this time was I found a part-time consulting gig that leveraged all my tech skills but also was very mission aligned with this cause of studying human progress and that’s with a website called Our World and Data. So those two things came together and that sort of enabled me to go ahead and I saw that there was a way, at least in the short term, for the first year or so that I could fund myself. I figured that would give me enough time to figure out the longer term.
Just to clarify. You said they came together – you pursued them, right? It was a proactive initiative you took?
Absolutely.
They didn’t just land in your lap. “Here’s a grant!”
Some things were a little bit like that, but that stuff pretty much never comes to you unless you’re out there kind of doing the hustle.
Just want to make sure that’s really clear to people because sometimes people are like, “I don’t have those.” You have to make it happen! It’s work.
Absolutely.
Interviewer: Thinking creatively, thinking about I want to fund myself, how could I? What would work? Then vigorously pursuing opportunities to do that.
There’s one thing, one pattern here that I think is important, is even making this decision, I didn’t have the whole long-term plan all figured out. All I really had, relatively confident on, was kind of the first step. I knew I could go at least three months, probably about a year, and beyond that I kind of had no idea. But the further out you get, the fuzzier everything gets. I’m okay with that and maybe learning to be comfortable with that kind of thing, where you can see the next step very clearly but the long-term only at very high level and not in too much detail. I think that’s an important attitude to be able to take as well.
So you don’t have like a five-year vision or goals?
I do, but it’s very high level. When I made the decision, I had kind of figured out, “Look, there’s at least a few different ways I could make a living on this long-term. Like I could write books, for instance. Now, a lot of books don’t pay very well, but if you can write a best-seller or if your books sell well enough and/or if you can write them fast enough, you can sort of make a living that way. Another thing you can do is you can get on the speaker circuit. Often a book will launch you onto the speaker circuit and then you don’t make a lot of money from the book but you make a lot of money speaking. More broadly, if you get a big enough audience, then you can monetize your audience in all different sorts of ways. If you have a super popular podcast or YouTube channel, you can monetize that if you have a Patreon. If you get up to about 1,000 people supporting you on a Patreon then you’re in the ballpark of maybe being able to make a living off just that alone. You need about 100,000 fans I would say to get 1,000 people who actually just pay you money because they love you so much. I saw if it got that big. And then there’s also another alternate path which is some people take this kind of independent research and they spin it into consulting. They find some much-smaller base of supporters who are willing to pay a lot of money for their expertise and so if you can get people paying you thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, then you only need dozens of those clients.
I saw there were all these different paths. I didn’t know which of those I was going to pursue. I did sort of know that a book would be a good step on any of those paths, in terms of building credibility and building an audience and so forth. That felt like a good mid-term goal, so I decided, “I’ll set this as my mid-term goal. In the next couple of years I’ll try to write a book. In that time I will also be figuring out what I am going to do after the book.”
Good. Smart. Having a blog and doing research all leads up to a book, because that’s all pieces of writing that you can weave together into what goes into the book.
Exactly.
Then you get feedback, also. When you blog, people read it and they give you feedback, so that sharpens your thinking and that all goes into the book. Well, cool. And kudos to you for making bold moves like that and setting an example, because I think that so many people live in fear of what if and can’t see themselves doing things like this, which is one of the reasons why I was motivated to bring you onto the show, to give an example and help people maybe pursue things they’ve been squashing down that are burning in them. Before you give us one specific action that I always ask my guests for, what’s new and exciting in your world? Everything you’re talking about is new and exciting, but I always ask this. What’s the project that’s got you most energized these days?
You’re right. Every new subject that I turn to is exciting. I just wrapped up a couple of months focusing on the history of infectious disease and how we conquered it really through things like vaccines, antibiotics, sanitation efforts and so forth and I’ve written a few blog posts on that. That stuff was fascinating.
So well timed with this coronavirus that’s in the news!
I know, I didn’t plan that.
That’s amazing.
And now I’m making a big transition. I’m just beginning a study of the history of the stock market and public companies and how did we get to the Wall Street that we have today and where did its features come from and I’m super excited about that too.
I mean, we’re going to link to your blog and people can go and look into it some more, but if you could say, what is your bumper sticker? What is your goal in the research that you’re doing? What do you hope the bottom line will be, the “aha!” will be for people?
I want to give people an appreciation of the modern world, of industrial civilization and the standard of living that we all enjoy because of it. I think too many people take that for granted. They don’t know how far we’ve come, how much standards of living have actually been improved in the last couple of hundred years. They don’t know how historically anomalous this was, how many thousands or tens of thousands of years that we went along with very little technology and very little wealth and people suffered greatly for it and how much today, in a certain sense, almost everyone lives like a king by the standards of old. So I want to give people that appreciation for that story, for how far we’ve come and therefore the drive to really keep it going into the future. I hope to motivate and inspire people to be part of that story for the next generation and keep human progress moving forward.
To inspire optimism and appreciation of the good. There is so much going on in the culture now where people vilify – that’s not the word I need here – it’s more like people complain and bemoan. Things are so terrible and the world is going to end. We need positive voices that shine a light on all the good that is happening.
Absolutely.
Good. Thank you for that. What is one specific action that our listeners can take today, this week, that can help them ratchet up their own success in their career or their own decision making or leadership or whatever angle you want to take on it?
I guess it’ll reflect my own personal proclivities, but I would say, “Read a book.” So many people don’t read enough. It could be something directly relevant to your career, but it also doesn’t have to be. I’ve heard from a product manager at one point who said, “Here are my top 10 reading lists for product managers,” and I don’t remember what all of them were but just to give you a flavor of it, one of them was Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
Wow. That’s unexpected!
But actually, Frankenstein is a great dramatization of what can go wrong when you have a creation that doesn’t turn out the way you intended or when you weren’t thinking very carefully, maybe, about what it was going to turn into and what you were going to do with it once it was in the world. I would just suggest that people read broadly, stretch your mind. Read within your field, but also get outside your field and just read some of the great works that have been handed down to you over the many generations.
That’s very inspiring. It’s interesting, because knowing you as I mentioned I also know that you are a man of your word and you do care about people reading because you actually on the side – if you don’t sound busy enough to people – you run sort of a philanthropic effort where you help connect people who can fund buying books and you send those books to people who can’t afford them but want to learn. Is that right?
That’s absolutely right. I made this really for the community of folks who are interested in the author Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism, and there are a lot of students who are interested in reading those books. They hear about them, they might not be getting them in their curriculum, so the site is for people to sign up and students can sign up and request one of those books and then I’ve got a bunch of donors who are willing to fund books going out to these students.
I participated in that before – not regularly as I probably should – but if I understand, also these people in their requests, they write a narrative about why they would like to read the book and as a donor, you can get a sense of the value that you’re giving.
I did it a little bit like those “adopt a child” charities, but in this case it’s adopt a student or adopt a little piece of their learning journey.
That’s pretty cool. That’s a neat project and I love that you give us an example and role model. You can live a very full life and do so many different things in so many different arenas. You’re pursuing your own passion and business, but you’re pursuing it in this sort of side hustle that is purely philanthropic. You don’t have any kind of monetary gain from it, doing work. You’re buying books and shipping them to people all over the world, so that’s pretty neat and thank you for doing that. People are going to want to learn more from you and about you. What’s the best place online, on social, where should they follow you?
Sure. My personal website is JasonCrawford.org. I have a blog there where I put out occasional thoughts about life and career. From there you can also find my main project, RootsofProgress.org, where I write about the history of technology. And both of those are on Twitter. @JasonCrawford on Twitter and @RootsofProgress on Twitter.
We’ll link to all of that. Jason, thanks so much for stopping by the TalentGrow Show and sharing your insights with us.
This has been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
My pleasure.
And that’s a wrap!
Well, TalentGrowers, I think that action step is one of the more unique ones. I’m pretty sure no guest has really ever said, “Read a book.” That’s so easy, it sounds so simple. But if you’re one of those people who isn’t reading a lot or isn’t reading at all or keeps meaning to but don’t get to it, maybe this will be your push to do it. And really any book will be good. Jason explained how maybe you can choose, but I’d love to hear what book are you going to read? And then what you thought of it, how it helped, any insights you had from this episode. I’m always interested in your feedback. Let’s stay in touch. I have a free tool on my website, just for listeners of the TalentGrow Show. It is called “The 10 mistakes that leaders make and how to avoid them,” and if you download that for free, you will have the way to avoid those mistakes and also we will have a way to stay in touch and you will hear from me on Tuesdays with what new episode is in the cue and what’s coming up the week after, plus actionable tips and learning opportunities. I hope that you will do that today.
And, one other action – share this episode with someone who could benefit from it. I make this content free for you and I would love to reach as many people as possible and by you sharing it with one other person, you just helped me double the listenership. Wouldn't that be a fun way for you to help me out? Help someone else out and feel good. Yes, do it!
All right, thanks for listening TalentGrowers. I really appreciate you. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and this is the TalentGrow Show. I’m really grateful that you’ve listened and until the next time, make today great.
Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.
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Intro/outro music: "Why-Y" by Esta
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