magazine
“if you work on your weaknesses you might be an all around good tennis player but you won’t be dangerous, unless you work on your strengths’”. In that book he talks about the negative spiral that we can sometimes find ourselves in. And I remember, Michael, when I was reading on your blog way back when you took on Nozbe as your thing and you talked about tens of things that were on your mind all the time. You know, one of those tens of things can start that negative spiral and can actually overwhelm everything! What Benjamin says, and what I echo is: “I don’t need to change and be a positive thinker but I do need to practice positive focus”. And those two things are different.
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Michael: Jason, before this new book of yours you had the other one “The Positive Promise Doctrine” that you wrote with your father, right? Jason: That was a fun project. You know, my father and I, we see each other physically half a dozen times a year, we talk quite often and he is a very successful CEO. He was the CEO of the Sharper Image, an American based company that was global, then he ran a garden supply company called Smith & Hawkin, and then he ran a manufacturing company producing those big massage chairs you see in the airports.
So he has experience over the past 20 years, has been running 150 to 400 million dollar companies... while my experience over the past 20 years has been in the classroom, either in a public classroom or in a corporate classroom, looking at how people receive those mandates from above. And so we have those two experiences almost at the opposite sides. Making the decisions and helping people implement the decisions. So we wrote a short guide book on what happens when people say and do what they say they were going to do.
Michael: Jason, tell us a bit more about yourself, please. Like for example you were with the David Allen Company and then you’ve decided to go on your own. What happened there? Jason: It goes back to couple of things that we’ve talked about so far. I started off as a junior high school teacher and then I went to high school. And while