Episode 5: Jason Mayden
Career Transitions for High-Performers with Jason Mayden
Episode 3: Show Notes
In this episode, we dive deep into the remarkable life and career of Jason Mayden, a true high-performer who has blazed his own trail in the worlds of tech, design, and corporate America. Join us as we explore the pivotal moments and inspiring insights that have shaped his extraordinary journey. As the CEO and Co-Founder of Trillicon Valley, an acclaimed design and strategy consultancy, he specializes in pioneering new ventures and orchestrating intricate negotiations involving athletes, entertainers, and global creatives through multi-stakeholder partnerships. As we delve deeper into Jason's narrative, we'll explore the mental hurdles and stereotypes he's faced, shedding light on the complex corporate dynamics in America and how they can affect an individual's self-worth. Learn about pivotal moments, including a life-changing connection with his high school art teacher and his intern experience at Nike. Discover how Jason's family and his determination helped him overcome overwhelming challenges and stereotypes. He also shares insights into the importance of self-worth, authenticity, and transcending job titles for fulfillment. Join us for this enlightening episode as we celebrate the life and career of Jason Mayden, a high-performer who not only navigated career transitions with grace but also redefined success on his own terms. Tune in now!
Key Points From This Episode:
Background about Jason and his current career transition decision.
His childhood inspiration and overcoming health challenges.
Jason shares an impactful moment with his high school art teacher.
A profound conversation that changed the course of his life.
Discover how he ended up working as an intern at Nike.
Championing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the tech and design industries
He shares the moment when he met his childhood hero Michael Jordon.
What Jason values the most in his life: his family.
Overcoming mental hurdles and stereotypes.
Corporate dynamics in America and how it plays into an individual’s self-worth.
Standing up against the pressure to conform in corporate America.
Shifting from employment to deployment.
Recognizing that self-worth isn't tied to job titles or external markers of success.
The value of accepting and embracing oneself.
Discover the role of high expectations and faith in reaching your potential.
Quotes:
“I’ve always seen myself as a person that is being deployed by God, not employed by man.” — Jason Mayden [0:07:30]
“I saw the connection between the jump shot and a sketch. Like the technique of shooting a jump shot elbow-in is the same as shoulder sketching when you’re drawing cars and drawing rims.” — Jason Mayden [0:27:51]
“My whole life strategy is to eliminate the way people can tell me no. I derisk things by taking the feedback and then immediately develop in the skill and the gap.” — Jason Mayden [0:28:55]
“That’s what art unlocked from me, was self-worth and value.” — Jason Mayden [0:31:20]
“I made decisions based on what I believed I was being called to do. Even if it didn’t make sense to the world, it made sense to me.” — Jason Mayden [0:43:34]
“I’m an enlightened leader. I have the data and I have the courage to make tough calls and to hold people accountable. Even if that means that I may lose my job by doing the right thing, I’m willing to do it.” — Jason Mayden [0:51:50]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
EPISODE 5 [TRANSCRIPT]
“[0:00:00.4] JM: So, this was early Google, so I was able to track down their headquarters because remember, Google at that point was like classifieds. The Internet, they put everything on the Internet at that point. Their headquarters, their address, the number, the email, like it was all there.
[0:00:12.0] JU: You just called this guy up at Toyota?
[0:00:14.3] JM: Yeah, I just called Toyota Japan and left a message and said, “Look, I’m a kid in Chicago, I want to design sneakers for Nike, you had Chi Wai Lee as an intern, where did he go to school?
[0:01:36.5] JU: All right, welcome to another episode of The Paint & Pipette Podcast. I am thrilled to welcome my brother to the stage, Jason Mayden. Jason, welcome.
[0:01:47.2] JM: What’s going on, what’s going on?
[0:01:48.4] JU: It’s great to be with you. We were just talking about how we just get to have a fun conversation in public, which is pretty fun. I’m really grateful for the chance to dive in. We’re going to do something a little bit different today, folks, we’re going to talk about where Jason’s at right now and – well, maybe Jason, why don’t you start?
Give folks a sense for where are you right now, what’s a decision you’re trying to navigate right now and then I want to kind of put a pin on that and then go back in time and let’s help folks understand how you’ve gotten to this point and we’re just going to have a conversation with brothers here. So maybe tell us a little bit about where you’re at right now and then we’ll go backwards.
[0:02:24.4] JM: Yeah. So where I am right now is a choice between continuing on the path of adventure that is entrepreneurship or starting the path of intrapreneurship within a large corporation. Both of them have positive upsides, obviously with careers and opportunities but the real decision that I’m making is, how do I actually stay in control of my time? Because that’s the most important thing for me at this stage of my life is not giving time to things that don’t deal with continuity and continuous return and max value.
So not only monetarily but like, the relationships I build, the knowledge that I gain, the network that I’m now a part of, the things that I’m able to learn, the strength that I’m able to develop. So I’m in an inflection point and it’s an interesting inflection point but I feel tremendously blessed to even have the presence of options. A lot of people don’t even have an option and I have, you know, a few of them and I’m working through which ones I align mostly but what I’m being called to do and then what I think I believe I would enjoy doing.
[0:03:25.1] JU: So, just to quickly recap, you’re at the point where you’ve got to make kind of an inflection point decision about the next call it, five years to your career. Yeah, I think we titled this Session Career Transitions for High-Performers for a reason, right? And hopefully, now, folks get a sense for of the creator transition that’s before Jason. As you said, it’s an incredible privilege.
It’s a real inflection point as you said because there’s tradeoffs and before we dive into these tradeoffs, let’s talk about the high-performer piece for a second. Let’s talk about how you arrived at this moment because some folks may know your background, many probably don’t. Can you just trace a little bit of your career journey and I may just pepper interrupt your questions along the way, fair warning.
[0:04:07.3] JM: Yeah, yeah. I would say, career started at seven years old when I was in a hospital sick with what could have been a terminal septicemia, which is a severe blood infection. It was at that moment that I discovered that there was a character named Dr. Lucius Fox in Batman 307, the guy who created gadgets for Batman and seeing a person that looked like me that was analytical and creative, was clearly in control resembled my father, his characteristics.
Like, I just became enamored with this idea that you know, I wasn’t limited in terms of what possibilities that I could dream of, right? Because I saw Lucius creating the gadgets for one of my favorite heroes and I’m like, “Well, if this guy can do that, then I could do the same thing for the hero that’s in real life” which is Michael Jordan.
[0:04:50.7] JU: Okay, but pause, pause, pause. How’d you get this comic book? Did somebody give it to you while you’re in the hospital or like, how did Lucius enter your life?
[0:04:57.1] JM: Yeah, so it was crazy. So my dad, when he came home from the military and he was going to school on a GI bill of Chicago State University and on the weekends, he would play pickup basketball for money and after we would watch and play, we would hoop also, we would go home and watch the old Adam West Batman and I didn’t know Batman was a comic book character. I just saw it as a television show.
So when I was sick, they had this room full of donated books and toys that were part of the children’s ward and so like, highlights, magazines, Lincoln logs and there was a damaged, yeah, Batman comic book. I remembered looking at it and being like, “Man, this is – what is this? This is Batman?” And so I had no clue that picking up 307, that was the first time Lucius Fox ever showed up in the storyline.
So it was serendipitous for me to gravitate towards that one when I picked that up because he wasn’t on the cover. Like I bought a copy of it, you know when I became an adult. There’s no indicator that Lucius was involved. So it was meant for me to find that story and to find him.
[0:05:54.4] JU: I just got chills bro, that’s so cool. Okay, so and talk for a second about – because you said, “Okay, my hero, Batman, but then my hero is Michael Jordan.” How did you make the leap? Is it because your dad was a hooper or you’re in Chicago? Obviously, the Bull’s dynasty era, right? So it doesn’t paint too much of an imagination stretch to get there but how did you go from Lucius as gearing up Batman I link you up MJ.
[0:06:16.6] JM: Yeah, I mean, Michael, for a lot of us, you know, as much as you know, we had access to him through television and proximity, a lot of us could never afford to go to the game. It’s kind of like the Warriors now, right? Like, you don’t really see a lot of real Warriors fans at the stadium because they can’t afford it, these people who look at it as an activity.
It was the same with the Bulls back then, right? Like the real fans, a lot of times were middle-class, low middle-class, people who couldn’t get access to the tickets and if they did, they normally came through like the YMCA or some type of work event and it was nosebleed. So we never really got a chance to see him up close and personal.
My perception of Michael Jordan is that he was enigmatic. He would drive through the city in a Ferrari wearing trench coats. You know, people would have reports of seeing him at night playing basketball. Like I saw him play pickup basketball more than I saw him play organized basketball.
[0:07:04.7] JU: He’s are legit superhero in Chicago.
[0:07:06.4] JM: Yeah, yeah.
[0:07:07.2] JU: On the court but even his off-court persona.
[0:07:09.8] JM: Yeah, it was wild, man. Like, he didn’t really know, it was always a Michael Jordan sighting, like, “Oh, he was here at this park playing and he was here at the school” or “He was here” and so, I just kind of looked at that as modern mythology and was like, “Wow, you know what? If he is the archetype of a hero, then I can be the archetype of a healer.” Because a hero needs a healer as a companion, that’s how they continue to do what they do.
I’ve always seen myself as a person that is being deployed by God, not employed by man. So, I know my gifts are not my own and even as a kid, I understood like, if I’m able to survive, I’m able to make it, then I would dedicate my life for using creativity in service to others, and I did that.
[0:07:46.1] JU: Okay, hang on, you just dropped so many nuggets there. I don‘t even know, I can’t grab them fast enough. Let’s put a pin in “deployed by God versus employed by man” because I like to come back to that but real quick. You’re seven, you’re in the hospital bed, you encounter Lucius Fox. In your brain, you think Michael Jordan, and then you think, “If I ever get out of this bed, I want to use my creative gifts.” What happened?
[0:08:08.8] JM: Yeah, so I was in the hospital for several months. Thankfully, you know, they pulled me back from the grips of death. I had an extremely high temperature, I was fading in and out of consciousness. What I say is I had a chance to experience life beyond the veil of reality. Like at seven, I saw beyond what we call life and it changed me. Like, it changed my relationship with time and it changed my relationship with what I think is possible for me.
[0:08:31.7] JU: How do you mean?
[0:08:32.2] JM: Well, you realize that this is a continuum. Like, we look at life as a linear progression, right? We go through these stages of evolution and maturation and there’s a conclusion. At seven, I saw that there was no conclusion. There was just a transference of energy.
So, energy never dies. Energy is just transferred to another state and seeing that energy transference, I’m like, “Well, what does a contribution to the zeitgeist that I could potentially, you know, be known for?” And at seven, it wasn’t, I didn’t have the sophistication or vocabulary but I had the urgency.
[0:09:01.1] JU: No, it’s definitely you’re worth saying, what’s the transference to the zeitgeist? I don’t have any of that.
[0:09:06.2] JM: I mean you know, according to my teachers, man, I definitely have a lot of words to say, you know? It was that age too, where I got out of the hospital and I went back into second grade, it was right after that that my teachers told my parents I was broken. You know, I’m neurodivergent. At the time, that wasn’t a term. It was if you’re a black kid in the inner city, and you have a different style of learning, then they put you in special education.
So her immediate response is, “Something’s wrong with Jason, he’s broken, put him in special ed.” But my parents were like, "This awkward because does he finish his work on time?” “Yup” “Is it correct?” “Yes” “Okay, so what’s the issue?” “Well, he seems to be, you know, bored in class. He moves and talks a lot.” My parents are like, “Well, that means that he’s not interested in what you’re teaching him, it’s probably too easy, have you challenged him?”
[0:09:49.5] JU: Wow.
[0:09:50.3] JM: Right? And so my dad, because he was in school in college, he would take me to college with him as a seven-year-old, eight-year-old, obviously, to be close to his son who had just got out of hospital but I was learning physics, I was learning industrial engineering, I was learning calculus, I was learning drafting at seven and I thought it was normal.
[0:10:06.2] JU: Of course, you were thinking of transference to the zeitgeist. I mean, this makes perfect sense, it’s all coming together for me.
[0:10:10.8] JM: Yeah, so it was wild. My dad and my mom never told me something was hard or impossible, they just said it just takes more time to understand it but, “Yeah, read this book about physics” and I’m like, “I don’t know what this means.” They’re like, “You’ll figure it out” and so that was my way of navigating the world and I took a liking to math and science and was really, really good at it at an early age and I think in that instance, in the inner city, people regressed to me.
they always look at you know, statistically, what the outcome could potentially be and they don’t leave room for freewill of God and they’ll just say, “Well here’s your trajectory based on where you live, what you look like in a socioeconomic status.”
[0:10:43.9] JU: Yeah.
[0:10:45.2] JM: But I don't know, for whatever reason, my parents were in a position to advocate for me. So they created the alternative, you know, educational path where I went to class but they sent me with drawing books and sketchbooks and math books that were supplementing what I wasn’t getting in elementary school.
[0:10:59.9] JU: So that teacher who said, “Jason’s broken.” Did your parent’s advocacy change the teacher’s opinion or did it change your opinion of the teachers?
[0:11:09.0] JM: In my books, I wrote a chapter about what happened. So I knew my teacher consciously was labeling me as cognitively dysfunctional. This is the terminology she used to summarize it to saying I’m broken. So I drew a picture with the kid standing on a pedestal with his middle finger up saying FU because I consciously knew like, “Lady, you’re making things up about me.”
Now, I didn’t intend for her to see this picture. Mind you, I was seven, this is me just rebelling. On his shirt, there was a little rocket. At that time, I wanted to go to the Air Force or either wanted to go to NASA. Like I couldn’t decide, I was like, “Oh, my brother wants to be an Air Force pilot.” Every kid has a dream of flying, so you know, you draw rockets and planes. It was a combination of the fact that the kid on the pedestal has a middle finger up.
I don't know why or where it came from but that was my way of rebelling against her and the rocket, and she thought it was a phallic symbol and so the quality of the drawing at seven was extremely detailed and impressive and so she called my mom and sent home a letter like they used to in our backpacks and I obviously looked at the letter and see what it was to brace for, you know, how I would be reprimanded.
[0:12:10.8] JU: How many spankings you’re going to get?
[0:12:12.2] JM: Yeah, yeah, like I had the have a strategy and so I get home, my mom’s on the phone with the teacher, she had called before I could get to the house and my mom wasn’t upset. It was like, she was laughing and so what happened is the teacher, even though she did not retract what she said about my intelligence, she started to tell my mom, like, “Your son has a gift, like, this drawing is phenomenal.”
Now, the subject matter, the fact that he had a middle finger in it. Hey, that’s – you know, but all in all, like, this is for a seven-year-old, you know, like, this is crazy because I had like four shortening perspective, foreground, middle ground, background, like I just drew this image of a kid.
[0:12:47.7] JU: You’re out of the hospital at this point.
[0:12:49.0] JM: Yeah, I’m out of the hospital.
[0:12:50.6] JU: You know that you want to use some of your created gifts. Did you know that some of your creative gift was drawing or was it the teachers actually known the backpack that made you go, “Ooh, maybe this is part of my Lucius Fox toolkit.”
[0:13:01.0] JM: Yeah. Well, it was because I didn’t fit in. I’m a mixed kid, I’m a nerd, a virgin, I was sick, so imagination became my community. They’re like my thoughts became my environment because I didn’t necessarily fit in with my peers. Like I was interested in things that kids in my neighborhood didn’t necessarily consider, you know, cool and so drawing was a form of escapism and you know, it was a form of rebellion because, on a piece of paper, I could be whoever I wanted to be.
When I drew something, I can make it what I wanted. I didn’t have to subject myself to the confines of my community and my opportunities weren’t bound by location when I was able to read and draw, and create. So I didn’t consciously think of it as a skillset, I thought it would be a more of like my companion. Like, my imagination was my best friend and I’m grateful that that was the case because I’m really okay as an adult with being, you know, sticking to myself.
[0:13:53.5] JU: We kind of keep kind of anchoring back to this present decision you have, it is right by your inflection point so I want to just keep that in everybody’s mind but the reason that we’re diving into this is because we want to appreciate this inflection point and hopefully, dive into this more.
So walk us through MJ, the hero who is in need of a healer. You started making these drawings, you realized, “Wow, my imagination is my best friend.” Keep drawing us along this journey for you. How do you as Lucius Fox evolve?
[0:14:19.9] JM: I thought I was supposed to be an engineer so I started to teach myself through my dad’s books, in mechanical and electrical engineering. So I would take apart gadgets in the house, TVs, radios. Whenever we had a mechanism, I would deconstruct it and reconstruct it and make something different. I really fell in love with data from buildings, I wanted to be just like him. You know, I wanted to be a goonie so bad, I thought it was cool like they never really showed images of black kids going on adventures.
Like, it was just always us running from crime or running from violence, never just innocently navigating our neighborhood and discovering things. So I became more of a kid who fell in love with that narrative of discovery and adventure. So at 10 years old, I started writing letters. I saw Ahmad Rashad talk about Air Jordans on an NBA Inside Stuff. They used to come on Saturdays when we still had Saturday morning cartoons.
[0:15:09.1] JU: Oh, I remember it, I’m right there with you. I’m sitting on my couch right now.
[0:15:13.2] JM: Yeah-yeah-yeah and so he was like, Nike in Beaverton Oregon and at that time, the only thing I knew about Oregon was like, Oregon Trailer, the game we played in school. I was like man –
[0:15:22.3] JU: You’re like forwarding the river and shooting your game.
[0:15:23.8] JM: Yeah, yeah. They’re like, “Oh, don’t get dysentery.” I’m like, “What the hell is dysentery?” And so I discovered Nike's address, I wrote letters, this is pre-emailing people, and I just continued on this path of trying my best to stay in front of them and it was at the age of 14 where my life took a turn. I saw my friend get shot in front of me and I ended up spending an insane amount of time going forward.
I feel like I was sketching shoes because that gave me safe passage to go home by having that delay in time.
[0:15:54.4] JU: You mean, you kind of take refuge at Foot Locker and you didn’t mind because you didn’t want to be in a dangerous situation?
[0:16:00.9] JM: Yeah, I just didn’t want to have to walk home with everyone else. So I spent two, three hours after school because practice was in the mornings for football. So after school, which is more of my own time.
[0:16:10.3] JU: Yeah.
[0:16:10.6] JM: And I was a good student so I didn’t really have a lot of homework. I finished it before I went home. So I would sit there and sketch shoes for two or three hours, and then walk home once everybody had you know, dispersed and I started to meet people from the industry, just by, just being there. You know, sneaker reps and merchants and people bringing in new samples and so I started to have access to the industry simply because of just being, like I said, approximate to where these conversations were happening.
[0:16:36.8] JU: You’ve heard of mall rats, so you were a locker rat.
[0:16:39.9] JM: I was a locker rat, yeah. I was a gym rat and a locker rat, I was working out, training, and drawing sneakers. Like, I was in the art room in the gym in the weight room, that was where I spent like most of my time.
[0:16:49.8] JU: That’s great.
[0:16:50.9] JM: It was interesting because that moment of discovering that my talent actually had a label and a talent and a value ascribed to it gave me confidence that it wasn’t just a hobby, that I actually was heading in the right direction and I had a teacher, Mr. Summers, in my junior year.
[0:17:08.7] JU: Come back to Mr. Summers and saying, how did you find out your talent had a label?
[0:17:13.0] JM: Well, I found out my talent had a label because of Mr. Summers.
[0:17:15.1] JU: Okay.
[0:17:16.1] JM: Right, yeah. So my freshman, actually, after I saw the incident with my friend, Mr. Summers was like, “Hey, I need you to stay after and airbrush.” So he would let us make money by airbrushing our friend’s shirts and clothes. That was how I made my money, cutting hair, shoveling snow, cutting grass, airbrushing jackets and so one day, we were sitting there and he had his wallet on the desk and it was like, full of receipts and money and I stare at it because I was like, apprehensive to walk into the room and be alone with his wallet.
And I was like, “Mr. Summers, like, yo, what are you doing? Do you know where you’re at? Do you know who we are?” And he was like, “What? You’re a kid, you’re not a criminal, shut up, like get off there and keep drawing.” Like he said it so fluidly like he didn’t even hesitate to like stop and think of what I was saying to him. He was like, it was absurd for me to consider myself a criminal simply because of where I was at.
He was an older male, didn’t come from the southside of Chicago, was driving there from Indiana, volunteering his time and he was like, “Bro, you’re not a criminal, you’re a kid. Like, What’s wrong with you, why are tripping? “Do you know what you can do? Like, look at your talent. You’re not a criminal, what’s wrong? Don’t ever…” He was pissed that I thought that he would think I was a criminal. So that was my first interaction with like realizing, like how society plays a devious trick for inner-city kids.
[0:18:29.7] JU: You didn’t share that same view that he shared. Like, talk to me about the view you had versus the view that he shared with you.
[0:18:36.1] JM: Well, I mean, the reality is, and sorry if I’m getting emotional, it just pisses me off that people don’t watch what they say to kids. The reality is that I thought that. I thought of it, I thought that my life was dispensable because that’s what you’re told. You know, you’re told by – after the second grade, this is the wild part. They did this thing in Chicago public schools and it’s taken me years to heal from this.
But they had a sitting room, all the boys, and they said, “Look to your left, look to your right, one out of three of you would be dead or in jail, by the time you hit the age of 25” and I’m like, eight years old. This is an assembly that was led through, by the police department that told us about anti-gang prevention and antidrug but they took all these little boys and set us in a room and said, “I guarantee, one of your friends are going to be dead” and all of us are looking like, “Are we going to be the one?”
So at eight years old, our life was on a clock. It was up against this fictitious mortality or this fictitious expiration date simply because of what we were born. So all of us were making decisions not for the long-term impact but for the short-term benefit of saying, “I was here” and so, when you’re 14 and you’ve been told, “Okay, you’re dying in 25” that’s 11 years from that moment”. So I’m like, “Well, what do I do with the 11 years I have left?”
[0:19:50.4] JU: You have to live a whole lifetime but then you’ve got this idea implanted from the time in the hospital, right? You’re stuck in that, “This is a continuum anyway, there’s transference anyway.” How did you kind of reconcile the talk at 14 and saying, “I’ve got 11 years left” and then the sense at seven that, “There is a continuum here, I have to be deployed by God.”
[0:20:12.6] JM: Honestly, I had no choice. Like, I’m not a quitter, you know what I’m saying? I don’t quit, I don’t run from a fight, I never was raised to take a step backwards. If I see an injustice or I see something that’s wrong, I run towards it and I knew in my heart that what they were saying about my life was wrong and I wasn’t necessarily trying to prove them wrong. I was just trying to prove God right like, “All right, you kept me here for a reason.”
That changed a lot of my trajectory because even though that was going on and I had my own, at that time unaddressed PTSD and anxiety and depression, like I didn’t know what it was called. You know, you just kind of felt it, it was this nudge in my spirit to just keep trying. Like, keep going, like, don’t, like for whatever reason, I couldn’t give up on myself. A lot of it was reinforced through my friend who did the violent act, the other friend survived, thankfully.
Barely, but thankfully and I saw him at a gas station years later because my parents eventually took me out of that high school and transferred me to a high school in a better neighborhood my senior year, which sucked because it’s like, you go to high school for three years and then boom, senior year, you get pulled out. It was a matter of safety. My sister was going into freshman year and they didn’t want her to deal with anything.
At the gas station, I ran into the friend who did it and I was pumping gas in my mom’s car, she had a Dodge Intrepid at the time, that was like the nicest car we ever had. It was a used vehicle but it was like, so nice to us and I feel somebody poke me in my back and said, “Give me your wallet” and I could tell it was him. I heard his voice and I’m like, I’m like, “Bro, what are you doing?” And we started laughing.
It was his finger and stuff and he was like, “Look dude, I’m going to tell you something. I’m going to die in Chicago, you’re not, don’t come back around here.” Like, he was that blunt with me, like, “Don’t come back around. Like, I know this is your neighborhood, I know we are all here, all your friends are here but Jason, you’re different.”
[0:21:51.2] JU: Wow.
[0:21:52.6] JM: You’re different.
[0:21:52.8] JU: You started establishing some connections by being the locker rat and the gym rat, locker rat, art rat. You hear this input from your friend, “Get out of this neighborhood.” How did you reach escape velocity, so to speak? What was the trajectory?
[0:22:07.4] JM: Man, so senior year, I got to my new high school and I met the principal and I met my coach and I stopped playing football. I only ran track and field and threw shotput because I was like, “Man, we’re a weaker team and I’m not playing for a rival.” You know, I’m a loyal dude, I was pretty much done with high school. I basically would spend my summers taking classes.
So I was done with high school like 15, 16 years old. So I was just going to school just to work out and like, hang out with my friends. I didn’t need credits. Junior year, I was done, I was going to be red-shirted and go to college and play football. So I’ve been basically, had to sit out for two to three years, would have been like a seven-year senior because I was so young, going to college, it would have been ridiculous.
So continued on to high school, get there, met the principal, met the coach, they both played in the NFL and they became like, like great mentors in terms of like, “Yo, you know, you should really think about the talent that you have and where it can take you beyond the field” and during that time period, I was dead set on like, “No, I got to get to – this is the way I’m going to get to college because my parents can afford it.”
I’m just using this as a means to an end, I had no desire to go to NFL. I’m like, “I’m just good at it.” It wasn’t where I wanted to be but I was good at it. You know, I was hit by a drunk driver and messed up my shoulder. So yeah, my life is like an odyssey, that’s how I know like, I’m supposed to do something purposeful because I’m like, the real-life tale in the DC, in Iliad. Like, I’m part of that like Chicago Iliad.
And what was interesting was, I couldn’t continue to play but it gave me pause to think about what I wanted the rest of my life to be like and they found an article of a kid because I had always continued sketching shoes like I was doing, and they found an article of this kid who had an internship at Toyota and it mentioned that he also intervened at Nike and it was during the auto show in Chicago, when auto shows was still a big deal in the Midwest because of Detroit.
So the Chicago auto show was like, the preeminent convergence of culture and technology, and just knows my way of seeing the world was through car design. So they found an article, they said, “Look, you need to call Toyota and figure out what where this kid went to school.” I didn’t know about international time zones. So this was early Google, so I was able to track down their headquarters because remember, Google at that point was like, classifieds.
The Internet, they put everything on the Internet at that point, their headquarters, their address, the number, the email, like it was all there.
[0:24:24.8] JU: You just called this guy up at Toyota?
[0:24:27.0] JM: Yeah, I just called Toyota Japan and left a message and said, “Look, I’m a kid in Chicago, I want to design sneakers for Nike, you had Chi Wai Lee as an intern, where did he go to school?” That was literally the message.
[0:24:36.4] JU: The voice mail, “Please call me back at 312…”
[0:24:39.2] JM: Yeah, call me back and they called me back on our Sunday, their Monday and we finally give them a call like a week later and the guy tells me, “Hey, how old are you?” I tell him my age. He was like, “Well, here’s the deal. The average age of an industrial design student at this point is like 25. Most people get a degree and then come back to go yo ID. So here’s what I suggest, go to CCS in Detroit because you have two choices, The Art Center in Pasadena, CCS in Detroit, from Chicago. If you fail, it would be an easier drive home than a flight home.”
And it was just like that blunt and I was like, “All right, cool, that’s logical to me.” So I drove to Detroit where my parents convinced them to take me there, and negotiated my way into the school because it was past the admissions date. I had a portfolio full of illustration and graffiti but my grades were stellar so I was able to go in and let them know like, “Academically, I’m sound. I didn’t grow up in an artistic family that gave me preparation and training but I have a work ethic.”
[0:25:32.9] JU: At this point, you’re also, you’re still sending letters to Nike.
[0:25:35.3] JM: I’m still sending letters to Nike.
[0:25:36.7] JU: I’m trying to chase the parallel paths in my mind here.
[0:25:38.9] JM: Yeah, I’m still sending letters, like still calling, still everything. Like, still just trying to figure out how to get there. So I tell them exactly what I, you know, say like, “Hey, I want to design sneakers at Nike. This is my journey, this is what I’ve done, I’ve been calling since I was 10, writing letters, I heard that they had an internship like that’s what I’m here to do and Chi Wei went to Nike as an intern and he went here so I want to go here too.”
And they were like, “Well, you can get in, but you have to double major because if you fail out out of ID, you need a major as your backup.” So I had to minor in graphics and illustration but major in ID and ended up, my freshman year, I wasn’t at the bottom of the list. I was in the middle, I wasn’t great, wasn’t good either. That summer between freshman and sophomore year, same thing, applied to Nike internships, got rejected.
But I came home and did a thousand sketches a day because Michael Jordan shot a thousand jump shots to improve his free-throw percentage and his three-point shooting. So I figured, drawing is just muscle memory, it’s a technique and you can learn any technique with repetition so I taught myself how to draw.
[0:26:38.8] JU: I just want to replay that for folks who may be listening to this 2X later. How many drawings did make per day?
[0:26:44.9] JM: A thousand.
[0:26:46.8] JU: A thousand drawings a day.
[0:26:48.6] JM: Yup.
[0:26:49.0] JU: How many hours did that take?
[0:26:51.4] JM: The whole day, like I would break it down into like, “Okay, so what is at thousand sketches? That’s a hundred sketches per hour which is 10 sketches per you know, 10-minute increment.” Like I would break things down into small increments like MJ broke down scoring points. Some people say, “Oh, I want to go out and average 45.” Mike is like, “No, I just need to get eight per quarter, get to the line at this amount of time.” Like, he broke things down incrementally and I did the same thing. It wasn’t a thousand sketches per day, it was one sketch per minute.
[0:27:17.6] JU: It’s interesting to me going back to the hospital bed at seven years old, you have this vision of becoming a Lucius Fox, your hero and you go, “How am I going to get there? I’m actually going to look at how he’s honed his craft. So in order for me to become Lucius, I got to see how Batman became Batman.” Is that what I’m hearing? Am I getting that right? Was that a conscious decision?
[0:27:38.0] JM: No, it was a very conscious decision. A very conscious decision because the thing about my neurodivergence is that I’m really good at pattern recognition and I’m really good at finding things that shouldn’t connect. I find an intersection at disparate concepts and so I saw the connection between the jump shot and a sketch. Like the technique of shooting a jump shot elbow-in is the same as shoulder sketching when you’re drawing cars and drawing rims.
So I started to find these different ways to turn design into a sport and so just like Michael will watch it, I will watch documentaries on art. I took art history classes and figure drawing because I’m like, “All right, what’s the foundational skills of basketball? Ball handling and defense. What’s the foundational skills of drawing? Figure drawing, color theory.”
So I took everything and juxtapose it against sport and I built a curriculum for myself because I was up against kids whose parents were pro designers and my dad was you know, ex-military, you know, special operator and my mom was a homemaker and dabbled in real estate. I didn’t have summer classes and design camp and all that.
[0:28:38.0] JU: It sounds like you know, trying to get in and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, I’m just recapping you. You probably going to get an internship, you didn’t get it, so you said, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to give myself an internship.”
[0:28:47.2] JM: Basically. Basically, yeah, I just refused to let myself sit idle and I looked at everything as, “You know, eventually, they’re going to tell me yes.” Like, my whole life strategy is to eliminate the way people can tell me no. I’d derisk things by taking the feedback and then immediately develop in the skill and the gap.
So when people say focus on your strengths, I agree to that but when I focus on my strengths as a way to improve my weaknesses then I became dangerous. That’s how athletes are, right? Athletes can ignore their weaknesses because that’s a vulnerability and a gap in the defense. So as a designer, I say my weakness is my knowledge of design as an industry, the history of art, and the role it played in my city and I started to learn.
Like wait, I looked around and all these buildings that were called housing projects were designed by Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. They were designed by people from the Bauhaus and came to Chicago as a result of Nazi Germany. My grandfather was one of those people, I found out later in life my grandfather’s Ashkenazi Jewish, that’s a whole other story and the word ghetto was in English.
When I first heard the word ghetto, I always thought that’s what black people live and then I found out it was Yiddish and it was a description of a Jewish community and it had nothing to do with black people, and the housing projects were designed for them not for low-income housing that was community house.
It was a derivative of a kibbutz, which was a community that you see in Israel. So I started to see like wait, they’ve lied to me about my city and tell me that it was violent and destitute and there was no beauty but it’s an open-air architecture museum built by people who migrated from the south in the great migration and people who came over from other parts of the other world and people who are already there pre-slave because the myth of all the Africans being here only because of slavery is a myth.
Historically, we’ve seen that they were here and I started to notice that my city was under siege and it was all the art that freed me. Art taught me that my city was beautiful and it taught me about Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Haitian immigrant, who founded my city. People don’t realize Chicago, third largest city in America, is the only founded, officially founded by black men.
Manhattan was founded, it was a black settlement but this is a city founded by a Haitian immigrant that was part French, part African. You know at that point, it was called Saint-Domingue before it became Haiti and it was phenomenal. I saw myself now differently because I’m like I’m part of something. I’m part of something because when you grow up in the US as a black man, you feel nationless.
My nation is my city. I don’t say I’m from America, I say I’m from Chicago because it gives me a sense of identity and belonging. So then when I realized the depth of my city, it gave me this confidence to look at it as an open-air architectural museum that could continuously – I could contribute to that. That’s what art unlocked from me, was self-worth and value.
[0:31:23.5] JU: So you get them this summer, thousands of sketches a day, that’s I don’t know, call it 90,000 sketches or something. How did you, for folks who don’t know this, did end up at Nike? All the rejections, I love your statement earlier, “My life strategy is about eliminating the way people say no.” How did you eliminate those and get to the asset, Nike?
[0:31:45.7] JM: Yeah, man. So my sophomore year, I got rejected again. So this time I was like, “You know what? I’m going to fly out there.” So I bought my own ticket, I flew out for a weekend and I just walked around campus because I’m like, you know the story of David and Goliath, right? Most people think that David wasn’t necessarily prepared and he was just a sheep herder that had no skill and Goliath was this beast.
Goliath was actually slow and sluggish, had to be walked onto the battlefield with two people holding his hand and the only way that Goliath was able to win is when you ran up on him and you fought him because now, he can fight you in close proximity because he couldn’t see and David realized that. David was, he was a sniper. His slingshot was a weapon of precision and he was training with lions running at him at full speed.
So Goliath was an inanimate object at that point, he was just a sitting target. So I had to go and stand in front of Goliath and see if it was really scary, if Nike was really that big, if Nike had the ability to control my God-given destiny and I got there then I realized it wasn’t. It was mortal men.
[0:32:41.6] JU: A bunch of people, that’s all.
[0:32:42.5] JM: Just a bunch of people, just mortal men and that gave me this confidence that I will be here. I’d pay for at least a couple of tables, all the shoes I bought. I was like, “Man, you know it’s not.” I took a picture of the campus and went back to my dorm room. I put it on my ceiling so it was the first thing I saw when I woke up, last thing I saw when I went to sleep, and I continued on that path of just writing letters.
I didn’t realize I needed to be a junior in college, that was the only thing that no one told me is that you need to be a junior to get an internship at Nike.
[0:33:11.2] JU: Okay.
[0:33:12.1] JM: So it never came up, so I just thought like, “All right, I’m going to keep applying” and eventually, got in touch with the proper recruiter, ended up becoming Nike’s first black industrial design turn and joint branch first design intern and when I got there, I didn’t realize I was the first until the end of the summer and then I told myself, “I won’t be the last. I can’t be.” So my whole mission at that point became, “How do I give people access to this thing?” because I’ve lived my childhood dream.
Like I grew up, I said I was going to do it and I did it. So now I’m like, “How do I help as many people as possible climb their first mountain?” and that’s been my mission ever since.
[0:33:46.4] JU: Did you get to meet your hero?
[0:33:48.1] JM: Yeah, on my first day of my internship. It was so weird.
[0:33:50.6] JU: Okay, why is it weird? Why do you say that?
[0:33:53.5] JM: At that time, design wasn’t necessarily a well-regarded discipline at Nike. We didn’t have representation at the C-suite, we didn’t have a budget. It was kind of just stuck underneath merchandise and so when you’re a design intern in the Adrenaline Program back then, it was cool but it was cooler if you were in timing and vision because that’s where Nike was doing the watches.
The TRIAX watch and then – so if you’re going into footwear, like it’s cool, like you were a nerd, right? Like sneaker geeks, we had basically just WordPress sites where we were just going on blogs and just talking about sneakers and trading them and meeting up with people all around the world. So it was a very niche nuanced community, so it wasn’t as cool as it is now. So I had to give that context.
So I got to Nike and they gave me a map and they say, “Figure out where your desk is at.” Now naturally, you would think Jordan brand would be in Jordan’s building. It wasn’t. It was in the fourth floor of the Jerry Rice building in the back corner of campus. So like the furthest part of campus away from senior leadership. So that tells you at that time –
[0:34:52.1] JU: Yeah, approximately the senior leadership says what value the organization places on you, yeah.
[0:34:56.9] JM: Exactly. So they were like Michael’s getting ready to retire, Kobe’s potentially going to come over from Adidas, LeBron, and Melo are two years away, three years away from coming in, like we don’t need this guy, no one is going to care. So it was a very interesting time because the Jordan brand was just a shoe, so it wasn’t a full powerhouse like it is today. I finally figured out that it’s the J. Rice building.
I get to the fourth floor, I’m looking at the map and immediately just got this long speech about no one at Nike wears hard-bottom shoes. It’s offensive, like, “You don’t wear brown shoes here, you wear sneakers. You wear the product.” I’m like, “All right, cool.” Elevated door opens up and I immediately spot two pairs of beautifully handmade Berluti Italian dress shoes and I’m like – I knew they were Berluti because Berluti has a very distinct look.
I’m like, “Who can get away with wearing like who’s doing this?” and I felt like, “Oh man, they’re going to get in trouble.” When I looked up it was MJ and Larry Miller, the president of Jordan brand. Instead of me like introducing myself, I tried to close the door and pretend like I was on the wrong floor but I pressed the wrong button, it was the one with the doors would open not close.
[0:36:00.8] JU: Right.
[0:36:01.5] JM: Because I was so nervous like this is Micheal Jordan, I’m standing in front of him and no one’s around. It’s just me, him, and Larry, and like the door is trying to close and he sticks his fingers through. He has these really long fingers and he touches my chest and he’s like, “Man, you know are you the intern?” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m the intern” and I’m just was mumbling and stumbling over my words and he said, “Well, how did you get here?”
I was like, “Well, I took the elevator.” He was like, “No, how did you get here from Chicago like I know your neighborhood.” This was the wild part, dude, this is how I know God is real in my life. I don’t push my faith on anyone but I do have to share this. So my mom and my dad were the first ones to integrate a high school on the southside called Finger High School. My mom was on the swim team with this woman named Juanita, who became Michael Jordan’s wife.
In my neighborhood, I had played with his nephews. I never even knew that they were related to him, no clue. So he knew my neighborhood and knew where I came from, knew what I overcame and I thought he was asking me how did I get to the fourth floor at the Jerry Rice building.
[0:36:59.0] JU: Right, right.
[0:36:59.8] JM: He was asking –
[0:37:00.2] JU: No, how did you get there, Nike from Chicago?
[0:37:03.3] JM: Yeah, yeah, “How did you get from here to there?” and it was that moment where we kind of chuckled and laughed and you know I realized like, “Man, I did it.” The dream I had as a kid lying on the hospital like I’m really here, I really did it. So I explained it to him, the story and you know, he was very supportive and throughout my career, he’s always been supportive because he knows how much it means to me to be a part of that.
[0:37:22.9] JU: We’ve now traced you from the hospital bed at seven to the internship but now you’re just going to call a 20-ish year gap or so between the internship and present day. Maybe two key highs and two key lows that have taken you from, if we should skip a rock across the history here.
[0:37:42.6] JM: Yep.
[0:37:43.0] JU: That bring you to this moment, a high that’s informing the way you’re thinking about your career transition and what’s a low that’s informing you?
[0:37:50.5] JM: Yeah, the high is my wife and kids. I mean, I’ve been married now for almost 20 years. We’ve been together for close to 21 years. That to me is the most important thing I’ve ever do, it’s the most valuable thing I have is my relationship with my wife and children. From a low light perspective, I think it was the revelation that my whole life I felt that I wasn’t smart enough and I needed to be grateful for these opportunities and I finally got to the room at the table with all the “big dogs” and none of them were –
I mean, I’ll be honest, which I wasn’t impressed with their intelligence and their abilities. I was actually quite appalled that these people had been allowed to occupy positions of power but they’re exceptionally mediocre. There’s no competency, there’s no leadership, there’s no discipline, no accountability, they’re just really good at not getting fired.
[0:38:35.5] JU: I know you might say it’s necessary but are there particular moments where you were like, “Wait, does no one know what’s going on here?”
[0:38:42.4] JM: Yeah, when I had someone post-graduate school at Stanford because in between that I went to grad school because I knew that I wanted to fulfill the dream of my dad. He never got the chance, he’s just raising three kids, always wanting his master's, and I’m going to be the person first in my family to pursue that type of degree. I came back and I was having conversations with a few colleagues.
I remember them saying, “Is that a Stanford word? Is that a Stanford word? Is that a Stanford word? Why do you think too highly of yourself? You think too highly of yourself. Well, why do you think this is?” and I realized like, “Wait, my confidence triggers people’s insecurity” because I’ve had to go through things that most people haven’t gone through. So I believe in myself more than the average person because I know what I can endure.
I know my pain tolerance, I know my persistence but I never projected in a way that can be regarded as arrogant but regardless –
[0:39:29.0] JU: And you tell the Stanford brand kind of came onto you that all of a sudden people go, that’s something that they could point at that you know, they could rationalize why you’re different.
[0:39:39.8] JM: But it was a negative thing in my regard. It was like, “Oh, you think you’re better than us now. You think you deserve more” but I didn’t realize that I was getting underpaid. I had a ridiculous amount of responsibility compared to my peers and then I also had the revelation that the founder of the company I work for who paid for my degree, he paid out of pocket with Mr. Jordan, he went to Stanford.
So I’m like, “If the company was founded there and I went there, why am I now being viewed as somehow a pariah or a disruption to the flow because I’m not accredited?” and then that’s when I realized the game that is being played. You know, not only at that company but in corporate America in general, which is the suppression of self-worth because the more you feel you need that place for provision, the less likely you are to speak up when you see an injustice.
The less likely you are to call things out because like, “I got to keep my job. I got to take care of my family.” I love every single bit of my journey. The company is not the people, it was the people who felt that way. The company is a collection of people. I’ve had more good experiences in this industry than bad but the ones that stood out was when it made me, once again, right back to when I was a kid, someone making fun of me because of my intelligence and assuming that since I was a designer and I’m supposed to dumb and just draw pictures.
[0:40:48.2] JU: You said a phrase I want to come back to for a second. You said the suppression of self-worth.
[0:40:52.9] JM: Yep.
[0:40:53.7] JU: How do you see that? I really resonate with that, it reminds me actually I had Seth Godin on a few months ago and he said something similar in his book, The Song of Significance. How do you see the suppression of self-worth being manifested in an organizational context?
[0:41:09.1] JM: Yeah, so in an organizational context, the suppression of self-worth shows up because of the broken incentive model, right? Because of moral decoupling, people are seeing very successful outcomes and they don’t question how people became successful. They’re just like, “They have more money, they’re powerful. Obviously, they’re better than us because they had these things.”
But then when you peel back how they got them, they’ve stepped over people, they’ve harmed people, they’ve been abusive, and so we’ve separated or bifurcated, which is the word that they said, “Is that a Stanford word?” and I was like, “Really bro? That’s a word that you know when you read, it has nothing to do with the degree.” We bifurcated accountability and leadership from the behaviors by which people exemplified to get to that position of leadership because we just care about the end result.
When you see that happening and you see a person who speaks up and then they get hammered or they get pushed out or they get strategically transitioned out of a company by giving them jobs they hate so that they quit, which happens a lot in corporate America, you don’t get fired, you just get put in a job you hate so you resign.
[0:42:06.3] JU: Right.
[0:42:06.6] JM: Which is a psychological trick to break your will and teach you to don’t speak again. So when you see that happening to a lot of talented people, you start to realize like, “Wait, this is a game of mental fortitude, chess, and understanding that this is a transaction.” This is a business, I’m providing a service, they’re giving me a fee for that service. This is not an indicator of my life or my worth.
This is literally a business transaction in the form of employment and the moment I realized that, the freer I became because I’m like, “I can do this transaction at any industry with any company.” I don’t just have to get valued here, I can go anywhere and get valued for my contributions if I continue to up my game and that freed me from looking for approval from an organization because remember in society, the only way that we show our value within a hierarchical structure is to the titles we hold.
Tribal structure is the way we dress, it’s the endorsement, and in modern society, it’s our resume. That shows my worth and my hierarchy within my tribe. So if I don’t have the big job, the big title, do I really have worth? And then you compound that by the narratives that a very divisive and hurtful of hyper-masculinity, where I’m not only have to have a big paying job but I got to be in control, I got to be part Tupac part Carlton from Fresh Prince.
I got to be a gangster that’s smart, I got to be this, it’s like this weird I have to be everything and nothing at the same time to be considered a man in America today and so I stopped subscribing to that mindset and that’s why I labeled my memoir, The Speed of Grace because I realized I was moving at the speed of God’s grace not the speed of anybody’s that you know, stereotypes and expectations or the market.
I made decisions based on you know, what I believed I was being called to do. Even if it didn’t make sense to the world, it made sense to me. That’s been the helpful way that I’ve navigated.
[0:43:44.0] JU: Now, we can come back to your comment you made earlier, “Deployed by God, not employed by men.” Can you talk about the difference between those two orientations towards work?
[0:43:55.1] JM: Yeah, so if you’re not a person of faith, the way that I would describe it and it’s okay, I think people need to realize something. Let me explain something, the faith community right now is going through a crisis because you have a lot of people in that city believe that they’re the most abusive. Those are not people who believe, those are false witnesses. Those are the people who do not understand the law of unconditional love and that we’re not supposed to be judgmental towards anyone because we already have our own battles to face.
So let me preface what I’m about to say with that. So the reason I say deployed versus employed, it’s a very simple concept, ownership versus stewardship. When you are employed by men, you’re worried about ownership. What could I control? What do I get? What do I – but when you understand that this is all entrusted to you by God, then you become a steward of it. What can I do with it?
How do I build something that then provides value for people that comes after me? How do I keep this thing that I value, you know, pristine and beautiful and inclusive? So that mindset shift from employment to deployment took me away from ownership to stewardship because ownership is a function of scarcity mindset. When you grow up within a city and you don’t have a lot, you’re told, “Hey man, you got to get it how you live, you’ve got to hold onto it.”
If you have a lot and you grew up in a nice neighborhood, you’re like, “I have an expectation to live up to. I have to maintain it. I have to sustain it.” So trying to get it and trying to sustain it are equal but opposite reactions to poverty and wealth and I’ve seen that. When I realized like, “Wait, some of my friends who grew up wealthy, they have way more stress and anxiety than I do because they got to maintain that expectation.”
[0:45:20.8] JU: Yeah.
[0:45:21.5] JM: There’s no expectations for me except for the ones that I place on myself. So my obstacles, you know, I have to overcome the work ethic. Their obstacles, they have to overcome to you know, getting that subconscious voice out of their mind that they’ll never live up to their mom or dad who is highly successful and then that’s when I realized like, “Wait man, if I let go and I stop telling myself that I own anything and I’m a steward, I don’t covet much.”
I don’t care if things don’t work out because I look at it as all part of this fluid experience that’s going to lead me to where I’m supposed to ultimately be if I trust it. So that’s what I’ve done, I just trust the process.
[0:45:54.3] JU: So this feels like we’ve kind of culminated perfectly now to your inflection point. I’d love for you to talk about there’s two components that you just recently spoke about, what is stewardship and then the other is the moral decoupling that takes place in organizations.
[0:46:10.5] JM: Yeah.
[0:46:10.9] JU: So stewardship, decoupling, that some of the folks are resonating within the chat, I can see. How do those two principles or insights have bearing on your decision to, “Do I entrepreneur or entrepreneur?” I think anybody that is probably paying attention is thinking as like, “Why is entrepreneurship even an option to Jason?” given all that you’ve said about the kind of moral hazards of organizations.
So talk about what is the reward in terms perhaps of stewardship versus what’s the danger in terms of decoupling?
[0:46:40.7] JM: I look at it like I mentioned earlier, I don’t fear anybody. I don’t fear anything like the stuff I’ve seen in my life, I’m like I do not walk around with scared of these situations and so when I think about going back into corporate America, I believe that if I am called to go back into these positions it’s because there’s been a dereliction of duty by the leaders that have exposed this ethos to these young people and they’ve abused them.
They’ve brought them in, built up their hopes, and they squash them. They bring them in, tell them that, “We need you because you’re a consumer” and then they don’t listen to their insight. They’d bring them in, they undivided the talent, and they overwork them and so I feel like if we’re not going to teach people how to be great leaders, by showing what leadership looks like within organized structures that we almost can guarantee a generation of people that look at us and think like we’re heretics.
We don’t believe in what we say we believe, it’s “Do as I say not as I do” and that’s what the generation after us is looking at. We got, you know, public servants who obviously, only doing things for personal gain. We have corporations that are record profits at the same time saying, “Hey, we’re in recession and things are hard” and laying people off the same year that they had you know, record profits.
So this generation has more information to discern like what we say we do and who we are, are two different things and so I feel like if I am going to be in a position in corporate America, my job isn’t to go in and just make product. My job is to go in and preserve integrity and show that there are good leaders that still exist because you never know the difference you make in a person’s life by being kind.
By just simply being kind. Mr. Summers, that’s why I love education. If it wasn’t for him, I’m just saying that I would not be a person that would stand in the classroom. I would have never thought that education would be for me but I had a great educator that said something to me that changed my life and I feel like that’s what great leaders are. You know, to meet a person at a certain point and say that thing to them, it helps them unlock their full potential and I care about that.
So whether or not it’s being asked to do the entrepreneurship thing, which a lot of times, it just feeds your ego, and as you can say, you run your own company or going to a corporation, it’s just more or less like, “Am I able to serve people in a season in my life in a way that I feel good about?” You know, and provide value for my family and be able to take care of my parents as they age and be able to take care of the needs of my children as they pursue their dreams and goals?
So the decisions I’m making have nothing to do really with if it’s a cool resume bullet point. It’s more about establishing a sense of you know, peace and stability for the people that I love and I want to care for.
[0:49:09.9] JU: So you said, and one key phrase that you just used, you said, “In a way that I feel good about” and what I would love to know is, what are you aware of? Whether you’re measuring or not, what are you tuning into to know whether you feel good about it?
[0:49:22.2] JM: Yeah. Well, if I don’t feel anxious in my spirit I know that something that’s meant for me. If I feel like someone’s trying to rush me towards a decision or rush me or people double back on their word or say they’re doing one thing like those are all red flags to me because I’m like, I really do care about first impressions and so if it doesn’t feel good and it feels like I am putting more effort into wanting to be part of the things versus them trying to get me to be part of the thing, then I’m like, “Yeah, there needs to be a parody in terms of effort.”
There needs to be parody in terms of value creation but then it also needs to be reciprocity in terms of respect. If you are not respected and you don’t feel respected from the very first interaction all the way through to employment then you shouldn’t tolerate it. You shouldn’t tolerate it because people should be valued simply because we’re here not because of the accolades that we hold.
There is no line for Stanford grads in heaven like, “You’re going to be here if you went to the JSB, you’re going to be over there” it don’t work like that. So we give ourselves these things in society that make us feel more valued but the basic principle for me is, “Do I feel respected? Do I feel cared for? Do I feel acknowledged?” and I’ve said no to a lot of things like I have not had a formal – I’ve been consulting and lecturing.
But I have purposefully chosen, you know, over the past 18 months to not take a formal road because I felt like a lot of people were trying to leverage you know, my insight and my character to make them appear more attractive and make them appear more credible to recruit talent that will believe that there is good leadership when there wasn’t and I’ve peaked that game and I’m like, “Wow, I have to be really careful about who I allow to benefit from the power that I’ve been given by God by the reputation that I’ve built.”
Because a lot of times, you know a lot of organizations is optical. They want to borrow a person’s power when they bring them in to make it look like they’re actually solving their internal problems when they’re not.
[0:51:07.4] JU: Right.
[0:51:08.0] JM: So I’ve been very, very hyper-aware of not caring about what they offer, they money, the power but, “What problem are you bringing me in to solve?” because the problem is that you don’t really care to help people and you just want a person that is on the leadership team that looks like they care, then I don’t want to be a marketing tactic.
[0:51:26.0] JU: Right.
[0:51:26.4] JM: I don’t want to. If you really want to do the change, you really want to build an organization that matters, the things that we learned in grad school then you want to bring me in to help start from the ground up, serving the least of these. From the generate to the CEO, they all need to feel loved and appreciated because that’s the style of leadership that I carry. I’m an enlightened leader, not a servant leader.
Servant leadership has been beaten into the ground and people assume us as this weak, weak leader who just doesn’t know how to make decisions. I’m an enlightened leader, I have the data and I have the courage to make tough calls and I hold people accountable even if that means that I may lose my job by doing the right thing, I’m willing to do it.
[0:51:59.1] JU: Right, you’re self-worth is worth more than the compromise.
[0:52:03.2] JM: Oh yeah, my soul is worth more than a paycheck. So I’m not selling my soul to be accepted by men and be rejected by God. I don’t seek approval because I know the world will never accept me. It’s not meant to accept any of us that’s why it’s temporary. We have to accept ourselves. That’s the only battle we’ll face, it’s the inner me, that’s our greatest enemy so once I accept that I am my best competition, I am my own worst enemy, I am my own bully, ambition is a trauma response, and it wasn’t an intention to become successful.
It was outrunning those periods in my life where I felt less than, then I got into this groove of understanding like, “Man, I’m enough.” Regardless of whatever job I hold, employed, not employed, making money, not making money, it doesn’t matter. I’m enough and that gives me peace.
[0:52:47.9] JU: If I may be so bold in these last few minutes that we’ve got, I feel like that’s, what you said, “My greatest enemy is inner me” what’s the last battle you fought with the inner me and tell us about how the Goliath rose up and how you identified it, how you realized that’s the problem?
[0:53:03.5] JM: I think the thing that I would share is overcoming my insecurity were how I look. So as a kid like I’m mixed race, right? Like my mom is mixed. I told you we found out later in life that my grandfather was Ashkenazi Jew and I didn’t know what that was, you know, I had to learn later on in life and so growing up, people would always ask me, “What are you?” Like, “What are you? Why is your hair straight? What are you?” like your mom, “What are you?”
So I always had like this insecurity over how I looked, so I felt like that in a certain point of my life, I needed to overcome that insecurity by having this level of success that would tell people, “Look, I’m valuable now. You may not like how I look or like what, you know, that I don’t know my ethnicity and all the things I’m mixed with but here’s this thing that you can look at that is irrefutably beautiful, irrefutably brilliant.”
Like that’s where I get my value from and so I had to stand there literally one day and just stare at myself in the mirror and be like, “Man, I accept every bit of me.” Every bit of me, I accept that this is who I am, this is what God has given me, I am grateful for it and I am not going to let this be the subconscious thing in the back of my mind that justifies when things go wrong. Like of course, it goes wrong, you know?
Think about it, you’re an enigma to be – I’ll always justify bad things by saying, “Of course I deserve it because of how I grew up or where I came from.” So I had to overcome that, you know, through therapy, through prayer, through writing my book, it helped me to release all those thoughts that didn’t serve me and serve my highest good when I was able to see it because you can’t conquer what you don’t confront.
We very seldomly confront ourselves because most people don’t want to look in the mirror because they don’t like what they see, so I stared in the mirror. Like I said, I ran up to Goliath after I killed him and cut the head off because I wasn’t afraid of the challenge just like I wasn’t afraid of looking at myself and saying, “All right, it’s me. That’s me that’s the limiting factor in my life.” There’s no external thing stopping me from being anything I want to be.
I don’t believe in that, I believe I am unlimited because my God is unlimited, so why would I place limits on something that is unlimited? And that broke me free by realizing that I don’t have to have low expectations of myself. If anything, I got to have higher expectations of God.
[0:55:11.6] JU: Yeah.
[0:55:13.0] JM: That’s it.
[0:55:13.5] JU: Yeah. You said something to me that I told you before we started recording or before we were live. I mentioned that kind of a key juncture in my life a few years ago, you reminded me that everything comes from God and part of my inner me is thinking that you know, it all rests on me, it all depends on me and so I can attest you know, as someone who has benefited from your leadership and example that you’re battling these battles for yourself is a blessing and uplifting for the rest of us, so thank you so much.
[0:55:42.9] JM: All good, man. This is part of the journey. You know, we got to share these stories because you know, success, it doesn’t look like what people think it looks like neither does failure and both are beautiful. When you embrace, it’s just part of your narrative, man. So that’s it, that’s my journey.
[0:55:59.7] JU: Yeah, it’s beautiful. We’re excited to see where you land, we’re excited to keep following. If you may, I thought of the Chili ad. I don’t know, I don’t know exactly but like the ongoing saga of this Chili ad is yet to wrap but we’re excited to watch as the journey unfolds. We’re grateful for your leadership and example. Thanks so much for joining us today, Jason.
[0:56:23.2] JM: Thank you, brother, for having me. Man, I appreciate you all for tapping in.
[0:56:25.9] JU: Yeah, thanks everybody for listening and we’ll see you next time. Until then, be good.
[END]
One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.