More About Jason

Jason is here because of Opportunity Set B.

What’s that? It’s from his theory about work and the power of change, and it goes like this. In front of you right now, there are two sets of opportunities:

Opportunity Set A is all the things being asked of you at your job. It’s the stuff you’re being measured by.

Opportunity Set B is all the stuff available to you, but that nobody’s asking you to do.

Over his career, Jason came to realize that Opportunity Set B is always more important. If you only focus on what’s asked of you, you’ll only be qualified to do the thing you’re already doing. But when you learn new things, pursue new opportunities, and constantly seek out change, you will set yourself up for an unpredictable but extraordinary journey.

Jason’s went like this: He started as a community newspaper reporter, but quit, then sat in his dingy bedroom next to a cemetery in rural Massachusetts, and started freelance writing. Then he took a job at a slightly larger newspaper, kept freelancing, and then eventually quit, moved to Boston, and insisted that Boston magazine hire him. (He’d been freelancing for them, but he wanted a full-time editor job. It worked.) Then he moved to New York and started hopscotching around magazines (Men’s Health, Fast Company, Maxim) while constantly seeking out Opportunity Set B (going on TV, speaking on stage, teaching himself to podcast, writing a romantic comedy novel, starting a media production company, and more). Was he good at these new things? He was not! He was terrible at first. But as Ryan Reynolds once told Jason, “You can’t be good at something unless you’re willing to be bad.”

It is true. We all learn.

Because of Opportunity Set B, Jason now occupies a unique space. Through his work at Entrepreneur, he has access to the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, and is often speaking with the most influential culture-makers. Meanwhile, through his podcast Build For Tomorrow, Jason investigates the history of innovation and the forces that shaped our lives. In short, he finds patterns of success. And that pattern is clear: Change creates opportunity.

What Jason’s Doing

Where you can find ideas, inspiration, and the occasional absurdity.