Featured Interview With Jason Heiber
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
My name is Jason, I am the founder of Digital Marketing NYC, and I would describe myself as half successful, half a failure, half smart, and half not so much, half rich and half broke. Well, doesn’t that leave me in the no man’s land of mediocrity, you might ask?
But I associate with all my many halves, and all the self-made and self-destructed in between, and can speak from many different places of experience. I am half Swiss and half Greek, so perhaps my DNA is accountable for being a hybrid of contradictions!
I’ve traveled the world quite extensively, I have built companies in Hong Kong, Germany, and New York, and have dabbled in a variety of fields, from trading, import/export, design, advertising, product development, production in the US and overseas, branding, community building, and not-for-profit work.
I am a big fan of Roger Federer and beat myself up for not pursuing tennis when I was young, given the fact that I am his age and we grew up in the same small town, and I am pretty merciless at anything I put my mind to. I chose fencing instead, accomplishing bronze in the World Cup of 2000—despite being admittedly half-assed, lazy, and wasteful. I confess that, not with arrogance, but with a profound awareness of what I might have accomplished had I approached it all with a little less youthful lackluster, which has now cultivated in me a zero tolerance of waste—of time, of talent, and above all, opportunity.
I love to cook, ambitiously and with complications. I’m never not reading, not questioning, and not researching. I focus on maximizing all the time I have right here and right now, and do so with a dry—but unlimited—sense of humor.
It is now my contradictory laziness and wastelessness that will keep my books short but concise. I need you to get the absolute maximum out of every energy cell expended, without sacrificing a drop of senseless effort. That is my ethos.
I even out on a very Swiss pragmatic middle ground, where tech boredom is ignited by a playful creativity, working outside the box whilst being resolutely goal- and result-oriented.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I have always loved to read, but with personal hardships the last couple of months I found peace in writing, it felt very cathartic. Plus I am a firm believer that books and the written word sustain moments forever. Reading books had an impact on me, so I am eager to be part of this community that can inspire others.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favorite writer is someone that is not yet published, so perhaps I will come back when that is the case. I currently read mainly business books and books that inspire me and the most inspiring and humbling book I have ever read is Nelson Mandela’s autobiography “A Long Walk To Freedom”. I wish that was mandatory for every human to read, as it teaches the reader very important life lessons.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book “Instagram Stories” sounds very mundane on the first look.
It’s a book on how to use Instagram Stories and that is what you will get, but there is an underlying message running throughout, laced between every line, encrypted in the contents, and subliminally suggested throughout. This is a book on Instagram Stories. If you want it to be. It’s also a book on everything else.
I open by initially talking about your time and your use of it. I don’t need to guilt you into confession or bully you into retrospection, but I wouldn’t be me, and I wouldn’t be operating out of a damn thing that I stand for, if I didn’t attempt to light a fire under your ass and help you see just exactly the realm that you are living in. It’s my job to illuminate the potential that, in this case, quite literally lies in your palm—in a three-by-six format—the opportunity that you alone stand the chance of robbing yourself of, and to give you a polite electric jolt of perspective. A swift but precise wakeup call of the very meaning of life, and what you stand to risk by not stepping up, leveling up, and superseding every fucking expectation you ever dared to dream too small. Excuse my Swiss German.
In the grand scheme of human perspective, the odds of you being alive in this very window of time are four trillion to one. FOUR. TRILLION. TO. ONE. Whether you believe in multiple lives, re-incarnation, heaven and hell, or a bleak atheist black hole at the end of a blip spent on earth—I really couldn’t care less—but you, the living, breathing, reading you, right here, right now, on this earth for an oh so sacred, oh so fleeting, what? Ninety at best? Years… You have landed in the strangest, fastest evolving, multi-faceted, universal and accessible window of time, EVER IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. Soak that the f up. Sorry. Again.
The digital, artificially intelligent, rampant, scaling creature that we are creating, is incomparable to anything that we have ever seen. We, us brilliant human beings, have quite possibly created the biggest threat to our very existence. We are plugged in and ever connected, and more switched off and disconnected than ever before. We are saturated and over stimulated, titillated and complicated, overwhelmed and ever hungry, but we lay right here in the land of opportunity, with the most at play, and the most at stake, than ever before. Never, ever, in any of your ancestors’ history, has the entire world been so readily accessible, and so easily reachable. Never have we ever had so much information, so many resources, and so many platforms to be seen, to be heard, and to reach out and meet like-minds and kindred spirits, as we do right here in this remarkable window of time. Muse on that, and then soak in the reality that some still dare to spend their time in quicksand time-sucks, on vapid TV, pointless social media, and vain free falls of validation. I am not blaming or shaming anyone, but I saved this for the end of the book for a reason—you already know you are hungry for more and that’s how you have made your way all the way here.
Do not get sucked into a digital world that robs you of your time and takes advantage of you… as it does with the majority of humanity in this very moment. Turn the tables and take advantage of this bizarre and unique opportunity at your fingertips, and dare to buy back a time and a freedom that you didn’t even know the meaning of before.
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