#217: Chase Jarvis – Thinking bigger and taking more risks as a creator

Chase Jarvis [00:00:00]:
I'm not talking about seat belts and sunscreen. I'm talking about the things, the decisions that keep us trapped in a life half lived.

Jay Clouse [00:00:21]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Today, I am interviewing Chase Jarvis, an award winning artist, serial entrepreneur, best selling author, and one of the most influential photographers of the past decade. Chase has created campaigns for Apple, Nike, Red Bull, and dozens of other fortune 100 brands. You may be familiar with CreativeLive, a pioneering online learning platform that Chase cofounded in 2010 and was acquired by Fiverr in 2021. I have been a longtime listener of Chase's podcast, the Chase Jarvis Live Show, and actually wrote him down as one of my ideal podcast guests when I started this show all the way back in 2020. So this is a full circle moment for me. This week, Chase is releasing his newest book, Never Play It Safe, A Practical Guide to Freedom, Creativity, and a Life You Want.

Jay Clouse [00:01:11]:
I've pre ordered my copy. I read the first chapter, which is linked in the show notes for free, and I recommend that you do the same. This conversation is about thinking bigger, taking risks, and getting out of your own way. I left this conversation feeling more relaxed, more inspired, and fully recharged with my creative work, and I hope that you do too. I'd love to hear what you think about this episode. Just tag me at jklaus on your social media platform of choice. And now let's talk with Chase. Alright, Chase.

Jay Clouse [00:01:45]:
So excited to chat with you as a longtime listener to CreativeLive. Excited to bring our creative worlds together here. You just published a new book called Never Play It Safe. And as a world renowned photographer, founder, and CEO of CreativeLive, You don't strike me as someone who plays it safe from the outside. And I've heard that we write the book that we need. So I'm curious to hear, is this the book that you need?

Chase Jarvis [00:02:13]:
Oh, Jay, you just opened it. This is Pandora's box here, man. First of all, thank you for having me on the show. 2nd, indeed, we mostly write the book we need, and I I feel like that's a reasonable place to start. I had been working on this book for 2 years. My company, CreativeLive, that you mentioned, was acquired in 2021. When the company was acquired, I did a lot of soul searching. Like, okay, what next? And where do I wanna be? What do I wanna do? Because the reality is when you go on any long adventure, you know, if you're one degree off and you walk for 10 years, you can end up pretty far from home.

Chase Jarvis [00:02:48]:
You know, I think that's the undercurrent that I wanna start today with, that this book, my story, and I feel like the story of so many people in my community. I'll say our community because the people we serve are the same folks. Entrepreneurial largely identify as creative or entrepreneurial or curious. We are constantly seeking a checklist of things to do, and there's tactic a, b, and c. You have to do this, you know, with your social and this with your email and this to build an audience. And yet, most of what it boils down to is who are we and what do we wanna do. So that is a question when I was afforded a little time and space after I've been, you know, working super hard for years on television shows and photo shoots and commercials, and this is my, technically, 4th book, my 2nd word book, so I've I've been super busy. And now, I'm like, okay, the storm is quiet, like, who am I really what do I really wanna do? And that journey was pretty interesting.

Chase Jarvis [00:03:45]:
And yet, after writing on this particular book, researching for essentially 5 months and writing on it for 13 months, so 18 months in, just 8 weeks before my deadline, I threw everything I'd been doing in the trash and started over because it wasn't the book that I was supposed to write. And it was a it was a very tidy business book. It said all the right stuff and yet, to your question, we write the book that we need. And the book that I'd been writing wasn't truthful, it wasn't real. Mhmm. So I had to get I'll say, I had to get real real. And yet, so often, this is what happens. Right? When we actually can quiet down enough to listen to that internal compass that we've got that tells us what we really want.

Chase Jarvis [00:04:32]:
The one that the world has largely shut down or muted. And these come from, you know, not people who hate us or not you know, they come from people who care deeply about us, and societal pressure, and, you know, mimetic desire. We just see all these things out in the world. But my belief and what I feel like we all need a healthy dose of, especially in this day and age, is this journey back to ourselves. Like, who are we? What do we really want? And, most importantly, how do we get it? How do we turn off all of these external noises? The world is constantly telling us to play it safe, and yet, anybody who's listening or watching knows. I mean, capital k know that all of the best stuff in life is on the other side of that. It's this exploration, this thing that we didn't expect, but we know to be true when we're quiet enough and alone with our thoughts. That's what I found in writing this book.

Chase Jarvis [00:05:28]:
And I realized as I looked back across my career and this is a theme, this is real. And that's what I wrote the book about and it is about how all the best stuff is on the other side of our comfort zone and how do we get there. It's not a checklist of things to optimize. This is very much a getting in tune with who we are, how do we show up in the world. And it's pretty tactical. I mean, the subhead is a practical guide to freedom, creativity, and a life you love, so it's practical. But that's been my journey for the last I'll just call it 3 years, and it's been a handful.

Jay Clouse [00:05:57]:
I wanna zoom into this moment where you scrap the book real quick because this seems like such a huge choice.

Chase Jarvis [00:06:03]:
Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:06:05]:
Are we talking about this is a different topic? Are we talking years of writing this book?

Chase Jarvis [00:06:10]:
Yes. 18 months, so a year and a half. And 8 weeks before, I realized that the path that I have been on is not the right one. Because my friend, Brene Brown, she may be familiar with her work. She researches shame and vulnerability and guilt, and and she has this phrase, the gold plated grit. And what that is is, like, we say, oh, I was super hard what I was doing, and yet and then you just turn right back on a dime and paint yourself in this great light. And we see a lot of that in the world. In this book, it basically it leaned really heavily on that.

Chase Jarvis [00:06:44]:
And yet, those are not the kinds of books that I like to read. The the best business books in the world to me are the ones that don't say how to do perfect thing a, b, and then c, and then get great outcome d. Because nobody's life, no playbooks, no realities look like that. One of my favorites is a book called The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, which essentially, the first chapter is like how to fire your best friend. The second chapter is like how to tell your investors that you lost all their money. The third chapter is how to close the company that you've been building. You know, it's full of real life stories. And I'd realized, again, just 8 weeks before, that the book that I had written was not like that.

Chase Jarvis [00:07:26]:
And, surprisingly, when I and my agent and my publisher were so supportive, and yet they were terrified. Mhmm. I imagine essentially like suicide as a as a as an author, and yet it poured out of me because it was truthful, it was valuable, it was a thing that I knew to be thing that I needed to share with the world. And importantly, it is like that. It's about how it's not that you never make mistakes or that you never betray yourself. It's really about how to get 1% better every day, how to learn to listen to that, how to recover from mistakes rather than behave perfectly. So to me, that's the book that I needed. Because when I look back at my past, truly, everything that was deeply meaningful and super valuable and, you know, created massive lift in my career or my relationships, it was all on the other side of some sort of difficulty.

Chase Jarvis [00:08:19]:
So that's what this book is about. And and the punchline, it's not about some external journey. It's an internal journey, and that's to me what's great. It's like it's all available to you right now. It's just a matter of sort of turning on the things that culture and society and being a business person, being a thoughtful, creative human, it's hard. So these are the answers that I feel like led to the best stuff in my life and the best stuff of, you know, more than a 1000 guests that I've had on my show and and historical folks as well.

Jay Clouse [00:08:51]:
How do you tune into that? Because once you had all of the space to, like, listen to what you really want, you know, you cleared things away. I kinda feel like consciously or subconsciously, a lot of times life is like intentionally clouding ourselves to not listen to this thing because it's like such a confronting question of what is it do I really want? It's actually one of the few questions that I have in my morning journal as a prompt, which is what do I really want?

Chase Jarvis [00:09:16]:
It's a powerful question, and I love that we share that if that's what you journal on. I essentially journal on that every day and have been for, gosh, maybe 12 months consistently. And before that, it was sort of, you know, once a week or once every other week. And I got that notion hat tip to James Clear from Atomic Habits. Just journaling on the same thing, you'd be surprised at how specific you can get and how valuable that specificity is. So you're right. We think that that's just readily available to us. But there's this really interesting thing that I found in the research.

Chase Jarvis [00:09:54]:
There's a a French philosopher, his name is Rene Girard, and he articulates very clearly that as humans, as social animals, we have what is called mimetic desires. And mimesis means to copy. It's not an accident why social media has become so terrifying and successful, you know, so addictive. But all we're doing is seeing people and then trying to act like them. And yet, when we're super quiet, staring at the ceiling at 2 AM when we wake up, or my mom's in the hospital right now, for example. And when we're faced with these really difficult moments, it's amazing how all that noise fades away. And my goal is to help you realize that without having to go through the trauma of losing a loved one or without having to hit really, really difficult patches because the information is there. It's right under the surface, but we've just been conditioned to not tune into it.

Chase Jarvis [00:10:53]:
So what if we could, instead of being like everybody else that we see on our, you know, radar, whether that's in our social feed or our heroes, what if we could be the best versions of ourselves and what is it that we really want? And, this combination of creating a little space, for me it was because my company had been acquired, but I realized it's actually that it's not required. So what I've tried to create is a little bit of a shortcut into that. And, man, soon as I could tap into that, this is like the juice that you get that allowed me to write an entire book in essentially 2 months when you actually tap into it. So that's, a, what this book is about, and b, you know, this is a road map on how to do it.

Jay Clouse [00:11:34]:
What is that shortcut you found? Or what are what are a couple of ways that people might be able to walk away from this and say, how do I give myself the mental space to explore this question of what do I want?

Chase Jarvis [00:11:44]:
Yeah. The framing of the book is pretty simple. It's essentially that all the best stuff in life is on the other side of our comfort zone. And how do we access that? Well, it turns out there are seven really really simple, but very powerful tools that reside naturally inside us. And these are things that culture again, there's no evil overlord here. This is just part of being in a mass culture and and part of being a social animal. Essentially conditions us away from those things. So there's 7 tools, and each one plays a really critical role in our ability to listen to this and take action on it.

Chase Jarvis [00:12:21]:
And I'll give you an example of one of these tools, and it's the first one in the book, and it aligns most with the question you just asked. It's it's basically our attention. What people don't realize, and I throw myself in there as people. I'm I'm only able to talk about this on the other side of doing this work, that our ability to direct our attention we we are born as attention seeking machines. A baby coos and cries when it comes out of the womb for a reason. Because if humans don't get attention, you know, we will die, literally. You know, and then if you look at culture, like, it's all about me. How do I stand out in a crowd? And, you know, how do people buy my products and services and hire me as a creator or, you know, whatever.

Chase Jarvis [00:13:01]:
How do I and yet, the most important thing and powerful thing is how do we as humans direct our attention? What do we pay attention to? And are we in charge of that? Or do we willfully give this away to someone else? Or to advertising or to your social feed. So there's a great story that I share in the book about attention, and it's a difficult one to swallow because it's about a man named Victor Frankl. He wrote a book called Man's Search For Meaning, and he was a psychiatrist psychologist who was in a concentration camp. His ability to direct his attention and help others in his proximity do the same, completely transformed his experience of being in a concentration camp. Now, you know, that's a pretty extreme example. But if you do extend that, your experience of life life is not happening to you. It's happening for you. And you literally decide every day how you're going to respond to what happens.

Chase Jarvis [00:14:05]:
And that it is a choice is not up for questions. It's it's scientifically, it's a fact. And Viktor Frankl's example, you know, is a great narrative of why. And yet, I, myself, you know, wake up, and this is a difficult thing, or I'm struggling here. And if we are able to control this organ, this multimillion euro organ between our ears, if we can direct what we pay attention to, gratitude instead of frustration and anger, we actually have a different experience of our life. We are the sum of our experiences, and that we choose our experiences, that's super powerful medicine. So there are a handful of very specific things to do. But that's what I mean about, like, the shortcut into that first is, what are you paying attention to? Do you care? Are you actually interested in the thing that we're talking about here? To me, I just see a universe of inputs telling us how we ought to be and behave and what we should be, and there's 5 things we should do as a business owner.

Chase Jarvis [00:15:05]:
And yet, if we can sort of quiet those voices, listen to the ones our internal compass, then that is the secret.

Jay Clouse [00:15:14]:
After a quick break, Chase and I go deeper on the attention economy, the discomfort that comes with leveraging human psychology, and the one question that we actually both write about in our daily journal. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And now back to my conversation with Chase Jarvis. You've mentioned Renee Girard and Mimetic Desire a couple of times now. I'm like chomping at the bit to talk about it, but I need to put it aside for one more moment here. This effort of focusing your attention, There's a great book called Wrapped by Winifred Gallagher. Have you read this?

Chase Jarvis [00:15:48]:
I have. It was a while ago. When when what,

Jay Clouse [00:15:51]:
I think it was released in 2010. So ahead of its time in terms of, like, attention economy.

Chase Jarvis [00:15:57]:
For sure. Yes. I remember this book.

Jay Clouse [00:15:59]:
The one thing I remember from this book after reading it, you know, months, years later, when it comes to focusing your attention, he described it as bottom up and top down. And he said humans, every creature has bottom up attention where we're attuned to, like, threats. Things that have to capture our attention. It's it's the red bird out of the corner of your eye when the rest of the landscape is blue.

Chase Jarvis [00:16:19]:
Something yeah. Moving on to the eyes and the saber toothed tiger. Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:16:22]:
And top down is this focused attention that you're talking about, which requires willpower and gets harder throughout the day. Harder the less you flex that muscle. And that's been a really powerful thing for me to think about that just emphasizes what you're saying because Yeah. The more people focus on this creator economy, the more emphasis is placed on psychology and basically weaponizing what we know about human psychology to take advantage of bottom up attention mechanisms in people. And it's just hard because, you know, you and I play in a similar space in that we want to bring attention to things. Yeah. But we also want to encourage people to choose for themselves, which puts us in a a weird position. If you think about this.

Chase Jarvis [00:17:07]:
Yeah. I do. And I feel like the way that I am able to manage my psychology around that, this is one of the reasons that I have dedicated a big part of my career to sharing information that I found valuable. My background, my trade is as a high end commercial photographer. I was one of the top commercial photographers on the planet for a decade and a half, and way back in 2,005, long before I mean, it was literally before YouTube. It was called Google Video. I had a full time video team, and the goal of that team was expressly put to them as document the process of me trying to figure this out. And I'm going to do the thing that I'm doing.

Chase Jarvis [00:17:53]:
I'm seeking to become one of the most successful storytellers in commercial photography, and I wanna get hired on the basis of that. And it's your job, video team, to tell stories about me trying to figure this out. So to me, that was a really natural way of I realized that if I'm doing something and I'm able to get some wins and share some pretty significant losses, that, man, I bet other people could pay attention. And and arguably, that is what put me on the map. Right? I was a very talented photographer, but being good and being highly skilled and competent is sort of one piece of the puzzle of breaking out. And it was my ability to tell stories. I had people, like, helping me because I believed that this sharing of knowledge was an interesting vector to explore, specifically because I didn't have that. I learned how to become a photographer literally through taking thousands of pictures.

Chase Jarvis [00:18:53]:
I never assisted another photographer a day in my life. I literally went to the library and checked out biographies of artists. And, boy, was that rough and slow and painful, and there had to be a better way. Foundationally, the answer to your question is that I've dedicated a big part of my professional career to sharing information. In part because in order to tell a good story, you've got to be pretty you have to understand it up, down, front, and back. Totally. And so it's valuable for me, and my hope is that in doing that for myself, man, maybe we can share this with a bunch of other people and and bring them along.

Jay Clouse [00:19:29]:
I wanna follow-up on your journaling practice because if I'm listening to this and I hear, wait, you answer the same question every day in your journal, wouldn't you just be writing the same thing every day?

Chase Jarvis [00:19:39]:
No. That's what's fascinating about it. It's not.

Jay Clouse [00:19:42]:
I wanna hear your experience because for me, it's also not. And I'm not asking you to, like, read me your private thoughts and and goals, but I'm curious to hear what patterns you see in answering that question day after day.

Chase Jarvis [00:19:52]:
If I try and summarize them because there's a a lot of journal entries, especially when you talk about, you know, there's 100 reflecting on the same question, it just ends up getting more specific, and it ends up starting to eschew the things that everybody else wants for us. That's the confusing thing about building a life you love, is that there's so many inputs. And what's extra confusing is that those inputs, not just from the Internet and whatnot, they come from people who you're close to, and people that really love you and want the best for you. This is why your grandma wanted you to be an accountant. This is why, you know, your career counselor didn't think you should be an entrepreneur, should take the 9 to 5. And these people care about you, and there's a lot of infrastructure and systems around how they think, and that you need to go to school because x y z. And yet, we end up taking advice not from people who are living our dreams. We end up taking advice from people who've given up on theirs.

Chase Jarvis [00:20:55]:
Mhmm. And that's a scary prospect. So this act of asking yourself the same question, what I really want? There's all kinds of genre you can talk about. You can ask like what I really want emotionally in a relationship professionally, but it ends up being so good at weeding out, you know, of finding the signal and weeding out the noise.

Jay Clouse [00:21:13]:
That's a good way to put it because that has been part of my experience where each day a lot of times it will waver from like, oh, I'm really feeling drawn towards family right now. And I just wanna talk about family. And then some days it's like I'm consumed with work thoughts. So I'm talking about that. What really surprised me as I was doing this exercise was I started to articulate that a lot of times I'm seeking respect from other people I respect and I don't know that's actually like aspirationally again what I want but it is what I'm realizing is driving my behavior.

Chase Jarvis [00:21:46]:
Sure.

Jay Clouse [00:21:46]:
And so that's like an interesting evolution of you know, I'm seeing what's driving my behavior. But now is that what I really want? And I think it starts to get to this point you had of chewing some of these things that are put on us, which brings me back to Gerard and desire because this is also something I've recently discovered and has really been blowing my mind so the concept of a desire is in lieu of choosing or articulating or pursuing our own desires and goals, we kind of wear the desires that we see if others around us like a jacket. What have you done to try and get at the core of what Chase actually wants?

Chase Jarvis [00:22:29]:
Well, there is this awareness piece, and that's one of the reasons of the seven tools that are in the book. That's why I start the book off with attention because it truly that dictates the experience that you have and what you pay attention to, your thoughts, the people, your external environment, what you pay attention to literally creates the experience that you have in the world, which equals life. You're creating experience and you're when you realize that you have a role in that, that's a a really interesting thing. So, actually working on developing the muscle of directing attention has been transformational. And, look, there's all kinds of mechanisms to do this. This is one of the reasons though why everyone who has really broken through in any major area of life has some sort of an internal dialogue practice. Meditation, mindfulness, awareness, prayer, like, I'm not actually here to prescribe one, but it's not an accident. My friend, Tim Ferris, I was in his book, Tools for Titans.

Chase Jarvis [00:23:31]:
And afterwards, you know, we were having a glass of tequila, and I asked him, so what was of the, you know, 400 people that you got in the book or whatever, what were the most common threads? And number 1 number 1 was some sort of an awareness practice, a meditation of mindfulness and awareness. The ability to train your ability to direct attention. So to me, that's been a huge, huge one. And then I'll go back to Brene Brown, who I mentioned earlier. And if you're not familiar with her work, she's absolutely fantastic. There's a podcast I'll never forget. It was one of the first times she was on my show. I think it might have been 2,000 10 or 11.

Chase Jarvis [00:24:10]:
Wow. And I asked her a very similar question. I said, you know, how do you decide who to listen to? And a lot of this is about, first, of course, listening to yourself. But this came through the context of being in the arena. There's a very famous Roosevelt quote called the man in the arena, and I'll paraphrase it here, which is essentially, what matters in life is if you're in the arena, and the people who are in the cheap seats, not actually in the arena, they don't deserve your attention. You shouldn't pay attention to them. And then, so the question becomes, okay, if you listen to yourself, who else? Because we're if we're only in this for ourselves, that's not really rich social connected human experience. She brings out of her wallet a little 1 inch by 1 inch square piece of paper.

Chase Jarvis [00:24:54]:
And she said, on this piece of paper and she's holding us up on this video podcast. You can see it's just an amazing moment. This list is the list of people whose opinions of me, I really value. It's a 1 inch by 1 inch piece of paper. You know, and she's looking at this. And without revealing the names, it doesn't matter. You know that there's not that many people. And so it's either the people who are directly doing the thing that you are wanting to do or be the person you wanna be or become, that they have true insights to that.

Chase Jarvis [00:25:27]:
Or the people that are very, very closest to you, that you are in service of. What, you know, maybe these are, you know, a spouse, a partner, you know, kids, or, you know, elders in your life. Like, that's who really matters. And so it's this combination, Jay, between journaling on what I want, what I pay attention to, and what I choose to do with this one precious life with the days that I have, the time and and energy that I've got, and who am I doing this for? Certainly, first for me, because if we don't have our oxygen mask on, it's hard for us to assist other passengers. You know, about that little euphemism there from being on an airplane. But there's also a handful of people that are really close. Those are the people that I care about what they think of me, and it's this combination of those two things. What lights me up and who do I wanna be on this journey with? That's a potent combination.

Jay Clouse [00:26:20]:
I think a lot of people, just about everybody listening to this podcast, they've probably already done some things that most people globally would look at as not safe. You know, the entrepreneurial path, not safe. Yep. But I don't think that's, like, the one fork in the road decision that then says you've done it. You are not playing it safe anymore. I find myself hiding, playing small, curious to hear all the creative people you talk to. Where do people who have already stepped off the traditional path typically find themselves still playing it safe.

Chase Jarvis [00:26:55]:
This is one of my favorite things about this is that it's a process. This is not about a moment where you realize it and then you're set. This is there is a tractor beam that is everywhere around you, and it's always trying to talk you out of your dreams. And it's trying to get you to be like everyone else. It's trying to get you to play it safe. And this tractor beam, again, there's no evil overlord. But what I have come to realize is that even after living a really interesting and very wide ranging set of experiences for me as a person, as an entrepreneur, as a business person, from doing television shows to advertising campaigns to venture back startup CEO. That's, like, a lot of experiences is that, man, I actually end up playing it safe in so many different areas of my life over and over again.

Chase Jarvis [00:27:50]:
And so what people don't realize, I'll just use meditation as as an analogy. Meditation is not the act of perfectly getting into the the the moment every time, being there for 10 or 20 minutes, and then leaving that perfection. If you ask, say, a monk, the act of meditating as an example is it's not keep your mind from wandering. It's when your mind wanders, just bring it back to center. Bring it back to the mantra, bring it back to the thing that you're focused on, breath, whatever. And by extension, it's on, breath, whatever. And by extension, it's not that we are not going to. We made a decision never to play it safe, and then we properly chase all the best things on the other side of our comfort zone and never look back.

Chase Jarvis [00:28:32]:
This is about no, man. There's all sorts of challenges that we face in this arena on a daily, hourly, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. Right? We figure out who we are, what we wanna be, what company we wanna start. We go after that dream, and then partway through, we get talked out of that dream because someone says, yeah, that's kind of a risky business decision. Or maybe you should sell that company, or maybe you shouldn't take that big leap and, you know, put it all on black or whatever. And we get seduced by this. And so, you know, this is why the book it's read it through one time first, but why it broke out in as a reference guide as well. Because when you start to do this, you should go back and read different sections that can reawaken you to, oh, man, this is why I'm making this mistake.

Chase Jarvis [00:29:20]:
And the key message is not, again, never to make a mistake. It's like, no, you're gonna make mistakes over and over and over. It's just about, again, recovering 1% more quickly, more wisely, more thoughtfully, more kindly than before, and how to get back on the horse.

Jay Clouse [00:29:36]:
Yeah. I like the word practice a lot because there was a time 3 or 4 years ago where I did a 10 day Vipassana silent meditation course. Super intense.

Chase Jarvis [00:29:48]:
Very. And I came back. Realize. Right? Oh my gosh. My wife does 2 a year. So I I I have not done one. Just so we're clear, Jay. You're a legend.

Jay Clouse [00:29:56]:
I used to think of it as a retreat, and then I did it. And now I'm like,

Chase Jarvis [00:29:59]:
oh, no.

Jay Clouse [00:29:59]:
It's not a retreat. It's a course. It's work, It's not relaxing at all and then I got back and I would meditate daily and that habit has lapsed a lot so it's just this reminder that even in that like specific meta example a period of intensity is good, is valuable, but it does not necessarily create the habit and it's not sufficient over the long term.

Chase Jarvis [00:30:24]:
Yep. Necessary, but not sufficient is a great way of thinking about it.

Jay Clouse [00:30:28]:
So how do you know if you're playing it too safe in your own life? Well, after one last break, Chase and I get into this and talk about the conversation on this podcast that still haunts me. We'll be right back. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Chase Jarvis. I had a conversation with Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit, a couple years ago. And he talked about this moment where he was building ConvertKit, but it was doing like a couple $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue. He's thinking about giving it up, and he had a mentor who asked him, do you still want the outcome that you wanted when you set out on this journey? He said, yes. I still want to build this. I still want to build a world class SaaS company.

Jay Clouse [00:31:10]:
And then the mentor asked, have you done everything in your power to give yourself the best shot at being successful? And that question just rattles around in my brain all the time because if you ask yourself those same questions for whatever it is that you're doing and your answer is no, I have not done everything in my power, you're immediately coming up with bullet points. What would I be doing if I was doing everything in my power? Yeah. And that to me is like the perfect illustration of where you're still playing it safe.

Chase Jarvis [00:31:39]:
Yes. Excellent. And I have nothing further to add. Like, that epitomizes what I'm talking about. Full stop. And that it happens to all of us in every aspect of our life. And it feels like you know, how do we feel like we can get off sort of the hamster wheel that that could create? Because if you'd ask that question in your career, you can find the answer. And you're like, oh, man.

Chase Jarvis [00:32:05]:
I can do more. And then you ask this question of your health and wellness. Oh, man, I could do more. And you ask that of relationships in your life. Oh, man, I can do more. So what I've tried to do is create a framework for how to manage those things and how to be thoughtful with them in all the areas of your life. And, you know, just I identify as a creative person, as a business person. I used to think that my creativity needed to be unbound.

Chase Jarvis [00:32:31]:
And, you know, as soon as you try and pin me down, that's the worst thing you could do with my creativity. And now I realized that a little bit of structure, actually, it set my creativity free. Some constraints, if you will, helped to drive amazing outcomes. And all of these things that that we can do in all these different areas of our lives, when we realize that we're not doing the most we could. Instead of beating us up and making us feel bad about it, it's a little structure gets us pointed in a direction with a handful of tools that are natively within us right now, wherever you are. It's about awakening those tools, reactivating them, and getting back to who you are.

Jay Clouse [00:33:10]:
What are some of those constraints look like for you?

Chase Jarvis [00:33:13]:
Well, lots of them. There's a whole chapter. One of the 7 tools in the book is specifically about constraints. And and I that example that I just shared about, I used to think especially early on in my career that, oh, man, no one's gonna tell me when to work and no one's gonna you know, that's those are things that are gonna keep me down. And yet, as I mentioned, constraints like deadlines, like, who are you accountable to? That these were incredibly powerful drivers of behavior. I like to think of those, you know, there's all kinds of constraints. There's external ones, time pressures, for example. And then there's internal ones, like, who do I wanna show up as? You know, I I mentioned I'm going through a really tough period with my mom right now.

Chase Jarvis [00:33:56]:
She's in the hospital and she's very sick. And it's amazing the lens that that puts on what's important. Those lenses, again, we we don't need someone close to us to be struggling in order to find those, and yet it's wildly convenient. And so how can we, instead of relying on those things, start to create those constraints for ourselves? This is one of the reasons that I journal on what do I really want every day because it helps me decide how I spend my days, my time, my energy, my heart, my soul, my thoughts. Like, if you're clear on this, then things that don't matter, you know, how many followers you have on social media or if that person that you don't really like likes you or not. Or, you know, there's a 100 little sort of whimsical throwaway examples. And yet, if you add all those up, that becomes your life. These are not moments in between our lives.

Chase Jarvis [00:35:01]:
Like, this is literally our life. And that's one of the reasons that I'm completely rewrote the book is because this is the book that I need. When you said, you know, a lot of people try and write the book that they needed, this is the book and the one that I'd wish I had 20 years ago. And now, of course, I wouldn't trade my experiences because they've got me to the position I'm in. But I'd imagine that there are a lot of what I call vitamins. Things you could do it'd be nice to be better at that. But I would also imagine that if you distilled, if you were, you know, again, quiet, 2 AM, staring at the ceiling when you're awake in bed, what you need is an aspirin. You need some relief from the hardest parts of your life that you are stuck in.

Chase Jarvis [00:35:44]:
That's the book that I felt like I needed, and so that's the book that I wrote.

Jay Clouse [00:35:49]:
You have the first chapter available on your website

Chase Jarvis [00:35:52]:
and I do.

Jay Clouse [00:35:52]:
It's actually a lengthy amount of the book that you give with that and there's part of it where you you kind of draw a distinction between extraordinary outcomes and what I would call like extraordinary choices kind of detaching the 2 which I think is important because not playing it safe is an extraordinary choice by definition. Yep. But it also doesn't guarantee any specific outcome. So if I can't guarantee an extraordinary outcome, what's the point? Why do this hard thing?

Chase Jarvis [00:36:28]:
Sure. I genuinely appreciate and value your style of conversing about this, Jay. And it's thoughtful question because playing it safe safety, I would just say, is an illusion. Right? It doesn't exist in nature, and yet, why do we seek it? And, you know, when I did years of research on this book, and when I've talked to so many people who have done, built, become people that I really respect and admire, it's because they took, you know, extraordinary risk. And yet, this is not about ignoring the downside. I say that in the intro. Also, you may remember this line. This I'm not talking about seat belts and sunscreen.

Chase Jarvis [00:37:10]:
I'm not talking about emotional safety or physical safety. All those things are very valuable. I'm talking about the things, the decisions that keep us trapped in a life half lived. And the same amount of stuff goes wrong pursuing a big audacious goal or a life that feels risky or out of reach as does every traditional walk of life. You think you're choosing a safe fill in the blank, and yet the same amount of shit is gonna go wrong. It's just when it goes wrong, it's gonna be extra difficult because you're gonna care way less about it because it's not truly the thing in your heart that you want or it's not truly an attribute that you wanna have or be or become. Safety is an illusion. There's actually a great quote that was very inspirational to me from Helen Keller.

Chase Jarvis [00:38:02]:
I'll read it really quick. It says, security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor did the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. And that encapsulates to me, that is the answer to your question. The belief that a safe path that is say and I'm again, I'm not talking about throwing all caution to the wind. If you ask Richard Branson, and I have, he's he invested in my last company.

Chase Jarvis [00:38:37]:
He's a friend and a mentor. Yeah. He protects the downside, and he's and he's got over 400 companies. What a lot of people don't know is that when he started Virgin Airlines, the first plane he bought was a 747. Everyone's like, oh my god. That's crazy. That's the biggest I mean, you'd think you'd start with a small plane and some small routes, and he chartered a flight to one of the Virgin Islands to be with the woman that he was trying to get with at that time. And that gave him the idea.

Chase Jarvis [00:39:05]:
He buys the 747, but he tells me, you know what? I prenegotiated the ability to sell that plane back to Boeing when my adventure didn't work. It just so happened that it worked, so he didn't have to. But this is not the, like, set everything on fire, burn the boats that it seems like from the out. And, you know, again, the the title might be a bit evocative, but what it allowed him to think about and do was to truly go after the thing that he wanted to truly you know, you can't stand out and fit in at the same time. It allowed him to truly listen to what he wanted to build, you know, who he wanted to be and become. And it was a vehicle, a path for doing that. Yeah. I guess the same amount of stuff's gonna go wrong.

Chase Jarvis [00:39:51]:
And if you're going for something that you really care about deeply and meaningfully, whether that's who you wanna be or, you know, what you wanna become professionally. If I told you that it was the same level of risk, which it's basically it is, which would you choose? I think it's worth a shot. Just don't don't play it safe. If you

Jay Clouse [00:40:20]:
want to get your own copy of Never Play It Safe or check out the first chapter for free, check out the links in the show notes. You can also find links to Chase's website and social handles. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next

Chase Jarvis [00:40:39]:
week.