Never Play It Safe with Chase Jarvis

0:01Light that spark fire nation a JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Truth, Lies, and Work. Today, we'll be breaking down why to never play it safe. To drop these value bombs, I brought Chase Jarvis in the EO Fire Studios. Chase is an award-winning artist, entrepreneur, best-selling author, and one of the most influential photographers of the past 20 years. As a lifelong pioneer, he's created campaigns for Apple, Nike, more than 100 iconic brands. He's an Emmy-nominated director, host of the Chase Jarvis Live podcast with more than 50 million downloads and is a serial and venture-backed founder and CEO of companies like CreativeLive with more than 100 million in revenue and a public company acquisition track record.

0:46In today's Fire Nation, we're going to be talking about Never Play It Safe, his new book on how you don't need gimmicky new life hacks or productivity gadgets. Fire Nation will dive into so much more as soon as we get back from thinking our sponsors. The next wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business.

1:19Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Many EO Fire listeners have launched non-food franchises and Franbridge Consulting has guided them. Fran Bridge's founder and frequent EO Fire guest, John Ostenson, has done more placements than any other in the country and his service is free. Sign up for a consultation with John or get a free copy of his book, Non-Food Franchising, at FranBridgeConsulting.com. Chase, thank you for joining me today and I want you to say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:58Fire Nation, what's up? It's been a little minute and it's great to be back on the show. I'm a big fan of counterintuitivity. So, you know, the things that don't seem as they are. And my belief in answering that question is around the concept of intuition. A lot of people are reluctant to trust their intuition, and yet I believe that it's the most profound and valuable thing that we have that we know the least about and use the least. And it's always there for us. Learning to use it is a lot like a muscle, and there's so many answers there to the questions that you have about your life. Getting started looking there is a great tool.

2:45Fire Nation, when one of the most influential photographers of our time and an absolute creative pioneer, Emmy-nominated director says something, I know that I'm listening. And Chase, it has been a little bit, as you mentioned. It was actually 2020 the last time we chatted, specifically February 3rd. It was your second time on the show. This is number three. And we always have a fun, engaging, and most importantly for our listeners, valuable conversation. And today's is not going to be any different because we're going to be focused on never play it safe. But before we do, what the heck have you been up to since 2020?

3:22Give us a quick update. Oh, man, so much. I think a couple of the highlights, the company that I had started in 2010 called Creative Live, which was the first online live learning platform out there in the world. It's focused specifically for creators and entrepreneurs. We had legends on the platform, you know, Brene Brown, Mark Cuban, Richard Branson. John Lee Dumas. Yeah, John Lee Dumas raised his kind of dough. That was acquired in 2021. Apparently, this whole online learning thing was going to take off. Who knew? We just needed a global pandemic to help people really understand. So that was acquired in October 1st of 2021.

4:09And I did a year with the big public company that bought us. And most people, if you're familiar with me or my work, you know that I'm not really a classic publicly traded executive or publicly traded company executive. So I was pretty clear that, hey, man, I'll do a year with the acquiring company. And after that year, it was fascinating. I took some time to ask, man, OK, what next? What do I really want? And it was a year of experimentation and inquiry and an internal journey. and one of the things that it produced is, as you mentioned, I got a new book out. It's called Never Play It Safe. That was written over this course of the last couple of years.

4:49It has been a super fun ride. I'm producing a television show right now that I can't talk about yet, but it's in development and it just feels like a creative rebirth on the backside of CreativeLive being acquired and got a new lease on life and it's a new chapter. I'm really excited. I love the new chapter. And that's one of the pleasures of having now done this show for 12 years for 4 ,497 episodes is that I get to see new chapters of people's lives. I mean, I just interviewed Seth Godin for the third time earlier today, and he was talking about his next chapter. And that guy's such a legend.

5:27And I love when people of his stature and longevity are just still opening up new doors and having fun. And, man, it's just great to just have all these wonderful connections and network. Yeah, I've got my hand right now on his new book called This is Strategy. That's what we talked about. Yeah. 294 of these lovely snippets. And man, I'll tell you, if you're into that book, by the way, we go deep into The Wizard of Oz because that's like one of his secret passions that I uncovered during our conversation that like he's never talked about publicly. And there are some really interesting things that came out of that.

6:04All right. I'm on it. Okay. He's a dear friend. He got an advanced copy of my book. He provided comments before it was in print. And I love Seth Dealey. What a brilliant man. Seriously. I'm going straight to that show as soon as it's out. I mean, people use the word legend a little too lightly these days. Yeah. He's truly a legend. He's the OG. That guy is truly a legend. 9 ,000 plus blog posts in a row. I mean, my 4 ,497 podcast episodes, I'm not even halfway there. So, I mean, this guy is legendary. But listen, this is about you. This is about Never Play It Safe. This is about a practical guide to freedom, creativity, and a life you love.

6:44Talk to us about this. We're going to go into the essential tools that you have. I mean, there's eight of them. I want to really do a deep dive into a couple of them, or sorry, seven of them, seven essential tools. But before we do, why this book? Why now? I think we authors are best equipped to write about the things that we know about and things that are happening in our lives with the goal of helping other people. Like we don't need to burn ourselves on the burner. We can watch other people touch it and realize that it's hot, for example. And so on the backside of, again, the company being acquired and a re-examination of my life, it became clear that, man, I was really, it was a neat chapter.

7:29And simultaneously, man, I have, how can I be a person who talks about this stuff 24-7? helps other people solve their challenges and creating freedom and joy and happiness in their lives. And how can I stumble? I'm supposed to have this stuff figured out. And without going too far into the weeds, I had written a very tidy book that sat at the intersection of creativity and business. And over the last 18 months, I've been working on it every day. And then eight weeks before I was supposed to turn that book in, I realized that this was not the book that I was supposed to turn in. I was supposed to turn in a book about this exact experience, about how I'd realized that when the dreams that I'd been talked out of, I had been talked out of so many of my dreams, ironically, by other people who'd given up on theirs.

8:23And to me, that was actually where the best stuff lies is like, A, what was happening to me for me when I was aligned with my purpose and when I knew what I was supposed to be doing and B, what about when I wasn't? Turns out that success leaves clues. And when I started uncovering my most successful adventures and massive public billion dollar failures that I'm happy to chat about, that there's a lot of information there and not dissimilar to your 4 ,000 episodes. I've done about a thousand and And so many of my friends like Seth and Tim Ferriss and some of the other people that I've named that were on the platform, Richard Branson, Tim Ferriss, Damon, John, et cetera, like there's a lot of wisdom there.

9:08And so I had unpacked a list of the accomplishments and the wins and losses of myself and the crew that I've just mentioned there. And it turns out it's very mappable. Everything, all of the best stuff in our lives is on the other side of our comfort zone. repeatedly demonstrably, like whether this is having a kid or starting a business or, you know, taking a leap into a relationship, it's, it's on the other side of fear and discomfort and risk. And yet we don't really have a good blueprint for how to get there. In fact, the world is constantly telling us how safe we need to play it. We need to stay in our lane.

9:47We need to not take big risks. So this book and in turn, the seven, you know, the tools that, that we talk about in that book are the response that I had when I had a couple of years to think about what would I do differently and what am I good at when I'm at my best and what would I want to help others. And it turns out that regularly accessing all the stuff that's on the other side of our fear is right at the heart of it. So that's the book that I wrote. I wrote this book as a response to that 18 months of writing the wrong book. I put this book out into my publisher's hands in 11 weeks. It's the best work I've ever done.

10:28I love that. And Fire Nation, there's so many things that Chase just shared that I love so much and I want to double back on. I mean, number one, we are all standing upon the shoulders of giants. I mean, these giants have been leaving clues for us throughout generations, throughout millennia, and we've been picking them up. We've been applying them because success does leave clues. It's just a reality, Fire Nation. it is absolutely a fact and there's just so many things that Chase has done and that I've done I mean that we've been so fearful of that have turned into such greatness and I'm you know we brought up Seth Godin I mean he was the second person I ever interviewed for Entrepreneurs on Fire because he's such a generous soul he never asked like how many episodes have you done or like how many listeners do you have he just said yes and I was interviewing this guy that I you know this is 12 years ago and it's my second ever interview and I'm holding a piece of paper up behind the microphone, I'm shaking.

11:20You can hear the paper in the background as it's waving in the air because I don't want to forget the question I want to ask him. And I'm just so terrified and nervous. And then of course, fast forward 12 years, we're just having the most fun, interesting conversation ever about the Wizard of Oz. And it's natural and it's easy. And it didn't start that way. It started with fear and stress and anxiety, but then magic happened as a result. Fire Nation, these seven essential tools we'll be diving into when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Picture this. You're at a party and someone asks you what you do as a marketer.

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13:10Fran Bridge is hands down the premier source for the best opportunities in the franchise world, including both active and passive opportunities from senior care to youth soccer, consulting to dog grooming, fitness and health to home design, and much more. John has served as an Inc. 500 franchisor and is a multi-brand franchisee himself, and he helps more entrepreneurs than any other consultant in the country. Sign up for a free consultation call with John today, or get a free copy of his book, Non-Food Franchising, at FranBridgeConsulting.com. That's FranBridgeConsulting.com Chase, we're back.

13:44Attention, time, intuition, constraints, play, work, fill your practice. That's actually eight, but I want to talk about the seven essential tools. Let's go. When things have been at their best for me personally and for so many of my friends that I've had really heartfelt, earnest conversations with over the years and ultimately ended up doing a lot of really deep research, like what was happening, what were at play. And it turns out that there's a very repeatable set of circumstances, these seven tools that reside naturally within us that when we are at our best, we have at least an awareness or some sort of control of these tools.

14:25And these are, again, much like creativity. It's very easy to see how creativity is trained out of us, right? You know, if you ask a first grade classroom, hey, who wants to come up to the front of the room and draw me a picture? Every hand goes up in first grade. And we know what happens in sixth grade. And then when we're 20, we're all scared to go to the front of the room. We don't think of ourselves as creative or whatever. So you could say that that's a natural state within us that gets trained out of us. Well, so do these other seven tools. You talked about our attention, right? Our attention is this is the most competitive time in the history of the world for our attention.

15:02We get served 20 ,000 ads per day, for example. So true. Or time, right? People don't, no one says, you know what? I have way too much time on my hands. Most people that I know, especially people who are working hard trying to, who'll be listening to the show, trying to, you know, make ends meet or building a living in a life that they love. We're like strapped for time. And so when I looked at things like our attention, time, as I mentioned in the intro of the show, like our intuition, these are things that our natural state is to rely on these things, to trust them, to know about them. And culture has largely trained us out of these things.

15:36So what if we could, through a handful of very basic practices, reconnect with these important aspects of ourselves, our play? That's a natural desire. I mean, one of the reasons you live where you do and you do what you do is because you love it. That is our natural state. Watch a kid. Put him in an empty room or a room with like some weird pile of random stuff, and they will start playing with that stuff naturally and natively. So I pause it, and it turns out that there's a pattern in the most successful, happy, and fulfilled people that when we can get in touch with each of these seven aspects of ourselves, that the world starts happening for us rather than to us.

16:16Let me jump in here for a second because things are coming up for me as you're speaking because it's so true for adults. We lose that ability to just do because we're worried about what other people are thinking, the judgments, et cetera, et cetera. And I think a great example that I've experienced where you just can see the break in that is when you have a little gathering at your house and you kind of surprise people. You're like, you know what, guys? I know you weren't expecting this, but we're going to do karaoke tonight. and everyone's like no no I can't sing I can't sing I won't sing I refuse to do it I'm so embarrassed I'm terrible and then the first person gets up and you know they're just okay and they're not like Adele so that people like oh okay well wait a second then the next person gets up and the next person gets up and then after everybody ends up going one round what happens everybody's like oh my god I have to sing this song and you see this whole different scenario of people refusing to do that to now being like wanting to fight their way on stage and I've just seen this play out so many times because not to get into too much detail, but down here in Puerto Rico, we don't have much to do.

17:16So we do a lot of karaoke parties. I'll give you that for sure. But just think of that as a little microcosm. If that was everything, all your dreams in life, someone says, do you want to go for your dreams? You're like, no, no, man, I'm afraid to stumble. And then someone else goes and you're like, oh, wow. And then someone else goes and they do their thing or someone else fails. And you're like, I don't think any less of that person. I love that person. That person's awesome. Keep going. You start to see that these are like, this is our natural state. And if you lift and stamp this, that karaoke experiment onto your life, we're all rooting for you.

17:52I'm here. The reason that you do the show is to help people. The reason I'm appearing on your show, the reason I wrote this book is because we want people to live their best stuff, live their best lives. And when you start to realize that we're all scared and we're all conditioned to play it safe, but the people who have tapped into it, who are living their dreams, they've taken a chance and so should you. And here's a guidebook on how to do it. Okay. Let me just say something right now. We've got attention, time, intuition, constraints, play, work, failure, practice. Unfortunately, due just to the reality of how I set my show up, we do have some constraints.

18:29I mean, we do have a time limit. So I want you to choose one more of these that for whatever reason you feel like is right to do a little bit of a mini deep dive on and we'll talk about that and then we'll say goodbye let's talk about constraints and because i think so many of us believe in even the word constraint right it's like oh constraints are there to keep us down right it's like we don't have enough money we don't have enough time uh oh if i just had you know a better job a different job whatever these are you know When you study the process of creativity, I open that chapter with a conversation with one of the most legendary designers of all time.

19:05His name is Stefan Sagmeister. And he helps me understand in that moment that constraints are actually our guideposts. That is creativity in action. And if we can learn to lean into those things rather than describe them as what's holding us back, that's where all the solutions lie. For example, the phrase in Stoic philosophy, the obstacle is the way comes to mind. I'll illustrate every time you decide like, oh, I am not really a writer. I don't know. I'm not a professional writer. And someone says, oh, just write me a little story. Like, I don't know. I don't know. You're sitting there in front of the blank page.

19:44And then if someone says, wait, I need you to write. It needs to be 180 words. the first word you know is never before the first two words are never before and then you have to do it in you know in this time frame and the main character has to be you know the 10 year old version of yourself and the key pivot point here is that you got lost on the way to your tree fort everyone can write that story because it's only 180 words yeah i got the first words to get you going. I told you what the problem is. You got lost on your way to your tree forward. It's the 10-year-old you. It instantly puts into view all of the things that are necessary to get you going.

20:30So let's take this. I want to build a business, for example, but I only have X dollars, but I only have Y time, or I live in Z and there's not a lot of other entrepreneurs there. So where do I get my inspiration and my, those constraints, the very thing that you were listing as keeping you down are there to show you the path. What, cause what you have to do is you have to build an online business and it has to be in, you know, in this direction and you don't need it. You know, it's not something where you can lay out a bunch of money to create a bunch of inventory. So it's probably a digital product, for example.

21:08So the goal with this particular chapter, like the others that we've already mentioned are our attention time and intuition like this is the way and we are naturally good at this but culture has told us that it's it's these constraints that are keeping us down if we can rewire our brain and learn some really basic uh solutions to help us get out of our own way the world is our oyster and in fact this is how the people who are the most successful happy fulfilled that we know people that we look up to respect and admire like Seth and like many of the names of the other people you've had on the show we've talked about already, they know this.

21:49So let's lean into it and get you going in the same direction as those folks in the direction of your dreams. I love this Fire Nation. And one thing that comes to mind, if like I told you right now, hey, you have five minutes to work out today and it has to be right now. Guess what? You would just work out right now for five minutes. You'd probably break a sweat. You'd probably do a lot of things like 100 pushups, all these setups, and you would just max it out. But if I said, you know what? You have to work out sometime today. And I kind of just left it at that. A lot of times people would never end up doing anything because they would keep procrastinating and putting it off because they just feel like, well, I can do it later.

22:21I can do it later. And then you have no constraints. So nothing happens. It's just unbelievable. So Chase, I'm holding Never Play It Safe in my hands, a practical guide to freedom, creativity, and a life you love. I am one lucky person. How can Fire Nation be so lucky? What would be a call to action for our listeners who want to be doing what I'm doing, holding this book in their hands? It's available anywhere books are sold. We just got certified a bestseller after the first week of launch. It's a, yeah, I'm so grateful. But what's the most exciting out of that is that it's now even more broadly available.

23:00Amazon just put it on sale. That's what they do with their best sellers. And so, you know, and I did my own stunts on the audio book. So if you live in a place where you don't want to wait to receive the hardback, please just go check it out. Neverplayitsafe.com. There's all kinds of interesting things there as well. But anywhere books are sold, I believe deeply this is my best work. and it's set to, if you're stuck at all or there's other people in your lives that are not understanding this dream that you have for this one precious life, I recommend the book. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

23:37You've been hanging out with CJ and JLD today, so keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Chase in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up and guess what? You can also listen to our 2020 episode, which was also Fire. It's right there. Chase, thank you, my man, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you, brother, and we will catch you on the flip side. Until next time. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Chase for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment.

24:18I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com and I will catch you there or on the flippity-flip side. The next wave, your chief AI officer hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented.

24:54The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Many EO Fire listeners have launched non-food franchises and Franbridge Consulting has guided them. Franbridge's founder and frequent EO Fire guest, John Ostenson, has done more placements than any other in the country and his service is free. Sign up for a consultation with John or get a free copy of his book, Non-Food Franchising at FranBridgeConsulting.com.