1061: Chase Jarvis | Embracing Risk for a More Fulfilling Life

25:04It's like, I don't need to do more in a day. I want to do less in a day. For sure. But tell me what the difference is in thinking about time and understanding what's important, because I think our timelines are pretty flawed. Time management is dead. It was never really real. And certainly our ability to focus our attention on what matters and avoid distractions, you can look at that through a lens of time. But I want to help people understand that the people who I feel like have life figured out, they operate on a completely different way with time. What if, for example, I told you that life was long and before your listeners throw a tantrum, life is short, you got to seize the day, all the phrases that we know.

25:42What if I told you that the difference between you falsely understanding that life is short, that makes you scurry around like a lunatic doing stupid shit because you don't do anything to its full potential. You run from one thing to the next. You allow yourself to be distracted. What if life is short and seize the day and all these phrases, they clearly make us behave in largely erratic ways. And what if, by contrast, you took the point of view that life is long? What would you do differently? A friend of mine just shared that they were at a sort of a Jeffersonian dinner and this, they asked many questions.

26:19And this was the question that was presented to the group. And it was by far the most fascinating set of responses because if you told people that what if you're going to live to be not infinity, but 200, what would you do differently now? You're guaranteed to live to 200 and you're going to be able-bodied and with it, what would you do differently? And everyone said they would do something different. And the funny thing is, is that most people, when they were able to zoom out, could do orders of magnitude more than they wanted to do by the time they were 75 or 80, which is the amount of time that we actually have on this planet.

26:54So the foundation to this thinking is that time dilation is real. We've all experienced, whether you experience it in a car crash and time slows way down or in a flow state and in an hour you get 10 times more done than you really ever thought was possible or than you would typically. That tells you that time is not some conveyor belt moving along in the background, that time is fluid. And for the people who know this, they are the people that we respect and admire and appreciate. They've got this figured out. That's why they can be so thorough. That's why they have multiple career arcs. I feel like I tapped into this reasonably early in my life.

27:30And I'm on my fourth or fifth, I would just call it reinvention. You know, again, from being a photographer to an entrepreneur building a multi-hundred million dollar company and having that acquired and now producing television shows. And to me, this is, I lucked into this. And yet when I started studying not just my own crazy weird life, but the lives of the people that I respected, many of our friends and historical figures, this kept coming up. There's a different relationship that the people who understand have with time. And it's also available to us. What if you changed and you thought about time differently, what would be true for you?

28:07And the facts are that you'd be smarter, you'd be more thoughtful, you'd be more connected, you'd be more thorough, the stress that you would alleviate from. And I'm not saying I'm sort of of this like short-term urgency, long-term patience camp, your life would transform today. And it's immediately available to you. And that's one of the things that I love about each of the tools. The book is organized into seven different chapters. Each one of them is a tool that is very counterintuitive. Like we think of time as a certain way, but if you just change the way that you think about time, a whole new universe is available to you.

28:41Again, to me, time is one of those tools. And the people that I know that have their shit figured out know this. Yeah, it's quite fascinating. That's an interesting thought exercise because I'm not sure what I would do differently if I was going to live to 200. I'm like, oh gosh, I might have to work longer. But I don't think that's the part of it. That's what I mean, but you're like, okay, I've got to work longer, so I'm certainly not going to do shit that I hate. Right, right. Oh, that's a good point. Right, yeah. I'm already doing something I love, thank God. Yeah. But you're right. And I'm taking care of my body now, finally.

29:09But if I'd known I was going to live to 200 20 years ago, probably wouldn't have gotten so freaking fat. Well, there's upside there, right? Maybe the bar is that low, but conversely, the bar can be crazy high and the amount of patience and thoughtfulness that you could input into your life and simultaneously the amount of joy in play. You wouldn't feel so compelled to work all the time and have to have everything figured out by 25. I mean, I remember having a conversation with you 10 years ago, and I remember specifically that you felt like you signaled to me that you needed to have everything figured out.

29:43I need to have X wins and Y dollars in the bank. And I'm not saying that that's not valuable, that motivation isn't important. I think that that's true. But boy, if you could increase the amount of play and joy in your life and you could then gravitate to the things that brought you both fulfillment and connection and a lot of value personally and professionally, like figuring that out instead of having to jump into law school track at 20 and a half years old. Yeah, I did miss out on a lot of stuff going to law school and then more starting a business. You know, a lot of my friends were doing traveling and living abroad, which I also did before that.

30:19And I was like, oh, I miss all that stuff. I got to do that stuff later. Well, there's no later. Because once you start a business, it's your business, man. You're stuck. Good luck living, you know, three months or even three years somewhere where the Internet sucks when you're running a freaking startup. Not going to happen. And I think it's interesting. You wrote as well in the book about learning how to rest. And I'm surprised, surprised one of those people who decides to never rest until my body forces me to rest physically. I've always been like that. I'd get sick the afternoon after my last final exam every single year.

30:49And I was like, I'm so proud of myself for never getting sick during anything important. And now I realized my body was just like, we can hold on for a few hours. But after this exam, you're going to start throwing up in the bathroom nonstop for three days. You know, like you're done. Totally. And it's ironic that that's actually celebrated. Yeah, of course. And you celebrated that at some point in the past. For sure. This is another sort of joy of realizing that you have a different relationship with time. You know, what if the things that presented themselves as mission critical and urgent, every time I've actually been able to have the space to look at them slightly more carefully, you realize that not required.

31:27Oh, probably not the right thing to send me scurrying after them. And I wouldn't call it, just so we're clear also, I'm on the other side of this after 25 plus years of sleeping somewhere around four and a half hours a night. If you want to talk about something that takes a toll, I was one of those people for decades and I thought it was genetic and I had a talk script that I said to myself, not intentionally, but that was one of those subconscious ones like, well, you just have different genetics. lucky you it allows you to do x y and z and then the shit catches up to you and i'm not saying don't work hard when you're younger and have maximum energy that's absolutely that's a brilliant and great thing to do but training the ability to find joy in the spaces between training the ability to sleep like it turns out an interesting story about a friend of mine tim ferris maybe your listeners might be familiar with tim we had a conversation about meditation years ago sitting on my boat floating out in the lake.

32:27And he's like, man, you seem pretty dialed. Like shit's going great for you. And you're like, you got your shit together. What's the secret? And I was like, no secret, man. I got interested in visualization and meditation and mindfulness back as an Olympic development athlete. You know, we had people, psychologists that were training us to think about this stuff. And it was, I found it was really valuable. So I got curious and been exploring meditation. And, you know, I found this one that really worked for me. And And he said, all right, tell me more. I'm always like super skeptical of meditation.

32:58And where this nets out is I encouraged him to try. And for me, it was Transcendental Meditation TM. And I was like, dude, I'll pay for you to go. It's like$1 ,500. Go get taught this by someone who's a certified teacher. And on the other side of that experience, he said, bro, it's like arguably maybe one of the most valuable things in my entire life. and the story that I had told myself was that my aggro nature, my high octane, pissed off, gonna battle at all costs, the reason I did not want to meditate was because I thought that that was my advantage. Yeah, you lose your edge. Yeah, that was my edge.

33:39That was my advantage and as soon as I had gone through this program and developed a meditation practice, which to be clear, this is a practice, but when I developed my meditation practice, I was able to see that the thing that I thought was my biggest strength was actually my biggest anchor. And now the clarity that I have, and just so we're clear, this is not necessarily a causal relationship, but this was the beginning of the Tim Ferriss podcast. This was when he launched his show. This is when he did his third and fourth books, which were instant number one New York Times bestsellers. That's on the other side of the shit.

34:13So your original question was around rest. And to me, this is just an awareness of, you know, being kind and gentle to yourself and giving your body what it needs and including great self-talk. And it ultimately distills to awareness and mental health. It turns out that's pretty valuable stuff. I want to talk about the intuition thing in the book. I know you're big on this. I wanted to explore this topic with you. Intuition's interesting, right? I'm often turned off by the woo-woo nonsense that people associate to it, such with it. You know, when people are like, oh, I know more than a doctor because I have intuition, mother's intuition or whatever, or they're psychic because their intuition told them something.

34:49It just like, whatever. It seems like a delusion and cognitive bias combined. But that's not really what you're talking about. The science is actually emerging is pretty clear that they can measure sort of the, I'll just call it the efficacy of speed and the correctness of rational thought. Let's just use that. And it turns out that rational thought is pretty slow, often wrong. We actually think that our memory is infallible, which actually is a major negative. We're not even aware that we could misremember things. And by contrast, intuitive thinking, which is very much, there's a reason that we call it a gut.

35:27The science indicates that our cells store information that is different than the information that's in rational thought, but that gut feelings actually do take rational, the stuff that's going on in your mind, in consideration as well. But there's a reason that this feels differently. There's the head intellectual stuff, and then there's the body like, I'm not sure if I should trust this situation or whatever. And there's all kinds of really good examples of this. One that I share in the book is about Captain Sully who landed the airplane in the Hudson River. When he took off, basically bird strikes, both engines, took both engines out, a couple hundred people on board.

36:07And I think it was JFK or maybe it was LaGuardia, you know, And he said, hey, bird strike. And they go, okay, come around, come back to the airport or any one of these other two. There's three airports in New York area there. And he says, nope, putting it down in the water. And they're like, no one had ever done that before. Protocols come back to base, basically. And he's like, put it in the water. And on review, now, Sullenberger had something like 30 years as a pilot. He had flown gliders. There's all sorts of weird trainings that he had that made him slightly different than a lot of other pilots.

36:42The reason that this is expressly interesting is because basically airline pilots, they run their entire, every flight, their entire professional lives are run by checklists. You know, you only do this when you're crashing, you're literally reading a book. You have your own protocols and then you're, that you are trained into, but you're literally checking the manual. And when Sullenberger made the decision to attempt to land the plane in the Hudson, it violated all of that 30 years of training to do that. And yet, when they reviewed the results when he crashed and everyone lived, they determined that that actually was the safest option given all of the options.

37:23So to me, there's a thousand million examples scientifically documented that indicate this. And I'm not saying ignore your rational mind. That's not at all what I'm saying. And I'm saying the people who are living rich, fulfilled, connected lives, this is a piece of the puzzle. And this is something like anything else, like your creativity or your muscles, right? You use them, you train it, and it gets better and stronger and more reliable. So in the book, I just give a handful of examples. Look, there's a reason that Travis Rice, one of the best snowboarders in the history of the world in big mountain riding is still alive.

38:00And so many of his peers are wrong. It's because he has turned away from all sorts of big film shoots in the moment, just because of his intuition. And then other people don't stay alive because they have ignored their intuition. So to me, this is just an interesting lesson. And the thing that maps back to each and every one of us is we've all experienced this. Every single person who's listening right now knows that there's some time when they ignored their intuition and it bit them and leaned into it and it paid off. And ironically, one other sort of side note is I just was on one of our mutual friends, Ryan Holiday's podcast, The Daily Stoic, and he had an intuition about one of his books.

38:41And when they accepted his pitch, basically, he was like, oh gosh, I think I might have done it wrong. And they said, no, no, no, we want to do one of these sort of daily readers. It was The Daily Stoic, basically 365 passages. and we think it could be a big deal. And he says, so wait a minute, wasn't I going against my intuition right there? And it turned out to be one of the best-selling books of all time, right? Millions of copies have been sold. And I said, actually, what did you say to yourself in that moment where they're saying, no, we actually think it's good? You actually trusted your intuition that the people that you'd put around you, your agent, your publisher, were really good decision makers.

39:19And so you took all of this information that was available to you to consideration and you decided to go forward with the project. And that is what made it one of your best outcomes ever as an author. So whether you work to explain this stuff away or you decide to lean into it, it seems to me that life is way more interesting and that there is enough data, scientific and anecdotal, to suggest that what have you got to lose? The answer there is not very much. What do you have to gain? Potentially a life that feels richer and more interesting to you. It's funny to hear you talk about this stuff now, because I think when we met, you were like spending a crap load of money going all over the place.

40:02Like I got to go to Shanghai tomorrow. I'm like, oh, that'll be fun. How long are you there? 12 hours. Oh, that's not going to be fun at all. The flight's like 19 hours. What are you doing? It was just like, I've seen you miserable. For real. There was one time where you had an investor meeting right after our lunch, and you were not your best self that day, I think. I'd met you before, so it was all good. I was just like, wow, he's at the end of his rope. And my wife, Jen, was like, yeah, this is not a good day for Chase. We'll have to catch him next time. And you were just like, you know, nonstop texting someone to get numbers on a spreadsheet probably or whatever.

40:36And I was just like, oh, God, I'm so glad I don't own a tech company. A venture-backed tech business. That's right. Just no thank you. So it's such a 180 from a decade or how, no, more than 10 or 15 years ago, whatever it is. This is what I mean. This book is the product of looking backwards and connecting the dots and trying to understand, wait a minute, if I connect the dots about all of the best things, things that worked when they weren't supposed to, the things that, what are the patterns there? And then I took that sample and I ran that against a thousand podcast guests and so many just really intimate conversations like the ones that we've had when we're not recording.

41:18And I mentioned a handful of other legendary friends that we share. This is the kind of stuff that I'm like, wait, I'm running sample tests against this stuff, my experience, and shit, it turns out that there is a pattern. You know, I mentioned Tim earlier, one of his books, Tools for Titans, it just basically featured a bunch of people that he'd interviewed in his podcast. I was in that book, and I think it was at the launch party or something. I'm like, what's the through line, the most popular through line between all the guests of the, you know, and this is everything. This is world-class athletes, photographer, chess masters.

41:50What are the most common threads between all these high performers? And the number one thing was the ability to direct your attention. Essentially, it's some sort of a meditation, mindfulness, awareness, prayer. And it doesn't matter what you call it, but an understanding, a belief that the ability to control the muscle between your ears that you are in charge and that this is not running the, it's not running the clown show was the defining characteristic for so many of these people. And that was the most popular thing. That's an example of me going through the data and saying, holy shit, what are the characteristics of these outcomes?

42:27And putting all of those characteristics, essentially it's sort of like a meta research project that at the core is about how to live a rich, fulfilled life. And the thread amongst the macro threads is all the best shit is on the other side of your comfort zone. Here's a roadmap for how to get there, to get comfortable, to get better at accessing it. One of the unique levers in your book was constraints. I wanna talk about this because you expect like, okay, focus, attention, all right, flexibility, whatever. Sure. But constraints, it's kind of like the opposite, right? You're like creative, the blue ocean, everything is open to you.

43:02And it's like, yeah, maybe put some boundaries on some stuff. Yeah. I do believe that in many ways, every one of the tools, there's seven tools in the book, levers as I call them. And I chose the word levers on purpose because that's like, what's the minimum input for maximum, right? That's essentially the definition of a lever. And they all have this sort of counterintuitivity to them, just specifically with time as an example. Oh, life is short, go fast and everything, run hard. And that's how you get the best out of life. And like, actually, what if I told you life is long? What would you do different?

43:32Well, constraints is another one. And you hit the nail on the head, which is we are taught that, especially when I started identifying, I'm super creative and I want to do this. This is who I am. I want to lean into this. Anything that wasn't like blue ocean, like no schedule, to me, it was there to keep me down. And the man's trying to suppress all my brilliant creative genius. And the irony was that just had me flailing and lost. And some super basic constraints like creating on demand, sitting down at the same time every day. And a number of exercises, one of which I chronicle in the book, a guy named Stefan Sagmeister, one of the best designers in the history of the world, graphic designer, really, really smart, interesting guy.

44:18He walked me through this exercise from a cat named Edward DeBona, which - Is that the parachute guy? What color is your parachute? Is that a different DeBona? Hold on. I'm going to Google it. I don't know. You can look it up. Yeah, you got your computer there. I'm talking about the Edward de Bona who pioneered lateral thinking, which essentially is - Maltese physician? Yes. Six thinking hats. Yes. I was close. Yeah. Not parachutes, hats. There you go. So he's a genius and developed the idea of lateral thinking. Essentially, the punchline is that constraints are the thing that provide us the vehicle of creativity.

44:52If I say you can do anything you want, most people think that that's what an artist wants. But by extension, if I told you you need to do something, it needs to be out of paper, it needs to be read, and you have to do it in five minutes. Those are all just simple foundations that will infuse radical creativity into the moment versus like, uh, what do I want to do? Now you're getting an envelope with those instructions. Yeah, exactly. I'm folding you an envelope. Yeah. And if you extend that metaphor to life, you start to think, wow. And I mentioned Ryan and early I can go back to the obstacle is the way.

45:26There's a stoic principle about that. And what if the thing that is holding you back is actually the thing that unlocks you? Like we're a startup, we don't have a lot of capital. One example is Airbnb. They didn't have a lot of capital. They weren't making traction. The founders themselves went to New York City and photographed the insides of the spaces they were trying to rent themselves because they were creative people, designers and, you know, Joe and Brian, and they could only do that because that's, they had no money and they did have cameras and they said, well, it presumably couldn't hurt.

46:04Let's try this. This was the thing that transformed Airbnb from not working to working high quality photos of the insides of the locations. And so it is this constraint of like, we have no money. What do we have? We have a little intuition. We have a belief that if people saw the insides of some of these really cool places that they would be inspired. And we have 10 days and we have the city that we're living in right now. What can we do? They did that thing. And it turns out that when you deconstruct so many of the most successful people or the most fulfilled humans, the outcomes that achieved the highest ROI, it was because of the constraints, not in spite of them.

46:49So I argue, what if you were to invite some additional constraints? We've all got constraints, right? Even some really big ones, race, gender, how you were born, socioeconomic status. Those are all certain kinds of constraints. But what if you, everyone has to play within what they're dealt. And what if you could actually increase the number? What if you could put some other ones in place? By choice, I'm only going to use social media 15 minutes a day. Just that one alone for 90 % of the people who are listening right now would probably transform your life significantly. And the irony is not lost on me that you found this show through social media, but that is an example of a constraint that if you chose that, you chose what you put in your body, you chose how you spent your time, you chose how much time you spent with people who were toxic.

47:38This is actually the vehicle to make all the changes that you want in your life. And it's right there, available to you. It costs zero dollars. It's just a change in thinking. And you don't need to make$50 ,000 a photo to afford something from the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support those who make this show possible. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

48:07You can also email us, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I am happy to surface codes for you If you can't find it, you're not sure if it exists. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Chase Jarvis. It sort of goes against, I think, what a lot of people are expecting out of a show about creativity. Like, hey, you should limit yourself way more than you are. It is helpful to think of things through this lens. I mean, this is a problem for me. I don't know what my career goals are beyond the next few things that I'm planning. I think part of the problem, just with creative careers in general, constraints aside, is that there aren't defined paths for creatives that we can simply follow.

48:44Like if you're a lawyer, you work, and then you become this kind of associate, and then you do that, and then you get seconded to a firm, and then you do that, and you either go in-house, or you go on the partner track. That's the career path. But when you're a creative, it's like, what's the next thing that I gotta do to get to the next level? I don't know, what is the next level? Oh, I don't know, that's a good question. So not only do I not know what the next level even is, of course I don't have a plan to get there, because I don't even have a destination in mind. But I don't know, are those paths disappearing for everyone?

49:11Or is it just a uniquely sort of crappy situation for a creative career? No, I think culturally, and I'll use some constraints here, not only do I think it's not crappy, I think it's the most desirable outcome. And it is a constraint to say, oh, I do this, I go to this school, and then I become this kind of associate, and then I'm on the path to being on the partner track or I go in-house or whatever. And yet it invokes this idea of, I mean, this is a multi-thousand-year-old idea, know thyself. I'm gonna quote some Aristotle here, right? It turns out that's a pretty powerful thing. And what about setting a compass?

49:50We've been sold a map, even within that universe of lawyerness, which we're talking about. We're sold a map. Turns out the map and lawyer is a little bit more refined, but let's take the path of an entrepreneur very undefined very ambiguous and what a map looks like you say if you go to this school and you get this job or you first you work at a startup then you are an executive at a startup then you start a startup and then boy that's how you actually get this or you join y combinator or you there's sort of like intimations of lots of paths but when we buy a map it starts here dot dot dot dot you know go over the hill through the whatever dot dot dot red x here when you buy a map, what invariably happens is you're six weeks into this thing and you're off track.

50:38And the goal is to just scurry back and get on track. But it turns out there's a mountain range in front of you. It turns out there's a swamp and turns out there's all sorts of AKA freaking life. And as soon as you have that, you're essentially sort of lost. And there's not a part that says, hey, go around this stuff and hook back up with the trail later. And this is the difference between what I invoke is the idea of a compass. What is your true north? What are your values? Who do you want to spend time with? What are you interested in? What do you like working on? If you are able to align with those things as your true north, I like to work in these areas.

51:15I like to work with these type of people. And that's my compass. When you bump into something like a mountain rage, you realize that, okay, I might be off track. I might have to walk this way, but my compass tells me where my true north is. My values, to extend the metaphor, tell me where my true north is. All I have to do is keep following my values. For the people that are able to adapt to that type of thinking, those are the people that change the world. Those are the people, and maybe changing the world isn't on your list of shit to do, but is fulfillment on your list of shit to do? Yes. Are you gonna become fulfilled by chasing all of the dreams and the scripts that everybody else has written for you?

51:53Hell no. It's about knowing who you are, about knowing what your values are, and how to actually walk towards that as often as possible, knowing that you can't always do it. To me, that's a way more powerful model than the map that we're sold, which leaves us feeling off track, stuck, essentially broken because we're off path, we're off track. I don't know what to do now. And if the people who are listening to this right now, if you feel lost or isolated or lonely or confused, this is probably what's happening. and again, this is one of the reasons I wrote the book, is there's just a handful of these tools.

52:29What if you journaled every day on the same prompt, what is it that I really want? What if you did get pretty clear, and you started listening to that piece of you that actually knows, and you weren't turning it off because your career counselor, your boss, mom, wife, spouse, partner, whatever was telling you? Pretty simple, and yet profound. That's the sorts of tools that I've tried to gather in this book. I think a lot of people don't think of themselves as creatives, right? They got that drilled out of them in kindergarten or fifth grade or whenever it happens. And it took me years to even think of myself as a creative person.

53:04And my friends were like, you're literally the definition of a creator. You create a show. And I was like, yeah, but it's not like artsy, you know, I just like talk. My friends are like shaking me. Like, are you kidding me? If you're not a creator, then no one I know is a creator, except for my aunt who's a painter. Right. Right. It's like, come on. Narrow definition of creativity has really done so many people a disservice. And your listeners know about your passion for photography? No, I don't really talk about that much. Yeah. Well, we'll keep it. We'll keep it off. I'm more of a video guy these days.

53:34Never mind. New topic. New topic. I mean, I don't take like nice portraits or anything. I mean, I just take pictures of my kids and I do videos and interviews, but that's creative, right? It just took me 20 years to realize that. Absolutely. And to me, this is why this matters. And I'm guessing why you brought it up is it's a mind shit. It's a mindset shift. Mind shit is a good term. You should trademark it. Mind shit. It's a mind shit, bro. The belief that you can drive, that you're in the driver's seat, the belief that you can change your circumstances. This reminds us that building, whether a living or a life that you want, is actually the ultimate creative mission.

54:14The lives of the people you respect and admire, they didn't just happen. They were designed. They were built. Great architecture does not happen from finding two fucking boards on the side of the road and hammering them together. There's a plan. And the same is true for your life. And if you think of yourself as a not creative person, you're automatically at a disadvantage for crafting the most important piece of art in the world, which is your life. By extension, if you have a creative practice, This is not about taking yourself seriously. This is not about moving to France and wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette.

54:50And that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about just acknowledging as a part of your identity that you have the ability to put new and useful things together to form other cool and useful things. That to me is really empowering. This is not about some label. This is about a foundational, fundamental, you know, this is the thing that separates us from so many other species on the planet, right? If you lean into that for a second and own that title, you don't need to put it on the door of your office. You don't need to wear a beret, as I mentioned. But if you actually embody this, if you own some of the principles that we're talking about here in this book and in other things I've written about and that we've had our previous conversations, you are definitely more likely to end up where you want to be than if you ignore those things.

55:36Yeah, there's kind of this societal divide between creative people and the rest of us, We're allowed to buy their music or whatever, but we're not really supposed to become one of them. You screwed up your life if you do that. To me, that's terrifying. That's like the definition of a belief gone bad. Because right now there's someone who's like, wait a minute, what Chase is saying actually kind of makes sense, but I don't really want to lean into it because I like science. I'm a scientist. I don't want my kids to do it. But yeah, it's pretty, he said some smart stuff. I know. Exactly. Exactly.

56:05I'm glad it worked for him. Yeah. And yet no one can argue that it is a wildly. I mean, just pause for a second, look around. Every single thing that you see, the software that we're using, the fact that we are not in the same room in video chatting, that's creativity on display. Corporations tout innovation, but what is innovation if not creativity applied? And how could you possibly have a creative or an innovative organization without the individuals in it being creative and innovative. You're a law student. You studied logic. If A, then B, if B, then C, you can't get there any other way. You can't have a creative organization without it being made up of creative individuals.

56:49Yeah, that's true. I suppose. And then try not to hire them because we want people with good grades and STEM subjects. Why aren't we being creative about this? You only hired people who have murdered their creativity as early as possible to focus on school, but okay. Exactly. Well, let's put it in a spreadsheet. Yeah. Somebody makes a spreadsheet. And that's not to say that I, again, go back to constraints. Like my creative career actually took off when I started putting some constraints of how I spent my time, who I spent my time with. Like it was very intentional. Turned out that's the combination of the two that really light us up.

57:21Well, so now that we're saddled with guilt about not pursuing our creativity, is the process reversible, right? Because it seems like the damage to our creativity happened in school. And a lot of us are decades out of school. This is another interesting thing about time, that all of this stuff, who you were yesterday or last week or the conversations that you have about yourself at night when no one else is in your head but you, all that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how you got to where you are. If you described yourself yesterday as someone who did X, Y, and Z, you can literally do the opposite tomorrow.

57:55And to me, that is incredibly powerful. And you might be saying, wait a minute, that's who I am. if I asked you to pretend to be something different, someone different tomorrow? And the different, to be clear, I'm saying that you've been someone who's not you. And what if you decided to be you unapologetically tomorrow? That is available to you. How much time has to pass in order for you to take that step? Zero seconds. It's a decision, and a decision always happens in an instant. Now, this is a glorified version of this because it's not to say that conditioning doesn't have deep breaths. and that we might need to retrain these muscles that have atrophied, whether this is our creativity, our ability to pay attention, our ability to trust our intuition or build good habits.

58:39And these are all things that I talk about a lot in the book. If you change the script on those things and you apply even a base modicum of effort, this is why I talk about these things as levers. They create leverage in your life. You can't unsee it once you've seen it. Once you acknowledge that you're a creative person and that you find yourself in a difficult situation, and you're like, you know what? I know how this ends. I actually figured this shit out. That's inertia. That's momentum. And that can happen with basically any area of your life if you're willing to let it. I think there's an interesting quote.

59:12I'm gonna quote Seth Godin that when I said - I thought you were gonna say yourself as you opened up your book. I was like, oh, this guy. I'm gonna quote myself. It's really brilliant. No, I'm not gonna quote myself. I'm gonna quote Seth Godin. That's good. That works. And that's just that line that I just use if you let it. Seth writes about this book, trust yourself. No one else can do that for you. Chase Jarvis is a maker of magic and a weaver of possibility. And this book can unlock the future for you if you let it. Now, ignore that part about me reading a nice quote about me. Yeah, I was like, and you included the testimonial for the book.

59:45Oh, that's, thanks for that. To me, it's if you let it. Like, that's the punchline. And to me, this is why I think this book is interesting. And I will tell you, I had a different book, wrote a different book for 18 months, eight weeks before my deadline. I threw it all in the trash and went into my cave and wrote this book. And that is the equivalent of author suicide. My agent, who's amazing. Yeah. He must have been thrilled that you threw 18 months of work away and decided to go back to the drawing board. That's 60 ,000 words. I am never working with you again, but okay. Show me what you got.

1:00:24trust is his intuition that I actually knew what I was talking about. And he helped me reframe the conversation for the publisher. And they're like, okay, dude. For me, it wasn't an option. It was like, let me do this, mom, dad. It was like, I'm doing this and I'm willing to live with the consequences, but this is the thing that has to happen. And it's not an accident that I came out with the book. And the irony is the title of the book, Never Play It Safe, came in that moment. It was the realization that all of the best shit in my life was on the other side of the comfort zone. And this was making me very uncomfortable.

1:00:59I was definitely terrified. I mean, I have a major advance, seven-figure advance. Yeah, I was going to say, you're not as terrified as the person who had the check. It cut you the check from the publisher. That person was the most scared out of any. Yeah, we think we should do this. Yeah, like, I'm going to need that check back. I say this as an example of actually walking the talk and that there have been times in my life where I didn't do this and it was only disappointment. And we've all done that, whether it was a person in our life, a relationship, a job, a career, like we have experience with this.

1:01:33And I'm suggesting that we actually rely on those, that we look at a pattern and we lean into that pattern. To me, this is the pattern. The pattern is that playing it safe is entirely an illusion. It's a mirage and shit's going to happen. And if shit's going to happen and the same amount of shit happens marching the direction that your dream of as happens when you're marching in a direction of something you do not care at all about, why not march in the direction of your dreams? It turns out that more cool stuff happens when you do that. The world starts happening for you rather than to you. And if that's interesting, that's why I wrote the book.

1:02:13Chase Jarvis, thank you very much, man. That's a great place to land the plane, right on the water there. In the Hudson, the icy Hudson. Yes, on the icy Hudson River. That was more of an airport glider landing. I feel like we - Fair enough, fair enough. We brought that in quite well. Let's not take credit where credit's due. We saved a couple hundred people's lives. That's right. But my good man, you're incredibly gifted in this line of work. and it's wildly creative. I love what you've done with the show. It's been so fun to watch the arc of your career. Again, having connected years ago when you were doing different stuff and having had a lot of conversations off camera, I'm absolutely over the moon to see what you've built and to be able to be a part of it and be a guest on the show.

1:02:52Thank you so much. And again, I'm grateful that you're giving me a platform to share this work. You got it, man. Links in the show notes. Chase Jarvis, thank you so much, man. Until next time, bud. you're about to hear a preview of the jordan harbinger show with a skilled art forger who made millions selling his fakes i was a storehouse of knowledge of how to create an illusion present it to a experienced expert and bring him to the inevitable conclusion that the painting is genuine it. We flooded the market with my paintings and eventually the FBI led to my door. They uncovered a mountain of evidence against me.

1:03:40But they never actually got you. Why did it go away? Why did you never get indicted? How are we having this conversation? I guess that's the greatest story of all. To hear details of how Ken Perenni evaded the scrutiny of everyone from the mafia to the FBI and lived to tell the tale, check out episode 282 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. That is one smart dude, also much more chill than he was just a few short years ago. You love to see it. I need to take a page out of that book. Remember, y 'all, every action you take today is a vote for your future self and the type of person that you want to become.

1:04:19The cost of good habits is right now, right? Working out, editing your podcast to get rid of filler words, paying for coaching for something. The cost of bad habits is in the future. Lung cancer from smoking, ignoring what it is you're really feeling called to do in your life, that kind of stuff. So maybe take a hint from your, and I know I'm going to hate myself saying this, from your intuition. Maybe I've taken too many hot yoga classes. This stuff is seeping into my brain. All things Chase Jarvis will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

1:04:49please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, the idea behind this is to give you something specific, something practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6 Minute Networking as well over at 6MinuteNetworking.com. I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me and or Gabriel on LinkedIn.

1:05:18This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who maybe needs to rebuild or reboot their creativity, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.