618: Chase Jarvis - Never Play It Safe, Work Your Creativity Muscle, Trust Your Intuition, Tell Great Jokes, & Become a Transformational Leader

28:34It makes us do stupid shit when we don't think that way. And when we do, we have the capacity to see way beyond the end of our nose. I also think, Chase, that it involves, like, I want to be around people who play long-term games with other long-term people. What I mean by that is every once in a while, you'll come across a transactional person versus a transformational person. And if you live your life as a series of transactions, meaning I'm going to give with the intention to get, we all know those people. Most of us don't want to be around them. Some of us have spent chapters doing that, but I see you as the ultimate long-term transformational type person where you want to have transformational relationships with others that are also playing long-term games.

29:26Life is not a series of transactions. You're going to give, give, give, give, give with no expectation of getting anything in response. But what happens, the crazy thing, what happens is when you live that way, especially for a long time, good stuff, great opportunities just seem to come your way. It's weird how it works, man. Being generous, being a giver, trying to help people, doing that consistently over time. Man, it's bizarre how the world seems to work itself out, how good things come your way. If you don't see life as a series of transactions, but try to be a transformational leader for yourself and for all the people in your life, what I mean by that is help them get better with no intention of receiving anything in return.

30:12And if you do, you seem to get everything in return. It's bizarre how all that works, man. Plus, plus. I mean, you get everything. And that's why it's a no-brainer to go on your show. honestly you've done such a good job of building a community around these ideas that you know when i think about the you know playing a long-term game and again the game of life certainly we hope is long and it's married and winding and yet if you have a certain set of beliefs and you live in line with those in accordance with your beliefs and for example prioritizing the depth and connection rather than transaction immediate and short term, they have a wonderful way of paying you back in spades, right?

31:06Whether this is financial, whether this is the measure of human connection and depth of relationships that you have, you just see it time and time again. And the research is clear that that mindset is, is the foundation for transformational life experience. And that short-term transactional, it does not. It doesn't build the depth of the relationship, doesn't build the depth of psychology that is required to really be the best versions of ourselves. So true. I want to talk about intuition. That's the third one of the seven basic levers for life. And you write about your wife, Kate. It's really sweet.

31:46When meeting on the beach, spending time apart, going to school 1 ,500 miles away from each other, going to Europe together. But you write that sparks were present, but no fire. But she had that special quality I couldn't quite place. It's like, oh, that gut intuition. Like, what is it? I don't know what it is. It's just there. It's just there. Can you go more into that intuition and that feeling you had in your gut for Kate initially and how then that blossomed as you guys got older? Well, I want to couch this story. Again, it's around this particular story I tell in the book. One of them in this intuition chapter is not dissimilar to a story that we have all, you know, some amount of stories that we all have regarding our own lives.

32:34We've all felt something, a gut feeling about a person, a place, a meeting, a friend. And we have likely all felt what it feels like to trust that feeling and simultaneously ignore it in a different time. And what normally people report is the trusting of one's gut. This intuition ends up being right. And in my case with my wife, Kate, it was exactly that. There was something special about her. And while we didn't pursue each other immediately, there was always a seed that was planted that we would come back to one another or find our way back to one another at some point. And that, in fact, did happen.

33:21And the details, I'll save them for the book. But for the person who's listening or watching right now, whether you believe in your spidey sense or you lean more into science, I want you to know that science is quickly coming to understand that intuition is everything that rational thought is and more, that the rational thought actually fits inside the bubble of intuition. And what it amounts to, I guess, a simplified version is that all of our cells have memory. And given that we are filtering billions of points of data every minute that we're alive. We're only really registering because our brain can only sort of manage so much of that.

34:10But the early belief was that data wasn't stored. And now what we understand is that data is stored in the body. And that's why when we have a gut feeling, it's called just that, a gut feeling. It's an instinct that you feel down here, less up here. Science is now refuting that rational thought is the end all be all. So certainly it may have helped us develop tools. And yet it's slow and bumbling. It's prone to mistakes and intuition by contrast is much more holistic. It is a deeper sense of knowing that's again, why you feel it in your gut. And I believe it's the most important thing that we know the least about.

34:53I just asked the question, the book, what if you started paying attention to that? And it turns out there's a really clear pattern. The person or the people who that pay attention to their intuition about what they want to be, who they want to be friends with, you know, why they would connect with this person instead of that. People who trust that they report higher levels of satisfaction with their life, higher levels of connection. And ultimately, I think that's part of what we're trying to build here. I have only had, it's not to say that your instinct doesn't pan out 100 % of the time. That can be fair, that that's a fair criticism, but nothing in the world does.

35:32Or it might not just pan out yet. And there's some longer term experience that you can't foresee or forecast that comes to bear or comes to be true at some point in the future. The point is specifically that you've been taught, not just similar to creativity, You've been taught to ignore or suppress it. And I'm just asking the question here in the book and providing a lot of very, very compelling examples that what if instead you paid attention to it? What if you leaned into that? The science says that you're more likely to succeed and be happier in the process. Do you feel we've been taught to ignore our intuition?

36:11I do. We're, we were programmed with the rational mind, math and science. Just look at STEM. Like that's all math and science. What people don't believe is that the science that you're learning in school or that you're kicking around conversations at the dinner table actually don't reflect the latest science. With the latest science is quantum physics, quantum mechanics, that the universe is non-local and that the thoughts that you think actually do affect the experience of reality. So, yeah, I do believe that we're taught to ignore our intuition or to distrust it at best, not to run at it in the same way that if we had verifiable data.

36:46The funny thing about science is that what people don't imagine, again, I was in a PhD program in philosophy and we studied the philosophy of science. So take this with a grain of salt if you're an armchair philosopher like I am. But most science ultimately is continually proving itself false. We used to believe that all objects fell to the earth at 9.8 meters per second squared. And now we know that's just a comfortable approximation. And that falls apart if you're 10 ,000 feet above the earth's surface. And if you go out into space, it just completely falls apart. So we're still teaching that in school.

37:20And that is a helpful, useful construct, but it doesn't actually represent reality. Now, by extension, what if we started paying attention to things like our intuition and the reality that we are, that has trained out of us and that it's a powerful tool that if we, if we just gave it some credence and leaned into it, just what would be possible? It's not like we're going to lose ourselves. The reality is that by leaning into our intuition, we'll certainly have a different and broader experience of our human experience, which I would say, bring it on. It just so happens that the science is there as well.

37:56What does that look like? Now, let's get practical. Let's take action for a second, Chase. What does that look like? Again, let's go back to the same avatar. The person who maybe doesn't think they're creative, they're running a big chunk of a company, responsible for a lot, stressful job, make good money, raising a family. what does it look like for that person to actually listen to their gut instinct, to listen to that intuition, to take action based upon that intuition, as opposed to saying, no, let me be, let me be reasonable here. Let's be rational. Like everything I invoke tiny experiments.

38:34And so if you're worried about trusting your intuition, when there's an intruder in the backyard, that's not the first time to start experimenting with this. The experiment should happen when the stakes are low. And the first thing that you ought to do is because intuition shows up in the body, you've got a thought loop that's happening on your mind and you have something else that you feel in your gut. Start paying attention to those. First, even notice them. What does he mean when he says feeling in the gut? It's not really a stretch because every single person has this intuition built into them.

39:12And we've just trained that the rational mind should override those gut feelings inside of us. And I would encourage the person who's curious or even dubious to start paying attention. What are those feelings in there? Is it about a person? Is it a direction you should go? Is it a restaurant you should go to instead of the other one? Start leaning into those things in areas of your life where the consequences aren't catastrophic. And what you'll find is like many things when you start small, like, oh my gosh, that was a win. I got a quick win. I listened to, should I go, you know, should I go out on a date with this person or that person?

39:49You had an instinct. You did because we have instincts for things like this. And I'm just suggesting that in small, lightweight ways, you start to pay attention to them. And over time, when you start to be able to trust this, It will really come in handy and specifically around creating a living and a life that we love for ourselves. The world will have you believe that the nine to five job with this particular company that's safe. that again, the concept of never playing it safe, it, it argues that that thing that you believe you're doing is safe is actually one of the riskiest things you can do.

40:35One, you're specifically doing it, not because you love it, but because someone else is convincing you that you should. And when you start, that's an example of how this stuff gets trained out of us. That in and of itself is a very unsafe behavior to not rely on this internal humanity, these structures and the parts that make us who we are. We start ignoring those. That's a very, very slippery slope. So remember, the book starts out, the first words of the book are safety is an illusion. It does not occur in nature, so why then do we seek it? and I just have to, to me, that underpins so much of what we're talking about here.

41:20For the person who doesn't trust their intuition, you think you're being safe by using all the data, but you have an opinion underneath all that stuff, and what if you started to listen to it? What would your life, what could your life be like? Let's talk about play. I love your story about Novak Djokovic. one of my favorite tennis players, an amazing, amazing, accomplished, such a gritty performer. It's inspiring to watch. What can we learn about play from Novak Djokovic? The story that chapter opens up about Djokovic opens up with him being so frustrated. He's had a really good career. And at this point, he's like, you know what?

42:00I just don't got it anymore. Tennis isn't fun and I'm quitting. And so he tells his coaches and he tells his family and you know everyone's of course trying to get him not because arguably he's at the peak of his career he feels like he's already on the over you know he's over the hill and he says i'm done and he doesn't make this necessarily there's a part of it that's public but not not how serious he is he's going to take a break and he goes on vacation with his family and his family of course still loves tennis they haven't played as a professional for their whole life and so they go hit the ball around.

42:38And he said, no, I'm done with tennis. And three or four days into the family vacation, he's like, okay, let me hit around with you guys. And they're like, no, you said you were done. And the story evolves to understand that it was in seeing the joy that his kids were having and his wife was having with the sport, playing it for the sake of playing it, for what it feels like to hit a great topspin forehand and what it feels like to slide on the clay or to laugh and to find joy in just being able to move your body in that way. When he saw that in his family, it rekindled those aspects of why he started in the first place.

43:23And as you might imagine, it's not a stretch to see that someone who's done this professionally every day of their life for 20 plus years, how you get to that spot. But what's also true is that these are largely stories that we tell ourselves, how we relate to tennis or how we relate to anything. And the most important words in the world are the ones we say to ourselves. And instead of quitting, Novak goes on a journey to find out, to remind himself of what he loved about the game in his past. And this is when he comes back and completely lights up and outperforms all, everything he thought was possible in his, so the first arc of his career and has another entire arc where he completely dominates.

44:12And it's because he, he made the game joyful for himself. And he actually looked like, what things do I love about this game? How do I love it? What did I love about practicing and communicated that with his coaches, his psychologist, and it transformed him as an athlete. And it led to the career that we're, that's why we say, oh my gosh, she's one of the best ever play the game, blah, blah, blah. So play, it turns out is the most important work that we do. And you can think about in our culture, right? This puritanical, like, oh, you know, I have to work first and then play. And it sounds joyful or sorry, it sounds rewarding, but the things that are joyful, it turns out that not only do we tend to be better at them, but we can do them for longer.

44:59And longer is more practice. More practice usually gets us better at skills and craft. And if the story that we tell ourselves about what we're doing, whether we call it work or play, it turns out it matters a lot. What if we could make even the most benign, banal things joyful? It turns out we can. And when we do, we usually get transformative results. I haven't seen you speak as a keynote, but I would love to. I have a sense that you bring a lot of what? I love it so much. Well, so here's the thing that I feel like I've felt, and I want to riff on this with you because of how prolific you are at it.

45:42There was a period where after you get booked a lot and you start become potentially robotic and you just go on to the next stage and you do your thing and you can forget how cool it is you can forget how like what an amazing opportunity i'll speak for myself i'm not speaking for you right give me your example and and so some of the joy can go away and i feel like one of the biggest changes that's probably happened for me over the past i don't know year and a half or so is to be like dude this is so cool let's have fun put on a show this is an opportunity to do something that's amazing that doesn't mean we're not going to be prepared doesn't mean we're not going to just like all right what the hell let's just kind of like let it go no we're going to be prepared we're going to make sure we know our stuff but once you get up there dude let's let it rip and have fun maybe make the joke that doesn't land every once in a while, just go for it.

46:40And I've noticed a big difference from that point where I felt like there was a little bit of a robot going through the motions because maybe there was a lot of them too. Like, dude, you know, your stuff, let it rip and have fun. And if you say the wrong thing or the part of the Q and a goes sideways, it's all good. You know, it's all good. And I feel like that has made things so much better and, and just more enjoyable and probably much better for the audience as well, as opposed to being this robot who wanted to make sure every single word and syllable was right. Sure. And man, you're nailing it.

47:19A couple of things that are intertwined as you're saying this, uh, there's this idea that, you know, a bird doesn't land on a branch, hoping that the branch won't break a bird lands on that branch, knowing that if it does break, it can fly away. So there's this trust in itself. And that's sort of what I'm advocating in this playful world. The belief is sometimes that we have to be serious in order to be taken seriously. But what gets taken seriously is results. And it just so happens that unequivocally, results are better when you're in a very positive state of mind. I mentioned my athletic background, And I had a very powerful experience with sports psychologists.

48:01I was training at the Olympic Development Center and we had access to sports psychologists. This was a long time ago when this was a little bit more novel than it is now. Now it's obvious and it's required. Every professional athlete has some sort of a mental training capacity or a coach, for example. But in short, I had the experience of them hypnotizing me and visualizing joyful, positive things and negative things. And they start with the negative. Visualize, someone does something to someone that someone harms someone that you love, and you get a chance to compete against them. What's it going to be like?

48:37And you have a series of visualizations. And then you visualize, in contrast to that, the most joyful, beautiful thing you can possibly imagine the people that you love the most succeeding and fulfilling and you're connecting with them. And they can measure sort of the power in one's body when they're having these two different experiences. And the positive situation way outperforms the negative anger, fear, motivation. So, you know, that was from a really long time ago, I experienced being put into that state and it was transformative for me. And now, of course, the science, again, is catching up to all this stuff.

49:20And it's clear that when we can be joyful, playful, light, still focused, but that's when we are at our best, when we have the expectation that we're going to succeed. This is what confidence feels and smells like. And the belief is that, oh, when I get results, then I will be happy. It's actually the other way around. It's being joyful, focused, light, and open, that's when results happen the most easily, unequivocally, right? It's not even close. So the question then becomes, what can we do to put ourselves in this playful, joyful state? And in the book, I detail some of that. And there's a lot of these just very basic exercises.

50:04I phrase all this stuff as tiny experiments. Nothing is a test that you can't walk back through the door if you don't like what you experienced. But it turns out that that play is powerful. There's another great little anecdote. There's a guy that I met by the name of Charlie Hone, and I met Charlie, Tim Ferriss, a good friend of mine. Tim was hosting an event. Charlie used to work for Tim. Charlie was putting this event on. And without going too far into the weeds, this is a very, this is a, I'm not talking out of school. This is a public knowledge. But Charlie got really burned out after playing this particular event for Tim.

50:39And after years of working for him, he quit because of his own mental health. And it was very unhealthy. He was taking fighter pilot drugs that would make you stay awake for multi-day missions and shit like that in order to make the event successful. But what I think is really interesting is Charlie was essentially suffering from crippling anxiety. and at the advice of, I think, a therapist to look into your childhood and say, what were some things that you loved as a kid? Loved, absolutely loved. He brought back really great, rich memories. And what would it be like if you reintroduced that into your life now?

51:18And so Charlie did this. Charlie loved, I think the story goes, he used to love hitting baseballs with his dad. and so he went and bought like a bucket full of five gallon bucket full of used baseballs and a bat and he and a buddy who also turned out loved to hit balls as a break each day they meet at the park down the street from their house one guy would pitch the other guy and rope like 50 baseballs all over the park then they'd walk and go pick that up and then they'd switch roles and and it was like a 45 minute exercise that they started doing a couple times a week and measurably, demonstrably, his anxiety was dramatically reduced.

51:58And when anxiety is dramatically reduced, what happens to performance dramatically increases on all aspects of life. So one of the things that I encourage about play is you might not have to go all the way back to being a kid, although that success leaves clues. And I find that, man, I started doing the same thing with so many areas of my life. And man, it was transformational. The ability to look at what you're doing is joyful and playful as opposed to a grind that we have to do. We realize that it's a choice that we are making. It's an attitude. And if we show up with the right attitude, the best outcomes are possible.

52:37When it comes to motivation, I'd be curious what you think about this. There are some that are deeply motivated by people who doubt them. Haters, some may call them. There are others who are deeply motivated and inspired by people who love them, by people who support them. And maybe we all go through different chapters of our lives where we're motivated by different things. What are you and what do you think is most useful long-term? Yeah, that's a lovely question, Ryan. I do not dispute that motivation can come from all different corners of our human experience. And it does, right? Even just the two, the sort of black and white example that you just gave there.

53:28I'm not really talking about motivation. I'm talking about a choice that we make to understand that all we have is now. Future is, you know, the past is gone. The future is an illusion that never arrives. All we have is this concept of now. And for every moment that we choose, and everything is a choice, not to be who we want to be in that moment, we suffer. And that suffering is chosen. That's not to say that bad things can't happen to great people, because we know that to be true. My mom just passed away a couple of weeks ago, and it was just absolutely heartbreaking. and deciding how you show up in that moment is everything.

54:22There's room for sadness. There's room for grief. And yet deciding how we want to show up, that's the whole tenet of the basic tenet of stoicism, right? It's not that things won't happen. It's the attitude that we bring to what does that matters. And so whether we're talking about good things happening or bad that thing's happening or what type of person am I? I am a person who wants to choose my response to the stimulus that comes in. And this is what is often true about athletes. That's not to say that they don't get motivated by someone who talked trash or that they're out there playing for their mother who just passed away a couple of weeks ago.

55:00And those can be motivating. But when you're trying to decide how you're going to show up day in and day out, do you have a positive, joyful, playful framework for that or a negative one. And the results are crystal clear that people who have a, well, first of all, think about who you want to be around right now. Anyone, do you want to be around someone who's mean and nasty or positive and supportive and brings out the best in you? It's really obvious. Now we all like the panacea and the Pollyanna, those are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. I'm just talking about people who genuinely show up authentically.

55:38we all want to be around those people more than their opposite. And so, you know, it just so happens that this is another, this is like where your intuition is right. That is a better way to show up in the world. The science says you're going to be happier. You're going to get, you know, more out of the experiences that you want to create for yourself in this life. And man, if you're looking for results there, it's not even close. so it's sort of like the stack the reasons for being a positive kind thoughtful person so dramatically outweigh the negative you know bullshitting counterproductive hater like that's just not a way to show up in the world so i put this again the book never play it safe which i really believe that it's a blueprint for how to access the best stuff in life this approaching with a thoughtful kind playful point of view is available to everybody and it's helpful the same is true with time realizing that life is long and not you know feeling simultaneously urgent on the short term but that you have time and you get to explore it's when you don't feel like you have the time to run any experiments that you have to choose the shittiest thing, which is right in front of you.

56:56But a life is created, the life of the people that you respect and admire and appreciate, whether that's your neighbor or someone you really admire on the internet, that life was created. It was designed with intention. And that is available to you if you choose it. That's, again, the foundation that I'm coming from in Never Play It Safe, is that these things are naturally, these tools, time, our attention, the ability to sort of play, that those are all naturally residing within us. And because of various social, cultural mechanisms, they've been turned off. I'm urging us to turn them on. They're all available for us.

57:34And it turns out that when you do, magic happens.

57:42It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Chase Jarvis. A few takeaways from my notes. We are all wildly creative. However, it's trained out of us as we grow older. Creativity is foundational to all human beings. It's on us to tap into our creativity and get it out of us to help solve problems, to create optionality, and to be more innovative. Regardless of your job, becoming more creative will make you better at it. And then play infinite games with transformational people, not transactional people.

58:34Life can be a series of transactions or you can play the long game with transformational people. It seems like when we give to others, genuinely try to help them and have a service orientation, good things happen for all. There are transactional people, as I said, and transformational leaders. Let's strive to be transformative and play the long game with high character people. And then, I love this quote, a bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking because its trust is not on the branch, but on its own wings. Believe in yourself and your ability to bounce back if the thing doesn't go your way.

59:20set up a series of experiments. Not all of them will work, but you'll be better for having tried and then tried again and then tried again. We learn from both our success and our failures. It's all about how we choose to respond. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the word and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Chase Jarvis. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader and because you continue to do that And you also go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and you subscribe to the show. So important.

59:55And you rate it hopefully five stars and you write a thoughtful review. It only takes you a few seconds. By doing all of that, you give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.