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

Go to www. LearningLeader.com https://www. LearningLeader.com for full show notes of The Learning Leader Show Sign up for "Mindful Monday" (it's free) - https://ryanhawk.kit.com/profile My guest for episode #618 is Chase Jarvis. Chase is a photographer, director, artist, and entrepreneur. He was the CEO of an online education platform called Creative Live from 2014 to 2022. He's earned countless awards for his photography and creative work including a Pulitzer Prize for a New York Times story he contributed to called "Snow Fall." He's also the author of multiple books including Creative Calling and Never Play It Safe. Notes: Opening Joke: "What has 52 teeth and holds back a monster?" We are all wildly creative. It is 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 innovative. Regardless of your job, becoming more creative will make you better at it. Play infinite games with transformational people. It seems like when we give to others, genuinely try to help them, and have a service orientation, good things happen to all. There are transactional people and transformational leaders. Let's strive to be transformative and play the long game with high-character people. Transactional leaders are infuriating. Transformational leaders are inspiring. "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. Set up a series of experiments. Not all of them will work. You'll be better for having tried, and tried again, and then again. We learn from both our successes and our failures. Initially, Chase planned to attend medical school after graduating from undergrad. A few weeks before his graduation, his grandfather died and left all his photography equipment to his grandson. "Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." - Helen Keller "Safety is an illusion. It does not exist in nature, so why then do we seek it? "Playing it safe is about fear. And fear is only optimized for survival--not creativity, happiness, joy, connection, harmony, fulfillment, or any of the gifts you have to give or receive in this life." Intuition is everything. What if we started paying attention to that? "I don't know why they call us founders. I didn't find anything. I built that shit. We are builders." There are 7 basic levers for life: Attention Time – NYU Professor James Carse. Finite and infinite games. Treat life like an infinite game. What's the difference between systems and schedules? (why are systems better?) Intuition – The benefits of compounding trust. Chase's wife Kate. First met on a beach just after high school. Sparks were present, but no fire. "She had a special quality I couldn't quite place." Went to college 1,500 miles apart. All along it was your intuition that kept you on notice. How do you know when it's your intuition speaking? Why is playing it safe the riskiest thing we can do Constraints - What can we learn about constraints from Stefan Sagmeister? Play - What can we learn about play from Novak Djokovic? Failure - Melissa Arnot Reid – Replaces the word "fail" with the word "live" – Instead of saying "I'm afraid to fail. She says I'm afraid to live." Practice - Purposeful practice. Anders Ericsson Keynote speaking - Don't be a robot. Have fun. Let it rip. Results are better in a better state of mind. Do tiny experiments when the stakes are low.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you are going to do anything special with your life, what's required is that you listen to you above and beyond all those other voices. And many of those voices are there ostensibly to help you, to guide you. But there are a lot who are trying to get you to be just like everyone else, because that's the reality of modern Western capitalism. And the contrast here is if you want to be the best version of yourself, if you want to live an extraordinary life and change yourself and have impact on others, you actually have to cut against that grain.

• 0:37Ryan Hawk?

  This episode is brought to you by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to empowering people through the dignity of work. If you need to hire full-time employees, contract employees, or a partner that you can trust for outsourced professional services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit insightglobal.com/learningleader. That's insightglobal.com/learningleader to learn more.

• 1:22Ryan Hawk?

  Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Text HAWK to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how our book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader. Text HAWK to 66866. Now on to tonight's featured leader. I love Chase Jarvis. He's a photographer, director, artist, and entrepreneur.

• 2:03Ryan Hawk?

  He was the CEO of an online education platform called CreativeLive from 2014 to 2020.

• 2:10Ryan Hawk?

  22. He's earned countless awards for his photography and creative work, including a Pulitzer Prize for a New York Times story he contributed to called, "Snowfall." He's also the author of multiple books, including Creative Calling, and most recently, Never Play It Safe. During our conversation, we discuss why people play it safe and how we can overcome that fear. Then, how we could better understand our intuition, listen to it, and most importantly, take action from it. Then Chase discusses the importance of playing infinite games with transformational, not transactional, people. And then we closed

• 2:55Ryan Hawk?

  talking about the approaches we both take to giving world-class keynote speeches. Ladies and gentlemen, so good. Please enjoy my conversation with Chase Jarvis.

• 3:10Ryan Hawk?

  So I want to open with a joke, okay? And I'm gonna have you actually finish the joke because it's your joke. You may know what this is. You were in second grade.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:26Ryan Hawk?

  When you first told this joke, second grade, okay? I'm gonna say it and then you could, you could finish it. Oh, you got the punchline, all right?

• 3:32Speaker 00

  All right, all right.

• 3:33Ryan Hawk?

  What, and I want, maybe pause for dramatic effect too. What has 52 teeth and holds, I can't even say it, dude. What has 52 teeth and holds back a monster?

• 3:51Speaker 00

  The answer is my zipper. And this, it is so true. I told this joke, this was like, this was the, uh, the bomb drop, the punchline for my second grade stand-up comedy routine. And I confess this in my new book, which is called Never Play It Safe. Maybe we'll talk about that a little bit today. But I confess that I didn't actually get the joke. And what I did get was that every time I said it, I would watch all the adults in the room like, lose it. And to me, that was enough.

• 4:27Ryan Hawk?

  Well, it was a laugh out loud. I was on the elliptical the other day. I'm rereading your book and the person next to me is looking at me funny because I am laughing out loud, reading this joke for like the ninth time because I'm just like, this dude is awesome. He said in second grade, he didn't know what it meant, but it, but it was great.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  I knew it brought the house down. The context there is, uh, in rolling into second grade, I was pretty, pretty stoked. I had just did my first film in the summer between first and second grade, washed cars to raise enough money, bought the film, rented a camera, hired somebody by hired, I mean, I literally paid them $1 and it was my, my co-stars, older brother to film the thing. And we had a profitable film that summer and I rolled into second grade film pretty good. I had a magic routine, stand-up comedy act and I was selling a comic strip that I was writing on the weekends and my second grade teacher, Ms. Kelly shut it down. She said, what's wrong with you? You do this, there's no room for this creativity stuff

• 5:30Speaker 00

  and you can't have a business here in second grade. There's, it's against the rules. And, but what you should, you are really good at sports. So you should be a jock and you should quit all this other stuff. And to her credit, I did, I went on to have a longstanding career as an athlete, went to college on a soccer scholarship, but it, it is a story that reminds us how the opinions of others, when we're little fragile minds that can, that can shape our lives a lot, sometimes for, for good and sometimes not for good.

• 6:00Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah, I was just gonna ask, what impact, maybe two, two-part question. What impact did that have on you for how you then chose to live your life growing up? And how does it impact you now that you're in a powerful position and you could have that type of influence on others?

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Well, I think as, just generally as humans, because we're social animals, we wanna be accepted socially. And that has benefits and drawbacks. And for me, it'll second grade me when you hear the story that, oh, my gosh, my second grade teacher squashed this sort of beautiful, cool, creative side of of me, or of any kid, like, how heartbreaking is that? And the reality is, as a second grader, because you just wanna fit in, you're like, okay, I'll just whatever Ms. Kelly, you know, thought was best for me, was must must be best for me. So I bailed on a lot of stuff. And I basically focused on sports and I eschewed all of that sort of creative stuff, the entrepreneurial stuff.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  And the irony is, I remember on my high school graduation day, I received an award. You know, they give out ten awards or whatever to the graduating class. And the award that I got was was the typical senior award, which

• 7:16Speaker 00

  is pretty horrific for for me. And at the time, I remember like, hmm, this is not good, because I'm not sure that typical is what I want to be. And what that meant was that I was the captain of the football team. I dated the cheerleader. I, you know, got good grades, went to college on a soccer scholarship. And it just was sort of like the giant cliche. And, you know, I think the the takeaway from that, and to extend the question as you did, is how does that affect me today? I realized that the world will have you believe all sorts of things, and there's all sorts of inbound messages. And what's confusing for all of us is that many of those messages come from people that we respect and love and admire. And yet,

• 8:02Speaker 00

  if you are going to do anything special with your life,

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Your, what's required is that you listen to you above and beyond all those other voices. And many of those voices, again, are there ostensibly to help you, to guide you. But there are a lot who are trying to get you to be just like everyone else, because that's what society, that's sort of the lowest common denominator, and that's where we steer people. And there's no evil overlord, that's not, you know, culture's fault, or there's no one, you know, force trying to shape you, but that's the reality of modern Western capitalism. And yet, again, the contrast here is if you want to be the best version of yourself, if you want to live an extraordinary life and change yourself and have impact on others, you actually have to cut against that grain.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  And so how that played out for me was at some point I realized that I had been ignoring that creative entrepreneurial side, and I then bailed on a career in professional soccer. I dropped out of medical school and became a photographer, which, as you can imagine, was horrifying for my parents, and yet it was the beginning of the next chapter of my life, and I never looked back. And so, you know, by extension, that is a lot of the work that I do in the world today, as I am an artist and entrepreneur, and I like to, in my spare time, when I'm not personally building, I like to help people understand through writing books, and I have a podcast, a long-running podcast,

• 9:37Speaker 00

  not dissimilar to yours, that is about helping people understand what it takes to live their dreams in career and hobby and in life. And my newest book is called Never Play It Safe, which is about exactly that.

• 9:52Ryan Hawk?

  I read a story about your grandfather when you were, I guess, going to med school, and he died and left his photography equipment to you. What impact did that have on you?

• 10:03Speaker 00

  Well, it was transformative, and it was at that time where I was starting to ask these questions, like, wait a minute, you know, this, I've always been drawn to things that were very different than, you know, if you were, well, first of all, I'm the only person in my family to graduate from college, and... There I did feel some pressure and you know, when my grandfather died and gave me his cameras, I knew that I had been curious about photography my whole life. I had, as an athlete, I mentioned, I was always on the other side of the camera and I had this weird instinctive connection with, with photography that my, that this, they were just capturing these beautiful stories and moments

• 10:47Speaker 00

  in a single image. And when my grandfather died and I was given his camera, I had some, there was some calling in me that said, you should, you should figure this out. So I dropped everything and then with a little bit of money that I had saved up and with his camera, I just walked the earth for six months with my then girlfriend, now wife Kate, taught myself how to become a photographer and that transformed my life, not necessarily because I, you know, steered clear of everything, you know, of business. I ended up making, uh, living in a life doing this. So you have to, you know, as a, you have to be an entrepreneur, you have to be, as an artist, it helps to be decent in the business, but I just expanded

• 11:29Speaker 00

  my world of, of possibility and what it is that I wanted to do with my life rather than what the world was telling me, which I needed to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a professional athlete, or something that, you know, everybody loves. And the reality is that if we're busy pursuing the things that everybody else wants for ourselves, for, for us, how are we gonna, how are we gonna find ourselves?

• 11:50Ryan Hawk?

  How much of your skill as a photographer, as a creative person, as an entrepreneur, do you think you were born with versus how much have you worked to develop the skills and earn the ability to make a living doing it?

• 12:07Speaker 00

  My belief, and it's a very strong belief, it's backed up by science, my own experience and, and the experience of lots of other, uh, stories and anecdotes, is that we are all wildly creative. And right now, there's someone in the audience who's listening or watching and saying, I don't know, you know, I, I never really, that's fine, but just know that that's- Your natural state is creativity. That's one of the things that separates human beings from all the other species on the planet. Um, and it's something that is trained out of you rather than bred into you. And uh, it's easy to see, all you have to do is go to a first grade classroom and come up to the front room and say, who wants to come up to the front room and draw me a picture? And every hand goes up in first grade and you ask the same question in eighth grade

• 12:50Speaker 00

  or you know, a dozen years later, uh, and you know, that number gets cut in half every couple of years and that's, that's evidence that, that this is our natural state and it's trained out of us through shame and cultural pressure and as I mentioned, Western capitalism and this toxic myths about starving artists. But the reality is that creativity is absolutely foundational to every human being and whether we choose to, you know, lean into that and develop it, that's up to us. And of course, you know, this is go back to that, what I was sharing about how the world will program us if we don't, you know, do the things that we want to do.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  That it is so easy to train something like that out of a child by telling them that it won't serve them. And you know, we've got all this stuff about STEM, which is about sciences and whatnot. And 10 years ago, even five years ago, if you surveyed what the world thought you should be, everyone said, oh, you should be an engineer, you should be a computer programmer. And now if you look at everyone who, you know, like who, the people who are the wealthiest people in the world that have the most influence are specifically in driving the technology leadership of our country or the world, for example, they're all saying, oh, oh, my kids, oh, no, no, computer programming, that, that's for the computers. The computers teach the computers how to write code. And the things that are

• 14:12Speaker 00

  going to help human beings stand out is art and the ability to do things that machines can't do as well. And so here we are, full circle. My belief is that we are all creative and that whether you are in business or you identify as a creative, leaning into your creativity is perhaps one of the greatest capacities, the greatest things that you can do to create the living and the life that you want, right? These things aren't found, although they call us founders when you create a company, but I don't know about you, I didn't find anything. I built that shit from the ground up. So you know, this idea of expanding the definition of what is creativity has always been interesting to me.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  And now, you know, having seen technology play out and having written a few books on the subject and, and built a couple of companies, one called Creative Live, which educates tens of millions of people around the world around their, you know, creative capacity. I know that creativity is embedded in everything that we do. It's just, we have to lean into it. And for those that do, they get disproportionately rewarded.

• 15:19Ryan Hawk?

  So I don't think your advice is like, everybody quit their job and go be a photographer touring the world. That's not your advice. So let's say, Chase, for the person who likes their job, loves their team, they're like an SVP at a Fortune 500 company, right? And they don't want to quit. How does that person tap into the creativity that's within them that maybe has been beat out of them over the many years since they were little to now tap into some of that, to become better from a leadership perspective, to run their teams better, to exceed the goals that their company has set for them, to love on their people, to do all these things to make their place a great place to do great work.

• 16:00Ryan Hawk?

  What can that person learn from your work, from Never Play It Safe, from all the Chase Jarvis stuff? I'm curious, what can they learn from you to help them be better at that?

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, my last book was called Creative Calling, and it was specifically that, that every person has a creative calling within them. And the, you know, cornerstone of that book was expanding the definition of creativity. Because when we were children, we were taught that creativity equals glitter and popsicle, popsicle sticks and glue guns and stuff like that. Creativity is combining, you know, any two things to make something new and useful. And so if you think about that, whether you're making a meal for your family or creating a a strategy for your business, or finding out what the best way is to motivate, lead and inspire your team. Creativity is at the core of all of those things, right? That is the essential, again, the essential difference from our species and all the other species on the planet

• 16:53Speaker 00

  is that we have the capacity to create, to create new things. And so, first of all, I would encourage you to expand your definition of creativity and to, and to call yourself creative. Despite the fact that whether through conditioning or self-belief, or probably a combination of both, you don't think of yourself as creative because you're not painting portraits for a living. That's not what I mean at all. I mean that we are, all are creative and that it is that capacity. And again, this is a habit as much it is a skill. It's a belief that you can create your way into any solution,

• 17:34Speaker 00

  you know, given time and, and resources and even constraints. So for anyone who's doubting, I would say, reminder, you are creative. It's fundamental to what it means to be human. And by leaning into that, all you're doing is you're giving yourself increased optionality. You're saying, I can create a solution if the solution doesn't exist. When you start to look at it like that, you start to realize, okay, I am creative. And then you start to dissect or deconstruct popular culture. And you start to understand that, wait a minute, the most successful, happy and fulfilled people in the world, they largely identify as creative or have, or acknowledge their creative capacities. You know, the, the largest company in the world, your most valuable, like comes like Apple.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Just ask the question, do they identify as a creative company? Absolutely, that's core to who they are. So I think there's, i- if you think about creativity in a broader sense, the answers are right there, hiding in plain sight. We all are creative and it's up to us to take an ownership role there and create the living and the life that we want for ourselves and the people around us, right? Your team, you talked a lot about that. That's the theme of your show.

• 18:46Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah. And. I was super inspired by Never Play It Safe. I'd read it before we'd even agreed to to record and then I reached out to you afterwards, which is not necessarily the normal sequence of events here with my show, but that's how good it was and how much of a fan I am of your work. And I want to read one of the initial lines from it and then have you go a little bit deeper because I think a lot of naysayers might say like, "Look, good for you guys. You get to be creative and have podcasts and do art and take pictures and make money and support your family. I have to go get a job. I gotta put food on the table, so I gotta get a job." Good for you. And so I gotta play it safe,

• 19:27Ryan Hawk?

  they might say. And here's what you, here's what you say. Playing it safe is out of fear and fear is only optimized for survival, not creativity, not happiness, not joy, not connection, not harmony, not fulfillment. It's only about optimizing for survival and that's what fear is all about. And, and to me like that, that really spoke to me, man, when it, when it comes to those who like, I get some of that from time to time. I haven't written a book about this, but you have. So you probably get a lot of it. I'm curious if you want to riff more on playing it safe and being out of fear and how it's optimizing for the wrong thing.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Look, fear is a fantastic motivator. It plays a role biologically for us and that role is to stay alive and procreate. But the difference between staying alive and having a fulfilling, happy, joyful life, there is a yawning gulf in between. There's a thousand miles in between those two things. And I believe that it's our job to find a way to get what we want out of this life. That is to survive and thrive and have a connected experience, whether that's with family, friends, whatever, build the, the living in life of your dreams and to optimize in the meantime for joy, connection, fulfillment,

• 20:52Speaker 00

  and so many of those things that frankly, I believe that everyone is seeking. It's natural. But we've got these biological brains. And so our job is then to, you know, and my thinking with the book Never Play It Safe was, I said, wait a minute.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  It's true that all of the best things in my life are on the other side of my comfort zone or always have been. And then I thought to myself, well, I think of all the books I've read of, you know, past leaders and of the thousand guests that I've had on my podcast, many of the world's top performers in every discipline, you know, sports, you know, the best in the world and business, Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, like all those folks that I've had on my podcast or that I have come to know well through business or, or, you know, my profession. Well, it just so happens that they think the same, right? That all the best stuff in their life is on the other side of big scary decisions.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  And that's not to say that the quiet moments aren't the ones we appreciate with your kids, for example, but the decision, for example, to have kids, big scary hairy decision. If it's true that all the best stuff in the human experience is on the other side of our comfort zone, what ought we do? We ought to have a blueprint for having the ability to get there over and over and over again, to get there 1% better, 1% faster, 1% smarter and more kind than we did the time before. That's what we're really seeking. And when I put that to the test or my own experience and the experience of, as I mentioned, a thousand other people that I've had on the podcast, it just so happens that there

• 22:32Speaker 00

  is a programmable, repeatable way to do that. And to me, that's, that's what I mean about not playing it safe. It's not about issuing shelter, food and shelter for your family and friends. That's not what we're talking about or taking some wild career leap. This whole idea that bet it all on black and hope for the best, that's not real. No real entrepreneurs do that. They might make a gamble, but the reality is that all the best stuff is on their side of our comfort zone. We can get there reliably. And in my book, Never Play It Safe, I've analyzed people who do that the most, who have the most sense of fulfillment, ironically, are also very successful in the process. And that's what I've, I've tried to capture

• 23:16Speaker 00

  in Never Play It Safe.

• 23:18Ryan Hawk?

  You write about

• 23:19Speaker 00

  All of this, right? That's, you know, it's available to all of us.

• 23:23Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah, 100%. And I like how practical you make it and entertaining with the story. So there are seven basic levers for life. Attention, time, intuition, constraints, play, failure, and practice. I'd like to dig into some of those as we go. So let's go to time and you write about NYU professor James Karst, I believe is his name, finite and infinite games, and why we should treat life like an infinite game. Can you go a little bit deeper on the difference between finite and infinite games and why we should treat life like an infinite game?

• 23:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's from game theory and game theory. It's a, it sounds stuffy, but it's pretty simple. In, in Monopoly, there are winners and losers, right? And at some point, the game ends and you're measured and then you're, the goal is to then play again. Infinite games, on the other hand, the goal is to keep playing. And that is way more what life is like, because let's just say you do get to the end of the game of life. Well, as far as we know, you don't have an option to go back and restart that game and take, take forward everything you learned from the previous game. So the goal of life is to keep playing and problems arise when you treat infinite games, like the game

• 24:39Speaker 00

  of life, as a finite game, like there are winners and losers. It creates short-term thinking and, you know, how this relates to time is that I'm aware from my own experience, for example, and if you deconstruct the lives of lots of other people and their people are listening here, how many of us do stupid shit because we realize, or we believe rather, that when we're 21 years old, we have to have it all figured out. It makes us go into huge, you know, into, I was $100,000 in student debt before I really, it really hit me what that meant. And the same is true. I observe

• 25:19Speaker 00

  so many people rushing around doing half-assed jobs on 15 things rather than doing a complete, heartfelt, thoughtful job on one thing, believing that, that that's the way to be in the world, or that if they don't have, again, don't have it all figured out, that they somehow will, will be left behind. And yet, that actually just creates a bunch of bad behavior and negative consequences.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  I'm not, this is not to say for everyone, I'm not saying that life is is forever, right? I am saying life is long. And what if instead of rushing around as a 21 year old figuring, thinking that you have to have it all figured out? What if you could explore? Or what if you realize that if you took a job, that you will have many jobs, in fact, you'll probably have many careers in your life? And that this is not permanent and what you're doing is learning and you're running a series of tiny experiments. How much healthier is that than the image that we project of you're going to get a job, you're going to do that job for 40 years. The hope is to get a retirement and a gold watch. We know that's not how the world works anymore. And yet,

• 26:29Speaker 00

  that's what college is still preparing us for. And that's the narrative, the dominant cultural narrative. So how, you know, game theory relates to, again, the chapter specifically on time is I think we get time super botched. We believe that this is some infinite hamster wheel that's running in the background. It's time is ticking by and the time is going to run out. Understand that you can both, you know, have short-term urgency. I want to get this done today. I want to reach my goal tomorrow. And you can simultaneously realize that

• 27:07Speaker 00

  life is long. And what if you get to run a bunch of tiny experiments? We never know if we're going to get hit by a bus to tomorrow, by, you know, tomorrow. But if we could change our relationship with time, if we could believe that there is enough time for us to, I'm on my fourth, not just career, fourth career arc. I hadn't, you know, we already talked about my, my career as an athlete. And then as a photographer, I had a 10 year, 20 year run as one of the top commercial photographers in the world, making tens of millions of dollars. And then I started an online learning platform. And that served tens of millions of people as an entrepreneur. We made $60 million, made hundreds of millions in rep, like that was another arc.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  And now I've had a third or a fourth arc now as a, as an author, writing books, never play it safe, trying to help other people do this. And if you told me that when I was 24 years old, that, hey, man. Just take a beat here. Look inside. The answers aren't external. The answers are inside. What is it that you really want? First of all, I would have never gotten probably, you know, $150,000 in a student debt. Second of all, I think I had done a better job ignoring Ms. Kelly in second grade and realizing that those films that I wanted to make, yeah, go ahead and make them now. There's time. And when you realize that waiting tables isn't necessarily how you want to live your life,

• 28:29Speaker 00

  maybe it is, but that you have time and space to figure out what you really want to do. It 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.

• 28:45Ryan Hawk?

  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. Life is not a series of transactions. You're going to give, give,

• 29:30Ryan Hawk?

  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, then 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. And if you

• 30:12Ryan Hawk?

  do, you seem to get everything in return. It's bizarre how all of that works, man.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Plus plus. I mean, you get everything. And you know, 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

• 30:52Speaker 00

  the, you know, depth and connection rather than transaction immediate and short term. Those, those, they have a wonderful way of paying you back in spades, right? Whether 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, that mindset is, you know, 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, that is required to really be the best versions of ourselves.

• 31:37Ryan Hawk?

  So true. I want to talk about intuition.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:40Ryan Hawk?

  That's the third one of the seven basic levers for life. And you write about your wife, Kate. It's really sweet. When meeting on the beach, spending time apart, going to school 1500 miles away from each other, going to Europe together. But you, 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. I just, 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?

• 32:17Speaker 00

  Well, I want to couch this story. Again, it's it's around this particular story I tell in the in the book. One of them in this intuition chapter is is not dissimilar to a story that we have all, you know, some amount of stories that we all have regarding our own lives. We'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, you know, ignore it in a different time. And what normally people report is the trusting of one's gut, this intuition, ends up, you know, you always, it sort of ends up being right.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  And in my case with my wife Kate, it was exactly that. There was something special about her. And while I didn't, you know, we didn't pursue each other immediately. There was always a seed that was planting that 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, and 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 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.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  That it, you know, that that the rational thought actually fits inside the bubble of intuition. And, you know, what it amounts to a, I guess, a simplified version is that all of our cells have memory and whether, 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. But The belief is that, the early belief was that data wasn't stored. And now what we understand is that data is stored and 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.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Science is now refuting that, 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. I just asked the question in 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.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  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 a hundred percent of the time. And that can be fair, that that's a fair criticism, but nothing in the world does. Or you might, 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 dissimilar to creativity, you've been taught to ignore or suppress it.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 36:07Ryan Hawk?

  Do you feel we've been taught to ignore our intuition?

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Oh, I 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 intuition or to distrust it at best. Not to run at it in the same way that if we had verifiable data. The funny thing about science is that what what people don't imagine, again, I was in a PhD program in philosophy.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  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 and 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 is trained out of us and that it's a powerful tool

• 37:34Speaker 00

  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 gonna lose ourselves. The the reality is that by leaning into our intuition, we'll we'll certainly have a 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.

• 37:56Ryan Hawk?

  What does that look like? Now, let's get practical. Let's take action for a second, Chase. What does that look like to the? Again, let's go back to the same avatar. Okay. The person who maybe doesn't think they're creative, they're running a 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.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Like everything, I invoke tiny experiments. And 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 you are, when the stakes are low. And the first thing that you ought to do is, is because intuition shows up in the body, you've got a thought loop that's happening in your mind and you have something else that you feel in your gut. Start paying attention to those first even notice them. What, 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.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  And we've just trained that the rational mind should override those gut feelings inside of us. And, and I would encourage the person who's curious or, 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? Like 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? You, you had an instinct. You did, because we have instincts for things like this.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  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 come in, you know, 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 you're, you know, that the nine to five job with this particular company that's safe. Then again, the, 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.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  One, 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.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  To not rely on this internal humanity, this, these structures and the, 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. For the person who doesn't trust their intuition, you think you're being safe by using all the data. But you have a, 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?

• 41:34Ryan Hawk?

  Hmm. 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?

• 41:50Speaker 00

  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? I just don't got it anymore. Tennis isn't fun and I'm gonna, I'm quitting. And so he tells his coaches and he tells his family. And you know, everyone's of course trying to get it 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, I'm done. And he doesn't make this necessarily, like 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.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  And so they go hit the ball around and he said, no, I'm done with tennis. And three or four days into the family vacation, he's like, okay, let me hit a round with you guys. And they're like, no, you said you were done. And you know, 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, you know, topspin forehand and what it feels like to slide on the clay or to laugh and to to find joy in just being able to move your body in that way. When

• 43:15Speaker 00

  he saw that in his family, it rekindled those aspects of why he started in the first place. And as you might imagine, it's not a 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 and instead of quitting, Novak goes on a journey to find out, to remind himself of what he loved about the game in in its past, in his past. And this is when he comes

• 44:00Speaker 00

  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. And 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 played 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,

• 44:44Speaker 00

  we don't 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 are we, do we tend to be better at them, but we can do them for longer and longer is more practice, more practice is usually gets us better at skills and craft. And, 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.

• 45:25Ryan Hawk?

  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?

• 45:33Speaker 00

  I love it so much.

• 45:35Ryan Hawk?

  Well, so here's the thing that, that I feel like I've felt, and I want to riff on this with you because of how prolific you are at it. There 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, I'll speak for myself. I'm not speaking for you, right?

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love it. Give me your example.

• 45:59Ryan Hawk?

  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. It's 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, oh, 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.

• 46:40Ryan Hawk?

  And 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.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Sure. And man, you're nailing it. A couple of things that are intertwined as you're saying this. 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 we have to be serious in order to be taking 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 had a I mentioned my athletic background and I had a very, you know, powerful experience with sports psychologist. I was training in the at the Olympic

• 48:03Speaker 00

  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 it's required. Every professional athlete has some sort of a mental training capacity or a coach, for example, but the in short, I had the experience of them hypnotizing me and visualizing joyful, you know, positive things and negative things. And they start with the negative, you know, visualize, you know, someone does something to someone that someone harms someone that you love, and you get a chance to compete against. And what's it going to be like? And you you have a series of visualizations. And then you visualize in contrast to that, the most joyful, beautiful thing you can possibly imagine,

• 48:45Speaker 00

  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

• 49:02Speaker 00

  Situation way outperforms the, 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. And 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, and open. That's when results

• 49:47Speaker 00

  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, you know, in the book, I detail some of that. And there's a lot of these just very basic exercises. I phrase all this stuff as tiny experiments. Nothing is a, 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 Hohn. 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

• 50:29Speaker 00

  very, this is a, I'm not talking out of, out of school. This is a public, public knowledge. But Charlie got really burned out after playing this, this particular event for Tim. And after years of working for him, he quit because of his own mental health. And the kind of, 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 be, to make the event successful. But what I think is really interesting is Charlie was essentially suffering from crippling anxiety.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  And at the advice of, I think, a therapist to look into your childhood and say, what were things that, what were some things that you loved as a kid, loved, absolutely loved, they brought you back really great, rich memories? And what would it be like if you introduced that, reintroduced that to your life now? And 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, a 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'd 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

• 51:44Speaker 00

  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 of times a week. And measurably, demonstrably, his anxiety was dramatically reduced. And 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, you know, 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, the ability to look at what you're doing as joyful and playful as opposed to a grind that we have to do.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 52:38Ryan Hawk?

  When 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.

• 53:06Ryan Hawk?

  What are you and what do you think is most useful long-term?

• 53:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a lovely question, Ryan.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  I do not dispute that motivation can come from all different corners of our human experience. And it does, right? Even just the, the, to sort of the black and white example that you just gave there. I'm not really talking about motivation. I'm talking about the 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,

• 53:56Speaker 00

  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. There'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

• 54:38Speaker 00

  that matters. And so whether we're talking about, you know, good things happening or bad things 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, you know, often true about athletes. That's not to say that they don't get motivated by someone who talked trash or you know, that they're out there playing for their mother who just passed away a couple of weeks ago. And 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.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  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. We 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.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  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.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  It's when you don't feel like you have the time to run the experiments that you have to choose the shittiest thing which is right in front of you. But a life is created, the life of the people that you respect and admire and appreciate, whether that's your neighbor or some, 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, you know, 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.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  I'm urging us to turn them on. They're all available before us and it turns out that when you do, magic happens.

• 57:42Ryan Hawk?

  It 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, [email protected]. 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

• 58:23Ryan Hawk?

  job, becoming more creative will make you better at it. And then play infinite games with transformational people, not transactional people. Life 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

• 59:08Ryan Hawk?

  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. Set 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. When you 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

• 59:52Ryan Hawk?

  and Spotify and you subscribe to the show, so important, and you rate it hopefully five stars, and you write a thoughtful review, it only takes you a few seconds. But 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.