Chase Jarvis - Co-Founder and CEO of CreativeLive | Never Play It Safe

We're born to fail and get up again as entrepreneurs or even just as people. Imagine walking away from a career in medicine, discovering a passion for photography by chance, and turning that into a multi-million dollar empire. Chase Jarvis did exactly that, from shooting pro athletes in the mountains to working with brands like Nike and Apple. Life that you want and that you've built in your mind that's all A within your reach B. It's on the other side of your comfort zone C. It's created. It's nothing that you just stumble on or find you have to go. He's the co-founder of Creative Live, a platform that's revolutionized online education, and he's interviewed world-class leaders like Tim Ferris, Brené Brown, and Gary Vaynerchuk on his show Chase Jarvis Live. Life happens for you not to you when you are in alignment. You know it. We have to develop this muscle of listening to ourselves. Success leaves clues. Looks backward to connect it up. We're born to fail and get up again as entrepreneurs or even just as people. We allow ourselves to get talked out of our dreams by people who've given up on theirs. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. I'm also a big user of HubSpot products. I've supported the show for over three years now and for all entrepreneurs out there, I need you to go back to a time in place when building businesses as tough as it is can be sometimes a little bit fun. When you're marketing, it should be fun, but marketing is not so fun anymore because it's very time-consuming, it's very difficult, and it feels like there's just a lot of friction. Content was simpler to make. Leads were easier to capture, and we weren't all spread so thin. As marketers, as entrepreneurs, the bottom line is that marketing used to be fun. It's not so fun anymore, but with HubSpots newly launched marketing and content hubs, I've been using it myself. It brings a little bit of fun and creativity back into marketing for your business. They're going to generate better content. They're going to generate more leads and next level results, which really make marketing fun again. So with tools like Content Remix, you can turn existing assets into all new pieces with just one click. Lead scoring helps you shine a light on the leads that are most likely to purchase and analytic suites they built out will help you with reports, KPIs, and just a gold mine of AI-powered insights. It's quick to get your results, it's easy to use, it connects all your teams and your data, so put the fun back into your marketing funnel with HubSpot. Visit HubSpot.com to get started for free. All right, Chase, I'm excited to do this, man. I'm excited to jump into this. I will talk about everything. We'll talk about your new book. We'll talk about playing it safe. I want to kick this off, though, with a question. It's attributed to a quote that you said very often. And I think this will just give the audience a really good idea of who you are. So you said before that creativity is a new literacy. So if you could go back and you could whisper one could be creative secret into younger, younger, Chase's ear when you're just on the come-up, what would that be? That life that you want when you've built in your mind over the years, whether it was from your own experiences, seeing the experiences of others that you aspire to be like or that it's all A within your reach B, it's on the other side of your comfort zone, and see it's created. It's nothing that you just stumble on or find. You have to build it. I love that. We jump right into it. I just want to, we jump right into it. No, it's it's good. And I think that what I always like to do, and I just even mentioned this before we press record, I like to understand, okay, so you know, your book is called Never Play It Safe, a practical guide to freedom, creativity, and life you love. But I always find it so interesting to unpack titles. So playing it safe, I mean, people kind of contextually understand what that means, but obviously this had a big impact on you and your career. So talk me through title, where it came from. Yeah, okay. This is a dope opening question, because it allows me to tell you a crazy little story. So I've always, well, I will one qualifier, when I say Never Play It Safe, I'm not talking about seat belts and sunscreen. I'm not talking about, you know, mental or emotional or physical safety. Those things are helpful and necessary. The kind of playing it safe that I'm talking about is the toxic kind where we basically dream up what's possible with our life based on what other people tell us, what we see in the world, what the media says is possible, how the world tells us to think about ourselves, which is basically, or shit. So my, the journey to this title starts about two years ago, and I was working on a new book. My startup had just been acquired. I created a lifelong artist and entrepreneur. My most recent company, I started about 2010. It was one of the world's first online learning platforms. We get tens of millions of users, hundreds of millions in revenue. It was oriented. First one really oriented around creativity. So photography, design, filmmaking, entrepreneurship, we had guests, you know, teachers and guests like Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, you know, Bernie Brown, and it took many forms. It was venture backed. And the, I would say that was acquired in 2021 by a big public company. And so I was, I was, I did it, I did it a year with the acquiring company as one founder often has to do. And on the other side of that year, I was like, cool, I need to, I need to rest first of all. And part of what I want to do is to get really, really honest in this next chapter. Because truth be told, I don't, I don't identify as a venture backed CEO without going too far into the creative life story. I started it. It was, you know, like tech crunch started up by the year growing crazy fast. And after we raised, I don't know, 50 or 60 million bucks, we hired a venture backed CEO, brought him in to grow the company. And that didn't go very well after a few years. And I had to come back and essentially rebuild the company, raised more money, you know, rebuild the team, complete, and restructure everything. And yet on the other side of that stuff, when I sort of looked at what I wanted to do in my next chapter, it, it wasn't build another, you know, multi hundred million dollar startup. That wasn't the vision. The vision was, what do I really, really care about when I wake up in the morning? How do I want to spend my time? Part of that, I journal. And so I started writing, what do I really want? And I journal, and this is a tip from James Clear, I journal on that every single day and allowed me to get really, really Chris. And one of the things is to write more. I had a bestselling book four years ago called Creative Calling, which was about how every person is, is creative. And I wanted to explore a thread around that short story long. I wrote what I thought was a really good business book took me 19 months. And I started feeling uneasy about it. And eight weeks before the manuscript was due, I threw it all in the trash and started from scratch. I went to my agent, I was going to say, what, no, I need to know why. I need to know why you feel uneasy about this book. And it was specifically because I had written a, a business book around, you know, again, creativity, entrepreneurship that was expected. And I knew in my heart and my soul that that was me doing all of the calculations about what everybody else thought would be a great book and why, what to write about and how. And it made me look really good. Honestly, it made me, you know, made me be what my friend, Brane Brown calls her gold plated grit. There's a lot of gold plated grit in there, which is the, you tell a very brief story about how hard something was and how vulnerable you were, and then you tell this heroic amplification of all the best stuff and you leave out the, the toxic or the difficult parts. And so eight weeks before it was due, I knew that that wasn't the book that I was going to give to my publisher, talk to my agent, talk to my publisher. Obviously, everyone was like, this has been a two year project and we're right on the cusp of being done. And it essentially was a 48 hour window into my soul that, you know, what, all the best stuff in life that I've ever experienced, the best companies I've ever, you know, built the best campaigns I've ever created, you know, as a lifelong photographer and creator. The best television shows were all where I was very uncomfortable with what I was putting out and moves because it was real and it was gritty and it was, it was vulnerable. And the book that I was about to hand in my publisher was none of those things. And so I decided to write the book specifically about that, that all of the best stuff is on the other side of our comfort zone and I wanted to give the creators the entrepreneurs out there a lens on how to do that. So I, you know, went through all of my best stuff. I've had, I've had a podcast since 2009, I have more than a thousand world class guests on there and there was a very, very clear pattern that I'd emerged, which is nothing great happens in a little vacuum where it's all tidy. It's usually messy and awkward. So what if I could create a blueprint or a roadmap, if you will, about how to do that, how to access that stuff? Eight weeks later, I came out of the cave with this book, Never Played Safe, Practical Guide to Freedom Creativity and I'll let you up. And I felt, I felt right about it. And that's the book that if you're listening to this right now and encourage you go check it out because it's the best. It's so interesting because I want to actually understand when you were built, when you were in build mode, not writing mode and auth mode, when you were building the company, you even mentioned that that was, there was seasons to that. And I'm curious about the mindset going into that. Did you feel like that was in alignment with you as a creative, or did you feel like it was out of alignment, or did it start in alignment, move out of a lot? Do you talk about playing it safe and going outside your comfort zones, but playing it safe and going inside your comfort zones, you have to be smart about it too. So when you started your company, it made sense, but then you felt like maybe the venture back CEO wasn't the right fit and you had to come back. So you don't just throw all caution to the wind either. So I want to understand how this plays into sort of your journey as an entrepreneur. Yeah. This is the point of the book, is that we have a handful of things inside us natively. Like our creativity is one of those things are intuition, our ability to direct our attention that the playful spirit like natively, we are all these things in the world. You know, there's no evil overlord, but the world just does a really good job of training those things out of us. You know, you can't stand out and fit in at the same time for example. And as soon as you want to do something wildly creative or take a risk, most of the people and ironically the people who care a lot about you rush to your side and tell you all of the reasons you shouldn't do it. And so we have to develop this muscle of listening to ourselves. And growing just like we try and grow muscles, we have to grow the strength of these, and you know, these are the seven chapters of the book, these seven attributes tools inside of us that again are natively within us to essentially forge a path that we want. We have to write our own script and we can't do this with anyone else. So the specifics around building a company and my my most recent company creative live. Of course, I had no ambitions of being a venture backed CEO. We started the company essentially in 2010. It was the first live streaming learning platform as well. And we had classes with 50, 100, 150,000 people watching in real time. And you know, we had a tiger by the tail. It was very, very early. We both now it's like going live as a thing you pressed a button, right? But we had to do all of that from scratch. And my belief of, you know, the the narrative that I had about myself sort of, you know, wide-ranging artist. I'd been a photographer, as I mentioned, a director, television ad campaigns. I developed the first iPhone app that used photos as a social network. It was the app of the year on the Apple platform. Predated Instagram, Instagram is essentially a lift and stamp copy of this app. And to be fair, they raised 50 million bucks and kicked my ass. And that was a massive learning thing. But you know, I think the punchline here is that I realized that at some point when we I started the company, handed it to the venture back CEO because I mean, these are people we were backed by absolute blue chip. Our cap table was, I mean, the who's who and Silicon Valley, the best angels in the world, you know, super big names in the in the universe of investing. And yet, you find out is those companies. And even though they've built Facebook and LinkedIn and all these brands that we, you know, see in the world today, they, you know, their hit rate is, you know, single digit percentage like one, two, three percent. And my belief is that despite that, they were the ones to help grow this company. And it worked for a while. Again, we were growing 800 percent year over year early on. And at some point, the the their ability to navigate the ecosystem. And this is the difference between sort of a an operator and the founder Mojo, right? At some point, I realized as the chairman that it was going off track. And the, you know, when you when you hire a CEO or a whole leadership team that takes the company in the direction that is very, you know, that isn't aligned with the values or the community or the the original product vision. There's a cost to that. There's a dollar cost. There's a time cost. And essentially, I got together with some of my peers and personal advisors and mentors. It was like, Oh, do we try this again? Do we try and go out and hire another CEO? Or do I get really uncomfortable? Start doing something I've never done before run a, you know, 300 person company that's raising, you know, tens of millions of dollars and try and try my hand at the steering wheel. And the short version is that it's very difficult. And yet, like any founder or a, you know, if you can think of this company as sort of like your offspring, you do whatever it takes. And it was doing whatever it takes. It was all on the other side of my comfort zone. We turned the company around, raised new money. And, you know, the the at one point, we were very, we were six months from running out of cash. And just two years later, we were doing a $36 million run rate, growing 40% year over year. And I felt like I had sort of fixed things alongside the work of hundreds of other people to be really clear. This is not a solo journey. And that was incredibly uncomfortable. It, it tested me in ways that had never been tested before. Despite having quite a bit of success, building a number of other multimillion dollar, you know, multimillion person community companies. And that's what these dark circles under my eyes are from. And it was the ride of a lifetime. And yet, I chronicle in the book that even that that risk that I took, it was necessary. It was well time. It was the right move. And I realized now a few years later, on the back side of having that company been acquired. And just going back to my true north is like, wait, that's that's actually not going in. What's my next chapter? And how can I be more in alignment? So this isn't about building the perfect company or building the perfect product. This book is about all the ways that we make mistakes. And how to recover from those stakes more quickly, how sorry, how to recover from those mistakes quickly find ourselves in alignment find our way back to ourselves over and over again, getting one percent better, one percent smarter, one percent more aligned with who we are so that we can create the living and most importantly, the life that we love. I'm so curious because you've not played it safe at multiple stages. If you think back and this is going way back, but when you first started sort of an entrepreneurial journey, did that feel in your opinion like more more taking a risk or did it feel like more taking a risk when you became the CEO of a 300 plus person multi million dollar venture back company because the playing it's safe, I feel like when we start to take risks and we don't play it safe and we get us at our comfort zone, we can start to build, we can start to create this like mental callus. So we feel like that outside the comfort zone is a little bit easier the next time and the next time. But I am curious because like the the the the potential liability and the potential you know to fuck everything up at a venture back level is much higher than when you first start but just from my experience it feels way more daunting when you first like leave a W2 9 to 5 and to jump into a big CEO position because it's it's so different from what you know and I think that's the the gap that you have to help people over. Yeah well I feel you know I guess the basis of the book the foundation of why I wrote this is because for everyone who's listening right now whether you're a W2 employee or an entrepreneur when you are in alignment you know it. Life happens for you not to you. Things come more naturally and there is you know there's a desire that I have to be in alignment with that because success leaves clues if anyone who's listening right now looks you know backward to connect the dots when you felt your most alive you're most connected it wasn't when you were you know just sitting on the couch with your you know legs crossed that's not how that's not where the best stuff is and if success leaves clues I like to think okay what was I doing who was I with what kinds of risks was I taking and for me you know I was programmed from a very early age I go back to Miss Kelly my second grade teacher told me that I wasn't very creative and then I should focus on sports and I was super entrepreneurial I had a comic strip I was doing magic shows I had a stand-up comedy routine in second grade I released my first film it was profitable and Miss Kelly told me hey you should just you know play sports you're good at sports and you're not very creative and this entrepreneurial stuff you can't do that in second grade you can't sell comic strips and it sounds goofy but it essentially shaped the next you know 15 years of my life I decided to I mean you know we're not actually I wasn't crushed I was like oh the adults in my life are telling me what to do I should do with they and this so you can see this sort of programming that starts early on and so I became the captain of the football team dated a cheerleader you know I was the typical senior award the last day of high school I don't know what that is but I know it's not good and yet I you know I was experiencing success in the typical action or the typical measures that culture you know lays out for us and yet especially in high school yeah yeah inside I was dying I was not in alignment with who I really was I was a curious weird creative you know punk rock kid and in a little lightweight ways I started experiencing that I bailed on medical medical school I quit a career in professional soccer to become a photographer and you can imagine my poor parents right and yet I had already been a hundred thousand dollars in student debt or yeah I basically got you know I had a crew to a hundred thousand dollars in student debt it was years off of the timeline that I could have been on if I had just listened to my own intuition but the world has a script for you and to me the the as I said success leaves clues and when I started wait a minute this feels good this journey that I'm on I didn't know where it was gonna go my grandfather had died given me his camera I started taking pictures of my friends skiing and snowboarding and I said I felt that juice that we all feel when we're in alignment with our values so this book is about looking at those values and trying to put on pause all of the noise that the world creates give you a little bit of space to listen to who you really are what you really want to do with this one precious life and then how to take action and that's all I've done over and over again the irony is you think I'd have it all figured out that would happen once but no there is a hundred tiny b trails throughout the life throughout each of our lines rather that we have to continue to get stronger and and learn to listen and use the tools that are natively within us to find our way home again I think I think it's not a sudden forget it I think it's a constant readjustment and realignment and I know again this is sort of just to tease out like a little bit of your framework and if people want to learn more that can go through the entire sort of framework that you use to figure this out in your own life but what's your barometer for not being aligned what is your red flag that you feel um disconnection if you're not excited when you wake up in the morning and I'm not talking about doing some chores I'm talking about the awareness that you are on the path that you are supposed to be on there's a feeling in your body in your gut that is a feeling of on we of boredom or of sadness of and and yet we can you can have a great face on and it can present itself as you know going out five or six nights a week parting with your friends and it can present itself as just hustling for that next promotion at work and yet when things are quiet and when you're alone at two or three in the morning staring at the ceiling that's when you know that it's a hint that there might be more for you it's a feeling in your body that this is not the life that I had imagined for myself and to me these are blessings and it's very hard to start to pay attention to it but as soon as you see it you can't unsee it and you know that's sort of that's the journey that I went on and why I've tried to be clear then I hate business books that say do perfect thing a perfect thing be great thing see learn all these lessons D and then build the company of your dreams because that's just or shit one of my favorite business books of all times is a book called the hard thing about hard things written by Ben Horowitz who's is the Horowitz of and recent Horowitz the venture capital firm and the chapters are like I think this is not totally accurate but like chapter one is how to fire your best friend chapter two is how to tell your investors you lost all their money chapter three is how to let your you know how to tell your entire company that you're closing the doors like these are real business lessons this is where you really actually learn something and so that's the way that I approached this project it's like no what if we put away all the shiny stuff and looked at the things that were hard and difficult and looked at the tools that were natively within us that that's the cool thing is like we don't have to you know move to Paris and get a new set of friends and you don't have to you can whatever you have for you know plans for your life but the best part about this is it's available to you right now all the tools within your your own natural creativity your own awareness of what you were made for your ability to again your natural ability to play we're born to fail and get up again I mean there's not a single person if there's a you know a bunch of parents listening here if when your kid fell down like that 38th time in a row trying to learn to walk did anyone here if you're if you had an able bodied child that anyone say I guess my kid's not a walker that's it we're done my kid's not a walker nobody said that you put your kid back on his her their feet and you started to get him to walk again and yet as entrepreneurs or even just as people we allow ourselves to get talked out of our dreams by people who've given up on theirs a big shout out to HubSpot and the HubSpot podcast network for sponsoring success story if you enjoy success story you're going to enjoy a ton of podcasts brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network including hustle and flow chart hosted by Joey fear the hustle and flow chart podcast with Joey is all about how to build a business so it gives you the freedom and fuel for your life you're going to join Joey as you discuss his systems mindset tweaks reframes and strategies for entrepreneurs and really anyone to enjoy the process of being in business and having fun this isn't for entrepreneurs looking to build a billion dollar business it's for somebody who wants to build a lifestyle somebody who is looking to build systems that work listen to hustle and flow chart wherever you get your podcasts you know it's interesting because all the systems in place sort of encourage safety and I think we're very much aligned with how we think I mean I've said this a lot how I feel like the traditional nine to five is it's not that it's not a fine option for people but yeah it's a fine option for lots of people right issue is that it's not as safe as people think it is and that's that's really the issue you're right and and like to me that's a really important piece of my thinking is that we believe that there is a safe path and the reality is is nothing is guaranteed I mean the first word of the book is safety is an illusion it does not exist in nature why therefore I'm going to the page it does not exist in nature so why then do we seek it and it it was you know that opening line was downstream of one of my favorite quotes in the world which is from Alan Keller security is mostly a superstition doesn't exist in nature nor did the children of men as a whole experience it avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure life is either a daring adventure or nothing and that's my greatest fear for people who are listening yeah I at the beautiful quote by the way yeah you're likely not going for it because you fear the consequences of actually going for it and yet the path that you're on has every bit as many pitfalls and negative outcomes so why would you trade the life that you could have or a life that you feel like you have on default when the outcomes are most likely every bit as tragic or difficult or worse than the dream that you're trying to live it's like that's the part that is the big conundrum there is no such thing as playing it safe it is all risky so why then do we seek the lowest common denominator and I will tell you it's because the world I mean there's a philosopher Renee Gerard is his name and he talks about this concept of mimesis which human beings were basically because of our neural structures are just really good at doing the things that we already see out there in the world we mimic other people and yet if you're listening to this watching or watching this right now the people that you look up to admire and they are the people who have put it out there the most this is one of the reasons we love rock stars because they're out there on the stage singing their heart out in front of everyone regardless of you know what judgments we may have of them and that's very very seductive and so the question I would pose to listeners is what you know what ways are you playing it safe what ways are you living according to the expectations of others and it turns out that we make a is a pretty long list of the ways that we're doing it and we've got really good justifications oh you know my family wants this or my family needs that or you know this is a there's a laundry list of things and yet most of those things are manufactured I'm not saying that providing for your family is not valuable but the methodology how you go about providing for your family is you have way more control over that than you think and this is not to say that you know they're some of us are not more advanced or disadvantaged than others but the reality is that you are the architect of your life and you know what why why are you in the position you're in if you can take responsibility for that the world is your oyster we're just so programmed again by people who have given up on their dreams talking us out of hours you know there's Alex from all these speaks about this and I he paints a really good picture like when you when you have nothing to lose it's like going to the casino and the only option is to say the same or to win so why don't you just why don't you just keep gambling if the only option is to win like the upside of doing things differently is infinite so taking shots at entrepreneurship building your own business being more creative like going against the grain there's unlimited upside I think there's a compounding problem though and I'm curious about your opinion on this because I have strong opinion I think there's a compounding problem that when you look at the potential upside the people that have done it in air quotes and been successful people have a hard time deconstructing the path that it took them to get there so they're like yes I get that there's upside but I get that I'm making a hundred hundred fifty thousand bucks in my nine to five right now and the path is opaque is just blurry and I can't see it and I don't know if you have a strategy or if it's something people are born with I I I seek it out purposefully now in my own life but I try and reverse engineer how people got there because to that makes it psychologically a little bit less scary yeah for sure and as I've said success leaves clues I'm there was something in my last book which was called creative calling there's a framework called D or D E A R deconstruct emulate analyze and repeat you deconstruct the lives that you see other people leading I wonder how to use Alex Ramose well he's very clear he told you how we did it the reality is you can find out largely in this world that we live in today a lot of the attributes the risks the understandings that people that you look up to respect admire you can deconstruct their lives I did that originally with photography with artists I'd look at all the artists in the 70s 80s in New York I loved you know Robert Washingtonburg Andy Warhol how do they build their career what do they do it I read books I you know watch documentaries I just devoured information about them you can do that again today it's even easier on the internet or you know following someone's career listen to their podcast you you can deconstruct the steps that anyone else took you emulate them start you know you have to act like a pro before you are them you have to act like the person that you want to be before you are them you have to order the habits that the people that you aspire to be like have built and you build those habits and then analyze what is getting you closer to your goals and what is taking you further away from them do more of the things that are making you closer to your goals and do less of the things that are pulling you away from them and then you repeat the things that are working this is a very you know it's a very available system to us and yet where we stumble is in the the attention our attentions the first chapter of my new book never played safe is about attention because rather than being very intentional about following someone who's doing what you have a vision for yourself you might want to do something like that and taking action in the same way that they've done it we get trapped watching endless videos of not just them but anybody who's like them and we believe that that's getting closer to our goal and the reality is that we it's like 10% planning 90% action you cannot achieve any of this stuff from the couch and so to the person that you've fictitiously you know oriented us around the beginning of this question the person who isn't a nine to five and making a hundred grand no judgment at all but if you find that you are seeking something beyond where you're at right now it's not what are you watching what are you thinking about it's what are you doing what action what steps are you taking and I would encourage you to look into your if you don't even know what kind of business you want to build or you don't know what your next career move is have you experimented are you actually doing stuff are you playing in the areas that are interesting to you because that's where the best stuff is that's where you have been aligned in your past those are the areas that are worth exploring and the cool thing is when you do things that you love the world happens for you not to you get more energy not less you know it's like a tractor beam for those Star Wars nerds out there towards the best shit and yet the world would have you believe you have to intellectualize all this stuff do it from the couch your mind has been hijacked because you're endlessly scrolling looking for more Alex Ramosi's rather than you know trying to base instead of trying to be a second rate him what about a first rate you and the thing that you want to be do where we come there is a you you you touched on something I've thought about this a lot it seems like of course there's different audiences we're speaking to but the audience that is listening to this is probably not an audience that has an issue trying to consume more information because they're listening to this podcast right but it almost seems like we're over indexing on just knowledge it's almost in vogue to just learn shit listen to podcasts on 1.5x to like how fast can I listen to as many podcasts as I possibly can or how many books can I read every single week and it's it's just funny how these how people just they they want to do everything except do the fucking work it's like everything up but doing the work they're like well and this is you know again the way that the pattern that this book is presented is a pretty simple one and that I have again deconstructed what has worked for me and where I have gone wrong has worked for many of my friends and peers and the highest performers in the world and what has gone wrong for them and essentially landed on the fact that there are seven tools that naturally reside within us that this and that's the cool thing we don't have to go looking for them they're already there that will help us find this alignment and I mentioned attention I'll go back to it again like at some point this the endless scrolling the endless information consumption that is a hijacking of your attention not you directing it towards action right that is and that is a absolutely fundamental thing you cannot you cannot none of the people that you respected my or appreciate got what they have in life learned the lessons were able to you know create the success and most importantly the fulfillment that they feel through thinking about it it's all through doing right it's no like a hundred percent I'm curious out of out of those seven traits which one did you personally have the most trouble with manifesting or living okay I think our intuition is the thing that we it's the most powerful thing that we know the least about the weird crazy thing is if that if you pay attention to actual science around intuition it's becoming pretty compelling the results about the understanding of the rational mind instead of that being the most impressive default mode to the human being we actually find that the rational mind is sort of slow and prone to errors and that intuition it incorporates the rational mind plus a bunch of other stuff and the reality is that we have you know trillions of cells in our body and they all have there's memory within all of those things this is why it's a gut feeling you feel these things in your body and not in your head now the cool thing is that the highest performers they have developed they have attuned to trust their intuition and this is not to say the intuition is always right however if you are wondering where you ought to be going in your life if this is something that is in line with your values or not this is usually not a heady experience it is a head heart gut body feeling it's a whole sort of body alignment and you know when my when my family for example it was saying oh you're smart and hardworking and talented you should be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever of course as you know the impressionable 16 year old the name is like okay cool what do what do like hardworking talented PO okay that's what they do and yet I knew that in my bones from day one and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan years off track only to find myself part with you that journey realizing that I knew all along that this was not the right thing and you can you know copy and paste that into a hundred different areas of our lives and yet if I told you that what what did you really really want as a kid this is why my number one journal entry is what do I really want I'd soft I often journal on this for 30 days straight and you get one percent smarter and more accurate and it's a fascinating exercise when you start to be able to tune into an intuition and listen to it and trust like this business partner that this business deal or that it's it's a pretty powerful thing so for me that was a big one mostly because the world the people who love us and care for us are you know want yeah again the illusion of safety for us and yet knowing that it doesn't exist how do we how do we strengthen that muscle within us so to me again being able to direct your attention fascinating quote from Andrew Huberman the the professor at Stanford um he said attention is the most I think it's the most important deciding factor between success and failure in any endeavor it's the most important thing in any line of like pursuing the ability to direct your attention and yet here we are you know stuck on our devices scrolling endlessly so in the book I'm very specific about how you can get better at developing your attention you can get better at listening to your intuition and again I just default to the people who so many of us respect and admire either in our personal lives that we actually know or our parasocial lives the people that we see on the internet that we respect and appreciate I'm telling you they are world class at these attributes you know you mentioned one thing that I think is actually a really important topic to touch on you mentioned your family and expectations of family and expectations of people that are not living their dreams and they feel like you want to they want to just make sure that you're comfortable in your safe again and air quotes and and I'm curious because different people I'm going to say the word deal with family I mean it's that's a very negative word but we all get where I'm coming from they deal with family in a different way so what place this the closest people around you have in your ambition in your thought process and your decision making process obviously they wanted one direction now building a nine-figured company later they're okay with the other direction I'm assuming but it wasn't always like that no and and it is true like they they want either the best for us or they want similar to them and the irony is that they don't know what the best for us is because they are not us and then similar to them are you willing to take advice from someone who's not done the thing that you want to do in both cases it's a losing matter right and they don't know what's best for us they don't know what we want and here they are coaching us well-meaning and yet unless they have actually done the thing that you dream about doing why would you take advice from them so you know the how do you how do you how do you keep that relationship without it deteriorating sure great great question and I'm pretty clear on this and in all of my writings in especially never played safe what I you know I dab a one-on-one coaching program and I coach high performing entrepreneurs and what I find is again through hundreds of cases that is going really deep into people's sort of psychologies and family lives and what not and talking to many of my friends who were you know absolutely elite world class at so many things is the ability to communicate very clearly what it is that you want and for example if you told your wife's spouse husband partner whatever at the right time in the right way what you have your biggest dream or your life do you really think that they would reject it or if you could tell them in a way that didn't feel like it put them at risk they weren't you're not going to drop everything and and put the families you know being on the line because any good entrepreneur the belief is that entrepreneurs go put it all on black and burn the boats and that's couldn't be further from the truth Richard Branson invested in my last company he's a friend and a personal mentor he's always protecting the downside he's got 400 companies he started Virgin Airlines it looked crazy because the first plane he bought was a 747 cost hundreds of millions of dollars and what people don't know about the other half of that coin the other side of that coin is that he pre-negotiated Boeing's price to buy it back not if when he thought the business wouldn't work so he's constantly protecting the downside and yet it's a massive this is this is you know it is not playing it safe to make the move and buy a 747 but it's never all in and imagine if you could communicate that to the loved ones in your life about I have these big dreams and I'm not going to you know I'm not going to leave you on the side lines here but I need to make some changes there's a way to do it incrementally and it's a communication issue it's a fear again all of the best stuff in life is on the other side of our fears how then do we start to you know reorient ourselves towards what we really want and you know the ability to communicate your dream is super super valuable do you believe as I know you'll have an opinion on this do you believe in balance I believe in harmony not balance and I'll tell you the difference balance implies that you it's something that you keep right you keep things in balance because balance is balance is not falling over balance is staying upright staying balanced harmony for example is when something in your life is you know up something else will probably need to be down so you know you can put this onto map this onto any different sort of variety of things friends health professional relationships or professional success rather not all of those can be humming and it's not a static system we're talking about life it's a very very dynamic there's all sorts of inputs for example we got cut off in this conversation because of a thunderstorm in Miami so obviously we can't control everything and yet there is a way to go all in on your dream and not burn the boats and the other areas if you have prepared for this there is a season where you were saving your energy and now you're expending it for example so I don't believe this especially as a someone who spent my life around the highest performing people on the planet both you know as a photographer my original career was as a photographer specifically in in action sports ski skates no a surf I've photographed the best in the world in probably 50 different sports and not just like taking pictures of them at a moment like worked one one serenoliums that you know Travis Rice and snowboarding the best surfers in the world Tony Hawk like all of them the characteristics that they have all it's definitely around you know around calculated risk and none of those people have balance it's all harmony they keep their lives together but they are not balanced you do not get to be world class and be balanced because you're a competing against people who are definitely not balanced and be like it takes a lot to be world class now maybe being world class at something is not your goal which is fine I'm not here to judge your goals or set them for you however on the topic of sort of balance or harmony harmony does make it all work and I think that's again that's where that's where you get to experience the most humanity the best the richest human experiences that I've had they're not wearing khakis walking down sidewalk on Main Street in perfect town you know America that is not where the best shit in life exists so why would we go there looking for it you're you know you're you're creative first and then you turn to entrepreneur something that I also find fascinating is a lot of creatives have trouble with that transition process into entrepreneur and business leader and I'm curious as a creative what from that world served you the best and what from that world hurt you when you were trying to build something I think the the muscle that I developed around creating something that this stuff doesn't just happen that it requires reps right and the best in the world they stumble and getting good at failing I've got a whole chapter and never played safe about failure and when you're creating something versions one two three and four are usually trash some people tell me oh I want to write a book but I'm not a very good writer and I say okay well show me all of your bad writing and the reality is that they've only tried like two or three times and then they've stopped what I don't often see is someone here's 10,000 pages that are shitty and yet if you talk to anyone who identifies as a professional creative and any endeavor they can show you the the the the drafts they've got the they've got the receipts to prove it and so that that lens on being willing to try and fail you know again as a my first you know universe was as a photographer one of the top commercial photographers in the world and I did not get there I got there through shooting film and learning very expensive very slow way of learning and the irony is that a picture takes you know a thousandth of a second to capture so it's each one of those is a tiny experiment so I became very accustomed to failing and succeeding failing and succeeding within the role you know a single role of film and then you extrapolate that when digital comes around and you can learn at even faster so I would say my life as a as a photographer specifically conditioned me for tiny experiments and tiny failures that's the way I want people who are listening and watching right now to think about the businesses that they want to start it's not go all in and you know bet it all in black it's what can you do to start tiny experiments so to me that's the thing that built my muscle of being willing to fail and then the way that that what would you have to like unlearn I guess is the best way to put it the thing that we have to unlearn is that we the connection between we who we are and the work that we put out so many artists they see a one to one that I am my work I am the results of this photograph and if it's seen by 10 million people or seen by 10 people one is a success and the others a failure but the reality is that you are not your work you're not the results of your work and you know by extension I feel like that holds so many people and that was my biggest thing it's like wait a minute if I put this thing out in the world and it's crickets humble weeds it's not necessarily it doesn't have anything to do with me it's something that I'm not do it I mean they're doing or not doing so how can I employ a bunch of tiny experiments to find what it feels like to be tracked to to to experience traction and usually this has to do with telling your dream to more people helping other people come along in this journey with you again so to reframe it's this thing that was the hardest for me as a as a and as a creative or the easiest thing the way it helped me was repetition I'm getting lots of reps and the thing that you know as I thought that I was my work rather than I'm just running a tiny experiment to see what works and what doesn't it has no reflection on me the reflection on me is how fast can I get back up after you know after stumbling I love it's a pretty yeah it's a pretty interesting dynamic and the cool thing is that's available to any right our ability to fail fail fast is such a cliche term I like to you know fail gracefully and if you fail a tiny experiment it's really not the measure of you it's the measure of the experiment that you run and what can you learn and move on and do differently the next time that's that's amazing advice it's not that it's not the measure of you it's the measure of the experiment you remove it out of yourself you remove it all that all that shame and all that negativity out of yourself yeah brain a brown has helped us culturally think a lot about our own vulnerability and shame and guilt and if you're not familiar with her work I'd steer you toward that and essentially it's the distinction from the experiments that we run in life right but you're trying to ask somebody on a date it's really not a reputation of you the person it's the result of the experiment that you run and how can you tweak that experiment or it slightly differently in the future on the back of having a goal of getting a different outcome completely different right one is like you know fast can I get back up and do it again because I learned this thing and there's a again a whole chapter about failure and if you study failure it really is about two things that's about the number of reps that you take and how you approach taking them the number volume is just getting reps and just like you know the kid being a walker you don't when your kid falls down after the twenty eight times you don't say your kids not a walker so get a lot of reps and two it's not just getting more reps it's actually looking at what worked and what didn't in the previous experiment and modifying that and trying again the last concept that I want to touch on as you mentioned both of these play and creativity and I think they're both fabulous concepts but I also before I even ask any questions about either what is the difference between creativity and play sure creativity is this innate human capability of capacity that we are all born with and you can see it you know ask go to the front of any first grade class and we want to come to the front of the picture front of the room and draw me a picture 30 kids in the class 30 hands go up and we see that being trained out of us with the school system I get no evil overlord that's just one of the downsides of mass culture mass society and and so first of all it's native and when we look at the definition of it it's just our ability to combine two or more things in new and useful ways and when I think of it very very broadly so art as an example that is that does not equal creativity that is a subset of creativity because building a business that's one of the most creative and dynamic things that I've done as an entrepreneur so creativity to me is our ability to do this this is we are natural creating machines that is you know that is what has kept us alive as a species for millennia right and yet play play is this natural state within us to seek joy to seek connection to seek things that light us up and the cool thing is is a great story in the book a friend of mine named Charlie home Charlie has written a couple books one called play it away where he used play to basically unwire a bunch of really negative loops that had in his neurology a bunch of fear and pain he he worked for Tim Ferris for a long time and and a handful of other authors he's an amazing amazing human but he was basically completely fried out and he went back as we all should do in his sort of the memory banks and said hand I'm so stressed out what are the things that are in my life that I loved as a kid what brought me a ton of joy whether it's again Legos exercise you know for me it was it was playing soccer being outside with my friends skateboarding music a lot of these things and to the listeners or watchers like there are things in your life what if you tried those again what if you went back and maybe it was you know playing the guitar doesn't matter what it is for Charlie it was the example that he uses in his book called play it away was he loved hitting baseballs I think with his dad as they would like throw you know throw baseballs he'd whack them all the field so as a bowl grown adult he went and bought you know a bat and 50 hard balls and he and his buddy would take turns and go to the park you know one friend pitches the other friend hits they go clicked all the balls reciprocate that to the other friend and just rope these baseballs all over the field and it that simple exercise is transformed his life relieved him from basically catastrophic levels of anxiety and it got him back in his body back into his joy something basic and simple that lit him up what's cool is if anybody who's listening or watching does this you will feel what joy feels like you will reconnect with your natural state the cool part is that this is always available to you what you have to be enough of is aware you have to be able to direct your attention that I need more joy in my life and I don't care if this is cooking meals for your family or friends or whack and baseballs around the field like getting outside a nature hungry down in the corner with a good book on this like a rainy Saturday that doesn't matter I have no judgment however what I do know the science is very clear on this that play and joy begets other play and joy it is in fact a contagious experience and if you can learn to bring play and joy into other areas of your life we are told that work comes first play is only after the chores are done but it turns out that play is the energy is the engine of life the most creative that I have ever been the most success that I've had in say even in business has been when I approached even the most dull taths with a playful mental this is a mindset game and look again the cool thing is that you can do anything and there's some examples in the book and some specific exercises for him embracing play reigniting it in ourselves and you know again those are the differences between play and creativity this turns out that they're pretty intertwined and that you know if we're playing we're probably doing something that's a little creative I love that I think it's so so smart because we everybody doesn't matter who you are you carry so much trauma with you and as a as a child you never get rid of that trauma unless you do a shit ton of work you you know you have to do a lot but then that's all the negative we carry forward and then that just is like running in the background all the time whereas all the positive that we did as a child it's like gone gone and yeah there's a great quote from J. sorry to interrupt you there's got to go from an artist named James Victoria the things that made you weird as a kid are the things that make you brilliant as an adult and most of us again we've been talked out of that part of ourselves because we thought it was weird or quirky or awkward and yet you know the people who are wildly creative even in you know the most expanded definition of creative like in business for example like they know what lights them up as an example and I'm an investor as well I do not invest in random market opportunities I invest in things that are interesting to me because I look at as as a vector to connect with my interests my hobbies my curiosities and area that I want to learn more or something that I know that I can disproportionately add value to those are the things that I invest in and so that is another vector for me to you know that's where I play I only start businesses personally and things that interest me because when shit gets hard and it will in any business if something is interesting to me where I have a lot of curiosity interest and knowledge you know the areas that of my my personal playbook that you know overlap with the things I care a lot about like that's what's going to allow me to you know create success and fulfillment in a way that other people when they hit that part of the journey they're going to quit so this is why you know this idea of chasing something that you're good at that you care about is you know it's great advice yeah yeah you're just you're you're articulating what people try and figure out in their career and their job it's like well why am I not just working for a paycheck why am I not just happy like even if you don't want to be an entrepreneur you're talking about you know building a company that gives you joy and is an interest to you very smart investing very smart I mean even if you're working for a company like go work for a company that built something that you think is cooler that you use yourself like that to me would be a lot of fun yeah if so many friends that this is not just like you know again I as an entrepreneur and as a lifelong someone identifies as creative there's a lot of stories in the book and I have a lot of your friends who run many of most innovative companies in the world and the that in itself is an environment if one cultivates and encourages creativity in the connection with others there are companies out that out there that do that and working for them I got no issues with that what I where I feel so sad and when frustrated is that it's the people who are essentially eating the shit sandwich that and they don't have to turkey is available ham is a lot of options exactly hummus red pepper and sprouts I have your revenge like it's available to you and I've tried to come up with a blueprint to help you find it I love that dude all right um if you could you know if you could just sort of dispel one major misconception about comfort zones or or or pushing past your comfort zone or like one major misconception that you've uncovered your for research is book as you've gone through your life what would that misconception be it's that you have to take massive a massive risk to feel the buzz that we're talking about and it's just the opposite it really is a series of tiny experiments I don't care I mean start this here here this is how crazy we're going to be start by driving home from work a different way than you normally do start by fixing a meal for your family that you haven't fixed before start like literally the tiniest of experiments and realized that those experiments make you feel one percent more alive and what if you had a habit you created a habit and a framework to be able to do this on the regular with other aspects of your life the people that you visit with how you spend time where you travel on vacation you know this is how we get to the other side of our comfort zone it's not dropping everything getting out of the relationship that you're in and moving to a foreign country it might be if you've built up a chest of experiences before this but for most and I would say 99% of the people who are listening are for whom this is interesting it's just about changing the smallest habits in your life as a vector for you know reaching the highest highs yeah it's it's so important and I don't think people understand how lazy their brain is and how much it likes to not work and how much it likes routine and how easily it is to fall into these patterns that maybe they served you for a while but if you don't consciously try and this is why I already mentioned it's our tier and this valuable thing because you need to be aware of that and to be clear I want to be super clear Scott if you are the person that's got just isn't I'm talking to the listeners and watchers now if you're a person like Scott just described on autopilot I'm telling you never play it safest for you first of all and second don't beat yourself up over it this is your biology your biology would prefer a familiar hell to an unfamiliar heaven we are wired by that and that's because our biology is not here to make us happy or fulfilled it is here so that we can reproduce and that's it the goal is just get to the get to the stage of being able to reproduce so if you want to go beyond that right we're wired for a negativity bias we're wired to again seek safety despite the fact that safety does not really exist it is a it's an illusion so don't beat yourself up and to me that's actually really empowering if you realize that okay I'm living in accordance with my biology the my biology is seeking the horizon for things that move it's either a mate and I want to go toward that or it's a saber-two tiger and I want to run from that but the reality is that the thing that we used to think of a saber-two tiger was actually a tiger and today it's oh should I post this on my social media or not it's not real right so our biology is working against us is submitting that you know that interesting report or that new presentation to your boss is terrifying hitting you know publish on social media is terrifying and yet it's only through doing those things over and over again that you can get one percent closer every day to the dream that you have and it's only through playing through the fear that that thing that's moving on the horizon is the saber-two tiger and I'm going to do it anyway like that's what courage is courage is not the absence of fear courage is feeling fear and doing it anyway in small lightweight ways such that you can build habit that this this can make you more resilient that's again why all of the best stuff in life is on the other side of our fear on the other side of our comfort zone and why the concept of playing it safe is trash I love it so when is this coming out um where where do you want to send people when this thing is airing it is out now wherever books are sold and okay what's worth if you go to neverplayatsafe.com and you bought a copy I'm up until the I think the 15th of October there's $507 worth of added bonuses I've got a essentially a companion workbook there's a live launch event with many of the people who would be considered heroes to the audiences guess that you've had before I'll be announcing this over the course of the next couple weeks we're going to do a live launch event there's all sorts of really really interesting things a master class that I'm teaching for example if you buy the book and then go to neverplayatsafe and and put your name and addy in there I'll get you access to all that stuff amazing okay so we're going to link all that stuff in the show notes where your socials I'll put those in the show notes is them at chase Jarvis on everything chase like the bank Jarvis on insta youtube you know I'd say twitter x whatever they want to call it now those are the places where I'm most active I have one of the longest running interview podcasts in the world started to very good I was watching it very very good he's an OG he does some you do live stuff which is good for you we've had you know live concerts with the shins maclamore lilluminers you know legendary guests I mentioned Sir Richard earlier brane brown's been a guest by Tim Ferris I don't know who other folks are heroes of the folks that listen to the show but you're naming them all there you go they've all been guests on my show multiple times and again this is the lens through which I have written this book is is what I've learned the battle scars having built again multi multiple multi million person communities and you know hundreds of millions in revenue companies and and fail a lot of times like if you look into my you do any research on me you can see in one case how I lost a billion with a B billion at dollars so I've got your interest in mind here I wrote this book for you I'll say I wrote for us because we're all in this together so we are thanks for having me as a guest on the show big fan you're doing great stuff with your community here grateful for having me on the show and look forward to to seeing some folks in your community leaking into mine