Epic Real Estate Investing - Creative Calling - How to Succeed in Work and Life with Chase Jarvis | 753

Episode Date: August 23, 2019

This Friday, Matt interviews Chase Jarvis, an American photographer, a director, an artist, a long-term Youtuber, and a CEO of CreativeLive, an online educational platform that he co-founded in 2010. Tune in and find out about Chase’s book Creative Calling, why you should not be skeptical to pursue your desires, what our guest has learned from his Youtube interviewees, and why you should listen to your intuition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Terio Media. Success in real estate has nothing to do with shiny objects. It has everything to do with mastering the basics. The three pillars of real estate investing. Attract, convert, exit. Matt Terrio has been helping real estate investors do just that for more than a decade now. If you want to make money in real estate, keep listening. If you want it faster, visit r-e-I-Aase.com.

Here's Matt. We've got a hot show for you today right here on the epic real estate investing show. And today I am joined by an American photographer, director, artist, and entrepreneur. Since April, 2014, has been the chief executive officer of Creative Live and the online education platform that he co-founded in 2010. He's got countless accolades for his creative work. He's been YouTubeing for what looks like more than 15 years. And I can't wait to talk all about it. So please help me welcome to the show, Mr. Chase.

Jarvis, Chase, welcome to Epic Real Estate Investing. Thanks for having me on the show, man. I appreciate it. You bet. So I've been researching. I've been following you online for a little while and seeing what you're doing. And you do, got your hands, seems like in a little bit of everything. But I wanted to look at the Creative Live.

So what were you doing just prior to becoming CEO of Creative Live? And what inspired that? Sure. Shortest version of my background is that I was doing everything that everybody else wanted. I was pursuing a career in sports. As a soccer player, I was told that I should be a doctor, go to medical school because that's respected. And then I bailed on that and then pursued a PhD in philosophy because I wanted to be held

in high esteem and be smart. And I ultimately had the courage to bail on the dreams that everybody else had for me and pursue my own, which led me to becoming a photographer. and it was after building a career, successful career as a photographer, that I realized, wait a minute, the technology could scale creativity. I built an iPhone app in 2009 called Best Camera, which was the iPhone app of the year, and it helped kick off the global photo sharing craze a couple years before Instagram.

We got our ass kicked by them, plus $50 million from some Silicon Valley investors. But it didn't change the kernel of the idea that I had around creativity, this innate thing that we all have inside us, plus technology could scale something. And so in 2010, from a grimy little warehouse in South Seattle, from a room that was about 400 square feet, we launched Creative Live. And our first class had 50,000 people in it.

It was a class on photography. And we started growing it ever since. We kind of realized we had a tiger by the tail. I launched it in 2010, led the company for a while, stepped away, some fancy other folks into what they were doing because I was just figuring this out. They helped grow the company. We took some investment.

Then I came back a few years ago to do, I don't know, wrangle and just basically aim a team of really talented people to create what is today. The world's largest platform for creators and entrepreneurs. Billions of minutes of video streamed. It's where the world connects with the top experts in photography, design, filmmaking, and entrepreneurs, many of which you've had on your show, for example, it's where they go to share their ideas and teach. Yeah.

So that's a core version. And you know, you're just talking about 15 years in my life here. So it's, I get it. I've been on your side of the microphone several times and, you know, you get the story and you're like, okay, how much energy to do it? How many minutes do we want to spend on my figuring out that all this stuff is, we're all just figuring it out. True.

True. So the educational platform for creators, and that's pretty wide array of, I don't know, what do you call it, disciplines that you... Sure. But then you throw in entrepreneurship in there as well. Are they two separate things, or do you mesh them together? Well, to me, that's part of the challenge. I think a lot of people think about creativity in the wrong way. So creativity is not, you know, art rather is a subset of creativity. But creativity is putting any two things together in new and useful ways. And the cool thing about humans is that we are creating machines. And this is something that you really haven't been taught in school or told. And we've got a cultural narrative that talks in a really curious and inaccurate way about creativity.

So building a business is wildly creative. It's one of the most creative things that I've ever done. And I've identified as a creator for basically my entire adult life. So I see them as together and catastrophically, things like art school and historically places where we learned the traditional creativity, not only do they do us as wrong by not helping us understand how to make a living in a life doing what we love, but they've programmed us that those things are whimsical and it's risky or even naive to pursue the things that you love. And, you know, that's the macro. We're going to talk about my book here, my new book called Creative Calling.

that's the macro on the book is that the thing that we're creating every day, whether it's a business, a real estate business, or whether it's a picture of photograph we take on our phone of our kids or the sunset or whatever, that's the same exact muscle that helps us create our life. It's just creativity at a different scale. And to me, the entrepreneurship and building a business and making a living and a life doing what you love, whether that's photography, design, real estate, or anything is like that's something that our culture doesn't do a good job of putting those two things together so I thought I'd take a stab at it nice what is it that you like best about what you do it provides a backdrop of meaning for my life the fact that I get to wake up and spend my time

doing the things that I want to do and it's not always easy it's not always fun but I do call it effortless hard work and it's the hardest work I've ever done but this idea that when you're doing the thing that you're supposed to be doing, that you're put on this planet to do, and you know it because you've listened to that heart, that intuition that we all have inside us, that that's our highest colony, right? Pursuing the things that we are supposed to be doing in life and thinking about it and doing it with the people that we love or that we care deeply about or in an industry that we feel like we can have impact, that is a very, very rich and fortunate place to be. And the reality is we're told that that's hard and impossible and whimsical and naive and maybe even dangerous.

And the reality is it's just the opposite. It's the most practical thing that we could possibly do. So the fact that I get to wake up every day. And again, it's not always hard. It's not always easy and not always fun, but to get to spend, I mean, time is our one resource, right? And to choose spending it on the things that we care about, that's to me a rich life and a fulfilled life. And so I get to, that I get to do that on a daily basis. And it wasn't easy, like, right?

It didn't come out like that. I did all the things that culture tells us to do. I spent, you know, I went to huge debt for student loans. I did all the things that everyone else told me was going to make me happy. And in the end, it's that little, listen to that little whisper inside of us that we all have. And rekindling that and cherishing it and then fostering it, it's building like a muscle in the same way that you'd go to work out. that's the same muscle that helps us create the life that we want, listening to that and fine-tuning our creative muscle.

Right. So for people that, knowing what you know now, and for people that are out there that have that little whisper, I think we all have that little whisper somewhere, and they've been thinking about it, maybe have reached a point in life where they have some regrets about not pursuing it. What would the practical advice? Is there a one first step or a three-step process to get started down that road to where you can have that fulfilling, enriched life that you've been able to capture.

Yeah, sure. Well, I want to make sure not to gold plate it, right? Again, it wasn't easy and always blissful, but we all have this capacity. And this is, I think, it's really important to, like, that little eight-year-old you that wanted to do the thing. And, you know, you started getting bombarded about then when you started having your own ideas about what you could do and what you could be, whether it was an astronaut, a veterinarian, a fireman or woman, anything. Like, the universe starts to tell you otherwise, and it looks at this

as an opportunity to program you. So that it's hard and that you haven't done it yet, or that you are starting and you're scared. All these things are all supernatural. So I want to frame it with that. Now, that being said, I've had the good fortune of making so many mistakes. I mean, going hundreds of thousands of dollars into dead and, you know, 10 years down somebody else's path where regret and angst and angst and frustration and sadness has, it had gripped me at different times to be able to have lived that and like figured it out. I come from a lower middle class family. To be fair, I'm white and male and born in America and there's plenty of privilege. So if it was the hardest thing that I've ever done to wrangle that, I want to acknowledge that it's not going to be easy for

anybody. But the reality is that we have the opportunity to do this. So by looking through the lens of my own life, the lives of the, you know, hundreds of people that I've interviewed on my podcast, Chase Jarvis Live and who've taught on Creative Live, these are people like Sir Richard Branson, Brunea Brown, Arna Huffington, Tim Ferriss, Damon John from Shark Tank, Debbie Millman. These are like legendary folks, the airy these folks have been on your show. If you're talking to those, there's this pattern. It's a very simple pattern. And A book is built on a system. The book is called Creative Calling, and it's built around a system that I call idea.

And it's a very repeatable, simple system that I've been able to deconstruct through my own life and talking to so many of my creative and entrepreneurial friends. You have to at first imagine the thing that you want for yourself, right? If you don't start with that, what do you got? And this is where I'm listening to that intuition, because every listener out there, they have something inside of them that they can hear, that calling and they're ignoring it or they're not tapping into it, what if you listen to that and double down, even just as a thought experiment, imagine for yourself something powerful,

whether it's this project in front of you, you know, buying this piece of real estate or imagining, you know, life with capital L that is on your terms. So then design, the system is imagine, design, execute, and amplify. So we talked about the imagine part. We talked about the imagine part, the design part is like you have to design a path to get there, right? You don't get anywhere without a plan. You don't get a house without a plan. You don't arrive at your destination without a map. So you've got to create a simple system. And that's by design. The people's lives that you love and you have on your show and that we aspire to, that was an accident what they accomplished. They had a vision and then they created a plan and they started executing against that plan.

that's the idea part. And then the last part to the system that the book is based on is the A part, which stands for Amplify. And you realize that none of these journeys are alone, right? You didn't start your podcast without looking at the work of others, without being inspired, without the woman who runs the rental counter at the local audio store that you rented your first mic from. It's like it's a community.

And by amplifying the ideas on what we want to see and be in the world, we actually bring other people along with us. And another word for this is sort of developing a community. So the framework, the step-by-step tactics, if you will, are, this is the macro lens on the book, right? This is like the big, repeatable system. And again, it worked whether you're trying to buy this piece of property that's right in front of you or whether you're trying to design the life that, you know, you see wherever you look for inspiring lives.

Nice. and an inspiring description, I think, as well. I'm on Amazon right now. Book comes out September 24th, Creative Calling by Chase Jarvis. I went ahead and got my pre-order in. Nice. Pre-Hatter's matter. Thank you.

You bet. And I encourage anyone listening that has that little whisper in the back of their head. Well, here's the thing. Matt, we've all got it. Yeah, we do. And well, that's why I was telling everybody. That was my way to tell everybody to go get it. Okay.

But we were taught to ignore it. You know, that's the part of the moment is really, or certainly repress it. And imagine the world if we actually tapped into that. And for everyone who's, you know, saying, well, it sounds really interesting, but I got bills to pay. I got X, Y, Z. Just know that you're trading, what you're trading is that the life of that eight-year-old person who has everything before them. And it's not impossible. It's hard, but it's not impossible.

and the book aims to be a roadmap to help you get there. You know, just on that, I don't want to turn this to a morbid direction, but I've, fortunately, I've had to, I've been to a few funerals in the last couple years. Oh, I'm so sure.

And it's amazing how, uh, you always have that epiphany on how life is so short, right? It's, and you get there and all the things that you didn't do that you wanted to do or meant to do or the things that you dreamed about. So I think this is an important book.

I'm glad that we were able to connect. Um, I was looking at your YouTube. page and you've been doing this for a really long time and it's a rather new venture from me. But I see all the people that you've interviewed and a lot of, you know, very accomplished people. We already mentioned a few of those people. What would you say out of all those interviews, which person did you learn the most from and how did it impact you?

Wow. This is not a softball. No, we're done with those. I'm going to 96-mile-hour slider at me here. It was what I was thinking. I was just like, wow,

if you had the chance to talk to all of those people, which one that really had the biggest impact on you? Well, this is both a way to slide out of the question gracefully,

but also the facts, which is there's just a little piece of a lot of philosophies of these people that have helped me. And so it's impossible to say that one person, did X because what I really end up doing, and this is sort of like a little bit of a metaphor for life, right?

We walk around borrowing bits of inspiration and wisdom from everyone. And, you know, that's why we're social animals. We, you know, even if you're an introvert or extrovert, it doesn't matter. It's we find meaning in life through connecting with others. And for me to be able to sit down and talk to the world's top performers, the top creators and entrepreneurs, the billionaires, the Pulitzer,

Grammy, Emmy, whatever winners, the thread that is, there's a couple of consistent threads and morning your team and designing

your day is very, very popular. And, you know, the most well-known folks for that or folks like Tim Ferriss, for example, calls himself,

the human guinea pig, he's been a friend for a long time, but, you know, that's very, very inspiring. And I feel like there,

that was a, a threat across a lot of a lot of folks just in like taking your day with intention and then there's the how do you understand what you're put on this planet to do that comes from like sir richard for example he you know richard branson is arguably one of the most iconic entrepreneurs in the history of the universe right and the fact that he's got more than 400 companies and that he's so um he's so clear about what he see, how he sees the world as just a world of abundance and opportunity. And there's a whole litany of a whole bunch of people that I think capture a lot of that. And then how do you do that? To me, folks like, you know, Brunay Brown and Debbie Milman,

hugely inspirational around doing that when Brunay has a way of talking about it. Like you should approach this with a strong back and a soft front. So you've got to have a spine to do the things that you want to do in the world. But what uses it if you approach the world hardened and it's like glue when you leave the cap off it? Like that's not a useful thing, you know. But what is useful is openness, connectedness, vulnerability, empathy, managing the shame that culture lays on us. So there's a whole group of folks that are that do that. And then then I think there's other folks that are that I think is probably maybe the most common trade across the couple hundred people that I've had on the show.

And that is that everybody thought that it was not doable. Everyone was told that culture programmed every one of these people. Even, you know, even folks like Gary, who had every, you know, he talks about it being an immigrant and his parents, and the same with Ariana Huffington, being an immigrant and having, you know, being programmed about how hard that was going to be, that there's some kernel inside of us that has the power to do these things that we want to do in life in spite of all of the, you can't do it, it's too hard. And in spite of this thing, which is the brain, it's not your brain. brain. This is the brain. This is a multi-million year old organ that's designed to keep you alive, not happy. So in the face of all that external pressure and the inside, our biology telling us that we should keep an eye out for all the saber-toothed tigers that are running around here. In spite of all that, it's doable. And that's what the book really tries to sort of put its arms around that

and give you a path to achieve it. Nice. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for sharing what you're sharing because, you know, I frequently have people that aren't real estate investors or that's not their focus at least. But, Matt, that's brilliant because that's where the best things in life are from outside your industry, right? And that's, you know, that's why I couldn't answer. Like, who's the best real estate investor? You're like, wait a minute, all the places that have been created, that have created the

most, the people that have created the most value on your show are not even from real estate. Yeah. It's, you know, it's taking bits and pieces of, you know, of your life, the lives of the guests that you've had to create a narrative arc that helps you understand it all. And that's, again, that's the same approach that I took to the book, you know, end of my life for sure. Yep. You know, one person's art may be photography and other persons art may be real estate. For sure. But we all have this brain that helps us create this design and, you know, factor in these ideas and how to execute them.

And so thank you for sharing that because that's. This is why you're here. Is just that I can show people how to write a purchase agreement out. You know what I mean? I can do that in 10 minutes. But why they don't get up and do it every single day to really pursue or capture what they're after is like that's what we're talking about now, right? The why.

It's the why. And again, we're taught that these desires, this passion that we have, whether it's for real estate or anything, that pursuing them is sort of really, it's to be skeptical around like this thing that you're tugging on your heartstrings and you know the reality is it's just it's not it's just it's just it's the most practical thing that we could do because imagine if we all did that imagine if we all were pursuing the thing that we were put on this planet to do whether it's real estate or professional sports or needlepoint or being a farmer and going to the farmer's market and it's on your apples like all these things like the world needs it and if you were doing those things every day with your time you how would it feel to wake up every day? That's powerful. Amen. For sure. So having conducted so many interviews and being the interviewer, and now you're here as the interviewee, what do you wish you could talk about more that you don't get the opportunity to? Might freak you out a little bit. You're okay with this? No, Grant was on, and boy, I think you

freaked everybody out. Okay. I'll tell you if you top him or not. Okay. To me, it's, mindset. It's the power of crafting your thoughts. Again, I was alluding to it earlier that this brain that we have, first of all, our wisdom and our like our process is not just a brain function. It's a whole body function, right? We have this thing called intuition. We have a gut feeling that we've largely been taught to ignore. We're like, oh, pay attention to the rational mind. This thing is, It's pretty good, but it's not ideal. And it certainly can't do the whole job. But they know about rational thought is it's ultimately kind of slow and it's imperfect and it's loaded with bias.

But the combination of your rational thought, your brain and the wisdom that you have in your body, any time you walk, like, that person's a little, I don't know, something's wrong. Something's off there. And when you didn't pay attention to that intuition, what happened? Sometimes you get proven wrong. But there's some piece of us. And the reality, science, and I think it's pretty early science, so I don't want to start quoting journals here,

and that'd be a little bit weird. But it's like this intuition that we're taught to ignore. It's the same intuition that told you that you couldn't be an astronaut. And we're taught to ignore it. We can program against that. And culture is, it serves culture very nicely. And there's no, to get me, you know, to be clear, like there's no puppet master saying,

oh, I got to get everybody to do a nine to four. five job and a like that's not what I mean here. It's just convenient and that's what culture rallies around a very narrow set of ideas and a very very narrow set of human experiences. Average experience, average life, average. And if you want to live outside of that, if you want to find out what's possible for you as a human and tap into your true calling despite it not being in the mainstream, it takes effort. And the biggest way that I see people with is they don't have the right mindset. And it's a thing that no one really wants to talk about because it's a little bit weird. The cool thing, though, is it's very programmable.

And that's part of, and there's a big part on mindset in the book. And it doesn't have to, it's not weird. You don't have to go to, you know, you don't have to eat mushrooms and walk into the desert. You don't have to do, you know, you don't have to do the things that have you've been told to do. It's really about a handful of very simple practices. Ultimately, it's about taking care of this thing and treating it like you're the boss of it rather than it's the boss of you. So it's very programmable. and it often gets in the way of people pursuing their true calling

and pursuing what they're supposed to be doing with their lives. And I'll just, rather than go into the weeds, like that's the thing I don't get asked about enough, that for all the top performers I've ever known, professional athletes, like whatever spectrum and whatever field, mindset has been a huge part of their success. Right, right. You know, I was just having a conversation with my wife the other day

and we're talking, I'm going to be 50 next month. Two days after the book, creative calling comes out. So make sure you go get that book. And we're talking about like our monumental birthdays, like when you hit 20 and you hit 30 and you hit 40, those decades. And 20, I felt like I knew everything. In 30, I realized I didn't know anything. And then 40, I realized like, what an idiot I've been.

But now I know a little something. I've got confidence. I've got this. And you know, my one was 50. you know, what do you maybe bring this up? Now that I'm being 50, like I'm seeing what that is, is you brought this word up intuition. My intuition is always right.

Always. It's always right. And I think of that, wow, if I would have trusted that in my 30s, what a difference it could have made. So anyone listening, that's, do not have to wait until your 50 to learn that you're going to trust your intuition and it's going to be right. And, you know, that's the thing that I want to get through real quick is this, again, I'm talking about creativity.

It's not about art. That is a great way to work on the muscle because the same muscle that helps you take pictures every day that helps you navigate that purchase and sale agreement or assemble the properties in such a way that you can build the thing that you want to build, like that creativity. It's the same exact muscle that doing that small daily stuff. It's the same muscle that helps you create the life that you want in the macro. It's just creativity at a different scale. And a huge piece of this, if you do not listen to your intuition,

you're going to spend a lot of time pursuing other people's goals for you. A lot of time, whether it's 10, 20, 30 years. And that's where that vicious, horrible thing we call regret manifests itself. And by contrast, if it's not that hard to train yourself to listen to that intuition and then to act on it in a very productive way, that's what this book is about. And to me, to hear you tell the story of being 50 and realizing that, oh my gosh, how much opportunity.

Well, first of all, that you found your thing and listened to it is huge, because not everybody gets that. In fact, most people don't. And for the folks that do and realize how powerful that is, what price could that possibly come at? There's no higher price. that is the number one regret of the dead and dying is they set out to please other people and they did so at their own expense and I'm not talking about please like as in like not do

work and give back I'm talking about pursuing you know how do you spend your time like that's what we've all got right it's their one currency and how you spend it and what you work on and who you work with and why you do it matters most Yep. I've heard that the last dying thoughts from multiple sources. And boy, you hear that enough, that'll scare you straight. For real. For real. You mentioned your funerals and I'm like, it's no joke. I'm really sorry that you had to do that. And that's a thing that we all as humans, this social animals, we're going to sit through a bunch of those funerals. and it's a very sobering thought when you're sitting there

and you can take action and you can shift gears today or September 24th. That's right. All right, let's leave it there. Talking to Chase Jarvis today, been very gracious with this time to come and talk to us here at the Epic Real Estate Investing Show. The book, Creative Calling,

establish a daily practice infuse your world with meaning and succeed in work and life, hits the shell, September 24th, go get your pre-order in. It helps the world learn as it gets more exposure on Amazon, is how that whole machine works. And anyone that comes to bless us with their presence here at the show, we certainly want to give back to them as well. So thank you, Chase, very much for being here. I had a good time. It was a pleasure. Let's do this again. Appreciate it, Matt. Great show. It's a pleasure to be on it. And keep doing what you do, man.

Thanks, partner. All righty. God bless to your success. I am Matt Terrio, live in the dream. Take care. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. You didn't know, home for us, we got the cash flow. This podcast is a part of the C-suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.