Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Unlocking Your Creative Potential | Photographer, Chase Jarvis

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

This week’s conversation is with Chase Jarvis, an award-winning artist, entrepreneur, and one of the most influential photographers of the past 20 years.His expansive work ranges from shooting advertising campaigns for companies like Apple, Nike, and Red Bull; to working with athletes like Serena Williams and Tony Hawk, to collaborating with renowned icons like Lady Gaga and Richard Branson.In 2013 Chase contributed to the Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times story, Snowfall, and in 2014, earned an Emmy nomination for his documentary, Portrait of a City.He also created Best Camera – the first photo app to share images to social networks, and is the founder of CreativeLive, where more than 10 million students learn photography, video, design, music and business from the world’s top creators and entrepreneurs.He also has a new book, Creative Calling, which debuted as an instant National Best Seller.I think you can probably infer what this conversation is about – it’s about creativity and more specifically how you can unlock your creative potential._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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there's a part of you, a light switch that flicks on and says, wow, I actually learned something really valuable. I got comfortable being uncomfortable, and now I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. And I just got to say 2020 already is incredibly exciting. And so I hope it is for you. And if you're on the other side of it and you're struggling, I hope you're finding some peace in knowing that all things are temporary. So that being said, the whole idea behind these conversations is to learn, but to learn from

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slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Okay. This week's conversation is with Chase Jarvis. He's an award-winning artist. He's also a legit entrepreneur who's built something really special. And he's one of the most influential photographers over the past 20 years. And he's got a ridiculous body of work that ranges from shooting advertising campaigns, all the slick, glossy stuff that moves the zeitgeist and culture, stuff like Apple and Nike and Red Bull, to him down in the trenches working with athletes like Serena and Tony Hawk and collaborating with massive icons like Lady Gaga and Richard Branson. And so then back in 2013, Chase contributed to the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times story Snowfall.

And in 2014, he earned an Emmy nomination for his documentary Portrait of a City. I mean, what a cool body of work. And on the entrepreneurial side, he created Best Camera, which was the first photo app to share images to social networks. And in a much, I don't know, more disruptive way, he's the founder of Creative Live, where more than 10 million students learn photography, video, design, music, business from the world's top creators and entrepreneurs. And he was radically disruptive in how he did this. And he's made a dent in the creative world, in the teaching world, and it's awesome. And he also has a new book, Creative Calling, which debuted as an instant national bestseller.

And I think that you can probably infer from what this conversation is about. It's really about creativity, but more specifically, how you can unlock and unscrew and untwist and unravel your creative potential. And we really talk about what that means. Like we all have it. We all have that ability to express artistically, however, it requires some work. And so we get into that in this conversation. So with that, let's jump right into this conversation with Chase Jarvis. Chase, how you doing? I'm happy. I'm happy to be on the show. Thanks for having me. Oh. Cool. What a good vibe to start with. Where are you in the world? I am up about an hour north of Seattle at a little beach called Madrona Beach. It's a little cabin, a little shag carpet, wood panel cabin that's been in my family for,

well, the dirt has been in my family, get this, for 100 years. Look at that. My great aunt's mom bought it for 10 bucks and i'm looking out at the pacific ocean come on were they pioneer spirits or like how did they get to the coast that yeah evoke an image of a covered wagon yeah settlers um no but it wasn't that far from that they used to take i think it was a Model A Ford it would take them nine hours to get here from Seattle and then they had to hike the last mile over this ridge down into the beach area now now it takes uh you know 55 minutes from my house in Seattle to get here via car

but uh it's been in the been in the family for like I said just a couple years shy of 100. And this is where I do my best relaxing and also my best thinking. So I'm more the former over the course of the weekend here, but I'm super happy to be on the show. I'm in a very relaxed place and excited to focus on our conversation. That's what's up. And you know, it's funny is that, you know, we know many of the same folks from the circles that we travel in. We've never met. I lit, I work in Seattle and we haven't been able to pin each other down to meet in person. So thank God for the advent of technology to be able to do this with you. And so I'm stoked. I'm in LA today and weather's perfect. It's amazing. And so we're both in a good spot.

And so let's start really quickly. So this conversation is going to hub around your insights, your framework about how you've become and done what you do. And more importantly, it's about like how you've organized your inner life to go explore. And your world is really around, as I understand, at least correct me if I'm off here is about creativity. And so much so that you were infused with a brand that as a founder that many people would recognize in creative live. And so as an online technology for learning, and can you just quickly talk about that? Or of course, correct me wherever I had some mistakes in there. Yeah, I'm happy to to it's something i'm really proud of uh and it also like most things in life was

very far from a straight line right it was all over the place as so many of the best things and in our lives are um i think the story it goes way back to my childhood when i i saw myself as as creative just through as a normal course of operating as a kid and then i came to find out that well creativity is this thing that is not very well understood by pop culture and certainly not um the culture that i was raised in and even you know just you can see where it stems out of the 50s and 60s and 70s, where it was sort of the beaver cleaver. Like, you know, you go to this school and you get this job and you get this get this degree, get this job. And then you go to work for 40 years, get the gold watch. And, you know, I didn't understand how creativity's place sat in that universe.

Fast forward a number of years and i i through the death of my grandfather was given this camera and it unlocked a whole world for me where i was i was sort of like wait a minute this this creativity stuff it's not just like it's not just painting and and theater and movies and popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners like we're taught in in school this is like one of nature's or one of the human beings most powerful forces so i managed to tap into that create a living and a life for myself as a photographer and that's what we are in you know keep talking about where our lives intersect and you lot of action sports photography. So we crossed paths there. As you were working with high-performance athletes, I was photographing them.

I know. That is funny that we've been working in the same places, but I don't know if it's funny. The same people and the same brands. At any rate, my world ultimately was shaped by unlocking what I would consider my creative potential, which really, um, started outlining or dictating or helping shape my, my human potential. And I was like, God, man, what if couldn't, what if there's a way that I can help other people experience what has been this massive unlock for me. And I think it really does tip into human performance, not just, not just like

on the sports level, but intellectually that creativity is more than just art. It's creativity. The capital C is like solving massive human problems. And so I started tinkering around with sharing information online in the early 2000s, built up a large social following. And then I thought, what if we could formalize this and make it a place where amazing people came to teach and that the world could tap into these experts brains. And so in 2010, did a little experiment with a photography class that I brought a friend of mine in to teach and, and we were going to make this class available for free online. Anybody could watch it.

And if you wanted to own it and watch it over and over again, then you could buy it. And we launched it. And 50,000 people attended this photography class. And that's sort of – we realized we had a tiger by the tail when our first class had that many people in it. And, yeah, that was class one. And now here we are about 10 years later, we've done nearly 3000 classes, um, with, you know, anything in photography, design, filmmaking, entrepreneurship names like Sir Richard Branson, Tim Ferriss, Brene Brown, you know, many of the world's top thinkers are, this is where they go

to teach and share their knowledge. And how did you get 50,000 out the gate? What'd you do for that? Like, was that part of your community? Was it strong at that point? It was the community that I built from just sharing ideas online in a pre-YouTube world. I started telling stories about that earlier part of my life that I was sharing with you just a moment ago about unlocking my own creative potential and understanding that creativity wasn't just art. thing that separates humans from all the other species on the planet and sort of documenting my journey not just as a well primarily as a photographer but in the larger sense as someone who identified overtly as wait a minute i'm i'm a creator and i not only can i create photos and businesses but i'm actually creating my life in the process of understanding, you know, understanding this thing called creativity. And, uh, so I built a community from sharing online, my journey, and, you know,

probably had about a million monthly readers of my blog. And so when we launched creative live, it was really easy for me just to say, Hey, everybody in my community, I'm doing this thing. And, uh, and voila, it was the community wanted to learn and wanted to learn from someone beyond just me. And so I, I sort of plugged them into that. And as I said, we were off to the races. Golly. Okay. I, I love, I want to get to the, yeah, I want to, I get how you got there, right. Is that the, you've been on this authentic journey about understanding the applications of creativity, using yourself as, you know, tier zero ground, ground zero experiment, sharing those insights and what you're doing, building a community of people that were vibing around this word and this lifestyle of creativity. I think I understand that I do want to get to some of the business stuff about how you built it, but let's, let's first go backwards because, um, when I say backwards, like earlier days, when you were describing, when your grandfather passed away and he gave you a camera, what was the relationship like with your

grandfather? And maybe that's a red herring and that's not where this conversation needs to go. But like, definitely I want to understand your relationship with your camera. But what was your family dynamic like? Sure. This is, I love this. I've got some questions for you on the psychology part of this. I don't even know the answer to these questions, but we'll go there. We'll see what turns out.

Okay, hold on. On that note, what does it take for you? Like even in this moment to go to a place that you haven't maybe talked about or gone, like what's happening for you right now in this conversation? Um, enthusiasm, you know, I've, I've got a new book out called creative calling. And the fun part about having a new book is that you get to talk about the thing that you've been working on for years. Um, and that, but the flip side of that same coin is that so much press just looks and feels the same and honestly that's why i was really excited to come on your show because i i know your show as you don't just trot out the the headlines you know actual conversation

um so but and so then if i drill in one more, like double click into it, like when you're like, Oh, okay, we're gonna go somewhere about my grandfather, like in places I haven't been, where does that happen in your body? And what happens in your body? Oh, very much a chest feeling for me very much. To me, I'm a huge, huge advocate. And I read at length about intuition. And we're taught very largely in our culture that rational thought that the mind is, you know, this is where all the default thinking and doing and all that stuff happens. looked into it and been oriented toward more toward creativity and intuition over the past chapter of my life, I realized that rational thought, while it may be powerful, is also lagmoth bias. It's reasonably slow. And it has a very narrow lens on what's possible because the brain is designed not to keep you happy or make you feel fulfilled, but it's designed to keep you

alive. So you've got, I call it the brain rather than your brain, because it's designed to keep you alive so you've got I call it the brain rather than your brain because it's just an organ and you need to learn how to program that and to me part of the lens through which we should program it is through our intuition and more for our body knowledge and I think we're early on in the science that understands how memories and thoughts and all that can be stored in the body at a cellular level that's more what i think of intuition and so when you ask the question for me it was very much like oh cool we're going somewhere and it was more it was heart chest body rather than head and i think you know that's i don't know what the what the – maybe you can tell me what's going on psychologically there.

Well, no. Like I think the next question will get to it, which is like when you feel that thing, what do you do with it? Oh, there's a – and I think this is a very much a learned behavior and that's part of what the book is about and part about what my shtick is as a as a person who looks at the world through our ability to create the living the life the experience that we want from this one trip around and that is like you've got to trust this part of you very much a behavior. It's not taught in our culture to trust our intuition. Intuition is thought to be flimsy and whimsical and naive. And I'm just the opposite. So when what happens in my body is a very comfortable place where I'm getting asked

about a thing that I've learned to hone and to trust. And, and there's an excitement of getting to share this with someone in their community who actually takes interest and understands this. There's a, a huge piece of the, you know, of my book about creativity is understanding this more, not necessarily as a map because our intuition, what we're sold in culture is a map, right? You start here, you take these, this route, and then you end here. And the funny thing is, the irony is that nobody's map ever looked, no one's experience ever, ever maps to the map that we were sold. Even if it was like, oh, you got to go to college and then you get this degree and then you get this job. Like it doesn't happen like that. That's, that's what we're sold. But rather what actually happens, the experience, if you

deconstruct the lives of the world's most fulfilled people, top performers is that they are, there's a compass and this compass that is, is very, it's, it orients, if we know how to listen to it, it orients towards our true north and the thing about a compass is that you don't have the whole journey right you just got an arrow and this is how you know intuition sort of comes into being in not just a life scale in the macro but in this moment right here with you like I don't know where this conversation is going, but I'm willing to explore it with you because I've learned to trust this piece of me, which I think is extraordinarily powerful. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous.

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and use the code findingmastery20 at felixgray.com for 20 off i'm nodding my head in a lot of different a lot of different moments of what you're talking about because if we work backwards the ultimately the ability to trust oneself to be able to adjust to the unfolding unpredictable unknown is the mark of somebody who has developed an inner life that can stand in the face of a rugged, challenging, unpredictable world. And how do we develop that sense of trust? Well, we got to do difficult shit. And I don't mean get your heart rate up and hold yourself on the side of a cliff through by your fingernails. And like, I'm not talking about that necessarily. Like we can use our environment and our environment can be, um, help shape moments for us to understand and explore our inner life, which are how do our

thoughts and our embodied cognition, how does our brain and our body speak and relate to our mind? Like, how does this thing work? And the difficult work is the emotional work. It's not the mental exercise. What is that? Mentally hard work? I don't even know what that is. And I'm a psychologist. It's not mentally hard work. It's the emotional work of being on the edges of comfort. And so that's why I was asking when you felt your body and what maybe there was like, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but just knowing basic physiology, it was like, maybe it was up in your chest. That means maybe there was a breathing change, a quick little breathing, maybe increased, or maybe it moved up in your chest, or maybe

there's a heart thump, or maybe there was a temperature change. I don't know. Or maybe it was a constriction, like there was some tension, but something, you had a physiological thing. And then what I hear you saying is you said, okay, I am aware of intuition, how my body speaks to me, and I'm going to stay in it. I'm not going to shut it off and say, oh shit, someone's going to find out that I'm nervous or my body's activated or, or that you say oh there it is so it's awareness without judgment and then you follow it yeah okay let me flip the script here for a second and ask you some more questions yeah like as a master psychologist oh oh oh we got labels now like you you are also entering we've gotten there's no rehearsal that's happened right we

just agreed that we were going to get on the phone and record it and share our experiences with anyone who wanted to listen and so you know how how do you what's the lens that you look at this moment to me this is we're co-creating this moment this is where you know you're basing i think the lens that that I'm understanding you're looking at this through is psychology and physiology and all of the areas that you're mastering and have studied. I'm thinking about like we're co-creating this moment and this is there's a certain amount of trust.

I'm willing to go. There's a certain amount of trust. You're willing to go there. But what's the lens that you're looking at? Yeah, cool. OK, so I want to share two things with you. One is, and I'll back into the lens that I'm looking through it with. And so you wouldn't know this because we don't know each other, but my philosophy, and I spent a lot of time trying to understand like, what is my true

North and what is the underlining philosophy that's going to help guide my thoughts, my words, and my actions when my compass is attuned. So I'm looking for true north as well. Back to one of your points that you're making. But to do that, because I know what north is, but I don't know the next step and what step I need to take. But I do know that I have to have a philosophy. And that philosophy is going to guide my thoughts, my words, and my next step, my actions. So when I tell you my philosophy, I think you're going to go, oh, okay. Listen, I've spent a lot of time trying to sort this out. And it's going to sound easy and eloquent, but it's spent many years in the woodshed trying to sort it out. So here, here it is.

Every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece. Okay. So I, I struggled with the word create, not it's one of my most important words. And matter of fact, it's the name, part of the name of the company that I just recently built with Coach Carol. It's called Compete to Create, Create a Living Masterpiece. But I struggle with the word because I didn't, I wasn't sure if I, like what was right, co-create or create? Because I believe that this is a co-creation process and there's a spiritual dimension to that and then a human to human dimension and a human to and with nature element. Because we're not in this alone. No one does it alone. No one does the extraordinary or the discovery process purely alone. There are elements that are quiet and reflective. So to get to your point, like how am I doing it? Like I'm all about getting into the unknown and my team, I drive them nuts because I don't want to prepare. I want to know where you've been, what you're doing, but I don't, I don't want to over-prepare and try to find like, oh, I'm going to go this way and that way in this conversation. I've got 12 questions. I want to understand. really like this naive exploratory approach and um i do love when my heart rate gets up and we can and we can get into uncharted you know maps and you know there is no map i i don't know

at least i know i've got like i've got breadcrumbs that i've left behind and so do you right creative lives a pretty big breadcrumb by the way way. That's pretty significant. To me, there's just this amazing overlap between our two worlds and that we're coming. And to me, this is part of what I'd aimed to capture in the book, honestly, because this has been elusive for a long time. I'm coming at this, my experiences, wait a minute, when I realized that I could take pictures every day and write a thousand blog posts on my blog and create a business in creative live and that wait a minute though these are all like these are activities that people don't necessarily think of as creative but here I am I there's so much overlap

between I also have a podcast where I've had all these you know the world's top performers on there I mentioned creative live so I get this experience of having what I'm thinking and my personal philosophy overlap with so many in this, it's happening right here with us, right? That, um, the fact that, that your company is called compete to create, like when we really distill it, creativity is so fundamental. Yeah. Like I'm looking at it as where I'm creating my day from the moment that I wake up.

I decided to go out and get in the 51 degree water and shock my system such that, make it uncomfortable and make it realize that I'm the boss of my psychology and I'm going to tell it to get uncomfortable for a second, even if it's in a physiological way, getting into super cold water, and then I'm gonna come in and create breakfast,

and spend some time visualizing, and et cetera, et cetera. And to then flip the script and hear how you were coming at this, our conversation, that you don't know where it's gonna go, and that's actually part of what gets you exciting or excited yeah this is the experience that i have from so many of my friends that are you know amazing performers is that there's this element of making stuff happen like i i crack up when people like oh you're the founder of creative lives and i'm I'm always boggled, like, founder? I didn't find anything.

I built that shit. Yeah, right. It's bizarre. It's like, or just finding fulfillment. No, no, no, no. This is not something that we stumble upon in the woods and like, oh, here's a bucket of fulfillment. You know, you have to actually you're putting all of your faculties at work to work in order to make this beautiful, messy thing that we call happiness or fulfillment or connection or whatever the word you want to use, that is such an active process that, to me, that's where, again, I then sort of distill it down to, oh, it was created. You can talk about making, or doing, or all those things, but I like to think of it as creating,

because it helps sew my personal narrative and the lens that I see the world through into one more tidy package. Yeah. And so Albert Bandora is one of the great psychologists of our era. And he came along and disrupted the field saying, you know, and the field was heavily bent towards, well, there's a stimulus and you respond to it. And then that creates your neural patterns. And then you're more akin and more likely to respond to that stimulus in the same way by strengthening the response to the environment and the stimulus. And he comes along and says, whoa, hold on now. Wait a minute. We're agents. We have agency in our life. And we are literally, to your language, co-creating and responding to ways of our choice each moment. And yes, there's some habitual patterns that you and I both have and all humans have. But when we're awake and we're aware that we can navigate moment to moment based on either intuition or

based on compass or a combination of both. And so, you know, Bandora was like a massive influence for me on this discovery process of figuring out like, how do I really want to do my life? And what are the ways that I can influence my internal skills to be able to navigate? Well, I love it. Yeah, it's really good. It is. It's so, it's like it's like um it feels i don't know it feels like a system to me and and for a i'm doing air quotes here a creative or someone who identifies as creative i think there's this label that that means we're you know we're sort of running around in the woods with no clothes on looking at the stars and i'm actually a really

structured thinker you know my background i bailed on a phd in philosophy part way through because it wasn't i didn't feel like it was delivering on the thing that i thought it was going to deliver on and and so this idea of a structured approach to something that can be wildly creative to me that's the that's like that is art and science coming together to it's like alchemy for example and it seems like that's the lens that you're coming at this through and probably if you know if if our worlds continue to overlap in the way that i think they will when you when you work with a world-class athlete you deconstruct you know their performance cues and their psychology,

that it's very, it's very similar to that of, you know, any one of the world's top artists or the entrepreneurs. Like there's this, um, this alchemy, this, a series of things that we know we can put our finger on. Then there's a bunch of intangibles and you put that together in some sort of a structure and you just get you you get um you know elite performance you get the highest you know quality output from whatever your individual potential is to me that's very very exciting and that's you know i wanted to take i love that you said like the part of the word that or part of the name of your company that sort of you didn't have a good uh you couldn't pin down was the create part right that's like literally what i'm trying to

do that's part of my life mission is to make that word not scary and just like no no don't worry about it you're creating machine you're constantly choosing if you look at it as free will or if you look at it as um as just a way to go about the world, go about your day, go about your, ultimately your life. I wanted to draw that, you know, put my arms around something bigger, this creativity with the capital C that I keep talking about. And that, you know, that means that the book that my life is not just for people who identify. Sure. If you identify as a creator, this is going to be helpful. It's going to accelerate everything you do but there's this part there's this um pool of humans who i would put you in that pool like i understand enough about creativity to use the word i also

don't understand enough to be sort of trepidatious about how to, how to couch my sort of quote creative instincts. And, and I think if we can make a bigger pie and make that word less scary, that that is another way that we can crack into our highest performing best selves. Okay. I love it. So I want to, I want to go underneath the word create for just a minute and understand the skills that you've built to be able to not become accidental in what you're creating. Like, oh, this thing happened, but lack the inability to sustain a creative approach to life. So I want to go underneath and get the skills. And we can use your craft as the laboratory, the working laboratory, or we can use your, um, you know, mastery of self. So there's mastery of self and mastery of craft. And the, the linking of the two

is very special. And I feel bad for the people that are just like, really, I have compassion for those that are just squarely interested in mastery of craft. And most people are not interested in mastery of craft without mastery of self, but people are not interested in mastery of craft without mastery of self but most people are interested in like achievement or success or the substandard to mastery high performance you know so i'd like to i'd like to go underneath and under and you take it either way mastery of craft or mastery of self but what are the skills that you have and that you're working on continuing to refine so that you can sustain a creative approach to life or craft very very thoughtful and powerful question um in order well i love

the relationships i'm gonna i'm gonna first sort of trot this trot this out which is i actually don't believe that you can master yourself until you master some craft, because what this is a personal belief that I learned through experience. And because you don't actually understand the concept of mastery until you've tapped into it. And so to go right to mastery of self without a vehicle through which to get there, I don't know how, I don't know how one does that. Um, because there's not enough tactile stuff to see the results play out. That's just, that's just a lens that I'm going to put on it. But if, if we leave that out there for a second and just know that that's where I'm going and then get to your question about skills, I think if you have to ask what mastery feels like, I don't think you've mastered anything. And I hope that for someone right now that is listening, they're like, oh, man, that's a bummer.

Chase just sort of turned me off. Because here's the flip side of the same coin is that means that you have like the best stuff in front of you, which is the opportunity to master something. And I'm an advocate of, of mastering a craft, going back to your initial question. And in fact, it's the best way and the only way to get to mastery like this, this capital M mastery. Well, when you look at someone who's totally world-class at something, and it doesn't have to be a big thing. It doesn't have to be is a billionaire business tycoon, or is a, you know, one of the world's best surgeons or is one of the world's top guitar

players. It doesn't have to be. It can be something you can master, something that is small, a personal domain for you. But when you've mastered something, you know it. And people ask me, well, when, like, I am a master in photography. Both I can say that word and not even bat an eyelash because I've done thousands of shoots under immense amount of financial pressure, um, um, in the moment pressure with huge brands and a lot riding on this. And

you've got to thread the needle. And what a master does something, the clues that you have around mastery are so powerful at informing other areas of your life. That is why you see someone, let's take someone, I don't know if you know, Tim Ferriss very well. He's a dear friend of mine. And he's, he wrote the, you know, he's got like five or six number one New York times bestsellers originally before our work week. And then he's gone on, he's one of the top five or 10 podcasts in the world. So Tim is a master of, he's learned how he learns. And the guy has been like a world champion in salsa dancing, a world champion in, you know, some form of judo he's written five New York Times best-selling books he's got television shows he's done like you

start to see this with someone who has uncorked what I think is their own lens on how to master something the cool thing is you get to then lift and stamp that into other areas so if we now, so if we pinned one thing to the map, to our, uh, our, our whiteboard here, our cork board, I just pinned another thing, which is mastery is when you've mastered something, you can master a lot of things. Now let's go back to your very initial question, which were the skills to me, the skills become, um, become, they're ultimately very, very transferable, which is what is it that, you know, what are the top handful of things that I need to know in order to become

very good at something? What are the handful of people that I can meet who can continue to inform, inspire, and unlock new aspects of this discipline or this craft for me? What are the characteristics, the mindset, if you will, of the master? And you start to label big areas where if you just understand 80 or 90% of that area, remember the 80-20 rule, right? Pareto's Law. It's like it takes 20% of the time to learn 80% of information. If you can become so good at understanding, well, let's just use photography since it's my area that I mastered first in my life.

And what I had to realize is that the technical aspect of it was very important, but that's like the walking and chewing gum. Like that is so fundamental and people will spend a lot of time on it. I get that. That's, you know, that's a good area of focus. You have to be good at the craft, but that's just one element of mastery,

right? The next element is working with your subject whether that's a human being an athlete a nature landscape you have to understand weather patterns you have to understand you know there's all this nuance around the subject that you're going to focus on and so understanding the subject is another area if you've got to master your ability to understand shutter speed, aperture, ISO, all these basic elements that go into a good photograph, then you have to master what you're learning, what you're photographing. And then you have to master putting that work out in the world. Right. world, right? How do you get that work seen? And how do you connect the work that you're doing with other people and move them and inspire them and make them feel connected to the work you've done? So there start to be a handful of buckets and let's just fast forward in time and say,

I got good at doing that in photography. And then through my podcast and through creative live, I was like, wait a minute, the people who are world-class thinkers and doers, they've taken this essentially a blueprint for mastery and just, it might be in breakdancing, understanding body mechanics and physiology and balance and strength. And once you understand those things, there's analogous elements of every discipline that when you've mastered one thing, you can more easily master others. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature.

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They've got some great new products I think you'll be interested in. A shampoo, conditioner, and a hair serum. With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding more. It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. I love it. I mean, the clarity that you have of self first, both craft first, right? Understanding that craft and then your

relationship to it and then environment and others as you move outward. And then the third concentric circle is like, how do you actually move that into the world? And that third part is sounds like, you know, why you develop creative live, why you, why you've written creative calling. And so, right. And so I've all often said, this is again, us like nodding our head to each other's thought patterns is that mastery of self through craft, because the craft is the reflection of it's the feedback loop and it's the response system of like, okay, this is the thing that I've felt inside and saw inside. And then I need to translate that out, whether it's a canvas or, you know, an athletic expression. I need to translate it somehow. And then during that

translation, oftentimes it falls short. So then we go back and we've got this feedback loop between what we saw and felt, what we expressed, and then maybe other people need to help us with developing psychological skills or technical skills, and then putting those two together under said conditions to express again. And people that have mastered, they are authentically, artistically expressing what they have inside with high command when they express it. And true masters can do it across, you're going to laugh when I say this, my insight is that true masters can do it across any condition. Holy shit, right? Like it's like, so, so you,

like you're saying you're saying I'm listening to you going hot damn dude. Like how did you get here? Cause I spent, I've spent my whole life trying to sort this out. It sounds like you have too. I have, I have. And I just, to me, this is the cool thing about, um, there's another nice, I would say a tidy metaphor here, which I think we can, I'll lay it out here, and then I'll try and make the macro point. So the micro point is that we both arrived at this particular point of view through very different experiences, right? professed in no years, whether it was, you know, I know you got your PhD in school and, you know, working with high performers and, you know, you, you came at it from a very specific way as we all do. And I came from a very, very, very different, you know, a very different way. Mine was super imperfect. I got 10 years off track pursuing the dreams that everybody else had for me. Um, you know, we're going to play professional soccer,

and then I was going to go to medical school and bailed on that. Then I was going to get this PhD that I just referenced and bailed on that. I was $100,000 in debt, in student loans, and through a very, very messy way that was, I almost died in avalanche. People close to me died, which helped me put a different point of view on my vision and mission for my life. It was a very messy way, but here we are. You got there through your own way, and I got there through my own way. Here we are holding up essentially the same thing, which is mastery. I'm coming at it through creativity.

You're coming at it through science and human performance. And then now to the macro, like to me, that's what is so powerful and exciting about life, the way we're able to live it right now. If you go back 50 years or even through that 20 years there was still a very prescribed path for everything if you wanted to be a fill in the blank it was generally thought that you had to do step a step b step c and step d and you know through whether it's the workforce or through schooling which is very linear largely linear that you had to do this and you had to check in with all these different gatekeepers along the way. And now what I think is wildly

empowering to anyone listening is your way is just fine. That whatever got you to where you are right now, that was critical in building up a set of skills and muscles and mindset that you have now that you can take regardless of where you come from you can take it and apply all the best stuff in you and get anywhere you want to go there's now a million paths and the gatekeepers to 90 of the things that you want to be and do in life are gone thanks to the internet information moving more quickly and um basically a uh a different structure culturally which no one cares how you got to where you are because there you are it's the both a deep philosophical statement as well as a very practical statement and nobody really cares you know there, there's, there are a lot

of people that, um, the arena is scary. And so they'd rather take shots from the outside. And, um, and most people are more consumed with themselves than others and only use others as a reflection to make themselves feel better. You know, that's a classic psychological shit talking, trash talking experience for people and do you have scar tissue from that from other people like saying what what a joke he is i mean i'll go back to my second grade classroom my i remember it like it was yesterday miss kelly i mean and i was you know what do you in second grade if you ask any first or second grade classroom who wants to come to the front of the room and draw me a picture every single head goes up yeah because

we're all born and wired totally creative and the system trains it that system by the school system the employment system culture historically has trained those traits out of us rather than and told us you're creative you're not etc and I'll never forget it was the ice cream social. There were some parent teacher conferences going on. I walked into my second grade class and overheard miss Kelly tell my mom that chase is so much better at sports than he is at art. And right now, if you're thinking, you're like, Oh, poor little eight year old was crushed. No, no. Eight year old me. It was just like, okay, then I'm not doing this art stuff anymore. I'm going to go be a jock. And then I bathed in that identity for 10 plus years,

and it served me very, very, very well. I went to Culloden, a soccer scholarship. I played on the Olympic development soccer team. I did all those things, but it was at the cost. And to your point about the labels that other people place on us, how powerful they are, it was at the cost of my creativity for a really long time. And I had to, through my grandfather dying and giving me my camera and me understanding that, wait a minute, I'd been denying this important part of myself, I had to sort of get back into it and get back onto my own path. And yeah, these labels, they matter. We're, and, and not just words that other people say to us, not just the words that miss Kelly spoke to me or that your teachers tell you or whatever, but the words that we tell ourselves, those are the

most important words in the world. Right. And, and this is why you see this there's a very strong correlation between the world's top athletes the world's top artists the world's top entrepreneurs of a being willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time b being you know very in tune with their intuition and a very powerful mindset that is not – it doesn't necessarily come naturally because it has to be cultivated in order for it to truly be as strong as it needs to in order to fend off the naysayers. And understanding that the naysayers, those are people that are usually – it's not just some guy up in the cheap seats talking smack. It's often our parents, our coaches, our peers, our teachers, our career counselors. These are people that we like and respect and that are close to us. So to have a mindset that can take in the good stuff, reject stuff that's harmful or hurts us or brings us down is a very it's a it's a skill that is cultivated and learned and practiced and the cool thing is if you can learn practice and develop

that skill it is you know again how important is mindset to your work that's center point yeah and so how did you okay so little scar tissue early on, you know, which caused you to create, it sounds like you're super like functional, like, oh, okay, well forget it. I'm going to trust the adult and I'm going to go swing over to sport. You invested identity there, whatever. So not really scar tissue there, but more like a trajectory shifter. But you had a creative something that was important to you. Maybe you didn't water it, and that's why you've come full circle as an adult to water that part of you. But I want to go back to the intersection of your grandfather as we kind of started this conversation. But before we go there, one more thing is how your introspective, self-reflective, self-discovery process is evident to me based on the words that you're thoughtfully choosing and the way that you're shaping the conversation. What is your process of investigating your inner life? And I can make it super simple or keep it wide open.

I can narrow that down if you want or keep it wide open. Let me flail around with it for a second cool we'll watch it in real time watch me flail like a fish here in real time um my what did you what's my method of investigation yeah like the your your self-discovery process i think it's a combination of what we touched on earlier this willingness to go to a place where you haven't been with a certain amount of trust like i think so much of the world um so it's a willingness to do that and then a a method for managing the fear. So it's those, those, those two aspects. And I think what the world teaches us that mistakes are bad. I mean, just, you know, go back to any simple childhood memory where you did something wrong and you made a mistake and the mistake was punished.

And what we're taught is that making mistakes is bad so that we should avoid them. But what we really should be taught, it's not about avoiding mistakes. It's about error recovery. It's about making mistakes and actually being able to recover quickly from them. And to me, that is a, as I'm, again, just we're doing this in real time here. I'm trying to answer them, the big questions of life from, from you. I think that that process for me is, is, is sort of a willingness. And I believe it comes about from under, when you make a mistake and recover quickly, just a couple of times, there's a part of you, a light switch that flicks on and says, wow, I actually learned something really valuable.

I got comfortable being uncomfortable and now I'm better because of it. That experience is just one click greater than the shame that you would otherwise have felt in a world that told you not to make mistakes. Because there's a world where the shame is outpacing the, you know, the other aspect. And at some point when your ability to make a mistake and recover is one click north of the shame that you feel for making a mistake, to me, that's this, oh my God, this is actually, this is the secret. I love that. I love that because that is what you and I were talking about earlier is actually the mechanical part of giving yourself and earning the right to say, I can do difficult things, right? Which is like, oh, I have the ability to respond to whatever happens next in

life, whether I purposely put myself there or some shit happens and like I'm in the middle of it. And I didn't plan, I didn't, you know, whatever. And I'm thinking natural disaster all the way to medical health, to something on the side of a cliff, maybe taking a picture that you purposely put yourself there. You know, whatever the mechanical part is or the experience is that ability to say oh i wait hold on i can adjust because you got lots of frames of reference to do that yeah i'll just go back to 45 minutes ago i was in 50 degree water yeah like i do that every morning and i i have a cold plunge in my home in seattle and here up at the beach i got the ocean, which in the Puget Sound, any time of year it's in the low 50s or high 40s, which is very unpleasant. And there's not one time where I'm like, I can't wait to get in this water.

It's going to be so awesome. It's always like, ah, I got to go get my ass into that freezing cold water because I'm going to get good at being uncomfortable. Maybe there's a, you know, that is another part of that trait. Once you make mistakes, recover quickly, realizing that that's where the good stuff is, that you can actually create a system, a behavioral system for yourself that manufactures that feeling over and over and then you can get more comfortable, etc. I don't know. Okay. that manufactures that feeling over and over, and then you can get more comfortable, etc. I don't know. Okay. And then when you actually make a mistake, can you call up a time when you've made a public mistake or something?

Call up in your memory. It doesn't even need to be concrete for me. But how did you adjust? And maybe there's a story around it. I'd like to go into the center of that mechanical response of how you adjust to the mistake well i think i'm gonna lock into what you're the word i think you used was public i'll go into a very very public failure that was originally um something that was a big success and to me that's part of why i think I'll trot this up, is because on the outset, it looked so successful and then became my biggest public failure was in 2007, I think.

The first phone was enabled with a camera, and it was this terrible little, it was a palm tree, and it was at a 0.3 megapixel camera in this phone. And at the time, I was shooting huge global campaigns for the Nikes and the Apples of the world. And I had literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of cameras. I was testing cameras that were never released I was like on as far on the inside of the camera industry as you can with the best technology available to me and and yet I found this immense joy in taking pictures with my palm trio and again 0.3 megabit i had cameras that were 50 or 100 megapixels that cost a hundred thousand dollars and were literally the best cameras on the planet

and yet i found a surprising amount of joy in this crappy little camera that i was that always was in my pocket wherever i went because it was my phone right and I figured out that that experience of um I popularized a phrase the best camera is the one that's with you because I had always despite having all that gear I'd always as even as a professional I was still missing amazing moments in my life because it was like oh man if i just had my camera with me and i realized very very early on that wait a minute the future of photography is that every human certainly every human in the western world was going to have a camera on them and this i don't know if it's going to happen next year or two years or 10 years from now but this is happening

this is not like a maybe this will happen this is 100 for sure so i leaned into this concept of mobile photography and i was totally ridiculed totally ridiculed by my peers like dude what are you doing posting photos to you know again as this is like early early early twitter early early facebook and and and it started getting interesting to me that the pictures that I was taking with these – and then from a palm tree it went to a flip phone. And the fact that I had the camera started outweighing the poor quality of the photograph. The fact that I could get that rare moment where most people wouldn't have a camera with them. Of course we had cameras at weddings and birthdays and all those things. But it was these in between moments, the moments of life that I was just so compelled by. So fast forward, that was 2006, seven, fast forward to

2009. And Apple had just released, I think it was the second iPhone. And it obviously had a camera and the camera's getting a little better and they had just unlocked the ability for anyone to submit software to the itunes store so that anyone could like create apps basically and i had submitted um what turned out to be the first photo app that allowed you to take a picture and add a cool effect called a filter and then share it directly to these platforms called social media and had my very own social media platform that was based specifically around photography so i launched that thing in 2009 and lo and behold it went to the it was the number one app in the app store it got app of the year

accolades new york times macworld all the wherever those awards happen and it in large part kicked off or helped kick off the global photo sharing craze that we knew now no this is you know 18 months before instagram and it's not like i just did a thing it was the app of the year like so you know millions of downloads and at that time they were you know three four bucks so it was you know creating a bunch of revenue and it was overtly a massive success and I did you know global speaking to where I did the first book of iPhone photos that ever existed and And what's this, the future of photography, you know, it thrust me into the limelight and lo and behold, through a series of weird contracts and my relationship with the developer that I had hired, we don't go into the details here. It's well

chronicled on the internet. Let's just say I got stuck. And so this, what had been my biggest professional success in my life made tons of money put me on the map as a not just as a photographer but as someone who's innovating in the space around technology and i i i basically got locked out of my own code and my company went from being crazy successful to a zero instagram which had been which was virtually a lift and stamp copy of my app which was called best camera and they threw 50 million dollars at it so i'll come valley did and basically out iterated and sold for a billion dollars a year later so yeah and it's like i was it's like i had run three quarters of the marathon and they hadn't even started yet and it was like i i basically i bonked at mile 21 or whenever you bonk and and i went no further and so it took again a year year

and a half for them to try past me across the finish line for the billion bucks. So not only was that a very public failure, but it was emotionally super hard, cost me literally a billion, if you're measuring it. And so I chronicled this in my book, Creative Calling. It's well documented on the internet. And the psychology around that is very difficult. And I truly didn't understand how I processed it or even my ability to process it until years later. But when I do look backwards, not only was it valuable but it was critical absolutely 100 creative live which has now gone on to affect tens of millions of people much larger audience than that not as large as

instagram sadly for me but like i'm very happy with the impact it was creative live was only possible because of this massive failure and to, this is a really important part of our conversation, that I hate books and I hate philosophies that come at it through this lens of perfection. Like if you do perfect thing A, then perfect thing B, and perfect thing C, then you get this perfect life D, E, or F. Versus, like, I've made all these horrible mistakes. Again, I've shared my $100,000 in student debt, 10 years off track doing everything that everybody else wanted. And even in this case, like massive public failure, way out in front, lose not just some money, but a billion dollars publicly. And it was 100%

required for where I am today. And I wouldn't have traded it for anything. Who did you go to? Like, who your go-to during those types of moments? Anybody with a shoulder. Was it tough? It was very tough. Yes, it was tough. No, I don't want to over-dramatize or over-characterize. By the time it actually sold i had developed a reasonably thick skin creative live um was already underway um but as i mentioned earlier

it's really it took me probably a couple of years after it happened to look backwards and connect the dots and see that a, the experience was so valuable. B, it literally enabled, it made creative lives possible. It taught me so much about venture capital and building a business and scaling it and, you know, all those things that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. Um, but to your question, who did I turn to? I turned to the same, um, people that any one of us would turn to, which is our community. And this is one of the reasons why I think community is so critical. Go back to something you said, you know, 30 minutes ago, which is like our nothing happens in a there's no solo show. We don't. No one does the extraordinary alone.

Nothing. Nothing happens alone. And, and so the blunt answer to your question is I turned to my community and these were other entrepreneurs, either these were other creators, people who had grieved something, you know, whether it's a person or a business or a decision that they've made in their life, I basically turned to my community for guidance, for support, for just friendship and connection in a world that can sometimes, especially when you make a big public mistake, you feel isolated and humiliating and frustrating and all of those all of those things that go along with the, you know, big public failure. And if you drill right into it, what was the mistake? I'm not, I'm not sure I totally get the mistake. Yeah.

The mistake, um, is it's a little bit esoteric, but I had just, I had written a contract in such a way with my relationship with the developer that I had hired. Allowed them to basically dictate what the terms of ongoing development of this app were. So again, very narrow, weird, esoteric way to get hamstrung. But essentially the firm that I had hired to build the app, I owned all the code I owned. It was work for hire and owned everything that they'd created. But through a weird series of events, I didn't actually have my hands on the code. It was through their account in Apple. And that was a black box back in 2009 that was very not well not well understood so I didn't actually if I would have done it a different and better way I would have hired

that person they would have been an employee we would have launched through our own account on the Apple iTunes store essentially it was very successful but they were they thought that apps were flash in the pan and that you didn't keep developing them. So I was way out in front and then they stopped doing additional innovations on the app and so it was essentially frozen. And so what I had done poorly is A, small mistake didn't write up the contract in a way that was helpful to me

and then B, which is more importantly that I didn't stop taking action against that because I was paralyzed as paralysis through analysis. And I didn't at that point, reach out to my community. I didn't, you know, go to, you know, seek legal opportunities, seek professional guidance, seek peer support. And I just sort of sat there in it. Oh God. It's worse. Yeah. It feels even worse when you're that specific with it. Oh, sorry to commiserate in something. It'll open up an old wound, but shit, you know, you're, you're reminding me of a time when, um, I don't think I fully learned

this lesson until right now is that I was courted quite heavily by a, um, I'm going to keep a lot of these details neutral so that, so because the people and the players don't matter, but well, they matter, but not publicly. And I was courted heavily to come work with a company. It was a rising star company and lots of money. They were making lots of money per day and they were well-funded. And the CEO, it was, they just got to the place that the founder left and a professional CEO came in. The CEO and I were building this great relationship. He says, Mike, I want to bring you in full time. It was a seven figure deal and with stock as well included on top of it. And I dragged my ass because I was like, no, no, I'm building something. And we went back and forth and negotiated about like, okay, a prorated 50% time with us, 50% on your, your other stuff, be a great base. We'll actually build products with you. We'll co-own them. It was this amazing thing. And I, but I was dragging my ass because i was having a hard time like giving up the entrepreneurial spirit

going in-house and um he calls me and he says uh i was in the airport he says mike we're going up to execute uh sign on the contract and this is probably when i say dragging my ass was probably like a six month experience you know going, going back and forth, which is too long. That's deal fatigue for sure. Especially in Silicon Valley. And I was in the airport going up to have a dinner, sign and execute. He calls and says, Mike, where are you? I said, I'm in the airport. He goes, good news or bad news? Which do you want? I go, uh, and he goes, he goes, I'm going to start with the good news. I just accelerated my contract. I go, what does that mean? I have no idea what that means. I. Good news is I just got paid $53 million and today's my last day. Founder came back. He goes, bad news?

He goes, I don't think the founder is going to want to work with you. And I was in the airport. He says, come up. We're going to have dinner. We're going to work together in the future somehow. And, you know, probably just not at this company or definitely not at this company because I'm leaving. We had a good dinner and we haven't figured out how to work together yet, but maybe we're getting close one day. But, oh, I relate.

I relate. I relate. Let's go back to the top of the hour. We're recovering from that. And, like, I don't think that you think that that wasn't valuable right you probably there's somewhere inside you that's going like man i learned a lot in that moment and that learning is you know when you apply that to your future that is extremely powerful and and sort of that's what i mean when i'm retracing youacing your question around what are the elements.

To me, this conditioned trusting in your intuition, your gut, and then believing that you can respond to your environment in such a way through repetition and through awareness to get you to become, I don know the boss the boss of your own life or to maybe in your words to not just have mastered the craft of something but to become a master of your life yeah there you go okay awesome let's go full circle ground your grandfather what was that relationship like um i think it feels like in in that it was characterized as that we were closer than we really are by it i mean just through the book

and through other interviews that i've done but i think it was just a reverence and an understanding that my grandfather was a cool guy who was passionate about his grandkid and used to like to take pictures. And I think it was equally powerful that my father also was into cameras. And between those two guys, like taking pictures of me as a young kid, as an action sports athlete, you know, skateboarding, BMX, soccer, football, the things that I like to do, it just put me around photography. Remember, if you realize that in second grade, I basically cut off that part of me,

and then I didn't really acknowledge it until after my grandfather had passed. There's all this time in the middle there where I'm looking at photographs of myself and my friends, and I'm realizing that this of myself and my friends and I'm realizing that this is a really powerful medium this is like these these are these are moments that will never happen again and I just remember being struck by that and and so while my relationship it wasn't like he was a father figure i had my father was at home and present and um as was my mother so i but my relationship with my grandfather was less i think psychological tension there and more just a uh an awareness and opening up of this thing called photography, which was both inspiring to me. It created a sense of curiosity

and wonder. Um, it was something that was very tangible. It's a skill. It's a craft that you can hone to all those things to me played really critical roles in getting me excited about it and looking at that as a vehicle through which I could explore my creativity and then fast forward to his death and I'm like literally it's a week before my college graduation he dies unannounced dropped out of a heart attack no like had a heart condition wasn't feeling well like this was just like done and and then voila I'm given his cameras. So I took some money that I got from his passing from my grandmother and these cameras. And I bought this 13-stop, the cheapest ticket you could possibly get to Europe with my then-girlfriend, now-wife, Kate. And just started walking the earth and exploring what it was like to

take pictures. And it was that the camera and that experience on the backside of his passing that truly opened up a world for me where I understood that I started to understand rather my own creativity and how powerful it could be to write my own script rather than do what was prescribed to me the shoulds the oughts the must from from culture and that you should go to medical school and become a lawyer or do this thing that's some way revered by our culture versus becoming a photographer and when you can i, it gave me a sense of personal agency that was ultimately, um, has, you know, shaped my life in a very clear and critical way. Chase, I can't wait to meet you in person at some point, um, in the Seattle area. Let's make that

happen. Cause, uh, I've loved this conversation. Folks that are listening for community members, like what would be some very practical things that you would hope that you've developed some insight around that they could also practice and to, to amplify their creative juices, you know, their creative exploration. I believe that there's creativity inside of every person and unequivocal. Again, go back to that first or second grade classroom, ask who wants to come to the front of the room and draw your picture every hand goes out so you know whether you're overtly admitting it or not you know that there's some creativity inside of every person what i want to tell you is that it's also it's a muscle it is not some

anointment that this you know that your second grade teacher or your art teacher or your math teacher tells you, you are, or you're not creative. You are creative. It's a muscle that like every muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. And then third is that it's only through creating in small daily ways and acknowledging this creativity, whether you're baking a cake or building a business or designing and executing your life, it's only through those small daily actions that you realize that you actually have agency

over this one special life that we have. It's in small daily ways that you understand it's just, it's the same muscle. It's just creativity at a different scale. To me, that's powerful. So I want people at home to take away that practical knowledge. I, I put it all in the book. It's all in creative calling years in the making. And, um, I, I think it's a, it's a really good, it's a, it's a, it's a tidy package for these ideas to travel in. So I would encourage you to check that out. And like, look, if for most people, the reason I wrote this book was because there's a gap between where we are in our lives and where we want to be. I know very few people who are,

for whom those are exactly the same thing. And they might be for a moment and then there's another gap and they may close that gap and then there's another gap. And that's, that's cool. That's life. But most people were sort of default mode is like a cork in the tide and, Oh, where I want to be is way over there. And I don't have a, I don't have a structured way of getting there. The book is a structured way of getting there. And to me, this, you might be a thousand hours away. You might be 10,000 hours away. You might be a hundred miles, whatever the distance between where you are now and where you want to be. It might be far and that could be frustrating, but here's, here's a different way to look at it. You are one decision from getting

there. And that is just deciding that that is what you will do. And to me, that's very powerful. Yeah. All right, Chase. Good stuff. I appreciate you. Yeah. I've really enjoyed this conversation and, um, you know, thanks for Steven Kotler putting us together. Um, you know, a little shout out to Pete Moran for being a good community member, you know, and, uh, yeah, I, I appreciate this. And so I'm looking forward to connecting and, um, I want to, you know, support folks to go check out the book and, uh, where, yeah, where can they find you online? Where can they get the book? And I know that, I think I just read that, that you hit the best seller.

It's less about the accolade. It's more that it's, it's resonating with people that, that, uh, I'm, I'm super excited about that, right? You've worked for years toiling in the early mornings and late nights writing, and then you put something out in the world. So I'm over the moon that it's, that's hitting the bestseller lists. Um, so it should be easy to find wherever books are sold, um, Amazon or your local bookstore. It's called Creative Calling. And I think more broadly, definitely check out Creative Live. And if you want to learn from the world's top performers.

And then I'm just Chase Jarvis. Anyone on the internet, I'd love to see you over in my community. And I want to just take a second and acknowledge the work that you've done. So impressive. Like, really, I've looked at your work from afar for a long time and grateful for Stephen for connecting us. Just the work you've done on so many different fronts. Obviously, I'm a huge fan. I'm this huge Seahawks fan.

Born and raised with those folks. Um, and, uh, but just in, in peak performance and sports in psychology, I love the work that you do. It's so wide ranging, uh, and so powerful. I want you to keep, keep doing what you're doing. And I'm a massive fan and I will be wherever you go. Oh yeah. Look at that. Let's do it, dude. Let's create a living masterpiece. How about it? And it's Chase Jarvis with a J J A R V I S. Find him on social, get his book. And I hope you've appreciated this conversation as much as the two of us.

So with that, brother, I'm looking forward to meet you. Let's do it. Yeah. All right. Take care. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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