Good Life Project - Called to Create | Chase Jarvis

Episode Date: September 12, 2019

Chase Jarvis wants you to know...YOU ARE CREATIVE! An award-winning artist, entrepreneur, and one of the most influential photographers of the past decade, Chase (https://www.chasejarvis.com/) has created campaigns for Apple, Nike, Red Bull and others. He was a contributor to the Pulitzer-winning New York Times story Snowfall, and earned an Emmy nomination for his documentary Portrait of a City. Jarvis is also the founder of CreativeLive (https://www.creativelive.com/), where more than 10 million students learn photography, video, design, music, and business from the world’s top creators and entrepreneurs. And, he's got a new book out, Creative Calling: Establish a daily practice, infuse your world with meaning, and succeed in work + life (https://amzn.to/2Lp6XIF) that is one part memoir, one part roadmap to discovering your creative calling. And, we dive into all of it.In addition to this week's podcast, we recorded a conversation with Chase as a few years back, which you can check out here (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/chase-jarvis/).-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So my guest today, Chase Jarvis, grew up in Seattle, was kind of a typical skateboard kid, into music, into soccer, went to college, and then made this really abrupt turn when his grandfather, who he loved, passed and left him a camera. And that profoundly changed the direction of his life, leading him into the world of photography, kind of finding his own way, completely bucking the system to become a big name photographer in the world of action sports and beyond. And then moving into the world of entrepreneurship and service and contribution, where he built a giant company called Creative Live, which has taught tens of millions of people how to essentially build creative lives and livings. And he has a new book out now called Creative Calling. So Chase has been on the podcast before many years ago,

actually, in the very early days. Funny enough, both that time and this time, we ended up having issues in our main studio. So I grabbed our mobile ring and ran down to the hotel he was staying at. And we ended up sort of jamming in his hotel room. So you may hear a bit of a difference in the sound, a little bit of background noise. It is all part of the New York City experience. And we really dive into sort of a reflective moment in Chase's life, why he wrote this book, what it's all about, and the really big lessons that he has learned as a fiercely creative, innovative, also rebellious person who has completely built his own path. very often going outside of the existing systems, completely bucking traditions and expectations and landing in a place where he wants to turn back now and share this hard-earned wisdom. So excited to share this conversation.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes the apple watch series 10 available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum

compared to previous generations iphone 10s are later required charge time and actual results will vary mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i know you're gonna be fun on january 24th tell me how to fly this thing mark walberg you know what the difference between me The events of your life that have led up to this moment are a big part of this story, a big part of what took you there. And for those listening, if you want sort of like the early, early days, we'll link to the conversation we had, you know, like years back. Well, I want to touch down on one particular moment. You grew up in Seattle. You were the skate kid. You were always active. You were really into soccer. You end up finding yourself in college

and doing well. You're playing soccer, in your mind maybe headed to med school after that, close to graduating, and something really traumatic happens in your life. Take me there. So I was reasonably close with my grandparents and they lived close to us. My parents and I, I was raised with my parents in Seattle

and I was going to school in San Diego at the time. And it was just a couple of days before my college graduation, looking forward to having the family down to celebrate the last, I wish I could say four years, but it was more like five and change. I remember picking up the phone and it was my dad who had just, he was still at my grandfather's house and my grandfather just dropped dead of a heart attack, completely no forecast, no, like wasn't having problems, you know, no signals whatsoever before. And just like, I think it was gone. And early in, in that, like I hadn't dealt with a lot of people dying that were close to me. It was when the grandparents, you know, we come of age, grandparents are starting to get older.

So this was like, it wasn't my first grandparent that to pass, but it was certainly like out of nowhere. And, you know, I like to try and find, I don't want to gold plate it because I don't want to make it like just, you know, 24 hours later, I was thinking about all the upside. So, you know, traumatic experience aside, the silver lining was that he was an avid hobbyist and an avid photographer himself. And he collected, he was like a tinkerer, and he had a little garage downstairs at a workbench that had all kinds of camera stuff. He was always tinkering and buying the new thing, and both he and my father were hobbyists. And when he passed, I was given his cameras

and a little bit of money, and with those two things, I had, I would say, reasonably quickly decided to go explore the world and teach myself how to take pictures. In part because of his legacy, in part because I was inspired by photography. I remember looking at pictures that he and my father had shot of me and my friends as young kids. And not because it was photograph of us or me in particular, but it was because it was a moment in time. And I remember thinking the power of a photograph to tell an entire story in a hundredth or a thousandth of a second. And so to go back to that moment was,

it was, again, both sort of one of the hardest moments of my young adult life. And also I would say the thing that gave me permission, it was, you know, I like to think of these moments as the toughest moments as also an opportunity. Because whether we want to or not, we have to take a really close look at what's happening in our lives. And that we like the passing of someone that we care about. It just frames a lot of our lives around, um, who are you, what are you doing with your time, with your energy? How are you spending it with, with whom? Um, it would be really nice and convenient if we didn't have to do that, if we could do it with a Vipassana or a Sunday morning jog. And I do believe that we can have access to that. But the reality is that for whatever reason, popular culture or life, we don't.

So it was a profound, profound experience for me. Yeah. I mean, it seems so on so many levels. And one of the things that I'm also curious about, so this was deeply traumatic. profound experience for me. Yeah. I mean, it, it seems so on so many levels and, you know, one of the things that I'm also curious about, so this was deeply traumatic. Somebody cared about deeply and, and I was a part of you when you lost, you gained instant access to this love of his, which was sort of shared with you through, through equipment, Through gear, yeah. Through gear. You were on a path before that moment, though.

I was. You kind of had a relatively clear trajectory in mind. So you saying, you know, I'm going to in part honor my grandpa's sort of legacy through this amazing ability to capture moments and see if I can make that a part of who I am too. It seems like at that point, this also wasn't necessarily, oh, this is my future. But what you also did was part of that decision was saying no

to the plan, was saying no to this well-plotted path that you are about to embark upon. So when you did that, in your mind, were you actually, was that a hard no in your mind, or was that a, I'm just going to take some time and do this thing and see what happens, but I kind of plan on going back to that? It was the first, this is like truth right here, because there's what I've told everyone in my life for basically most of my life. And then there was now having a little distance from it, you can connect the dots looking backwards. And for me, it was a, oh, hell no, I'm not doing the thing that everybody else thinks I'm doing. Going forward, I have to figure out a new thing. And to me, it was the first step in a masquerade, in a basically a show that I was going to put on for everybody else in my life to start weaseling out of all of the stuff that

everybody else wanted me to do. All of the expectations of parents and culture and friends and relatives. And I knew at the moment that I didn't know that it was going to be photography, but I knew that it wasn't going to be the stuff that I had signed up for very publicly at the suggestion is not strong enough of a word and oppression is not, is not, is too big a word, but there's someone, there's just a bunch of inputs culturally that, and you know, we're talking about me right now, but this is a part of the book that, that we're going to talk about over the course of the next short while here is that everyone's got a whole list of shoulds for you. And if you're not careful, you end up living somebody else's, like all those shoulds or some common, even worse, an aggregate of all of the shoulds of everybody else for your one precious life. And at that moment, to go back to your question directly, I realized that I couldn't sign up for that stuff. And this was

the beginning of a way out. It was a crack that I could then step into, figure out what my journey was, and at the same time, find a way to not do the thing. Because I was terrified of disappointing everyone in my life, the people who had provided for me. And two things occurred to me. I remember at that time, um, and especially now looking backwards, but two things, one, how this is probably the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life, be willing to disappoint everyone else in my life to do the thing that I knew I had to do, which was to, it was both simultaneously not do what I'd been talking about publicly going to medical school or graduate school and whatever. And also that if this is hard for me, when I'm basically, I have, I'm white, I'm male, I'm born in the United States in the seventies. Oh, it was just,

there's a subtle at that time now brick in the head awareness, wow this is the hardest thing i've ever done imagine if you didn't come from all those privileged backgrounds and i was i mean to be fair i was lower middle class and i wouldn't say super poor but not well off but i had basically every other advantage and was still the hardest thing in the world to do to just grab your own life and start to drive it the way you wanted. And in that moment, it was the first semblance of, wait a minute, this is doable. Not only is it something that I want to do, it's something that I feel like I have to do. Yeah. So this was right at the edge of college for you.

You're about to graduate. You're dating the person who would eventually become your wife, right? Yep. So you're close to her. And when you make a decision like this, yeah, it impacts your life, right? When you make a decision like this and you're in a deep relationship that will then sustain on for decades and decades afterwards, it doesn't just affect you. It affects her. For sure.

I'm curious when you have moments like this how people navigate those intimate conversations um i thought a lot about this and i appreciate you asking the question and it's pretty well chronicled in the book because this is you know i'm talking i was talking just moments ago very generally about disappointing people but when you start you talk about it generally and it's a little bit easier. You start talking about like your parents or your spouse or your partner, like it starts to get really real. And I think that's probably why you're asking the time. And she was born of adventure. She moved a lot as a kid and she'd lived abroad. And so the thought of striking out and traveling the world and living very, I mean, we literally ate beans and tuna fish under the can in order to make this possible for months and months. It was relatively manageable, but it's a reasonable time to put a

pin in that and say, I've, you know, through my own experience as a, an adult and through conversations with, you know, hundreds of people in my podcast and, you know, across creative live and, you know, we have millions of students, so you get a lot of input and a lot of data. And there's a really clear pattern arises that that's ultimately the hardest thing that we do is to disappoint others that we we were young and there was a sense of ambition and exploration and a willingness to, we didn't have a lot to lose. I do know for the people who are listening right now that that is the thing that's keeping you from doing the thing that you're supposed to be doing in this world. To listen to that little call inside you, that voice of that, whatever joy you got as an eight-year-old or a 10-year-old when you discovered that thing and you thought you might be able to do it forever. And then reality and all the shoulds and the oughts and the culture starts weighing down on you.

And it's not a sledgehammer. It's a thousand paperclips on your back, a million paperclips. And at some point you just realize you can't escape it until you can. Yeah, I mean, the weight of external expectations, I think for so many of us is stifling. And I think also, I think it's important for us to probably also touch down in this part of the conversation on the fact that we have the weight of expectations, which very

often just psychologically, very often we don't want to deal with that. We will stifle so much of what we feel we're here to do in the name of not having to quote, disappoint. And at the same time, as you mentioned, different people are born of different means. For sure. And we'll have. So it's not for some, it's expectations. And literally, when you strip that away, then it's, okay, so what is the process by which I go from here to that thing that I have in my head? For other people, it is quite realistically much more difficult. For sure. Much more involved, simply because they come from a profoundly different circumstance. Yeah, and that's one of the things that I try and be super aware of. And the way that I like to think about it is if we at least put the spectrum on the table,

then people can put themselves on that spectrum. Like I'm not just because I came from maybe low economic status, but you know, all the other benefits of my random birth that, and then I had to navigate it. And by sharing that it was hard for me, even with all that relative privilege that hopefully people can put themselves on that spectrum. And of course, there's probably a million different axes, right? But it's not to provide the roadmap. It's to show that a roadmap can be found in all this messy stuff. And the roadmap, as you said, from where you are to where you want to be,

what I find is it's much closer. Even from interviewing people who are more disadvantaged in all sorts of other ways, there's a really common reporting to me in that, wow, it was really just a series of a handful of small decisions that I told myself a story about how hard, I mean, again, we got to qualify that this is like, there are people who can't, you know, escape their village or they can't leave or their families will not survive kind of things. But if we talk, I think try and most of the folks who are listening here are probably not in that of an extreme circumstance, but there's a spectrum. And if you can put yourself on that spectrum and realize that

you're a handful of decisions away from where you are right now to where you want to be, I think that's profoundly inspiring and that it's doable. And that not only are these sort of things that are nice to have, but if you just get to that really quiet place inside of you and you listen for that call, that it's there for everyone. It's about finding it and then about doing those things. Yeah, right. So there are kind of two keys there, I think. One is finding it, which is a whole process.

That's a thing, yeah. We'll talk a bit about that. That's a thing. And then there is the, how do I extract myself from whatever circumstance or limitation or expectation I have to the extent that I can. And potentially for some people take even, you know, a longer, very gradual lens on the process. That's what you need to do. For sure. You went out. So you basically, you run with this thing, you grab the cameras and you hit the road and you just start taking pictures so what's interesting about this to me also is you know we're sitting

here recording this in 2019 where everybody's got a badass phone on the device that they have in their pocket right um you start out when you're working with film. Yep. Which, beyond the technical changes and all this other stuff, the psychology of constraint when you're working from film, especially when you're pretty young and you don't have a lot of money in your pocket and it takes a long time to process

and every role costs you like 10 or 20 bucks back in the day. The thoughtfulness and the mindset, the psychology that goes into figuring out how to do this thing is profoundly different for sure than today it's go slowly yeah as like everything's fast and i advocate for learning as fast as fast as you can because it's nice to take a picture look at it see what you learn what you didn't learn and And this is true. We're talking about photography, but it could be true for anything, right? Give a speech, create a business, make a cake, you know, anything. And to be able to learn quickly and figure out your mistakes on your phone, like, oh, wow,

that's overexposed or, oh, I should frame it differently. There's a pole coming out of my kid's head or whatever. And to not have that to learn, it does it. The lens that you have to put on it is a slower lens, which meant that I probably wasn't going to eat the next day, or I was going to skip a day and a half for the food in order to develop my film. And I would have been camping at the time rather than staying in a hostel so that all those little $10 bumps could make it possible to develop film. And it does focus your attention. The stakes got higher. And yeah, I don't advocate that. I mean, it's sort of what you're willing to do in order to find the thing

or tap into the thing or get the juice that you're trying to get out of any moment in life. Or in this case, for me, it was learning something that I was called to, to spend my time on. Yeah. It's really interesting to me also in the context of the pursuit of creative mastery, right? You look at the research and this is something a lot of people in the creative, every creative domain out there doesn't actually like to own. But the research is pretty crystal clear in the academic world that mastery is in no small part of volume game. You know, when you look at people who are charged with, okay, so create a thousand just random pictures or sketches, you know, in this window of time, and then we'll pull out the 10 best of those. And then you talk to another group of people

and say, create 10 phenomenal things in this window of time. The 10 best pulled out of, you know, like the volume where people are just kind of like going over and over and over and over and over. And the research are generally evaluated as being much better, much more, quote, creative. Yeah.

I don't even think it's generally. I think it's like overtly and i thought there's a there's a some apocryphal study about uh uh i think it might be fictitious but it's it's it's it's littered throughout the research and then the the environment that you're talking about right now the academic world about a class that is split down the middle one uh a pottery class you know one is like you're literally, you're judged, your grade is on volume and the other is you have a project.

And it wasn't even close. So the volume, you know, dramatically exceeded, obviously, the folks that just made one. But the number of great things dramatically outpaced the projects that half the class had had to focus on just one thing and just they blew them out of the water in both axes yeah and when you started you couldn't do that for real you had to be sort of hyper mindful because your constraints simply would

not allow it i do think that that actually had a profound impact on my being a massive advocate for technology for creativity like when digital photography started emerging and not to go down a rabbit hole but the precious photographers of your they were like oh digital sucks and here's all the reasons why it'll never be as good as film and blah blah blah and i, blah. And I actually was one of the few pros. I mean, I remember getting like ridiculed for this. Like as soon as digital came out, I bought the first digital camera that I could possibly afford. And because specifically the pain that I had through learning, I realized that this would be a massive accelerant. And, you know, to your point, like just volume and digital photography made the volume, basically the capability go to a hundred when it was at a one or a two.

Yeah. So you took a lot of heat for that. That was not the first time you took heat for the career. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Let's fill a little bit of the gap here, right? So you go off on this adventure.

You start taking everything you can. And you're semi-maniacal about tracking because you can't immediately see what's good and bad. You know you're going to have to wait. You did your research. So you're like every shot. Well, this was like the F-stop. I wrote down. So you knew when you saw the shots a

month later developed. You remember it. You could tell what the settings on the camera were. So you become this fierce autodidact. But you didn't go up through the quote, mainstream mentoring assistantship system where, in theory,

that is how you get made in that world. You know, you rise up through this very well-defined path, not unsimilar to the art world, the painting world, the gallery system, right? College. Right. There is a prescribed path and this is how you do it. You are kind of like learning on your own, out of sight of all the pros, and you kind of start to sneak in. Not even kind of, like literally all kinds of examples of sneaking in, but yeah. And you start to sell your work. And you're selling your work essentially to the same people who are buying the work of these people who've been doing it for decades. So, you know, you're taking care of it at a very young age because who do you think you are?

Yep. And I think it's fascinating that, you know, it's a really interesting example to me of almost the power of coming from a completely different mindset and almost not even knowing what the system is. For sure. And making your own. Yeah. It had a huge role. Like my ignorance of what it was supposed to be certainly was a catapult to my being able to become it.

I started living the idea that if you were the verb, you could be the noun. I had business cards printed up that said Chase Jarvis photographer before I had a professional camera. So you end up selling your work. In relatively short order, you become a really well-known photographer doing a lot of stuff with outdoors, action sports, and you're building this incredible career. And something happens in you that says, you know, this is really cool, but there are other things. There are other things.

Was it a gradual awakening or was there a moment? Well, not dissimilar to my grandfather. I think you can look back and you can see very, very clearly it was a moment. I really wish it didn't have to be a moment, but this is my slow learning. You can just see this is the universe beating me over the head to pay attention to something. And in a very similar fashion, uh, yeah, I would say I had the career that I had dreamed of, you know, that was a, we'll just fast forward a few years there where I figured out a bunch

of things that helped me, as you said, license my pictures to people who were, who were, you know, alongside people who are much held in higher esteem and, and, uh, had sort of paid their dues quote unquote. And I had not, I think I had paid my dues in a very, very different and hard way, but so let's just, we're fast forward to we're there. And I was aware that the life of an independent artist was also very much about trying to make it. And if you don't take care of yourself and try and put money on the table and in your pocket or food on the table, money in your pocket, that no one else is going to come along and give it to you. So it's very much, it felt competitive. It felt very chest beady, like I have to stand out and this is how you get noticed. And that's a myth,

a well-chronicled myth that if your work is just great, that it's going to, you're going to be discovered. And that's, as you and I both know, that is couldn't be further from the truth. You have to, you have to spend time sharing your work with others, and that takes many forms. I'm lightly pondering this at this one point in my life, and I'm on an assignment for Nike, and I'm in Alaska. And again, this is fast. We have fast forwarded. So, well, to be able to shoot campaigns for Nike, for example, unlimited helicopter budget in the, in, um, the mountains of Alaska, the Chugash range. And we, when you go to Alaska, you, you sometimes have to sit there for weeks on end and wait for the storms to blow over and to find the perfect weather in which you go out and you do your work. And as a photographer, when you're doing those things, you it's, it's dangerous after big storms. Um, but you do a hundred percent of your work and that 1% of time where it's most dangerous. And, uh, and I was caught in a massive

avalanche and it was the biggest avalanche of the season and all the heli ski deals. And by every measure, every measure I should be dead right now. I shouldn't be here. And you can read the story in the book. I recount it in some painstaking detail. But suffice to say, it was another one of those moments. This is, again, life hitting me over the head with a hammer saying, look around. You're really, your self-awareness is low. You need to be doing something different.

And it's not like 180 degrees from what you're doing right now, but it's a different trajectory that's going to solve for the things that you're questioning right now. Why am I doing this? What's my why? What's my bigger purpose? Thinking about your work, Jonathan, about how important purpose is. And for me, my purpose was to find my passion and my passion was great. And it was delivering all the things that I thought, friends and travel and a career. And then even that started to feel a little bit hollow.

And it's like, that wasn't quite purpose. And it, you know, coming as close to death as I came, it slapped the shit out of me. It was like, wake up. And yeah, it made me realize that I wanted to do something different and it wasn't bigger or more or fancy or anything. It was just different. And in part, it was to share. I had felt like I tapped into the mainframe. I said, oh my gosh, I figured out.

And it was, remember all the pain that I talked about my grandfather and the years of trying to figure out how to be good at the craft. And then you make it. And then it's sort of like when you make it, you realize you are just getting started. And so I wanted to see if I could try and find a way to help give that gift to other people as well. The gift of tapping into the thing that you're supposed to be doing, to your why, to your purpose. And that opened a whole new door for me, which was sort of the next level of purpose for me. If you're peeling the onion or opening a door or whatever analogy you want to make. Yeah.

I mean, it's from the outside looking in, you know, it, it looks like this is the move from you as a craft person, craft person building a business. Yeah, sure. But focused where like the center of your identity is chase the photographer. Yep. Right. Chase the person who can see in a way that other people can't see and capture it in a way other people can't capture it. To chase the guy who is moving into this interesting other phase, you describe it in your work as, you know, like sort of like the move between two arcs,

right? Acquisition and contribution. Do you feel like that was a moment where you started to bridge that gap? Not only was it like, I mean, I can reduce it to a 10 second window. It was during the avalanche. So when you get caught in an avalanche, it looks like it's happening really slow motion and all the footage that you've seen on National Geographic or wherever you've seen avalanches happen. And when a skier gets caught in that nine out of ten times, a skier triggers the avalanche. And that was the case with me.

We won't go into the details about how we were there and why we were there and should we have been there and all those things. We checked all those boxes, but Mother Nature has a plan. And when that happens, you may have heard near-death revelations before, but time, it was like the avalanche took hours. I remember very methodically as I was hit by the snow that was coming from behind me, it of course knocked me off my feet. They call it the white room, but there's nothing white about it. Snow is white, but it's pitch black because you're under the snow.

And there, I was in a very big avalanche. So there were, you know, a trillion snowballs and, you know, hundreds of Volkswagen car sized chunks of snow rolling down this 50 degree mountain face at 50 miles an hour. And yet my mind, everything was going so slow. And it was the first thing was like, Oh my God, this is serious business. And then so, Oh, so this is what it's like. And is it really going to come down to this? And there was both, there were two parallel paths of my thinking. One was what I was doing to, to get myself out of this particular situation. And the other is the thing that I've been doing suddenly feels insignificant.

And that's both to focus your attention. And I think also this is like the higher, like what's next for us as humans? Another plane of consciousness. So if we can cut to the chase, that's a bad joke. Um, we can, the end of the story is that in 10 seconds, I didn't know it in the middle of the 10 seconds, but I knew that something had changed and shifted in me. And I recalled the story a little more detail in my podcast. And, you know, when we flew away from the hill that day, I was, my injuries were minor and I should not be alive. You know, that night I didn't sleep.

And the reality is we still had to finish the job. So we had to go back out in this environment. But I stayed up all night, virtually all night, I think. And I didn't know exactly what was different, but I knew something in me had changed. And could back trace it back to that 10 seconds. And, um, it took the next several, I would say months to really reconcile. And then years later to ultimately reconcile with the feelings. Cause I didn't really talk about it. And, you know, it's like either as, as, um, you know, I don't want to draw this

down gender. I don't want to draw it down sport or athlete, but they're just, I didn't, it didn't seem useful to talk a lot about it. And only years later, when I really started discovering that thinking more critically about that 10 seconds, that's when everything changed. And the way it changed for me was I felt like I tapped into that second arc. If the first arc was about acquisition, acquiring skills, acquiring knowledge, acquiring financial security, acquiring whatever, the second arc for me would be about contribution and about trying to manifest my ideas in the world in such a way that it helped others. Yeah. How old were you when that happened-ish?

Early 30s, late 20s. Right. Early 30s. You've been doing this for a bit yeah you're you're well perched in your profession yeah occupation and also you're building a life you know with with your wife then yeah for sure that was yeah it's like and and that was part of the you know again you can only see this looking backwards i thought i felt on top of the world yeah and then you know when i look back i was like oh wow this this, like, senior you looking back at junior you, like, ah, young grasshopper. And I felt, you know, I felt like everything I had it figured out. And bookend type of things where the way that you enter this career has people who are already in it saying, who do you think you are

to? The way that you then choose to not entirely leave the career, but kind of like step into the next phase of your life. I would bet also had a lot of people who wanted to be you at that moment in time saying, how could you leave this behind? Like, this is what so many people want. It's what you've worked so hard to build. You've gotten to this place. How can you start to step away from that? Totally.

It goes back to the thing that we sort of opened with is this, the pressure that it comes from all these external inputs and arguably those external inputs, they create a lot of self-talk and then those pressures become internal as well. Like you said, like, how could you possibly do this? Hey, how did you get here? You know, you don't belong here. You know, so there's a lot of mindset that has to happen to overcome that a lot of strength and mindset and a lot of damage and pain and all those other things that go with it i don't want to go believe it and then on the other end to your point now and you say okay great i'm gonna it's not it i wasn't leaving the creative industry but i wanted to start carving

out broader territory what was possible for a photographer and, and how we, as a, as, as creators can think. And it was also met with a ton of resistance. Like, why would you, I, there's a little stint where I had, I was partner in an agency that I started that then started, I did the iPhone app. That was the first iPhone app that shared photos to social networks called best cameras app of the year in 2009. And a lot of people didn't really understand it. They just saw it as sort of a, like another parallel path, but maybe this guy's kind of weird. He's doing some shit. That's not, that's not what photographers do. And I can't say that I had a perfect plan. I had it all scoped out and it was perfect or intentional even, but

I knew that it was the thing that was inside me. And that's like, if you can't name it and you can't point to it and you can't pick it up and show it to somebody, that's part of what's hard about our calling. And is that it sometimes is a whisper and there's rarely a map. It's almost always just a compass. And if you think about the difference between a map and a compass, the map shows you the whole path, right? You go to here, get there and you can plot it. You can see where you have to go. And a compass is just, it's just a pointer. It's just, I got to go East or I got to go North or whatever your direction is. And to me, that's the lesson that I learned from that is as it made me so in tune with my intuition, it was almost like, this is a requirement that you do this.

And again, I wish I could have discovered these things without the traumatic event and just by reading a great book. And I think you can. That's part of why I wrote this book is because the calling was always there. It was always inside of me. I was just so thick headed that I needed to get hit with a sledgehammer or a wall of snow moving at 60 miles an hour down a 2,000 foot face in order to listen. Yeah.

I mean, it's really interesting, right? One, the idea that you think you hit a point where you reach a certain level of success where either the external expectation machine goes away or you just don't care about it anymore. And the truth is, it keeps cycling back during every major seasonal shift in your life. And you have to, again, grapple with it. I remember a couple of years back sitting down with a mutual friend of ours, Debbie Millman, and sort of exploring this idea of discontent and expectations with her. And I was like, do you know anyone in this? And she's been in the creative industry for so long.

And she knows everybody. She's a legend. Do you know anybody who is at that point where they're just content? And the expectations. And she named two men who at that point in their lives were icons in the field and were in their 80s. So it's kind of like, okay. Massimo Vignelli maybe was one of them. Massimo Vignelli and Milton Glaser.

There you go. So at that point, you're like, okay, maybe while you're there, you're like, you know what? I'm good. Whatever. I'm good. Yeah. But until then, I think it's fascinating having spoken to so many people who have created

and shifted and changed to see this continually cycle back into their experience of creation and recreation. So you end up in 2010, starting this thing called Creative Live, which becomes this massive educational platform, starting in the early days for photographers and creative professionals are really expanding out into basically anybody who has the Jones to make something from nothing. In no small part, it becomes a powerful business engine on its own, standalone, but also this is you stepping on a really grand scale into that contribution part of the arc there. It's also, it sounds like you're building this thing. It becomes very

successful. And it's you stepping into the role of thing. It becomes very successful. And it's you stepping into the role of CEO. It's you stepping into the role of running this organization. It's you stepping into the role of something bigger where you're much more forward-facing, too, in a lot of ways. And your burden on multiple levels changes profoundly. Were you ready for that? And how did you and have you experienced that? Definitely not ready for it.

And I think that's part of, that's a lesson that I talk a lot in the book about of if you sat around and you wait until you're ready, you'll never start. And of all of the lessons I've learned through a creative career, just this concept of starting is a very powerful one. And you don't need to have the answers. You don't need to have the map.

You don't have to see the whole staircase. You just have to see the next step. And that's part of the calling is that we actually intuitively know the next step. Or if we don't, it's there. It's available for us. We have to find a way to tap into it. And to me, this, like I didn't have what, what developing the iPhone app that went on to become the app of the year in 2009, what that did is that helped me understand that, that we were going to be able to build tools that could help scale creativity. And that was

interesting to me, especially go back to, you can start to see connect the dots now and go back to my film, like how painful that was and so i started developing tools oh if you had an iphone app you could take a picture i mean this is how crazy this sounds right now it was the first app that did two things allowed you to take a picture actually three things take a picture add a thing called a filter and then press the one button and then it could share it to social networks revolutionary and then so that was one thing that it did first. And another thing, it was the first photo feed.

So Apple didn't have a mechanism. They first rejected it from the app store because they said that there was no way to, that you couldn't have a thing called a photo feed because you couldn't possibly manage those feed, those photos going into a feed that they would then serve up on their servers for anyone to see. So we had to work very closely with them. And I think they understood the vision that I'd had is like, no, this is going to be how things are going to be consumed.

You can start to see it in Twitter and you could see it in Facebook. And then, so if photography is going to be the same way, so we were able to work with them. And in seeing those patterns, what I was ultimately seeing was how technology could scale creativity. And then if you apply that to them, so you could see me becoming a creator and then starting to build tools for creators. And then realizing that what was missing was a platform for people to learn how to use those tools because the tools does not a creator make. So, you know, that was a

progression. And every one of those steps I was in way over my head, no idea. But I think there's something profound with starting before you're ready and starting to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And it's a muscle, you know, that's the, you know, those are a couple of key principles that I like to talk about in the book, and I think they're good to bring up here. One is that we're all creative. This is not creativity. Art, rather, is a subset of creativity. Creativity is a very big thing.

It's putting unique ideas together. You also have to then believe that creativity is a muscle and that by using this muscle, it is a habit. It is not a skill. It is a process, not a product. And in things that are process oriented, that's how we develop muscles. The same as working out, for example. And then if you believe one and two,

then what follows with three is that it's in creating every day and using these muscles with small things, baking a cake, even building a business, which you could argue is much bigger than building a cake. But in building those things on a daily basis, you actually realize that you can create the life of your dreams. It's just creativity at a different scale. And since the same muscle that is deciding what your life arc is going to be is baking a cake, playing music, making this podcast, publishing your blog, morning pages, same muscle, different

scale. So what I started realizing is like, okay, I wanted to make some tools for myself or become a creator, make some tools for myself and my friends, then do a learning platform. And ultimately the book is like, it's sort of like explaining all this stuff, which is probably the arc that you're walking on right now. And for me, this, the, the, the role as a new CEO, in over my head, again, founded the company and it grew very quickly because we tapped into a good idea. And then I started realizing, oh, I'm in over my head. Here's the great thing to do is like, what is it? Smart people, they delegate and great creators, they outsource the things that they don't do or they don't know well. And so I'd found people that I thought could be really helpful, both venture capitalists and CEOs that had lots of experience and brought those people in to help me with my project.

And again, it was a small, very highly committed group of people at this time. And we assembled a new team. And I came to realize pretty quickly that that wasn't going to work, that there isn't always a shared vision, and that you're sold a narrative that you're not. In the same way that people are sold a narrative that they're not creative, us creatives are often sold a narrative that we're not business people. Right. And we know that. And almost that you we're not business people. Right. And we know that. And almost, almost that you shouldn't be business.

For sure. Oh, just focus. Cause you get kicked out of the club. For real. Yeah. And you know, not this similar.

I, I, I believed that we were all becoming hyphens that, you know, when I started becoming a photographer, you had to just do that. And I was like, no, I need to actually make a living. I got to put, I don't know about you all, but I got to feed myself and my family. And so there was this necessity to be, it was not a desire to become

good at selling your art or purveying your goods or wherever you want to couch it. No, it was like requirement. And then you realize, oh, then I started like developing software for like the iPhone. And then you start to just become many things. And then when video came out for cameras, you start, oh, wait, now I'm a director and I'm making, so by extension, you know, fast forward to this world where now I'm building a startup and now I'm a startup founder. And now we have, you know, Silicon Valley, you know, tier one, triple A, gold, diamond, some of the best investors in the whole world want to give you money to help build the thing, but that doesn't come with no purse string. So then you have to

figure out that whole universe. So I guess the punchline is it never stops and you can either be uncomfortable and disappointed around that and be frustrated, or you can find a way to enjoy the process and realize that it is a process. And that process is a process of personal development of growth of, I mean, what are you going to do otherwise? Like, that's another way of thinking about it. Like what's the alternative?

Yeah. Well, it wasn't that, you know, like the famous Bob Dylan quote, which I won't get it exactly right. You know, like we're,

you know, those of us who aren't busy being born are busy dying. There's no stasis. No. There's no sideways. You're either in this process of rebirth, creation, elevation, or slow decline. You may not see it because it may be having it at a pace where you're not consciously aware of.

But one of those two trajectories is always unfolding. And my sense is that, you know, the great fallacy is that we have less input than we think we have. You know, like that's a story we tell ourselves. And again, some of us have, we have varying levels, but when you always ask yourself, you're like, where is my sense of, do I have agency? And if so, how much do I have and where does it lie? If I don't, is there anything I can do to slowly get it? Creative Calling is a book about agency. Yeah. And that's really what jumped out at me. This is something where it's like, okay, so what if I was both responsible and came from a place of possibility? The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. So we're nine years into CreativeLive at this point, right? It's our 2010-ish. So you've got this big thing right? Start 2010-ish. So you've got this big thing kind of rolling behind the scenes. Still doing some photographing.

That hasn't completely left you. No, I was photographing you before we started. Exactly. And something in you says, you know what? Okay, so now I'm at a point in my life where I'm well into my contribution arc. The platform that I built, the company that I built has touched, what's the number, like 10 million people at this point? Tens of millions. Right. But there's another itch in me, which is there are some fundamental ideas, frameworks, offerings that would best be served up in the dish of a book. How does that drop into your mind?

And when it does, are you like, oh, hell yes, or oh, hell no? Very, very unpleasantly. I will answer that. It very unpleasantly drops into my lap. And here's why it's unpleasant. And I actually really gravitated to photography in part because of my lack of patience. And I started out experimenting with light. And before even my photography, painting started out with oil. And that was too slow.

So I moved to acrylic. It was a little bit faster, but not as fast as a photograph. And a photograph is virtually instant, right? And then even then you had to go in the dark room and do all those things. And so it wasn't quite instant. And now digital photography is like, okay, it's virtually instant. And so having built a decade, multi-decade career in that universe, the thought of doing a book sucked. It was horrible. But I also was very well aware that that was the right package for this because I've done just through different, you know, being lucky enough to have some things that someone wants to put you on television. I've

done a lot of the daytime talk shows and all that kind of stuff. And TV gives you like three to five minutes max, like a five minute segment is a massive segment. Radio is a little bit longer. This is, you know, podcasts now are an amazing opportunity, but still that's like, you know, it's an hour. And I knew that the ambition that I had for a book, which is really the why, right? So why does all this matter? What's this creativity stuff? And it seems like fuzzy. And there are a couple of books that deal with it and they deal with it in a very academic, like very, I need to wear as a beret and you have to be pure and you have to do all these things. And to me, that's not what creativity is. It's super accessible. Everybody has it. And so I needed to put these ideas into a vehicle that was really broadly accessible, that you could listen to if you wanted to on Audible or whatever.

You could pick it up. You could carry it with you. There was a lot of an opportunity for depth and a lot of explication, storytelling, and the fact that I've also interviewed hundreds of people in my podcast, some of the top creators and entrepreneurs, like, you know, the, the people that are at the apex of their career in every discipline, had them on my show and not dissimilar to the guests that you've had. And you start to, you start to see really clear patterns and you start to see where you've gone wrong. And I think that's something that is also was, I'm very aware of this book is a lot of books that I have read, especially sort of that hit the business or creativity or business or entrepreneurship. They basically lay out what they call, you know,

they consider the gold standard. This is how you do it. And this, what it results in is the perfect experience. And you know what? Nothing is perfect. Why would you have a book that took everything as if you looked at through this perfect lens and you started it the right way the first time and, you know, you hired perfectly and then you got the funding that you needed and then you, or you built the product. And my story in the book is everything but that. It's like, no, no, I was a hundred grand in debt, student loans. Cause I made choices that cost me 10 years of my life and a hundred grand. I made choices where I, they basically have just done so many things wrong with littered with landmines around there. And so the hope is that you can

learn through my, my misgivings and the stuff that I've learned from others that there is a path through all this stuff and we can connect some of the dots. And it's not prescriptive, but in the particular, in my story and the stories of the folks that I share in the book, lies the universal. And there are these handfuls of universal truths about creativity and about human discovery and human connection that I think are really critical when we're talking about creativity and about human discovery and human connection that I think are really critical when we're talking about creativity. Yeah.

It was interesting as, as I, you know, like we've known each other for a long time now. I think it's coming on 10 years, right? It's probably something like that. Yeah. So it's fun for me just as, you know, like a friend to be able to dive into something like this because it takes me deeper into the workings of your mind and also fills in some gaps in the stories that generally friends don't sit around talking about.

Yeah, you had no idea about the Avalanche story. I didn't, I didn't. And the other thing was that as I was reading along, I was like, I had flashes of things like Twi'lek Tharps, you know, the creative habit. Yep. And three words kept sort of like popping into my mind. One was habit, which you talk about, and we've talked about agency or sense of creative control,

you know, which again, you talk about, we've talked about. And this thing also with getting, I don't know if comfortable is the right word, but finding the capacity for equanimity in the face of sustained uncertainty. That is like a poetry, what you just said right there. I'm going to, we got to write that down. That is like, you, you speaking in prose now, man. Because I, I think that is those three things, you know, like saying, okay, so yes, it is both our opportunity and responsibility to step into a place of

creative control. It takes habit. You know, like this is not, it's not a magical thing. This is your devotion over time, over and over and over and over. And the uncertainty part of it comes in from the fact that you don't know how this is going to end. It could be horrible. The thing that you worked 10 years to create could suck. And yet you still have to show up and do the thing every day. And that is, in my mind, maybe the hardest thing of really committing yourself to a life of creation. Yeah.

And God, that was like, I'm definitely transcribing this. It was, that was beautifully put. Will you go on book tour with me? We can just walk around and go to all the different cities. And here's my friend.

He's going to speak for me. That was super well said. And I think the, um, each of those things is so true. And it's a really critical piece of the puzzle, I think, is that this is not pretentious. This is not for a select few. I'm trying to put creativity on the same level as nutrition. It is nutrition and exercise. They are pretty much seen as not optional.

Like you have to move your body or it stops working. You have to eat or your body stops having, you know, it loses its capacity to function. And I think the same is true with creativity. It's something that, you know, this is paraphrasing Maya Angelou it's one of the only resources where the more you use the more you get and if you don't use it not only does it not help you but it becomes toxic because this is we are creating machines it's sort of like a machine that doesn't do what it's supposed to do it's not going to well. And I think that is our reason for being is we are creating machines, form something new and useful. And when we don't do that thing or creativity that goes,

I'll say unexpressed, it becomes toxic. There's a, you know, Renee Brown talks a lot about this. If you're familiar with her work about, it doesn't, you know, it turns out that that unused creativity is not benign, it's toxic. And, you know, it turns out that that unused creativity is not benign, it's toxic. And, you know, the flip is also true that, you know, we have this little, this piece of creative plutonium inside us and it can power us for a hundred lifetimes. And when you start to use it and you start, what it sort of uncovers is this agency that you talk about. You know, go to my earlier point that when you're baking a cake and you're playing the guitar, you do become a better doctor, dentist,

custodian, horseback rider, because you start to understand that, wait a minute, I'm actually, I have agency. And when you start to realize that the more of this that you do, the more agency you both are aware of and then can create for yourself becomes a really beautiful cycle, I guess. It's like the best, most virtuous cycle that I'm aware of. Maybe there's one with love in there, the more love that you can put out in the world, it's coming back to your gratitude. But that's the level that I'm talking about in this stuff. And it doesn't need to be at all fancy. It doesn't need to be academic. And honestly, that's the only thing that I would say with the books about creativity that have come before this one. I think they're incredible. I've learned so much. I've read all of them multiple times,

but they're also, they seemed like academic and there's a little bit like, you need to wear the beret and it's precious. And I'm trying to do something that's very not precious. And I don't know if it succeeded or not, but that's the lens. Yeah. I have a sense also that, you know,

part of the thing that's driving you is the notion that we are all creative and it's not pressure. It's the domain of every person. But at the same time, when you learn the fundamentals of a creative process in the context of one particular application or domain, it's sort of like what you were just talking about. There's a sense of creative cross-training that happens where this then, the same principles, the same ideas, the same frameworks, a lot of which you talk about, you write about, this has been stuff that you have been learning, developing in this arc of decades now, that those same things expand out into your ability to create the life that you have in your brain on some level, to create, to design, or co-create with whatever it is that is out there that you believe in accompanies you along the journey. And that is a big part of what you're about and what this book is about. It's a very, again, you just keep putting it better than I could put it. of kind of what you're about and what this book is about.

It's a very, again, you just keep putting it better than I could put it. You know, that's what I'm hoping the book does. And while I was whinging about writing because I'm impatient and I just knew that, you know, I didn't really choose the medium. The medium was like, nope, this thing has to be a book and it has to be written and audio and i have i did my own audio so if you're an audible person like that was a process in itself too um and and yet the um just trying to put it in a package that was uh something that was also outside it was very trippy to be, and you'll appreciate this, to be writing about creativity and to be, so you're creating on a daily basis and you're

resisting your own advice from 20 pages earlier or 50 pages earlier. I'm internally cringing because I've done that so many times. I'm like, yep, in there and I will be again. Yep. And, and so I knew you could appreciate that. So it was also, it was a very, you know, it goes back to this being a process, not a product. It's a habit, not a skill. And when I was getting up at five in the morning, because you know, I'm also like building creative live and that, that takes a ton of energy and, you know, it's a big, big job in itself. And

so this was something I was trying to do at five in the morning and, and on the weekends and, and it didn't come easy. And, but at the same time, I ultimately had to follow the book. And to me, this is, you know, maybe this is part of the book tour story, but like it works. It's, it's, it's when you think of it as this, as a process where you're constantly, I liked how you thought about co-creating, you know, you said you're, you're co-creating that with, you know, whatever you believe in, but you're moving forward. It's three steps forward, one step back, sometimes worse than that. It's just a great reminder that it's just the act of putting one foot in front of the other. And I think there's something that is a strong theme in the book of, I refer to it pretty often as action over intellect. You can't actually think your

way out of it. And we have we, you know, we have these rational minds and their tools and we're taught to use them in school and we believe that they're infallible. And the reality of both the science and my own instinct and experience tells me, no, no, this is rational thought is actually slow. Intuition is very fast and intuition is more in the body and the brain is no, no, we're going to take this as we're going to do it like this. And the fact that we have all these faculties, we've been taught to not use them. And, you know, it was just a very, very messy, messy process that you cannot think your way out of. You have to take action. It's sort of like riding a bike. Is it actually even

riding a bike if you're just balancing? No, you need some forward momentum to be able to figure out what the next thing you're going to do with the handlebars and the brakes and the pedals. You can't do that standing still. Yeah. You can't take the perfect shot or a gorgeous stroke or build an incredible company or an amazing relationship with a human being by just reading every book that was ever written about it or thinking it through. Like you got to actualize around it. Um, yeah. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle sitting here. It's funny. I was, I was saying, I didn't have a chance to review the, uh, first time that we taped cause it was so long ago. Um, I don't, I don't remember if I was asking this question at the end of the conversations, but as we sit here in this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

It's to be unapologetically yourself. That's why this book is both about, it will supercharge your creative skills if that's what you desire. But it's really about a journey back to who you are. And it's about creating the living and not just the living, but the life that you want for yourself. And that's the number one regret of the dead and the dying, right? Is that they took too many inputs from other people. And so this is both a journey through doing and creating in small, you know, habitual, simple ways, making a meal for your family or a business

or all the various examples we've got, but it's really a journey back to you, the human and the life that you want to lead. And who do you listen to? And how do you pair that out from all the, like what's the signal to noise ratio of everything you have going on in your life. And there are a lot of people and those people are important and they all have opinions. And yet, how do you become what is your highest calling, which is to be unapologetically you, to stand in everything that you stand for, the good, the bad, the indifferent, even the ugly, and just own it. Because in that is this immense sense of, and again, it's just like, it's, it's a process of becoming, you know, it's, it's like, there's no stasis. You're never just like, I have arrived. Maybe, you know, Massimo Vignelli can claim it, but I can't, but the, but I do know that,

and you know, if you're listening right now that you've tapped into this before, where you're doing the things you're supposed to be doing. You're listening to that piece of you that is authentic. And so your full circle question is like, what is it? All this is basically a journey about being your unapologetic self. And that is an act of creativity. And it requires recreating on a regular basis in small daily habit ways. None that require you to move to Paris or get oil paints, but in just an awareness of what it is that you're doing to find that journey back to you.

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making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die.

Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.