The Jordan Harbinger Show - 252: Chase Jarvis | Cultivating Your Creative Calling

Episode Date: September 17, 2019

Chase Jarvis (@chasejarvis) is an award-winning artist, entrepreneur, and one of the most influential photographers of the past decade. He is also an author, and his latest book, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life, is out this week. What We Discuss with Chase Jarvis: Some of the most common barriers to creativity and our pursuit of creative outlets or careers and how to work past these barriers. Why creativity is a habit, not a skill, and what we can do to cultivate this creativity with practice. How even Chase has experienced creative slumps, and what he did to dig himself out of them. The DEAR framework for being able to understand what works in any situation -- by studying the masters who have come before you. The importance of community for sustained success in any endeavor. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/252 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics. Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show.

I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFillebaud. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Chase Jarvis. He's an award-winning artist, entrepreneur, and one of the most influential photographers of the past decade, and he's a friend of mine, which always works well here on the show. show, he's worked for huge brands like Apple and Red Bull. However, he's also been in some big slumps, lost his creativity, found it again, sacrificed it on the altar of Silicon Valley capitalism like many of us have, and then reclaimed it. Not a bad ride. Today, we'll discuss

some of the most common barriers to creativity and our pursuit of a creative outlet or career, whether that's work or family obligations or just a lack of know-how. Of course, we'll also show you how to work past and or around it. And Chase is adamant that creativity is not only a must have for those of us who want to stay sane and live at our potential. And also that creativity and creative pursuit is at the end of the day practical as hell. So whether we're trying to just complete a creative project or become a professional creator ourselves, this episode will give you some tools to make it happen. I met Chase through my network and I'm teaching you how to create personal and professional networks, whether that's to increase your business or just to increase your quality of

of life. All of that is at six-minute networking, and you can find that all for free at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. All right. Here's Chase Jarvis. Well, all right. We can talk about your book, I guess. I'm looking at it right now. Got a nice headshot here with your hair on fleek in front of your steel wall, which I called a wooden wall, which got me in trouble before we started rolling. Don't want to downgrade your wall. Don't even try. and downgrade the wall. Before we get into the creativity stuff, though, you almost died in Avalanche.

It has to do with the fact that you wrote this book somehow, but let's get into that. All right. I've almost died a few times. I have zero books. What's the connection between Avalanche's and books? Yeah. The story goes, and I guess it's not a story, it's my real life,

but I spent a long time as an action sports photographer. I left the plans that everybody else had for me. Disappointed a lot of people in my life. It costs me a lot of money, time, and energy. to pursue my creative calling, which was to become an action sports photographer, got to travel all over the world, worked for amazing brands.

One time up in Alaska shooting an ad for Nike, I was indeed caught in a helicopter skiing and stuff that doesn't really get skied very much or at all. And despite having all this years and years, decades of experience in the mountains and working with the world's top athletes, and I was caught in an avalanche. It wasn't just like, oh, nice, it was like,

I don't know what the math is, but I know I shouldn't be here. Yeah. How do you know it's happening? For me, there was a huge wumpf, which is basically that's the entire mountain settling because the snow has fallen in most of all the best ski commercials and snowboard videos and ad campaigns that you see are photographed immediately after a storm and when the one day, then the weather comes out.

So action sports photographers and pro-snowboarders and whatnot spend virtually 100% of the time in the one percent most dangerous time it is to be in the mountains. Oh, because you don't want to go there. when it's just snowed, is that? You do. In the snow, it's basically hard to get good pictures. So immediately, you know, it had been snowing. It snowed for maybe three or four feet at this particular point in Alaska.

And then it cleared up so then you can fly the helicopters. So then we get dropped off in this peak. You can read the detailed account in the book. But ultimately, I was caught in an avalanche. The side of the mountain basically rips off. And I somehow managed to skate. We're talking like snow, like dozens of football fields buried 50 feet deep kind of managed. not just to like, oh, could you just ski out of it?

No, this was like car-sized chunks of snow and rolling down the hill. Are they passing you? I mean, where are you in the middle of it? You're just like a snowball amongst a million other snowballs. It's called the white room for avalanche survivors. Imagine if you're rolling down a hill, but it's anything but white.

It's completely pitch black because you're under the snow. Buried under the snow? Yeah, because as soon as it, what happens is it cracks open and so you actually sink, and then you're tumbling down this 40-degree slope, accelerating you start going very fast, you know, so going 40 plus miles an hour, tumbling with these

Volkswagen car-sized chunks of snow and a gazillion sort of baseballs and soccer balls and BB's sized chunks of snow racing at 40, 50 miles an hour. What do you do when that happens? There's a bunch of different little protocols that one does when they're stuck in an avalanche

if you have avalanche training in which I had extensively, but you're pretty much at the mercy of it all at that point because, again, you're accelerating rather quickly. I threw some very, very crazy human, superhuman strength that happens when your body is capable of complete crazy things when you're literally facing death. So some of that happened to me, and I got super lucky. Yeah. So made it out alive. And one of the main points of the book, and I think the takeaway is that these huge moments in our life, right? You know, this you just had a child, right? Yeah, it did. It's not always near death. It can be something great.

Yeah. They cause us to reflect on our lives. And for whatever reason, I wish it didn't have to be those things. I wish we could just reflect on our life walking down the street. But it causes us to have a massive amount of reflection in a very short amount of time because we're faced with their own mortality and a handful of other things. And in that moment, I realized that I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing. I wasn't living my, not just my creative calling, my calling in life.

But you were already creative if you were doing sports photography. Sure, yeah. And I was. I was truly living what I thought. my dream was, but there had been a little bit of a lie that I was telling myself because it was convenient and comfortable to just stay in the status quo, which is in telling that story, and yet I was still looked to everyone else to be my peak, best self. Take whatever imagination you have about one of the top commercial photographers in the world and then amplify that.

It was that good or better. And yet I was still not satisfied on the inside. I was unhappy, wasn't really doing the things that I was supposed to be doing. And that moment caused me. a great moment of reflection and put me on the course that I'm on now where I'm still doing all those things, but I started building tools and platform for creators, things like Creative Live. I started doing iPhone apps that one went on to be the app of the year in 2009 on the Apple platform. Best camera. Best camera. Good name for a, there's go. People are probably just searching like, oh, what's the best camera? I still got the URL. You need it? Yeah. Yeah. A hundred thousand dollars. Maybe more. Maybe more. Yeah.

So ultimately, I recognize that I needed to do something different, and it was very powerful, put me on a new path. And the real point of that is that this happens to us all the time. We sometimes take the path that we're supposed to take, and sometimes we continue to ignore it. And these wake-up calls will just continue to happen. They're not always near death, but the reality is that we are programmed in our culture to ignore a lot of the things that we know inside to be true. and because of external forces and we want to please our parents and our friends and our spouse

and our whatever, it causes a lot of problems. I think that's definitely true, although there are people right now who are like, wait, let me get this straight. You're upset that you weren't being creative because you were only doing action sports photography with like Red Bull athletes in Alaska who are hellas skiing?

Yes. Cry me a river. Yeah, totally. But I think that that's actually, it underscores my point. Yeah. Is that whatever it looks like on the outside, you can just continue to cruise along

because you get just enough of validation. It's sort of like being in a relationship where it's not horrible. It's just good enough. Yeah. And it's not about what I was doing. It was more about what my potential was and what I was really meant to be doing in the next chapter of my life. Of course. And I was sort of denying myself that.

And the same is true. Like it's not about me skiing in Alaska with action sports athletes and helicopters. Like right now, whoever's listening, you might be at home in your underwear in Ohio saying, like, you know what? I'm not actually following that thing that I know to be true in myself. I would have mentioned somebody sitting in their underwear in Ohio. I was probably saying that all the time. Eating Cheetah. watching ESPN2 or C-SPAN and being like, you know, this wasn't, this is not my calling.

I do like Cheetos. Yeah. The only part of this that is my calling are the Cheetos. The rest of it I never thought would be happening. I get it, though. For me, I have the same problem. I don't really know what my career goals are. I have an inkling that there's other stuff that needs to happen, but I used to be a lawyer.

That I knew for sure was not for me. Can we deconstruct that for a second? Let's do it. Okay, so what happened? What was your feeling? How did it feel? It's not that complicated because I knew before I went there. Bingo.

Right? I did the same thing with medical school. Yeah. And the same thing with like five or ten other things cost me $100,000 in student loans alone. It cost me 10 years of my life. And why did you go lawyering when you knew before you started lawyering that you didn't want to be lawyering? You know what it was?

I didn't know what else I could even do. Bingo. Yeah. Bingo. So that's one thing. So unemployable plus Dr. Fireman. Like when you're in kindergarten, you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, or whatever

your mom and dad do, because you don't even know. Totally. And I realized that by the time I'd graduated from college, I'd expanded that like 10 other things, but not like a million other things. Right. You know, this is a huge point of the book. Why aren't we asking ourselves that? It seems like this big, crazy question, and the reality is the answer is right there.

It's right beneath the surface. We've just never been taught to think about it, to ask about it, to explore it and ourselves. What we do is we sit around and we wait for all those other inputs that say, doctor, lawyer, fireman, astronaut, firewoman, those are the things that are helping us decide, and I think that's a pretty crappy matrix for a decision. It's horrible. I mean, I literally went to,

I've talked about this on the show before. I went to law school because I was like, well, not really having any jobs laying in my lap with this undergraduate degree. More education is definitely the answer. Oh, what subject? Doesn't matter. Oh, lawyers get hired a lot, and they make money.

Guess I'll go to law school. I mean, that was the whole thought process. Yeah. I thought more about what I would have for breakfast. on a Sunday when I'm at freaking stacks getting like pancakes or sausage. Hold on. I need a few more minutes. Yeah. That wasn't even my, I didn't even throw that much energy into my law school. Right. And I believe the same is true for 90% of the world and maybe more. And I believe there's a little bit of a cruder version than maybe 90%. But for most of us, we just take what's spoon-fed

to us. And to me, that is tragic because that is how you spend a lot of your time with this, to be crystal clear, one precious life. And what if we could uncork that? What if we found a way to look inside us? What if we actually rewrote the cultural narrative, not just about creativity. You know, I do couch a lot of this in creativity rather than like finding a job. And I'll get to that in a little bit. But what if we actually had a cultural narrative that supported pursuing the things that you were supposed to be doing?

Because it's literally just as easy as the one that's existing now may be actually easier. We just haven't taught it, programmed it. We've said things like, oh, it would be naive to pursue things you. love. It would be too playful, too whimsical, too risky. I think it's the riskiest thing that you can do to play it safe doing someone else's life. I think that's true. And I think a lot of people run into these weird stopping blocks. They do this extremist thing. Like, well, I can't be creative. What am I going to do? Quit my job and go be a landscape painter in Venice. And it's like, whoa. That's like saying you can't play basketball with your kid on Sunday because what are you going to do, join the NBA.

Totally. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, that is a huge problem with creativity, which is one of the things I'm trying to do with the book as well is rewrite that narrative. And there's a lot of ambition of the book, but the moves are actually really simple. What you just described as the epitome or the vision that so many people have of creativity in this book, I'm not asking you to move to Paris, no smoking zy cigarettes, no wearing a bray, no painting, no like, none of that stuff. Take all of it and throw it away. It has everything to do with a mentality. It's a mindset and a small shift in the way that you look at the world and the way you move through it. Sure, all those things, if you want to be a painter, a designer, photographer, all those things, they will supercharge

your creativity with a capital C. I think that's a really important thing to get on the table is that it's not, though, just about art. Art is a little subset of art. Yeah, it's hard to, as somebody who doesn't consider themselves creative as I sit in a video studio doing my show that I created, I still don't even think of myself that way, because I can't draw. And I'm not kidding. I'm not even being facetious. This is why I'm psyched, because I knew that when I came on your show, you would tell it like it is, and what you're saying right now is replaying for so many people, and I'm the guy to tell you that, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're going to put a pin in that. Let's uncork some of this just for a second.

It is not going to take long. If we think about creativity as not art, sure, art is a subset of creativity, but creativity is when you're taking things that didn't previously exist and you're putting a couple things together to form something new and useful, you're creating. So you doing your show, writing your show notes, creating dinner, a meal, building a family, all these things. This is just Facebook, but yeah. All these things are wildly creative.

And the principles of the book are really simple. There's three of them. One is that everyone is creative. No questions asked. It is part of our DNA. It's what separates us from all the other species on the planet. Our ability to create. We make tools.

We build our lives. We have autonomy and agency and all these things. So just follow me here for a second. Everyone's creative. Thing two, creativity is a muscle. the more you use it, the stronger it gets. Like anything, it's just not a big stretch, right? It's not about a skill.

It's about a habit. It's more about using it. So one, everyone's creative. Two, it's creativity as a muscle. Here's the kicker. The things we do in small daily ways, you creating the show, the meal you made for your family last night,

the business that you're building, fill in the blank, whatever you're doing that is creative. It's those small daily creative acts that when you do more of them and you do them with intention and just a certain level of awareness. You don't have to move to Paris, start painting none of that.

With everything you're doing right now, you become more aware of your ability to create these things, and then you realize something that's the mindblower, is that you're using the same muscle to do all those things that you use to create your life. So there's this leap of like, wait a minute, you understand and start to develop this sense of agency that you don't have otherwise.

So for the folks at home there, sitting on the couch eating Cheetos that we described earlier, I don't think they think they can create their life. I think they think their life is happening, to them. And my explication of the book, what I know to be true for myself and having deconstructed the lives of the most creative people on the planet, neither did they at one point. And then they started doing what I'm describing here. And it basically uncorked their life and showed them what was possible. They then had agency to pursue their dreams in career hobby, just life in general.

It's a really simple pattern. They recognize this. And then it empowers them to take action. And the cool thing, it's available to us right now. reading the book made me look at the crazy looking artist people and be like, I get it now. Like the reason they seem irresponsible sometimes or completely on a different planet is because all this other stuff inhibits their creativity, right? So all the stuff that we're used to that people complain about,

somebody listening right now, the guy in Ohio, for example, he's going, I can't. I have work. I've got kids. I've got to worry about my career. I'm building a side hustle. I can't do this creative thing. And then you see this crazy artist person

who like can't pay their cell phone bill. Right. And you go, ah, that makes sense now. Because you paying your cell phone bill is like you getting up in the morning early for a flight and then go into a meeting. It's like it's going to screw up your whole flow. So you just don't do it. True. That was a big aha for me because I went, oh, okay, these people aren't just like crazy dysfunctional.

Or they are. But that's the reason they have all this open white space. What if take that same version of yourself that we just described, you're creating your show. And what if you recognize that, okay, that person over there that is that crazy artist that's spray peering. creating the mural on the side of the building, whatever, that you see as much of that in you as you want, that you have the same level of creativity. It's maybe not as strong a habit, or maybe it's even stronger because the business that you're building and you're having impact in the world and maybe he or she, this isn't about comparing. It's about seeing what we're

truly capable and who we are as a creative species, that it's available to everyone. It requires that you acknowledge it. This is where, like, self-talk and mindset matters. I talk a lot about mindset in the book. And it's because if you say the words, I'm not creative, it's not just a neutral. What you're essentially doing is denying arguably the single greatest power of the human species is the ability to create things. You can imagine if you're programming yourself to say, I'm not creative, that not only does that have a neutral effect, that it actually has a negative effect, because we do need to express ourselves. That's part of why we have emotions. That's part of why we do build tools. Look around you. Every single thing in this room, whatever you can see,

if we're in your ears right now and you're running down the street and you can see a park bench or a light pole or a it was all created. It was all designed with intention. And even if it's a bad design, it was all designed. And the same is true for you in your life. But we just haven't owned that yet. And I'm saying as soon as you start to own it, not in a move to Paris, start painting and wear a zebra kind of way, but just as own. this stuff that the world starts happening for you, not to you, and you have agency over your life in a way you never did. You didn't just randomly discover creativity, though, after ditching med school.

I mean, I read that you literally broke into a dark room at college, cracked the window so that you could get in. And then, like, from midnight to 4 a.m., you're developing. Not even the college that I was attending. No, someone else's college. To be clear, not even your own college. So yes, do not turn me in. I will not name the college so they cannot come after me.

Right. Yeah. And this is part of the cultural narrative that I would love if you took anything away from this conversation. There's so many shoulds in life. You should do this. You should do that. You should go to the school, get this job. Just think of the experience that we both had and we talked about already.

And here's the hard part is that comes from people who you respect, who you love, who you admire, who you're close to, your parents, your peers, your teachers, your student counselor, all these people who are giving you information. then you're just fielding this. What we're really not taught is like, yeah, but what do we want? What is possible? Remember, you thought you had 10 choices. So if we can flip the script and start opening this

as the choice that it really is, things are going to get better. And I'll give you my experience. So as a second grader, I went into second grade, just having made my first film called Sons of Zorro. Wow.

We washed cars to pay for the film. I can remember it like it was yesterday. We hired my friend, brother to film it. He had a super eight camera. We bought film, gave him the film. We sketched it out, basically wrote the screenplay, did our own costumes, shot it all in camera. So there's no like post editing. He just like, okay, one sort of big scene. And then had it developed, went and bought candy, screened the film, put flyers all over the neighborhood, and made more money than we spent on the film. That's incredible. Profitable first film as an eight-year-old. Yeah, yeah. Eat that James

camera. Right. So then I roll into. second grade, feeling pretty good about myself. I've got a comic strip that I'm distributing weekly at school. I got a little stand-up comedy routine. I'm doing magic tricks. And then it's the parent- Just a hint of comedy. I can't actually say the joke that I used to tell

because it's horrifying. It's so inappropriate. It doesn't work in 2019, yeah. Didn't work in 1980 because it was just wildly inappropriate. I'm going to hear that after the show. The point is I was doing what I think is supernatural for second graders, for just expressing ourselves in all these ways. And then the student teacher conference happened.

And I remember hearing my teacher, Miss Kelly, tell my mom, I overheard it, chases so much better at sports than he is at art. And here's eight-year-old me, like you'd think eight-year-old kid is crushed, not at all. What did I do? I am a social creature. I'm a human. I want to fit in.

I want to be a part of the tribe. I just go, okay, cool. I don't do that anymore then. I do this. And it just like flipped a bit. Okay, new identity. This is who I am. And it worked, and it was very successful for me. I went to college on a soccer scholarship. I was on the Olympic development soccer team. I had aspirations and a plan and a clear

path to play professionally. So in a way, she was right. But just think of that single sentence that she said, how it shaped me. And you know, you can say like, oh, if you really wanted it, you would have stuck with it. Well, your original question was how did you sort of come into your own creativity? And my point is that we all come into this world wildly creative. Ask any first grade classroom. Who wants to come to the front of the room and draw me a picture? Every hand goes out. And then we have a system of schooling and employment and job and culture that sort of trains it out of us as something that's not practical or irrational or whimsical or naive.

And you either figure out that that's BS or in my experience, another one of these traumatic moments happen where we reflect. And this particular traumatic moment for me was a way. week before my college graduation, the phone was on the wall, ring, ring. And I went on my college phone, picked it up. And my grandfather had dropped out of a heart attack. And a week before my college graduation, and no one's signing this coming. He wasn't thought to be unhealthy or anything, just boom, dead, gone. So obviously horrible and traumatic, but there was a silver lining.

And the silver lining was that he was a avid, hobbyist, amateur photographer. He and my dad have they spent a lot of time around camera. and taking pictures of me playing all these sports and skateboarding and all that stuff. And I was given his cameras. And there would be some little montage right now if this was a movie. And it was like my whole sort of experience from Ms. Kelly's second grade class to virtually denying my creativity. I mean, I remember I was pursuing medical school and a PhD in philosophy and all these things that everybody else wanted me to pursue. And then realized that I'd been denying it.

And so there's a little whisper inside me that said, you need to go like, experience. of this. This is like, just do this. So I had always been interested in photography, hadn't really talked about it, because I was on the other side of the camera. I was being photographed, and I would talk to the media as my college soccer team was one of the top ten in the country. So we were always on TV and whatnot, and I was the guy who'd get interviewed. And I was curious about photography, and I just started following that thread. So I had a plan to go to Europe with a little bit of money that I got for my grandfather's death, took a 13-stop discount super ticket to get there. And I just lived out of a bag with my then-girlfriend now, wife, Kate, and walked the earth and taught

myself how to take pictures. And it was like, oh, wow. Now, I think it's an important side point. It's not going to be that way for everybody. Didn't you have any sunk cost fallacy going on? Like, well, I'm already so invested in soccer and I'm already on my way to med school. All those things are true. Yeah.

And yet, this is one of the things I love about our conversation so far is that you had that same vision for yourself in law school, like sunk cost fallacy. like, well, I'm already most of the way there. I tick the L-SAT, I tick the D, all these things. I had done all those things as well. But mostly, so yes, there was a sunk-cost fallacy, but mostly it was like, I'm going to disappoint. If I change directions now, I'll disappoint people that love me, that care for me.

I've told everybody what I'm doing. I'd have to let them down. And I'm really unsure it doesn't feel safe because I've got all this programming, this self-talk about how impractical this is. And remember, we're using photography right now. for me. But it's just an example. It's a metaphor for our real path. And here's the tragedy is it happens all the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week to 99% of the people in our culture. I'm just asking us to stop that behavior. Pay attention to the things that are actually truly

calling you. And in the case of my life, and I don't know how you would quantify yours, but again, hundreds of thousands of dollars, 10 years of my life. And honestly, just everything would look good on paper, but there's just a lot of sort of dis-ease, which actually causes disease. Yeah, sure. Literally. And I had a bunch of weird ailments and.

Really? Yeah, weird. I had an inner-infection that was like I had a 20 beer buzz for a year. Oof. Not good. Not good. Yeah, and it's, I mean, it sounds like, whoa, someone I was like, that sounds pretty cool, free, you know.

Not at all. Like, no driving. No driving. Yeah, like I struggled to walk. and exercise, and it just came on overnight. So bizarre. The macro here is that when we're doing things that are sort of, even at a lightweight, antithetical towards what our true calling is, that there's a price we pay.

We don't actually know that price. Yeah, you don't know it. We can quantify it in dollars and years when we connect the dots looking backwards, and I'm just making the point that why would you figure that out? Why would you waste the time? And the answers are obvious because culture gives us all these shoulds. Yeah. And I think what I've given you in the book is a framework for how to work your way out of it.

And it's super practical because you don't want to disappoint your spouse. Your spouse is like, wait a minute, honey, we've got two kids. We've got a mortgage. We've got all these things. And I'm giving you a toolkit for managing your way out of that and toward the thing that's going to bring you a lot of joy. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Chase Jarvis. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show.

And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visitjordanharbanger. slash deals. And don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Chase Jarvis. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Chase Jarvis. I think a lot of people, also hide the creative part of themselves because they want to be liked. They want to fit in.

You kind of mentioned that before. Yeah. Kids especially are like, oh, I don't want to do, I don't know, this kind of art or this kind of stuff. Sure, that kid over there, they're their own person. They're dressing how they want to dress and their hairs how they want to dress. And if you're not that comfortable in your own skin, you look at that as like, that's sort of threatening. So I would just, oh, I don't want to do that. I just want to do that. The funny thing is, is that we look at other people in our culture, who we admire and respect and whether they're entrepreneurs or artists or just upstanding citizens and they stand out. But as a culture, we are really taught to fit in. And so there's this weird disconnect and a dissidence. And the way I think about it is you can't

actually stand out and fit in at the same time. It's tough. I don't really know how that works. Totally. Like there's a spectrum though, right? Like a lot of people go, oh, man, it must be nice to carve your own path, Chase Jarvis, Jordan Harbinger. You don't want to go like full Rodman. But, I mean, also it worked for him until it didn't. Right. You know? The point is that maybe even Dennis had some ulterior motives. I think so. And it seemed to work for him. But what if there was, you said it true that there is a spectrum,

but what if you were on that spectrum and you were driving? That's the thing that people don't realize, is that A, you're on the spectrum, B, you're driving, and right now you're driving in a place where you don't actually need to drive to that place that's not awesome. You can drive to the place that's awesome. Yeah, you can actually plan this out. And I think that's one of the core messages of the book is that this is not only highly

practical, but something that you can work towards sort of stuff. Not only, yeah, not only is creativity, not whimsical and playful and naive. And it is literally the way I've written the book and the way I believe, the most practical thing you can do is to get good at it. Because if you can create something, you know, they call founders of companies founders. Yeah. They did not find anything. They created it.

And you're like, oh, find happiness. And he's just going to find it. It's going to be in a bucket on the street, in a coffee mug. Yeah, I traveled a lot looking for it. It didn't really work. Right, because you have to create it for yourself. And the same is true. You start to think of it.

Everything in the world is created, all your emotions, all your experiences, what you want in a life, your attitude right now. You're in charge of all that stuff. So it's sort of like a combination of radical opportunity and radical ownership combined with something that makes you feel good, more alive, more engaged. And I think, especially in this day and age, more connected. So those benefits sound great, but what about people who go, look, it's selfish of me to be creative. I can't afford to. Look at all my responsibilities. You're not a tough case. That's what everybody does, as what I would say to them. And I think, first of all, it's natural. So I don't want to throw rocks. Remember my path?

I'm sitting here talking about it. I want to make sure not to be, but I'm talking about it like it was really easy. It was a straight path for me. I knew it, figured it out, and here I am. I did just the opposite. I made all the same mistakes. Whoever's listening right now. They're beating themselves up a little bit. Don't beat yourself up. The cool thing is you can start today. And the way you start is, by shifting your mindset and acknowledging some of these super fundamentals set things, like that truly doing something different for dinner tonight is step one. The next time you're going to take a picture of your kid to record their fourth birthday, like lean into that a little bit.

Instead of taking one picture just to, quote, document it, take three or four, try and take a good picture of your kid. Tony Robbins talks about no extra time, net time. Like, I want to be efficient and effective. And there's a million ways throughout your life right now that you're moving. This is not about dragging. the paints out for four hours to do a thing and then your creative activity. Don't get me wrong. Those things are great. And I would be super supportive of that. But it's not required. And it's not

what I recommend, especially for someone who's trying to sort of wrap their brain around this for the first time, that hyper-practical prioritizers, what I call that person in the book. They're like, oh, I got other priorities. So again, the way you should look at this is, A, there's a way to do it super small, lightweight right now today, taking pictures with meals, very, very, very simple ways. And over time, as you get more comfortable, you can expand this. Not required because you'll get full benefit starting on day one. You won't understand the benefits until you've moved through the paradigm a little bit. I'll just give you an example, my 65-year-old mom.

Also, hyper-practical, and she had pride around that. She was the head of the household at a very, very young age in her world, and the bills were paid, the dinner was on the table at the right time, and all these sort of pressures that she put herself. And because of that, she owned it and as an extension of our culture, she therefore believed that she wasn't creative. Fast forward, like 65 years into her life.

We mentioned the iPhone app that I created in 2009. I gave her this iPhone app and an iPhone. And she started taking pictures on her walk. This is a walk she takes every day on her lunch hour from one building to another building, started taking pictures and sharing them online with her friends. And she went in a matter of weeks, not months, not days, but weeks. from in her friend circle to like, oh my gosh, Joy, you are so wildly creative.

These are amazing. And the cool thing is that I watched that transform what she made for dinner, how she dressed, where she traveled, the level of ambition of her trips, instead of going to the safe, old place you'd always gone. She wanted to start traveling to China and Africa. And it basically opened her in a way that is available to us all. and you can't actually see the benefits, but if you start doing it, you will.

And the part is you have to take my word for it. And the evidence that I would offer outside of just my word is the lives of the people that you admire. Ask them how they got to where they are. And no one said, God, I just woke up and I was here. No one says that. You know, I've had hundreds of people on my podcast, all the teachers of creative live,

the millions of students that have gone through our programs, the ones that have actually grasped this. It was all intentional. was all created. So these stifled creativity, the limiting beliefs and everything, this is reversible. And you've given some personas that inhibit creativity. One of them was what, the prioritizer? Yeah, that's when I was just mentioning where everything else is more important than creativity. And again, if you think about the way I'm talking about it, I'm trying to make it so that it can fit into your life really easy. And you're like, wow, I just really take a few pictures every day.

You don't know. Seriously, I've tracked that behavior for the last seven years. I create something every day with intention, even if it takes five seconds, even if it's 11.30 at night, and I have not focused on that intentional creative act, I will do it because, again, it's a habit. And when you start thinking creatively, thinking of yourself as a creator, and practicing this in a lightweight way, that's why I call it a daily practice, right? It literally rewires your brain. There's things called default neural networks where you go through the same habit, like how many people drove to work today and you didn't have to really think about it. Yeah, it's the shower that stuff when you come up in this shower

and you're like, this is so good. Yeah, if you imagine your default neural network is telling you do the same thing every time and what creativity does is you jump out of that rut and you start to be able to go, wait a minute, I have a choice here. And that is a pattern that you want to support. You want to support different thinking.

You want to support the muscle that is connecting things that used to not go together rather than the things that we always just fall into. I'm saying you can actually make a habit of doing things differently. And you're like, I like my routine. I'm not suggesting you change your routine. I'm suggesting you add a layer to it.

And part of your routine is getting yourself just slightly uncomfortable and creating something every day. Personality type number two, the defensive, the unreasonably defensive, non-creative. Yeah. What about the starter, the striver?

These are good too, because I want the audience to self-identify. Because I feel like there's people who are like, no, but I'm not one of these because I'm a, and then it's like, okay, you're a striver, you're a starter. Sure, we don't have to go through all of them. But the starter, for example,

someone who starts a lot of stuff. Like, oh, cool, I love what Chase is saying right now. And you know, he said, you don't have to go on and buy a bunch of paints. I want to, though, because I was a painter in college, and I really loved it. And so, and now I'll go do that. And then tomorrow they'll go do something else and the next day. And they won't actually ever create a thing.

They got the supplies where they started the business, but it's just a side business. And they started telling themselves a different narrative. So they start a bunch of things and not don't actually, as soon as they bump up against any resistance, they stop. The striver is it has to be perfect, right? It has to be, oh, I'm never finished with this thing. I'm an advocate of volume over preciousness.

Yeah, there's science behind that. Have you seen this with the pottery experiment? So there's debate as to whether that's an actual experience. So we'll call it the apocry experiments. But the myth goes like this, that teacher, and I really want to get to the bottom of this. I want it to be true, because otherwise I'm just... No, I think it is true, but I don't know who knows it. Yeah.

But it's obviously, it has been replicated in labs and experiments, but the original version of this. Oh, so the idea is sound. Yes. Okay, well, that's a relief. Yeah, it's been replicated. But at the start of the lore, I just can't find the teacher who did this. So the story goes like this, that pottery teacher, first day of class. All right, we're class divided into two groups.

This group over here, your entire grade is on one piece, one pot. You all over here on this side, this half of the room, you are graded on volume. If you make one pot a day, great, one pot a week, less good but still good. One pot a month, less good, but still okay. Volume is your grade. So that'd be like an A, B, C, or D, whatever. And at the end of the semester, let's look at the work. So not only did the group, the volume side of the group, make infinitely more work, actually

infinitely, but they made a lot more work. the work was way better. And if you think about it for a second, it's not surprising, right? Because what are you doing? You're practicing. You're iterating. It's hard to get worse

at something over time or not improve at all if you're continually doing it. Right. And you start to go places. You're like, well, I made one yesterday and it looked like this. And so you end up falling into your own

little bit of style based on repetition. Stakes are low too, right? Like you're going to make another pot tomorrow, so who cares if this one is like the upside down pot and it doesn't work. Bingo.

So if you think of it in terms, like that's part of what made me realize and put very crisply in the book that this is, that creativity is a habit. And the same thing is true with the pot in this experiment as with life. You start to experiment in lightweight ways. Remember, go back to like principle three that I mentioned. It's in doing small creative acts and acknowledging them that you ultimately realize that you have agency over your life. Just creativity to a different scale. You mentioned in the book, and I'm paraphrasing, I think, if you value money, comfort or convenience over creativity, you jeopardize all for. What's going on with

that? That seems particularly insightful. Well, unless you don't remember. No, no, I remember right. I know. I thought it was pretty good. I was proud of myself, pat on my back. So there is something with creativity and go back to the neural network pathways we're just talking about and just explore comfort. It's uncomfortable to cook dinner a different way. You've got the thing. You cook it all the time. You've got the ingredients at your house and to change it, you have to get uncomfortable just for a second. Well, what if my partner doesn't like whatever? I'm going to put anchovies in the Caesar salad. What if they don't like that? And whatever the different thing is, we have, there's a sort of a resistance to it. Stephen Pressfield talks about this in the War of Art, this resistance.

And I'm saying that the best stuff in life is on the other side of comfort. If you're always seeking the comfortable, and I know, I don't want to pretend that I don't see comfort. This is an active process. Those shoes look comfortable. Those are those shoes that I did the... Have you seen the ads for those shoes? Are they called the startup? Yes, they are.

Yeah, those are my shoes from K-Swiss. I am in the ads for these shoes. I've seen them. Yeah. So, wait a minute, but the ad is not a print ad. You're in a video. I'm in a video. Yeah.

And also on, like, Instagram ads. Nice shoes. There you go. Yeah. Wow. Not even on purpose. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I should have worn mine.

I got some from the president of Casewitz. Oh, no big deal. I haven't met the man. wrote me a nice letter. And I think you probably wrote that letter to a few other people. Just guessing. I mean, I had to be in pictures to get shoes.

You just had to open your mail. So I'm a little jealous. But just think about we naturally seek comfort. And this is another thing I want to acknowledge that the things that I'm prescribing here sometimes are a counter to our biology. Right? Our biology is seeking safety and simplicity

and getting uncomfortable is antithetical to that or it can be. And the same is true for our brain. I like to call it the brain rather than my brain because it's a multi-million year old organ and it is in your skull and it is designed to keep you alive, not happy. See, that's an important point

that most people don't necessarily realize. Right, which is why I'm that huge advocate of mindset deciding you're going to overwrite this biology that used to be useful because its job was to keep you away from saber-tooth tigers. I'm here to tell you that not enough people liking your Instagram post is not actually a saber-tooth tiger.

Your biology treats it, the same way and your biology treats it the same way that I wouldn't want to create a meal that's slightly different than the one I normally have. I'm telling you it's not a safer tooth tiger. And not only will you not get eaten by the saber tooth tiger, but your life will be enriched. Think of the times and you're like, oh, I really don't want to go to the thing and you go to the thing because you had to or whatever. And you're like, that was cool.

I wonder if I break out of my comfort zone a little bit, what would happen? And this is a pattern that's true for so many of the top creators that we, we aspire to. I want you to have habits. I want you to have healthy habits that support the life you want. And one of those habits should be getting uncomfortable, whether that's Ja Zhang and his rejection therapy or Tim Ferriss getting uncomfortable, whether that's, you know, Brené Brown, getting uncomfortable through having hard conversations or the people that are the highest performers, they have a part of their routine, their life, where they intentionally make themselves uncomfortable because it's on the other side of comfort

that the best stuff is. I get in an ice bath every morning. In your house? I have a cold plunge outside. I have a hot tub and a cold plunge at my house. How do you keep? It's just like a refrigerated tub? It's a reverse jacuzzi.

Yeah. Wow. It's super gold, and it's right next to some water that's super hot. And while that may sound sort of trendy, sure, it's good for inflammation and good for, you know,

there's immune benefits. Sounds like something a startup founder in Seattle would have. Vim Hof, the Iceman, is patented. method of breathing and blah, all these things are true. And what is also true is that is a way for me to get uncomfortable every day. There's not one part of me that goes like, I can't wait to get in that cold water.

Really? It seems like after a while you'd be stoked about it. I am kind of stoked about it because I like the results. I don't have to love the process to get there. And there are lots of mornings where I would have to break the ice to get into it. And this morning, I took a 6 a.m. flight to get here. Yeah. I was in that thing at 4.15.

in the world. There's no discussion about it in my head in the morning. I just get in it and it makes me comfortable with being uncomfortable. I don't think you have to do that, to be clear. But what is a small lightweight way that you can get uncomfortable? Because it's in breaking out of that habit. Yeah, like you could take a cold shower. To me, that's the

next best alternative. Take a normal shower, bathe and then for the last minute as cold as you can stand there. Right in the back. Being a little bit uncomfortable each day. I mean, people always go, do you get nervous when you do your show? And the answer is not really, but I'm not nervous but I'm like, I'm always, there is some feeling of discomfort with everything. And my brain tells me, oh, it's because you're a little bit later.

You're worried about traffic or you're worried about the lighting. But it's not really one of those particular things. Like, I'm sort of addicted to that feeling. And as soon as I get really comfortable, like when I was doing audio only, I got really comfortable doing my show. And it wasn't really fun anymore. Right? Then you had some cameras.

Like, oh, oh, God, I better. Brush my teeth. Sit up straight and do my hair or something. Yeah, yeah, looks good. And you like kind of resent that. But then you go, okay, I'm stepping it up. For sure. And you're not alone.

The same is true for everyone. This is called growth. This is called development. I'm couching it. Those are all terms that are thrown around pop culture. I'm actually couching all those terms in creativity because you're choosing those things. You're writing your own script when you're doing those things. And you can either choose discomfort or you can choose comfort.

And not everything is binary in life, but the point that you can arc your moment, your hour, your day, it's obvious that you can architect your life. I just want you to own it. You mentioned this in the book. You say things like follow your instinct or your gut. How do we know if we're following our intuition or a heart or whatever you want to put it,

or if we're just responding to marketing and programming that we're getting through conscious or subconscious channels? Because how do we know if I'm using my gut or my creative instinct? Yeah. Or I've been listening to too much... Oh, I should be an entrepreneur because that's trendy right now. Right, it's trendy right now.

Oh, and this fake thought leader. He wants me to join his $40,000 a year mastermind, and he makes money selling masterminds based on, wait a minute, and you just start going. Like, if you think about it, you realize it's like a pyramid scheme or a circular logic, but how do we know if we're following our gutter or if we're responding to programming

that we don't even see anymore? I believe that you know most of the time. And I do believe I don't acknowledge that there's a part of you that doesn't know, but let's talk about the first one first. So I think we know. If you look back in your life when you knew something

and you followed it, how did life feel? It felt good. That's a flow state. Life was agreeable. You were doing things you wanted to be doing with people you wanted to, maybe where it felt good. And then think about when you ignored your intuition and it went badly. How bad was it? It sucked.

I knew I didn't need to date that person or that job was not healthy for me or the boss was not, whatever. And so I think your intuition covers like 90 plus percent of the cases. and the irony is that it's so much like creativity I liken it to the book that we're taught to ignore that. But the reality is that if you juxtapose that to your rational mind, we talk about the mind being so smart

and that's a huge feature for being human. Totally, I get it all of it. But you know what? It's also true. The rational mind, remember, go back to the part, like this is not my brain, this is the brain. And it's meant to keep you alive, not happy. So if you want to be alive but not happy,

always do what your head says. If you want to be alive and happy, you can use the whole system. And that includes your gut, right? We have this feeling, and that's why they call it a gut feeling. This is your biology talking to you, and it's beyond just your rational mind. We know that the rational mind is actually slow. It's super fallible. It's full of biases.

What we don't yet know, but we are starting to understand is that the gut, that all the cells in your body have some sort of a memory. Because right now I can feel what it feels like, the chair on the back of my leg, I'm not thinking about that when I'm talking to you until I shift because I couldn't. I'd be paralyzed if I was thinking of every place my clothes touching my body and what's happening outside in this room and with the microphone and we just focus because that helps us move through life. But what is believed is that just because you're not paying attention to it doesn't mean your body's not storing all that.

And so think of traumatic moments or happy moments, your body storing all this stuff. And I'm trying to advocate that you don't just listen to your head, but you listen to your heart and your gut. And with those tools, that's how we're supposed to think, that we make the best decisions. It's an aggregate rather than just one of those parts. So we're taught to ignore that. I think we get it when we start to learn to listen. This is actually the calling part of the book. It's not like, I'm called to be a painter. It's just like we all have some callings in us, and it's a calling to do this over that, and we're taught to ignore it. If you can start to listen to that calling, I think you have a radical advantage. Now let's talk about that 10,000.

percent where everything feels right, but to the point that you asked, like, I'm just being swindled at that moment. Okay, step into that for a minute. Just assume you're going to go do the mastermind. And when you're 10 minutes into this mastermind, and you're going like, uh-oh. This better not be it. Uh-oh. Yeah. And then I would advocate that you keep doing it until that feeling it was like, oh, few, that was just me, my fear. And now I start to see the benefit and it feels good. or you tip into the other side of that equation, which is, I just got hoodwinked out of 40 grand. And this dude's a fraud,

and this woman next to me, she must be a plant and, you know, whatever the dynamic is. And, you know, go back to intuition, through action, again, the doing of the thing, you know like that. So I believe we do so much in our culture sitting back and thinking,

go back to dude on the couch of the Cheetos. He's thinking about all the ways he's going to get creative, thinking about how he's going to change his life, thinking about what he wants, to do. And in the book, I talk a lot about action or intellect. It's, oh, really? You're not sure? Start doing something. Do you like it? No, this doesn't feel right. Do you like the other thing? It kind of feels good. Do more of that. That, the metaphor I use in the book, there is the path.

The cool thing is that none of these are foreign. We all have this experience of listening to our gut, following it and it working out or following it and not working out. So let's go down the working out path and then we have this like gosh i've been doing this for a while and it feels good that's called being on your path and what we want in our culture is we want a map we want to say okay if this is like the map that we were sold like okay grow up get good grades in school that's checkpoint one on the map go to this college that's checkpoint two have this career checkpoint three work this many years checkpoint four get the gold watch checkpoint five then retire happily checkpoint six that's a map you can see where you start you see all the dots then you see the red x at the end you're

You're like, I want that. Safe, predictable, blah, blah, blah, blah. The reality is what we need to be paying attention to is a compass, not a map. Now, think about how they differ. A compass is an arrow. It says, go this way. You're like, I don't know, that goes into the woods. I can't, I can't see very far. It goes up this hill. But you don't need to see the whole journey. In fact, that is one of these things you need to get comfortable with, is not seeing the whole journey for two reasons. One, if you can see the whole journey, you know what? There's some pitfalls in there that you can't see. Culture tells you you can see it all. I don't know anyone's life who's been a straight line. I don't know a single person. Versus this compass analogy, the people who we admire the most and who are inspiring to me and who I

respect and admire and for a myriad of reasons, they do get good at trusting their gut. They realize that they are in control. They may not even have mastered fear, but they've become comfortable enough, just one click more action than fear. And that is the recipe, not just for success in our culture, here's the true kicker, it's fulfillment. And success without fulfillment is the worst thing possible, right? You're flying around in your private job by yourself. That's the worst. I wouldn't know. But fulfillment, like, again, I've mapped this stuff with my own experience where I've had successes in failures and the experiences of the people who are the top performers in so many disciplines. And this is like almost verbatim the same experience for everybody is like felt scary,

follow my compass, not my map, and just started pulling on the things that were working and started to walk away from the things that weren't. The same is true for people. If you're the average of the fight people you spend the most time with, might as well choose wisely. We put ourselves around crappy situations, make ourselves feel bad, people who talk us down or get in our head. We need to change that. You are creating all of these opportunities and you are making all these decisions. You're the architect of your life. Own that. And wow, life gets really interesting really quickly. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Chase Jarvis. We'll be right back after through this. You've got this set up, I don't know what else to call it, dear, right?

Sure. Deconstructing and analyzing work from people that you admire that maybe you want to emulate. Can we go through this? Because it seems highly practical. Yeah, super practical. Well, super actionable. I'll tell it through a little story. So my experience developing my skills as a photographer, it was before digital. It was films, very slow, very slow. Yeah, super slow. You don't even know what you got until next week. Or next month, and it was very expensive. And so you'd have to be judicious about teaching yourself those things.

And not dissimilar in the way today you have access to who are the gatekeepers and who aren't. And where do I get this information? I just type it into a search bar. And for me, I aspire to be, let's go back to early career for me, action sports, photographer. I wanted to shoot, you know, skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, surfing all over the world with my friends because that's what I did for the day to day. And I was deeply embedded in that culture. And wouldn't that be amazing if I can make a living in a life doing that? And I didn't have any idea where to start, both on the photography side and on the action sports, how to get your stuff

in that world. And I remember I was so poor that I couldn't actually even buy magazines to read them. So I would stand in Barnes & Noble for hours and take notes in the magazines when I saw pictures that I liked. Where were they? Who was in the photograph? What were they doing? And then I go to the front part of the magazine in the thing called the masthead, write down the name of the photo editor, the name of the magazine, the address, the phone number. And I started sort of like building a database of people and things that were finding their way in the world and becoming successful in the world, both photographs and people. And so in a super analog way,

I started deconstructing the industry that I was really excited about. And by that I mean, what are they doing? What does it look like? How are they doing it? What are the combinations, the elements that are combining to make a successful magazine

or a successful photograph? And I learned that it was a handful of these elements. And if I, okay, well, maybe I can replicate some of those elements. And so I started basically emulating the photographs that I was seeing, in a sense, copying or pretending, and then I would decide what of that was working for me and not when I saved up all my money and went to Utah and ski for a couple of days and didn't get the photographs.

Why didn't it work? Turns out it really wasn't a very good skier athlete that I was paired up with, or turns out the weather was crap, or turns out, blah, blah, blah. And I did that for years, and I very quickly found success when I had locked into, started to be, for me, like a winning formula of understanding these things. And then fast forward 10 years later, and, like, that's how all of the fastest learners in the world learn. Let's talk about our friend Tim Ferriss.

You know, he wrote the book on learning how to learn in The 4-Hour Chef, and he had a slightly different way of deconstructing, but it had to do with deconstructing. And for Tim, it was, like, looking at the 10% of the people who got the most extraordinary results. And then in that subset, look at it. the people who weren't supposed to be successful, look at the marathoner who wasn't built like a wiry stick and was like maybe 220 pounds and was running 200 mile ultra marathons. Like what does she or he do to find greatness?

And so whether it's Tim's method or other like quick learning methods or whatever, for me, I just applied this and now looking backwards. You never understand it when you're in it, but this is what I've been doing all along. and it pairs really nicely with when I've been super successful. And when I haven't used this, I've sucked and I've failed. And again, the acronym is deer, deconstruct, emulate, analyze, and repeat. And the repeat part's really important because if you just deconstruct, analyze, and emulate and analyze, then there's no repetition in there.

You're just like, okay, I know the answer. But then you haven't actually done it yourself. And you also then don't end up finding your own path. Because what you're looking for is it's sort of the 80-21, 80% of what's working with the universe and then 20% of your own z-jj. And if you're not repeating, you don't know where your own j-j-j-z.

Z-Z-J-J-J-J-Z. That's a double Z-J-J-J-Z. There's a Zay in there. 90% of the way there. So close. There's that Zay in there. Gets you every time. Would you say?

Yeah. This is what Avici did, though, right? I remember him talking about this somewhere where he heard tracks that he loved, stayed up all night making a copy of it using like Fruity Loops 3 or whatever music software he had at the time. Go upstairs, take a nap on the roof,

apparently, that was his thing, and then the sun would like give him a tan, which now sounds horrible, but I guess when you're Scandinavian, you need it, you know, when you can get it. And then he would just sleep for the rest of the day, get up and do it again and again and again. And then he said something like,

I ran out of songs to copy, and then he started making his own music. And it's freaking legendary, Obama name-checked him, right? I mean, crazy. And this is exactly what I mean. I'm talking about it from my own experience because that's what I know.

But having deconstructed the lives of the most wildly successful people in our culture, some are friends of mine, some are not. I just can't find an example when I really get in the nitty-gritty, if each is a great example, of it not being like that. There might be the one-off random success,

and what I'm looking for is a repeatable system that anyone can pick up this book and start getting to work. And so there might be a different way. And I don't know about that, but I know from personal experience and from seeing this so prominently across the landscape that it works. How do we do the analysis, an example? So let's say I want to add more personality to my show. So I'm listening to Howard Stern, the new stuff, not the old stuff.

Well, what does Howard do that works and what does Howard do that not works for you? Right. Right. And so if you, it's like, oh, man, I don't know, his potty mouth bugs me or his, when he screams, or when he screams, or when he's, or when he's, he says this thing, it turns me off. Okay, great. So do you write this down? I do. Yeah. And you keep it handy when you're doing your work? Yeah, I think it's a little bit more ingrained than me now, and I do it a little bit more naturally, but go back to me standing in front of the Barnes & Noble magazine rack, what worked, what didn't. And then I went out, and I was like, wait a minute.

So I thought that I needed to go to, you know, this great location in New Zealand where the backdrop looks like this and shoot with this snowboarder and then I'm going to get this result. It's like, oh, okay, well, I didn't get a good result, but what part of that I fail at? Go back to the example that I gave earlier of going to Utah, didn't have a very good ski athlete. I thought he was awesome, or I thought she was the world's best at whatever she was great at. Could it also be your fault? I feel like it's the weather or the athlete. Totally. Come on, Chase. Or that's a group. Or my skills aren't there yet. And that literally happened. I would then

try and deconstruct it further. Like, what skill is it? Is it my ability to pan? Is it my ability to understand the relationship between shutter speed aperture and ISO. Is it like you start to understand that it's, oh, it's exposure. All these are under exposed. They're too dark. Okay, I need to go. Are you asking other people for their help with this? Or are you able to have that problem? That is a huge part of the book also, which is all around community. This is another area that I think that humans in general, certainly entrepreneurs and creators, people that identify as that. And those that don't, I think you suffer from the same thing, but I'm just going to talk about it in terms of, I think it's wildly misunderstood the role the community plays in success. And it sort of goes like this. Mostly we're

taught in our culture that the best work, I mean, the cream rises to the top, right? Yeah. Not true. Some of the most like talented people I knew never broke through. What I know about success and specifically success through the lens of community that no one has achieved sustained success without a community, even if it's a small community. It was the right community. It was a cross-section of people that were connected around common themes and common goals. And they had beliefs that they shared and they worked together in a collaboration, in supporting one another.

And the cool thing is like these communities, whatever, name some random community that, what's the most random? Like people who paint portraits of dead presidents on Tuesday. I bet there's a million people who do that, random. But so the point is that there are existing communities out there for whatever it is you're interested in or even curious. Curiosity is a good place to go if you're not sure where to start. And you can, when I talk about becoming a joiner, which to me is like joining something, is like, I get all kinds of anxiety. Sure, yeah.

You have to show up on time. Do I got it like, what's the thing? But I encourage you to become a joiner, even temporarily, you start to participate. What I really mean is participate in these communities. You can participate digitally and physically, and I suggest you do both. The point is that when you're a part of a community, it accelerate your learning. I advocate for being the fan you wish you had. If you wish you had more likes on Instagram, maybe she'd go likes and more posts.

If you wish you had more comments and engagement, go post some comments and engage. Be the fan that you wish you had for other people. That is also called showing up in your community. You can do it in your own unique way, but I just file it all under participating physically and digitally. So that's one sort of a community where if you're curious about something, you want to get good at it or close to it. I don't know if you went to the podcasting. Podcast movement. Yeah, podcast movement, which is a trade show. Yeah, I went. So you're interested in podcasting. That's a community. You showed up there. You paid a fee. You sat down or maybe you got paid

and your people around you. How is it feel? You're physically connected to them. You walked away with some digital connections. You're going to stay in touch. It just puts you closer to the thing that you love or want to know more about. That's awesome. Another part of community that's also misunderstanding. is that you actually have to start building a community around your work. You usually join a few communities. You learn a little bit. And then you're like, okay, I can do this. And then at first the community is you and your mom.

And then it's you and your friend. And now when it's you and your friend that you met at the podcast movement thing and two other of her friends and you see this community starts to grow and it's around you and your work, oh, I love what you do. Oh, cool, thanks. Here's my card. Let's stay in touch, whatever. I'm saying this business card like it's 1987.

Yeah, yeah. I've had a business card. I mean, we still don't have that bump act working. Remember that thing? That was so exciting for five minutes, and it still doesn't work. The point is, is there's a couple different kinds of community,

and I go into depth in the book. Here's the thing. Not only does cream not rise to the top, but the sustained success of every person you know, every person you admire, respect, appreciate, I have gratitude for it, look up to, is because of community. And here's the other kicker,

is they put way more time and energy into that community than you think is possible. and they do that by participating and showing up. They do that by going to meetups, starting meetups, inviting people into their work, sharing their work. That's all sort of participating in community. Because what you're doing, think about it, it's not crazy.

We've all had this experience. You prep for this big thing at work. You got this cool presentation. You got it all dialed. You're ready to rock the room. You go in there and you click through your slides and you do your thing and you look down and everyone's on their phone or whatever.

It's like crickets, like tumbleweets, right? Whether you've launched a product or maybe your first episode of the podcast or whatever, we've all had this. And the reason is because we didn't cultivate a community before we started putting stuff out there in the world. Now, I advocate for these in tandem. Yeah, because otherwise people are going to wait until they have a community to even open up the freaking paint.

For sure. So I don't want to create a chicken or egg situation. But the reality is a success of everyone who has continued success is they've basically prepared their community to receive their work. by doing work and engaging with that community. You wrote the book, as we wrap here, you wrote the book that you needed to read,

how poetic, Chase, because you were in a creative slump before this thing came out. What's going on there? Because it was this little bit... I didn't know we were going to go here. I know. Yeah, yeah, sorry.

Oh, I'm not sorry. Sorry, not sorry. Sorry, not sorry. I won't throw anything in here that might get you in trouble, although I might not know what that is. We had an email correspondence about this. Yeah.

Yeah, I would say that I was in, a little bit of a creative slump. And those happen for all kinds of reasons. Life ebbs and flows. Everything is cyclical, right? Seasonal or whatever. Not like fall, winter, summer, spring, but just there's an arc of life.

It follows a path. And I didn't actually realize it. Yeah, it sneaks up. It does. And I was in that area where, you know, sometimes when you're like, I am in a slump. This is no gray area here. This sucks.

I wasn't in that place. I was just in kind of like that relationship that we talked about. It's like not good enough to be joyful, but not bad enough to leave. And again, as someone who has, you know, built platforms for creators used by tens of millions of people, on iPhone apps, been a creator, identified it, been a creator my whole life, spent my last 20 years all over the world talking about this stuff and being passionate about it. I didn't even recognize it myself.

And I knew that I had to get this book out. I knew because it started to eat me. I've been working on it in my head for 10 years. and on scraps of paper for two years. And my agent, he was just like, you know, we talking about this thing? How are you feeling about it? I'm just like, yeah, yeah.

And at some point, I just had to get it out. And it started to sort of eat me up. And so one weekend I sat down and I wrote what I call my eighth grade book report. Normally a book proposal is super meaty, sample chapters, all this stuff. And I wrote, I poured my heart and soul into eight pages over a weekend. And I sent it to him. And he was like, Whoa, we got something.

And it had gotten so bad, my creative practice was so thin and flimsy that, A, normally I'm pretty comfortable because my launch calluses have calluses. Like, I'm comfortable putting work out there. So I was really uncomfortable with that. I'd finally figured out a way to get this eighth-grade book report out. And then within five days, I had a book deal. And normally it doesn't go like that. So I think that tells me that the world was ripe for that.

And what I had to say was important enough that someone was like, I'm back in this guy. This is a good thing. And then what I do? I'm like, oh, geez, I don't know. I couldn't really get to work. Yeah. But I did. And it started off with 5 a.m. mornings.

And it started as like, okay, I'm kind of behind schedule here. 5 a.m. mornings, the occasional weekend. I made a series of videos of this process. And it was in the process and making videos about the process that I realized how blocked I was. and that this muscle that I advocate for all over the world, that it had atrophied in me. And just see if you follow me here. I'm writing a book about creativity, and I'm blocked.

Yeah, yeah. It is the worst. And you can't really admit that to too many people. Totally. I tried to work it into the book in a way, and it just felt a little bit awkward, but I probably wrote books a couple hundred pages, 300 pages long, and it's probably 75,000 words.

I probably wrote 175,000 words for this book. And how many are in here? Just maybe 75,000. So you cut most of it. Yeah, a whole other book. Or it never made it in there. I just kept writing horrible first drafts after horrible first drafts. But it was the process of sucking, giving myself permission to suck.

And here's the craziest thing. I would get stuck. I would get stuck for days. And I would not know what to do. And then I was like, wait a minute, I wrote about this like three months ago on one of my morning writing things. I would literally go back, reference my own notes, take my own advice, apply it. And so I guess if you're looking for...

You mean, what you're writing is, are things you've actually done that work? That's highly unusual. It is highly unusual. And I wouldn't recommend that. I mean, I'd recommend knowing what you're talking about, but it was a very slow and painful process. But my point is this,

is that as painful as that process was, the act of creating a process around my creativity is what saved me. And not only did it bring an awareness that I was actually in a tough place, but it gave me a road out of that tough place and in a very simple way. And so I took my own medicine

and it's available to everyone. We're all going to do it in our own way. Amazon.com. And in the show notes. But it was also really humbling and really painful. That meta narrative that I couldn't actually get out of my head

in following my own advice and finding a way to make it work. the world is always going to have a list of shoulds for us, and we're always going to go a little bit off track. And if you know anything about like meditation, for example, the goal of meditation is in some higher state. It's very simple. It's like when mind wanders,

to be clear, that's the job of the mind is to be all over the place, bring it back to the mantra, the breath, the weather, or just like bring it back. And the same is true with our life. We're going to get off of our path. Our calling is going to fade and it's going to get, really far off in the distance and we're going to lose track of it every once in a while.

But we always know it's there. And just like the breath is always there or just like your calling is always there, you can just bring it back to that thing. And to me, like, the world is imperfect. And that someone who's advocating for this that I am the most guilty of being

not often enough vulnerable, not often enough creating or losing sight of my own stuff, it's cool. Don't worry about it. The answer is, to just go back to basics. I've put the basics in the book. You will know what your basics are

when you start to be able to look at yourself in this sort of framework. And you can either think of that as scary because, oh, man, you never actually, I mean, even when you've mastered it, you haven't mastered it because you can still wobble. I think that's beautiful. You know, we are imperfect

and we can continue to bring ourselves back to who we are. It's also true that the more you do it, you better you get at it. And that's, to me, also reassuring that I can't, actually violate my own intuition very well anymore because I've honed it so well that something feels off about this and it could be something that's really good. Every once in a while I still do it and then if I get smack down, I'm like, oh, that's the old intuition. I need to continue to pay attention to

it. So if I can do it, having had the really indirect path, all of the mistakes that I've made with death and tragedy and money and, well, it's available to you too. Chase, thank you very much. Amazing. Thank you so much for having me on the show. You got it. Happy to be here. Watch the pop screen duck.

I'm a fan of what you do and keep in. It's wildly creative. And I want you to make sure to stop saying that you're not creative. You're phenomenally creative. And I think your story is super helpful because it matches the story of so many people out there. We took a path that everybody else wanted for us. And only when you figured out and started listening to yourself, did you find the thing that you were supposed to be doing,

and you're doing a damn good job of it. It's fun to be a part of it. I appreciate you saying that, and I appreciate you coming all the way down here. Happy to do it. It was my pleasure. Thanks to Chase for flying down to see us and do this show. The book is called Creative Calling,

and we'll link it in the show notes. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube, and there are also worksheets for every single episode so you can review what you've learned from Chase Jarvis. Those are at Jordan Harbinger.com in the show notes. I'm teaching you how to network with great people, manage those relationships using systems and tiny habits, and that's in my six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course,

and I know you think you're going to do it later, but you've got to dig that well before you get thirsty. Procrastination leads to stagnation when it comes to your personal and business relationships, and the drills take a few minutes per day. I wish I knew this stuff 20 years ago. This is really crucial. You ignore it at your own peril. again, Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Most of the guests here on the show,

they subscribe to the course and the newsletter, so come join us, and you'll be in smart company. Speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out and or follow me on social. I'm Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show is created in association with Podcast One, and this episode was produced by Jen Harbinger, Jason DeFilippo, edited by Jace Sanderson,

show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty, music by Evan Viola, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger, Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own. And yes, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends

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