The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 618: Chase Jarvis - Never Play It Safe, Work Your Creativity Muscle, Trust Your Intuition, Tell Great Jokes, & Become a Transformational Leader

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you are going to do anything special with your life, what's required is that you listen to you above and beyond all those other voices. And many of those voices are there ostensibly to help you to guide you, but there are a lot who are trying to get you to be just like everyone else because that's the reality of modern Western capitalism. And the contrast here is if you want to be the best version of yourself, if you want to live an extraordinary life and change, yourself and have impact on others, you actually have to cut against that grain.

Starting point is 00:00:37 This episode is brought to you by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to empowering people through the dignity of work. If you need to hire full-time employees, contract employees, or a partner that you can trust for outsourced professional services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit Insightglobal.com slash learning leader. That's Insightglobal.com slash learning leader to learn more. Welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Brian Hawk. Thank you so much. for being here.

Starting point is 00:01:30 Text Hawk to 666866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help you start your week all right. You'll also receive details about how our book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader. Text Hawk to 66866. Now on to tonight's featured leader. I love Chase.

Starting point is 00:01:59 Jarvis, he's a photographer, director, artist, and entrepreneur. He was the CEO of an online education platform called Creative Live from 2014 to 2022. He's earned countless awards for his photography and creative work, including a Pulitzer Prize for a New York Times story he contributed to called Snowfall. He's also the author of multiple books, including Creative Calling and most recently Never Play. it safe. During our conversation we discuss why people play it safe and how we can overcome that fear, then how we could better understand our intuition, listen to it, and most importantly take action from it, then Chase discusses the importance of playing infinite games with

Starting point is 00:02:50 transformational, not transactional people. And then we closed talking about the approaches we both take to giving world-class keynote speeches. Ladies and gentlemen, so good. Please enjoy my conversation with Chase Jarvis. So I want to open with a joke, okay? And I'm going to have you actually finish the joke because it's your joke. You may know what this is. You were in second grade.

Starting point is 00:03:25 Yes. When you first told this joke, second grade, okay? I'm going to say it. it and then you could you could finish it oh you got the punchline all right all right what and i maybe pause for a dramatic effect too what has 52 teeth and holds i can't even say it dude what has 52 teeth and holds back a monster the answer is my zipper and this it is so true i told this joke. This was like, this was the, uh, the bomb drop, the punchline for my second grade stand-up comedy routine. And I confess this in my new book, which is called Never Played Safe.

Starting point is 00:04:10 Maybe we'll talk about that a little bit today. But I confess that I didn't actually get the joke. And what I did get was that every time I said it, I would watch all the adults in the room, like, lose it. And to me, that was enough. Well, it was a laugh out loud. I was on the elliptical the other day. I'm rereading your book. And the person next to me is looking at me funny because I am laughing out loud, reading this joke for like the ninth time because I'm just like, this dude is awesome.

Starting point is 00:04:43 He said in second grade, you didn't know what it meant, but it was great. I knew it brought the house down. The context there is rolling in the second grade, I was pretty stoked. I had just did my first film in the summer between first. in second grade, washed cars to raise enough money, bought the film, rented a camera, hired somebody by pirate. I mean, I literally paid them $1, and it was my co-stars older brother to film the thing. And we had a profitable film that summer, and I rolled in a second grade film pretty good.

Starting point is 00:05:16 I had a magic routine, stand-up comedy act, and I was selling a comic strip that I was writing on the weekends. And my second grade teacher, Ms. Kelly, shut it down. She said, what's wrong with you? There's no room for this creativity stuff, and you can't have a business here in second grade. It's against the rules. But you are really good at sports, so you should be a jock and you should quit all this other stuff. And to her credit, I did.

Starting point is 00:05:41 I went on to have a long-standing career as an athlete, went to college on a soccer scholarship. But it is a story that reminds us how the opinions of others, when we're a little fragile minds, that can shape our lives a lot, sometimes for good and sometimes not for good. Yeah, I was just going to ask what impact, maybe two-part question, what impact did that have on you for how you then shows to live your life growing up? And how does it impact you now that you're in a powerful position and you can have that type of influence on others? Well, I think as just generally as humans, because we're social animals, we want to be

Starting point is 00:06:22 accepted socially and that has benefits and drawbacks and for me a little second grade me when you hear the story that oh my gosh my second grade teacher squashed this sort of beautiful cool creative side of me or of any kid like how heartbreaking is that and the reality is as a second grader because you just want to fit in you're like okay i'll just whatever miss kelly you know thought was best for me it must must be best for me so i bailed on all that stuff and i basically focused on sports and I issued all that sort of creative stuff, the entrepreneurial stuff. And the irony is, I remember on my high school graduation day, I received an award. You know, they give out 10 awards or whatever to the graduating class.

Starting point is 00:07:08 And the award that I got was the typical senior award, which is pretty horrific for me. And at the time, I remember like, hmm, this is not good. I'm not sure that typical is what I want to be. And what that meant was that I was the captain the football team. I dated the cheerleader. I got good grades, went to college on a soccer scholarship. And it just was sort of like the giant cliche. And, you know, I think the takeaway from that and to extend the question as you did is how does that affect me today? I realized that the world will have you believe all sorts of things. And there's all sorts of inbound messages.

Starting point is 00:07:55 And what's confusing for all of us is that many of those messages come from people that we respect and love and admire. And yet, if you are going to do anything special with your life, what's required is that you listen to you above and beyond all those other voices. And many of those voices, again, are there ostensibly to help you to guide you. but there are a lot who are trying to get you to be just like everyone else because that's what society, that's sort of the lowest common denominator, and that's where we steer people. And there's no evil overlord.

Starting point is 00:08:29 That's not, you know, culture's fault. There's no one, you know, force trying to shape you, but that's the reality of modern Western capitalism. And yet, again, the contrast here is if you want to be the best version of yourself, if you want to live an extraordinary life and change yourself and the, and, and, and, and, and, have impact on others, you actually have to cut against that grain. And so how that played out for me, it was at some point I realized that I had been ignoring that creative entrepreneurial side. And I then bailed on a career in professional soccer. I dropped out of medical school and became a photographer, which, as you can imagine, was horrifying for my parents. And yet it was the beginning of the next

Starting point is 00:09:15 chapter of my life. And I never looked back. And so, you know, know, by extension, that is a lot of the work that I do in the world today, as I am an artist and an entrepreneur. And I like to, in my spare time, when I'm not personally building, I like to help people understand through writing books. And I have a podcast, a long-running podcast, not this similar to yours, that is about helping people understand what it takes to live their dreams in career and hobby. And in life in my newest book is called Never Play It Safe. which is about exactly that. I read a story about your grandfather when you were, I guess, going to bed school and he died

Starting point is 00:09:58 and left his photography equipment to you. What impact did that have on you? Well, it was transformative, and it was at that time where I was starting to ask these questions. Like, wait a minute. You know, this, I've always been drawn to things that were very different than, you know, if you were, well, first of all, I'm the only person in my family need to graduate for. college and there I did feel some pressure and you know when my grandfather died and gave me his cameras I knew that I had been curious about photography my whole life I had as an athlete I

Starting point is 00:10:35 mentioned I was always on the other side of the camera and I had this weird instinctive connection with with photography that my that this they were just capturing these beautiful stories and moments in a single image. And when my grandfather died and I was given his camera, I had some or some calling in me that said, you should, you should figure this out. So I dropped everything. And then with a little bit of money that I had saved up and with his camera, I just walked the earth for six months with my then-girlfriend, now wife Kate, taught myself how to become a photographer and that transformed my life, not necessarily because I, you know, steered clear of, everything, you know, a business. I ended up making, living in a life doing this. So you have to,

Starting point is 00:11:21 you know, as a, you have to be an entrepreneur. You have to be as an artist. It helps to be decent in the business. But I just expanded my world of possibility and what it is that I wanted to do with my life rather than what the world was telling me, which I needed to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a professional athlete, or something that, you know, everybody loves. And the reality is that if we're busy pursuing the things that everybody else wants for us, how are we going to, how are we going to find ourselves? How much of your skill as a photographer,

Starting point is 00:11:52 as a creative person, as an entrepreneur, do you think you were born with versus how much have you worked to develop the skills and earn the ability to make a living doing it? My belief, and it's a very strong belief, it's backed up by science, my own experience,

Starting point is 00:12:12 and the experience of lots of other stories and anecdotes is that we are all wildly creative. And right now there's someone in the audience who's listening or watching and saying, I don't know, you know, I never really, that's fine, but just know that your natural state is creativity. That's one of the things that separates human beings from all the other species on the planet.

Starting point is 00:12:34 And it's something that is trained out of you rather than bred into you. And it's easy to see. All you have to do is go to first grade, classroom and come up the front room and say, who wants to come up to the front room and draw me a picture? And every hand goes up in first grade. And you ask the same question in eighth grade or, you know, a dozen years later. And, you know, that number gets cut in half every couple years. And that's evidence that this is our natural state and it's trained out of us through shame and

Starting point is 00:13:03 cultural pressure and, as I mentioned, Western capitalism and those toxic myths about starving artists. But the reality is that creativity is absolutely foundational to every human being and whether we choose to lean into that and develop it. That's up to us. And of course, this is go back to that what I was sharing about how the world will program us if we don't, you know, do the things that we want to do, that it is so easy to train something like that out of a child by telling them that it won't serve them. And, you know, we've got all this stuff about STEM, which is about sciences and whatnot. And 10 years ago, even five years ago, if you surveyed what the world thought you should be, everyone said, oh, you should be an engineer,

Starting point is 00:13:49 you should be a computer programmer. And now if you look at everyone who, you know, like the people who are the wealthiest people of the world that have the most influence are specifically in driving the technology leadership of our country or the world, for example, They're all saying, oh, oh, my kids, oh, no, no, computer programming, that's for the computers. The computers teach the computers how to write code. And the things that are going to help human beings stand out is art and the ability to do things that machines can't do as well. And so here we are full circle. My belief is that we are all creative and that whether you are in business or you identify as a creative,

Starting point is 00:14:30 of leaning into your creativity is perhaps one of the greatest capacities, the greatest things that you can do to create the living and the life that you want. These things aren't found, although they call us founders when you create a company, but I don't know about you. I didn't find anything. I built that shit from the ground up. So,

Starting point is 00:14:49 you know, this idea of expanding the definition of what is creativity has always been interesting to me. And now, you know, having seen technology play out and haven't written a few books on the subject and built a couple companies, one called Creative Live, which educates tens of millions of people

Starting point is 00:15:04 around the world around their creative capacity. I know that creativity is embedded in everything that we do. It's just we have to lean into it. And for those that do, they get disproportionately rewarded. So I don't think your advice is like everybody quit their job and go be a photographer touring the world. That's not your advice. So let's say, Chase, for the person who likes their job,

Starting point is 00:15:29 loves their team. They're like an SVP at a Fortune 500 company, right? And they don't want to quit. How does that person tap into the creativity that's within them that maybe has been beat out of them over the many years since they were little to now tap into some of that to become better from a leadership perspective, to run their teams better, to exceed the goals that their company is set for them, to love on their people, to do all these things to make their place a great place to be. do great work. What can that person learn from your work, from never play it safe, from all the Chase Jarvis stuff? I'm curious, what can they learn from you to help them be better at that? Yeah, my last book was called Creative Calling, and it was specifically that, that every person has a creative calling within them. And the cornerstone of that book was expanding the definition of creativity, because when we were children, we were taught that creativity equals glitter and popsicle sticks and glue guns and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:16:29 creativity is combining, you know, any two things to make something new and useful. And so if you think about that, whether you're making a meal for your family or creating a strategy for your business or finding out what the best way is to motivate, lead, and inspire your team, creativity is at the core of all of those things, right? That is the essential, again, the essential difference from our species and all the other species on the planet is that we have the capacity to create, to create new things. And so first of all, I would encourage you to expand your definition of creativity and to call yourself creative, despite the fact that whether through conditioning or self-belief or probably a combination of both, you don't think of yourself as creative because you're not painting portraits for a living. That's not what I mean at all.

Starting point is 00:17:18 I mean that we all are creative and that it is that capacity. And again, this is a habit as much it is a skill. It's a belief that you can create your way into any solution, you know, given time and resources and even constraints. So for anyone who's doubting, I would say, reminder, you are creative. It's fundamental to what it means to be human. And by leaning into that, all you're doing is you're giving yourself increased optionality. You're saying, I can't create a solution if the solution doesn't exist.

Starting point is 00:17:54 When you start to look at it like that, you start to realize, okay, I am creative and then you start to dissect or deconstruct popular culture. You start to understand that, wait a minute, the most successful, happy and fulfilled people in the world, they largely identify as creative or acknowledge their creative capacities. You know, the largest company in the world, the most valuable, like companies like Apple, just ask the question, do they identify as a creative company? Absolutely, that's core to who they are. So I think there's if you think about creativity in a broader sense, the answers are right there hiding in plain sight.

Starting point is 00:18:34 We all are creative and it's up to us to take an ownership role there and create the living and the life that we want for ourselves. And the people around us, right? Your team, you talked a lot about that. That's the theme of your show. Yeah. And I was super inspired by Never Play It Safe. I'd read it before. We'd even agree to to record and then I reached out to you afterwards, which is not,

Starting point is 00:18:56 necessarily the normal sequence of events here with my show, but that's how good it was and how much of a fan I am of your work. And I want to read one of the initial lines from it and then have you go a little bit deeper because I think a lot of naysayers might say like, look, good for you guys. You get to be creative and have podcasts and do art and take pictures and make money and support your family. I have to go get a job. I got to put food in the table. So I got to get a job. good for you and so i got to play it safe they might say and here's what you here's what you say playing it safe is out of fear and fear is only optimized for survival not creativity not happiness not joy not connection not harmony not fulfillment it's only about

Starting point is 00:19:46 optimizing for survival and that's what fear is all about and and to me like that that really spoke to me, man, when it comes to those who, like, I get some of that from time to time. I haven't written a book about this, but you have, so you probably get a lot of it. I'm curious if you want to riff more on playing it safe and being out of fear and how it's optimizing for the wrong thing. Yeah. Look, fear is a fantastic motivator. It plays a role biologically for us, and that role is to stay alive and procreate.

Starting point is 00:20:21 But the difference between staying alive and having a lot of it. a fulfilling, happy, joyful life. There is a yawning gulf in between. There's a thousand miles in between those two things. And I believe that it's our job to find a way to get what we want out of this life. That is to survive and thrive and have a connected experience, whether that's with family, friends, whatever, build the living in life of your dreams. And to optimize in the meantime for joy, connection, fulfillment.

Starting point is 00:20:52 and so many of those things that, frankly, I believe that everyone is seeking. It's natural. But we've got these biological brains. And so our job is then to, you know, and my thinking with the book Never Played Safe was, I said, wait a minute. It's true that all of the best things in my life are on the other side of my comfort zone or always have been. And then I thought to myself, well, I think of all the books I've read of, you know, leaders and of the thousand guests that I've had on my podcast, many of the world's top performers in every discipline, you know, sports, you know, the best in the world and business,

Starting point is 00:21:33 Richard Branson and Mark Cuban, like, all those folks that I've had on my podcast or that I have come to know well through business or, you know, my profession. Well, it just so happens that they think the same, right? That all the best stuff in their life was on the other side of big, scary decisions. And that's not to say that the quiet moments aren't the ones we appreciate with your kids, for example. But the decision, for example, to have kids, big, scary, hairy decision. If it's true that all the best stuff in the human experience is on the other side of our comfort zone, what ought we do?

Starting point is 00:22:10 We ought to have a blueprint for having the ability to get there over and over and over again, and to get there 1% better, 1% faster, 1% smarter and more kind than we did the time before. That's what we're really seeking. And when I put that to the test or my own experience and the experience of, as I mentioned, a thousand other people that I've had on the podcast, it just so happens that there is a programmable, repeatable way to do that. And to me, that's what I mean about not playing it safe. It's not about issuing shelter, food and shelter for your family and friends.

Starting point is 00:22:45 not what we're talking about or taking some wild career leap, this whole idea that bet it all on black and hope for the best. That's not real. No real entrepreneurs do that. They might make a gamble, but the reality is that all the best stuff is on the other side of our comfort zone. We can get there reliably. And in my book, never played safe. I've analyzed people who do that the most, who have the most sense of fulfillment, ironically, are also very successful in the process. and that's what I've tried to capture and never played safe. You write about this. That's available to all of us, right?

Starting point is 00:23:20 That's, you know, it's available to all of us. Yeah, 100%. And I like how practical you make it and entertaining with the story. So there are seven basic levers for life, attention, time, intuition, constraints, play, failure, and practice. I'd like to dig into some of those as we go. So let's go to time and you write about NYU professor James Kars, I believe is his name. finite and infinite games and why we should treat life like an infinite game.

Starting point is 00:23:49 Can you go a little bit deeper on the difference between finite and infinite games and why we should treat life like an infinite game? Yeah. So that's from game theory. And game theory, it sounds stuffy, but it's pretty simple. In Monopoly, there are winners and losers, right? And at some point, the game ends and you're measured. And then the goal is to then play again.

Starting point is 00:24:12 infinite games on the other hand the goal is to keep playing and that is way more what life is like because let's just say you do get to the end of the game of life well as far as we know you don't have an option to go back and restart that game and take it take forward everything you learn from the previous game so the goal of life is to keep playing and problems arise when you treat infinite games like the game of life as a finite game like they're are winners and losers. It creates short-term thinking and, you know, how this relates to time is that I'm aware from my own experience, for example, and if you deconstruct the lives of lots of other people and there people are listening here, how many of us do stupid shit because we

Starting point is 00:25:01 realize or we believe rather that when we're 21 years old, we have to have it all figured out. It makes us go into huge, you know, into, I was $100,000 in student debt before I, really, it really hit me what that meant. And the same is true. I observe so many people rushing around doing half-ass jobs on 15 things rather than doing a complete heartfelt, thoughtful job on one thing, believing that that's the way to be in the world or that if they don't have, again, don't have it all figured out, that they somehow will, will be left behind. and yet that actually just creates a bunch of bad behavior and negative consequences. I'm not, this is not to say for everyone, I'm not saying that life is, is forever, right?

Starting point is 00:25:52 I am saying life is long. And what if instead of rushing around as a 21-year-old thinking that you have to have it all figured out, what if you could explore or what if you realize that if you took a job, that you will have many jobs, in fact, you'll probably have many careers in your life and that this is not permanent and what you're doing is learning and you're running a series of tiny experiments. How much healthier is that than the image that we project of you're going to get a job, you're going to do that job for 40 years. The hope is to get a retirement and a gold watch. We know that's not how the world works anymore and yet. That's what college is still preparing us for and that's the narrative, the dominant cultural

Starting point is 00:26:34 narrative. So how, you know, game theory relates to, again, the chapter specifically on time is I think we get time super botched. We believe that this is some infinite hamster wheel that's running in the background. It's time is ticking by and the time is going to run out. Understand that you can both, you know, have short-term urgency. I want to get this done today. I want to reach my goal tomorrow. and you can simultaneously realize that life is long. And what if you get to run a bunch of tiny experiments? We never know if we're going to get hit by a bus to tomorrow, but if we could change our relationship with time,

Starting point is 00:27:18 if we could believe that there is enough time for us. I'm on my fourth, not just career, fourth career arc. You already talked about my career as an athlete. And then as a photographer, I had a 10-year, 20-year run as one of the top commercial photographers in the world, making tens of millions of dollars. And then I started an online learning platform. And that served tens of millions of people as an entrepreneur. We paid $60 million, made hundreds of millions and rep. Like, that was another arc. And now I've had a third or a fourth arc now as an author writing books, never play it

Starting point is 00:27:53 safe, trying to help other people do this. And if you told me that when I was 24 years old, that hey man just take a beat here look inside the answers aren't external the answers are inside what is it that you really want first of all i would have ever gotten probably you know 150 000 in the student deck second of all i think i had done a better job ignoring miss kelly in second grade and realizing that those films that i wanted to make yeah go ahead and make them now there's time and when you realize that waiting tables isn't necessarily how you're want to live your life. Maybe it is, but that you have time and space to figure out what you really want to do. It makes us do stupid shit when we don't think that way. And when we do,

Starting point is 00:28:39 we have the capacity to see way beyond the end of our nose. I also think, Chase, it involves, like, I want to be around people who play long-term games with other long-term people. What I mean by that is every once in a while you'll come across a transactional person versus a transformational person. And if you live your life as a series of transactions, meaning I'm going to give with the intention to get, we all know those people. Most of us don't want to be around them. Some of us have spent chapters doing that. But I see you as the ultimate long-term transformational type person where you want to have transformational relationships with others that are also playing long-term. term games. Life is not a series of transactions. You're going to give, give, give, give, with no expectation of getting anything in response. But what happens, the crazy thing,

Starting point is 00:29:36 what happens is when you live that way, especially for a long time, good stuff, great opportunities just seem to come your way. It's weird how it works, man. Being generous, being a giver, trying to help people doing that consistently over time, man, it's bizarre. It's are how the world seems to work itself out, how good things come your way. If you don't see life as a series of transactions, but try to be a transformational leader for yourself and for all the people in your life, what I mean by that is help them get better with no intention of receiving anything in return. And if you do, you seem to get everything in return. It's bizarre how all that works, man. Plus plus. I mean, you get everything. And, you know, that's why it's a no-brainer to go on your

Starting point is 00:30:24 show. Honestly, you've done such a good job of building a community around these ideas that, you know, when I think about the, you know, playing a long-term game, and again, the game of life, certainly we hope, is long and it's miried and winding. And yet, if you have a certain set of beliefs and you live in line with those in accordance with your beliefs, and, for example, prioritizing the depth and connection rather than transaction immediate and short term, they have a wonderful way of paying you back in spades, right? Whether this is financial, whether this is the measure of human connection and depth of relationships that you have, you just see it time and time again.

Starting point is 00:31:15 And the research is clear that that mindset is, is the foundation for transformational life experience. And that short-term transactional, it does not. It doesn't build the depth of the relationship, doesn't build the depth of psychology that is required to really be the best versions of ourselves. So true. I want to talk about intuition.

Starting point is 00:31:39 That's the third one of the seven basic levers for life. And you write about your wife, Kate. It's really sweet. when meeting on the beach, spending time apart, going to school, 1,500 miles away from each other, going to Europe together. But you write that sparks were present, but no fire. But she had that special quality. I couldn't quite place. It's like, oh, that gut intuition.

Starting point is 00:32:05 Like, what is it? I don't know what it is. I just, it's just there. It's just there. Can you go more into that intuition and that feeling you had in your gut for Kate initially and how then that blossomed as you. you guys got older. Well, I want to couch this story. Again, it's it's around this particular story I tell in the book, one of them in this intuition chapter is, is not dissimilar to a story that we have, you know, some amount of stories that we all have regarding our own lives. We have all felt

Starting point is 00:32:35 something, a gut feeling about a person, a place, a meeting, a friend. And we have likely all felt what it feels like to trust that feeling and simultaneously ignore, you know, ignore it in a different time. And what normally people report is the trusting of one's got this intuition ends up, you know, it sort of ends up being right. And in my case with my wife Kate, it was exactly that. There was something special about her. And while I didn't, you know, we didn't pursue each other immediately there was always a seed that was planting that planted that we would come back to one another or find our way back to one another at some point and that in fact did happen and the details all save them for the book but for the person who's listening or watching right now

Starting point is 00:33:26 whether you believe in your spidey sense or you lean more into science i want you to know that science is quickly coming to understand that intuition is everything that ravely thought is and more, that it, you know, that the rational thought actually fits inside the bubble of intuition. And, you know, what it amounts to a, I guess a simplified version is that all of ourselves have memory and whether, given that we are filtering billions of points of data every minute that we're alive, we're only really registering because our brain can only sort of managed so much of that. But the belief is that, the early belief was that data wasn't stored. And now what we understand is that data is stored in the body. And that's why when we

Starting point is 00:34:20 have a gut feeling, it's called just that, a gut feeling. It's an instinct that you feel down here, less up here. Science is now refuting that that rational thought is the end all be else. So certainly it may have helped us develop tools. And yet, it's slow and bumbling. It's prone to mistakes and intuition by contrast is much more holistic. It is a deeper sense of knowing. That's, again, why you feel it in your gut. And I believe it's the most important thing that we know the least about. I just asked the question of the book, what if you started paying attention to that? And it turns out there's a really clear pattern. The person or the people who that pay attention to their intuition about what they want to be, who they want to be friends with, you know,

Starting point is 00:35:08 why they would connect with this person instead of that. People who trust that, they report higher levels of satisfaction with their life, higher levels of connection. And ultimately, I think that's part of what we're trying to build here. I have only had, it's not to say that your instinct doesn't pan out 100% of the time.

Starting point is 00:35:28 That can be fair. That's a fair criticism, but nothing in the world does. Or it might not just pan out yet. And there's some longer term experience. that you can't foresee your forecast that comes to bear or comes to be true at some point in the future. The point is specifically that you've been taught, not just similar to creativity, you've been taught to ignore or suppress it. And I'm just asking the question here in the book

Starting point is 00:35:55 and providing a lot of very, very compelling examples that what if instead you paid attention to it? What if you leaned into that? The science says that you're more likely to succeed and be happier in the process. Do you feel we've been taught to ignore our intuition? I do. We're we're a program with the rational mind, math and science. Just look at STEM. Like that's all math and science. What people don't believe is that the science that you're learning in school or that you're kicking around conversations at the dinner table actually don't reflect the latest science with the latest science is quantum physics, quantum mechanics that the universe is non-local and that the thoughts that you think actually do affect the experience of reality.

Starting point is 00:36:37 So, yeah, I do believe that we're taught to ignore our intuition or to distrust it at best, not to run at it in the same way that if we had verifiable data, the funny thing about science is that what people don't imagine, again, I was in a PhD program in philosophy and we studied the philosophy of science. So take this with a grain of salt if you're an armchair or philosopher like I am. But most science ultimately is continually proving itself false. we used to believe that all objects fell to the earth at 9.8 meters per second squared. And now we know that's just a comfortable approximation. And that falls apart if you're 10,000 feet above the earth's surface.

Starting point is 00:37:14 And if you go out into space, it just completely falls apart. So we're still teaching that in school and that is a helpful, useful construct. But it doesn't actually represent reality. Now, by extension, what if we started paying attention to things like our intuition and the reality that we are, that has trained out of us, and that it's a powerful tool that if we just gave it some credence and leaned into it, just what would be possible? It's not like we're going to lose ourselves. The reality is that by leaning into our intuition, we'll certainly have a different and broader

Starting point is 00:37:48 experience of our human experience, which I would say, bring it on. It just so happens that the science is there as well. What does that look like? Now, let's get practical. Let's take action for a second, Chase. What does that look like to the, the again, let's go back to the same avatar, okay? The person who maybe doesn't think they're creative, they're running a big chunk of a company responsible for a lot, stressful job, make good

Starting point is 00:38:14 money, raising a family. What does it look like for that person to actually listen to their gut instinct, to listen to that intuition, to take action based upon that intuition as opposed to saying, no, let me be reasonable here. Let's be rational. Like everything I invoke, tiny experiments. And so if you're worried about trusting your intuition, when there's an intruder in the backyard, that's not the first time to start experimenting with this. The experiment should happen when the stakes are low. And the first thing that you ought to do is because intuition shows up in the body, you've got a thought loop that's happening in your mind and you have something else that's you feel in your gut. Start paying attention to those first, even

Starting point is 00:39:02 notice them. What does he mean when he says feeling in the gut? It's not really a stretch because every single person has this intuition built into them. And we've just trained that the rational mind should override those gut feelings inside of us. And I would encourage the person who's curious or even dubious to start paying attention. What are those feelings in there? Is it about a person? Is it a direction you should go? Is it a restaurant you should go to instead of the other one, like start leaning into those things in areas of your life where the consequences aren't catastrophic. And what you'll find is like many things when you start small, like, oh my gosh, that was a

Starting point is 00:39:44 win. I got a quick win. I listened to should I go, you know, should I go out on a day with this person or that person? You had an instinct. You did because we have instincts for things like this. And I'm just suggesting that in small, lightweight ways, you start to pay attention to them. And over time, when you start to be able to trust this, it will come in, you know, it will really come in handy.

Starting point is 00:40:08 And specifically around creating a living and a life that we love for ourselves, the world will have you believe that you're, you know, that the nine to five job with this particular company that's safe, that again, the concept of never playing it safe, it, it argues that that thing that you believe you're doing is safe is actually one of the riskiest things you can do. One, you're specifically doing it, not because you love it, but because someone else is convincing you that you should. And when you start, that's an example of how this stuff gets trained out of us. That in and of itself is a very unsafe behavior to not rely on this internal humanity,

Starting point is 00:40:55 these structures and the parts that make us who we are. We start ignoring those. That's a very, very slippery slope. So remember, the book starts out. The first words of the book are safety is an illusion. It does not occur in nature. So why then do we seek it? And I just have to, this to me, that underpins so much of what we're talking about here.

Starting point is 00:41:20 For the person who doesn't trust their intuition, you think you're being safe by using all the data. but you have an opinion underneath all that stuff. And what if you started to listen to it? What would your life? What could your life be like? Let's talk about play. I love your story about Novak Djokovic. One of my favorite tennis players, an amazing, amazing, accomplished, such a gritty performer.

Starting point is 00:41:46 It's inspiring to watch. What can we learn about play from Novak Djokovic? The story that chapter opens up about Djokovic opens up with him. being so frustrated. He's had a really good career. And at this point, he's like, you know what? I just don't got it anymore. Tennis isn't fun. And I'm going to, I'm quitting. And so he tells his coaches and he tells his family. And, you know, everyone's, of course, trying to get him not because arguably is at the peak of his career. He feels like he's already on the over, you know, he's over the hill. And he says, I'm done. And he doesn't make this necessarily, like there's a part of it that's public,

Starting point is 00:42:23 but not how serious he is. He's going to take a break. And he goes on vacation with his family. And his family, of course, still loves tennis. They haven't played as a professional for their whole life. And so they go hit the ball around. And he said, now I'm done with tennis. And three or four days into the family vacation, he's like,

Starting point is 00:42:43 okay, let me hit around with you guys. And they're like, no, you said you were done. And, you know, the story evolves to understand that, it was in seeing the joy that his kids were having and his wife was having with the sport, playing it for the sake of playing it for what it feels like to hit a great, you know, top spin forehand and what it feels like to slide on the clay or to laugh and to find joy in just being able to move your body in that way. When he saw that in his family,

Starting point is 00:43:17 it rekindled those aspects of why he started in the first place. And as you might imagine, it's not a stretch to see that someone who's done this professionally every day of their lives for 20 plus years, how you get to that spot. But what's also true is that these are largely stories that we tell ourselves, how we relate to tennis or how we relate to anything. And the most important words in the world are the ones we say to ourselves. And instead of quitting, that goes on a journey to find out. to remind himself of what he loved about the game in his past.

Starting point is 00:43:58 And this is when he comes back and completely lights up and outperforms all, everything he thought was possible in his, so the first arc of his career and has another entire arc where he completely dominates. And it's because he made the game joyful for himself. And he actually looked like, what things do I love about this game? How do I love it? What did I love about practicing?

Starting point is 00:44:22 and communicated that with his coaches, his psychologist, and it transformed him as an athlete, and it led to the career that we're, that's why we say, oh my gosh, she's one of the best ever play the game, blah, blah, blah. So play, it turns out,

Starting point is 00:44:37 is the most important work that we do. And you can think about it in our culture, right, this puritanical, like, oh, you know, I have to work first and then play. And it sounds joyful, or sorry, it sounds rewarding, but the things that are joyful, it turns out that not only are we, do we tend to be better at them, but we can do them for longer

Starting point is 00:44:58 and longer is more practice, more practice is usually gets us better at skills and craft. And if the story that we tell ourselves about what we're doing, whether we call it work or play, it turns out it matters a lot. What if we could make even the most benign, banal things joyful? It turns out we can. And when we do, we usually get transformative results. I haven't seen you speak as a keynote, but I would love to. I have a sense that you bring a lot of what? I love it so much.

Starting point is 00:45:35 Well, so here's the thing that I feel like I've felt, and I want to riff on this with you because of how prolific you are at it. There was a period where after you get booked a lot and you start become potentially robotic and you just go on to the next stage and you do your thing. and you can forget how cool it is. You can forget how, like, what an amazing opportunity. I'll speak for myself. I'm not speaking for you, right?

Starting point is 00:45:58 Yeah, I love. Give me your example. And so some of the joy can go away. And I feel like one of the biggest changes that's probably happened for me over the past, I don't know, year and a half or so is to be like, dude, this is so cool. Let's have fun, put on a show. This is an opportunity to do something that's a, amazing. That doesn't mean we're not going to be prepared. Doesn't mean we're not going to just

Starting point is 00:46:25 like, all right, what the hell. Let's just kind of like let it go. No, we're going to be prepared. We're going to make sure we know our stuff. But once you get up there, dude, let's let it rip and have fun, maybe make the joke that doesn't land every once in a while. Just go for it. And I've noticed a big difference from that point where I felt like there was a little bit of a robot going through the motions because maybe there was a lot of them to like, dude, you know your stuff, let it rip and have fun. And if you say the wrong thing or the part of the Q&A goes sideways, it's all good. You know, it's all good.

Starting point is 00:47:03 And I feel like that has made things so much better and just more enjoyable and probably much better for the audience as well as opposed to being this robot who wanted to make sure every single word and syllable was right. Sure. And man, you're nailing it. A couple of things that are intertwined as you're saying this. There's this idea that, you know, a bird doesn't land on a branch, hoping that the branch won't break. A bird lands on that branch knowing that if it does break, it can fly away. So there's this trust itself. And that's sort of what I'm advocating in this playful world.

Starting point is 00:47:38 The belief is sometimes that we have to be serious in order to be taken seriously. But what gets taken seriously is results. and it just so happens that unequivocally results are better when you're in a very positive state of mind. I mentioned my athletic background and I had a very powerful experience with sports psychologist. I was training in the at the Olympic Development Center and we had access to sports psychologists. This was a long time ago when this was a little bit more novel than it is now. Now it's obvious and it's required. Every professional athlete has some sort of a mental training capacity.

Starting point is 00:48:17 you're in a coach, for example. But in short, I had the experience of them hypnotizing me and visualizing joyful, you know, positive things and negative things. And they start with the negative, you know, visualize, you know, someone does something to someone, someone harms someone that you love, and you get a chance to compete against them, what's it going to be like? And you have a series of visualizations. And then you visualize, in contrast to that, the most joyful, beautiful thing

Starting point is 00:48:44 that you can possibly imagine, the people that you love, the most succeeding and fulfilling and you're connecting with them. And they can measure sort of the power in one's body when they're having these two different experiences. And the positive situation way outperforms the negative anger, fear, motivation. So, you know, that was from a really long time ago, I experienced being put into that state. And it was transformative for me.

Starting point is 00:49:16 And now, of course, the science, again, is catching up to all this stuff. And it's clear that when we can be joyful, playful, light, still focused. But that's when we are at our best, when we have the expectation that we're going to succeed. This is what confidence feels and smells like. And the belief is that, oh, when I get results, then I will be happy. It's actually the other way around. It's being joyful, focused light and open. that's when results happen the most easily, unequivocally, right?

Starting point is 00:49:50 It's not even close. So the question then becomes, what can we do to put ourselves in this playful, joyful state? And, you know, in the book, I detail some of that. And there's a lot of these just very basic exercises. I phrase all this stuff is tiny experiments. Nothing is a test that you can't walk back through the door if you don't like what you experienced. But it turns out that that play is powerful. another great little anecdote.

Starting point is 00:50:17 There's a guy that I met by the name of Charlie Hohn, and I met Charlie, Tim Ferriss, a very good friend of mine. Tim was hosting an event. Charlie used to work for Tim. Charlie was putting this event on. And without going too far into the weeds, this is a very, this is a, I'm not talking out of, at a school. This is a public knowledge.

Starting point is 00:50:34 But Charlie got really burned out after playing this particular event for Tim. And after years of working for him, he quit because of his own mental health. And the kind of, it was very unhealthy. was taking fighter pilot drugs that would make you stay awake for multi-day missions and shit like that in order to be to make the event successful. But what I think is really interesting is Charlie was essentially suffering from crippling anxiety and at the advice of I think a therapist who look into your childhood and say what were things that what were some things that you loved as a kid loved absolutely lovely brought your back really great rich memories. And

Starting point is 00:51:15 What would it be like if you introduce that, reintroduce that into your life now? And so Charlie did this. Charlie loved, I think the story goes, he used to love hitting baseballs with his dad. And so he went and bought like a bucket full, a five-gallon bucket full of used baseballs.

Starting point is 00:51:32 And a bat, and he and a buddy who also turned out love to hit balls. As a break, each day they'd meet at the park down the street from their house. One guy would pitch the other guy and rope like 50 baseballs all over the park. Then they'd walk and go pick that. up and then they'd switch roles and and it was like a 45 minute exercise that they started doing a

Starting point is 00:51:49 couple times a week and measurably demonstrably his anxiety was dramatically reduced and when anxiety is dramatically reduced what happens to performance dramatically increases on all aspects of life so one of the things that I encourage about play is you might not have to go all the way back to being a kid although that you know success leaves clues and I find that man I started doing the same thing with so many areas of my life. And, man, it was transformational. The ability to look at what you're doing is joyful and playful as opposed to a grind that we have to do. We realize that it's a choice that we are making.

Starting point is 00:52:31 It's an attitude. And if we show up with the right attitude, the best outcomes are possible. When it comes to motivation, I'd be curious what you think about this. there are some that are deeply motivated by people who doubt them, haters, some may call them. There are others who are deeply motivated and inspired by people who love them, by people who support them. And maybe we all go through different chapters of our lives where we're motivated by different things.

Starting point is 00:53:05 What are you? And what do you think is most useful long term? Yeah, that's a lovely question, Ryan. I do not dispute that motivation can come from all different corners of our human experience. And it does, right? Even just the two, the sort of a black or white example that you just gave there. I'm not really talking about motivation. I'm talking about a choice that we make to understand that all we have is now.

Starting point is 00:53:40 Now. Future is, you know, the past is gone. The future is an illusion that never arrives. All we have is this concept of now. And for every moment that we choose and everything is a choice not to be who we want to be in that moment, we suffer. And that suffering is chosen. That's not to say that bad things can happen to great people because we know that to be true.

Starting point is 00:54:10 My mom just passed away a couple of weeks ago, and it was just absolutely heartbreaking. And deciding how you show up in that moment is everything. There's room for sadness. There's room for grief. And yet, deciding how we want to show up, that's the whole tenet of the basic tenet of stoicism, right? It's not that things won't happen. It's the attitude that we bring to what does that matters. And so whether we're talking about, you know, good things happening or bad things happening or what type of person might, I am a person who wants to choose my response to the stimulus that comes in.

Starting point is 00:54:49 And this is what is, you know, often true about athletes. That's not to say that they don't get motivated by someone who talk trash or, you know, that they're out there playing for their mother who just passed away a couple of weeks ago. And those can be motivating. But when you're trying to decide how you're going to show up day in and day out, do you have a positive, joyful, playful framework for that or a negative one. And the results are crystal clear that people who have a, well, first of all, think about who you want to be around right now, anyone, do you want to be around someone who's mean and nasty or positive and supportive and brings out the best in you?

Starting point is 00:55:28 It's really obvious. Now, we all, like the panacea and the polyana, those are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. I'm just talking about people who genuinely show up authentically. We all want to be around those people more than their opposite. And so, you know, it just so happens that this is another, this is like where your intuition is right, that is a better way to show up in the world. The science says you're going to be happier.

Starting point is 00:55:52 You're going to get, you know, more out of the experiences that you want to create for yourself in this life. And, man, if you're looking for results, it's not even close. So it's sort of like the stack, the reasons for being a positive. positive, kind, thoughtful person so dramatically outweighed the negative, you know, bullshitting, counterproductive hater. Like, that's just not a way to show up in the world. So I put this, again, the book Never Play It Safe, which I really believe that it's a blueprint

Starting point is 00:56:26 for how to access the best stuff in life. This approaching with a thoughtful, kind, playful point of view is available to everybody and it's helpful. The same is true with time, realizing that life is long and not feeling simultaneously urgent on the short term, but that you have time

Starting point is 00:56:47 and you get to explore. It's when you don't feel like you have the time to run any experiments that you have to choose the shittiest thing which is right in front of you. But a life is created, the life of the people that you respect and admire and appreciate

Starting point is 00:57:01 whether that's your neighbor or someone you really admire on the internet. That life was created. It was designed. designed with intention, and that is available to you if you choose it. That's, again, the foundation that I'm coming from in Never Play It's Safe, is that these things are naturally, these tools, you know, time, our attention, the ability to sort of play, that those are all naturally residing within us.

Starting point is 00:57:26 And because of various social, cultural mechanisms, they've been turned off. I'm urging us to turn them on. They're all available before us, and it turns out that when you do, magic happens. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note. Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Chase Jarvis.

Starting point is 00:57:57 A few takeaways from my notes. We are all wildly creative. However, it's trained out of us as we grow older. Creativity is foundational to all human beings. It's on us to tap into our creativity and get it out of us to help solve problems, to create optionality, and to be more innovative. Regardless of your job, becoming more creative will make you better at it. And then play infinite games with transformational people, not transactional people.

Starting point is 00:58:34 Life can be a series of transactions or you can play the long game with transformational people. It seems like when we give to others genuinely try to help them and have a surface orientation, good things happen for all. There are transactional people, as I said, and transformational leaders. Let's strive to be transformative and play the long game with high character people. And then I love this quote. A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking because its trust is not on the branch, but on. on its own wings. Believe in yourself and your ability to bounce back if the thing doesn't go your way.

Starting point is 00:59:21 Set up a series of experiments. Not all of them will work, but you'll be better for having tried and then tried again and then tried again. We learn from both our success and our failures. It's all about how we choose to respond. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the word. telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Chase Jarvis. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and you also go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and you subscribe to the show.

Starting point is 00:59:54 So important. And you're rated hopefully five stars and you write a thoughtful review. It only takes you a few seconds. By doing all of that, you give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Foguesue, get wait.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 618: Chase Jarvis - Never Play It Safe, Work Your Creativity Muscle, Trust Your Intuition, Tell Great Jokes, & Become a Transformational Leader

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