The Rich Roll Podcast - Never Play It Safe: Chase Jarvis On Risk, Creativity, & 7 Tools To Build The Life You Want

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Chase Jarvis is a renowned photographer, creative entrepreneur, and author of the new book “Never Play It Safe.” This conversation surveys Chase’s perspective on creativity and personal growth, emphasizing risk over safety. We discuss his journey from traditional career paths to creative pioneer and CreativeLive founder, reframing failure, embracing uncertainty, finding play in everyday life, and more. He incisively understands the creative process, offering practical tools for freeing one’s potential. Chase is a wellspring of wisdom and inspiration. This conversation is ideal for anyone seeking to live boldly and creatively. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  Peak: Get 20% OFF thoughtfully crafted carry solutions 👉PeakDesign.com/RICHROLL. On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richroll AG1: Get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs 👉drinkAG1.com/richroll Squarespace: Use the offer code RichRoll to save 10% off your first purchase  👉Squarespace.com/RichRoll This episode is brought to you by Better Help: Listeners get 10% off their first month 👉BetterHelp.com/RICHROLL Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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It is truly Swiss innovation at its best. Visit onn.com slash richroll. That's onn.com slash richroll. Your attention has been hijacked. You've always been told that there's not enough time. You've been taught to ignore your intuition. The world is doing a little bit of work on you. That's true.

But what's more true is you're doing the dirtiest work on yourself. If you want to live fully, never play it safe. Safety is an illusion. It does not exist in nature. Why then do we seek it? Chase Jarvis is an expert on creativity and an authority on what it means to pursue and live a life of meaning and purpose. All of the best stuff in life is on the other side of our comfort zone. Multi-talented and multifaceted, he is an award-winning commercial photographer, director, an artist, an entrepreneur, and the best-selling author of one of my very favorite

books on creativity, Creative Calling, which was the subject of our first podcast back in 2019. As I look backwards, which is the only thing we really can do, that's the only way we can connect the dots, right? What I find is that the answers were always there. We will all betray ourselves over and over again. And the goal is to just return to ourselves with a little more kindness and get 1% better every day. Today, we explore actionable tools designed to help you embrace a more creative mindset and a more authentic experience of life through the mindful embrace of risk. I just encourage people to start to think differently about failure. What if it was a bunch of lightweight, tiny experiments? What would you do differently? Who you were yesterday,

if you want it to be completely different today, you can have it that way. And you might be a thousand miles from home, but you're one decision away from taking a step in the direction of your dreams. Chase Jarvis back in the house. So good to be here. Yeah, it's been a long time. A lot has happened since we last sat down. A lot of life lived on your part,

which I wanna get into. since we last sat down, a lot of life lived on your part, which I wanna get into. But I will say you are the first guest in the history of this show to send over a mocked up thumbnail a month in advance of the podcast. Thoughtful brother. Which I appreciate. Trying to make it easy on my friends. Cause I know what the other side of that job looks like.

Yeah, for sure. Well, that's these guys over here. Happy to do it. Thank God I'm not the one designing those. Well, I'm thinking about them. That's what they need to know. And it's also quite timely. Like I love the book and it's speaking to so many things

that I'm not only thinking about myself, but also struggling with and working on as I tackle, you know, writing this book that I'm working on right now, which is something I haven't done in a very long time. And I'm, you know, really meeting my maker on it and, you know, having my struggles. And also because just the other week, I spent the day with Steven Pressfield,

who did like a one day silent writing retreat. And so I'm kind of steeping myself back into, kind of the wisdom and tools of unlocking the best of, our innate creativity. Steven Pressfield legend. Yeah, he is. I get that book a lot. He's a gift.

The war of art is what I'm, he's got a couple of books, but the war of art is like off the charts. Legendary. Yeah, respect. Legendary. But you've got this new book, I do. Never Play It Safe, which in thinking about it,

I mean, it's great, I love it. It's a book about creativity, but it's really a book about life and a sort of relationship or a dynamic in which we all approach our lives. And I found it to be extremely incisive and also helpful. And also I think a product of like a very, you know, difficult journey that you've been on.

Yeah. That really boils down to your experience with this baby that you had creative lives. Yeah. That really boils down to your experience with this baby that you had creative lives. Yeah, there's a few babies in there. Yeah. But the book is called, "'Never Play It Safe For A Reason." And I'm not, just to be clear,

I'm not talking about seat belts and sunscreen. I'm not talking about physical safety, emotional safety. All those things are really important. The kind of not playing it safe that I'm talking about is that all of the best stuff in life is on the other side of our comfort zone. And so my hope is that this is a bit of a training manual that will help us get there because that's not,

that's not the experiences, the inputs that we get from our friends, our loved ones, our culture, and the organ between our ears, not they're telling us to take risks and that all the best stuff is on the other side of our fear quite the opposite. So my goal was this to be a little bit of a manual and it does, it trots out, not just, you know,

my own relationship with risk and fear, but, you know, having had a podcast that's had more than a thousand guests and just having gone through a lot of creative invention and reinvention myself, I've learned a lot about that process. And so I'm trying to share it transparently. And I shared before we started recording,

I might as well just spill the beans here that I worked on this book for 18 months, And I shared before we started recording, I might as well just spill the beans here that I worked on this book for 18 months, five months in active research and 13 months of writing. And then I threw it all in the trash eight weeks before my deadline to write the book that you're holding. And that's so crazy.

And I did it for a reason. And because that's the book that I was supposed to write. I presume that the earlier version of the book was, Very tidy. Was one that played it safe. It made it look, it made everything look great. To quote Brene Brown, it had a lot of gold plated grit where you tell just a little gritty story,

but you get right back to the how shiny and magical everything is and how shiny and magical you are. And that's just not real. And so indeed it was the process. And that's where the title actually came from was that process of throwing it all away. And yet it's the, now I can't even think of not having had it been that way. Yeah. So what was the impetus to write this now final version of the book? Because I'm thinking about how it relates to this adventure that you've been on with CreativeLive.

It feels very much born out of that struggle. Not only, you know, the kind of, you know, professional challenges that it presented, but how it kind of brought you to your knees and made you look inward and really reflect on like, who am I and what am I doing? And how do I wanna be spending my time? And why was I doing this and what happened?

Yeah, well, two things, I'll try and keep the audience in mind when I say this and my own story. So the story that you talked about with, essentially CreativeLive is one of the characters in there. And that is a, if people are new to that, it's an online learning platform that I started 15 plus years ago. And it was the first one of its type. It was the first live streaming.

We built live streaming technology from the ground up. And we had many folks who are the best in the world on the platform. We raised, you know, $60 million, had tens of millions of users, made hundreds of millions in revenue. And at some point along the journey, I, having been the chairman and like charging, this is where we're going, we're taking the hill and had a lot of the venture, the Silicon Valley universe, like driving the thing. At some point they were gonna drive it off a cliff

and I had to come back and capture it. And essentially the way I think about it is catch the ball right before it hits the ground and step into a role as the CEO running a venture-backed company. And I'm a lifelong artist and not necessarily suited for that. So I had to basically betray myself in a way in order to make that happen. And on the hindsight, on the backend of looking backwards, now that company, we grew it again, made a profitable, sold it to a publicly traded company.

I did some time as a, yep, me as a publicly traded company executive, dangerous. And so there's a reflection on that. But to me, that was a central character in the book. And yet, when I look back, all of the best things in my life were when I took these big risks. And ironically, even though that was a massive risk,

as are so many other chapters that I talk about in that book, that's what made me grow. I wouldn't have changed it. And yet, there were so many other chapters that I talk about in that book, that's what made me grow. I wouldn't have changed it. And yet there were so many aspects of that were, were tiny betrayals because I, you know, I, I, I ignored who I was to go do this thing because I thought it was going to be well-received and look good. And it was the next career step. And so the book is not about, you know, having a perfect beginning, middle and end.

It's about know that we will all betray ourselves over and over again. And the goal is to just do so slightly less and return to ourselves with a little more kindness and a little more awareness and get 1% better every day. Because you know, what is it? The person who is, you know, a degree off, but walks a thousand miles ends up pretty far from home.

Right, right, right. So that's that story. And I hope that that's, you know, it's foundation for other people to be able to see that in themselves. Yeah, it is. I mean, you're certainly speaking from a place of authority in that you have done so many things. You've been this very successful celebrated photographer,

booking all the big jobs and enjoying everything that comes with that. And then you launch this pre-Instagram mobile app, basically a little too early, had a 15 minutes of kind of, you know, haloed fame. Sure, it was the app of the year, on the Apple platform. Yeah, it was like, it was a big deal for a minute.

And then that didn't end up kind of being what you thought it might, and then kind of going back to the drawing board. Can I say differently? I lost a billion dollars. The billion dollars did not go into my bank account. They went into Kevin Systrom's bank account. Uh-huh.

Yeah, we talked about that last time. We did, I remember. And kind of, how do you go to sleep at night and make peace with yourself over something like that, over which you've honestly didn't have that much control. Totally, yeah, I just got my ass kicked by a lot of money and some smart people. Back to the drawing board and CreativeLive

and all these things and then figuring out, these are all expressions of creativity that then when they blossom, often lead not just you, but anyone who experiences them into, you know, kind of a trajectory that ultimately can very easily become a betrayal of the sensibility that birthed it in the first place, right?

And that's where the trap is. For sure. Because it's a trap of success where the external world is smiling upon you and showering you with material reward. And so you don't see, you don't identify any reason to like pause and reflect on that, right?

Right. Which is, look, that's a privilege problem, of course. For sure. But a problem nonetheless. But as you kind of continually say over the course of the book, like, you've always found a way to, you know, go back to what's important to you and find your footing

and like rebuild again, like you've had so many chapters in this, you know, creative life that you've pursued for yourself. And, you know, again, my, as I look backwards, which is the only thing we really can do, that's the only way we can connect the dots, right? And what I find is that the answers were always there and not that I could have avoided all of the pitfalls,

but I do find some redemption and some beauty in the remembering that these tools that we have are alive natively within us. And just for whatever reason, culture, all of the trappings of modern society, the fact that we see instant success, the scroll of a phone, that all has the function of disconnecting us from ourselves. And yet, if we have a handful of practices and tools that we can turn to, that the answers are within us all the time. And it's our job just to stay as close to those things as we can. So to me, that's the big win to me of the book and the structure. It's essentially there are seven tools that are naturally residing within us. And much like our creativity gets trained out of us from an early age, so does our ability to focus on the things that we want to pay attention to. So does our ability to listen

to that quiet voice that we all have inside of us. So does our ability to seek out joy and play and fun and laughter. Like all those things are natively within us and the world, there's no evil overlord. It just has the function of talking ourselves out of those things. So in some ways it's really refreshing and that's the redemption of the book is that it's all inside of us. It's not a journey.

We don't have to move to France and get a new set of friends. This is an inside job. And if you're willing to do the work, all of the tools are there for you. What does it mean to play it safe? On some level, like we're kind of hardwired, play it safe. We're creatures that seek comfort

in our alliances with the tribe. And it's important that the tribe smiles upon us and accepts us. Like we have- We are social animals. Hard wiring, you know, that drives us towards conformity. And I think within that, there is this sense that people are kind of born

with their own unique compass around like risk and security. Or like some people are just, like the people who don't play it safe, they're just, that's just because that's how they came out of the womb, right? But I'm not like that and I can't do that. And so I can read about these inspiring stories, but I find it difficult to connect with that or to relate to that because those are special people. So maybe we can start with just talking a little bit

about what you mean when you say play it safe versus not playing it safe. Sure, sure. Playing it safe is not showing up as who you really are. Playing it safe is being unwilling to take a chance for fear of not looking like your absolute best. It shows up in a lot of ways and it's insidious because it comes off as a virtue.

Just think of the program that you had. Why don't you go become a lawyer? Be very good for you financially, security, your family's security. It's very well respected culturally. You should become a lawyer. And at some point that took, you know, that seed probably it took seed and was like, okay, and then you started building a life from there. And

I'm not saying that that is bad in any way. And yet it's playing it safe because that is someone else's prescription for your one precious life. It is not your own. And yet, if I ask anyone and I've done this research, I've done it on myself, I've done it on a thousand podcast guests and a lot of historical figures. I literally do not know of anyone who can answer the question, think of the best experiences of your life,

which side of your fear were they on? Were they on the, this is safe and makes me feel comfortable? Or was it, I'm uncomfortable. It's a calculated risk. I'm having, I'm experiencing fear and I'm going to find a way to navigate through over and around it. 100% of the time, the answer is it's on the other side of it. So why then do we as a culture default to the safety thing? You made up a great point. Biologically, we're wired for this.

We're wired to look to the horizon, to see the saber-toothed tiger and to stay close to our tribe. And yet there's something that we know that that is not right about that. Because that is, what is that wired for? That is wired for our ability to reproduce. It is not wired for joy, for freedom,

for happiness, for fulfillment. It's not wired for any of the things that we can all obviously say are the best things in life. So to me, I felt like I needed to, in this book, pull together a handful of stories, tools, and a compass to help people navigate. If we agree that all the best stuff is on the other side, how do we make a practice of getting there safely?

The irony is that the goal is not to light it all on fire. Again, I know the title is catchy, and yet there is a method to the madness and we can get there without having to light it all on fire. To me, it feels like there's two things at play here. And yet there is a method to the madness and we can get there without having to light it all on fire. To me, it feels like there's two things at play here. On the one hand, we have a culture, a society with a prescription for what it means to be successful and respected.

Yep. And that prescription is very narrow. And it's generally- We would all have eight jobs, right? If we did the thing, there'd be eight jobs on this planet. And with it, and it's all oriented around respectability

and kind of the drapings of material reward, a good salary, a good retirement package, a status-oriented job title that's on an upward trajectory and one that people who love you can go to parties a status oriented job title that's on an upward trajectory and one that people who love you can go to parties and brag about. Like these are the things that for some reason we've decided are important. Yes.

And so obviously that's driving a lot of these decisions as members who want to be well received within our tribe and feel like we belong, right? Second to that, and perhaps even more important is, and this is particular, especially in the Western developed world, which is this overemphasis on like the intellect over the heart, right?

Like what we champion and what we celebrate is rational, logical reasoning and thought. And that's great and that's an engine for progress and has created civilization and progress and all the like. At the same time, it comes at the cost of the importance of tapping into the heart brain, right? I had Kimberly Snyder in here,

just wrote a whole book about this. So I'm thinking about this a lot. Yeah, I love that line. And that obviously speaks to, you know, intuition and, you know, there's science behind this, but there's also, you know, name your mystical or, you know, spiritual tradition. Or your own experience.

But all the incentives of our culture tampen that down and mute it and don't value it, right? Like that's some kind of weird dismissive indulgence. And when we tune the heart out, that's when we're more susceptible to all of these other incentives that are driving us away from what, you know, our interior lives are telling us

is the better course for us. And I think you've lived that, I've lived that, like, you know, we speak from personal experience with this and I think everybody does on some level. And it's a compromise that we make every single day. Yeah, and that's the part, I refer to those compromises as little tiny betrayals. And so it's not about not compromising or it's not about never betraying yourself. The goal is to become aware of it and to get 1% better at listening to who you truly are

and what you really want to do. Because we are, if our goal was perfection, then we're in the trap of perfectionism, which that's not a real life, right? So the goal to me is to become aware of these things, aware that our natural, our biology and the cultural programming is to do things that look a certain way. Like we were just jesting a second ago. If we all did what our parents and career counselors want,

there'd be eight jobs on this planet. And that's just not how the world works. So the goal instead is to attune to get quiet enough that you can listen to who you really are. I have begun journaling on the same question every day, which is what do I really want? I got this tip from James Clear. And the downstream effect of that is unreal because you can get so specific and it moves, it migrates because what you want migrates. insightful that this is where the quiet that we all need to listen to that voice inside of us, it can exist for long enough for us to get the message

through across the barrier, so to speak. So to me, this is a lesson of reminding ourselves over and over again, that we do have a path back to ourselves. And in fact, the people that you love, respect and admire and appreciate for what they may have done, the people that you love, respect and admire and appreciate for what they may have done or the person that they are, the experience tells me, the research tells me that they have run the course of deciding to eschew all of the trappings that you were just

talking about and do that bold, crazy thing. And so we silently revere this. And yet we find it so difficult to do that for ourselves. Yeah, that's the great irony, right? Cause all the people that we put up on a pedestal and revere and idolize and, you know, wish in our deepest dreams that we could sort of emulate or become are all people who understand all too well how to tap into the heart and listen to it

and trust in it enough to step away from convention and incur risk and blaze their own path. And we just like, it's just like Steve Jobs saying, think different. And yet what do we do? We all conform by buying Apple products. But this is, to me, this is why I had to write the book. And I became aware of this

through writing a different sort of book that intertwined business and creativity. And it was like, this is really the answer. It is, what if we had, in a sense, a framework, a blueprint is a little too bold of a term, but if we had a framework for how to remind ourselves that that was true, that the things that we love and appreciate,

both about ourselves and about others that we respect and admire, that there are a certain set of characteristics that those have in common. And to me, those are the seven tools that when I did the research, I found that, wow, if we can really focus on these things, the cool part, again, they're natively available to us right now that, wow, that would help us do the things that we wanna do and be the people that we wanna be in the world. It's a natural extrapolation of your focus on creativity. You're just like putting, you're taking like a telephoto lens off your camera

and you're putting on a macro, right? And you're looking at like what you know and have learned about creativity and being a creative person and how that's accessible to everybody to now like kind of go 10,000 feet, you know, higher up into the atmosphere and say, well, we're all creative beings.

It's not that some people are born more creative and other, you know, there's these talented people. No, we all have this, right? And in the same vein, extrapolating out from that, we all have, you know, our hearts, you know, desire, and we're all uniquely, you know, configured. And our job is really to express that uniqueness. And maybe that comes out in the form of creative artistry,

but it's really just our relationship with our own lives and the decisions we make about where we wanna not just invest our attention, like everything is like a downstream of that, right? Literally everything. And the biggest sort of thing that trips us up is this fear that if we take that leap or even, you know, that tiny step in that direction,

that we're not only sacrificing our solid membership, you know, in our in-group or whatever, but that we're unnecessarily like incurring all of this risk that puts like security at peril. And so- And the irony is it's just the opposite. You open the book with this Helen Keller quote, which is basically security is mostly superstition.

Life is either a drawing adventure, a drawing adventure or nothing, right? And that's a really powerful thing to reflect upon. Like this, everything, this whole construct of security that drives so much of how we see the world and the decisions that we make from the very small ones to the very large ones is really just bullshit.

Yep, the opening line of the book is safety is an illusion. It does not exist in nature. Why then do we seek it? And to me, the quick answer, and this is why I have to deal with it. We're not talking about seatbelts and sunscreen here. The reason that that is, I think, bold is that we are so programmed. We are in the petri dish.

We're soaking in, like a fish does not know it's in water. So we're in this universe that tells us that this is the way to take the risk or no safer to not take the safe bet, what is predicted to be safe or what our friends or peers or culture will tell us. It's actually riskier because it's pursuing a path that isn't authentically you. So we're basically buying into a lie right at the very beginning. It's just a lie that we all look at each other and agree to go in on. And again, I'm saying lie with a lowercase L here. There's no evil overlord,

but we all do get sucked into believing the paradigm that that is somehow more safe to do the things that is expected that everyone else might have us do. And yet I would argue that that is, you know, the riskiest thing that you could do. The costs are different though. They are different. And we appraise them like sort of inaccurately

because yes, if you're gonna venture, you know, this risk to express your whatever it is, the cost, the potential cost or the actual cost of that may be, well, you know, you can't buy your coffee at Starbucks every morning and you need to move out of your one bedroom into a studio that you're going to share with a roommate. Like, you know, and, and, and we, and we, we really recoil at that cost, but the greater cost is the cost to our soul. But we're very dismissive of that because that's something that

may or may not rear its head, you know, 10 years, 20 years down the line. And we sort of think, well, we kind of compartmentalize that and rationalize that either that's not gonna happen or you'll deal with that when it comes. And we make this bargain with ourselves that it's fine that we're making this choice.

Yeah, and it's a deal with the devil. I truly believe that. And that's part of the, you know, first of all, I'm taking you on tour with me because you just articulated that so well. But when you actually deconstruct the costs, we talk about it in this way, I think at a very visceral, heartfelt, earnest level,

that it is, we're trading our soul. But I will articulate, and I have, and I have throughout the book, I was hundreds of thousands of dollars into student debt because I took the traditional path. I nearly lost my marriage because I went all in on my career and it couldn't have been better. It looked amazing on the outside. And yet the private jets and all that fancy shit made my wife like, what are you doing? Who are you? And I was like, this is what it looks like. This is what we've been working for for so long.

And she's like, maybe you, where do we get lost? So the toll, it's easy to say, ah, it's mask and it's difficult. But if you really look closely at your own life, doing the stuff that everybody else thinks you should do, there are every bit as many trappings there, financial, social, familial, as there are with any other risk.

That's again, that's why the book starts that way, right? Safety is an illusion. It's all risky. So you might as well take the risks toward the things that you love. And then it gets really scary because you have to understand what is it that I really love? Most people don't wanna look hard enough.

It's rather just cool. What's next? If it's like at a conveyor belt sushi place, rather than ordering what you want, you're just happy to take the next thing off the conveyor belt. I'm imagining the person who's listening to this right now or watching it and thinking, yeah, okay, that's great.

Like, yeah, but you don't understand my life and how complicated it is. And I don't have the flexibility to make those kinds of choices. Like my life is the way that it is because it has to be because of my specific circumstances. And, you know, look, everybody has, you know, their external constraints.

There's a chapter in the book, by the way. But also I kind of think it speaks as well to just how powerful our defense mechanisms are around this. Because what you shared is very confronting. Like if somebody is disconnected from their heart, maybe they don't know what it is that they feel like they're here to do, but they're just, you know, making it work with whatever they have.

Or, you know, whether they do know or they don't know, everybody wants to be able to go to sleep at night and feel good about like the choices that they're making. And to suggest that maybe there's a different way is it's a terrifying prospect. It is. And again, just referencing the book, the defense mechanisms are so powerful.

But if I remind you that, well, it's difficult to look at these things because your attention has been hijacked, because you've always been told that there's not enough time, because you've been taught to ignore your intuition, because constraints were always there to keep you down, because work was always before play,

because failure was not a gift, because no one ever taught you how to practice all of these things. Like those are the chapters of the book, those individual words. These seven levers. And yet that's why it's so easy to see this defense mechanism

for the people that were feeling, you know, left behind in this conversation. Or it's so easy to see this defense mechanism for the people that were feeling, you know, left behind in this conversation. Or it's easy for you to say, because I have all of these, like, that's two things happening. One, the world is doing a little bit of work on you. That's true. But what's more true is you're doing the dirtiest work on yourself. is you're doing the dirtiest work on yourself. Matthew McConaughey, in his book and on my podcast,

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Check it out. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you remember when you were a kid and learning was nothing but joy? We had this sense of wonder. Why do we lose that as we get older, as we become adults? When you think about it, learning should be something that is joyful, that inspires awe and wonder. Because in truth, learning a new language or honing your cooking skills or, I don't know, beating a friend at chess, these are fun things. And they shouldn't be reserved for the joy that we experience as kids. It's back to school season. But again, this also isn't something that's just for kids. We can all go back to school anytime. And sometimes we need a little bit of help to reconnect with that curious inner child.

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And if you need to switch, no problem, no extra charge. Rediscover your curiosity with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash richroll today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com slash richroll. We focus on all of these externalities that are driving our decision-making. But fundamentally, we kind of live our lives blithely, focus on all of these externalities that are driving our decision making. But fundamentally, we kind of live our lives blithely,

kind of refusing to look inward to identify and deconstruct all the things inside of us that prevent us from making those better choices. Yeah, and to me, that was the, again, I was in the middle of experiencing that and had just come through that chapter for myself, which is like, all right, I got to get real. I got to get real honest with myself because what I'm learning in this process is like, shit, all this stuff is right there. All of the tools, it's sort of like I'm trapped in this cage that, wow, looks

suspiciously like I made this and all of the tools to get me out are right there. But this one looks too heavy. This one looks too sharp. This one's a little bit, you know, it's just like I'm unwilling to go into these tools. And to be clear, I wanna, like the tools, they look like one looks like a key, one looks like a lever.

I mean, they're pretty simple tools. It's not like we don't know how to use them and it's not like they're completely unfamiliar or that working with them would be a stretch. Like we know how to do all of this stuff. It's right there for us. And yet both the world and ourselves, we do some dirty work and we are content with the things that we're looking at right now. Like you said, you don't, oh, sorry, you don't understand my individual situation. And I hate to break it to you. I don't need to understand your individual situation because the tools are the same. The tools to get out of your

situation are the same. And if you can either do one of two things, one, agree that I'm here by choice and decide to love it or decide to change it. Those are your options. And I'm asking you to take a look at those things. And it's a little bit, it is a little bit, I mean, tell me, were you confronted with like- No, you're very kind of like gracious and welcoming. And it's not, you're not like-

I throw myself under the bus. You're not like doing Goggins and you know, like basically, you know, like telling people- Thank you for saying that. Stop, stop, you know. Don't be such a loser. Yeah, it's not like doing Goggins and basically, telling people to stop, stop. Yeah, it's not like that. I guess what I'm saying is it's coming from a sensibility of trying to empower the reader, obviously. For sure. And this is like, it's also,

I don't want you to feel alone on this journey. And this is why, hey, guess what? Everybody's doing it. Yeah, this is a spectrum disease. Like we're all somewhere along this road. And on some level, everybody has made decisions maybe that weren't in their own best interest because of external pressures

or because of whatever voices in your head are defeating you from taking that leap. But why don't we go through them? I mean, the first one is, the first one's attention, which- Not an accident. Yeah, there's, we often say like, oh, you know, time is our most precious resource and it's the one we so willingly give away,

but truly it's our attention actually is the thing that we have tremendous agency over, but which we spend the least amount of time, sort of with any kind of concentrated awareness of where we're directing it and why. Yes, what I would add to that, it's a brilliant statement, clarifying statement of that. And your experience of your life is entirely contingent on where you place your attention.

I mean, it's not an accident. One of the examples in that chapter is of Viktor Frankl, 1942. He's basically in a concentration camp. And his decision where to place his attention, he has the benefit of being a psychologist. So he's aware of the power of the opportunity here and his decision what to pay attention to and how to seek meaning in the most horrific of all situations

ends up being a very valuable experience for him and for the people that were exposed to him while in that camp. And so, you know, by extension, if you can be in the worst fathomable situation and still direct your attention in a way that can provide meaning and value, well, what if you weren't in the most extreme, horrible situation? So if you take it quite literally, like you are, the experience of your life is what you pay attention to. If you want to see, you know, if you want to see the good in the

world, you can, I would spend more time in nature. If you want to see what's horrible with the world, spend more time on social media. So the choice of where to place your attention is yours. And that's a radically simplified example. But if it's as fundamental as I say and believe it is, then why don't we practice how to direct it? And why are we so easily distracted? And this is not about completely transforming your life, lighting everything on fire and becoming a monk.

This is about how do I do this within the time and the space that I have? And there are a handful of things, practices that you can employ to help learn to direct your attention. And I cover them in the book, but it's not like, we're not talking about soul reinvention here. No, it's subtle.

It's a very subtle kind of gentle nudge and thing that you can continually remind you know, remind yourself of. It's not an upending of your entire life, but it is a radical act in that you're saying, I'm actually going to exert agency over how I direct my attention rather than just allowing it to do whatever it wants, which I think is for the most part is what most of us do. And we just, it just goes where whatever's stimulating in the moment and we're not even actually aware, conscious or even exerting any kind of decision-making

power over it. Like, oh, I'll scroll. I have a few minutes, I'll scroll. What's on Netflix tonight? Oh, the news is on. Like we're just, we're literally just ping-ponging around without ever saying, hold on a second, like what am I here to do?

I can't, I'm distracted, I can't do my work or like, or I'm tired now, I need to go to bed. But you can actually improve this. This is a skill just like anything else. And you're not, it's not like you just, you are as you are, like anything, like going to the gym, you can actually learn to improve how you direct your attention.

Use the example of like, you know, a flashlight, like how narrow do you want that beam? And, you know, when you're directing it towards the thing that you've identified is important to you, by definition, it has to darken all these other areas of life that you're used to paying attention to. And that's just sort of part of the bargain.

You know, many of that's a popular phrase where attention goes, energy flows, or, you know, that to me is very simple and true. What you pay attention to expands, that becomes your world. As you said, the other things darken and you're able to see more clearly, like the way the eye works, not to get into all photo nerd stuff, but in a sea of darkness, when you point at a flashlight and you look at the brightest place, your eyes adjust to that and the rest of the world literally gets darker. Like that's the

function of the, you know, the opening, the iris of the eye. I think it's the iris. And so exactly as you articulate, that is controllable. That is up to you with anything in life. And people, it's really easy to cast blame. And yes, there are, we get sort of 20,000 ads per day. Yeah, I mean, we've never lived in a more attention hijacked environment than today, which means that it's all the more urgent that we draw our attention to attention. Yeah, right.

Meta self-referential reference there. Yes, and it's not just the external stuff, it's the internal, like what's going on. That's the harder part. What's going on between your ears, that attention. Am I like, are you aware that I'm talking right now and how do other people perceive me and how do I? So it's not just that your screen is around

and there's a bunch of ads getting served to you. It's like, are you running this 2 million year old organ between your ears or is it running you? Because. And what is that loop? What is that narrative that keeps circulating in your brain? And choosing to put the narrative that you want in there

and you deciding what your brain will do, like you are not your brain, right? The mind and the brain are different things because you are the observer to your brain. If you can observe your thoughts, you are not your thoughts because otherwise you couldn't observe them. Not to get too meta here,

but to me, that is just a great reminder how important that is, that the most important words in the world are the ones that we say to ourselves. Yeah, there's the external factors that hijack your attention. It is the internal ones though, that are quietly the ones that are most deserving of examination.

And what you realize when you become an observer of those thoughts and you start to see patterns, like the things that you tell yourself, right? Which are generally negative. I don't know about you, but like I don't know who those people are who are walking around telling themselves they're awesome all the time, like God bless you.

Yeah, give me some of that juice, bro. But you know, it's that trope of like, you would never treat a friend the way that you treat yourself with whatever those messages are. But fundamentally in becoming the observer, you realize like it's a story. It. You know, it's just a story, like where that story came from, childhood, things that happened to you, whatever.

It doesn't matter. But that story was assembled unconsciously. Like you didn't actually make a conscious choice to construct that story. It's formed from occurrences, memories, things that happened to you, choices that you made. But the kind of looping of it is constantly affirming it, right?

And I think the real epiphany comes when you realize you can deconstruct that and start to build a different story, or you can put it to the test. Like, is that really true? Let's look for evidence otherwise or whatever. And obviously these are mindfulness practices and they're incidents of developing a meditation practice, all these things that you talk about in the book.

But I think that's the real driver of all of these decisions. It's not the billboard that you see when you're driving down the car. And yes, when you feel uncomfortable, you'll pick up your phone and scroll, but like what is the source of that discomfort? That's an internal thing. For sure.

And all these reasons, it's the rationale for it being the first chapter of the book and it's a lot. And yet I couldn't put that chapter somewhere else in the book because it's so foundational. And once you have even the most basic practice and you are able to start to see that, or if you're listening to the show right now or watching it and you realize that I do that, I beat myself up verbally or whatever, I wonder what it'd be like to not do that just for a minute. And when you do

find that little space to not do that, everybody I know is like, well, that was very pleasant. Maybe there's some more of that available to me. It's not just that it reduces your stress and gives you that sense of feeling calm. It is the only opportunity in which your intuition and whatever your heart is trying to tell you can be heard. Yes, yeah. And there are the next two chapters,

the one after that one is called time and the one that follows it is intuition. And it's constructed very intentionally. And as you said, when we get to the intuition, it's like when you are able to, and we're not talking about becoming a monk, this does not require mastery. I never say anything mean to myself. I'm always like in a Zen state. All you need is little glimpses. And because it's in those little windows where you

do create enough space that you can hear yourself for who you really are. This is who I really am. This is what I really want to do. If I could snap my fingers and be in a different place with a different life in one, three, five years from now, what would that look like? When you start to be able to listen to that part of yourself, boy, it's a beautiful part. And why time is in there is because the people who can direct their attention effectively experience the world in a much different way than the people who cannot. Namely, time becomes, instead of this hamster wheel running in the background that's always marching us towards our death, it becomes very, very malleable. And this is where things like flow state, where you get 10 times more done, it's because you're in this, there's beautiful alignment and the world starts happening for you rather than to you.

And also, what if I could, what if I asked you, it's like, okay, you can live to 300. You have the same body 225 years from now that you have right now. I'm not implying that you're 75, by the way, if you did the math. I'm inching up there though, but go ahead. What would you do differently? And most people, this is, to me, this is the gas. People are gonna get this wrong. Like, wait, well, I thought we were supposed

to seize the day. I thought we were supposed to, you know, I agree. But what would you do differently? Well, you'd realize that I don't have to have it all figured out in 20. I don't have to go get the job that my parent wanted me to get to satisfy the thing. You're like, okay, I got some time to experiment.

We ended up doing so much stupid shit because we are scurrying around, hoping to fit it all in that we do nothing to an 11 and do everything to a four. And where does that leaving it? Leaves us feeling empty, which in turn makes us beat ourselves up. So, well, that's, yeah, that's an incentive. It's this cultural imperative that we're constantly comparing ourselves to other people

and we're in this race, right. And the race analogy is really powerful. And if you're, you're not, you know, kind of toe to toe with people who are your age or falling behind and you're losing like the game, right? And it's like, what are we really talking about here? Like it's total, it's completely insane. You're the most successful thing you've ever said in the history of your social media is, fill in the blank. I have no idea what.

I did my first X. Oh, right, yeah, like the, yeah, I didn't start until this, like, yeah, exactly. And to me that is the reason that is- Life is long, like you have yeah, I didn't start until this. Like, yeah, exactly. And to me, that is the reason that is- Life is long. Like you have a whole section in it. Like life is so short. We gotta be hurrying, whatever.

But then you're just, you're living reactively, right? You're living impulsively. And those people who are on their deathbed are finally reflecting back upon what's most important and realizing the lie that is that race and what they really, you know, are pining for are those quiet moments with the people they care about,

or there's fleeting moments of joy or, you know, that. Simplicity, beauty, awe. Yeah, like that moment that they had a spark of, you know, creative energy and that turned into, like all of these things that we don't really value as part of what we consider to be important. And incentives are big. It's not just like being accepted by the group.

It's like what we decide is important and valuable. And as a creator, right now, all the incentives are around being everywhere, every day, on all platforms, constantly, right? And everything you share has to be creatively inspired. And it just creates this impossible benchmark for even the most creative person out there. And it's important to understand and remember that great works of creativity take time to the point of time. Like Paul Thomas Anderson is not on social media posting reels every day.

He's like writing his movies and every four or five years, he comes out with like a brilliant work of art that we talk about, you know, that the entire culture embraces and talks about. And it's only because he's not participating in that game. His flashlight is narrowly focused. He understands who he is, what he's here to do. And I suspect that he's pretty good at making sure

that he's not paying attention to all this stuff that isn't mission critical to what gets him excited and the song that his heart is trying to sing. There's a really hard thing going on in my life right now. My mom's real sick. And I, there's just a little glimpse into something that, and this is like, we're talking, this is like 48 hours old, so I'm still processing it, but it made clear to me that my mom being this close to death, how easy it was for me in my psychology, deep middle of my brain, my heart,

that connection right there to say, okay, cool, we're playing like five games right now. Those are kind of fun to play. Time to turn them off for a little bit and get focused on the thing that matters. There is this internal realization, agreement that what I'm doing is playing a game over here. Am I successful in this regard?

Am I winning on this axis? Am I, I mean, I literally said the words like, okay, timeout, we're playing a bunch of games. How do we feel about those games? Not important. Let's go sit by our mother's side in bed. And it was so, there was such a little, like a beautiful little awakening. And of course, I went back the next day and did a lot of the same things I was doing before.

So I'm not suggesting that we just have to settle of those things down. And yet there's a little glimpse into what truly matters. And can we get closer to the things that truly matter and move further away from the things that don't. Right, I mean, that's the final lever is practice, right? Like this is a practice. It's not about doing any of this perfectly,

but I find it so interesting. First of all, sorry to hear about your mom. I know it's tough right now. Yeah. But so interesting that this is happening at the exact moment when your book that is, you know, basically kind of about this is happening at the same time.

So you're really being tested. It's like, you wrote this book, I believe you, and now you're gonna have to actually practice this in the most challenging context. Let's see if it really matters. Let's see if you can actually do this when every probably instinct inside of you is like, yeah, but I wrote this book and now I wanna go

and I wanna talk about it. Totally. And I want these opportunities to do that. And the viability, like all the kind of real world, the sales and whatever, all that kind of bullshit that gets, you know, that you get caught up in. Obviously is a function of you showing up for that. And now you're being asked like,

hey man, you might just have to let that go. It has been. Because this other thing is happening that you've talked about in the book that you know. It's been the biggest gift. In your heart of hearts and also because you've gone on this exploration and writing this book is more important. It has been.

And what are you gonna do? It has been the most amazing gift, right? And amazing is in quotes because it's a tough one. And yet it's so clear. And that's part of it's those moments where we are, and we've all had them, everyone who's watching and listening, you've had those moments of clarity. I'm not suggesting that you have to try and live there

because that is equivalent to the to being a meditator and thinking that if your mind wanders you're failing not the case meditation is actually about bringing your attention or your awareness back to the mantra back to the breath that's what meditation is meditation is not staying perfect it's the act of bringing your breath or your mantra or your attention back to the breath. And by extension, the goal is not to only live in this blissful, perfect state where I'm 100% aware that my mom is in a very difficult place and my book is coming out at the same time. And if I could just live there. No, we can't.

We can't possibly process that level of gravity. And yet we just need to find enough of those to remember who we truly are, to give us a compass of what we need to do with this one precious life. And it's available to us. That's the thing that I've realized in doing this. And again, the title of the book

came very, very late in the game because I realized that that's, oh my gosh, this is all of the best stuff. All of the best stuff is over here. We spend a lot of time over there, but all the best stuff is over here on the other side of taking chances and putting ourselves out there.

And man, what if I could eschew this safety or just get better at it? I don't need to do it all the time because that would also probably be exhausting. We all need some higher ground, right? We all need to rest after swimming and stand up on the beach for a second. And so these things can coexist. Yeah. It's that idea that somebody who's new to meditation, who sits down to meditate and the thoughts, there's just a waterfall of thoughts and they decide, well, meditation's not for me. Instead of saying all the more reason I need to meditate.

Like when you start to notice that that's what your brain is doing, it's a cry for help, right? Like I need some reigning in over here. Yeah, and this is not, I don't wanna frame the book up as meditation because it's not at all. It's very practical.

I mean, that's the subhead, right? Is a practical guide to freedom, creativity and a life you love. No, what you're saying is, in order to make these better decisions, liberate yourself from the shackles of all of these kind of social constraints, you have to go inward and get quiet enough

to actually have an objective view of like how you've behaved and why. And you can't do that unless you can create boredom and unshackle yourself from the things that are distracting you. And these are tools for doing that. But the purpose isn't to become a good meditator. The purpose is to start to like reconnect you.

We're living our lives so disconnected from ourselves. We're connected to our devices and sort of tangentially to all of these people in the digital space, but we're utterly disconnected from who we are. We don't really quite know why we do what we do or what it is that is driving these decisions. And I think just clarity around what's important to you. Like what is it when your head hits the pillow

that is that dream deferred from when you were a kid? I mean, you tell the story of like all the creative things you did as a youngster and how they were pounded out of you. It's about going back to that place and trying to recapture some of that and give it expression in your adult life. Yeah, and one of the things that I have found

that is also equally fascinating and for anyone, like I want you to enjoy the book and you're not just signing up to lift a bunch of weights. This is not like, this is not a heavy book. It is a- No, it's a super easy read. Yeah, and it's very practical. And to me that was important in that,

I took a lot of care and energy in making it as such. The thing that is interesting to me is who you were yesterday has literally, if you want it to be completely different today, you can have it that way. And because as you said, it's largely a narrative, your identity, so many of the things like you can have a different, if you were a person who slept in all the time and you wished you got up early, the only thing that is keeping

you from doing that is an alarm clock and the story that you have about yourself. And to me, that is wildly refreshing. Like, you know, you might be a thousand miles from home, but you're one decision away from a version of you that you might enjoy. Yeah, the present moment, right? You mentioned Ram Dass and Be Here Now, Eckhart Tolle. Like we're just completely captured by the past and a fantasy of the future.

And both of those are illusions, basically. We're just completely captured by the past and a fantasy of the future. And both of those are illusions. Absolutely. Basically. But we're just passing through the present without that level of awareness to understand that actually right here, right now is the only opportunity to do anything whatsoever. Yep.

And to me that you can look at that two ways. One, you know, difficult and scary and hard or cool. What am I going to do right now? And I like that empowering part. This is one that I like. That's part of why time is early in the book. That chapter is because if you think that you're about to go on this massive journey where you have to carry all this water and chop all this wood, boy, that sounds really hard. all this water and chop all this wood. Boy, that sounds really hard. And I'm just gonna give you a little sneak peek, like what do you want to change right now? And there's a couple of just little thought experiments in there where you find how easy it is to change a story that you had about yourself for 20 years.

The interesting lens that you put on time is that we shouldn't be thinking about it the way that we're all obsessively thinking about it, which is time management. Like how do I manage my time? How do I create the ultimate like, you know, schedule and which notes app should I use and all these sorts of things, right?

And instead, let that go. I'm such a sucker for that too. And I've just got dragged into it and like, yeah, then I do this work and yeah. It's about dilation, right? Which is an interesting concept. I mean, it gets into flow state, but it's really about more than that.

It's about the malleability of our relationship with time when we are engaged with our kind of heart song, right? Like when we're in that joyful place of play and creation, doing the thing that we love, like time suddenly takes on a whole different kind of dimension. Totally. And that's why I like it because everyone has experienced that time where just everything felt effortless and you were present and joyful. And were you aware that you were in this sea of a clock ticking in the background? No, you were completely disconnected

from the horror story that we've created about time. And that's what it really means to be alive. To be clear, the clock and seconds and minutes, and they're very useful for meeting someone else on time or for starting an industrial revolution, but they are not part of real life. Yeah, I'm curious on a personal level, your relationship to like all the kind of flow state research,

like you mentioned Kotler in the book and stuff like that. And like, quite honestly, Chase, like I, it's great. And I'm glad people are studying that. And there's a discourse around flow states and how you can access them. But at the same time, to me, it feels like a lot of prep, like now you're gonna sit down and you're gonna do these things

and this is what's gonna create, like it's not how it works for me. Like I basically have to just immerse myself in something I really care about and the rest takes care of itself. And like for me to like kind of deconstruct it in that scientific way. But we all have friends.

Actually makes it harder for me. Fair enough, good feedback. And we all have friends that need a chart. I got a bunch of my engineer friends that are like, cool, where do I sit? And what sort of lens do I put on this while I'm doing this? What kind of chair do I need to be in? Totally.

And yet for you and I, but this is sort of why doing what you love is so powerful because you get a glimpse into all, and you start to see partway through the book, it's sort of like the, in Fight Club, you start to get, you start to figure out that, oh my gosh, Tyler Durden is, you know, the same character. Okay, great, you start to figure it out.

Partway through the book, you realized how interconnected all of these tools are. Right, and when you give yourself, you just do something that you love, something that's truly authentically you, you have time and space. It becomes play, it becomes this thing you give yourself, you just do something that you love, something that's truly authentically you, you have time and space. It becomes play, it becomes this thing you wanna practice, your attention naturally gravitates towards it,

time, fate, all these sorts of things. Yes, and to me, that is really, whether you're talking about flow state, to me, those are the most beautiful moments of life. And that they're just there for us. If we can take some of these basic steps, that's why this is a beginner's guide. This is like, get started with like truly loving your life and feeling free rather than, you know, pulled in a hundred ways. And this is really for the person who said, yeah, Kate Chase, but you don't actually

understand. I got this and this and this and all these reasons why I can't actually pursue the thing that I'm after. Cool. Don't pursue that magical thing. Just do these three things. It's like Stutz said. It's like, fine, just do the shit I'm saying. Do this for a little bit. And if you don't get results, then give it up. But the irony is if you do what Stutz is talking about, then you can't help but actually discover those things. But that's an affront to the human mind that wants to know, Chase, just tell me, okay, like, I think this is my dream,

and like, this is how I'm gonna get there, and like, I need to know every step of the way and how it's gonna work out. Like any creatively fulfilled, successful person will tell you that, you know, like that's just not how it works, man. It's about connecting with the heart and then being like, oh, it would be cool to take a photo of that.

Like it's not any more than that. So I think we build it up into this, you know, thing that's impossible to understand. And that becomes a rationalization for paralysis and never kind of getting into the action piece. I agree. And that's why the world invented stories. And that's why there's a lot of stories in the book

that help you see that that's actually not case. This person did these things and this was the, it wasn't the culmination of the act. It was the beginning of the act. And person did these things and this was the, it wasn't the culmination of the act. It was the beginning of the act. And boy, did that feel good. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. In today's digital age, having a strong online presence is just crucial. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a creative professional, or someone with a groundbreaking idea. Squarespace is the ultimate platform for building that standout digital identity. Their latest innovation is called Squarespace Blueprint, and it's really revolutionizing web design.

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And when you're set to launch, Head to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're set to launch, check out squarespace.com slash richroll to save 10% on your first purchase of a website or domain. Greetings, devotees of the Rich Roll Podcast universe. It's me, Rainn Wilson. And if you ponder what it means to be a human being with a body and a soul, give my new podcast, Soul Boom, a listen. I sit down with big thinkers, artists, philosophers, entertainers, and more, exploring the existential questions we all

grapple with. It's inspiring, soul-nourishing, and we have a lot of laughs along the way. So subscribe to Soul Boom on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. The greatest story in the book though is the story that bookends the book from at the beginning and then at the end, the story of Paul. Can you tell that story? Sure. I'll tell a short version of it. Yeah, it's long. But essentially, I received a phone call. I'll never forget it. I was lying in bed. It was like 5.05 or something. Very early in the morning, my phone rings. I'm like, my phone is just on the nightstand across the room a little bit. So I crawl over there. I'm like, what is... And I look at it and it's my friend, Brandon Stanton. Now, Brandon is the genius behind Humans of New York,

which is arguably one of the most successful photography projects of all time. Tens of millions of fans and followers. They've raised tens of millions of dollars for organizations all over the world. It's just telling stories of everyday people. And it has a home in New York because it's called Humans of New York, but he goes global with this.

And he's telling stories about pediatric cancer and all sorts of other things. It's just brilliant. If you are not familiar with it, you're in for a treat. He was like a superstar on Instagram. He was one of the first kind of like megawatt kind of breakout stars on Instagram

for his chronicling of these stories. And he is like one of the most like tried, heartfelt, earnest artists that I know. Like nothing to betray the art. He's just like, and he was a bond trader before this and got fired and said, I'm going to go take pictures in New York and make it. And he lived on a mattress and it's a beautiful story if you're not familiar with Brandon, check it out. Anyway, Brandon calls me and I'm like, and he does this because he like time zones for him. They don't mean anything. He lives in New York. I live in the West coast. It's like, Oh, Brian, Brandon thinks it's eight o'clock for me. I pick it up. I'm like, yeah. He's like, yo dude, I'm standing in the town square in Accra, Ghana. And I'm with this kid. And this kid says, he recognizes me from your podcast and from creative

live and that photography and learning all these skills has transformed his life. And I'm like, wow, that's a great message. Oh, cool. And he's like, this kid is real. I'm looking at his portfolio. He's like genius level work. And we gotta just, I wanted to let you know

I was thinking about you, bro. And he's just a lovely person. So he hangs up and fast forward a few weeks, we're together in New York. He's back from Ghana and he's like, you know, more details about Paul. Essentially he had applied, or back up just a little bit.

He had a baby out of wedlock in Africa, which culturally for them, it was a huge deal. It was completely ostracized. And yet he, as a, the father of this child that were, that he did not, was not married to the mother was a serious problem. And so it was extra, extra pressure on him to provide and a lot of shame on his family and, and the family of the mother. And he needed to find work essentially. And he tried all sorts of different things,

screen printing t-shirts and hustling, all this entrepreneurial stuff. And he saw someone getting hired to shoot events with a camera and was making like five or 10 times more money than he was. So he sells everything he owns, including his phone, the only way he can communicate with the outside world, anywhere beyond his like call home, all those things and buys a camera. And with this camera, he somehow magically pulls together

a portfolio and submits it to the International Center of Photography in New York to somehow try and get out of Africa, earn a different income at a different scale. He's accepted. But as soon as he's accepted, he realizes that's in New York and I'm here, I can't go. Brandon finds this out through the process that Brandon does of asking amazing questions. And we're back in New York a few weeks later and he tells me the story of what he finds out about Paul.

So we as established, working professional photographers, we, with his permission, each of us write a letter to ICP saying, reinstate Paul. You should really think about giving him a stipend because he's an incredible talent. And Brandon also says, and I got some paid internships.

So short story too long, we get Paul over here. Most credit goes to Brandon here for hatching this plan. Paul goes to school, deals with all sorts of really difficult stuff and using the tools that I have deconstructed in the book basically becomes insanely successful. Starts landing major campaigns, commercial campaigns as well. He's a documentary photographer. He's collecting photo books because none of that was available to him in Africa. And the end of the first chapter

starts with, and we should all take a cue from Paul, but not know, the end of the first chapter starts with, and, you know, we should all take a cue from Paul, but not to reveal the end of the book, but fast forward, you think that's where the story ends, but it's really the beginning because what Paul does is he collects more than 30,000 books and vows to start a library, a center for photography in Africa where Africans can tell stories about Africa with their cameras. Nothing like this exists. Brandon does a fundraiser. They raised two and a half million dollars. Paul takes this money, goes back, is reunited with his daughter and builds the Deacon Center, which is the largest center for creativity and photography in Africa.

Deacon Center, which is the largest center for creativity and photography in Africa. He's got the largest photo library and the entire content and a program that now educates like all sorts of photographer from Africa. It is a destination on the planet. It's an absolutely insane story. Insane. You left out the one piece though,

which is when Paul first meets Brandon, he says to him with his cheap camera and like, that's it basically, I wanna use photography to transform Africa. Like he was very clear, like that was his North Star. Yes. And then goes on this journey is the embodiment of all of these levers and principles

that you talk about in the book. And I'm sure it was extremely difficult, but ultimately ends up basically realizing that dream. And then- I'm like at a crazy level. 10X is it, right? It's like, I wanna have a photo library and now it's the Deacon Center.

And I'm just the other day on my feet, I'm like see some crazy ass celebrity who's out in front of the Deacon Center in Africa. In Ghana. Yeah, in Ghana with, you know, a picture with Paul and heads of state and all that just like. And so if you, so now deconstruct that story

and how your levers or principles come into play in the context of like how that all unfolded. Essentially, when you look at the core aspects that allowed that to be possible, they were a handful of tools that had been talked, that Paul had been talked out of, that when he really was faced with providing for his daughter, essentially with a theoretical gun to his head,

that he was able to discover, I would say rediscover these tools within himself, his ability to focus on the most important thing, which is creating a resource for African photographers in Africa to transform photography and to provide for his daughter. Like, okay, he's singularly focused on that goal. He realizes that this is going to take a long time. And if I just start to put one foot in front of another, you know, this is going to happen. He realizes also that it's his gut that's telling him that this is what I need to do. And in doing this, I will also somehow be able to, because theoretically he could be successful at that and not provide for his daughter.

So he trusts his intuition. The constraints that this guy has are just off the charts. He's 15,000 miles from where he needs to be in order to do this. He doesn't have any money. He has no history with photography. And this thing doesn't exist in the world. So there's all sorts of constraints that he overcomes.

He, you know, and there, this thing doesn't exist in the world. So there's all sorts of constraints that he overcomes. His, he finds joy in the act of photographing. He's a very serious person. And the building of all of these things brings him so much, you know, play and joy. And when he's doing these things, it lights him up. And he realizes that he can only get there

if he is actively practicing all of the things that he knows are true within him. And essentially each of those are levers in the book. And to this day, he stands to me as this unreal example. And if Paul can do this, like us being able to grab onto some or any of these tools has to be, has to have an incredible capacity for change and growth. Yeah. And I think it's, it's easy to minimize that story by saying, well, what if he hadn't met Brandon? But the point is that he met Brandon

because he was doing all of these things and he put himself in a position for something like that to happen. And had he not met Brandon, something else would have occurred. For sure. And that's the way it works. That's what you don't get to see.

And that's where like faith is a big piece in this, faith and trust. Like you can have your intuition and what your gut is telling you to do, but fundamentally you have to have, you have to develop a capacity to not just have self-belief, but to have like trust that if you walk this path that you will be led.

Yeah, it does. You don't get to decide how that looks or how long that's gonna take. And the more that you hold onto that, the less likely you are to be successful. Yeah, I mean, my last book was called Creative Calling and that's that calling that is out there. That is, we're not quite sure what,

but it does take a belief and a trust. And what I find to be interesting is that when you do those things in the most unattached way that you can, things start happening for you rather than to you. And you can choose to ignore those things or if you just let them inspire you a little bit, you might want to do the mental math

and make the connection even if your rational mind is telling you otherwise, that isn't that a much more beautiful and blissful way to live than the opposite. For people like Paul though, like he was very clear on, you know, who he was, what he wanted to do, all of that. And that's a gift in its own right, right?

Like to have that, I'm always like, but didn't not envious, but like mad respect for people when they're very young to be like, this is what I'm doing. Like, that's a cool thing, right? Most people don't have that, but I think that's where the intuition piece comes in. And you kind of characterize it as training yourself to see what you've been trained not to see, right?

And this is a very nuanced thing, especially for somebody who's disconnected from themselves because you can mischaracterize intuition as something else. Like you could say, well, my intuition is telling me to do this, but you're so disconnected, you're just reacting, right? Like, and you're calling it intuition when actually you're so disconnected

that your intuition can't, you can't even feel or hear or see your intuition. Yeah, that's very true. And I'll give you that. And I also think though that that's the person who, I'm trying to give this nugget in a tidy little package called a book that you don't have to try very hard

to read 30 pages of that book and realize that there might be something here. To me, that's whether we have to hurt enough to start to do that work or whether I can make the work so palatable, I don't actually care. I'm trying to do, and that's, again, go back to the meta story here

is that that's the work that I realized I had to do in that last eight weeks before the deadline is this is an exercise where we can, this is palatable, it's available to everybody. And it's not really the sugar with the medicine, I think, but it is putting it in a framework that is easy to understand where I don't have to completely transform,

I don't have to blow up my life, or you can, it's up to you. But what if there was a way for us to just sort of like hand you a little letter, if you could read a paragraph and a handwritten note, and if that could inspire you, that's my concept of the package that this book is trying to do. Yeah, and it's full of all these practical tools. I mean, on the intuition piece, you know,

there's, you know, journaling, there's things you can do. You talk about the artist's date. I love the artist, you know, it's like the Julia Cameron book, Artist's Way. Like if you don't know, you know, what the thing is, like you have to get active with yourself so that that can like percolate up.

And that can be fun, that that can be like a stress relief or that can be like a little gift you give yourself rather than more work. And to me, it was really important to, it's not to say that you get any of this in life without hard work. You certainly don't get to live your dreams

without a bunch of hard work. And yet starting is actually, if that's the hardest part, how can we make that so low that you can trip over it? Talk a little bit about constraints. Constraints, my relationship with understanding how constraints work is completely downstream from my life as an artist. When I was new in the field, I wanted unlimited, I wanted a blank canvas. I can do anything.

And you start to figure out that that's really hard and actually not that useful. Because you end up if, you know, utility is part of what I love about, that's one of my love languages and it's part of what I like about art. And when you start to then throw even the most fundamental basic thing as a constraint into a piece of art, you're going to, I'm going to choose the medium. It's going to be a painting, or am I going to choose the, the, it's going to, I'm an architect and it's going to be a house. Like a thousand other things come into focus that you can then attack versus if you've got, you know, this is why the blank page is so scary. Well, I would say at least it's, at least, you know, it's a page and you're going to write something. But you know, this, the cool thing is that as you

start to lean into constraints, constraints are there to guide you. There's a beautiful exercise that the legendary designer, Stefan Sagmeister, helped me through with a previous project. And he said, the lateral thinking expert, Edward de Bono, basically coined this sort of process of looking at anything that you're going to make through the lens of something else. You're going to design a tennis shoe. Instead of looking at all the other shoes for inspiration, what else could you look at? Well, let's look at this glass of water. What are the attributes of a glass of water that you could start to think about a shoe? Oh, maybe the sole is clear or

there's some aspect of fluidity and you immediately unlock 50 attributes that you could map from this glass of water to a shoe. I'm not saying that your shoe needs, that that's the answer. But if you want to start to unlock your creativity, because what your mind does, it's a series of well-worn ruts. It immediately goes to,

what are all the other shoes that I've seen and they all have laces and they all look mostly kind of like this one. And, and it takes your brain. It needs something else to start to reject some of those really well worn ruts. It starts to go from things that you've seen to things that you've experienced. And when you can bring in something like a glass of water, you basically shatter that whole paradigm that your relational brain goes into when trying to create something. So I would encourage this,

especially if someone thinks of themselves as not very creative, this is a magic way to impose some constraints on anything that you have to create. Just drag something else into the picture and think of it as the fuel for what you need to make. Yeah, it's another thing that's counterintuitive to our instincts,

which are constraints are impediments to creation, right? But they actually drive creativity in every single way. And they can be, they come in all shapes and forms. I mean, a deadline is a constraint, right? Absolutely. You have five minutes to write a page and you're not allowed to write about whatever and it has to be about this or whatever.

Like those are all constraints, right? Yeah, if you're an artist and I gave you a, you have to paint something, you have five minutes, it has to be in red and it has to have circles. You're immediately painting, right? Like, and the more you throw in there. So within constraints though, there are external constraints

and there are self-imposed constraints. There's perceived constraints, environmental constraints. We talked about the constraints of success that, you know, like that can be a constraint, right? Like when you're so successful, you're constrained in, you constrained in the choices you're making because you have more to lose or your attachment to a certain lifestyle, et cetera.

But, you know, kind of parse these various versions of constraint. I think the most useful way of answering that question is that historically, it's just to sort of go back to square one, which is historically constraints have been the things that keep us down. I don't have enough money, time, space. Let's go back to that person that you articulated earlier, the thing. Yeah, Chase, this might be nice for you, but, and then they're essentially listing a number

of constraints. I got a mortgage. I've got a couple of kids and this is the you know the spot that i'm in in my life and what if you for example saw those those are versions of external constraints as cool i need to create something where those are all the limiting functions of what it is that i'm going to create whether this is a new job whether like like, those are external constraints. And what if you saw those as not the thing that's holding you back, but as a powerful director of where you should go next? Like I can't do any of those things, so I'm going to go in the direction that I can go.

It defines the boundaries of the playground. Exactly. And then if you look at those various permutations, again, they're sort of, technically they fall into a couple of different, you know, umbrellas of constraints, but let's just call those are external. And then what about that internal constraint that you have,

which is if you told yourself, this is how I'm going to show up in this thing. Here's how I wanna show up, lazy, tired, frustrated, angry. But what if I give myself a series of constraints like I'm going to do this with all I've got for 20 minutes a day? Let's take, for example, working out. The goal is not to go from never working out to working out five hours a day. goal is not to go from never working out to work to, you know, working out five hours a day. What if I could do 25 pushups a day? Because I don't, I don't have a gym. I don't have time. My kids are everywhere. Great. Can you wake up at five in the morning and before you get in the shower,

can you do 25 pushups? Can you do 50 pushups? Everyone can do that. Now there's the external constraints of time and energy. And then there's the internal constraint of- Again, the big ones. That's where all the big stuff is, right? It is an inside journey. It's an inside game. But to me, the cool part about that is it's just a decision then.

It's easy to be scared of those big internal things. And you might be a thousand miles from home, but you're one decision away from getting fit, or you're one decision away from taking a step in the direction of your dreams. And to me, that's powerful medicine. Again, it goes back to the present moment. What is the decision you're gonna make right now

within the constraints of this moment and what's available to you. And it's the mind that rebels against that. Now, when money and all these other kind of external things are suddenly no longer constraints in that specific moment, it's between you and you. And that's, and to be fair, what I tried to do, maybe you can judge me on this. I tried not to beat the reader up in this case. Like to me, this is, it's just a gentle nudge. And I try and show myself and all the horrible things that I've done to betray myself and all of the ways that I've skirted, you know, responsibility and, and told myself all the lies that we're able to very easily make up

about why we can't do X or Y. So I use myself in there as an example. And there's no shame in this book. The goal is meant, it's meant to just show you that, oh my gosh, I can do this. This is, it's like accessibility is the goal. Yeah.

The lever around failure is interesting because you kind of take a different tack. The discourse around failure is either like, we need a new word, you know, like failure isn't really a thing. We should just be failing all the time. But there's the other piece, the other side of that is there's kind of a,

there's like, it's like failure porn almost, you know what I mean? Totally. And it's kind of not really either of those things. We don't, like you're acknowledging like failure does suck. We shouldn't all be like running towards failure. Come on, and they're not carrying enough. Certain failures carry great cost. I mean, you talk about the space shuttle

and like these are not trifling things. So the sort of Silicon Valley dismissive relationship with failure, I think is in need of kind of closer examination. And you seem to do that and have awareness around that. Failure is really obvious in one sense and really tricky in another because we have, we're simultaneously glorifying it.

Like, oh, fail fast, fail forward, fail often. I mean, there's so many like adjective way that we should be failing and we throw it around like it doesn't mean anything. And I don't know about you, but the failures that I've had, they hurt real bad, most of them. And so where can we culturally start to land failures as, yeah, sometimes they are big. If they don't sting at all, are you really learning something? Like if you don't try with your first draft

and you get some negative feedback, like is it really, you know, was there value there? If you didn't try, it's because you are afraid of failure and you always have that backdoor of saying, well, I didn't really put myself on the line. Totally. And yeah, I get it, trying to take the pressure off of V1, just do something for people who tell me,

oh, I'm a terrible writer, can you help me? I'm like, sure, show me all your shitty writing. And they can produce exactly zero pieces of paper with bad writing on it. And I'm like, well, your problem is you need to write a bunch of crappy stuff first. So in some ways, this is what I mean, our relationship with the term

failure generically is sort of fragmented and not cohesive. And this is the point that I make. So let's just talk about, what if we framed it as tiny experiments? What we're running is a bunch of tiny experiments. And it should sting if those experiments don't go well, because otherwise, we're not going to put that much effort into getting them right in the, in the first place. And that is what makes for iteration, adaptation, growth, and, and to me, like. Resilience. Yeah, resilience. And if they're tiny, if they're tiny experiments, then the stakes are lower, you know. For sure. And the cool part is that your definition of tiny can evolve over time. Is what you've built here, is that a tiny experiment? Is the expanding of the network of shows, you tell me, where does it fit on the scale of tiny to

massive? Needs to sting if it doesn't work out. And yet the potential and what I'm seeing come out of the ground is just spectacular. So I just encourage people to start to think differently about failure. What if it was a bunch of lightweight, tiny experiments, what would you do differently? I think the key piece is uncoupling identity from success and failure of a particular project or task, right? Because again, it goes back to our lizard brain. It becomes a fight or flight thing. It's like an existential threat to our lives

if our identity is so interwoven with the success or failure of a certain thing. And that creates the fear to not start it. And like the sort of paralysis when you're in the middle of it, like all of these things are counterproductive and it cross purposes with actually, like sort of actualizing the thing that you're trying to do.

Yeah, and that's part of the reason I want to recast that. And this is why I wondered in architecting the book, could it be, to me, it's a very, very important tool. And I think of it as a tool because that is, if you, how else would you build resilience? Like literally, answer me the question. If you can't try and not succeed, how could you build resilience?

Or how can you learn anything? Like basically anything that you don't know how to do to get to the point where you know how to do it means you're going to like, you know, fall down. Which person who's listening, who has children said after the 49th time that your child fell down while walking, if you had an able-bodied child,

guess my kid's not a walker. I mean, you'll laugh because it's laughable. And yet we do that to ourselves so easily and so readily all the time. And usually before the 49th time that we fall down, before the third or fourth failed business venture, we must just say, yeah, I guess I'm not cut out for this or whatever. So to me, these are the discussions that I had when framing. I was very intentional with all of the work. It took 80% of the work to actually align on these key tools and why I feel so confident that if we can have a different relationship with failure and you hit the punchline, right, which is not

to tie our identity to it, which takes a fair bit of work. But man, can you imagine the freedom? And that is like literally, you wanna build a resilient human, you know, challenge them. And you can't get there any other way. So, you know, this is, it does very much go back to the title of the book.

Like you're going to struggle if you take chances and taking chances and struggling builds a resilient person. And we find the characteristic of resilience to be very valuable in this life. Well, let's then start to reshape how we think about all these things, you know, with specifically failure as a key one of them.

Yeah, you drill it down to one concrete thought in the chapter, which is basically like, if you're afraid to fail, you're afraid to live, right? So if you wanna live and the larger you wanna live, like failure, just it's, that's the package, right? It comes with it. So the key is yes, the identity piece and then developing the sort of resilience

and wherewithal to kind of meet failure without it and learn from it, but without the kind of negative side effects of like it cratering your motivation or a sense of your own possibility. Yeah, and the science around failure is pretty interesting. I did a bunch of research on this chapter.

Again, I was like, man, is this really a tool? And of course it is. If you wanna build resilience, you wanna build a skill, you wanna learn anything, you have to get comfortable with this, but you wanna be too comfortable because if you're too comfortable, it doesn't sting a little bit,

then you're not gonna try hard enough. So once you can put up the constraints, the framework around this stuff, diving into it, it's pretty interesting. And the science is pretty clear that trying to learn something, that looking at the results of what you achieved the first time around, if you were not successful, turns out that that's really valuable. Having a debrief, looking at what went wrong, trying again is also valuable and trying quickly is valuable,

but just doing it randomly is not. So specifically like trying something, it not working, you deconstruct quickly what happened, go after it again on a slightly different vector, and you do that over and over, that's actually meaningful failure. There's a few different types of failures in the book, and that's the one that you actually want. One that when they analyze, and they mapped this across all sorts of different paradigms. Investing was one way,

and there were three or four other ways that this particular study was done. Turns out that trying a lot, trying different things, but not randomly, trying to learn from what you did last time. I mean, this is not a huge leap here. This is how, if I was gonna try and do anything,

this is how we really would want to do it. And yet, if we look at our own lives, we rarely do that. Right, right. My startup doesn't work. I'm like, what did you change from the last time? Nothing. Cool, there's some pretty basic principles at work here

that you need to change something. A huge Achilles heel in this is just our preoccupation with what other people think. And it's tied to the identity piece, but we're all captured to one degree or another by the opinions of, you know, the, who knows who, you know, anybody, it doesn't matter, right? So what have you learned or what can you share

about liberating ourselves from being, you know, kind of a victim of that and letting like, whether it's family members, friends, or just the unnamed, like whoever's seeing you on social media, like these people loom so large in our life in terms of the decisions we make and our own kind of calculus with the failure we're willing to kind of invite into our experience. Yeah, a couple of different vectors

on which I'd like to address that. And to me, the most important one is a tip that I got from Brene Brown. And we were talking about shame and guilt and failure, vulnerability, all the things that she is, one of the world's leading experts on. And she shared with me that, I said, how do you do all these things

in front of all these people? And you know, a lot of her early work. And you're asking her that on stage in front of a lot of people, right? It's true. And this was very, this is like maybe 2010 or 11. Like she was earlier in her journey. Her Ted talk had gone viral and she has a funny line.

She says like, well, how do you introduce yourself? And she's like, well, I, especially on airplanes, if I want to talk to the person that I say, cool, I'm a researcher. And if I don't, I say, I am a shame, guilt, and vulnerability expert. And that usually people are just like, you know, they just go back to their business. It's hilarious. And she, she says it so funnily, um, funny. Uh, but I asked her, it's like, so she, she, a lot of her work at that time had come out of the, the, the famous Roosevelt quote,

the man in the arena, which is essentially like, if you're out there giving it your best and you're which is essentially like, if you're out there giving it your best and you're bleeding and dirty and sweaty, don't really think about the people who are in the cheap seats talking about how this failure is so unbecoming of you. And it's really that you are, cherish this, you're amazing and keep going. And it's a very beautiful quote, the man in the arena.

And she said, well, part of how I decide who I will let affect my behavior is that I write it on a one inch by one inch piece of paper. That's the number of people that I'm allowed, however many I can get on that one inch by one inch piece of paper of people whose opinions of me actually matter. Everything else, gotta find a way to turn it off. That's such a cool piece of advice. Have you done that? Have you written this out? I have.

And how many people are on that little piece of paper? It was less than five. And I try, not always successfully, but I try and when things successfully, but I try. And when things get hard and they will for everyone, think about that piece of paper. And it's to me, it serves a very valuable function because you can then turn that into, well, wait a minute.

Then we get to some entrepreneurial concepts like Bezos says, be willing to be misunderstood by large swaths of people for long periods of time if you want to do something material, if you want to move mountains or transform the world or your world. People are not going to get it. And if you can pay attention to that list of, that you can put on a one inch by one inch paper and be willing to be misunderstood by everybody else for long periods of time, turns out that's a pretty powerful combination. Difficult to put into practice though. Very.

Practicalities of the real world. And you know, the other ripple with this is, if you do summon the courage to kind of chart your own course and you start breaking ranks with whatever you had been doing, the people in your immediate environment and the people that you care about will not, are less likely to kind of smile and applaud.

You think like, oh, they're gonna be like, look, I'm doing this thing and I'm trying really hard. Like, because you're shining a mirror that challenges their own, like sort of worldview around what's possible. And it's forcing them to kind of confront or ask themselves questions about like,

why am I doing what I'm doing? And nobody wants to do that, right? So that turns into, you know, kind of a disgruntled lashing out at that person. And that's something you need to be prepared for as well. Sure, if I may ask you a question. Yeah. How did it feel when you got sober

for the people that were in your friend group who were not desiring to be sober? I mean, those people needed to go away anyway, and they're all practicing alcoholics, so they're deep in their own self obsession. That part wasn't that hard. The harder part was finding, I needed to find all new friends for the most part.

I mean, I still have some friends, I had some real friends from that period of time and they're still my friends and they were supportive. The harder piece was when later in life, when I started to kind of blaze this different track outside of the law. And that was, you know, in and of itself, like incredibly trying and difficult,

made all the more difficult because people were sort of looking at us side-eyed as we were struggling and doing it. And that really, that was a real challenge. Well, where I was gonna go with that is I was gonna ask you about that moment of sobriety. And then I was gonna ask you about building this. And then I was gonna ask you about the next,

like, this is a pattern, right? You were getting judged constantly. And who is judging you and your awareness of that. It matters, but not to a point if you have built as you have the resilience to keep going. Right, but a lot of that is sort of, I can conveniently speak to through the rear view mirror, but when you're in it,

I'm fundamentally a people pleaser and a sensitive person who does care too much about this kind of thing. And it was hard, it's still hard, it's still hard. It's still hard to be a somewhat public person and see people criticize you. That's like not fun. I've gotten better at like, cause I know who I am and I know what I'm doing

and people are gonna have opinions about that. That's fine. But here's the cool thing. 51%, yes, 49%, no. That's all you need. Is the 1% that is greater than that part that says stop, that says keep going. Oh, inside yourself. Inside yourself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it doesn't always feel good. And again, failure is not supposed to not sting, but here we are. You have successfully navigated those things. And if I ask you to look back, are you the same, better, or worse for it? I don't know anyone who can say that I'm worse because I did that, because I continued when

it was a clear path for me not to, and here I am. Now, this is not the framework of all frameworks, but it should hurt to fail. And yet it is your willingness to put it out there, to, again, go back to the title of the book, to be, you know, to eschew safety, because safety would have you not doing anything new or different, and take that leap, be willing to fail, be willing to fail publicly. Doesn't feel, it doesn't say it feels good

because it wouldn't have value if it did. But it's a lot easier to weather that when your ballast is firm and your compass is properly calibrated, which goes back to the inside job and the intuition and the awareness. Like these are all critical so that you have like an adequate sense of self. Like, I know what I'm doing. I know why I'm doing it. This is where I'm going. And so when you fail,

you're like, okay, it doesn't matter because like, it's just another step, you know, on this path that I'm on. But without that, when you are trying to do something difficult and other people are not happy about it and have choice words for you, and when they, you're gonna interpret that as failure, or they're telling you that what you're doing is failure or on a crash course with failure. If you don't have that compass or that ballast,

you will misinterpret what's happening as failure when in fact it might be something different. So again, like all of these tools are only, only, you know, optimally applied when, you know, you've really begun, you've built that foundation inside yourself. And two examples, one, that's not an accident that failure is the next to the

last chapter because all of these things are sort of building on one another. So if you're doing these things in a valuable, constructive way, boy, this is a time to actually, let's pressure test this a little bit. Do I have the foundation to use your words to actually be comfortable here? And it's not going to say it's going to be easy or fun. And yet you start to realize, you know, the story I tell in the book about failure is Arno Reed, who Melissa, she's the first American woman to climb Everest and descend without supplemental oxygen. And the whole climbing community was basically like, she can't do it. She tried five or six times

and it was just heart wrenching for her. And yet, again, she was able to, is the 51 49. She was just one click more successful than all the doubt and fear and all the other things. So, hat tip to her. And the success was really a function of her coming to terms with how much that criticism was weighing on her.

Yeah. Right. And it was only when she could kind of transcend that, that she was actually able to like break through and achieve that goal. Yes. And to the point that you made earlier, which I think is really, I mean, you're a smart cookie. No, no, no surprise there. But how failure is different for different people like something that you consider a success someone else might consider failure the example that i give in the book is at creative live we were growing 40 year over year doing basically on a 36 million dollar annual run rate and i was like you know i come back, done a whole big overhaul, you know, basically retooled the entire company. We're growing again.

You know, to me, that's pretty sweet. You're doing 36 mil, 40% year over year. Who's not going to love that? Had a great board meeting and an all-hands meeting where we shared the news with the company. And I sit down with my lead investor. I'm saying, so we should go raise another round now. This is like, we're taking the world by storm. And he looks at me and he's like,

yeah, it's just not that interesting. Because his lens is, is this gonna be Uber or Instagram? And if it's not, like, it's kind of boring. Yeah, not only not boring, but it doesn't fit into their business model anymore. And this is what people don't understand. This is not to rip on venture capital, but the goal is literally to get you to be a billion or multi-billion dollar company or die trying, not happy with just, you know, a couple hundred million dollars. That's not the part of the business model. And our alignment on what success looked like and what failure looked like were so radically

different. And the point of that story is that's okay. And you have to get good with the thing that you are measuring, you know, focusing the things that you can control. It's a very stoic way of thinking about it. You can't, I can't control how this, you know, how my investor thinks about where we are right now as a business, but I can be proud of the work that we've done to retool it and all the other sort of, and number of things that we could describe about the success of the business or the failure of the business. It doesn't actually matter. And this is where your own barometer,

this is why this is an inside job and why this is a lifelong pursuit matters. Like that's what we're trying to do here. Yeah, do you have your own clear definition of what success means and looks like for you? Or are you only successful if some third party, you know, decides that you are who has a very different definition of success.

That moment for me was a real heartbreaker and super empowering because what it did was I was like, oh my gosh, my initial instinct is like, what you don't think we're great. And then it was also like, oh, we got to tie this thing up. We got to wrap this up. Okay. It made my clear the next couple of years, crystal clear for me, get profitable, sell the company because I'm not sort of in their endeared circle. And I don't want to waste their time. And me pretending that that's not the view

that they have of my company would be fiction. And I feel like I have an understanding of what's possible to business, given all the constraints. And cool, I know exactly what to do now. And to me, this is when you, this is just a parting of ways, a different way of parting ways.

Cause it's not like you're fired, I'm out of here. It's like, we still go. But my next conversation was, I was like, if that's the way you feel, then here's our next steps is the way I see them. And maybe you can tell me how you see it. So there's something beautiful about that. Yeah.

The reconciliation of those. There is no one definition of success. And I think when you're starting to, you know, cast your version of that, like careful what you ask for, right? You know, because if it's private jets and, you know, fancy restaurants and, you know, luxury sports cars, that's gonna have an impact on your ability

to pick your kid up every day at school. So what are your values? What's most important? What is a function of how other people are going to see you and the importance of that in your life versus what's truly important when you're on your deathbed looking back with regret? Yep.

And that lens is the lens that I'm hoping that we can put on our lives now without actually being on our deathbed. The one that trips me up the most though, dude, that I think I struggle with the most of all of these is the play, is the play thing. That's a tough one. Sure.

It's hard for me to inhabit that space. Like intellectually, I know, but I'm the guy who's like gripping the table. And if I'm not suffering, like I'm not working hard enough and it's not good, and I'm gonna will my way through whatever I'm doing. And of course, as a result of that, I rob myself of joy. I'm not as present in my life. My relationships suffer, like all of these things, right? And you've been pretty

transparent about a lot of that on the show. And I think it takes courage to do that because I believe that play is our natural state, right? Just in the same way that our natural state is to be wildly creative. Again, this is an age-old exercise. Go to any first grade classroom. Say, who wants to come to the front of the room and draw me a picture? Every hand goes up. Ask the same classroom theoretically 10 years later

and how many hands go up? Not very many. So this is a natural attribute that's trained out of us i believe the same thing is true to you know certain extent with play that is our natural state we are able to enjoy anything with some framing with a belief that we, that joy is not something that we experience after the work is done. And if we are having fun, therefore it's somehow not valuable. Like those are things that it's,

it would not be unthinkable to hear that in lots of boardrooms or in all sorts of other contexts. And yet it's pretty easy to say that those aren't facts. Yeah, I mean, I would say, yes, I would say that I find joy in what I do, but I'm not sure it would qualify as play. You know what I mean? And I think we should say- What if you decided?

What if you decided? Yeah. What if you decided? I mean, I try to be in a playful state when I'm doing this. It's all the other stuff. It's like when this is happening, like I'd let go of all of that,

but it's everything that kind of surrounds it, right? And I think it's hardwired into me, like this Protestant work ethic kind of thing. And the idea of play is sort of associated with taking your eye off the ball and like being lazy. But you're doing all the work here. I don't even have to say it. You're saying all of the right stuff

that I put in the book. Protestant work, we gotta do the work before we have any fun. And it's like, who's to say it can't be fun? That cleaning up the toys can't be just as fun as dragging them out all over the floor. Yeah, you talk about folding the laundry and- Yeah, that's an Alan Watts.

And you have the Alan Watts, yeah, like all of that. Doing the dishes. Which is all true, because it's not about like joining a softball league. It's about like, how do you inject that kind of like, that spirit to kind of animate the mundanity of our daily lives. It's true.

And I think it's an interesting exercise to decide to inject something playful. And there's a little tiny experiment, a little exercise in the book where I like fold some laundry and roll up to that thing. Like, I can't believe I have a thing that will dry my clothes.

How cool are you? You're a tool. I don't have to do anything. I press a button that will dry my clothes. How cool are you? You're a tool. I don't have to do anything. I press a button and then when I take them out, look at all the colors. I know, and then I'm like, yeah, but you're just putting a mask on and acting like a lunatic.

Fair enough, totally. And yet, if you are actually able to go there. It's all true, I know this. It's true, it's true. And hey, what's wrong with a little lunacy? Yeah, I'm so. It's true, it's true. And hey, what's wrong with a little lunacy? Yeah. But the, you know, go ahead. I'm so grateful to have clean clothes, you know.

And yet, would you find there to be some value in looking at something that could otherwise be hard and saying, I think this can be a positive experience? What does that feel like when you make a decision instead of a, you, you accept what you believe or what you've been taught to believe the world thinks of this thing that you're about to do. So it's an, it's a tiny defiance to me. And this is why it's a little rebellion. And the book is basically, you know, it's basically very, everything in here is counterintuitive. That's part of the, to me, what is interesting about the book. The thing that, you know, go back to attention, we're taught to get attention

or we die, right? Look at me, this is how you find a mate, get a promotion, all the things. And yet it's the ability to direct your attention, to pay it, to give it away, to direct it functionally where you want it. That actually is the superpower. And by extension, okay, let's look at work. All this stuff. We're like, we feel good if we just grinded and we're at the end of the 12-hour workday, it feels good. And what if you didn't rob yourself of the joy of you could find a way for it to be joyful? Would that be somehow worse? Would you be worse off the same or better? And I just argue that it's better. And this is not to say that we have to pretend that I give the example in the book of actually digging up my septic system by hand, which is the most absurd example I could come up with. And yet I decided that was gonna be fun.

And it was actually kind of fun. I met a bunch of my neighbors, learned some things, made a lot of, you know, jokes in the process. And then you ended up designing a new like cap for it or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. But you know, I think it's reasonable to have, to be skeptical around some of these tools.

The goal is that when I deconstructed my relationship with fear and risk and that all the best stuff on the other side of the comfort zone is where like where life really has its best stuff to me getting there or providing a lens or or a blueprint for for getting there a compass joy and fun and play like they have to be a piece of it. That's a, like life is meant to be joyful. It's meant to be, think of the times where you are at your best, go back to that moment and success leaves clues, right? If you look back to your past, when did you feel your best? Who were you with? What were you doing? I'm guessing you probably weren't, you know,

bawling your eyes out in misery. You were laughing and, you know, hugging people that you care about and connected. And so what are the attributes of those moments and how do we then build in some framework and some discipline around them to create better access to those? The joy and play piece comes into play for someone who knows what that experience is like

and has followed that muse, like, oh, this is what lights me up. This is, I love this. And they start to invest in that. And that leads to another thing and another thing. And suddenly, you know, they've built a life around this thing that has brought them so much joy. I'm somebody who has done that, right? suddenly, you know, they've built a life around this thing that has brought them so much joy.

I'm somebody who has done that, right? Yes, you are. But with that comes, you know, an edifice around it. And then what was once play is now job and vocation and responsibilities and managing people and all these other things, right? And those things have a tendency to drain the joy out of the thing to the point where

it's no longer the thing itself that got you into it, right? And you tell the story about, you know, Djokovic and his, you know, his experience with that and playing tennis. And then it becomes sort of a challenge as to whether you're gonna be able to find a way back to that or give it up and do something altogether different.

Yeah, I think it's fascinating that you are articulating out loud. You're doing all the work for me here, which is the same exact thing. You were able to very clearly see it as joyful and fun. And then you're still doing the same thing 10 minutes, 10 days, 10 weeks, 10 months later, but you have decided that now this is work.

Nothing changed about the thing except your relationship to it. And so to me, that's the intellectual trap that I capture you in. It's like, what else has changed? Nothing except your attitude. Therefore, if you can have the attitude because you once had it, we have proof

that's available to you now. Yeah. I mean, in the context of like this thing that we're doing the podcast, this is still like, I got into it cause it was fun. It's still fun. Right. But I think what I've had to do, because I've been doing it for so long,

is put guard rails around that to make sure that it stays fun. Because if it's not fun, then what's the point? And honestly, it's not a good experience for the audience, right? Right, you can smell it. Here I am, I gotta do another podcast,

but you know, woe is me. Like, come on, dude, like this is like the greatest gig ever. And if you can't continue to stay engaged with that and connected to the fact that like it's a gift and a super fun, awesome thing, then you should give it up. But because there's all these other things around it now

that didn't exist from the beginning, those, you have to like find a way to manage all of that without it like imposing or encringing on the thing itself. The gold plaque on the wall over there, the million subs that actually- Yeah, I mean, those things start to like, they're like mind viruses. Totally, they are, they are.

And to me, our ability to be aware of those is, I guess that's winning still, right? It's like, even if you're aware that that is the thing that's keeping you down and it feels frustrating because now I need to go get the next million or I needed to go to 10 million or whatever. Yeah, I mean, you're just, you're like a heroin addict, like just chasing the high.

Right. And it's an empty pursuit. It's a completely empty pursuit. And you did that already with law school, which is one of the reasons I put you in the book. We should tell people that. I'm honored to be in the book. There's a lovely story about Rich

in the intuition chapter about him following his. What is the thing that trips you up the most? the intuition chapter about him following his. What is the thing that trips you up the most? Wow. I think knowing all of these, intellectually understanding them and still finding myself avoiding them is incredibly painful. And what's the one that comes up the most?

I would say it's attention. And I would say that because it's the hardest one. It's the biggest one. And I've put the most time and energy into training my attention. And it still eludes me. It's still being, I'm allowing it to be hijacked. I've been, I've had a meditation practice for more than a decade.

I think of myself as pretty good at it. And here I am trying to direct my attention to the right things. All the self-knowledge and still flailing in practice. So then the self-defeat, like who the hell are you? You wrote this book about this stuff and you suck at it, Like all of that, right? And that's one of the age old quotes, right?

Know thyself. A lot of this comes down to that. And the goal with providing these simple tools is a vehicle for you to get to know yourself on all of these different sort of ways of thinking. And to know that this is my challenge. And some of it comes from a beautiful place. The curious place in me is, you know, interested in the new thing. And, and yet after chasing a lot of new things, I was very clear in the book. And it goes back to this, the analogy of meditation.

This is not about never, our mind never wandering. This is not about us never betraying ourselves. This is not about always not playing it safe, always be in maximum risk mode. That's not what this is about. The whole package is about understanding human nature, our nature, leaning into the things that are so valuable about that nature and not letting the things

that are difficult or bad about that nature drive us. You're in an interesting kind of transitionary phase right now, so where does your attention find itself? Like what are you, so you're, my sense is like, you're kind of betwixt in between, you finished this creative live chapter, you've got this book coming out, but there's sort of an unwritten aspect

as to like what's gonna happen next. And so this is like this amazing opportunity for you to like, okay, where does my curiosity and my attention naturally gravitate towards? And like, what do I need to be paying attention to in order to figure out not just what the next thing is, but what the next right thing is for you? Well, there's the, one could easily have wedged my own story into this book

about the macro process that's going on for me. It's true. You know, lifelong career as a photographer leveraged that into a venture backed startup around training tens of millions of people around the world to be more creative on photography, design, filmmaking, podcasting, entrepreneurship, all of that. It's a nice tidy story. And then there was, you know, when I, the company was acquired and I, you know, just basically took some time to breathe, a bunch of stuff came true for me, which is like, I'm actually really tired. That was really hard. I've been working stupid hard for, you know, a decade and change, maybe more. And that, that had an effect on me. It took its toll. And what about that looking backwards? Do I want more of, and what am I very clear that I do not want more of? And, you know, I, I have, I extract that. I did not include that sort of macro lens on the book other than just being aware that simple joy is what I'm looking for. It is a really fun period to have created, again, just 51% awareness beat the 49% doubt of what are you doing here? And I'm just looking backwards because success does leave

clues. What in my past lit me up the most, gave me direction and soul and feeling connection to my people and to my community. And man, if I start to excavate that, there's some really good stuff that's undone there. What kind of projects did I love that I feel like are undone? Turns out that that is giving me a pretty interesting roadmap. Writing a book that shared what I have learned along the way was essentially one of those pieces. I'm going back to operating my own personal brand, which when you get slurped into the venture capital world and you're the founder, your personal brand gets really mashed together with the universe and you have to be, you're part of a company. It's very hard to be an individual. And I realized that that's not, I'm never going to do that again.

And so that was the thing, a lesson that I learned. So I'm interested now, this is why it is a very creative book, right? We are literally creating our lives. We learn through creating in small, lightweight, daily ways. It's the same muscles that we use to create our lives. So I've got pretty good muscles because I've been creating stuff my entire life. So I'm going to put that to work in this next chapter, creating the life that I love. And I've got a bunch of indicators looking backwards. I've got a television show in development that I'm really excited about. A couple of companies I'm playing with that I'm not going to operate, but I'm going to share in the equity around building in the AI and creativity space, the intersection between art and the machines was fascinating to me.

So in many ways, it's sort of like I cleaned out my closet and it feels good. I feel lighter. I feel smarter and still scared, still just 51, 49, but that 51 is propelling me to action. Yeah, that's cool, man. I'm excited to see what that's going to look like for you. Thank you. And it is such a treat to be back on the show. Thank you so much for having me. What you guys are doing here is incredible. I love the expansion of the vision and it's a treat knowing how,

I mean, I'm one of the few people that know how long you've been doing this. Yeah, you do. Cause you've been in it longer than I have. You're one of the few that's been doing it longer. You're an you do. Cause you've been in it longer than I have. You're one of the few that's been doing it longer. You're an absolute OG. And I think I said this in the first podcast that we did, but you've always been like a beacon,

like somebody who is creating at a high level, like doing it right with, you know, not just from a production value perspective, but from an integrity perspective. And as I look around and kind of canvas the environment these days, it feels like those standards are being eroded and going the way of the dodo.

And so I just wanna acknowledge you for that. And you have always been not only supportive of me, but like I said, like just an inspiration for the way that you have been this, you know, font of creativity and inspiration and wisdom for so many people. So, you know, I'm a fan, dude, and I am at your service. So thanks for coming.

Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to be here and And should we just keep doing it? Yeah, keep doing it. What choice? What choice do we have? We're alive, right? That's right. We're here to create.

That's our number. That's our superpower. Keep showing us the way, Chase. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me as a guest. I appreciate you. Peace. We're brought to you today by On.

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