← The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
461. Never Play It Safe: Embracing Constraints and Creativity with Chase Jarvis
00:47:09
In this episode of The Brainy Business podcast, Melina Palmer welcomes Chase Jarvis, author of Never Play It Safe, for an inspiring discussion on living a good life by leveraging essential tools we already possess. Chase, an award-winning artist and...
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- [00:00]
Melina Palmer
Hey there Melina.
- [00:01]
Chase Jarvis
Here, I'm excited to share.
- [00:03]
Melina Palmer
I'm teaching two virtual courses in Applied Behavioral Economics which are enrolling now. Advanced concepts of Behavioral Economics and internal communication and change management. So if you're interested, don't delay, learn more and enroll at HBL.
- [00:21]
Chase Jarvis
Like Human Behavior Lab dot TAMU.
- [00:24]
Melina Palmer
Like Texas A&M University EDU. Again, that's HBL dot TAMU EDU and click on Certificate program when you're ready. Let's start the show. Welcome to episode 461 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is about the secret to living a good life with Chase Jarvis, author of Never Play It Safe. Ready? Let's get started.
- [01:00]
You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.
- [01:16]
Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business podcast, what Makes a Good Life. My guest today argues that we don't need gimmicky new life hacks or productivity gadgets. We already have everything we need, we just need to learn how to leverage it. Instead of striving for external validation. The key is to look inside and engage the essential tools already available to every single one of us. In our conversation today and Chase's new book, we examine the seven essential tools including attention, time, intuition, constraints, play, failure, and practice. And yes, if you're thinking, wait, failure is one of the keys to living a good life. I promise we'll get to that. And yes, it is. So who is Chase anyway? He is an award winning artist, entrepreneur, best selling author and one of the most influential photographers of the past 20 years. As a lifelong creative pioneer, he's crafted campaigns for Apple, Nike and over 100 other iconic brands. He's also an Emmy nominated director, the author of Creative Calling, and the host of the Chase Jarvis Live podcast which has over 50 million downloads. Previously he was founder and CEO of Creative Life, which boasted more than $100 million in revenue and a public company acquisition track record. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Chase and myself, and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 461. Now let's jump right in. Chase Jarvis welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.
- [03:10]
Chase Jarvis
Thank you, Melina. Happy to be here. Appreciate it.
- [03:13]
Melina Palmer
Yes.
- [03:13]
Chase Jarvis
I'm so excited to be chatting with you today. I really enjoyed your book and I know the audience is going to love to hear about it as well. You do have a fascinating and diverse background and so take this however you choose. But for those who don't yet know.
- [03:31]
Melina Palmer
You, can you share a little bit.
- [03:32]
Chase Jarvis
About yourself and the work that you do?
- [03:35]
Sure. Lifelong artist and entrepreneur. I'd say the first significant, you know, the first 20 years of my life, I spent doing everything that everybody else in the world wanted for me. These are people that cared a lot about me. My parents, friends, career counselors, teachers, mentors. But that wasn't my path. My path was a different one. And the world that I came from told me that if I was smart or talented or hardworking that I should be one of these four jobs. And so I leaned into that. And at some point in my early twenties, when I was a hundred plus thousand dollars in debt for student loans and years off track of the life that I really wanted to be living, I figured it out, made some changes. And I wouldn't, you know, describe those changes as perfect, but rather made a lot of imperfect, just low weight, stumbling, tripping, pursuit in the direction of my dreams. And I figured out that I was actually onto something and went on to become a photographer, as I mentioned, sort of an artist and entrepreneur. I've built a number of large businesses, tens of millions of customers, hundreds of millions in revenue in and around this idea that we get one precious life. So how do we build a living and a life that, that we love? And written a couple books along the way. I got a new one out, which is one of the reasons we're talking right now. It's called Never Play It Safe. It's essentially a blueprint for deconstructing and rebuilding essentially how all the best stuff in life is on the other side of our comfort zone. So how do we reliably get there without burning our life down? And pretty happy to be here to talk about it.
- [05:22]
Yes. I'm so excited to have you. As I've already said, and I really love the, you know, that journey of discovery that that comes with. And what you're saying too is like you were really successful doing the things that people say you should totally do, but then say but, but it's not for me. And being able to, you know, when you can align with what is your real passion and focus, finding something that's even better others could have dreamed or you could have dreamed for yourself, I think is always.
- [05:58]
And I sort of in that description, I sort of blamed it on the world. But what I found since then is so the world does its part, says you should be like this, walk like this, talk like this, look like this, act like this, dress like this, et cetera, be this in the world professionally. But we really do the dirty work on ourselves because we let the world, you know, honestly, we give up on our dreams based on listening to people who have already given up on theirs. So this is about a reframing. And it was for me and it was. There's not some. Like, it was dark one day and then it was light the next day. It was a series of discoveries and two steps forward, one step back. And I've come to find out that that's actually, that's the system working. Working for us rather than happening to us. And so I, yeah, I've set out to build a life like that for me. And in the process, I've shared my journey with millions of other people around the world. And turns out there's something there which has been fun. It's been really fun to uncover that.
- [07:01]
Yeah, absolutely. Also, I really love that you share at the beginning of the book talking about as you kind of dig deep and look back to the source of the moment or the person that kind of first taught you that the way you wanted to be was wrong, maybe right. So. And knowing that was a. A moment in second grade, I believe so which one? What I think is so important too is to know that those offended comments, the words that we think shouldn't be that big of a deal, whether it's for a, you know, subordinate new employee or our kids or if you're a teacher, any of these aspects, to know like it is shaping so much for that person that you don't necessarily realize. So to know that your own words have a lot of power and can change the course of another person's entire life, for better or for worse, I think is really a key lesson here. But will you share a little bit about young Chase?
- [08:08]
Yeah, what there's a little bit of. I'm kind of thumbing the nose at the same system because it is true those words, as you mentioned, they have not always, but they have the capacity to shape a life. And the reason I shared this story about my second grade, I made my first film in the summer between first grade and second grade. We washed cars to earn enough money to rent a camera and buy 8 millimeter film. And we wrote a little script out and we paid my friend's brother a dollar to shoot the film. And we made this little film, we screened it in my friend's basement and it was profitable, right? We made more money in the, in the creating and the screening of this film than we spent. And it was my first little entrepreneurial business thing. And, and I was like, wow, this is cool being, you know, you can make money doing whatever you love. Then I rolled into second grade feeling pretty good about myself. I started to had a magic routine, I had a stand up comedy routine. And I was publishing a weekly comic strip that I would write up, have my mom, who had access to a photocopier at work, she would go photocopy some of these things and I would hand them out for exactly the price of milk in the lunchroom. And my teacher got wind of it. And without going too far into the weeds, there was a teacher, a parent teacher conference. And it was more of, it was billed sort of as a family evening, but it was really a parent teacher conference. And they were serving ice cream in the gymnasium, which turned out to be very close to my classroom. And I stumbled into my parents and my teacher talking. And my teacher essentially said, hey, you know, Chase is not really that creative. He's way better at sports than he is at art. So we gotta make sure he's not doing all these things that are distractions and we need to get him, you know, in school. And I was good at school, I was getting good grades and whatnot. But we need to turn off all this other sort of extra stuff and he should basically do the school path, which was, you know, study and whatever the sports were that the school was offering. And you know, a lot of people, you know, when they say, oh, Chase wasn't good at, you know, wasn't creative and he should stick to sports, a lot of people say, oh, poor second grade little Chase. And the irony though, as, as you sort of indicated earlier, the second grader, the kid just wants to be accepted, wants to fit in. We're social animals. And so I basically just did exactly what Ms. Kelly, I overheard that, didn't tell anybody, dropped all my creative stuff, started focusing on sports in school. And the irony, the sad irony is, as you also pointed out, is it worked, it was fine. But I had this sort of underlying nagging feeling that I had betrayed myself and that I was missing something. And the irony is that whether that's second grade chase or, you know, 33 year old you who are listening to this Right now, it doesn't matter, you know, where we are when we discover this, but the reality is that the world will have us believe a set of things about ourselves and will coach us in a direction that isn't necessarily always best for us or most aligned with our true self or our passions or interests or who we really are. So again, whether it's second grade Chase figuring this out or you right now, the cool thing is it's never too late. Like literally never. And I. It took me another, you know, decade plus multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, years off track before I realized it. And even then I feel like I caught it in the nick of time. And right then and there, what is the saying? The first time, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. Well, similarly, it doesn't matter how you got to where you are right now, there's always a chance for you to move in the direction of your dreams. Like starting now. So what if we had a blueprint? That's why I wrote the book.
- [12:04]
I love it. And I was thinking you have so many good quotes throughout the book and I am going to poorly paraphrase full of one liners.
- [12:14]
Yeah, for sure.
- [12:15]
Yeah. So in my bad paraphrasing of this and totally forgetting who apparently said it, but the, you know, that you have, you know, our books are made of our lives are. Are separated into two books. The first one is everything until the moment you realize you need to like, change and there's kind of a new life, right. And then it goes kind of from there. And so I think that, you know, that could be any day or moment that it's time to make a change and you can like, the good news is, and you talk a lot about how, you know, the past is gone and the future will never get here. And so like, gotta live for the moment you're in. So any moment can be that new book, right? That, that new direction of what, what you want it to be. And just. I also have to say, I love that you said in the book that you won, I think the typical senior award.
- [13:09]
Oh my gosh, that's like the most horrible award you could ever win. I literally. It's called the, I mean, essentially it's the cliche award, right? I mean, I was the captain of the football team. I dated a cheerleader. You know, I mean, it was just all of those and any sort of, I guess, attribute that you could stack under that heading is horrible. Like you're just, you're average. You're literally average in everything, in every way. You are the average. And it occurred to me that that wasn't good at the time. It was couched as good or fine. But I knew that something was off. And in many ways, I wouldn't say that moment was the beginning of the discovery. It was really. My grandfather dropped dead of a heart attack on his garage floor. And I was given two things. I was given his watch and his camera. And it was really his camera. And my realization right before my college graduation that maybe this is an invitation from the universe to sort of get back into that creative part that I really enjoyed as a kid. But I'd been talked out of. And, you know, my hope is that. And I was close with my grandfather, so it was very. It was difficult in lots of ways. And it's my hope that while, you know, big life events and difficult moments and traumas and whatnot, they can be very useful. There was another big shift in my life when I almost died in an avalanche. But what if we didn't need these massive reckoning moments in order to realize that we wanted to make a change in not just what we're doing, but who we are? And I'm obsessed with this idea of identity. And it turns out that all these things are shapeable in the direction of our dreams with really not that much work. It's mostly a set of habits and beliefs that we can adopt pretty easily. And the way that the book is structured. Again, the book is called Never Play It Safe. The way that the book is structured is that there are these seven tools that you know, that live natively within us, that we're born with, and that the world sort of talks us out of. One example would be intuition. Another is attention. Like, we are actually really good at paying attention. That is a key, foundational, like a central element to being a human being, regardless of your. If you're neurodivergent or typical or whatever. We're actually good at paying attention, especially if something we care about. But the world's job has seen itself as sort of trying to get us to pay attention to other things or to not pay attention, to be distracted. And the same is true with intuition. We're told not to trust our intuition or that it's so fallible and we really need to be more logical. And yet it is fundamentally those two tools, and as I articulate in the book a few others, that if we can learn to pay attention to these things that reside naturally within us, direct our attention in the way that we want to go and listen to our gut, to our intuition, as two examples that, boy, life really starts happening for us rather than to us. And we have all the tools we need inside us. It's just about reawakening those.
- [16:36]
Yeah, I. And I love the structure of the book, and it's very articulated. It's great stories tying in with different people and things. We're able to get along the way. I do love that you say it's like, not a blueprint of, like, pick up this person's life. Right.
- [16:51]
Melina Palmer
But more as inspiration. I'm curious. So at the end of the book.
- [16:56]
Chase Jarvis
You talk about how you, you know, you got to the end, and I have done this with all three of my books, but, like, you get. You get to the end, and you were, like, close to the deadline and then said, this is all wrong. I'm gonna, like, shake it all up and write a whole new book. Right. So because it was actually that you were essentially playing it safe in the first version and decided to redo it, can you share a little bit about what was, like, what did you realize was wrong with the first one? And what do you love about the way that it came together in the final book?
- [17:26]
Well, there's two points to your two pointed question, like two sub points. So the way that it happened is I had. My startup had recently been acquired, and it was in that acquisition or the time immediately following it, where I was working for the big public company that had bought it, and I did a year with that company and then had some time. It was in that period after the acquisition and when I was transitioning out that I had a chance to really reflect and. And, you know, want to write a book. But I had come out of essentially a period where I was doing work that wasn't aligned with me. I'm, as I mentioned, I'm a lifelong artist and entrepreneur, not a public company executive. And yet that was part of the deal. It was work I needed to do in order to get the company acquired and. And all of the other things and support the shareholders and the investors and whatnot. And. But it was in that coming out of there that I realized, okay, you know, I got another book deal. And, well, what would, you know, what? Everyone obviously would want to know what it's like to start a company from scratch and build it and have it acquired by it. So I just started going down that path, and I realized very late in the game, which is not uncommon, that, oh, my gosh, I'm doing it Again, I am writing the book that everybody else, you know, thinks I should be writing. And these people care deeply about me. My agent, my publisher. These are people I've got long standing relationships with. But oh, my God, I'm writing the book. Everybody else thinks that you're right, which is what it's like to get your startup acquired. And what lessons did you learn and how can you help other people go after their business dreams? And it sounds great, but I realized in that moment that, man, there's essentially eight or 10 weeks left in my deadline and I'm doing it again. What have I learned every time I stopped betraying myself or every time I became aware that I was living the prescription that culture or the world had for me rather than my own true desires? What have I done in the past when it worked? And the answer was just, you've kindly and thoughtfully let everybody else know that, man, this is not who I really am or what I really want to be working on right now. And you've gone sort of boldly in the direction of your dreams and you've gone to the other side of your comfort zone to where fear and risk live. And when I deconstructed my life in that moment, I realized looking back that, man, you know what, there's a pattern that all of the best stuff in my life was always on the other side of fear, on the other side of comfort zone. It was bailing on medical school and deciding to become a photographer where I really came alive. It was in not dating the people that looked like X and acted like Y. But when I met my wife, I knew there was something, that she was my future wife. And there was something very special about that. And I could do that with any number of things. So in that moment, I reached out to my agent and said, hey, look, I. The book I've been writing, I know it's. We're 55,000 words into a 62,000 word manuscript, and it's basically done and everybody loves it, but this is not the one I want to go to market with. And then we took that information to my publisher and had a very thoughtful, heartfelt discussion with them. And this is the part where most people, you know, where we're scared to have those tough conversations because it's like, oh, man, it's just good enough. And, and you know what I, what I subscribe to or suggest is that it's, it's really in having those difficult discussions when you are aware that you're betraying yourself in either a tiny or A massive way that you show up for yourself, as I miraculously did after again ignoring myself for a really long time. And I've got a vision for a book that I want to write I think I can put together in the next eight or 10 weeks. And I did, and I put a picture of my wife on one corner of my monitor and a note that said don't play it safe on the other corner of my monitor. And I just wrote, and I wrote about the things that were most important to me, not about the things that were going to make a nice, tidy, well selling business book. And you know, never play it safe is what came out. And it was instant bestseller. And that's just again, it's just a reminder proof that it's actually in doing that sort of work. So that all file all that under one point and the other point, which I think is really important and often gets missed is this is not about constructing a perfect life, it's about constructing your life. And it's about realizing that, look, we're going to get off track all the time. This is such a dynamic environment. Things are coming and going and we've got friends and kids and families. And this is not about never getting off track. It's about when you realize that you are off track, how do you recover quickly and in the direction of your true dreams. So it's sort of an imperfect guide to living a life that you ought to be living. And to me, that was a really important point to underscore in the book, in my experience, is never about. It's not about not getting off track. That's just fiction. We all get off track, little tiny betrayals of ourselves. The cool part is that's actually what this is about. It's just about returning to yourself over and again. Each time stronger, more kind, gentle, wiser than the time before. So whoever's listening or watching right now, it's like, that's what this is about. You know, it doesn't matter how you got to where you're at right now. If you're living a life you love, congratulations, high five, you're killing it. If not, let's get you back on track.
- [23:22]
I love all of that, of course, and thank you for going on that journey. I don't know how, if ever, or how often you've been asked that question, but no, it's true.
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It's fun. You know, it's like that. And that's. It was in that moment that I realized that's the book I needed to write. And it was in writing that book that I was like, oh my gosh, this is the pattern that we're all stuck in and here's a reliable way to get out of it. That's, you know, that's really what I wanted to put into the book.
- [23:49]
I love that. You know what really resonated with me in the story you were telling of the like going to the agent, going to the publisher and how easy it is if we think about our habits. Status quo familiarity, bias. Like all those things right where and sunk cost for sure. Like fallacy coming into play and not.
- [24:11]
Melina Palmer
Wanting to let people down.
- [24:13]
Chase Jarvis
Right. And that hurting species. And like, well, I'm already this far. So like maybe the next book I'll. I'll write that one but like this one is. It's too. It feels like it's too late. But like you said you had eight to 10 weeks and you're able to make it happen and have that tough ish conversation. But I was reminded of. So I did my first TEDx earlier this year and. Awesome. Thank you. It's called there's nothing Magical about Monday. And like it's very related actually with a lot of the. Every Monday, you know, it feels like, oh, I'm going to have the best week. I'm going to do all these things as you plan for Monday and then Monday comes and you do all the same crap you always do. So it's talking about like getting our own way. Right. And like how our brains are actually wired to make us keep making that mistake and like ways out of it. So kindred very much on this path, but in the process. And I had been working with the team at TEDX Portland for months and sending script versions and back and forth and whatnot. And I was going to be going in and doing this first like live run through with the team that they're, you know, watching and critiquing my every move to do the like kind of final version of it. And I felt like it was basically done and I have to do this and I was working with a. For something else. Someone who helped with a speaker reel video I was doing and he helps in storytelling stuff. And I was like, I want you to read the script. And I feel like it's jamming. Right. It's like the thing. And he had read it and it's like, oh, it's good. You know, but like you said, I mean it's basically. You said it's like too late. So it's just. It's fine, right?
- [25:51]
Melina Palmer
It'll Be.
- [25:51]
Chase Jarvis
I don't need to give you feedback because like it's, you know, it's what it's going to be. I was like, well, that sucks, right? Like, what if it wasn't too late? What if we were going to change? So I, you know, restructured the whole thing three days, you know, before I was going in to actually do the read through and said to the team like, hey, I'm going to go in another direction and here's the new language and I hope we like it ended up going with it. It's a million times better than what I had. I'm so happy with it.
- [26:21]
Right.
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But the same, you know, focus making it happen. And in my case, you know, my, my husband being like, you know, we need, we'll make the time for you to rewrite it.
- [26:32]
Melina Palmer
Right.
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Chase Jarvis
You need to do it, do it right.
- [26:33]
Melina Palmer
That's the way to do that.
- [26:35]
Chase Jarvis
So I felt that as you were telling that.
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But see, here's the deal, Melina. Everyone feels that when you've sort of paid attention to that voice inside, you got some advice that was difficult and hurt or was point on or right down Main street and you're like, oh, God dang it, the right thing. You're right. Why am I doing this? Everyone has that experience. And it's my goal with sort of socializing this and writing about the dozens, hundreds of other people, the examples in the book of people who've done exactly that. This is not a broken system that we have to fix. This is actually what it looks like. This is it working. When we pay attention, when we can direct our attention in the direction of our dreams, this kind of stuff is possible. And in fact, again, not people think, for example, take meditation. That meditation is the act of staying perfectly still and thinking of nothing. And you know, but that's not at all. Ask any person who's meditated for their entire life, any sort of monk. No, no, no. Every, even the monk who's been meditating for 40 years, their mind wanders. Meditation isn't keeping it there. Meditation is the practice and the process of bringing your attention back to where it's supposed to be, either to the breath or the mantra or whatever. And the same is true with our life. Our life is not that there aren't distractions or curve balls or, or difficult moments or ways that we get off track. That's actually life working. But when it's really working, it's. We develop the ability to recover quickly, to know who we are, to know what we want in this life. And to continue to move in the direction of our dreams with intention and that's it working. That's the best we can do. And by gosh, if I just had some basic tools, I would love to do that. Said pretty much everybody who's ever discovered or reawakened or realized that, that that's the system.
- [28:36]
Oh, yeah. And I think too, just in knowing that, you know, in a world where we're making thousands of decisions every day.
- [28:43]
Melina Palmer
You can't change every single one of them.
- [28:45]
Chase Jarvis
You need to be in that, you know, way it's always been done, you know, standard habit stuff most of the time. But if you are paying enough attention and you are thoughtful about the time that you have and what matters to you, any moment could be the moment that you want to make a little change and then what's the next one going to be?
- [29:04]
Melina Palmer
Right?
- [29:05]
Chase Jarvis
It doesn't have to be everything, but if it's the right ones, then it just is always a little better version of. Of that.
- [29:12]
Yeah, I like to think, I like to think of I. I mentor and I have a coaching business. I am sort of coaching business where I help entrepreneurs and solopreneurs sort of move in the direction of their dreams, as I talked about. And a lot of these, there are goals that are, you know, life, business, financial, et cetera. And there's a really thing that's mappable from that world back to this world that we're talking about. Sort of this world of who do we want to be or become. It's sort of like you want. There's a different mode. Working in the business is doing the tasks and doing the stuff versus working on the business is like, what's working about this business and what's not working? And you can, you know, lift and stamp that onto life. Well, we all have to, you know, go buy some groceries and, you know, if you've got kids, drop the kids off or pick them up, or if you've got a boss, then do what your boss says or, you know, whatever, or if you've got your own business, then do a bunch of tasks that make the money come in. That's working in the business, working on the business or working on our life is cool. We've all got to do this stuff. But what do I really want and how could I change such that I can get closer to those things? And it turns out that it's very, very doable. But there's, you know, there's sort of two things. One, the awareness that we're off Track, which is sometimes a difficult conversation. And then two, a set of, you know, actions and behaviors to use the language that you use in your community to support those.
- [30:53]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, as we kind of transition into. So the book has these, you know, seven levers. You talked a little bit already about, you know, intuition and, you know, some about kind of attention and whatnot. Do you want to maybe give a little bit about each of those seven levers just to help people to know kind of what those areas of focus are?
- [31:19]
Sure, sure. Yeah. And again, these levers, these are tools. I chose the word lever because I like the concept of leverage. Like, leverage in finance can be good or bad. Someone has leverage or does not have leverage. But if we think about the essence of what a lever is, it's something that you want to put minimal work in and get maximum output. So it's really a good, smart, refined things, like getting leverage is using a powerful tool in a smart way. But these seven tools. I mentioned attention, we mentioned intuition, a few others. One that is very, you know, again, a lot of these are counterintuitive. So one that's, I think, very counterintuitive is constraints. And when we think of constraints, even the word has sort of a negative connotation. It's, like, there to keep us down. But what if I told you that, you know, everything that, you know about constraints is wrong, and that constraints are actually some of the most freeing things? Instead of meant to keep you down, they're actually meant to show you the path. So in art, it's really easy to articulate this concept. For example, if I'm sitting there and you're staring at a blank page, you're an author or you're a painter, and you're staring at a blank canvas, what do I paint? I could literally paint anything in the world. Oh, my gosh. Or as a writer, the blank page. I can literally write about anything. But if you're a writer, or we'll take a painter, for example, and I told you, you have to paint something, you have to paint it in under 10 minutes. It has to be red, it has to have a hat, and it has to, you know, do these three things immediately. I mean, these are constraints that if you look at them in a way of like, oh, man, someone's giving me constraints. I have to paint a red painting in 10 minutes versus, oh, my gosh, I know. You know, I'm 85% of the way there on what I need to do. You know, the same thing is true in that sort of painting example with everything in life, oh, I don't have enough money, I don't have enough time, I don't have the freedom between the hours of 9 and 5 where I have these financial constraints. Awesome. That's really helpful because what can you do outside of all of those constraints or within them to move in the direction of your dreams? Do that. Start there. So it turns out that constraints are so, so helpful. And it's that sort of counterintuitive that I feel like is true with all of the levers in the book or all of these tools. And you know, we've talked about attention. The irony is that our culture thinks it's getting attention is the best stuff. That's how your business stands out. That's how you find a mate or get the job that you want or whatever. But to me, it's actually just the opposite. It's in a world where we're taught to get attention, what if we really learned to pay attention, to pay attention to the person in front of us, to pay attention to what we really want, to direct our attention. Not in service of the attention grabbing machines that are our phones and are all of the other distraction machines out there in the world. But what if we could focus on what we really want? You know, so, you know, that's the way I thought about each of these levers. And the cool part is when I deconstructed my life when I was, when it was working for me or happening to me, and the lives of many of the most successful, creative, talented, interesting people and ordinary people who'd lived extraordinary lives, these seven tools just kept coming up, right? The ability to direct our attention, the ability to listen and trust our intuition. That's actual knowledge. The science is getting clearer by the day that, you know, that rational thought, which we attribute a lot to, it's been great, but helped us develop tools and build our society or build culture. But it turns out it's kind of slow and fumbling and prone to error and misunderstanding in a way that actually our intuition might be actually stronger and much more powerful because it's got a wider base of drawing, you know, that we can only manage. Of the billion data points we get every minute, we can only, you know, draw on a handful. So it's actually we're turning off a lot of information, but that information doesn't mean it's not in our body somewhere rather than this organ that's placed between our ears. So learning to listen to our intuition, turns out, is a really powerful thing. So attention we talked about intuition. We talked about constraints. Time is another really fascinating thing. I think we're all taught that life is short. We have to hustle for what we want. And. And I don't disagree that we could all get hit by a bus tomorrow. But what if I told you that life is long? And what if we realize that the thought that life is short keeps us running around with our head like a chicken with our head cut off? Especially, you know, when we're trying to graduate college and go on and get a job. And, you know, what if we could, by contrast, relax a little bit, explore, play, goof off. It's in that sort of play that we realize what we love. And if we do things we love, boy, we end up being really good at them. And time is suddenly working for us. You know, we've all had that experience of flow, right? Where you get five times more work done in an hour than you ever thought was possible because you were so engrossed in it and so effective. Or by contrast, you. You know, when you're doing the meaningless work that other people want you to be doing because it's your job and you have to check this box over and over and over again, how slow and painful time feels. And yet the experience of doing what you love, time, flying and being completely immersed and alive, that's just a very, very powerful and enriching feeling. So the people who have lived these lives that we love, or we've all had this experience like, that's available to us all the time. So why would we ignore it? As an example with time. So I've got attention, time, intuition. We've talked about constraints, talked about, which are really, again, super powerful. I mentioned just a second ago play, which is. That's our natural state, right? Like naturally playful, creative, jovial beings. That's the status of a human being. And yet the world trains that out of us, right? We've got to work before we play. And you know, just that whether it's this, you know, this puritan work ethic or I'm not saying it's a horrible thing to accomplish stuff. And yet it turns out if there, if we are playful in doing it, if we can make the choice of being playful, we don't have to be suffering the laundry. Doing laundry can be fun and joyful. It's very much about the attitude that we bring to that and by extension, to anything. The two other remaining levers that we talk about in the book are failure and practice. Failure being when we set out to try something or to succeed at something and we don't hit our objective. The funny thing about failure is that it is absolutely required to do anything, like literally anything. If you set an intention, you're not going to be good at it the first time and it's going to take you repeating it like over and over and over. And not one person, if there is any parents in the audience, if you have an able bodied child, after the 112th time that your child was trying to walk and stumbled, none of you, zero percent of the people who are listening or watching said, I guess my kid's not a walker. No one did. No one did it. It's absurd, right? And yet we're so easy to say that about ourselves and others in the direction of our dreams on any vector. You know, if you've tried something 50 times and it didn't work, you're like, guess I'm not good at that or guess I'm fill in the blank. We're happy to label that, but we know that's not true. We know that, you know, there's a lot of research that shows that every winner started as a loser in every capacity. So failure is a big tool. And then of course I mentioned it a few times in there. And we have to practice. You can't expect to be good at anything without practicing it. So if we are our practices or by extension our habits, we are what we do every day, we can control those. What if we actually set a plan in place? Not some rigorous 20 step action plan, doesn't require you to move to France or get a different set of friends. What if we just set up a few basic frameworks to practice what we want to be or become. Turns out that that's real powerful.
- [40:18]
Oh yes, I love it. And I love that throughout the book. And thank you for walking through each of those seven levers. A little bit of course, for everyone as they go and get the book as they should. And they're going to be reading even more and great examples throughout. They all hearing you talk about them. I'm also hearing they build on each other in such a clear way. Right, yeah. And so you say, okay, so we practice the fundamentals. You had great examples of musician and an architect and I forget the third one, but that it's, you know, going back to, it's not that you have to be doing the hardest thing, but like going back and, and practicing those fundamentals and finding the, the love in the details. And I did really enjoy the laundry example. My, my husband absolutely hates doing the laundry. And, you know, we find the balance right, where like, you know, cleaning the bathroom's not my jam. I would always rather do the laundry. And I can find some fun in that repetition. And so, you know, you can divide and conquer.
- [41:27]
Melina Palmer
Yeah.
- [41:28]
Chase Jarvis
I mean, the point of that story is like, you really can. If you go in with the attention of like, I'm gonna love this. What would it be like to love laundry? And I walk you through an experiment where you look at the machine that dries your clothes and you're like, oh my gosh, I am so grateful for you. There is a machine who. I put wet clothes in there and it magically makes them dry. And I don't have to walk outside and hang them on a line and hope that the wind is going to blow and that the weather's going to be good to keep them, you know, get them dry. And then, oh my gosh, when you open that, the smell that comes out and the warmth that feels so nice. And then you look at all the colors and you touch them and they're warm. Like you can do that literally with anything. Lying on the beach without a towel in the gritty sand, you can actually decide to love that. Now the point isn't actually about loving laundry or actually loving, you know, laying on sand without a, you know, a beach towel. It's that we can apply that by choice to a lot of areas of our lives where we feel like we're victims or we feel like it's, it's difficult or challenging. And boy, if we make some changes in how we approach different aspects to life, again, scientifically proven, practice based systems that, man, it turns out that this stuff is really, really powerful. Let's do more of that.
- [42:54]
Yes. And even, you know, paying attention to the thing you're doing with the laundry. Right. It's again, building on all those practices and how it makes the time shift in a great way. Right. So even something as simple as laundry is a great example for everyone here. And just imagine all the possibilities within your, your life. Right, listener, as you're thinking about this and you will build on that when you get the book. So, Chase, thank you so much for joining me today. For everyone who's so excited to learn more and to follow you, we'll of course have links in the show notes. But you know, what's the best place for them to go?
- [43:28]
Never play it safe is the book. I appreciate your, your you picking up a copy. I'm at Chase Jarvis, essentially everywhere on the Internet, whether that's YouTube or Instagram built a community that is interested in this kind of stuff, growing and changing, becoming the best version of ourselves. You're welcome to join. There's all sorts of ways to engage and yeah, I'm just Chase Jarvis out on the Internet. I hope to cross paths with many of you.
- [43:55]
Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining me. It's been delightful to chat with you today.
- [43:59]
Awesome.
- [44:00]
Melina Palmer
Until next time, thank you again to Chase Jarvis for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I can't help but be drawn to these examples where someone else saying something that might seem like an offhanded comment to them can have such a massive impact on the other person. In a couple of weeks, I will have Adam Galinsky coming on the show to discuss his new book, Inspire. And in it we talk about the leadership amplification effect and it is so closely related to this. So me reading both these books books and having the conversations around the same time could have something to do with why that stood out to me so much. But the key point there is not to live your life for someone else or what you think they want or mean or whatever else. There's so much opportunity these days for people to craft really amazing lives. I'm always in awe of the different YouTube channels and TikTok accounts and whatever.
- [44:59]
Chase Jarvis
Else that's out there today.
- [45:01]
Melina Palmer
Truly, if you have a passion for it and are dedicated, you can turn absolutely anything into a job if you want. It's really amazing, isn't it? So you don't need to play it safe and do what others have done. Do what makes you happy, find time for it every day, give it attention and consider your time and habits around making that central to your lived experience. Your life can be whatever you want it to be, which is so cool. One other thing I want to draw attention to that I think is so key from this book are the ideas around constraints and how they help you to be more creative. Putting something in a box can actually give you so much more opportunity to do big things and think differently. That's a really cool concept. So give yourself some constraints as you plan that next project or as you look forward on your goals for this year and see how creative you can get by constraining yourself. And of course, the importance of failure and practice can't be forgotten. Time and attention on the right things, whatever that means for you, means you need to set aside time to try new things to fail and stretch and practice the basics, revisit and learn and love what you do and focus on. You only have one life after all. Which we were reminded of with my conversation last week with Jody Wellman on her book you only Die once. So don't play it safe and live for others. Live your best life and whatever you choose to do or not do or change or keep the same. If you were inspired to do something from this conversation and series of episodes, come share it with me on social media. I would love to hear all about it. You can find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are of course links in the show notes to make it easy for you, along with links to my top related past episodes and books, including Never Play It, Safe Ways to Follow Chase and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 461. And thank you again to Chase Jarvis for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.
- [47:30]
Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.