How to build business mastery and avoid being a commodity trap: With Chase Jarvis and Ramit Sethi

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Sethi from Ramit's Brain Trust. I want to show you my interview with Chase Jarvis. He's one of the world's best known artists and photographers. And I want to show you what separates an ordinary photographer from Chase. He's been hired by companies like Apple, Nike, Starbucks. What makes companies like this hire a photographer when anyone else could just as well buy the same camera that he uses? What we're going to learn is it's not about the equipment, it's about something far deeper. We're going to learn the strategies that he employs to get in front of those decision makers. We're going to learn the exact words he uses when he's in those meetings. And most importantly, we're going to go deep into the psychology of mastery. How do you go from an entry level writer, photographer, artist, or any craftsman to being the very world's best? Watch along as I interview Chase Jarvis on Ramit's Brain Trust.

So you can have your personality, but ideally you want to be someone who they appreciate. And so I don't want to position them when we're talking about big clients only, I think that's really sort of gating to me for your audience. Like, look at this guy, knows what he's talking about.

Exactly. It's to show that only the masters get up to that level. But that doesn't mean you only stay there only for the money or only to brag about it.

Absolutely. And some of the things that I enjoy the most are the things that I fund myself that are personal projects.

You have a book that you did that was amazing.

Yeah, I've got a couple of books. I've got a bunch of projects. I've done some television shows. And the beautiful twist is that some of those things were either the lowest paying or they were so low paying that I paid for them.

Yeah, they were negative pay.

Right? They were negative pay. And this is not even like. This is even rare. This is a very normal thing, which is. Is part of the way that I stand out from my competitors is, remember, be different, not just better, is by doing a project that has a super low budget but is like super interesting.

Yeah. Like a passion project, like film directors do often.

Yep, absolutely. So an example I'll just cut right to the chase here is I love food.

Yeah.

I would consider myself a foodie, even though some negative connotation.

You snob.

Yeah. But at the same time, I love music. And so myself and a good friend named Michael Hebb, we got together and we did this project called Songs for eating and drinking, where we're reasonably well connected people. So we're getting guys like Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam and other big name musicians. We bring them together, we serve them dinner. Celebrity chef comes in, who's also a friend of ours, Michael is really well connected there. And say 25 people sit at a table. These are rock stars that are multi platinum Grammy award winning. And they're all sitting together. Celebrity chef. And we're filming it and then we share that live or we share it online. And what art director from what New York ad agency that has what fat budget, sees that online and doesn't want a piece of it? They're like, that is awesome. I've never seen like 50 Cent and whatever together doing a ditty over ribs. That's amazing. And then they will seek me out based on being different and putting something out there that's unexpected.

So this is something that I have learned from you. And I'm still just at the beginning of my career in this and that is in my world, it's like I do this, I measure it like crazy. I have analytics and everything and I'm very direct about it. I do X, I measure it, I get. Yep. Your career as it's become more successful is so much more about the softer skills.

Yeah, right.

Talk about your thinking there.

Sure. So my thinking there is that anytime I've been able to afford to take the long term view on a brand, on a project, on my pocketbook, on whatever, it's always paid off for me. So I realize that sometimes we're not able to take long. Dude, we got real bills and you have to do it. But if you can ever take a long play, if you can ever say no to a client because the money's not quite what you want, it is. If you can ever do that, feel good about it, it always comes back. And it comes back bigger.

Let's talk about like when you wake up in the morning on an average day, what time do you wake up?

I usually wake up about 6:30.

And what time do you start? Like let's say work. I shouldn't say work. What time do you look at your email first?

I try not to look at it till about 11. Okay.

All right. So in the morning, what kind of stuff are you doing?

I take care of myself, actually. I meditate, which is something I have that has been amazingly valuable for me. I just sit still and sit quiet for 15 minutes every morning and every evening. And that was also learned. That's just been the last probably Year. But I eat some protein early in the morning. That's also. I think there's science that's saying that's a good thing to do. I hydrate. I usually get some exercise. And those things have been able to replace like 4 cups of caffeine or whatever you would normally do. And I'm not off caffeine. I still love the sauce. I'm from Seattle, for God's sake. So to spend the morning taking care of myself and being intentional with. What are some things that I need to get done today.

Like if nothing else got done, if I just did this one or two things, I would be happy.

Yeah. And it sounds again, that's why I joked at the beginning of this part of the filming. This stuff seems so simple, but it's crazy that it took me 20 years to figure it out.

It's simple, but hard to actually execute.

Man. I have partied as hard as you can party and traveled as far and as high and as. But it's really only to make that sustainable, like building systems. I used to resist schedules and systems as the sort of the deviant artist. Like, no, you can't put me in a box. And then I really realized that systems and schedules allow you the freedom and the headspace to put those other things on autopilot. So that you like your financial system.

Yeah, exactly.

My wife and I use that to this day.

I love it.

And it's. Do we have. I have full time accountants. I have full time assistants. And we still manage our money in the way that you have articulated it should be managed. And I will teach you to be rich. Because it's on autopilot. We don't have to think about it. We step in when we need to step in and we'll do whatever we need to do. Those little time management and sort of personal. And I should say this is the routine that I sort of went through is not how everybody is meant to run.

Of course.

We all are our own sort of machines. And a little bit of self discovery and self honesty and being able to put yourself in that in the position to succeed, I think is really valuable. So that's a super simple tip. But it's the part, like you said it really good, really well, which was by organizing around a couple of specific principles and doing some things very well. It allows you to be risky with other things.

Exactly.

And some of the things that I choose to be risky with are my travel. Yeah. I am literally 150,000 miles without. And that's gone hundreds of days A year, right? You're on the road 200 days a year. And if I didn't have these systems that didn't take good care of myself, I certainly couldn't do that. And that's for, you know, both personal and professional. Mostly professional. But that is just an example of the risk of being not around to manage your shit.

Totally. It has to work, has to work. You can't just like, oh, I'll do it later, I'll do it on Saturday. No, you're gonna be on a hot air balloon Saturday.

I'm on Kilimanjaro. I can't manage my 401k.

I see a lot of entrepreneurs, they do all these long term things but they don't even have any revenue coming. And so you're saying focus on revenue first but focus on getting your business set up, whatever that may be.

Well, let's bring up CreativeLive as an example.

Tell people what CreativeLives.

CreativeLive is basically it's a learning platform where we connect the world's top experts. Guys like Ramit Ramit Tim Ferriss guy Kawasaki Reid Hoffman in the business sort of world. And Pillager prize winners, New York Times best sellers with millions of people live so that anyone in the world can watch for free to learn their secrets. And if you want to own the content, only then do you have to press buy.

The business model was actually one of the most genius business models I've seen in the last 10 years.

My partner Craig Swanson came up with it and I, I was over here with millions of people working in my photography world and he had this brilliant business and we've been friends for a long time. He had this brilliant business model and over time we were like, duh, we should put these two things together. And the thing about CreativeLive is it was profitable early on. And so especially here in the Valley, like when you say it's like what you have a startup that's generating revenue, they that is what enabled us to have to be able to sort of write the terms for our round of funding. When we decided to try and scale and to do it big because we had a real business model, we demonstrated that we were making money. And I should say for entrepreneurs and for you folks out there, regardless of what line of work you're in, being able to demonstrate that you can make money getting that first client and using that first client to get the second, third, fourth and 10th. That is how you start a business and only how you start it. There's no other way to start a business without a client.