Chase Jarvis with Shane Mac

The reality is the most successful people in our culture, the people who we admire or aspire to be, are largely the people for whom they found a way to not be constrained by all these inputs that society tells you, "You should be like this." To me, that's part of what this book is about, is that each of our callings is very individual and independent, and we know what we're supposed to be doing if we can listen to it. I made basically every mistake you could possibly make.

Chase Jarvis talking with Shane Mac. You know, they've known each other for years and it really shows in this latest conversation from Ask. For 10 years, Shane has been arranging experiences where people can stretch out and spend time talking about the things that give our lives meaning. And this seemed like a special time for them to get together in front of some mics, what with this being the 10th year for Ask and Chase's new book, Creative Calling, about to drop. Well, you know how you hear that phrase, a man who needs no introduction? Yeah, well, that's Chase Jarvis. So let's just get to it.

Where the hell did you grow up?

I'm born and raised in Seattle. My dad went to Ballard High School, my mom went to Lake Washington, and they were sort of like on opposite sides of the city. And born in Seattle proper and then moved out to the burbs of Seattle.

How did they meet?

They met at Dick's Hamburgers in Seattle. It's just like the grimy little burger joint. So my parents met there on a Friday night. And have been married for 50-something years now, 53 years.

That's amazing. So, parents are together, parents are still living.

Yeah, parents are still living and together. Yeah, they've been a huge model for my relationship with my wife Kate. And, I would say I was raised middle, lower middle class. My dad was cop, my mom was a secretary at a biotech company. And, there was always definitely a right way to do things in my house. Good discipline backbone but also a lot of freedom. I was an only child and I think that cuts both ways. It was definitely not a spoiled situation given we weren't loaded. I would say, again, I had upside-down Nikes as a kid, we'll put it that way.

What is that?

Nikes with like two I's in it.

Like a China version of Nikes?

Yeah, like Adidas with four I's.

It's like a fake Rolex.

Adidas that had 4 stripes, and I was like, how come my Adidas have 4 stripes and yours have 3? Didn't really care or put it together until I was, uh, a little older.

But what is something that you've taken away from your parents that has changed or influenced your relationship with Kate? 53 years.

I think communication was very critical. The reality is that humans can grow together, grow apart. We, you know, grow at different rates and around different things and aspects of our life that we need to grow around. And I think communication, and not always like the most natural and healthy communication, but some communication is better than no communication. So I think that's a thing that Kate— and I'm also probably from my parents, I'm an over-communicator. I would rather sit down and have it out and figure out what we need to do differently or what's working. And that was modeled pretty clearly for me as a young person. And I think that definitely contributed to the world that I have built for myself now, for sure.

A lot of people are like, communications, what we do and how do you do it? Like, do you say, hey, Kate, every 3 weeks we're going to sit down and we're going to talk about things we're not saying? Or how do you structure or design a life that forces communication?

Fascinating. So I believe that regular imperfect Communication is better than trying to make perfect communication at some future point. And as far as like, what is our tactic? Yeah, Kate and I, we literally have something on the calendar on Sundays that we call walk and talk. And it's just like, it's literally like, and I track this, we both track it as a habit. And it's just like to check in on an emotional, like what's going on in your brain and your heart. And sometimes, it's 10 minutes sitting on the couch, other times it's walk and talk. We try and do it while we're moving and just go walk around the neighborhood and check in on stuff that's big picture stuff because life is full of a bunch of small little tactical like, "Oh, I've got to fly to LA this week. What are you doing?" "Oh, I've got my meditation class I'm teaching on Thursday." That's how life is. So, stepping back to 30,000-foot, are we on track for our life goals, our relationship goals, And again, it's imperfect. Sometimes it's 10 minutes, sometimes it's an hour and 10 minutes, but it's definitely something that we prioritize. And I notice it if we miss a week or if I'm traveling on a Sunday or whatever. Definitely, we have to work extra hard to get back on the same page.

How do you teach someone to have imperfect communication?

I don't want to come at this like it's something that I have known my whole life. This is an adult trait, I feel like.

When did you learn it?

I can't point to a time. I can point to a series of relationships that were not oriented around positive communication, just with early girlfriends. And yeah, I think you can only connect the dots looking backwards. But there was one thing that I really credit my parents with, which is, again, I pointed to our sort of lower-middle economic status. And My parents, they both had, again, working class jobs, but they over-indexed on the things that I feel like were really important for some sort of sense of stability, which is like the things that I loved like soccer, everything was like they took care of for sure. I think the things that they prioritized, we always had a real stable home. My dad worked 8 hours a day as a cop and then came home and we built Both the houses that I grew up in, the house that my parents still live in, my mom and dad built with their bare hands.

My dad did too.

Yeah. And so there was both a sense of strong sense of place, and when you build your own home, you can make it, you can, you can like put your claws into it, right? You can make it yours for sure. And, and yet we lived in a nice house in a good neighborhood, and still they found a way through you know, this was early, like mileage, uh, programs and whatnot to get us to Europe. And my dad was a cop in Seattle, and he worked the locker rooms of all of the sports games— so the Sonics, the Sounders, the Seahawks. And so we got to know all the players. And with respect to the Sounders, he became good buddies. And so when we, we would, like, the first week of summer, we would get on an airplane, I would go stay with someone who was a legendary European soccer player and was like a star in the MSL or the NASL. And, you know, I was like, oh, that's cool. Like, we're— I'm staying at the person who's the captain of the Sounders in London or whatever. And so it was, it was a way to have a very cheap experience because we didn't have to pay for accommodations. But I got to be in Europe and I got to be in not just the UK. We'd go to France occasionally and And I remember mohawks and punk rock music and hip-hop. I remember bringing the Grandmaster Flash home on a cassette tape when I was in 7th grade and like rap just exploded my brain and I started breakdancing and stuff because of what I saw in London. So I don't want to like gold plate this because it was just very normal suburban, but there was these hints of what was possible. Mohawks, and it wasn't small town USA. And I credit that to helping me have a different worldview than most of the people that I grew up with. So, I just wrote a book called "Creative Calling." I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about it, but part of what I chronicle in there is our culture's sort of lack of understanding of creativity and its power. And the book is based on 3 fundamental principles. One, that there's creativity inside of every person. We're all creative naturally. It's in our DNA. It's what separates us from every other species on the planet. And it's this immense power that we have as humans. Principle 2 is that creativity is a habit, not a skill. Because we all have it, the more we use it, the more we get to use it. It's like a muscle and it can be conditioned and strengthened. And then 3, if you believe 1 and 2, 3 is that in creating in small ways every day, That's how we actually understand that we have agency and create and can create the life that we want for ourselves. It's the same muscle. It's just at a different scale. So using that muscle more regularly will literally help you understand and create a better life, the life that you seek. So if you think about those 3 things and go back to principle 1, I believe that everyone's creative and you just have to go to the first grade classroom, ask who wants to come up to the front of the room and draw me a picture. Every single hand goes up in that classroom. Every kid wants to because we haven't programmed these kids yet that they need to be practical and all these things that we have somehow mistakenly juxtaposed creativity to practicality or all these other things when reality says that creativity, being able to create something, is arguably the most practical skill that a human can have. And then, at some point in there, we're made to believe that those things are impractical and not We need to shift gears and now sort of grow up. But the reality is the most successful people in our culture, the people who we admire or aspire to be, are largely the people for whom they found a way to not be constrained by all these inputs that society tells you. You should be like this. You should either go to college, get a job, work 40 years, whatever. To me, that's part of what this book is about is that each of our callings is very individual and independent. And we know what we're supposed to be doing if we can listen to it. And regardless the thread that the book follows, but also in line with your questions here, like I made basically every mistake you could possibly make. I listened to everybody else and, you know, I ended up going to graduate school. I bailed on that career in professional soccer. I was in a PhD program in philosophy. I bailed on medical school, all these things that cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars and wasted in some cases like 10-year paths down the drain because I was pursuing someone else's dream. And most of it was walking away from that magic-doing, filmmaking, breakdancing 7th grader that I really was at my core. And it sounds weird to like identify now as an adult as like, no, I'm that 7th grade breakdancer. That's not really— you know, the goal is not to be a professional breakdancer, but the goal is to do the things that bring you joy and condition that muscle as opposed to doing things in your life that everybody else wants you to do, which is, I think, how we end up in a culture that's distracted and toxic and painful for a lot of people.

So I have a couple questions here because I want to dig in on this a little deeper. The first one is, you said something earlier about your father, and you said, you know, there was a right way. I, I feel this in my life. There's a right way to do something. What I thought about this specifically is My dad's just trying to protect me because he knows his career and he's like, this is the thing that worked for me. I think this is what you would do. But he actually didn't really know anything else. I mean, he was blue collar, worked in the trades. We went on the same vacation every year for 18 years.

Yep.

How do you acknowledge that and say everyone's trying to protect their children for sure and get the parents to actually understand there's ways they don't understand?

This is so core to the book, and I think having these conversations is one of the most important things that's not happening culturally. And you got to understand when you see someone that you love doing something that you don't understand or agree with, how do you feel? You want to protect them. You want to steer them in a way that, you know, it's like if you see a CEO taking an investment from an investor that you have experience with that didn't turn out well, whatever, you're like, "I want to coach you to do something different." And especially when they're— think of the dominant cultural paradigms about creativity over the past 50 years. The dominant cultural paradigms about creativity were such that because it didn't fit in, the dominant paradigm was the factory. You went to college and you went into this school and you were paraded through, literally treated like a widget, and then you get these inputs on this timeline. And then, when you come out, everyone's basically similar and then you can go get a job at the factory. And, that worked for a really long time and then it didn't. And, what we're seeing right now is the effects of it not working and you see $1.5 trillion student debt loan. It's bigger than the debt in our country from credit cards, for example. So if you look at the toxic narrative that is still swimming around, that's why people like your career counselors, people like your close friends, your spouse, your partner, your parents, they try and steer you towards things that they know of. And I don't blame them, but what we have to do is over-index and program ourselves to listen to the voice inside us. Which is unique and a one-off, and because no one has lived the same sort of unique path and all the different random inputs that you have over your time. To me, listening in and being able to hear it, grasping on that and walking the path that we're each supposed to walk is to me the most practical and useful thing that we can do. Because intuition, rational mind and rational thought, they used to be, you know, that's supreme. And now what we understand about rational thought is it's super fallible. It's really slow. It's very laden with bias, all these things that are working against it. And things like intuition, it's in a moment. You're like, well, what is intuition? Right now, you know, if you just envision this, you know what your jeans feel like on the back of your right thigh. You can feel that if you actually pay attention to it, but your body's not paying attention to it. 'Cause right now it doesn't need to know what your jeans feel like in the back of your right thigh, but that it's information, that's data that's hitting your body and your body is storing that. It's just in a different kind of memory than your brain. And so, to me, our ability to tap into all of our knowledge, not just our head but our heart and our emotional background, like, to me, that's a very— it's a much more complete way of experiencing the world and understanding what's true for each of us. And if we can build up this muscle, which is our creative muscle and also the muscle that I want us to listen to what's inside of us rather than all of the external programming, keeping in mind from people that you and respect and care about. They're all trying to tell you to do the thing that worked for them. But if we can start to trust ourselves and listen to that calling that we have inside of us, how rich and powerful can a life be?

So if everyone is creative, my question then is, how do you give them the confidence to believe that? Because here's an example. I say to people all the time, anyone can learn how to sing. But when I tell people that, unanimously people say, I can't sing. And I'm like, it's, it's literally a muscle that vibrates that has to be at a level. Even if you had no ear and no tune, I could get you to sing out of tune to be in tune. Like, you can sing. Yeah, people don't realize it takes 2 years of practice, and you look like an idiot for 2 years because bad singing is super embarrassing. And the only reason I was able to do it, I think, is because of my mom's, like, ridiculous confidence that she gave me. That just like, you were great, son, you're doing great. And I was horrible. I mean, I couldn't keep a tune. But then, like you said, yeah, it's a habit every day. But how do you get people to switch that view of themselves?

This is why I wrote a book. Here's my personal arc, which I think is, you know, hopefully resonates. Very imperfect, all over the map. And when you look back, that's how life is. It's very imperfect and messy, which is fine. But my second grade teacher— go back to my childhood— I overheard her at a parent-teacher conference saying, "Ah, Chase is lovely. Love having him in class." Literally, Mrs. Kelly said this to my mom. "He's a lot better at sports than he is at art." And I remember second grade me loved dancing and performing and comic books and all that stuff. But what did I do in that second grade moment? Boom, I ran straight to sports for the rest of my youth. And it served me well because I was good. I went to college on a soccer scholarship, played for the Olympic development team. Like, it was not a bad recommendation. But what I heard was, "Bad at art." And when you hear "bad at art," what do you want to do? As a kid, all you want to do is fit in. And I just use that as an example of how we're all programmed. And ultimately, I've gone on to have a very successful creative career. And so what did I have to do to overcome that programming? It's very analogous to, like, your mom telling you you're a great singer. There's work that we have to put in. And rather than saying people need to put work in to be a better singer. I'm saying people have to put work in to be able to listen to what they truly want to do. And I think you should believe me at face value that we're all creative. There's enough signals out there in the world that just like, especially if you look at the definition of creativity, it's not art. Creativity is so much bigger than art. It's putting unlikely ideas together to form something new and useful. So writing code, wickedly creative, building businesses wildly creative, cooking a meal, baking a cake, building a family. All those things are very creative endeavors where you're making choices in moment to moment about what you want the outcome to be. That's a creative process. So if I can get you to de facto understand that, okay, great, I'll give you that, we're all creative. And then if I can help you understand and listen to what's in there, to me, that's a win. My own experience was bailing on all that stuff as a young person. Coming back to it after my grandfather passed away, I was given his cameras. And I, from my soccer career, there was always cameras on the sidelines 'cause I went to a really successful soccer school. And I was one of the kids that could actually speak to the local paper after the game. And so I just got used to being around cameras and I was intrigued by them. But when my grandfather died, a week before my college graduation, Obviously catastrophic is horrible, but the fact that I got his cameras, started experimenting with those cameras, and tapped into a piece that I— of myself that I'd been neglecting for 10, 15 years, it was like this light bulb moment. And then I went on to have a career as a photographer, and I did an iPhone app that was the first app that allowed people to take a picture, add a cool effect, it was the— the— and share it to social networks. That was the app of the year in 2009. So I went from becoming a creator to starting to build tools for creators, and then I launched CreativeLive. So I've I had this arc and what's missing from this arc is the explanation of all of the questions that you have right here in this interview. And so that's what's captured in the book. The book is the, wait a minute, we're all creative. Why and what can I do with it? What use is it? And I believe that not only is it the most practical, but it's also the most powerful tool that we have in our toolbox because it's human agency. By developing this muscle in the same way you're developing a muscle to sing, We can develop our creative muscles. And if the output of you developing your singing muscles is you can sing great, I'm saying if you develop your creativity muscles, that you can create anything, including and especially the life that you want.

Is school at odds with your mission?

Not intentionally. I don't think that there's a wizard who's controlling the puppet strings. And, you know, at some point the government does know that it's useful to have a workforce that doesn't ask too many questions, is not— it sort of stays in its own lane. But I don't think it's intentional. I think it's byproduct of just mass culture. But it does have the effect that you're asking about. It does have an effect of, you know, in the book I chronicle, like, imagine two paths. One path is the path of average emotion, average experience, average career opportunity, average love possibility, average, average. And what society in any mass culture does is it literally tries to push you to the middle because it knows how to manage and control that. That's why there are traffic and there are lanes, and lanes go in one direction, and because that's all required for the big neural network that is culture to work. But what's implicit in there is that that's what everyone's life should be like. And the message of the book and the message that I have for anyone listening is that you don't need to sign up to be average. It's telling you to be average because that's what works for the system, but that is not what is celebrated in our culture. That is not what I think creates— it creates something aside from this average sort of beige middle that is the result of mass culture. By extension, if you can think outside of that world, we were sold a lie that not only is that world good— and it's not bad, there's nothing wrong— like, it's just that's where it funnels everyone. And it said that anything out there, the reason you wouldn't do something that's on the fringe or not right down the middle is because it's really bad and scary and dangerous. That's what our biology thinks when we hear the word safe. That's what your parents are thinking when you tell them that you're going to drop out of college. Their biology senses a saber-toothed tiger. And what I'm here to tell you is saber-toothed tigers don't exist. 95% of the things, 99% of the things that your mom and dad or your peer, your career counselor, or your best buddy those are false fears. They— you're actually not going to die. And so conceptually, what I'm trying to help people understand is that if you can park some of these and allay the fears of the programming and the biology that you have, that the best stuff is not on that beige middle path. The best stuff in life is off that path. And you're a data set of one. If you start listening to what's in here, that's not about averages, right? Because there's no dataset. An average, you need a bunch of data to create an average. And there's only one you. And this, I'm not trying to create a special snowflake scenario here, but the reality is there's one human who has the DNA that you have that has walked the path of life that you have. Lean into that because that's where all the best stuff is.

How do you get people to understand the language they use is hurting people? So, an example would be, My father, actually, I called him out recently. A buddy of mine in my hometown went to college, went to work at Maui Gym. He had a good job. Everyone in town was like, Josh has a good job. He's an account manager. You know, you're like justifying the signaling theory of Maui Gym and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He left and he went to LA to be an actor. And I'm at, uh, having beers in my hometown and my dad can't even say what he left to do. He's like, ah, Josh just gave up a good— all he talks about is what he left, not what he's doing. And he would say, man, he left a really great job here at Maui Gym. You know, like running, I don't know, events and shit for like fucking sunglass company. Who cares? But the language— and then everyone at the table was like, yeah, he's just out there in LA. I think he's, he's trying— I mean, no, he's— I was like, I literally stopped him. I was like, he's trying to be an actor. Like, how cool is that?

Yeah.

And the whole table, all people could talk about was that he left this fucking bullshit job. And how do you change that?

But to me, this is— I love the question. Because it's conditioning. It has nothing to do with reality. They look at LA as a saber-toothed tiger. They look at anything except the thing that they know as a saber-toothed tiger because that's what their biology has taught them. That is what they were raised with. That is what all of their inputs are. And this is why, like, small daily acts of creativity, whether you're trying to learn to sing or you're painting and you're a terrible painter, or you're just making yourself uncomfortable in light, joyful, simple ways every day, That's how you can start to deprogram that voice. And so yes, like cooking a beautiful meal for your family or playing the guitar does make you a better surgeon. It does make you better at trying to become an actor in LA because you get better at being slightly uncomfortable and simultaneously you're programming your neurology that, wait a minute, if I can create a song or create a noise with my mouth or create a business I sure as hell can create the life that I want for myself. So, the language, to go back to your original question here, is really, really critical. I have a section in the book about how words matter, is the title of the section. And as an example, when I realized that what I really wanted to do was lean into this photography stuff, I didn't even have a professional camera. I had basically a little point-and-shoot that I had hauled around Europe, slightly better than a point-and-shoot but not much. It was certainly not a pro camera. But I basically had only taken snapshots and I printed up business cards that said Chase Jarvis Photographer. And it wasn't because I was going to hand those business cards out to everybody else. It's because I needed to reinforce that in myself. I needed to say that I needed to own the label. And the point of owning the label and that words matter, or in your case, language, I think that labeling and understanding that we are all creative and identifying as a creator is like a catapult. That is the massive force multiplier to everything that we do. And if you can start to realize that, a funny thing happens when you identify as it. You start to realize that you have preferences. You start to be able to identify those preferences and start to go toward them. And here's this cool thing that happens when you start doing that. Other people can tell. And at first they resist in the same way that your dad or the people at the dinner table resist. But you know what? If Josh starts showing up on billboards or he comes back and he's in a film with, you know, the latest Quentin Tarantino film or whatever, you know what your dad's like? Josh made it. How cool is that?

Yeah.

And, and, and so to me, there's like the words and the language that Josh needs to be programming Josh with. And that if you as his friend want to help change the dynamic in your town, you'll do the thing that you said. And to me, this awareness, labeling ourselves creator, it becomes easier and better for you. And then people start to show up for the people that have done the thing. What is it? There's a Chinese proverb: the person who thinks something cannot be done should stay out of the way of the person who's doing it. Yeah. So, you know, I think if you look at Josh as an example, when Josh starts to find success and Josh calls Josh an actor and you call Josh an actor, when Josh shows up at the party and he's in the Quentin Tarantino movie, I'll be damned if your dad's gonna not know what he does. He's like, Josh is an actor who's in the latest Quentin Tarantino film and he's on the billboard there in Nashville or wherever you might be.

For sure, that's amazing.

And again, these are small, like people wanna know what they can do. That's how— what we all want to do in the world, whether you're trying to affect climate change, you're trying to make your own way in the world, you're trying to create a family or whatever. Like, we just want to be able to be useful and to take some action that will help our own outcome. And I'm suggesting that the lie that we've been sold is toxic, and you can easily park it by starting to create small things every day. And these are just individual units of joy. Like, what made you excited as a kid? Was it drawing? If you just wrote for 20 minutes, 5 minutes in the morning into morning pages, or or a journal, or you play the guitar for 15 minutes. These are all things that were in our childhood that brought us great joy. We know what it feels like to hear that calling and to be on that path. Just, you can just look back at times where life felt effortless for you or where you were around the people doing the things that felt good. We've all had those moments where we were on the path. This is just the adult version of that, right? This is just finding and paying attention to those things and putting yourself back on that path in small joyful ways that ultimately can create utility and vision for what it is that you really want to be doing with your time, because that's all we got.

I want to tap in there specifically because if I'm listening to this, I would say, yeah, cool, I can be creative, but that's not a career. I can't actually build this into something. What's changed in the world that allows people today to really be successful and build a life with creativity that didn't exist 10 or even 20 years ago? Like, has something changed? Has something fundamentally changed in the world that has new opportunities?

Sure. One, information moves much more quickly than it ever had. So this idea that creativity isn't useful can be fully dispelled as bullshit. People have couched the idea that I'm espousing right now in all kinds of things, in personal development and performance and business. And I'm just couching it in creativity because to me, that's actually the most fundamental thing at work here is realizing that you have agency over your life and you can direct it in a way that you want. And that's whether that's a career, a choice in a partner or a mate or like whatever whatever, we have agency. So, you know, if you think about— if we frame it in around like what's different now, information's moving more quickly, so we understand that these things are bullshit historical legacy artifacts. Two, democratization of all sorts of tools that used to cost a lot of money. For example, a distribution platform, use social media for example, or a YouTube or whatever. Most of the jobs that are existing that are creating disproportionate return on people's investments, whether they're moving to Silicon Valley and starting a startup or whether it's pursuing a career in acting like Josh did or whatever. A lot of those jobs didn't even exist when the people who were throwing rocks at them were born. So it's not unnatural for this to be the belief. But knowing that information is moving faster, that there are no more gatekeepers, right? So there are all kinds of cultural shifts, I would say tectonic shifts, that are contributing to this. But what's most important, and maybe I'd say interesting about your question, is it still hinges on how creativity is sort of aligned with art. And, and I— we need to dispel that, that creativity is this fundamental human characteristic. It's a muscle that we all have. It just so happens that a really easy and useful way of developing that muscle is through things that are seen as creative in the classic sense, like painting, drawing, playing music, etc. But that's not the limit of what creativity entails. For example, even if you took a photograph every day at lunch on your walk, and in fact, I'll give the example of my mom. So my mom believed most of her life that she was not creative, only in the classic sense that you and I are talking about here, which is very natural. She was very much a producer, production-oriented person, spreadsheets, and this is how it is. Everything had a right and wrong way. In 2009, when I did that iPhone app that went on to be App of the Year, it was so different for my mom. She was like, "Okay, great. It's App of the Year on the Apple platform. Like, this is— there's something here. I'm going to try it." So I gave her an iPhone with my app on it, and she started just taking pictures, no extra time. She would walk at least a mile every day at her lunch hour, and she started taking pictures with her iPhone and sharing them to social networks. And in a matter of weeks, not months, went from believing that she wasn't creative and being okay with that to being arguably the most creative of all her friends in her friend circle. Like, "Oh my God, Joy, this is a beautiful picture. I had no idea you had such a creative eye." And I witnessed it personally, watched it change food that she made. I watched it change how she moved through the world. I watched it change her fashion, her expression. She started wearing cool jewelry. I watched her change her travel. Her desire for adventure and experience. And it was all rooted in that just small shift in our mind. So, you know, to go back to again, your original question is like, what's the foundation of all this and what's different now? There's 100 little teeny things and it's those 100 little teeny things that we can all tap into that will basically open the door for us in a way that we didn't have even just, you know, 10 years ago.

It sounds like creativity, the way you're talking about it, I mean, it's, it's the core to making anything.

Yep.

Making anything is the core to owning anything. And getting people to be owners, this is something that I care really passionately about. I, I want to make more owners in the world.

Mhm.

And I think the core of that is actually creativity is the core of below ownership, right?

For sure. That's, I'm just trying to couch it in like the most fundamental thing.

It's such a fundamental shift when I talk to people because everyone is making a paycheck and they don't understand that payroll is actually a debt versus owning equity has long-term value.

Yeah.

Because they think in short-term ways, this is just the way it works. And until you've actually been an owner, it seems so scary, but it's really not.

Yeah.

How do you get people to realize that creativity is the core of actually owning your future?

Yeah. Well, first of all, with respect to employment, I want to like put an asterisk there because for some people, the time they would want to put in to become an owner does not outweigh the time that they want to spend pursuing that. So, I do think you can be an owner in the classic sense of the word that I think that you mean it even within a larger organization. Like, you can own what you work on, who you work with, what team you represent versus being a cork in the tide. So, you can still collect a paycheck but be an owner in the way that I think you're trying to talk about it mentally. Yeah, if we just, just for purposes of illustration, to go back to the way that you were talking about it casually, which is just like, yeah, like if you're just trading your time for money, the opportunity for agency is limited relative to being an owner with the capital O, for example. And I do like, whether it's in employment or not, The concept of agency is where I'm trying to land this. And you call it ownership, I'm calling it agency. That is the fundamental little juice of creativity. We have this little plutonium reactor of creativity. As Maya Angelou said, creativity is an infinite resource. The more you use, the more you have. That's that muscle concept. And I'm strongly advocating for people, to use your words, ownership, to my words, creativity and agency. It's only through doing. People want to think their way out of stuff. I'm a champion of what I say, action over intellect. We try and sit at home and think about what it would be like to own a business or to write a song or bake a cake or start a family or whatever the thing that we— because that's what we're told culturally, you rationalize these things. But nothing is equivalent to the experience of doing something. And you don't have to see the whole staircase. You just have to see the next couple steps. As soon as you take your first step towards that thing, that call, then you're on your path. And we all have felt what it felt like to be on that path, even if it was just for weeks or months or maybe years in your path when you were in your past, when you were doing something. It just felt good. It felt natural. That can be your normal day-to-day. This doesn't mean shit doesn't get hard. That's just saying it feels natural to you and you're walking towards this thing. And it's really important to understand that this is not a map, right? It's a compass. And the difference between a map and a compass— a map, you see where you start, you draw a red line, and you put the X where you want to end up, and you see the whole journey. A compass, it just gives you an arrow, like, I need to go north, and you start walking north, and you walk over a hill, and then you see the next landscape. And there's the illusion that life is mapped out for us, right? That's what your parents are trying to say. If you do this and go to college and then get this degree, then you'll get this job, and then that's the closest thing to seeing the whole path, and that's why they choose that for you. The concept of a compass is scary because you don't know what's over that hill. This is the great paradox, is that of the people that anyone who listens aspires to, is inspired by, They didn't follow a map. They followed their compass. So if you can look at those lives that are inspirational and meaningful and, you know, that you find powerful and inspiring, why not do what they did? And you can say, well, I've got 4 kids and I got a mortgage and I got all these— great, great. Those are all trappings. That's a story that you're telling yourself. You can still change those things. It's going to be a little harder and you might have to make some different sacrifices, but at what cost? The cost that we're talking about is ultimately refusing to betray yourself. And when you soon tell yourself all these stories about what you could and you have and all these, "Oh, I can't do this because X, Y, and Z," the cost is regret. The cost is we got one trip. And I just think that's a really high price to pay.

Fascinating. David Marquet actually said one time, "You act your way to new thinking. You don't think your way to new acting." There you go.

Action over intellect. You don't get there by sitting on the couch pontificating. In fact, we tell ourselves stories about how it worked and how this person made it successful. And just listen to your dad about Josh. He told himself a story that he left a good job. I just don't understand. Like, to me, this is the riskiest time in the history of the world to take a safe path because the safety is an illusion. We all know that corporations are cutting jobs like crazy. And the history of employment is not the same thing as the future of employment. What got you here is not the thing that's going to get you there. And the people who aren't oriented toward this style of thinking, or maybe it's generational, maybe it's experiential, I think that is this programming that I'm talking about. But it's totally natural and they want the best for you. You have to be able to turn those volumes down and the volume of your soul and your intuition, your creative calling, you have to turn that way up and listen to that.

So, people say to me all the time, "You're risky. You take risk." And I say to them, "Listen, I know exactly when our company dies. If I'm burning money or we're making money, like I know, okay, I have 25 months. I have to figure something out before that date ends." Or if I have a cash flow business, I know that I have to do XYZ. And I see risk and I'm like, "You have no idea if you're going to show up tomorrow and your boss is going to fire you." But like, they don't perceive the risk, and then it happens and they're surprised.

Yeah.

How do you change people's perception of either that's safe or this is risky?

Yeah, that's a pretty heavy question, I think, because it underpins basically everything that I'm trying to get people to do as well. And to me, what's ultimately at play here is just whatever is the loudest voice, the strongest cultural narrative, that's where culture orients around risk or reward or safety or whatever. And the hope that I have is that just through some simple analysis and looking around for a little bit, just pressing pause and stopping and looking around and saying, "Wait a minute, most of the jobs that my parents wanted me to do, if I'd have done them now, I'd be in a really hard place." And Maui Gyms, for example, I go back to Josh, it might not seem risky, but for all the reasons that you just outlined, he could show up one day and, "Hey, we're not doing events anymore. We're a digital company." Oh my God. And just that pattern, that orientation that your dad has is natural. You can't throw rocks at him for that. But if you're you sitting right now listening to this, I'm here to tell you that the things that used to be couched as safe are arguably now riskier than ever before. And that is true for employment. That is true for relationships. That is true for identity. That is true for So many things. And if we can just pause again, look around, collect our thoughts, the thing that's going to overpower that is it's in here. It's inside us. It's not out there. And that's the part that is hardest to get people to lean into. And the way that I prescribe you do that is through starting to create in small ways every day, or listening to that piece of your childhood and looking back and what brought you joy and how can you do some of that right now? Just tap into a little bit, a little bit every day, because it's in those small moments that you— it's this, remember, it's the same muscle.

I want to change directions for the last part here. When I met you, I didn't know who Chase Jarvis was, the Chase Jarvis, right, the photography guy. And then friends of mine who are photographers are like, oh my God, Chase Jarvis. And I'm like, is this guy something?

The fuck is this guy?

Um, I'm curious about, like, you exude so much confidence and you're, you know, very authentic and you're vulnerable. Do you struggle with like the mask? Are there areas that you aren't as confident in, or you're actually very insecure about, or behind the Chase Jarvis?

Um, I think it also has a lot to do with information, and this is maybe a little bit esoteric, but you know, whatever is out there on the internet, because information moves quickly, and then you know those things Things in motion tend to stay in motion. And there's probably a bunch of other phrases. The part that I want to acknowledge is that— and I'm going to couch this in the book also. I'll just start with the book and then I'll go to me personally. I hate books that start off and they tell you, here's how to do A, B, C, D. And if you do all these things perfectly, then you're going to get this logical conclusion of F or G or whatever letter we're on. 'Cause the reality is this, nothing is perfect. Nothing happens in a vacuum. And if you're giving me a roadmap to be able to guide my path in a perfect universe where there's no wind and there's no rough seas, and they're like, how useful is that? That's fucking useless. I cite one of my favorite books of all time is The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which is a book by Ben Horowitz about leading through really hard, imperfect times in the startup and how he managed it. And when I picked that book up as a first-time founder CEO of a venture-backed company, it was like the Bible for me. It was like, oh my God, this is like— chapters are like how to fire a friend, how to tell your employees you're out of money, how to like all of the things. Like, that's what—

incredible, actually.

Yeah, that's what life is really made of. And so this book aspires to be the same. Like, I've basically made all of the mistakes that you can make In addition to going arguably $100,000 in debt and spending 10 years of my life chasing dreams that other people, scripts that other people had written for me, knowing that it was against what I felt and believed in my soul. And so to feel that regret and that burn, like I'm trying to be that very imperfect connective tissue throughout the book. The book is really laden with a bunch of great stories of people like yourselves that I've had on my show that I've interviewed on the Chase Jarvis Live Show or people who've been on CreativeLive's platform. This is the Richard Bransons, the Brené Browns, the Tim Ferrisses, the Gary Vs, and Arianna Huffington, you know, whatever, long list of people. And you know what's miraculously aligned is all of those people have really imperfect, very messy paths. And so if we can start to reveal some of those stories, the story where I let down nearly everybody who mattered to me in my life by deciding to bail on medical school and become a photographer. And here's how I did it. Here's what it felt like at the beginning, middle, and the end. And by the end, the hardest parts of my life, all those stories and the stories of the folks who had built businesses and lost them, it's in those stories of vulnerability and authenticity and imperfection. That's where all the best stuff is. I've had lots of failures. And when I've failed and I announced it publicly, it just basically goes away. For example, the best camera app, it was the app of the year. It was a year and a half ahead of Instagram. Had millions of users. And what did I get out of it? I got a zero. I got nothing. And they just threw $50 million of venture capital at Instagram and they just totally kicked our ass. And that story, I've told that story very publicly on my blog. It was very, very painful. I mean, it just arguably cost me a billion dollars to not be the one who like rang the bell, took the prize, whatever. But it's in the revelation of those stories that I actually gain credibility and authenticity both to myself and my peer group. I can't decide which stories culture latches onto, right? The fact that I wrote that very public story and not very many people have read it. They hear the story about founding CreativeLive and now it's got 10 million people using it. They— me as a photographer shooting for Apple and Nike and they don't hear the 10,000 hours. They don't hear the disappointing your parents. They don't hear the almost dying in an avalanche and realizing that I wasn't doing the thing that I was supposed to be doing. They don't hear all those stories, but that's not up to me. The part that's up to me is showing up for my friend Shane when you've got some hard stuff going on in startup world and sharing with you the shit sandwich that I'm eating, even if it's not in the headlines. It's not our job to run around and make headlines. It is our job to show up for ourselves and show up for our friends and our community. I think that's another really interesting and pivotal piece of the book is It's framed around a repeatable system. The book is— the sections are I-D-E-A. So there's 4 steps in this. This is a creative process that can get you through a project or through your life. And the first one is imagine. Imagine what's possible, whatever you want, whether it's to bake a cake or build this life that you have. D, you have to design a path to get there. Nothing happens accidentally. You can't build a house just by starting to hammer wood together. You have to have some sort of a plan. Executing that plan, that's the E part, and then amplifying the results. To me, this is the part where so many people, if you, you know, you can have the first couple down, but then you make a big project, you write a book, or you make a proposal at work, you spend hours or days or weeks or months on it, you put it out there in the world, and what happens? Crickets. Nothing, right? Just falls completely flat. And to me, that's because we haven't spent time— in the book I talk about it as amplification. But the foundation of amplification is a community. And there are communities that we can be a part of. There are communities that we can build around ourselves, around the things that we love. And this doesn't mean millions of Instagram followers. This can mean if you're a blacksmith working in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and 12 restaurateurs come to you because you make the best knives, that can be a community. So, you know, if you go way, way back and your, your question is, you know, it's very foundational. Like, our authenticity is all we have. Deciding that you're going to show up for yourself in the face of all these other voices, when you start to realize that they are concerned for you and that's okay, but what's most important is that you deciding to write your own script and play out your own one shot at this thing. That's where personal power and agency takes in. And showing all your imperfection, all the vulnerability, all that stuff, that just creates credibility and authenticity. You can't actually own the narrative that someone else will say about you or share on the internet or whatever, but what you can do is own your own. And the more you own your own and you keep showing up in that space, to me, that's the key to tapping into that.

Do you ever feel fake in your online presence? Have you ever been in times being so online that you felt you were being fake or not yourself?

Oh yeah. Anytime, like, you're— you know what I like to identify for people and remind them of, including myself, is that, like, social media, there's all kinds of very, very positive aspects of it, especially as you're trying to create a business or grow a personal brand or express yourself and put your art out there. It's a channel of distribution that when you're consuming that, what you're actually doing in the psychology is very interesting. Is that you're comparing your day-to-day experience. You know that you're late on your car payment and that your bike has a flat tire and you're in a fight with your boyfriend or your spouse. You know those things. But what you're looking at is somebody else's highlight reel. In fact, everybody else's highlight reel. And what we do is we compare what we know, all of the intimate truths of the shit that's going wrong for us, with other people's highlight reel. And that creates this isolation, this disconnect. And, you know, that's honestly a subtext of the book is a lot around human connection. And because at the root of authenticity and vulnerability is human connection. So what can you do? The way I like to combat the social media stuff is taking a page out of a friend of mine. Her name is Marie Forleo. We talk about creating before you consume. If you wake up and the first thing you do is you're scrolling through your Instagram versus setting an intention for your day, doing some morning pages, meditating, getting your day started in the right direction around the goals that are meaningful to you and around the life that you aspire, then you're going to be much more open to consuming the lives of others because you've done things for yourself first. So this idea of creating before consuming to me is very, very, very powerful. So of course, I like— again, we're all social animals. We want to be loved. Go back to the second grade me. I made a 180 because I just wanted to be accepted and liked and arguably loved, and that doesn't change. But in the same way that creativity is this muscle, starting to put things out in the world and having a range of responses, and you go back to action over intellect and just creating and sharing versus creating and putting in a folder or living in your parents' basement where no one sees your work and you're not connecting with other people. And for me personally, when I'm guilty of that, what I try and do is just put work back out in the world. And by work, it could be photographs, it could be, you know, stories, it could be connecting with other humans. There's a muscle that we're building up in that context as well.

Me personally, I always know with myself the minute that I start consuming that I'm in a not very good mental, like, place. I will catch myself. I wake up, I just start consuming shit, and I'm really unproductive. I don't really do a lot. And like, you know, I'm an episodic worker, I would say, where like I can get more done in a 5-minute span if I've thought about it and go do it if I'm in the right mindset, or I don't. I'm just like fucking worthless, basically. And I'm curious on your side, do you ever not work? Do you just like sit and do nothing?

Yes. And I have found a pattern of what puts me in that position. It's a lot of what you just described. It's consuming the work of others. It's not providing space. One thing that this book is not, it's not a productivity book. There are tools and a lot of lists of creativity boosters and zappers and things that are helpful and things that are harmful. And there's the patterns of the people who are the most successful, but it's not about productivity. And when I think about what you just shared, I can see myself in that same exact lens. When I have— this is go back to my IDEA framework. Like, if you imagine what's possible, you design a system, you execute that system, and then you share it with people that you care about. That I think lines up pretty accurately to What you would say is when you're an episodic worker, when you have a plan, you execute that, you know what I mean?

You're—

you've said, okay, great, I'm going to sit down for 5 minutes and I'm going to do the thing that I just thought about. Like, that's a very— that's a simple explication of the framework for the book. I just deconstructed all my moments where I was my most successful and I was my most shitty. And I said, what are the things that are most successful have in common? Oh, they all follow this pattern. And then I started applying that pattern to all those people I've had on my podcast, the Garys, the people that you already cited. You know what? Lo and behold, all the best shit has come out of that same thinking style. What you just said worked for Shane is the same thing that works, lo and behold, for Brené Brown, which is the same thing. And these are, I mean, like nuanced versions of it, but it's still a very simple way we imagine what's possible. We design a simple framework for getting there. We execute that vision and then we amplify it. And so I try and do more of that and less of For example, if you don't do that full system, if you just are imagining and designing plans, what is that? That's just you're a dreamer, right? You're not going anywhere. You're just like, "Oh, what's possible? I'm still sitting on the couch drawing diagrams in my journal." Sometimes it feels good, but it's still diagrams in my journal. And then the antithesis of that or something different from that is just executing and amplifying. Those are the dreams of other people. Those aren't your dreams. You're just doing. And then you're going to the place where what you're doing for whomever you're doing it tells you to put it. Maybe that's work, your work community or whatever. If you're just a cog in the machine, you're executing somebody else's vision. It really takes doing the whole thing like your vision, designing your system, executing against your vision, and then amplifying that within your community or a community you're joining or a community you're building around your own.

The community piece is so fascinating because someone said one time, If you want to actually quit drinking or if you want to be honest about wanting to do something or change, you have to tell your friends. And without telling other people, it's like you don't take the first step. You're not going to actually do it. And that is the key piece at the end there.

I think that, and if we just talk about the community piece and isolation, here's the facts, is that we are social animals. We are social animals. If a child is born and it is not held encoddled, experience human touch, you know what happens to that baby? It dies. It literally cannot survive without human connection. We're social animals. So if you take that to its logical conclusion, like us feeling connected to a community, us not just in our easy joyful moments, but in our hard dark moments staying connected, isolation is more toxic than smoking. Like, that's the science. This isn't me, like, hand-waving over here. This is science. Isolation is more toxic than smoking. If we're social animals, of course, connecting with our community can both create accountability and provide strength and support in an area where we might be weak. That's what learning is, right? You're emulating, deconstructing the work of other people who have already done what you've done, taking things that are like Shane or like Chase and amplifying those and experiencing, pursuing the things that give you mojo and juice and energy. Like, of course, that makes a ton of sense. And if you've got this connection with other people around you, even if it's, you know, this is where we can throttle it based on our own personality. The reality is that this community and connection and human connection plays such a huge role in it. It's fiction to ignore it. And if you're an actor in LA, if you're your friend Josh and you don't know any producers, you don't know any directors, you don't know any screenplay writers, you don't know any— it's really hard to get a job. It's really hard to manifest your art. Of course, you can take it on yourself, but then you don't have anybody to do the film with. You're not going to hold the camera and click the sound thing and do the, you know, so you have to build a community. And there are communities that are out there in the world for whatever it is. If you want to like paint portraits of dead presidents on Tuesdays in Nantucket. There are probably some people who do that for sure.

I want to close out here with, uh, something I'm curious about with you. You inspire me. You're a very aspirational person. If you go out 20 years and look at yourself, Chase, what are you most proud of?

I think life takes two arcs. The first arc is about consumption. It's about defining who you are, your accumulating is probably a better way of— you're accumulating knowledge, you're accumulating wealth, you're accumulating experience. You're— it's basically, it's about me. You're sort of grabbing and bringing things close to you. And then through either time or trauma, or for me, for example, it was getting caught in a massive avalanche in Alaska where I shouldn't have lived. There's not a math person in the world that would tell you that I would be sitting here today if you saw the avalanche and where I was and how I was caught. And—

What happened?

I was shooting a campaign for Nike in Alaska, a ski and snowboard campaign, and I got caught in an avalanche and should have died. But, it doesn't matter if it's through time or the traumatic event like that. Those are moments where we take stock and we're like, "Wait a minute, what am I doing?" And so, for me, that first arc of my life about acquiring and chest-beating and as a photographer, if you didn't beat your own chest, no one else is going to beat it for you. So, That's how we can stand out. The second arc of life is about contribution. And not everybody lives both arcs and not everybody gets to choose when they flip from one to another. There's all kinds of qualifiers. But when I look back on my life, what I think I will cherish and what I hope I'm more attuned with and maybe people think of me in this life was someone that I had an extraordinary acquisition phase. Skills, friends, people, knowledge, even accolades, you know, public recognition for things. And it felt great. But if I can have the effect of giving someone who didn't think that that was possible for themselves the tools, a path, the inspiration, even the opportunity to pursue that, I will have been a very, very, very happy camper. And you can see that in the— again, becoming a creator Building tools like iPhone apps for photographers, then building a community millions of people can go to learn from all those people, and now writing the book, which is basically the why. This is the how, all these other things I built, and now this is like why. Oh, why? Because creativity matters. It separates us from every other species on the planet. It's the most powerful thing that we could possibly do is become a master creator because we can create things in small ways and we can create the arc of our life. So, it will be, if I could write my own epitaph, whatever's on your tombstone, it would be that I helped others pursue the experience that I got to have with tapping into what it felt like or what it still feels like to this day to be doing the thing that we're put on this world to do, on this planet to do, and that it feels good and help other people connect those dots.

Well, I told you this was going to get to the real stuff. If you dig it and you think someone would benefit from hearing what Chase is saying, then let them know. @startbyasking on Twitter is one way to start. We'll amplify it. And let's help more folks find a way through the weeds. Hey, one last thing. Have you ever had the experience where you're talking to someone and you go, man, I wish I had remembered to ask that? Well, that happened in this conversation with Chase. So Shane reached out and because we love you, here you go.

Hey man, to a lot of people in the world, you're this guy that has the life they want to lead. You're successful, connected, someone who has a place in our culture. One of the ways that comes through is you always name-drop a lot. I don't think it's in a bad way. Actually, every time I hear it, I'm like, "God, he's connected to everybody. He knows all these amazing people who are doing incredible things." I was thinking about the role that plays for you. Is it as simple as this is who you're connected to and so you're referencing them? You're like, "I was with Richard Branson last week and Brené Brown." et cetera, et cetera. But I also wonder if there may be something more, a personal brand building tactic, a way to validate yourself through association. It's almost like the signaling theory of today as related to me going to Harvard in the past is actually more powerful through personal association than through institutions as it used to be. Why is it powerful? What is the reason for that? I can say that I definitely don't use other people's names to validate myself. Myself. I feel comfortable in my own skin. Let's see, but I can't think of maybe two ways that I would use someone's name. One would be, for example, if I actually got information from an expert and someone who I am connected with. And I do have the very good fortune of being connected to some amazing humans, and I would want to, you know, shower light on them and praise them for their wisdom that they would probably have to give to me personally, and so I would want to make that distinction sort of like a reference, for example, or to juxtapose it if some 8th grader running a lemonade stand was telling me about business versus something that they, Richard Branson, said. So that's one context. And maybe another context is, so I can see myself saying, "Oh, so CreativeLive, that's where people like Tim Ferriss and Brené Brown and Richard Branson," those are some experts that are on the platform, for example. I've said that before. To me, that's authority. That is sort of those people and others like it, that is where they are on the platform and sharing their expertise. That's social proof, authority, or authenticity. And again, certainly not to validate myself, but I think these are useful markers in culture that help us identify and orient. I get that, but then how do I, who's not Chase Jarvis, get to spend time or learn from or be friends with people like Richard Branson, Tim Ferriss, and Brené Brown? How do you do it?

All right, I'm gonna give it to you straight. Um, first, there's a really big section in the book on this that you have to go deep on it to truly understand, but I'm going to give you like the 60-second version here, and it's this. This a long-term play. This is like creating friends or connections, meaningful connections. This is not like you get someone to sign your book or you get your photograph with them when you bump into them on the street. This is like if you actually want to connect to human, how would you do it in real life? You would seek to be around those people in a non-creepy way over time. This is a multi-year deal. You connect on social and not in a creepy way. You're at the same conferences, you start to meet people that are interested in what you're interested in, and you are interested in them, and they happen to be friends of a friends of a, and again, it's just 99.9% of the people who are listening to this are thinking about this transactionally, and it's not that at all. Just think of how you would want to connect with any human on the planet, and you're like, wait a minute, Well, I want to connect with that human right there, but they're actually right there, and someone who inspires me is across the planet. Great. Connect with them in a way that you can right now. The short answer is long-term adding value and contributing in a way that only you can, and do so over time, and seek to make real and genuine connections. Put yourself in a position to win. How can you you get closer to the action? What can you do to connect with other like-minded people that might be in a different circle than you but in the same circle as people that you identify with or inspire you? There you go. Well, there you go.

Creative Calling is the new one from Chase Jarvis. This is Ask. Say hey @startbyasking on Twitter and please share this with the people that you appreciate. Thanks for giving us some of your time today. Sure appreciate you.