Hey everyone. Welcome to The Gathering Room again. I have a really special treat for us all today, wherever we are in the world. We have a huge international audience for this podcast for some reason, and I only bring people here that I really trust, really admire, and who I think can really do better than I can at giving you advice and inspiring you. So Chase’s new book, Never Play It Safe: A Practical Guide to Freedom, Creativity, and a Life You Love, is one of those things that you can absorb almost like a hydration if you’re dehydrated. It will give you back a sense of possibility, a sense of purpose, and a really, really practical guide to how you can achieve the things you want to.

So, however, I will say one thing, Chase himself is so accomplished that it might actually discourage a few of us out there who are going, “Wow, I wish I had these all-performing superstars in my life.” You’ve been an athlete, you’ve been a photographer, you’ve been a zillionaire entrepreneur, you’ve been an author now, bestselling author several times over. So I’m thinking all the people who tune into The Gathering Room in the middle of the night in New Zealand may be thinking, “Ugh.”

So I wanted to really poke you a little bit about how you so brilliantly have done so many things where—I call it eagle view/mouse view. Some people can only see things in the big frame, like, “What is my life’s purpose? I’m going to go sit in a cave for 12 years and figure this out.” Then there are people who are in mouse view: “Okay, I know I’m going to try to do the best thing that’s in front of my eyes right now.”

You do both. And you go up and down and up and down. Through the whole book, there’s this rising up to find your ultimate purpose and using skills for that. It’s not just a gift from the gods and then coming down and zeroing in on what’s in front of you and just doing it with such courage and dedication, dedicated practice to living the absolute best life you can. Could you tell us how you do that, please, Chase?

Chase Jarvis:
Well, Martha, thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s a treat, and I’m a longtime fan. What is it? Longtime fan, first time caller, maybe. It’s a treat to me. Been in your community for a long time. I need to tell you a story in order to convey the answer to your question, which is the book that I had written for the previous 13 months up until 10 weeks before this book was due to the publisher, I’d been working on it for approximately five years, working really diligently, as I said, for 13 months. And just 10 weeks before, I threw it all in the trash.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Chase Jarvis:
Weeks before it was due. And as an author yourself, you know that is the equivalent of publishing suicide. And the reason I threw it all in the trash is because I had been working on the book that everybody else wanted from me, and it very much was that sort of eagle view that made everything look rosy. And embedded in your question is this nuance, like how can we both desire to be the best version of ourselves and fail miserably and return, go back and forth between those things.

And the book that I had sort of written, and again, the world will encourage you to do this, was a highlight reel. It was show up and everything’s going to be hunky dory. And when this comes along, our mutual friend Brene Brown calls this gold-plated grit. You get two sentences in there about how this was the hardest thing and then you went right back to being awesome.

And it didn’t feel right, didn’t feel authentic. Most of all, it was to me it was going to be not the journey that I actually went on. So I threw it on in the trash.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Chase Jarvis:
And I thought, I woke up at two in the morning and I had this phrase that “You’ve got to stop playing it safe.” And so I put a little yellow sticky note in the corner of my monitor, and I started telling my truth. And the truth was there were highlights, but ironically in between each of those highlights, there were a hundred tiny betrayals of who I was. And so that’s why this book is this sort of a juxtaposition of the things that when the world shines on us and when we shine on ourself, what you’re capable of. And then it’s not about avoiding mistakes, it’s about learning to recover quickly. The bird doesn’t land on the branch hoping the branch won’t break, the bird lands on the branch trusting its ability to fly away.

And so it was once I sort of stumbled on that, the work poured out of me, and I’m glad that you recognized it for what it was. To me, that’s what this is. We become aware, “Oh my gosh, this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” or “This is what I’m not supposed to be doing.” And then we correct it. But we are constantly sort of drifting away from that. And it’s not about remaining in this perfect state. This is what it means to be human. And I felt like the book needed to reflect that.

Martha Beck:
Well, it certainly does. It’s incredibly inspiring to see the highs, but even more for me, the way you describe failures. In fact, I’m going to sort of go at the book backwards. You introduce seven levers starting with Archimedes learning to—not learning to —building a machine that would move a ship using just leverage and his own ingenuity and body weight.

So that right there is like, oh, okay, that’s pretty big. But you talk about these seven levels, levers that you can use to move your whole life in the way you want it to move. So lever six is failure.

Chase Jarvis:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
And there’s all this wonderful instruction on paying attention and learning to bend time and intuition. I loved all of it, but the one I wanted to zero in on here is failure because most people seek out this podcast when they’re in a state of feeling defeated, a pain point.

And I love the way you talk about failure in this book and I haven’t seen it in other books that are similar. Could you talk a bit about how you come back from failure for somebody who’s just crushed out there?

Chase Jarvis:
Well, first of all, I want the person who’s crushed to know that you’re not alone. And that’s part of an important part of this process, the process of realizing what failure is. And I had a really interesting journey down the science of failure because I’m a lifelong artist. I bailed on medical school, quit a career in professional soccer to become a photographer. You can imagine my poor parents. And so I have sort of been “failing” at this stuff that the world wants for us over and over again, only to sort of realize that, wait a minute, this failure stuff is actually the potion, the alchemy that makes up success. And that sounds cliche, so I need to double click on that.

The science of failure is very interesting. I think the study was, I forget where the study was, it might’ve been out of UPenn, but there is a pattern to failure and the people who are able to rise up from that. And it is more than just dusting yourself off. And it’s more than try and try again. First of all, you have to care. So for those software developers out, there’re like, “Oh, I’m going to put out my MVP, which means minimum viable product and just I’m going to throw something at the wall.” No, you actually have to care. The science is very clear here. If you’re just moving through life and allowing the not caring and allowing the universe to just be a cork in the tide, the science is pretty clear that that actually isn’t going to get you what you want. It’s not “Try and try again.” It is “Try, feel the sting of failure, deconstruct what actually happened in the process, and try something slightly different.”

And it turns out that might, on the surface that sounds rather simple, but the results are actually profound. And to me, I love things that are simple but not easy. The simple part is anyone can activate on this stuff.

And that’s an important piece to the concept of the levers. These are essentially seven tools that reside within us, which the world has sort of talked us out of. We have been led away from them. You talked about in the first chapter is about attention. The world is constantly trying to distract you. It wants a piece of you and so therefore your ability to direct it is a superpower. And the same thing is true with failure. Culture has, this is a system that’s endemic inside us that we know this to be true. Watch any toddler learn to walk. I mean how many, if you’re a parent and you have an able-bodied child, how many parents listening right now when your child stumbled for the 96th time said, “I guess my kid’s not a walker.” Right? Zero people did, right? Zero did. But what you watch the toddler do is the system is built in. You watch them stumble, they look around, there’s a little mild disappointment that they stumbled, and then there’s a curiosity and then they try and stand back up.

And in doing so, they’ll grab for mom’s pants or dad’s finger or whatever. And this is adapting. I didn’t have mom’s pants last time, I didn’t have dad’s finger. And I’m using this basic analogy here so that we can understand that that actually is what we’re doing when we are failing.

First of all, society has reminded you that, oh, you’re a failure if you don’t get something on the first try. And yet nowhere in nature do we see success instantaneously. And this is part of the problem with information. This is part of the problem with social media in our culture is what we see now apparently is effortless brilliance everywhere we look. This makes us feel less than.

So for the person who’s in New Zealand right now and waking up, staring at the ceiling and saying, “What am I doing here?” I want you to feel seen. I want you to know that it’s not an accident that your biology is being messed with, that you see effortless brilliance everywhere because information moves quickly.

We used to see the person in our tribe who learned to hunt, they went out and they were a bad hunter at first, and she didn’t get her kill and she came back dejected. And you watched that happen in real time over a long period of time. So now we don’t see that. This is why you feel bad. But rest assured, this mechanism in you to fail and adapt and to grow is natural. It’s native. We see it in kids. We’ve been talked out of it as an adult, and it’s available for you right now. What matters is reorienting how you think, experience and believe about it, what you believe about it. So the point of view that I come from is let’s get good at this. Let’s not pretend it doesn’t sting. Let’s acknowledge that.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Chase Jarvis:
And what can we do to be 1% better, 1% kinder and return to ourselves over and over again?

Martha Beck:
And you talk about how Tiger Woods, gets wone out of four puts or strokes onto the green, but he takes so many strokes that that adds up to a lot of practice, but most of his strokes still don’t go in. It’s not a hole in one.

Chase Jarvis:
For sure.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, the internet’s been so messing with us about that. I’m glad you mentioned toddlers because again, moving a bit backwards, you talk about play as being one of the levels, the levers. And there was something really thrilling and freeing, liberating, about your use of the word “play” and then your description of how to play.

And I totally agree with you that most people are socialized out of playing very early in life. I mean certainly by the time we start school. And so that may be why toddlers laugh 400 times a day on average and adults laugh 15 times a day. So life’s not as much fun.

And babies, little kids play and play and play. And what I love about your story, as well as this book, is that you show us a playful life from, like, you never quite gave up on it. Two things. How did you keep this playful spirit? And what would you recommend for somebody who’s like, “Play? I haven’t played in many years. What do you mean, sir?”

Chase Jarvis:
Well, I’ll take those in reverse order. It’s not dissimilar from creativity. Most of us, if you go into any first grade classroom and say, “Hands up, who wants to come to the front of the room and draw me a picture?” Every hand goes up. And then you ask the same classroom in sixth grade and then in 12th grade, and each time it’s cut in half or worse.

And that is a reminder that it’s native within you. And just like creativity is native within us, just like our ability to adapt from difficult circumstances and failure natively resides within us, so does this play. And you threw the science out there before I could get to it, which is if a toddler laughs 400 times and we laugh 15, we are clearly, we can clearly become aware that this is a thing that’s natively within us that’s getting talked out of us.

So the most important thing is recognizing that. Cool, this is not a mission I have to go on. I do not have to get a different set of friends. I don’t have to wear a beret, I don’t have to move to Canada. It’s wherever you are right now. So this is an inward journey. And to me that’s the most exciting part about the whole book. In deconstructing the lives of my experiences and the people that I know who are the most either successful but not just in the classics and successful and fulfilled, these are the ingredients. There’s this awareness that this is native within us and there’s a willingness to go inside to look for it.

And I like to say success leaves clues. If you are not playful enough in your life, if you’re one of those adults that’s laughing 15 times—I mean maybe we can’t get 400 given the state of the world, but maybe we get 250. I would ask you what were— success leaves clues—what are the things in your life that has historically brought you joy? Who are the people? Where were you in your life? What were you focused on? What did you care about? How did you invest your time, energy, money, your spirit, your soul? Those things are still available to you right now. We have just been talked out of them by a world that’s largely given up on their dreams.

So let’s return to what brought us joy in the past. Who are the people? Can you put yourself around those people or those types of people? What were the activities? Because the goal is not to just flip a switch. That would be nice, but that’s also wishful thinking. The goal is to remember, to rediscover, excavate, if you will, what’s been buried deep inside of you and give it a little room to breathe. Give it a little oxygen.

And I call play the most important work that we do because it is work. It’s just like a muscle when it’s atrophied. We get to go back and rediscover that muscle. Oh, this is what it feels like to do some jumping jacks or some pushups. And in the process of doing it, we do realize, A, that it’s there and B, that it’s available to us. And it’s that process of discovering and rediscovering and then activating it intentionally where we awaken that playful giant that resides within.

Martha Beck:
That’s fantastic. And I know a lot of people might be thinking, “Well yeah, but I’ve got kids to raise. I’ve got this job.” But another lever is constraint, limitation. And that was, so I did some research for a book I just wrote that told me the brain actually needs to be stuck in order to have quantum leaps. We need the constraints to create variety and innovation. And that, again, is very counterintuitive. And I love your stories too. People who are just everyday folks on the street and people who are world famous, you seem to have interviewed them all. So give us a quick example of like, “Okay, a lot of my time is taken up with drudgery and things. How do I have time to play? How do I have time to re-access that giant within?”

Chase Jarvis:
Well, this is, you’re hitting on an important piece. These seven levers are the results of my years of deconstructing when I felt connected to myself and to the world the most. And when I’ve deconstructed the lives of ordinary people who have done extraordinary things, and extraordinary people. And I’ve distilled them essentially to these seven things. And you just called out right there like, okay, we all want more play, but we’ve got the reality of “I need to work this many hours and I got to take care of the kids.” And you can see the interrelationship between play, which I’m asking you to spend time and energy looking for, and you’re like, “I really don’t have that much energy.” And yet, constraints—I kind of got you in a ninja move here because you can’t get away from it. It turns out that constraints are arguably the creator of our creativity.

Martha Beck:
Oh wow, I got to let that one sit for a minute. Constraints are actually the creator of creativity. Holy smokes. This is why you allought to read this book. This is so good.

Chase Jarvis:
Tweetable, I guess. No, but the punchline here is really that when we think about even just asking an artist, and you know this, or you staring at a blank page. If I said, “You have to write a page, it has to be this long, it has to use this many words, it has to use a pink unicorn and a guy named Gary, and four other characters,” you immediately have something of a shape that if you squint, you can play within that constraint.

And that’s all we’re doing with life when we have, to your point about play and constraints, when I say, “I don’t have enough time,” like, great. If you’ve decided that this is a priority for you, then what are the things that you can do? Well, if my kid wakes up at—I’m just using kids, I don’t even have kids, actually, I should reveal this, so take me with a grain of salt. But if your kids wake up at 6:30 ought you then wake up at 5:30, this is a priority for you. And you say, yeah, but I have to work late in the evening too. Great. Well, what are you going to trade for this? Because I believe you can have it all. You just can’t have it all at the same time.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Chase Jarvis:
So when a constraint arises, I share a story of one of the world’s top designers named Stefan Sagmeister. I’m stressed out about designing a book. It was the cover from my previous book about creativity. And he uses an exercise in what’s called lateral thinking developed by a cat named Edward De Bono, which is thinking about the thing that you want to create through the lens of literally anything else. I use the example in the book of, “Hey, I gotta design a book cover,” and Sagmeister picks up a glass of water. And he says, “Well, let’s look at the book cover through the glass of water.” What are some things, because your mind goes to the things that first of all, it’s already experienced, second of all, it’s already seen, nd you really have to trudge through those first two to get to something new and innovative.

So when you’re saying, “I can’t do this because of X, Y, Z,” your brain is going to all the reasons it didn’t work in the past and then all the reasons you’ve seen it not work for other people. But what if you then crafted a narrative that says, “Okay, I’m going to try and do something completely extraordinary and different. I’m going to run a tiny experiment.” So it’s this act of running a tiny experiment or in Sagmeister’s case, looking at a book cover as if it were a glass of water. Maybe the book cover could be clear, maybe there’s some sort of fluidity around it. And the goal isn’t to get a book cover that looks like a glass of water. The goal is to change your thinking.

And this is the value of constraint, not dissimilar to when you’re trying to learn to play. When can I play? What can I play? If I’m constrained to being inside, cool, whether I play, then look into your past, what were the games that I enjoyed as a kid? Success leaves clues.

The point here is that when you start to use all of these levers together in a very simple way, you unlock these pieces of you that give you hope. And what we really need—and what your work is absolutely legendary for—is clarity and momentum. Clarity and momentum. If we have those two things, we really can move the world.

Martha Beck:
Okay, so I think you just gave me two different words for eagle vision and mouse vision. One is clarity, one’s momentum. And the stuff on constraint is so powerful because you also show through multiple examples how people actually fabricate stuff around their constraints.

The one that struck home for me most was Glennon Doyle, and you talk about how her leaving her husband was a big deal, but there’s also the fact that she had three little kids and no time, and she started her huge career writing a blog post called Mamastery about being stuck with little kids. And you talk about several other people who do things, people with physical disabilities who become great athletes, people with all kinds of pressures on them that shouldn’t allow them to succeed,and yet they do. It’s incredibly inspiring. By the way, I’m going to read some of the other levers because we only have half an hour here.

But along with failure, play, and constraint, there is intuition, attention, time, and practice. And I’d love to end by talking about time because I see my clock and I’m like, “Okay, we’ve got three minutes left.” Not really, we have more like five minutes left. But I’m thinking, “Wait, he taught me in this book how to bend and stretch and collapse time.” I’d love you to give us your perspective because your perspective is so countercultural, and we have such a cultural view of time as the chains and bars that limit everything. And we can’t argue with it. It’s just the way it is. And that is not the way you describe it. So could you just briefly tell us about your view of time?

Chase Jarvis:
Yeah, it was one of my favorite and then one of the most difficult subjects I’ve ever written on. And it’s in part that way because it is so embedded in our culture that time is this conveyor belt that’s moving in the background, and whether we like it or not. And yet, we have evidence that it’s different. We’ve all had the experience of being lost in something, of the flow state, for example, when you’re able to learn an extraordinary amount. Or you go on, if you’re a writer, you sit down to write and you don’t even look up and you’ve written 40 pages that day. That is the expansion or dilation of time. And the cool thing is this is always available to us. What the people who have mastered time realize is that time management is dead. Therefore, the people who have this experience of time expanding and dilating in service of the dreams that they have on this planet, what is the key?

And the key, it turns out, is presence. Being able to be present in the moment. And what if we had this idea that if we are present, life is unmistakably long? Now the reality is again, we shared before we started recording, my mom passed away not too long ago, and I’ve been really having to grapple with the idea that that’s a real thing, right? We are faced with this, our mortality, and yet most of us just the numbers speak the truth, which is most of us who are listening right now are time billionaires. That means we have a billion or more minutes in our life, or seconds. I think it’s seconds. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
In 31 years, right?

Chase Jarvis:
Yes, exactly. And what if we stopped doing all of the things that the world wants for us because we’re going to run out of time? What if we could be present, we could sit with the decision, we could experiment and have the experiment not work such that we can return to a new experiment or back to ourself over and over again?

And it turns out that when you stop scurrying around, like time is going to end and you’re going to be left holding the bag, everything starts happening for you rather than to you. And this is the secret that people who have struck that cord of fulfillment. You’ve been around them, you carry yourself like this, Martha. This is one of the reasons I love your work and I love being in your presence. The ability to just be is such a radical act in today’s culture, the ability to be present. And I’ll tell you, I see this all the time with people who are 22 years old and they expect to have their life figured out. I’m 50 and change and I’m on my fourth, maybe fifth career arc.

And I admit that I felt terrified when I was 21 because I was quitting things. I was leaving medical school, as I mentioned earlier, and the world was saying, “Yo, what’s your problem?” And it was only through a presence, a quietness, an awareness of what was going on in my head and heart that I could actually realize what I actually wanted. And then in the pursuing of that, here’s what time did: It slowed way down. I found all of the things that I’d been looking for from my childhood in my career as a photographer.

And the same is true, it can be true for you. You can imagine if you had an awareness, not that time is infinite, but that time is on our side as opposed to what the world will tell you. Could you imagine the level that it would change your thinking if you were patient and kind with yourself? Turns out that slow—wait, is it fast is slow? Wait, smooth is—

Martha Beck:
And slow is fast.

Chase Jarvis:
There you go.

Martha Beck:
Smooth is fast and slow is fast. I don’t know.

Chase Jarvis:
Wait, let me try and nail this. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Martha Beck:
There you go. Perfect.

Chase Jarvis:
Anyway, it was a treat to write about time. And I truly, people who are listening right now who feel, so many of us feel behind in life, that’s fiction. What if you could just be comfortable where you are, wherever you are, it doesn’t matter how you got there, there’s where you are. And what if you could just build the life of your dreams one day, one minute, one hour at a time? Wouldn’t that be joyful?

You can start to see how time and joy and play and attention and failure and running tiny experiments, how all this stuff is connected. That’s, I think the punchline, Martha, is that if all of the best stuff is on the other side of our comfort zone, then we need a blueprint to reliably get there safely. And the irony is this is the act of not playing it safe when you can start to trust this, hence the title of the book. But that is the goal of this book. And knock on wood, I think we got there.

Martha Beck:
Oh my gosh, it’s so amazing. And in that chapter on time, you reveal yourself in a kind of essence that you’re not just an athlete, artist, businessman. What you essentially are is a mystic. You’re a spirit aware of having its time on earth and aware that it can play with time. So you lift away from sort of the quotidian way that we define ourselves as humans, the culture’s way of saying, “Life is a bitch, and then you die.” And this whole book says, “No, wait, go up. Go up to the clarity, go up to the eagle vision. And then when you drop down, don’t lose that perspective. Never lose it.”

And the whole book sort of infuses that into the reader and lifts us and helps us forward toward the lives we want to have, and I love it. And I love all your work.

Chase Jarvis:
Thank you, Martha.

Martha Beck:
And I’m so grateful that you were willing to be here with us.

Chase Jarvis:
Well, that little summary that you just shared, that’s why we all pay attention to you. That’s why we listen to your wisdom. That is absolutely a nutshell. You could have saved me a lot of time and energy if I had just come to you first. Thank you so much for everything that you do, Martha. It’s an absolute treat to be here.

Martha Beck:
The treat is definitely mine. It’s wonderful to read your book. It’s wonderful to speak with you, and it’s wonderful to see you going on and just making more and more fantastic things in this world. So thank you.

Chase Jarvis:
Thank you.