Never Play It Safe – A Practical Guide to Creating a Life You Love | Chase Jarvis

Michael Gervais (0:01)

What if your biggest risk in life is playing it safe? Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. Today, I'm stoked to welcome back to the podcast, one of the most dynamic voices in the creative world, Chase Jarvis. Chase is an award-winning photographer and entrepreneur, and he's the founder of CreativeLive, the leading online learning platform that has supported millions of creators worldwide. He also just released the book, Never Play It Safe, a practical guide to freedom, creativity, and a life you love. So with that, let's jump right into this conversation with Chase Jarvis.

Chase, I am so stoked to sit with you. It's been a while since you've connected.

Chase Jarvis (0:58)

It has, man, it's been a hot minute.

Michael Gervais (0:59)

And I love the way you've created your life. And so I wanna do a couple of things. I wanna talk about life design and how you've done that.

Chase Jarvis (1:07)

Thank you.

Michael Gervais (1:08)

And I also wanna understand how you've become so skilled at your craft. So there's a blend there.

Chase Jarvis (1:12)

Okay, happy to talk about that.

Michael Gervais (1:14)

And you've been diving deep into risk.

Chase Jarvis (1:17)

I have, yeah.

Michael Gervais (1:18)

And it's the title of your book, which is Playing It Safe. And so I wanna dive into like the insights that you've been attending to, which are near and dear to my heart as well.

Chase Jarvis (1:28)

Yeah, we are kindred spirits, brothers from another mother. And I'm very, I mean, you know, I'm hustling a book right now and I'm very excited about it. And yet what it really means is I get to spend some quality time sitting down, having meaningful conversations with my friends. So I've been looking forward to this one, but thank you.

Michael Gervais (1:44)

Ditto, ditto. All right, so for folks that might have missed your earlier episode or are unfamiliar with your work, just give us a quick flyover about what you do and how you come into this world and what you do.

Chase Jarvis (1:58)

Yeah, it does go back to second grade, Ms. Kelly. I was a super creative kid in second grade. I had a comic strip that I published every week. I had a magic act, a standup comedy routine. And at some point early in my second grade year, I overheard Ms. Kelly tell my parents that I wasn't very creative and this entrepreneurial stuff had to stop. And I should really focus on sports. So as a, you know, you are very connected to sports, so this will resonate with your community. But I did exactly what Ms. Kelly said. I just said, OK, I guess I'm just going to that's going to be my identity. And to be fair, Ms. Kelly was not entirely wrong. I was a good athlete. I ended up, you know, winning all the races in the second grade and went on to gain a Division I soccer scholarship, played on the Olympic development team. And when I graduated high school, I was the award that I got at the senior breakfast was typical senior, which is horrible. Like that's catastrophically awful in my mind. I didn't know what it meant, but I knew it wasn't good when I got it.

Michael Gervais (3:08)

Average in every way.

Chase Jarvis (3:09)

Exactly. It was predictable. Essentially, you followed the script. And so at some point thereafter, my grandfather passed away, died of a heart attack immediately on his garage floor. And I was given two things. I was given his watch and his camera. And at that time, I was dabbling in professional soccer with sort of an eye on if that didn't work, I was going to go to medical school because I had decided that I needed to, you know, have do the thing, please the adults in my life. They were helping me think of, well, if you're talented and hard working, you should be a doctor or lawyer. I mean, of course, pro athlete would be nice. So I had this suite of opportunities before me. And in order to clear my head, I chucked that camera that my grandfather had given me into a backpack and with my then girlfriend, now wife, Kate, and went and walked the earth for a year.

And it was in that year that I ended up coming back to that time, to that person that I was in second grade, which obviously sounds ridiculous. But that person was in second grade, was a curious person who was listening to the beat of their own drum and had gotten off course, basically sort of betrayed myself for a good decade and change. And I was curious who that person was. And it turned out that person was someone that I really really liked. And so on this year walkabout, I taught myself how to take pictures. And I came back and bailed on medical school, kicked the professional soccer thing to the curb, and essentially became a photographer. And my poor parents, right? I'll never forget telling them this, like, this is really what I want to do with my life. And I think where that took me was a place that I could never have imagined. I've lived this, an amazing, beautiful, heart forward, heartfelt, connected, creative life. And I am a builder of things. So if I was to articulate to your audience, I consider myself an artist and an entrepreneur. I've been one of the top commercial photographers in the world for 20 years. And I am a builder of things that support the creative community. So I've created the first online streaming platform that helped creatives learn. We had tens of millions of customers, hundreds of millions in revenue that was acquired just a couple of years ago.