I feel so good, it's engaged and connected and this is what I'm supposed to be doing and I knew it all along.
Just, God help me find my way back to myself again and do more of this.
We need to return to ourselves, return to this point of view, this disposition of realizing that all the best stuff is on the other side of our comfort zone.
Learning how to play through fear and risk to get at some of this stuff is a skill and if we can focus on it, we can develop these skills and live richer, more meaningful, connected, and fulfilling lives.
So so much of our lives is governed by this innate desire to feel safe.
I totally get this.
The world can feel like an unstable, scary place feeling physically and psychologically safe.
It matters to our mental health, to our physical health, but does there come a point where playing it too safe actually causes us harm?
Where it makes our worlds, our relationships, our experiences and lives smaller, less good rather than better.
Feeling like deep down, you know that there's more to life than just existing within the confines of a box that, sure, might feel safe, but also keeps you and your life so much more narrow and limited than it could otherwise be.
And all too often, the confines of that box, that alleged safety, have been drawn by someone else's expectations.
So my guest today is Chase Jarvis and his new book, Never Play It Safe, a practical guide to freedom, creativity, and a life you love.
It serves as an inspiring clarion call to challenge the notion of safety as an excuse for complacency.
An award -winning artist, serial entrepreneur, and one of the most influential photographers of the past decade, Chase has created campaigns for iconic brands like Apple, Nike, and Redbull.
He's also the co -founder and former CEO of CreativeLive, an online education platform that has helped over 50 million students unlock their creative potential.
So in our conversation, Chase shares his really personal journey of shedding the shackles of playing it safe to fully embrace his authentic path.
And along the way, he had to kind of blow up the expectations of a lot of other people around him.
He offers this refreshingly candid perspective on the innate tools that we all possess to more courageously step beyond our comfort zones and craft a life overflowing with freedom and creativity and fulfillment.
So if you're ready to trade in the treadmill of supposed to, that's sort of like an overlay of safety.
For the trail of what if, then this boundary pushing conversation is for you.
So excited to share it with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
I want to dive into never played safe, interesting phrase, and it's sort of this invitation to live boldly and authentically.
In fact, you use that language early on in the intro when you're teeing this up, you're basically saying to everybody, there is a way to step into life.
Here is my question for you.
When you use phrases or words like live boldly, live authentically, here's my honest reaction.
My eyes start to roll.
I'm like, I have seen this all over the internet.
It's in every meme.
It's all over the place.
This feels like the type of thing where I don't understand what it means anymore.
So when you use words like that, when you use phrases like that, what does it even mean to you?
And what are you trying to convey to people that's not sort of like the generic stuff that you see all over the place?
The book opens up pretty earnestly around the concept of safety.
And the first line is safety is an illusion.
It does not exist in nature.
Why then do we seek it?
If you put a slightly nuanced lens on your interesting question that you're opening our conversation with here, it's not just about living boldly, but my belief is that when I looked back on all of the best stuff in my life, and I did that for any number of reasons, we can talk a little bit about it,
like why I just was at a particular point in my life where I sort of was like taking stock.
And I was like, wait a minute, all of the best things, best relationships, my best experiences were on the other side of my discomfort, on the other side of fear, on the other side of risk.
And I was like, wait a minute, if that's where the best stuff is, why are we conditioned to not go there?
And how can we change our conditioning so that that is a place that we can constructively seek and seek with some sort of reliable blueprint way of getting there?
Because it's biologically wired to not do that stuff.
We're biologically wired to stay comfortable.
And to be clear, when I say safety, I'm not talking about seat belts or sunscreen, I'm not talking about emotional or physical safety.
All those things are very important.
I'm mostly talking about the experience.
And then you say, well, I love the experience of actually just being really comfortable sitting next to the one I love.
It's like, yeah, but how did you find the one that you love?
You had to first probably ask them on a date, or there was some sort of early interaction where you had to be uncomfortable, you had to push through some fear and some risk.
And so whether we're talking about relationships or career or personal experiences or adventures, or even going inside where most of this stuff is, there's a repeatable set of tools that I feel like we can use reliably to go there and to program our experience.
This is, I know this feeling, it's familiar, it's discomfort, and the world is going to try and tell me to be one way or to be this way.
And I know that I need to, because of evidence from my past, push on, around, or through over these feelings.
Because reliably, I have proof that on the other side is something that's more interesting, richer, more human, more connected, more authentic, more me.
That's the framing.
I mean, you write early on, playing it safe is about fear, and fear is only optimized for survival, not creativity, happiness, or fulfillment, which is really what we're talking about here.
I'm curious when this touchdown in your life is really the notion of not playing it safe, because I remember you telling me stories all the way back, early in life, like you're in your early 20s, I guess it was, like the whole, you're planning on going into like a world of medicine.
Your grandpa dies, your grandpa passes, and you discover basically his camera.
And there's something inside of you, even at that young age that says that this path that I've been working towards, that had been like everything that's been set up for me, I'm like committed to this, like blows up in almost a heartbeat.
And you're like, there's something else.
Profoundly unsafe, not again, not from a physical safety standpoint, from everything you've taught about how you're supposed to live your life.
And yet you take this left turn, which is completely counter -culture to almost everything you've been doing up until that moment.
What was happening inside that made it actually feel like, and yet I still have to do this.
I think it was the realization that prior to that moment, there had been a thousand tiny betrayals and that, wait a minute, this whole life.
I mean, like I chronicled this in the opening of the book, when going back to second grade, Miss Kelly, I had a magic show, I had a stand of comedy act, and I was doing all this really great.
I had just done my first film, I'm talking second grade.
And Miss Kelly, my second grade teacher, shut it all down.
She said, you can't sell your comic strip, no more magic shows, no more whatever, because this is a business.
And frankly speaking, this stuff doesn't mean anything.
It's not real. So throw it away.
And I was like, okay, great.
And in an instant, I mean, like, man, who is this Miss Kelly woman?
She's vicious. And yet we all had a Miss Kelly in our lives and probably lots of them.
And as a kid, I did not say Miss Kelly was awful.
I was like, oh, the adults in my life are telling me what to do.
And this is they, I like Miss Kelly, Miss Kelly likes me, I should probably pay attention.
And that sort of starts the betrayals where we give up on our dreams, largely by being talked out of them from people who've given up on theirs.
And I looked in my life, and then I realized that I didn't actually want to be a doctor.
How did I get to, how did I start pursuing medical school?
Well, my uncle told me that smart, talented, hiring people, they're either doctors or lawyers or engineers or, you know, or whatever.
I was like, oh, okay.
So I started pursuing those subjects in school and I started so that moment that you talk about in the book where I realized this, I take that 90 degree turn, just decide not to go into medicine was because I'd already basically spent a lot of money.
I was in debt, student debt, pursuing things that everybody else wanted for me.
I had given up on so many things, you know, the creative side of myself that I was sharing with you earlier that Ms.
Kelly talked me out, I realized that I'd betrayed myself enough times and that, you know what?
Enough is enough. When you face with sort of death in your family and the reckoning of, oh my gosh, there's I'm going to die at some point, Amorfati, the stoic principle, it's like, let's try something different.
Let's run a tiny experiment.
Feels radical. It's not a door that if I walk through it, I can't walk back through it.
Let's see what it feels like to go through this door.
And this is that comfort zone that I'm talking about.
And as soon as I stepped through that or went beyond my comfort zone, took the risk of disappointing people who thought I should be off to medical school.
Oh my God, I felt so alive.
I felt so connected.
I felt so autonomous and simultaneously I found a whole world of people who were like me that I actually felt more connected to and felt like, wow, this is actually a thing that I could do.
And look how curious and fun and interesting.
These are my people.
So I think it's important to, again, in answering your question, what made me do that?
It wasn't the first time I had, you know, it wasn't like I had always not been brave and then became brave.
It was realizing that man, I'd given up on myself so many times and I'm tired of it.
It kind of was more of a put your foot down moment, which is really important to me in the context of this book, that people don't feel like I'm if you, if you're listening to this right now, and it's like, I don't want to think that I had it all figured out.
This was the series of so many tiny betrayals, but that's actually the system working.
Right. So wherever you are right now, if you're listening to this like, hmm, that's kind of interesting.
Doesn't matter how you got there.
Doesn't even matter where you are.
What matters is that if you did take stock and decided that I might want to get comfortable getting uncomfortable, maybe there is something to this.
It's never too late to pursue the person that we are want to be.
Maybe now is a good time to start.
Like that's really what I'm asking the reader.
And in this case, the listener to do is ask yourself those questions.
And do you want to have any regrets at the end or are you willing to maybe take a chance now?
I mean, it's such an interesting point about the, you know, the thousand tiny betrayals leading up to this moment.
I think so many of us have felt some version of that.
And also this notion that when finally the switch flips inside of you, and you're just like, this is the last one that doesn't necessarily mean that you then know what the path is from that moment forward, you know, sort of like you're flipping in from a thousand tiny betrayals to you uncomfortably saying
yes to potentially a thousand micro trials of like, is this me?
Is this me? Is this me?
Is this me? And I wonder if one of the things that that stops people is because they feel like they have to be clear on that before they'll close one door.
Like they have to really understand what is next.
Like how is it going to tee up?
How is it going to position me so that both I feel okay stepping into it and those whose approval I seek will not just completely decimate me with their glares and wouldn't it be nice if the world works that way, but it really doesn't.
Yeah, you've described a very tidy box that it would be fantastic if that's the way it was.
But on two different vectors, on the first vector of, you know, disappointing others.
One of my favorite experiences is a friend of mine, Brene Brown, probably know her, you know, her work.
I know that and your listeners hopefully do.
She's amazing. I had her, I've had her on my show, my podcast many times, she came out to Seattle.
We had an in -studio audience and I was asking her about, it was around when she was doing the gifts of imperfection and she had popularized at the time.
Her TED talk was just going viral.
It was really like 2010 or something, super long time ago.
And she, I said, you know, how do you decide who, who do you, who are you willing to disappoint in being sort of vulnerable or being authentically you?
And she said, Hey, can you grab my purse?
So the PA ran and got your purse.
This is all on camera and sets it up on the couch and she opens a purse, pulls out her wallet, opens her wallet, and she pulls out a little piece of paper in her wallet.
And then this piece of paper is a one inch by one inch square.
And she says, she holds it up.
She says, on this piece of paper, I have written the names of the people who I actually truly care in my heart of hearts.
If I disappoint a couple of interesting things there.
One is that there's not that many not in that much room for many names, right?
It's, it's, it's on a one inch by one inch piece of paper.
So there are very, very few people.
And that's not to say that she's not going to disappoint people, but these are the people who, whose opinion of her actually matters to her at the end of her days.
So to me, that vector on who you're going to disappoint, it's interesting in all sorts of ways.
And we ought to have our own little one inch by one square.
And then there's that bigger piece of the pie.
You know, when you're talking about who you disappoint and then does it need to be perfect?
Do you have to have to have everything lined up?
I just asked the question, what if you didn't?
What if you thought of all of these things, these questions that you had about what you could be or what you could do or where you could go next or, you know, aside from here, you're going to disappoint.
What's the tiniest experiment that you could run in the direction of your dreams?
To me, that's a really interesting question.
So those two things together.
OK, let's talk about I might disappoint my career counselor or my friend's brother's cousin or my neighbor, Bob, but it's not on the list.
And of course, it seems like I have to have it all figured out and make perfect move X or Y.
And we try and do this stuff from the couch.
Right. But what if we didn't what if we did it in a sort of a clumsy, small, lightweight, experimental way?
What would that look like?
To me, the answers to those questions provide much more interesting places for us to explore.
Yeah, it's so interesting, right?
You know, as we have this conversation, I'm 58 years old.
I'm still running experiments.
Absolutely. And surely some of those experiments have borne fruit.
Some of them have turned into bodies of work or companies or offerings or whatever it may be.
Many more than that have just completely proven themselves not worthy of pursuing along the way.
Because I think one of the questions that people hear that, oh, OK, so maybe I'm OK like spending this window of time, like running these experiments, but like at some point I'm going to lock it down and then I'm just going to be on that path.
Right. And maybe for some people, that actually does happen.
Maybe you find out like there is this one thing that I've fallen in love with that I really wanted to devote myself to.
And it sustains you indefinitely.
And this is that's an amazing thing.
In my experience has more the outlier story, even though that is the mythology that we're told to aspire to.
I'm curious what your take is on that.
Absolutely. A line review.
I think it's it's a mythology.
And well, there's sort of like an interesting way that I think about as I'm answering that, I'm trying to be really honest, which if you are doing a good job of listening, going inside like that's the secret to this.
You know, one of the things my favorite thing about this book is that it's an inside job.
I think that's what Seth Godin told me.
It's like this book could also be called an inside job because all the best stuff we have to actually go inside and think about what it is that we actually really want in order to actually go out in the world and get it or do or become the people or do the things that we want to do.
So to me, that's simultaneously fascinating in that the answers are in here, not out there.
So if we do a little in here, but it's also cool because it's once you get it, it is truly right there.
There's no gap between if you can hear, you start to pay attention to this stuff.
Now, so let's just say that you start to get good at that and you do decide what it is that you really want.
And as you talked about, we're like, we're going to run some experiments.
The better you are at listening to what you want.
It doesn't mean that you're not going to fail experiments, but the experiments, they are all generally more interesting to you.
You're more engaged than because they're on this path, right?
They're in line with or they're just aligned with who we are as our core.
The funny thing is the better we know who we are and what we want the experiments, even if the ones that don't work, they're like, Oh, well, that was kind of cool.
I figured out, I learned something.
And it's just the essence of you don't have to see the entire staircase before you make a move in order for it to feel good or like you're willing to make a move.
You're like, I just have to see a couple of stairs.
I'm going to go a couple of stairs.
And if I go up there and it's not what I like, great.
Then I'm gonna come around and go back down because even those few steps were in the direction of my dreams.
And I knew that because I had a real heartfelt conversation with myself and I figured it was worth exploring.
Just imagine if you could, wherever you are right now, do more of that and less of the to -do list that everybody else piles on us and that we pile on ourselves, right?
What if we could do a little bit more in the direction of our dreams every day without feeling like everything had to turn out perfect and a little bit less of the to -do lists that culture and our parents and our career counselors and frankly, most other people in our lives will pile on us.
It's not, there's no evil overlord, but it's just about getting one percent better in the direction of our dreams.
And it's very doable.
There is an evil overlord, but they lie within not without.
Like, it's true. Like that is the inside game also.
But it's interesting cause you bring up another thing which has been memeified endlessly, which is this notion of like, you don't need to see the whole path, take the first step and the rest of the path will follow or not.
You know, like the truth is you may get five steps in and you're like, dude, no, like this actually is completely not OK.
There is no other path like that's now appearing before me because there shouldn't be one.
And yes, now I need to actually go back to where I was or just start from where I am now and figure out how do I make like a hard left or hard right.
But like part of what you're bringing up here also, and this is one of the things that you speak to is this notion of trusting yourself, like the art of trusting yourself intuition, which I feel is is such an important part of us sussing out like, OK, so as I'm running these experiments and trying to
figure things out, I'm sure I'm going to rely on some external data if it's available to me.
But there's this whole thing like there is a set of data that bubbles up inside of us that so many of us are just profoundly disconnected to.
We don't even know that it exists, let alone understand how to surface it and trust it.
Yeah, I believe that our intuition is the most powerful thing that we know the least about.
And, you know, when I was writing the book, there's a whole chapter on intuition.
And it was fascinating because I liked some of the science behind it.
And it is really leaning in the direction that rational thought is, you know, it's thought to be the pinnacle.
And sure, it made us you know, it gave us tools which helped us evolve and all this thing.
Yeah, awesome. And it's also sort of slow and bubbling and prone to error and intuition, which is an actual kind of knowledge.
It's very unclear where it comes from, but it's usually at a cellular level.
It's more of a body and the cells, they actually all they're always changing and regenerating.
But there's memories kept in there in different formats.
It's still data. It's just different types of data.
It's like, man, if we could start to actually pay attention to that and intuition actually, there's signals that set that appear that intuition actually takes rational thought into account as well versus rational thought doesn't take into consideration.
Intuition, you know, I start to think, wow, this is actually kind of an interesting skill.
And the, you know, the the follow up question, the natural question is like, well, OK, how can you train it and trust it?
And the answer is pretty simple.
It's just like any other muscle when you feel it in your body.
And we all have this.
No one that I know has ever told me like I don't have a gut feeling.
So, well, what if you paid attention to that and you could do it in small lightweight ways?
What do you want for dinner tonight?
What if you just said it as opposed to jammed it down?
What if you gave yourself an intuition Saturday where you wake up?
What do I want to do?
Well, I want to watch cartoons and then I want to go have peanut butter and chocolate chip pancakes at the Waffle House.
And then I want to, you know, what if you just did that for a while?
How does that feel at the end of the day?
It's like, cool, I don't want to do that every day, but it felt good to just know that I have answers in here.
And maybe that's an example of doing that one day.
But there's certainly a way to build that muscle through repetition and through learning to listen.
I mean, even acknowledging that there's a voice in there that's at a gut level to me, it's one step ahead of where most people are.
And yet it's right there below the surface if you're willing to look and to listen.
And I will say feel, that's one of the exercises in the book is like you can feel this stuff.
This is a body scan, right?
You know what it feels like to have a gut feeling about a person or a place or a thing.
Why don't we decide that we're going to lean into that?
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
I mean, it's really interesting, right?
Because if you look at the world of behavioral economics, their version of intuition, and this is really popularized by Daniel Kahneman, you know, this notion of we have two thinking systems, like we make decisions in two ways.
We have system one, system two.
System two is this slow burn analytical rational system where we analyze all the data system.
One is this sort of like in the moment, just like we feel it like there's we can't actually its insight base.
We can't actually tell you why we made the decision, but it feels right.
And we bounce back and forth between the two.
So like that system one is like the equivalent of sort of the way that you're describing intuition.
The big difference that I'm sussing out though is that in that world where it's all about science, it's about heavy stuff, and there's experiments that are run, those systems largely exist in your brain, you know, and what you're adding to the conversation is in a lot of the behavioral economists, like
they would kind of equate those fast pace, those intuitive decisions to what's really happening here is that as you get older, your brain is taking in massive amounts of data you're not even aware of, and it's building a pattern recognition machine.
And the more data that you have, the more easily and readily you can actually like recognize patterns.
And that shows up as intuition because you just you have so much data, you see the pattern and you just kind of know.
We take in billions of data points every second minute and you can't possibly be your rational cognitive mind can't process that stuff.
So you've got to put it in a different place.
Exactly what you're talking about.
Right. So you don't know that's what's happening.
That's one of the theories around this in the world.
But what you're adding, which I so agree with this notion is and yes, there's an embodied part of this.
Like part of this is a feeling, a sensation that happens from the neck down.
That's really important.
But we are so disembodied these days that even though our bodies are often screaming to us what you're like, listen, please listen.
We're just kind of like somebody's saying something.
Right? Like screaming at the top of the lungs, that part of our body.
And to me, it's important to state that my approach on intuition is not mysticism.
You know, it's as you said, it's grounded in science and we certainly are taking in billions of data points.
We know that and we certainly know that our cognitive mind, it's sort of like our RAM, right?
We only have so much memory that we can work with.
So there's other stuff happening.
And boy, let's just start to turn onto that, tune into that a little bit.
This is not, we don't have to be, just throw everything into the wind.
And yet if you started, this is sort of like the decision.
You start paying attention to that.
What's the cost to that?
The cost is zero. You know, he's like, okay, I'm going to look for this interesting, my body to tell me what it feels like my gut.
Oh, well, just start trusting it.
Just start, first of all, paying attention to it.
Oh, I'm aware there it is.
Oh yeah. Maybe that's what they're talking about.
Okay, cool. Oh yeah, I really like this person's, person's cool.
Eh, not sure. I like that restaurant that doesn't feel right to me.
Whatever. Just start paying attention to it, acknowledging it.
When you start leaning into that, what I find is most people like, that's actually pretty important, interesting, curious, profound.
I want to do more. And it's in the doing more that you start to build the muscle.
And this is, it's very clear from a sports perspective, for example, sports psychologist is a famous psychologist named Bob Rotella that talks a lot.
It's just a lot about the unconscious mind, the ability to perform at a very high level, not in the thinking like, okay, I'm going to move my, you know, Michael Jordan doesn't say I'm going to put my elbow right here and I'm going to cut my wrist at 32 degrees.
And then I'm going to hold the ball.
You know, it's basically all those things come together in a millisecond.
This is essentially what I'm prescribing for life.
Like these, all of those systems are absolutely applicable to day to day life.
Let's try and leverage them in this way.
It doesn't, again, you don't have to move to France, get a new set of friends.
I'm not asking you to dress a different way.
It's just like, just start paying attention.
And when you do not dissimilar to the world's top athletes, you'll notice things.
And those things are interesting.
And if you start leaning into those, wow, this is another system.
I like the system one system two that you use.
It's like, wow, super powerful, helps me things.
I'd like to learn to listen to that better.
And then what I find, and as I deconstructed my own experiences and the experiences of hundreds of the world's top performers and ordinary people who have done extraordinary things, is that this is one of the tools that they really tune into.
JS That also brings into the conversation the notion of attention or attentiveness.
What are we actually attuning ourselves to?
And this is one of the things that you also dive deep into.
Interesting line that you share.
Getting attention is everything in this life, but what if I told you that nearly everything you've been taught about attention is wrong.
JS That's a little word play in that chapter, because the chapter opens up with, hey, look, look at a baby, a baby coos and it's cute and all these things.
Because if a baby doesn't get attention, a baby literally dies.
If you do not hold a human baby, there's the studies that were done in the orphanages and Romania where just the deaths, literally deaths, they were healthy babies, but all measure, but they weren't held because there was too many of them.
They couldn't go around and hold them.
There's a lot of pretty interesting studies that that's a fact.
If you don't get attention, if a baby's not held, they die.
And from an early on, we're taught that getting attention matters.
It's like to be cool or stand out or be popular or get a date or a mate or a new job or whatever.
You have to stand out.
You have to get attention.
Yet, that little twist I shared there, what if I told you everything is wrong?
It's really the people who are capable of directing their attention, of paying attention that get what they want in life.
And they don't just get what they want because they can direct their attention as in like, I'm focused on the right thing here.
I'm climbing the right mountain.
It's also in when you pay attention to other people, the feeling of having somebody else paying attention to you is such a rare experience that that is true human connection.
My wife, she has many gifts.
She's a meditation and mindfulness teacher coach.
She's one of the most present people I know.
And her ability to pay attention, like when she's just talking to anyone, nobody walks away from a conversation with Kate and just said, that woman wasn't really present.
She's just like, that's one of her superpowers.
And I'm telling you, it is such an absolute gift.
So, the twist in that chapter is, it seems like we're told to get attention, but what if you really were an expert at paying attention or the phrase I like to use is learning to direct your attention?
It turns out that this is what thousands of years of meditation training or mindfulness or awareness practice, what you choose to focus on literally dictates your experience of life.
One of the examples I use in the book is Victor Frankel in concentration camps in 1942, the most horrible place you could probably ever be.
And yet somehow, he, through being a trained psychologist and through will and wisdom, finds meaning in this.
And in the book Man's Search for Meaning, Chronicles is very interestingly, but that is the ultimate form of directing your attention.
You're creating meaning and through what you pay attention to in this particular environment, it's very stoic.
It's not what happens to you, it's the attitude that you bring to what happens to you that matters.
So, what I advocate for is, boy, it seems like if what we pay attention to literally describes the experience that we have of being alive, doesn't it make sense that we should learn to direct our attention.
It seems like it's a really powerful and valuable skill.
Let's do more of that.
It turns out it's difficult in some capacities or in some sense of the word, but there's a handful of very basic things, journaling, meditating, just some basic fundamental stuff that, boy, when you do that, you are at a massive advantage for the experience that you want to have of life.
Let's do more of that.
Yeah. I mean, obviously, this resonates deeply with me and the way I look at the world as well.
It's interesting. I remember diving into Frankl's book, which I've read so many times.
If I'm remembering this correctly, the Man's Search for Meaning is a translation of the original title in German, which actually the original title translated more directly was nevertheless continue or say yes, which kind of changes the frame on what it was about.
But this notion of you said your attention dictates effectively the experiences of your life.
I would even go a step further and say your attention is your life, because basically, whatever you are attuned to in any given moment in time is the nature of your experience.
So, there could be five other things happening around you, but if your brain isn't paying attention to them for all intents and purposes, they literally don't exist in your experience of life.
They could be surrounding you, but they're actually not present in your mind, which means they're not present in your life.
And that goes for people.
It goes for experiences I've talked about on and off over the years I have tinnitus.
So there's a sound that, in theory, my brain exists inside of my head and nowhere else, and it can be screamingly loud and high -pitched.
And yet, over the years, I've trained my brain in ways using some of the tools that you've talked about so that for all intents and purposes, until and unless I go searching for it, it doesn't exist.
It's not that I don't hear it, which is how I kind of understood it in the early days.
Oh, I've taught myself not to hear it anymore.
What I began to realize is because it only exists in my brain.
When my attention is not actually attuned to it, it's not that I don't hear it anymore.
It literally doesn't exist in my life.
And it took a lot of work to get there and a lot of suffering along the way, but I was motivated by pain and my desire to get out of it.
And sadly, that's what it takes for a lot of people.
Yeah, but many of us are in pain.
Talk to me more about taking me there more.
I'd be on board with exactly what you said, and I think your example is so precious and so real.
It's like when I'm listening to people in my community, creators, entrepreneurs, people who are trying to dole a living or a life that they love, there's so many.
The list of things that is wrong or difficult or whatever is very, it's long and multifaceted and we pay a lot of attention to it.
And it's not to say that it doesn't exist or or just how real is that list like as you just indicated with your tinnitus.
Tinnitus, tinnitus, tinnitus.
Either way, bring it in your ears.
It's like by learning to direct your attention that can bring it in and out of focus, there are moments where you're like, it wasn't present at all in my experience, therefore it didn't exist.
But I find this, so many of us, and this is part of the, when I went inside to decide what am I writing this book about, it was, wow, if I realize that I can control so much of my own experience by what I direct my attention towards, why is it that we are not taught how to better direct our attention,
especially in a world that is we see 20 ,000 advertisements a day.
So part of it is certainly learning to weed out distractions, but it's also there's a quietness that's like, this goes back to the, what do I really want?
And this exercise, I'll challenge people.
If you know that the trick here, then bear with me for 10 seconds.
And if you don't, then enjoy.
So wherever you are right now, again, if you can focus on something besides the road, if you're driving, look around and see everything in your field of view.
I'm going to give you 10 seconds to do this.
Everything in your field of view that is red, count the number of things that are in your field of view that are red, go, you know, a thousand, one, two, three, four, we're going to go on to, let's call that good.
So that's seven seconds.
How many blue things did you see?
And you're like, wait a minute.
You told me to count red.
And I'm like, exactly.
So how many blue things did you see?
And then you get the point, right?
The trick is that you see what you're looking for.
And by extension, if we apply this to our conversation around attention, whatever the thing that's dominant in your mind right now, you're going to, unless you can remain open and aware and present, all of those things are just going, you're going to see what you're looking for, versus being able to
be open and present.
This is one of the reasons that the concept of presence or awareness or an Eckhart Tolle, like being present in the now is so powerful because you see things more like what they are rather than like what you are.
And to me, that is very powerful.
And so by learning to direct our attention, we get to create, as you said, our experience.
It's not like we get to, you had a better twist on it, but it was like, this is the experience.
Your attention is the experience.
So where are you going to place it?
Let's choose rather than feeling like a cork in the tide.
That's something that's chosen for us.
I love that simple experiment.
I see so many different versions of it.
One of the things I'm curious about what your take is on this also is that I've come to make a distinction when I go into the world of attention and awareness these days.
And I have a long standing mindfulness practice and have done a lot of different work around this.
And a lot of times when we step into practices like this, the opening move is built around how do we focus our attention and oftentimes we're given a mantra or an anchor, like the breath or a word or phrase or prayer, which is great.
Really powerful skill, really powerful tool.
It will help you in so many ways.
But part of what you just brought up is a little bit of sort of like the ninja level of awareness in my mind.
And so, which is why I'm curious what your take is on this.
So the deeper I got into my practice over the years, like start to get exposed to this other world, which has been sort of like loosely phrased open monitoring.
This is a different type of attentiveness where instead of saying I'm going to cast my attention in a very specific and focused way, I'm going to effectively sit here and open my mind and see if I can actually be attentive in a very spacious monitoring way where instead of being like very narrow, I'm
actually casting the widest net possible.
I'm just going to sit here and say, okay, so I am a screen door in the summer and there's like a breeze blowing through me and there's going to be like warm and cool and fast and slow and dirt and moss and all this stuff.
And I'm just going to let it blow through, but I'm going to experience and feel and notice all of it.
And I feel like that's a different type of attentional training and experience that often we don't talk about.
But in my experience of life, that is where so much more aliveness comes from.
Well, first of all, it's ninja level for you to call that out.
I think that is a higher level order of the process of learning to direct your attention.
I think some practices call that difference between tension and awareness.
Like so awareness is sort of this openness screen door.
Like what is, what am I experiencing now?
To me, an interesting exercise is focusing on the senses.
You talked about, you know, hot and cold and breeze blowing on your skin and all these things.
And so just this process of awareness of if you just rely on your senses, you're not making any value judgments.
It's just like, that's what that feels like on my face.
Whatever. And I, there's a fun little twist of an exercise in the book about, take something that you have an opinion about.
Most people have an opinion about folding laundry.
You know, like it or hate it, like whatever.
Just talking to my wife about this last night.
Most people have an opinion are loading the dishwasher, for example, or unloading it.
You know, and the funny thing about this exercise, it sounds rather esoteric, but it's very like, again, the subhead on this book is a practical guide to freedom, creativity, and the life you love.
I think this is ruthlessly practical.
So the next time you go to the dryer, show up and look at this dryer and like, man, this is a machine that does chores for me.
Like touch the door.
What is it if the door's cold?
Okay. Pull the door.
There's a squeak. There's a sound.
What happens when you open the door?
Like a wave of heat hits you in the face.
What do you see when you look in there?
I see colors and I feel like when I put my hands in there, I feel this like static and then I smell things and feel things.
And like, what if you did that and you could fold an entire load of laundry?
It's going to take you like three minutes.
Just do that. And then juxtapose what that frame was like, how rich that was, how playful, rich, interesting, fascinating, sights, sounds, smells, feel like sensory and then go back to like, I freaking hate folding laundry.
It's like, that is the juxtaposition that we're faced with here.
It's like, you can live in that state.
And now someone out there on the jogging pad is going, dude, I have no desire to live in a state where I'm just like, like I'm tripping out on folding clothes.
But it does make a point.
And the point to go back to home base here is what you pay attention to matters.
And it dictates your experience of life.
So when you want to be in charge of that and learning to take charge of that has to do with being aware of these exercises, putting them into practical use, put them into practice to create the experience of life that you seek.
Let's do more of that and less, you know, cork and a tide.
Why is this happening to me?
When in reality, all of this is happening for you, if you're aware of it.
Just to be clear also, we're not talking about having some sort of giddy polyanistic view of life, you know, like that stuff happens, they're suffering around us and in between us.
There's some things that we can do things about.
There's some things that we can't.
And I think the invitation here is, it's a yes and it's not deny like a lot of what's happening.
But what if we also ask the question, like, is there an opportunity to focus our attention, our awareness in a way that in some way, qualitatively changes the nature of the experience to maybe on a spectrum from just making it slightly more bearable to actually feelingly profoundly alive, maybe we can step
a little bit more into that spectrum, as we move through all the experiences of life, which is going to include, you know, like as Zorba the Greek said, the full catastrophe.
Yeah, well, we're on the good life, right?
So let's like, how do we get more of that?
Well, it certainly has to do with what you pay attention to.
And when we talk about paying attention, it's really a choice.
If Viktor Frankl can do it in a concentration camp, we ought to be able to do it in life.
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
One of the things that you've sort of been alluding to loosely also, and this is again, another sort of like larger topic that you speak to, is the notion of how we experience time, how we become present in moments, and the opportunity for us to change our relationship with that.
And I feel like so many of us feel like we open our eyes in the morning, and we are just profoundly reactive until we close our eyes at night and that we don't have any control over both the experience of time, and also our ability to be present in any giving moment during our experience of time.
You plant the seeds and say, let's zoom the lens out here and look at this a little bit differently.
The notion of time management really fades into the background when we can create enough space just for a second to talk about what we've all experienced or had the experience of time shifting, right?
It's expanding or contracting that went so fast or, boy, this lecture is so slow.
We all have this experience.
And again, the framework for this book is I am advocating that there are a handful of tools that exist natively within us that if we can use them effectively, we can get to the best stuff in life more easily and more regularly.
The most connected feeling is to pursue the things that light us up, to find people and experiences that make this life rich, or to paraphrase the show, the good life.
It's on the other side of this and we can master these.
There's a handful of tools.
We've talked about a couple of them.
And what I noticed is that our relationship with time is, time is one of those tools.
And you're like, wait a minute, isn't time this thing that's running in the background, this conveyor belt that's marching us toward our death?
And it's like, no. And the reason we know that that's not true is because we've all had this experience of time expanding and contracting.
A friend of mine, Tim Ferriss, who might be familiar with some of your listeners, he talks about time dilation, where if you were, let's just say you're on a hike in nature and you've done so many things, so many of these things are novel and new, you're touching it, making your breakfast in the outdoors,
camping, for example.
And then you did this thing you've never seen before and saw this set of sights that you've never seen before and experienced this thing for the first time.
And boy, at the end of a couple of days, it feels like time, two or three days, feels like a week and it's a week's worth of experiences, new novel experiences that have sort of come in.
Well, if that's the case, then go back to this lived experience.
Do you want to live 50 % longer?
If I could told you you can live to be 150 or 170 or 200 years old, geez.
Well, it turns out that infusing a bunch of novelty, new things, and new experiences in your life, it actually changes how people report how much time has passed.
Now, that's a little esoteric and you got a squint to see it, but just like what it feels like to love to do something, just think of anyone or anything right now, whoever's listening or watching, like, what do you love to do?
Saturday morning, you wake up, you can go anywhere, do anything, what's the thing?
You're like, oh my gosh, I would, I don't care what the thing is, go play pickleball with my friends.
When you're playing pickleball, what happens?
The rest of the things fade away, you might talk about, there's a sense of the word, the A phrase that is popular here is the sense of flow.
Mahay, Chick sent me high, I was one of the first people to talk about this idea of flow and it's when things effortlessly happen, we lose track of time, things feel effortless and fun and connected and there's a joy and flow, we've all experienced that.
So, it turns out that isn't that like a really rich experience?
Well, cool, the people who are good at getting on the other side of their comfort zone, they know this about time and they actively are programming for it.
This is why doing something that you love professionally to get paid for it, there's a special reward there because we spend so much of our time working that if you can enjoy your work, that's not to say there's not going to be difficult times, but this is the sort of the hallmark of doing what you
love for work is like, wow, my experience of it, the time that it feels like, it feels rich and connected even if there's hard parts versus a lot of other people who do not have that in their work, talk about it being sort of more of a grind and there's a hundred different lenses that you can put on this,
but that's at the core.
Like time isn't this, sure, we've got this clock time, it makes it so that we could show up at this podcast on you and I and record this thing at the same time is very useful, but if there weren't clocks and time and stopwatches and second hands and minutes and time zones, boy, our experience of time
just out in the woods is different.
Let's get a little bit more of that.
And what if you could think about learning to manage and activate and tap into that as opposed to stashing more things into the day so that you can feel 1 % more accomplished, sort of the rat race you feel.
And I think that's interesting.
Yeah, Oliver Berkman, I love his take on sort of like a time management.
He's like the best productivity systems in the world, they're just going to give you the time to stuff more things into the same amount of time that like it's not about that.
It's actually, it's often counterproductive to actually what doing more of what genuinely matters to you in life.
Yeah, and you start to see how attention and time fitting, like you said, like what are you going to pay attention to such that when you have more time, you can do more of the things that let you up.
And that's the interesting thing about each of these tools is that they're all when you start to talk about them, they're all so hyper connected.
And to me that, you know, that's in part what makes us interesting, but it's sort of like an unfair advantage to the best stuff in life.
You start to think of these things as connected when you're paying attention.
Time works for you rather than against you.
And let's be real. How many 21 year olds or 23 year olds listening to this thinking they have to have it all figured out?
I'm on my life fourth or fifth career arc, and I'm realizing that man, life is actually long.
That's not to say that we shouldn't live with the sense of urgency and in revere and respect life, but boy, how much less stupid shit would you do if you realize that I'm going to really experiment here.
I'm going to play, I'm going to learn this.
I'm going to go deep on this thing as a podcaster, and then I'm going to have a career as an ex and a Y.
It made me completely relax.
And anytime I could afford to have the long -term view of things, things tended to turn out better.
So I'm trying to keep this stuff in context here because you started talking about time and it's like, whoa, where are we, bro?
What planet are we on?
Are we talking about time warps here?
No, I am talking about a life well lived and the people who report that they are doing this successfully have a different unique relationship with time relative to folks who do not.
Yeah. And as you described, when you understand even like a small set of tools or experiences that have this ability to quote warp time, whether it's dilation or like flow where you just completely lose track of it, it changes the quality of your experience, of your life.
Just a couple of weeks ago, we were visiting our daughter in Telluride, Colorado, which is tiny town.
Amazing. In a box canyon at elevation, we happened to be there during that one 24 hour window where there were some sort of electrical storm where the northern lights were basically covering the incontinential US.
So at like close to midnight, and this is a ski town and they have a gondola that runs year round.
So at like close to midnight, we basically go out, we go on the gondola, we take it up to 12 ,000 feet.
We're on the top of the mountain.
There's no light here.
There is like no ambient light.
If you look down in the canyon, you see the gorgeous lights of the town, but you're so far from them.
And we just lay down and look up at the sky, like this stunning light show and time stopped.
I couldn't tell you whether it was there for 30 seconds or five minutes, whatever it was.
Had I been upright, my jaw would have been on the ground.
And I'm just like, everything about me slowed down.
I'm there with my kid.
It's like magical. And you're just like, we do have, and Dr.
Kelton talks about this notion of awe, like being one of these other things that really can profoundly warp your experience of time, which is what I was experiencing.
And the invitation that I think you're really offering is saying there are these things, slight changes that we can say yes to that really can change the way that we experience time.
And when we do that, when we just make it more of a practice, when we look for those opportunities and we get to actually start to shape time to more accommodate the way they want to feel in our lives, we change the way that life happens around us.
And it just we participate in a very different way.
Is that right? Absolutely.
Yeah. Well, you just go everywhere with me on my book tour so you can explain time.
You mentioned Oliver Burke when I was talking to Oliver yesterday.
I referenced some of his material.
He wrote a great book called 4000 weeks, which is essentially about time and time management and how it's sort of dead.
And it's just an appreciation for a lot of the things.
There's a whole book about this topic, essentially.
To me, it's an important piece of a bigger pie, but I really want to bring this back to earth, right?
This is super practical.
What if you literally can have the idea that life is long?
Wow. And then it's okay for your kid to be until you're right exploring the post -college, like, great, take your time.
Enjoy that. Live in the mountains for a while.
Feel what it feels like to take a break after you've done something really hard versus like, you don't have it figured out.
You don't have your lifelong career job.
Just think of the different human experience that that little lens alone can create.
So it is very practical and there is, as I'm trying to sort of beat this drum, there's a pattern of people that are good at sort of getting at some of the stuff that is on the other side of our comfort zone.
There's a handful of tools that continually are referenced in their experience.
And each of us, I think when I'm saying these things, they're learning to pay attention, thinking about how time feels like intuition.
These tools, you start to go like, man, this is a pretty dang powerful toolbox and the irony is not dissimilar to creativity.
These things have been trained out of us.
The good news is that they're still in us.
They might be a little dusty, but it's pretty easy to go back in there, dust them off and have a great relationship with these tools and live a richer, more meaningful.
And again, this book is about practicality.
It's this is a great lever for the next chapter of your life.
Speaking of which, as we have this conversation right now, as you invite people into the notion of not playing it safe in their lives and offering tools to help sort of navigate stepping into that space of the unknown, how are you not playing it safe in your work and life right now?
Oof. In order to answer that, I feel like I have to give a little bit of context, maybe even for the book itself.
So let's zoom out. Let's go back in time, 18 months, maybe even a little longer.
Let's go back two years.
I'm working on this book.
I got a book deal. It's the sophomore follow -up to my last one, which is a best -seller, a creative calling.
I'm working on this book.
I'm researching for five months and then I'm actively writing for 13 months on this book every day.
And it's eight weeks from my deadline.
And I come to the realization that this is not the book that I want to put out.
This is not what I was supposed to publish.
And I, not dissimilar, have been, this is a tiny betrayal.
I got slurped into the world of writing a book that I thought that everybody else wanted rather than the one that I wanted.
And this is on the backside of having my startup acquired, which I chronicle, and having a little time and space to look around and ask myself journal on the same topic every day, which is a tip that I got from James Clear on what is it that I really want.
Really interesting exercise, by the way.
But I'm eight weeks from this deadline and I call my agent who's absolutely awesome.
Steve is incredible.
And I'm like, I have a difficult, we need to have a difficult conversation here.
And this conversation is that, you know, this 55 ,000 words that I've completed at the 63 ,000 word manuscript is, they're going in the trash.
And here's what I want to write about.
This is the book that I'm going to do.
I believe I can do it in eight weeks.
And the only way to know is for me to begin.
And so Steve helped me talk to my publisher about this.
And she was incredibly supportive.
And not similar to so many of the things that we've talked about already.
Like all of those time just took a back seat.
It was like, certainly I was very busy over those next eight weeks, but time was working for me, you know, rather than happening to me.
And it was some of the most profoundly creative, fulfilling time that I've ever spent.
Difficult in all the ways you'd expect that exercise to be.
And yet it was insanely risky.
I mean, Steve is as thoughtful as like book agents.
They're very thoughtful.
They're like, okay, like, how do I support my guy here?
And tell them you can imagine these conversations.
So, you know, it's like, I've been in them numerous times as an author, so I don't need that to imagine that I know it.
Maybe the people are listening, you're like, you can imagine, like, okay, so work with me here, work with me.
We got, we got eight weeks here and you're pretty much done with a book.
That would be pretty dang good book.
We've all like been along for the ride and you're gonna, this is the way you just, this is in the trash now.
Okay. Okay. Help me here.
Help me. No. I mean, I'm jesting a little bit, but it's risky.
And yet I was quiet enough and I had realized that what I was doing again was betraying that tiny part of me that said, this is the book you have to write, not this other one.
And I'd been just ignoring that and stuffing that feeling down.
And when I decided to pay attention to it, everything I needed was there.
And although time on calendar time was short, clock time was short, I had all of the time that I needed exactly the right amount it turned out to put this book out.
And when I turned this book in, my agent and publisher like, oh my God, could you imagine if we'd written the other book?
Like this is, this is the book it was supposed to be in.
And two things were true in that window of time.
One, I had a picture of my wife, Kate, in the upper right hand corner.
And it's sweet that I had a picture of my wife and that's, but that's not the point of that.
The point is that I'm writing these things for specific actual people in my life.
And the beginning, I wrote this particular section for Kate, but that picture of Kate up there just reminded me that I'm actually writing this stuff for real people in my life.
And I want to say, I see you're stuck here.
I think this is going to be helpful.
Here's what I've done.
Here's what the research says.
So it's written for actual humans.
And then the other left hand corner of my monitor was at little yellow sticky that said, don't play it safe.
And that was a reminder that the language that the actions and that very act of writing this book, again, this goes back to your question, which where's the time that where you have not played it safe recently, it was in the making of this book that I had realized that, gosh, and then of course I'm
doing it. And I'm like, this is, I feel so good.
It's engaged and connected, and this is what I'm supposed to be doing.
And I knew it all along.
Just God helped me find my way back to myself again and do more of this.
So that's where the title came from.
And yet, you know, I'm sure since this book has come out, I've played it safe many a times, but the point is not that we won't.
It's to acknowledge that we're going to make mistakes, but we need to return to ourselves, return to this point of view, this disposition of realizing that all the best stuff is on the other side of our comfort zone.
Learning how to play through fear and risk to get at some of this stuff is a skill.
And if we can focus on it, we can develop these skills and live richer, more meaningful, connected, fulfilling lives.
It feels like a good place for us to come full circle.
So I'm going to ask you the question that I've actually asked you a few times over the years in this container of good life project.
If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up in what sounds like a hedonistic answer to do what you love with who you love on your own timeline on your schedule, I believe that there is something to that.
And yet that almost sounds a little bit too active.
There's a certain relationship with a good life that an awareness, like a truth rather than this act of mimesis of seeing what other people are doing and running at that as a vector of the good life.
There's a quietness that I believe is true.
And when we get honest with ourselves, we start to be able to hear what it is that we truly want.
And in my world, if we do pay attention to these seven tools that reside naturally within us, that we will get better at doing the things that living the life I would call it the good life that when we get to our death bed, we will look back.
None of us will have no regrets, but that we can have fewer regrets for a life well lived.
To me, that is a doable thing.
I don't love the hedonistic, like everything I want, when I want it, with who I want it, because to me, there's a little bit of that we have had to have listened first in order to do that.
And I don't want to ignore that part of it.
I think it's a really important part.
So the good life is being quiet enough, smart enough, wise enough to know what you want, and then realizing that you have all of the tools within you to tap into it.
Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode safe, but you'll also love the conversation we had with Chase about finding your creative calling.
You'll find a link to his episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me Jonathan Fields, editing help by Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter, crafted our theme music, and special thanks to Shelley Dell for her research on this episode.
And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app.
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Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, and I'll see you next time.
