How Safety Sometimes Stops Us From Living (and what to do about it) | Chase Jarvis

So much of our lives is governed by the desire to feel safe. I get it. The world can feel like an unstable, scary place. Feeling physically and psychologically safe matters. To our mental and physical health. But, does that come a point where playing it too safe actually causes us harm? Makes our worlds, our relationships, experiences and lives smaller. Less good?

Feeling like, deep down, you know there’s more to life than merely 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. 

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” 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 Red Bull. He’s also the co-founder and former CEO of CreativeLive, an online education platform that’s helped over 50 million students unlock their creative potential.

In our conversation, Chase shares his personal journey of shedding the shackles of “playing it safe” to fully embrace his authentic path. He offers a refreshingly candid perspective on the innate tools we all possess to courageously step beyond our comfort zones and craft a life overflowing with freedom, creativity, and fulfillment. If you’re ready to trade in the treadmill of “supposed to” for the trail of “what if,” then this boundary-pushing dialogue is for you.

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Episode Transcript:

Chase Jarvis: [00:00:00] 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. And 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, fulfilling lives.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:32] 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 world, 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 Red bull. 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:12] 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, you know, that sort of like, uh, 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, um, never played safe. Interesting phrase. And it’s sort of this Invitation to live boldly and authentically. And in fact, you use that language fairly 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 on 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:03:38] 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 look back on all of the best stuff in my life and I did that for any number of reasons, I can talk a little bit about it. Like why I just was at a particular part of my point in my life where I sort of 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 we’re biologically wired to not do that stuff. We’re biologically wired to stay comfortable. And to be clear, I’m not. When I say safety, I’m not talking about seatbelts or sunscreen.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:04:58] 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, you know, inside where most of this stuff is, is there’s a repeatable set of tools that I feel like we can use reliably to go there and to program our experience like 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:11] Yeah. 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 we’re talking about here. Yeah. I’m curious, when this touched down in your life sort of like, 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 has been like everything has 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 from everything you’ve taught about how you’re supposed to live your life. Yeah. And yet you take this left turn, which is completely counterculture, 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:07:17] 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 back going back to second grade, Miss Kelly, I had a magic show. I had a stand up comedy act. Now, 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 they. I like Miss Kelly and 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, I liked it. How did I start pursuing medical school? Well, my uncle told me that smart, talented, hardworking people, they’re either doctors or lawyers or engineers or, you know, or whatever.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:08:39] And 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 to decide not to go into medicine was because I had already basically spent a lot of money. I was in debt, student debt, pursuing things that everybody else wanted from me. I had given up on so many things, you know, the creative side of myself that I was sharing with you earlier that Miss Kelly talked to me. I realized that I’d betrayed myself enough times and that, you know what? Enough is enough. When you’re faced with sort of death in your family and the reckoning of, oh my gosh, there’s I’m going to die at some point. amor fati, 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 step 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:10:01] 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. I 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 if you if you’re listening to this right now and it’s like, I don’t want to, you think that I had it all figured out. This was a 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, mm, that’s kind of interesting. It doesn’t matter how you got there. It 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 or 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?

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:09] Yeah. 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, it’s 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:12:13] 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, Brené 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 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 it was like 2010 or something super long time ago. And she 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, grabbed her purse, this is all on camera, and sets it up on the couch. And she opens the purse, pulls out her wallet, opens her wallet, and she pulls out a little piece of paper in her wallet. And on 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 interesting things there. One is that there’s not that many. Not that much room for many names, right? It’s it’s on a one inch by one inch piece of paper.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:13:32] So they’re 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 inch 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 who 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, okay, 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 he 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:48] And it’s so interesting. Right? You know, as we have this conversation, I’m 58 years old. I’m still running experiments.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:14:53] Absolutely.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:54] And sure, like 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 then, oh, okay, so maybe I’m okay, 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 fall in love with that I really want to devote myself to, and it sustains you indefinitely. And this is that’s an amazing thing. In my experience, that’s more of 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:15:36] Absolutely aligned with you. I think it’s it’s a mythology and whether it’s sort of like an interesting way that I think about it, I’m 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. He’s like, this book could also be called The 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 to them because they’re on this path, right? They’re in line with our they’re just aligned with who we are as our core.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:17:01] 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 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 stairs, I’m going to go a couple 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 1% better in the direction of our dreams. And it’s very doable.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:14] Yeah, and there is an evil overlord. But but they they lie within. Not without. Like it’s true. Like that. That is the inside game also. But it’s interesting because you bring up another thing which has been mummified 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 okay. 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 a 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, of trusting yourself like the art of trusting yourself. Intuition, which I feel is, is such an important part of us sussing out like, okay, 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:19:28] 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, is thought to be the pinnacle. And sure, it made us, you know, it gave us tools which helped us evolve and all of those things. Yeah. Awesome. And it’s also sort of slow and bumbling 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 that appear that intuition actually takes rational thought into account as well. Versus rational thought doesn’t take into consideration intuition. You know, I started to think, wow, this is actually kind of an interesting skill. And the, you know, the follow up question, the natural question is like, well, okay, 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:20:53] 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 is 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:58] 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, An 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 it’s insight based. 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 heady 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. And a lot of the behavioral economists like, they would kind of they 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 have so much data. You see the pattern and you just kind of know.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:23:25] 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 got to put it in a different place. Exactly what you’re talking about.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:36] Right. So you don’t know that’s what’s happening. That’s one of the theories around this in that world. But what you’re adding, which I so agree with, is 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, but, you know, like, listen, please listen. We’re just kind of like somebody saying something.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:24:07] Right? Like screaming at the top of the lungs. That part of our body. And to me, it’s important to say that. 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 is sort of like our Ram. Right? We 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 on to that tune into that a little bit. This is not we don’t have to be, you know, 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 start telling 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. Uh, I’m 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:25:22] 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. It tells me things. I’d like to learn to listen to that better. And then what I find, and as I’ve deconstructed my own experiences and the experiences of hundreds of the world’s top performers and ordinary people who’ve done extraordinary things, is that this is one of the tools that they really tune into.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:40] That also brings into the conversation the notion of attention or attentiveness, like, what are we actually attuning ourselves to? And this is one of the things that you also dive deep into an 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?

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:26:59] That’s a little wordplay in that chapter, because the chapter opens up with hey, look! Look at a baby. A baby coos and is 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 is, you know, the studies that were done in the the orphanages in Romania where just the deaths, literally deaths, they were healthy babies, but, you know, all measure, but they weren’t held because there were too many of them. They couldn’t go around and hold them. There’s a lot of really interesting studies that that’s a fact. Like if you don’t get attention, if a baby is 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, right? You have to stand out. You have to get attention. And yet, you know that little twist that 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:28:11] I’m climbing the right mountain. It’s also in when you pay attention to other people. The feeling of being 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 is a meditation and mindfulness teacher and coach. She is 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 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, you know, 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, you know, meditation training or mindfulness or awareness practice, like focus what you choose to focus on literally dictates your experience of life. One of the examples I use in the book is Viktor Frankl in Concentration Camps in 1942, the most horrible place you could probably ever be.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:29:22] 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, he chronicles this very interestingly. But that is the the ultimate form of directing your attention, right? You’re creating meaning, and through what you pay attention to in this particular environment, it’s very stoic, right? It’s like 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, seems like if what we pay attention to literally describes the experience that we have of being alive, doesn’t it make sense that if we we should learn to direct our attention. It seems like it’s a really powerful and valuable skill. Let’s do more of that. And 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:34] Yeah. I mean, obviously this resonates deeply with me and sort of like 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, you know, this notion of you said your attention dictates effectively, so like the experiences of your life. I would even go a step further and say your attention is your life. Yep. Because basically, whatever you are attuned to in any given moment in time is the nature of your experience, you know? So like, 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:40] It goes for experiences. I’ve talked about, like on and off over the years. I have have tinnitus. So there’s a sound that, like in theory, my brain generates, it exists inside of my head and nowhere else, and it can be extremely 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. 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:32:32] Yeah, but many of us are in pain.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:35] Talk to me more about Take Me There more.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:32:36] I’d be on board with exactly what you said. And I think your example is so prescient and so real. It’s like when I’m listening to people in my community creators, entrepreneurs, people who are trying to build a living or a life that they love. You know, 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 that’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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:09] Either way, ringing.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:33:10] In your ears. It’s like by learning to direct your attention that can bring it in and out of focus it. There are moments where you’re like, I know 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 and said, 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, let’s get. Why is it that we are not taught how to better direct our attention, especially in a world that is, you know, 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 I really want. And this exercise I’ll challenge people. If you know that the trick here, then bear with me for 10s. 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 10s 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 in 1001 two, three, four.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:34:23] 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, you know, Versus being able to be open and present. This is one of the reasons that the concept of presence or awareness, or in 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 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 know, 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:38] I love that simple experiment. I’ve seen so many different versions of it. Yeah, one of the things I’m curious about what your take is on this also is that, like I’ve, 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 a 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, I started to get exposed to this other world, which has been sort of like loosely phrased, open monitoring. And 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:37:23] 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 the difference between attention 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:11] You’re just talking to my wife about this last night.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:38:14] Okay, so you have an if most people have an opinion or 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 a life you love. I think there’s this 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? The door is 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 when I put my hands in there, I feel it’s like static. And. 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, feels like sensory.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:39:21] 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 some someone out there on the jogging path is going, dude, I have no, no desire to live in a state where I’m just like, ooh, 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 wouldn’t 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, putting 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 tie. And 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:15] Clear, also, we’re not talking about having some sort of giddy, Pollyanna view of life. You know, like bad stuff happens that are suffering around us and within us and in between us. There are some things that we can do things about. There are 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 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 feeling like 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 like Zorba the Greek said, the full catastrophe.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:41:03] Yeah. Well, we’re here 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:22] 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, um, 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 given moment. During our experience of time. You plant the seeds and say, like, let’s zoom the lens out here and look at this a little bit differently.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:42:12] The notion of time management really fades into the background when we can create enough space just for a second to talk about. Look, 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. You know, whatever. 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, like 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, you know, contracting.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:43:27] A friend of mine, Tim Ferriss, who might be familiar with some of your listeners, he talks about time dilation, where if you’re 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. You’re making your breakfast in the outdoors. You’re camping, for example. And then you did this thing you’ve never seen before and saw this, you know, 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. Three, 2 or 3 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 could live to be 150 or 100 and 70 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 to squint to see it.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:44:34] 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. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 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. You’ve all we’ve all experienced that. So it turns out that if 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:45:43] 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 100 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. It’s very useful. But if there weren’t clocks and time and, you know, stopwatches and second hands and minutes and time zones, boy, our experience of time just out in the woods is different. Let’s 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. The sort of the rat race you feel. And I think that’s interesting.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:46:47] Yeah. Oliver Burkeman I love his take on sort of like a time management. He’s like the best productivity systems in the world are just going to give you the time to stuff more things into the same amount of time that it’s not about that. You know, it’s actually totally it’s often counterproductive to actually what doing more of what genuinely matters to you in life, you know?

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:47:06] Yeah. And you start to see how attention and time fit in, 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 light 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 are listening to this thinking? They have to have it all figured out. I’m on my like, 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 a sense of urgency and and Revere and respect life, but boy, how much less stupid shit would you do if you realized 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 X 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 start 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 who report that they are doing this successfully have a different, unique relationship with time relative to folks who do not. Yeah.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:48:35] And as you described, you know, 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, you know, like flow where you just completely lose track of it, it changes the quality of your experience of your life. Just a couple weeks ago, we were visiting our daughter in Telluride, Colorado, which is a tiny town. Amazing, you know, in a box canyon at elevation. We happen to be there during that one 24 hour window where there were some sort of like, uh, electrical storm where the northern lights were basically covering the continental US. So at like close to midnight. And this is a ski town and they have a gondola that runs year round. So like close to midnight, like we basically go out, we go on the gondola, we take it up to 12,000ft. We’re on the top of the mountain. There’s no light here. Like 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:39] Yeah, I couldn’t tell you whether I was there for 30s or five minutes. Whatever it was, had I been upright, my jaw would have been on the ground. And I’m just like. Like everything about me slowed down. I’m there with, like, my kid. It’s like magical, you know? And you’re just like we do have. And Doctor Dacher Keltner talks about, like, this notion of or like being one of these other things that really can profoundly warp your experience of time, which is what I was experiencing. And yeah, the invitation I think you’re really offering is saying, like, there are these things, like slight changes that we can, like, say yes to that really can change the way that we experience time. And when we do that on 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 that we want to feel in our lives, we change the way that life happens around us, you know, and it just we participated in a very different way. Is that right?

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:50:35] Absolutely. Yeah. Will you just go everywhere with me on my book tour so you can explain time? You mentioned Oliver Burkeman. 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, that it’s okay to for your kid to be in Telluride 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 and you know, versus like, you don’t have it figured out. You don’t have your, you know, lifelong career job. It’s just think of the different human experience that that little lens alone can create. So it is very practical. And there is, as I tried 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, you know, each of us, I think, when I’m saying these things are learning to pay attention, thinking about how time feels like intuition, these tools 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 and dust them off and have a great relationship with these tools and live a richer, more meaningful. And I’m, you know, again, this book is about practicality. It’s like, this is a great lever for the next chapter of your life.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:52:26] 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 like navigate stepping into that space of the unknown. Um, how are you not playing it safe in your work and life right now? Oof!

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:52:47] 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 bestseller, a creative calling. I’m working on this book, I’m researching, and 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:53:57] 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 of 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 dissimilar 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, and all the ways you’d expect that exercise to be. And yet it was insanely risky. I mean, Steve is a thoughtful was like book agents. They’re very thoughtful. They’re like, okay, like, how do I support my guy here? And tell him, you can imagine these conversations? You know, it’s like I’ve been in.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:55:08] Them numerous times as an author, so I don’t even have to imagine it, I know it.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:55:12] Maybe the people listening are 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 the book. That would be pretty dang good book. We’ve all, like, been along for the ride. And you’re going to. 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 all the 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 were 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. 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:56:35] 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 a little yellow sticky that said, don’t play it safe. And that was a reminder that the language that the actions and that the very act of writing this book, again, this goes back to your question, which where is 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 life feels so good. It’s engaged and connected, and this is what I’m supposed to be doing. And I knew it all along. And just, God, help 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:57:48] 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.

 

Chase Jarvis: [00:58:01] 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 active 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 at living the life. I would call it the good life, that when we get to our deathbed 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.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:59:29] Mm. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode, Safe bet, 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. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle 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. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did. Since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven-second favor favorite and share it. Maybe on social or by text or by email. Even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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