Next month’s book is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Join the book club to get all the posts.
This month we read Never Play it Safe by Chase Jarvis. Jarvis’ premise is that the best stuff in life lives just outside your comfort zone1. While comfort isn’t bad, and can lead to a good life, it may not be the best that we can do for ourselves2. If we’re willing to push into discomfort we can find something better than mere comfort.
To help readers push out of their comfort zone Jarvis introduces the seven levers he’s observed while watching people become their best creative selves3.
Jarvis’ 7 Levers
Lever one is attention. Jarvis encourages us to spend less time working to get in front of others and get their attention and more time worrying about where we put our attention4. He goes through the basics many readers have heard before, don’t waste your time following the crowd, stay away from the stuff some big company says you should focus on, and while everyone is deserving of respect not everyone is deserving of your attention5. Far from expecting that your attention should never wander, we should take a page out of mindfulness texts and simply recognize when our attention wanders and refocus it when we notice we’re mindlessly giving our attention away.
The second lever Jarvis identifies is our time. While this seems very similar to the first lever, he takes a slightly different tack as he encourages us to not judge ourselves by the timelines others establish for life goals6 and instead worry about where we are now. I think of this in terms of my most important relationship, my marriage, and note that my marriage of the future is made up of all the moments I exist in now and how I treat my wife. Focus is another key highlighted as Jarvis looks at how we should spend our time. Specifically, we need to make sure we have large swaths of uninterrupted time to focus on a task so that we can do a good job of it7. Here he channels Cal Newport and Deep Work who has spent years telling us to find time without interruptions.
Third Jarvis encourages us to trust our gut in a world that trains intuition out of us8. The fictional work My Friends tackled this idea head on as we followed a teenage artist that saw things differently. Instead of encouragement he had a teacher that only wanted to see the exact things described on the syllabus. The teacher saw art in a single way, a map that you must follow to be an artist. Lucky for the artist, his friends saw something different and encouraged him to follow his intuition, and he became a world-renowned artist. Jarvis too wants us to worry less about the prescribed map and find our own path.
While many people chafe against constraints, Jarvis introduces them as another lever that creative people can use to find their best creative works. But constraints can help you be more creative, and we have the Köln Concert to show us a great example. A substandard nearly broken piano was used to give one of the greatest Jazz concerts ever. In fact without all the issues present in the piano we likely would never have heard about this concert. It would have fallen into obscurity along with all the other regular Jazz piano concerts.
Our fifth lever is play, which gets beaten out of adults in a world focused on productivity. The Industrial Revolution was the impetus that took play away from adults, making it exclusively the realm of frivolous children9. Much like we treat rest as an inconvenience10, we treat play as a way of shirking responsibility if we see an adult doing it. But the step from play to flow is a very small one and when we’re in the groove our brain is alight with dopamine11. Most of us can remember a time when we played a sport or with Lego and fell into the pursuit with abandon. Hours flew by without notice and we finished the strenuous activity with energy to spare. If you want to be creative, there needs to be a place for play in your life.
Most of us view failure as undesirable as a baby’s soiled diaper. If we have to deal with it, we do it fast and then forget about it. We certainly never mention it again or look at the event as a happy point in our lives. To this attitude Jarvis asks if we’re really doing hard work, our best work, if we’re not occasionally encountering failure12. When I used to race mountain bikes I realized that if I wasn’t crashing, or getting very close, I wasn’t pushing my bike handling skills to their limit so I could become a better cyclist. We should be applying the same idea to our creative work. Not simply trying again with no changes13, but tweaking our approach to increase the likelihood of success on our next attempt14.
Finally our seventh lever is practice. There are two parts to practice. First you must have enough volume15 in your practice so that quality can be achieved. If I want to be a better cyclist I can’t just take the best 2 workouts from a pro and then do them. I need to ride 4 – 6 days a week to build a good base so that I can then do the hard workouts that really will build my speed. While talent can carry you part way, deliberate practice is what will let you maximize your abilities.
Should You Read Never Play it Safe by Chase Jarvis?
While there is much to recommend this book, it falls into the same traps that any book in the self-help genre falls into. Jarvis relies on the stories of successful people as prime examples of why his ideas work. This starts in the introduction as he tells the story of Paul, a photographer in Africa that sold his stuff and went homeless to get a camera. Jarvis uses the success that Paul got to illustrate how committed you need to be to win at the creative life.
The problem with this is that for every Paul out there we have hundreds that were just as committed and didn’t succeed. This striving and failure is even represented in my past creative efforts. Years ago I followed my intuition, as suggested by Jarvis in this book, and started to focus heavily on my writing. I published courses. I revamped them and my marketing when I didn’t see the sales I wanted. I paid for mastermind groups, and courses.
I passioned as hard as anyone and took risks and went to conferences and wrote for many publications. I put years of effort in and the end result was I nearly put my family out of a house as I neglected my paid work to follow my passion.
We never hear about those stories of failure though because they don’t match with the narrative the author is trying to push, and these people don’t speak up because they feel like failures. They’re embarrassed. Plus who wants to hear a 30 minute talk from someone that failed at a dream and still washes floors?
No conference is booking that speaker.
Just like every self-help author I’ve read, Jarvis greatly underplays the role of luck in success. Paul was lucky to meet another famous photographer before he starved and had to give up on his dreams. Sure he put effort into being in good spots to meet photographers, but it was mostly luck that someone was willing to listen to him in that moment.
You should use these books as inspiration, but remember that you can use all the levers described here and still not fulfill the creative dream authors are selling you. Great meaning can be found in mediocrity and it’s okay to not follow hustle culture into the realm of working every minute of the day.
Jarvis fails to recognize how he supports the industry of the self-made person. No one gets everything solely on their own merit. Schools, roads, and myriad other public goods contributed to your success. It’s quite likely that there are many people out there far better than you that will never get a chance. Not because they didn’t work as hard, but because they had financial scarcity that meant they had a single chance and it didn’t work. Many of the successes we herald as ideals to follow came from a place of privilege to start and could take 12 tries. They had parents to fall back on, or didn’t have kids so their financial obligations were not as large. Maybe their spouse is a high paid lawyer so they can keep trying whatever and not worry about money until something finally clicks.
Then we tell a story about how they just kept pushing and won. Oh, you should follow this example. We then neglect to mention that they had the financial backing, and they conveniently forget that and call themselves a self-made success.
Alex Banayan exemplifies this in The Third Door as he tells us to keep going and find a third way around our issues. His third way was being able to not work for months and find a space in his parent’s law office where he could sit and think. He somehow had enough money to jet around trying to interview people like Bill Gates. He could skip final exams in university to maybe get an interview. The tens of thousands of dollars could be risked by Alex without question. His whole book is littered with examples of his witless spending which is held up as an example of how to push to success.
Unfortunately for much of life, that’s the type of person that succeeds. Someone that could have been successful in many fields because of their access to money and the friends of their parents. They could keep trying until the luck of success found them, but then they pass success off as solely accomplished via their hard work.
So should you read this? Sure it’s got some good ideas to jog your mind into a more creative space. It will challenge you to explore the things you really want. Getting out a journal and doing some thinking about what you want based on the content of the book can help you adjust the life you currently have to get it closer to the one you want.
Just don’t expect that you’ll read it, follow the advice, and suddenly have the life you’ve always dreamed of. In fact, don’t drop everything as Jarvis suggests a few times. Take a measured approach and make sure that your family can still eat.
- Purchase on Bookshop.org – support local bookstores
- Purchase on Amazon
- Never Play it Safe Pg 3 ↩︎
- The Big Leap talks about this differentiating between your Zone of Excellence (comfort) and your Zone of Genius (the best thing you can do) ↩︎
- Never Play it Safe Pg 18, 19 ↩︎
- Never Play it Safe Pg 29 ↩︎
- Never Play it Safe Pg 52 ↩︎
- Never Play it Safe 70 ↩︎
- Never Play it Safe 78 ↩︎
- Never Play it Safe 94 ↩︎
- Never Play it Safe 139, 140 ↩︎
- Rest Loc 65 ↩︎
- PlayDHD Loc 413 ↩︎
- Never Play it Safe Pg 167 ↩︎
- Never Play it Safe Pg 169 ↩︎
- Our book for July, Farsighted covered how to deal with failure and how to change our path forward to do better next time ↩︎
- Never Play it Safe 202 ↩︎