- Rolling.
- Hey, everybody, how's it going?
I'm Chase, welcome to another episode
of the Chase Jarvis Live Show here on CreativeLive.
This is a show where I sit down
with the world's top creators, entrepreneurs
and thought leaders and I do everything I can
to unpack their brains and bring`valuable information
to you with the hope of you living your dreams and career
and hobby and in life.
My guest today is a New York Times best selling author,
he was the former Director of Marketing for American Apparel
and then wrote one of my favorite books of all time
called Trust Me, I'm Lying, about media manipulation,
then a book called The Obstacle is the Way,
which has helped popularize stoic philosophy
and we're here to talk about his new book, Perennial Seller.
My guest today is the amazing Ryan Holiday.
- Thanks, man.
(lively music)
(audience applause)
- We love you.
- Thank you for being on the show.
- Of course, you were my first big interview
that I ever did.
- Second time on the show and the first one
was right at Trust Me, I'm Lying,
which was like four years ago now, three years ago?
- No, five.
- Five? - Five at least, yeah.
- Holy crap, I'll never go five years
without you being on the show.
That means we've been doing this for a long time.
- Yeah, you could say that it's a perennial show.
- Bomp, bomp, shhh.
We're going to unpack the book, but before we do,
we're in Austin, Texas, we were just talking about
the last time you were on this show,
you were living in the middle of Los Angeles, were you not?
- Yeah, I was either in Los Angeles
or I lived in New York, very urban, yeah.
- One of those two places, super urban.
I thought of you like a crazy renegade marketer
who was hacking billboards for American Apparel
and helping people launch best selling books of their own.
And now we're in Austin, Texas, you're just talking
about you drove past the farm store.
- Yeah.
- Massive life change,
so have you moved to the country to write
or what's the story behind your life transformation?
- I think that one of the reasons I left New York,
was that there was too much going on in New York
and it's very hard to do work that I liked
in the sense of when you're in Manhattan
and even when I'm there like on business,
there's an unlimited amount of things.
I don't know that you can do stuff culturally
or sightseeing or whatever,
but there's so many people there
doing really great work that it almost feels
like you're being irresponsible not taking certain meetings,
taking certain jobs, going to certain events
and so I found it was like incredibly hard
not just to write, but to do any sort of thinking
or any of the work that had propelled me to be able
to afford to move to New York City in the first place.
First I just moved to Austin, to just like Austin proper
and part of it was like I won't feel bad
not being at a party in New York City if I live in Austin,
because I live in Austin and I shouldn't be there, right?
So it was like it was a way
of just sort of radically saying no and simplifying things
and then as things are wont to do, it quickly snowballed
from me living on the east side of Austin,
to living very east of Austin on a cattle ranch,
which has been great.
- I follow you on Instagram,
of course I follow everything you do,
and I'm watching you feed carrots to donkeys.
- Yeah, or this morning I woke up
and one of our Longhorns had jumped over the fence.
You spend all this time making this barbed wire fence,
of course they can't go through the fence
and you think you've all got it.
Then you just watch this 1,500 pound animal
just pfft, right over the fence.
Yeah, I don't know, it keeps me busy
and in a way that's not, that's very the opposite
of what I do for a living.
Having that balance has been really, really good for me.
- I will jump on that bandwagon.
I love working with my hands
and so much of the work I'm doing right now is very, it's--
- Yeah, cerebral.
- Yeah, it's very cerebral work and it's leadership
and inspiring others and learning from others
and applying that to the CreativeLive world,
or to make videos and whatever we're doing.
I still love, we've got a, mostly in San Francisco now,
we have a home in Seattle and we had a big remodel
and I got to get into it a little bit.
- Sure.
- Felt so good.
- I mean it feels good, it takes you away
from what you're doing, but I've also found
it's very humbling, too.
So like all the things I do on my farm, they don't require,
they don't require you to be smart in the way
that I always thought of myself as smart.
So it's like, we're having this garden built
and I hired my 16-year-old neighbor to do 98% of the work
and then I'm just sort of involved on the periphery.
But there's not a lot of things that 16-year-olds
are often showing me how to do
and there's not a lot of things that I'm having
to watch YouTube videos to figure out.
It's like the farm stuff, you don't have to be smart,
you just have to be patient and you have to be tough, right?
And that's just so the opposite
of what I do on the computer or what I do when I'm writing.
I think it's made me better at the other things that I do.
- I love the connection.
I gonna go back five years ago to Trust Me, I'm Lying
and maybe even how you got into that whole world
because you were a marketer.
So talk to me about a) how you landed up in marketing
and then the transition to, maybe how you identify today.
- Yeah, so five years ago, I sort of sat down
and wrote a book, which today we would say
it's a riff about fake news
and about the manufacturing of fake news
and how this system can be and is sort of manipulated
by marketers to get messages out into this very noisy world.
- Whether marketers are companies
or politicians or messangers.
- Yeah, how information spreads in the internet age.
I thought I was basically lighting my marketing career
on fire, literally like destroying it by writing this book
and it sort of went the opposite direction.
I started a company that's worked with all sorts
of cool clients since then.
But what it really opened up for me was the idea
of writing as a profession.
That was my first book, then I've done now,
I think I'm on my sixth book, six books in five years.
It's been, let's say exhausting, to put it mildly,
but just the idea of being able to wake up and have an idea
and write about it and communicate it to an audience,
to me is, not only is that the end of marketing,
that's like the goal of marketing,
but that's very creatively doing it.
I would say I sort of identify as a writer first
and then I keep my hand in the marketing world
as a way of keeping things interesting
and then also making sure that I'm not,
I don't ever just want to be on the sidelines
sort of talking about how things might be going.
I want to actually be doing the work.
- Know. - Yeah.
- When you wrote your first book,
I'm gonna go back to the fake news comment.
Of course the political environment in the United States
is unlike anything I think, that anybody saw coming.
Or if you saw it coming and you talked about it,
people would like downplay it.
- Yeah.
- You go ahead.
- Yeah, I mean this is, what I was writing the book about
one of the messages I felt in the book was
here's how I'm doing this when I work with author,
clients or when I work with clothing companies
or when I work with funny people
who are trying to do some prank or some stunt.
And to me, the ultimate message of the book
was if I can do this so easily with these things
that don't matter, what do you think people
with more resources and less ethics
are going to be able to do?
I don't want to say that message was dismissed,
but there was a lot of shooting the messenger there
and I think that came at our peril.
I don't even want to talk about politics on the show,
but it is interesting to think that Donald Trump
has been talking about running for president
since longer than I've been alive.
Like his first, I think it was '86, '87,
so he's talking about it and then every four years
he would talk about it again.
So what changes in 2015, 2016?
It's that these forces that have been operating
on our media system for so long got to a stage
where this sort of act became real
and that's very, very alarming.
I think people need to understand these things,
not just like defensively,
because you don't want to be manipulated.
How many people were, they wake up every morning
and they're upset and they don't know why they're upset
and they don't see what's acting on them.
Then also, you have to know that these are the things
that you're competing with,
so whether you love Donald Trump or hate Donald Trump,
what he is, is an embodiment of how information spreads
and operates in 2017, and you need to know,
one of the things I remember I was saying
that people thought was funny on your last show,
it was like you have this charity
that's supposed to help kids in Africa
or you have this message of inspiration or hope
about something you deeply believe in.
Then you're competing with low cats and internet pornography
and fake news and all these things,
so we're all competing in the Facebook feed
for everyone's attention.
And if you don't know how to break through that,
you're gonna wonder why no one knows who you are.
- So true, and to me, that was, I would say,
largely made my photography career on the back
of information spreading quickly.
- Yes.
- That's one of the reasons that I was initially besides,
was it in '10 that I introduced us?
- Yeah, I think so.
- To impress, besides having mutual friends,
I was fascinated because I hadn't deconstructed,
effectively deconstructed my own success
and it was largely around information moving quickly
and the information of how to take amazing photographs
in the world wasn't just about some special technique
that I had, that if the information was going to spread
and that information was going to be available to everyone,
like you can lean into it and lead with it
or pretend it doesn't exist and try and keep it quiet
for as long as you can.
So I was the recipient of the benefit of sharing
before it was trendy to do so.
And when I saw the similarity,
I mean I was aware of why I was doing it
and that it was effective, but when I saw it as, wow,
this is going to be much bigger than my little world
and today to have it affect politics the way it does
and international news has been a mind-blower, so--
- When you think about advertising, right,
it's like on the one hand, the photographer let's say,
their job is to take this photo that's supposed
to sell the product in the magazine or on TV
or on social media.
But then actually what advertising has really become,
given the infinite amount of news sources we have,
is really it's supposed to generate discussion and attention
and chatter, so it really changes
what a lot of people's roles are.
It's like, you know, my job isn't to capture
how the shoe looks, my job is to capture way the shoe looks
in such a way that other people will start talking
about it on Twitter.
So these forces sort of crank up how controversial
and interesting and provocative, or crazy or weird things
have to be.
If you just think your job
is to take the best photo possible,
you're gonna be continually disappointed
why your work's not breaking through.
- Yeah, I just read that adidas passed Jordan
as the number two sneaker brand.
- Really.
- It used to be Nike, then Jordan, then adidas was,
their market share didn't equal,
their whole global market share didn't equal
to what Jordan was in the US and there were people
just a couple of years ago saying they should totally throw
in the towel. - Right.
- And through tapping into cultural icons for example,
they have used that, whether it's unintentional
or intentional, it's just like, we're gonna go
the celebrity route or whatever and the fact
that people are talking about adidas making adidas
different and interesting is more valuable
than all of the actual advertising in of itself.
- Yeah, of course, you look at cryptocurrency,
how much of it is that people go,
oh, I really believe in this or how much of it
is like, everyone's talking about it?
These things were just so exposed
and they get so much attention that they become real.
That's both really empowering and really terrifying
at the same time.
- I'm gonna shift gears from Trust Me, I'm Lying,
to stoic philosophy.
- Okay, a very natural trend, of course.
- But to me, it's natural because it explains so much
of your recent success.
I'm unabashedly applying a lot of this to my life.
I grew up, I don't know if a lot of people know this,
but I was in a PhD program in philosophy.
People asked me all the time,
I remember my parents saying, "Are you gonna philosophize
"about being unemployed?"
What is philosophy, when I met my wife, Kate,
she was like, "That's like sociology,
"it's just like whatever path that's gonna get you
"the shortest, the quickest degree."
And yet, it has been a tool for critical thinking
and when I think about stoic philosophy here,
I remember learning about a little bit back then,
but you've brought this with maybe even the first book
Obstacle is the Way, you thrust it into the limelight
of popular culture.
Now all the football coaches are talking about it,
strategists, politics, pop culture, it's everywhere.
Give us a little backstory.
- It's kind of sad, this thing that we done as a society
or culture for thousands of years is dismissed
as this thing for academics.
It's obviously a tool for critical thinking
and that you even got that out of it, is unique
or unusual, right?
But the truth was,
for most of its history ancient philosophy was not
this academic discipline, it wasn't about thought exercises.
It was supposed to be sort of practical lessons
for what they would call the art of living.
The stoics almost didn't believe
in what people were writing.
They were like, how do you live your life, what do you do?
So that's the kind of philosophy
that I'm really interested in.
There's a line--
- Is it practical, is it practicality,
is that what it is about it?
- Yeah, so Epicurus, who wasn't a stoic,
but he'd say, "Vain is the word of the philosophers.
"It does not heal the suffering of man."
But the point is, it's supposed to help you in your life,
do what you're doing.
Marcus Aurelius, who is one of the stoics, he would say
that, 'No role is so well suited to philosophy
"as the one you're in right now."
The idea is, you're a photographer, you're an emperor,
you're a writer, you're a janitor, how can you apply
these principles if your actual life, right?
It's not can you have this interesting debate
about do we exist or not, is this a computer simulation?
They would say what should you do
when you feel your temper coming up?
What should you do
when you're in a position of power or leadership?
What do you do when you start to think about the fact
that you might only have twenty or thirty years left
in your life?
Or what do you do when a friend of yours passes?
Those are the kinds of situations that they would say
that philosophy is designed for.
So I was really interested in it,
specifically there's one exercise from Marcus Aurelius
the book is based on.
Basically he's saying, "The impediment to action advances
"after one stands in the way, becomes the way."
Really, what he meant is that we don't control what happens,
we control how we respond and that's the element of stoicism
that I've tried to introduce as a writer.
The New England Patriots read it on the way
to the Super Bowl in 2014, and then they beat the Seahawks.
- You shut up. (Ryan laughs)
- They beat the Seahawks and then--
- The (mumbles) Seahawks,
that was the worst game ever, sorry.
- That's what's so interesting, if you lose a game
on the one yard line that you thought you were gonna win,
that the decision you made in probably 99 times out of 100,
should have given you that win.
I sat in Pete Carroll's office in his chair
and he was talking about what do you do in that situation?
And these are precisely the situations that--
- Stoic philosophy.
- Yeah, the philosophy's designed for it
'cause you can't go back in time,
you can't undo what you did, you only control what you learn
from that situation, how you carry yourself forward.
What I loved, and he hadn't read the book yet
so this is all him, but Pete Carroll's response,
afterwards they're blaming the quarterback,
they're blaming the receiver,
and he said, "I made the call, it was my decision
"and I own it."
That is a philosophical decision,
to decide to take responsibility for something
that you very easily could have pushed off on someone else.
So that's the kind of philosophy
that I'm really interested in.
- So what I would like to do is take the,
even still conceptually,
stoic philosophy, there is a barrier from people saying
I really want to embrace stoic philosophy as a mechanism
to, again the audience who are listening here
are largely creative, entrepreneurial.
That's what I lean into in my profession
and that's what CreativeLives stands for
and so for the folks at home who are going whoa,
stoic philosophy, let's now go specific.
Even the Seahawks and the Super Bowl,
those are some abstract things.
- Right, so first off,
they're probably not saying that like that.
That sounds super boring, I won't get into that.
(Chase laughs)
But I get what you're saying.
Stoicism is basically three disciplines I talk about.
First is perception, so how do you look at this situation,
any situation, someone is rude to you,
your company's in trouble.
- You need to get your work out there
and be discovered and seen.
- Yeah, so do you look at it as this negative situation,
do you look at it as being totally unfair,
do you look it as impossible?
The way you're gonna look at it is largely gonna determine
how you're gonna be able to respond.
Not the secret right now, like wish that it's good
and it becomes good, but like how are you gonna see it
and what are you gonna focus on?
So the stoics would say first off, you want to look at it
as objectively as possible.
They would say there's no good or bad,
there's just how we look at things.
Which is true, right, because a negative situation to you,
there is somebody in another country
who would literally kill for the opportunity
to have that amazing thing happen to them.
What you take from that is, that oh wait, how I see this.
The perspective that I look at this thing is gonna change
what I'm gonna be able to do with it.
We have a huge amount of power.
On the one hand it's sort of disempowering
to think that we don't control 98% of what happens
to us in life.
A car crashes through your living room,
your plane is delayed, an investor backs out,
all these things, you don't control those decisions
because other people make them, you know, physics.
- Sure.
- But that final 2% is what we tell ourselves,
that those things are or mean.
Do you know what I mean?
- Absolutely.
- Like I had a thing that went south a couple of days ago
and I got this nasty email and there might be some dispute
over money about it, and I was really upset about it.
Then I was thinking first off, what did I do wrong
in this situation?
And I did a number of things wrong
that led up to it happening, so it was okay,
let me take responsibility for those.
And second, is this not a wake up call about those things?
Obviously, I'm gonna try to fix this situation,
get it right, maybe I am in the right,
but at the very least, this is gonna wake me up
out of sort of a stupor or a status quo
where I allowed these things to happen,
does that make sense?
- Absolutely.
- The perception that we bring to things,
that's probably the most important discipline of stoicism.
- Is there a sense of it's almost like awareness practice,
where you're asking yourself a question,
like what does this mean?
- Yeah, so Marcus Aurelius' famous book
is called Meditations, so he's meditating on these ideas,
not in a sort of a Zen pose, but he's writing.
We have this book that survives from this great man,
where he was just sort of like, there's this one line
that I love where he goes, "Are you afraid of death
"because you won't be able to do this anymore?"
He's like just implying that whatever crap that he did
that day, that was a total waste of time.
You know, one of those days where you're just like
doing nothing, and then he's like wait,
this is what I'm protecting?
He's just working on these things mentally
and he's also writing them down, I think journaling's
sort of part of it.
But yeah, it's let's make sure we're thinking
about these things right.
- So you talked about a framework and the first part
of that framework was really thinking
like what does this mean,
what attitude am I gonna bring to this challenge?
This is where I love the practicality of this system.
I've seen it in The Obstacle is the Way
and in just your work everywhere, but talk to me
about steps two and three.
So one is how you look with your attitude--
- Yeah, then what do you do with this information, right?
Again, not the secret, not like, hey, this horrible thing
happened and I said it's positive so it becomes positive.
Right now, it's like what do you do with this information?
One of the most compelling examples of this
if we can go historically is you think about Eisenhower
in the second World War and over and over again,
this German blitzkrieg had this devastating effect
on the Allied forces.
After D-Day, it's this massive counter-offensive,
like 200,000 German men in tanks
and there's this scene where Eisenhower,
he calls all his generals into this conference room
and he walks in and he says, "Look, I want you to see this
"as an opportunity and not as a disaster.
"There will only be cheerful faces
"at this conference table."
So that's the perspective side of things.
What he's done is, he's looked at it differently,
and he's realized that this sort
of massive counter-offensive, this offensive mindset
that the enemy is doing, is also desperately overreaching,
so they're rushing at you.
If you break and you are intimidated by this, then it works.
But if you absorb it and you encircle it,
then there's an opportunity there.
This is what they do, if you think about,
this first happens at the Falaise Pocket
and then at the Battle of the Bulge.
People have heard about the Battle of the Bulge.
What you don't realize is the Battle of the Bulge
was the Nazis thinking that they're winning.
They create this giant bulge in the Allied lines,
but then slowly the bulge begins to close around them.
So the discipline of perception is how am I gonna see this,
what good is in this terrible situation?
And then how can I take action and decisions
based on this information,
how can I exploit this opportunity, which he does,
and basically, they take some 50,000 German prisoners
in the Battle of the Bulge alone.
So it's this idea of catching yourself,
seeing it differently than everyone else
and then doing or zooming in on that thing
that people aren't willing to do or aren't able to see.
The second discipline of stoicism then is action.
You have to make this into something.
Just because you see it, it's not enough.
- I'll take some notes, and now it needs to be active.
- Yeah, we both know Casey Neistat and Casey's saying,
I remember this interview he did a couple of months ago
or years ago and someone was like, "Look, I want to run
"this idea for a business by you."
And he was like, "I don't care about your idea.
"Tell me when you've started it and then show me
"what you've made and then maybe there's something
"to do together."
And I think that's true on books or movies, or companies,
people are like, I'm thinking about running a marathon.
Well, who cares, right?
I'm thinking about doing a lot of things that I never do,
so what are you gonna do and what is your actual plan
for doing so, I think that's the critical variable.
- Did you list that as number two?
- That's two, the third discipline would be
the discipline of the will.
How do you deal with those sort of overwhelming moments
when life just sort of kicks your ass?
I told the story of Thomas Edison in the book,
as an old man,
he was the most successful inventor in America
and his factory burns down.
He rushes to this scene, it's still in flames
and his son is standing there sort of shell-shocked.
And Edison famously goes, "Go get your mother,
"she's never gonna see a fire like this again".
He's just sort of embraced this thing
that he can't do anything about and he tells a reporter,
"This prevents an old man from getting bored,"
essentially is what he says.
So the stoics have this image, they call it,
their metaphor is fire.
Their translation was (foreign language),
it means a love of faith, but basically the idea
was anything you throw in front of a fire
only fuels the fire.
So the stoics had this idea for the problems
and difficulties that we face in life,
even the ones that we can't do anything about
can still transform us or change us in some way
and we always have that power.
On the one hand, they're almost preparing for bad things
to happen, they're almost visualizing them in advance,
and then in some ways, they're almost looking forward
to them because they know it's gonna change them
or improve them, they'll make the most of it in some way.
- I have loved this so much and the way I have translated
this into a message for the folks who pay attention
to what is it that we're talking about here or the show,
is that when shit gets hard, and it will, I 100% guarantee
that if you commit yourself to anything that matters
or is meaningful to you or any cross-section of the world,
shit's gonna get hard.
And when it does, you can either look at it
as something that's there to keep you out,
or something that's there to keep everybody else out
that doesn't want it as bad as you do.
- No, I love that, I say that all the time.
I go, like with books, if it were easy
there'd be more amateurs doing it
and there wouldn't be any money in it.
Like what creates the financial upside or the recognition
or the things that people are asking is scarcity.
And if it was easy, if everyone could do it,
if it was naturally gonna go your way,
if there weren't those walls keeping you out,
it wouldn't be worth anything.
It's like no one's proud of you for knowing how to drive,
because everyone knows how to drive,
a 16-year-old can learn how to do it, right?
(Chase laughs)
it's not an accomplishment, but launch a new company
or building a brand or working for this or that,
these are things that not everyone can do
and that's why they're impressive.
- Yeah, appealing or impressive, yeah.
- Or lucrative, yeah.
- I'm gonna talk about ego for a second.
You have another book, one of the six now,
I can't believe you've done six books man, that's nuts.
Title of the book is Ego is the Enemy.
Let's just talk about popular culture for a second,
because it goes hand-in-hand with ego.
There's so much in popular culture
and I think so many creators and entrepreneurs
as you try and stand out from everyone else.
You know, I advocate being different, not just better,
but there's so much ego baked into the highlight reel
of one's self or the highlight reel of others,
comparing to all your dirty laundry.
What role does ego play in both the success
and, if you don't believe that, it contributes
to the success, to the problems for so many?
- I make a big distinction between ego and confidence.
I say like, I don't believe in myself, I have evidence
and I'm only gonna have confidence up until the point
that the evidence supports it and then everything else
is sort of beyond where I want to go.
But the nice part about that is it's in my control.
I can go get more evidence,
I can go prove more things about myself.
I think one of the things that's so hard about our culture,
clearly ego's always been a problem.
Going back to the Greeks, hubris is the theme
of all great Greek tragedies, right?
But Odysseus didn't have to have an Instagram acct,
didn't care how many Twitter followers he had.
So I really pity, you and I were both lucky enough
to grow up, I was just on the other side of it,
to grow up and become a fully-formed human being
without social media warping who you were
as you were becoming it.
- Yeah, I think about that a lot.
- Cheryl Strayed says in your 20s, you're becoming
who you're gonna become, so you might as well
not become an asshole and social media makes people
into assholes I think.
Because it's like when I look at my Instagram feed,
I know that that's not my life.
First of all, I know that
I'm not that good of a photographer.
The smartest programmers and designers in the world
are working to trick me into thinking that I'm better
at this than I am.
And then I only take photos of things that I think
other people will like and so I know what happened
in between those photos.
Then when I look at other people's,
I'm no like, oh, this is a snapshot of their life.
I see them running up the steps of a private jet
or getting out of their Lamborghini
or on the beach in Bali or something,
and you go, why am I not doing that?
Are they better than me?
Am I doing something wrong, should I feel bad about myself?
So these things are sort of warping it.
On the one hand, I would never dispute
that this is not part of the age that we live in,
that this isn't part of having a brand,
that there isn't marketing, but it used to be
that only public people had to do that delicate balance
between their image and who they actually were
as human being and increasingly
that's a problem we all have,
which is how do you play the game without believing in it?
How do you do the marketing without marketing to yourself?
- Wow, how do you market without marketing to yourself?
Is there like a fake it till you make it thing in there?
- Yeah, it's like how do you play the hype game
without buying into your own hype?
I think one of the things that I've found
about really great companies and entrepreneurs and stuff
is like, for instance, if I was pitching CreativeLive,
you would give me the best pitch in the world
'cause you know it.
But then if I was like, privately, I was like, Chase,
tell me all the problems with CreativeLive.
That would actually be a much longer list,
so the CEO or the leader has to know,
okay, here's what we're working on,
here's where we're going, here's what we sell to people,
and then on the other hand, you can be this ruthless
perfectionist who's zooming in on the thing,
always trying to get better, yeah.
- (mumbles).
- So I think as a person,
you have to know what you're working on,
where your weakness, like if confidence is an understanding
of your strengths, then you balance that out by humility
by a very real understanding of your weaknesses.
If ego is just how all the things you wish
were true about yourself,
it's the most dangerous because just because you believe
you can do something doesn't mean you can do it.
On the other hand, if you don't believe you can do it,
you're probably not gonna do it.
But the idea of faking it till you make it,
to me is very dangerous.
- Oh, it's toxic.
Yeah, I've transformed that saying,
I write fake it till you make it, then I cross out
the fake and I put make.
- Right, right, just make it.
- Make it until you make it and to me,
that's a little bit more healthy.
But it's directly tied into that ego thing about
like feeding yourself your own bullshit,
like you think that's positive thinking
or mental visualization but it's really not.
I think it's toxic and undermines your ability to succeed.
- Well, we both love Austin Kleon's work,
so I wrote at this in Perennial a bit, but I love
his concept of you can't be the noun without doing the verb.
In some ways, the healthiest thing is to almost forget
the noun and fall in love with the verb.
Then that way, it's like you're not even concerned
with how these things are coming off because,
I got very lucky when The Obstacle is the Way
really started to blow up, because I had already sold Ego
and I was getting my ass kicked every day by it.
So there wasn't like parties and celebrations,
it was in a weird good way I almost wasn't able
to enjoy it because I was too busy on the craft
of the next thing.
I think social media makes it really easy
to celebrate things before you've done them
and then to reflect, to sort of become absorbed by them
when you do have them, rather then doing the verb.
- Like the verb, I just was with someone
who's wildly successful,
most people would know this person's name
off the tip of their tongue easily,
easy to roll off the tongue.
And they have an amazing opportunity at their hands
and they're asking some advice from a friend that came in,
like what should I do here?
The immediate place that I went to,
and I'm not a great therapist, I ended up being
a pretty good career counselor 'cause, you know,
face-to-face with thousands of people off stage,
and said what do you love to do?
What part of this potential area of massive opportunity,
what are you going to actually do?
What are you going to wake up and put your shoes on,
your boots on, and go do
and if you don't love the doing part, the rest of this
is a shit sandwich and it's not going to work out.
And how do you think about, apply that,
use a little bit of Ego and the Enemy to talk to the people
at home about the thing, whether they want to be
a photographer or entrepreneur, or whatnot,
and try and make a story out of that for me.
- One of the things I look at in my own career
when I'm deciding to work with clients
or when I'm deciding to work on a different project
or whatever, is I try to go, okay,
let's say these two opportunities.
One's gonna pay me a lot and one's gonna pay me
not as much.
Obviously depending on do I need this to survive,
these variables are very real
and I don't want to dismiss them, but which one
am I gonna learn more by doing?
I think if you always pick the learning one,
or you take the learning one more often than not,
it's gonna keep you humble, it's gonna make you
by definition, better in some way
and you're gonna enjoy it more.
We always appreciate what we've learned
and that process of learning.
Oftentimes, there's a reason that people who make
lots of money are often still very dissatisfied.
People who are being challenged and learning and growing,
I find that it's less often that you're,
"I'm learning the time but I'm just so miserable."
You know what I mean,
like those don't go together very often.
- Don't often go together, yeah.
All right I want to fast forward to Perennial Seller.
I feel like there's a nice lily pad from the media stuff
up to Perennial Seller, and I thank you very much
for including me in your galley list,
I got the early copy and to me, it was sort of an ah-ha
thing that was right there in front of you the whole time,
right there in front of all of us in popular culture
trying to be successful, not for the sake of success
but to make something that matters
and it was like a face-palm, like duh.
So walk us through the concept behind Perennial Seller:
The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts.
What was the ah-ha for you that said this is a book
that needs to be made?
- The weird ah-ha moment was this tiny thing in publishing.
If you look at The New York Times bestseller list,
which everyone sort of uses as a rubric for success
in the publishing industry, it says very clearly
in the fine print like, "Not tracked in The New York Times
Best Sellers' List are perennial sellers."
What's a perennial seller?
It turns out the vast majority of income
in the publishing industry comes from books
that were published a year ago, five years ago,
10 years ago, 100 hrs ago.
- So you have what's a highly effective, how many?
- Great, great, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird,
What to Expect When You're Expecting,
sold like a million copies a year.
Yet, 90% of the focus of the industry
is about chasing something new and it's been cool
to see my book sell, like The Obstacle's the Way
sold more copies last year than it did the year before,
than the year before, than the year before.
Paradoxically, less marketing from me
because the book does something for people.
It's solving a problem, it's real.
It's just so interesting to me that no one would dispute
that it's hard to start a company, write a book,
make a movie, yet most of this stuff just disappears.
Even the successful ones disappear very quickly,
so I'm fascinated by stuff that lasts,
that really survives.
My favorite restaurant in Los Angeles
is not some fancy Michelin starred restaurant,
it's The Original Pantry Cafe, which is across the street
from Staples Center that opened in 1924,
and it's open 365, 24/7.
So there's no locks on the doors of the restaurant
because they've never closed.
I just love that idea, like first off,
they only accept cash, so it's probably just made
millions and millions of dollars and they probably report
very little of it to the government.
I would much rather own that business then like Nobu,
or Mr Chow's, you know?
That's so cool and if we're really honest with ourselves,
that's what we're trying to do, but we just end up
getting distracted by the fact that fidget spinners
are popular or that everyone's on that.
I can only imagine in your space what it's like,
you start this company because you believe in it,
but then you see all these other people
who have much worse companies,
it's like, oh, they sold to Microsoft for X amount
and they sold to Yahoo and it's like even though we set out
to make something last, we get distracted by all the stuff
that's going on around us.
So I tried to write sort of
like a glorification of things that last,
like the really great things because why not,
you know what I mean?
- But those are the things that take up, I believe,
the space in between what's the new, just stuff
that people are churning on, and when shit gets hard
or when (mumbles) goes south
or when there's a terrible catastrophe,
what do you fall back on?
- Right.
- And there's something that's sort of more real,
or I don't know what it is.
I'll give you an analogy around CreativeLive,
we have now almost 2,000 classes, 10,000 hours of content
we've been making from the ground up for seven years.
First of all, when we first started making this
and investors said, you should just open it up
and be a two-sided market place so you get 100,000 classes.
But I'm like, oh my god, there's so much junk in there
so we're gonna do it the slow way
and very, very intentional.
But what we did is, we developed this amazing muscle
to make the world's best learning content
with the world's top experts, like yourself
and Richard Branson and Tim Ferris
and Arianna Huffington and the list of names
is long and impressive.
We got so good at making stuff,
that what we were not good at is marketing things
that were the best stuff in our catalog.
What we ended up doing is just focusing on
what's tomorrow, because you get addicted.
When shit gets hard, like, what makes us feel good?
We've celebrated as a culture in our company
the releasing of a new title so then you're just like
when stuff gets hard, you don't actually stop.
- We need more, we need more.
- Yeah, and I realized, fortunately we realized
at CreativeLive and we still make a ton,
but we're looking at the things, for example,
your class.
We can continue to go back and like how to stand out
and get great articles for PR, or great PR for artists
and creators, because is that ever going away?
(Chase laughs)
- No, and it's crazy because like, I mean, I get the checks
and I'm like whoa, how does this happen?
I've actually noticed that's started to happen
on CreativeLive, like about a year ago it seemed like
there started to be a spike again, which is very cool.
The truth is, almost all the creative industries
are that way, right?
Movie studios are putting out the new Transformers
movie but it's really a Christmas story
and Shawshank Redemption and Star Wars, all these movies
that are just churning out, that people are discovering
or watching on television for the 50th time.
Seinfeld has made $3 billion dollars.
Not Jerry Seinfeld, the show Seinfeld
has made $3 billion dollars since the show went off the air.
That's the value of making something that's (mumbles),
do you know what I mean?
And because we still work in offices, people still
move to New York, like the themes of the show
are still so true.
Yeah, just think about it, it's like all the people
that are chasing the new, popular business book,
like oh, How to Become Rich in the Trump Era
or some showy things like that.
Then it's like What to Expect When You're Expecting,
or a book that you give to your son when he graduates
from college, or that you give to your daughter
when she gets married.
What are the books that solve a part of your life?
- An example you gave in Perennial Sellers,
like turning 50.
- Yeah.
- Pretty much everybody, unless you have an unfateful
death before then, you're gonna turn 50
and that is a thing that everybody goes through
so how can you solve, maybe we can shift
to get you some tactics right now.
- Yeah, so you want to go this is a blank
that does blank or blank, right?
So can you actually fill in that question?
I love, I talk about Red Wing Boots.
Red Wing Boots starts making boots in the early 1900s
to equip the US Army in the First World War
and they're still making the same boots.
The boot is called like the 1915 boot
or something like that.
I have a pair that cost $300 when they came out,
so that's very expensive, but I've had them resoled twice,
they get more comfortable every day that I wear them,
people notice that.
It's like, it's more expensive but they're not having
to roll out a new edition every year.
It was actually weird, the same way at American Apparel,
one of the mistakes the company made was chasing
the fashion seasons.
Whereas the reality is, if you make something great
and you make the same thing over, you get better at it,
it gets cheaper to make, the margins get better
and you have to do less marketing
because there's word of mouth.
So when I think about my own books, I go, are people
going to read this in 10 years, is it still gonna be true
in 10 years, and if not, then it's probably not a great use
of my time.
Or, let's just make sure that if we are writing
about something somewhat timely, that we're focused
on the timeless elements of it.
I wrote a book about growth hacking,
that's how startups market each other,
but it's almost five years old and it's still selling
because I focused not on the very, very specific
cutting-edge tactics, but on the mindset that goes into it
because one is gonna last a little bit longer
than the other.
- And the examples that go one step deeper there
would be like A/B testing versus like how to buy this type
of add-on Facebook (mumbles).
- Exactly, right, right, here's a great app
to get you more Twitter followers.
Well, what if they go out of business tomorrow?
I was thinking about, I wrote about Snapchat in the book
a little bit.
As an example of this, because when I started the book,
they were called Snapchat, now they're called Snap.
Then Instagram launches Instagram Stories
and all of a sudden, Snapchat's usage is cratering.
So it's like, your thing isn't going to last
if it's based on things that are unlikely to last.
My editor (mumbles) note early on in the book
and I made a joke about Groupon, or QR codes or something,
and gourmet cupcakes, and she was like,
"Imagine that someone is reading this book in 2040, in Thai.
"Would any of this make sense?'
and I'm like no, it wouldn't so I have to pick
some deeper analogy or deeper example
that's gonna be more timely.
So in The Obstacle's Way, I'm not saying,
yesterday my friend Steve and I were talking about,
I'm gonna tell you a story about Thomas Edison
or Demosthenes or Odysseus because The Odyssey
has been part of our culture for 2,000 years,
probably not going anywhere.
- Yeah.
- You want to make sure that you're basing your work
on really great stuff.
- Let's deconstruct for a second.
Let's talk for a second how people can deconstruct
their own work.
- Yeah.
- I think when I talk to folks who are early on
in their career, they're just starting out,
they're trying to go from zero to one,
consider themselves a maker
or launching a business or whatever,
I feel like there's a lack of research
and a lack of thoroughness and a lack of understanding
what you're gonna say, what your critics are gonna say,
the stuff that is wildly successful by and large,
has a ton of research behind it and it's very thoughtful.
I think what people think is that they sit down
and they just blast something out.
- A lightning strike,
the creative genius lightning strike.
- Right, so talk to me what your philosophy is
and how you know, what amount of work goes into it
and having studied it, what are the habits.
And maybe this is the punchline, what are the habits
of the people who make great work?
- That's a very great question.
I would say that one of the symptoms of this problem
is a question I get all the time, where people go,
what influence, or should I have someone promote my book
or movie or my start?
It's like, if you don't know those people's names,
let alone you should have personal relationships
with all of them, but if you don't know who they are,
and you're asking a total stranger about this,
you should hit the stop button as quickly as possible
because there's probably some fundamental flaw
in your product that doesn't address,
you know what I mean.
If you don't know your space well enough,
yeah, I want you to resist that egotistical impulse
of like this thing that you thought about for eight seconds,
is gonna be wildly better
than the people who have been in it for 10 years.
It's not to say that it's gonna take you 10 years
to get caught up.
- Or that someone else won't have a good idea.
- Yeah, but put in the time to actually check your work.
Check the math, make sure it's actually true here.
One of the best ways is, like with a book,
I know what I'm trying to accomplish,
I know who I'm trying to reach.
One of the reasons you have an editor,
and in publishing you submit to an editor,
that's a legal term, you submit the manuscript
and then they accept it and you only get paid
if they accept it.
Like it's contractually the submission and acceptance,
so the S and A payment, right?
What that forces you to do,
is go to an objective third party
and then they're gonna give you all sorts of notes
on your book and a lot of their notes
are gonna be totally wrong, but where their notes pertain
to what you are trying to accomplish,
they're gonna be able to tell you if you did it or not.
Harper Lee turns in To Kill A Mockingbird
and her editor says, this isn't a fully-fledged novel
is what she said.
Obviously Harper Lee thought it was
or she wouldn't have turned it in.
But Harper Lee does something like two years or work on it,
it comes out.
Usually what that book looks like would be lost to us,
but when Go Set A Watchman comes out,
it's the original draft of To Kill A Mockingbird.
It was really popular at first,
but do you see anyone reading it on a plane?
It's not very good, it's not good compared to the work
that her editor forced her to do to create
To Kill A Mockingbird, which becomes
this life-changing epic novel.
Even Adele, Adele's last album was called 25,
and each one of her albums is supposed to come out,
it's titled after the year she wrote it or the year
it was released, how old she was.
But it came out when she was 27, because Rick Rubin
made her do two more years of work. (Chase laughs)
It's almost impossible for you to see your own work
objectively, so you need to make sure
you have a really strong network of creative collaborators
who you can trust, who can be like, Chase,
there's flashes of genius in here
but they're not connected together
and you need to fix this.
Or like, I tried it and I don't get it
and then you go, that's okay, 'cause it wasn't
made precisely for people like you.
Or perhaps that person is your ideal target customer
and if they're telling you I don't like it,
you've got to listen to them.
- I talk about a thing called the other 50%.
In creating, I think most people believe
that it's just the product,
that you make a great product
and then it's wildly successful.
The approach that I've taken is no, the great product
is the get-in-the-door fee.
Then you're actually on the field.
- The buy-in.
- Yeah, get the buy-in or, I don't know why,
but I use professional golf, like the 300 golfers
who are on the PGA, the men's PGA, the women's PGA,
the LPGA, the difference in skills is nominal.
It's like the amount of distance that they
can hit off the tee, the amount of putts they sink
out of 10, and yet how many golfers' names do you know?
There are so few and so it's basically,
what you think is 90% craft and 10% all the other stuff,
is sort of probably the other way around.
You have to be great at your craft and I don't ever
want to diminish it, but it's this whole package.
Now, so you zoom out a little bit, you see
it's not just a thing, and you zoom out
and you say, oh my god, it's the total package.
Then what I do, is I draw a line right there
and I say great, that's 50% of the thing
and the other 50% is cultivating relationships
and community around the things that you're trying to make.
Like you said, if you want to launch a project
and you don't know who the influencers are,
you've stopped at the other 50%.
And if you don't know the other 50%,
you have 50% less chance of success.
Respond to that for me.
- Right, your thing about the golf is that
you have to qualify for the PGA tour.
So if you win, it's something that proves
you deserve to be there and then you'll keep winning, right?
But the way I think about it is,
I say with creative projects is making them is this marathon
and it's the hardest thing you've ever done.
Then you've just barely, you stumble across--
- You stumble across.
- ...the finish line and then the race proctor,
they grab you by the hand and you think they're
taking you to the rest tent or to the medal stand,
they're gonna put the medal, actually they're grabbing
you and they're just directing you to the beginning
of a second marathon that you're not at all prepared for.
But that marathon is marketing, it's positioning,
it's packaging, it's relationships, it's investors,
it's all the things
that go into taking this idea and then getting it
from your physical space to my physical space.
There's a lot of overlap between the two phases
so it's not a perfect analogy, but the idea
that if you build it, they will come has killed
so many great projects.
And you have to remember, given the economics
of how content and stuff works today,
you're not just competing with the other people
who started at the same time as you.
Like, if I make a YouTube series, I'm not competing
with just the other YouTube series.
I'm competing with the fact that on Netflix,
I have access to some of the greatest shows
that were ever made.
Think about all that is your television,
it's like think about all the people that have never
watched an episode of The Wire yet,
or Breaking Bad, or Madmen.
You're competing for those customers with
those proven products that are objectively amazing.
So marketing is the tool that you use to win that fight.
So are relationships and your platform
and your relationship with your fans and all these things.
And yeah, so the idea of just like the world isn't,
no one's like, we really need more amazing stuff.
They're like, why should I choose your amazing stuff
over this other amazing stuff?
And by the way, this amazing stuff, it's free.
- And it's been out for 50 years and it's time tested
and it's on billboards and on all the awards shows
and blah, blah, blah.
- Yeah, so it's really, really, really hard.
- I was scrolling through my phone the other day
looking for a photograph and came across a photograph
of you, me, Scott Belsky and Tim Ferris.
- Oh, at his party.
- Yeah, at a party that Tim threw and made me think
of Scott, who was on the show a couple, two weeks ago,
something like that.
There's some many great ideas in Creative's heads
that aren't going to be successful because
they don't have their shit together.
I was wondering if you could react to that.
Like what does it mean for the folks at home are like,
I want to have my shit together.
So what is having one's shit together, is it other stuff?
- I think about it like, 'cause I think about books a lot
'cause I work with lots of authors and I think about it
with myself, but don't judge a book by the cover.
That's why books have covers.
I mean, that's the whole point of the cover
is because that's what people do, right?
So I'll see products and, here's a good example.
Wealthfront, huge startup, billions of dollars
under management, I use it, I think it's wonderful.
Its first name was Kachingle.
Would you put your retirement money in a company
called Kachingle? (men laughing)
I wouldn't.
- No, 'cause I could never find it in the app store.
How do you spell Kachingle?
- It's ridiculous.
- Right, it's totally ridiculous.
- A company isn't going to urge their employees
to put their 401K in Kachingle,
but they will put it in Wealthfront.
Or did you see the Tom Cruise movie, The Edge of Tomorrow?
- No.
- Okay, it's a great fucking movie
but The Edge of Tomorrow is not what the movie's about
and it's a terrible title, so when it came out on DVD,
they couldn't change the title but they just rejiggered
the poster so that the tagline was Live, Die, Repeat.
The movie is, he's stuck in this continuum, so every day
he dies at the end of the day until he can get
to this thing.
So he's waking and--
- I did see the film, I saw the film, okay.
- Terrible title, right and Live, Die, Repeat
is an amazing title for that movie.
So these things title, cover, logo, copy,
the people who are involved with the product.
This things have an incredible, we wish that they didn't,
but they have an incredible impact on whether people
are gonna try them or not.
In the same way that you would judge someone
coming into an interview wearing shorts and sandals
and their hair all disheveled, we judge work that way.
Especially now that lots of people are self-publishing,
you already have a knock against you, so you have to be
like twice as good to get over those reservations.
So these things can't be ignored, they can't be phoned in.
They're as much as part of the creative expression
as the work itself.
- You have the concept of hacking is, the word is,
the vernacular, you know words matter
and it came out in a computer software.
And then the term growth-hacking, to make a reference
to something you said earlier, I'm wary of the concept
of hacks because the people who hack things
and if it's not repeatable, then to me that's part
of what distinguishes something or someone who's able
to be successful and you look at the most successful people
and they repeat their successes over and over.
Do you, for the folks out there who are looking
for quick fixes, do you throw them in the trash
and then talk about them or think about them?
You've written a book called Perennial Sellers,
is that antithetical to hacking, or would you
take hacking out of hacking category and put it
into like, user best practices?
Help me reconcile.
- As long as you're not using hack as in terms of shortcut.
If you're using hack as shortcut,
then it's a dangerous word.
If you're using hack as a creative way of doing something,
a way of combining this thing and that thing
to create something new, then I think it's very positive.
There's just something in our culture where people go,
like they want step one, two, three, four, five,
as if that would work and if it would work,
how quickly it would be exploited and used by everyone.
So I think, what I try to do in my books
is not create formula, but to create sort of a set
of principles that are always gonna be true
and that you can think about
in lots of different situations.
Go to the principles that undergird, like in industry,
aerospace or a career path that you're on.
Don't look for shortcuts because it's like
if you're already looking for the shortcuts
and you haven't even started, what does that say
about when the shit gets really hard?
You're gonna be like, done, you're not gonna have
what it takes.
- For sure, you're certainly not attracted to the verb.
- Yes, yeah, you have to actually like that it's hard.
Yeah, I think people want this like tried and tested formula
and it's never, not only is that never possible,
but you wouldn't want it to be possible if it was.
- And by definition, if it was that easy or that possible,
or just a series of steps that anyone could do,
it would be wildly exploited and there would be
no upside for you, no real upside for you.
It'd be like driving.
- Yeah, exactly.
- You gonna learn how to drive,
a rad education in this job.
- Chase Jarvis, he's been a photographer
for all these years,
he's built this company, also has his driver's license.
- You're not on the list of shit to do.
- Right it doesn't go in the bio.
- Got it, so let's get tactical again.
I think part of the stoic philosophy is
what are you actually gonna do?
Like what the action, that second step.
And are there some helpful frameworks in the book?
- Yeah.
- Give us a couple of frameworks for people to chew on
and, again, this is a book that's dense enough
that you're gonna want to get it.
This is not the solution,
this interview is not the solution to Perennial Seller.
- I'd like the book to leave people some questions
to ask when they're starting.
I tried to create something you could re-read every time
you're starting on a creative project.
The first question that I think entrepreneurs and creatives
forget all the time is, who is this for?
'Cause they're making it for themselves
and that's not a big enough audience.
Or, I'll ask who this thing is for and they'll go,
everyone, smart people, Malcolm Gladwell fans or whatever.
So who is this for, do you actually know what your product
is for or are you a solution in search of a problem,
which is a very dangerous place to be.
Who is this for, I think is a very important question
that I would tack.
Not just like, oh yeah, I know, but like actually
who are they, where to they live, what do they do
for a living and then what does your thing do?
My editor said to me, she's like, "It's not what a book is,
"it's what a book does."
What does my project do for people?
CreativeLive is like a full tool kit for anyone
trying to do basically any creative profession.
That's very clear and obvious.
And then, because it does that, there's the chance
that you have word-of-mouth
if you can bring those customers in.
I think that's very important.
On the marketing side, I want you to think about
how crazy it is that anyone buys anything.
It's like if you think of all the stuff
that's free out there, like take a book.
This book is, where's the price, is it on there?
- Think it's on the inside.
- On the front, so all right, so $26 US.
I'm asking people to give me $26 and a week of their time
for something they don't know what's in these pages.
So one of the reasons I do interviews,
I give tons of content away, I make videos,
I excerpt it widely, is because I know how crazy it is.
Do you know what I mean, I just spoke at a conference
that was full of writers yesterday, and I had the publisher
give away 250 copies because that's the exact community
that I'm trying to reach.
So it's like, chances are your product is the best possible
advertisement for your product,
and so I want you to give it away for free
as much as possible.
I'm not saying work for free, and that is a dangerous thing,
people get taken advantage of.
But who are the people that need to read this,
or that need to experience it or gonna talk about it?
Make sure that you've brought them through your system.
That's all marketing is, so people are like,
oh, I figured out how to hack Facebook ads,
it's like have you ever bought this thing?
Have you ever bought something from a Facebook ad?
Meanwhile, somebody gives you a book for your birthday
and then the next thing you know, you've bought it
for all your employees.
So understand what you're asking people when you're buying
and just how expensive it is, and make sure your marketing
and your creative efforts are designed to make it
as accessible as possible.
Then the last big lesson I would give is your platform.
Everyone wants a platform but they don't want
to put the work into it and they want it now,
and the best time to have made it was 10 years ago.
You know what I mean, or five years ago or yesterday.
What's that thing about a tree, it's like the best time
to plant a tree was 20 years ago, second best time
is right now.
Like, don't be thinking just how to market this thing
you have right in front of you.
What are you gonna need to market over the course
of your career?
If you want to end up with 1,000 true fans,
how you gonna number 640 and 642, how are you doing that?
So from a marketing perspective, I'm thinking about building
a body of work,
thinking about building a reciprocal relationship with fans,
thinking about owning that permission-based connection
and if you're not doing that, you're at the mercy
of newspapers and social media and television.
If they decide, sorry, we've already talked enough--
- We changed our minds.
- ... about online courses, we're not interested
in promoting another thing, okay, I guess I'm done.
And you don't want to be in that position.
- Right, I've noticed that you're doing a lot of speaking
and certainly it's a great way to sell books,
but it's also to be able to experience
your rendition of the book and the ideas therein.
It's very compelling and a lot of the folks
that hire you to speak are companies, and given the way
that you've thought about it and given
that between 1/3 and 1/2 people who are watching here
are inside of companies, some are leaders, some are not,
doesn't matter, but talk to me about some of the qualities,
maybe just go through a couple, like team building
or leadership, let's talk about leadership.
So when you go to speak at these big companies,
what are some things that are in your purview
that are really applicable to modern leadership?
- One of the things I think about as a speaker
is like, 'cause I watch lots of talks, and people are just,
here's a bunch of facts and figures, here's my pitch deck,
let me run through it.
I think we just learn by stories, stories are basically it.
So I want to leave people with just a handful of stories
or quotes that change how they think about what they do.
If I was thinking about leadership,
something like that Eisenhower story
that we were talking about earlier,
where it's like a guy faces this incredible
situation, overwhelming.
He stops the chaos and the retreat and the despair
and he says, what positive can we find in this?
Then he goes out and he goes, oh, actually,
not only is there kind of a positive here,
this is how we win.
And so I like to leave audiences with stories like that.
Because that's how I learn personally.
- We're hardwired for narrative, too.
- 'Course, 'course and that goes to all the things
that we're talking about here, which is like,
is what you're doing delivering value to people?
I think stories are that, I don't want to tell stories
about me because you might not like me, right?
Or you might go, okay, that's great but what about X?
So I want to present sort of that incontrovertible,
undeniable, inspiring things
that are gonna stay with people.
- You know the book, Tell To Win?
- Yeah, uh-huh [Affirmative].
- Is that Peter Gruber?
- Yeah.
- And Peter is a studio executive, wildly successful
billionaire dude.
- Owns the Warriors.
- Yeah, he's partners with (mumbles) and the Warriors
but the concept of Telling to Win or telling stories
as a leader, like I've learned a lot about leadership
now running a company of 120 people or something.
Is that a thing that you see people wildly deficient in?
- Yeah, they're not good at capturing stories,
they're not good at telling them
and then they're not looking for them.
Having to gotten to know a lot of professional
and really great NCAA sports teams, it's like
you realize that the coaches all basically know
the same amount about basketball or baseball,
but it's what are they teaching mindset-wise,
what are they teaching approach-wise and most of the time,
they just get up in these meetings and tell stories.
So these coaches read incredible amounts of books,
they study history.
I was at a conference a couple of days ago
and Bill Walton spoke before me.
After, we were talking and he was telling me
that John Wooden, in the course of four years when he played
for him at UCLA, talked about the other team twice
and they lost both games he said.
His job was to tell them about the game
and about what it is to be a man or to be a teammate
or to be a good person.
And that's where stories, I think, come in
and as a leader, you should be collecting those.
I think one of the reasons, politically what upsets me
so much right now is that so many of the issues
that we're upset about are really non-partisan
and will really be solved
by sort of finding the connective tissue
between people instead of fighting about this or that.
I think what we're missing with Obama not in office,
again, politics aside, is that he followed
for the most part, the actual role of the president,
which was to be the president of all people
and to communicate to us what needed to be communicated
in important or tragic or stressful or scary moments.
- Yeah, storytelling.
- Yeah, and that's the leader's job.
- Regardless of political affiliation,
it's like the leader is there to communicate
and to facilitate communication.
- Yeah, so you think you're it, someone thinks their job
as the CEO is to solve these problems
and actually you hired the people to solve the problems
so your job as the leader is to keep everyone in the boat,
going in the same direction.
And a lot of that is storytelling, creating culture
and things like that.
- What about creativity and innovation inside
of these places?
I see a very clear role of storytelling and leadership.
What are some of the, as you've been asked to speak
inside of these Fortune 100 companies,
what about creativity and innovation,
is there any insight there that you can offer?
- That's one of the things I was thinking a lot about
in Perennial Seller, it's like no one gets that excited
about making something that we're gonna sell
to some other company, because we know it's garbage,
you know what I mean?
They get excited about being able to push themselves
and do something.
I imagine what it would be like to be an engineer at Apple.
Must be pretty, I'm sure it's incredibly stressful
and sometimes you want nothing more than to quit.
But just the standards that you're forced to uphold
and the opportunities that you have,
that's what keeps people going, more than the stock options.
Like Peter Drucker would say, "Culture eats strategy."
So it's like what standards are you putting in place,
what story is at the heart of your company?
I think that transcends all these things.
- Yeah, especially if you need to be inspired
to do your best work.
There's the worker who can come in, sit down
and do their stuff, but the role, and I think this is
wildly misunderstood, it touches on storytelling
and so many things
that have been a part of our conversation,
but the ability to motivate, in Tony Robbins, it's energy.
If you don't have energy to bring to something,
you have basically no chance for success
because everything requires energy.
Talk to me a little bit about the role that inspiration
plays and you can bring it again, the story aspect,
but when you have spoken and when you wrote
Perennial Seller, what role did inspiration play?
- It's like on the one hand, inspiration's
wildly overrated because people think it's like,
I just need to be inspired, I need this epiphany
and it'll all happen.
On the other hand, it's very underrated in the sense
that like, again, if what you're trying to do
is very uninspiring, who's gonna give their best
to make that thing?
So what are your goals, what are you trying to accomplish
as an organization, what are the standards
that you hold yourself to?
When I think about my own books, I'm thinking
I'm not trying to make a book to get more speaking gigs,
that's very uninspired, right?
(Chase laughs)
- Sorry I laughed at that.
- But that's true, right, a lot of people do it
for that reason.
If your interest in football is that you think
it will make you famous, you're not gonna get through
two a day practices in the summer, right?
You're not gonna rush to overcome a torn ACL.
If your interest in photography is that you saw other people
making a lot of money on Instagram, there's gonna be
nothing to what you're making.
All the subtle things that you can't really see
but you can feel are not gonna be there.
So you've got to go into this for the right reasons
and I think one of the company's job,
the job of the leaders of a company, is to insist on
and sort of be the caretaker of those values.
I've built a site recently based on the stoics,
we had a site called Daily Stoic,
and we made this one product and it was doing really well.
Then so it's like oh, we can do this and this.
You could see how easily it could become a cash-grab,
let's throw up some tee-shirts.
And it's like no, the reason this product is doing well
is because it does something for people
and they really liked it and it took a long time to make
and we didn't cut any corners on it.
So my job as a leader is not to kill their bad ideas,
but to go here are the boundaries
of what the acceptable ideas are
and here are the principles that I'm insisting
that be true for us to proceed.
Now once that's constrained, now everyone's really
focused not necessarily on what's gonna make the most money,
but what's gonna be best and then that's gonna be
most likely to last over the long term.
And then again, make the most money
but what are your principles?
If you don't know, you're in a bad spot.
- I'm gonna touch on The Daily Stoic before we hang it up.
The Daily Stoic, incredible book you and Steve put together,
Steve Hanselman, and I admit that I don't stay with it
everyday, but there isn't a day that when I touch the book
I don't get crazy value from it.
- Did you get the email?
- I don't.
- I read an email every day that's like unrelated,
like another one 'cause none of them carries the book
around with them.
But it's my favorite thing to do.
It's like I get to do one big thought
of ancient philosophy every day in a really practical forum.
It sort of blew me away, it built a 100,000 person
community at this point, the book sells like crazy
and I hear from all these senators and athletes
and celebrities and stuff that are like hey,
I do this every morning and it's been
this really incredible experience.
But then yeah, again to go to what I was saying
about the product, so we made this coin.
It's like this coin you carry in your pocket,
I have one actually.
- I have one in my wallet, I carry it every single day.
- Yeah, see, so it's this memento morning.
- I'm not sitting on it right now because
it'll make noises and it sits in the same pocket
as my microphone pack.
But it's in my wallet, it goes everywhere with me every day.
- I sent you one, right?
- You did.
- Okay, that's good, so it would be much easier
to make a tee-shirt or to make a course,
like there are many cheaper things that would potentially
have better margins.
But it was like no, I feel responsibility to this space
that's been very good to me, that's changed my life.
I don't want to be the one that's poisoning the well,
do you know what I mean?
I don't want to be the one that's turning this
into something sleazy or scammy
and that's very important to me
and so my job as the leader is to inspire the people
that are part of that thing that I've made
to adhere to those standards.
And if I fall down on the job,
it would be potentially lucrative in the short term
but very destructive in the long term,
so that's what I think about it.
- Can you rub the coin first?
- That's the point of the coin too, which is like,
there's a corporate market--
- Hold it up, that can see that.
- There's a quote from Marcus Aurelius on the back
and he's basically saying, "You can leave life right now,
"let that determine what you do and say and think."
I think as a leader, that's a great way to to think too.
It's like this could be the last time you talk
to your people, this could be the last email that you write,
this could be the last trip that you go on,
could be the last time pulling into the driveway
after a hard day at work, so are you gonna do it right?
What's gonna motivate you, are you gonna actually live
and experience that moment?
If you're not, is that not very entitled?
Are you not betting that you'll have 1,000 more
of these mornings or whatever,
and I just don't want to take that chance.
- Memento morning.
- Yeah, remember you will die.
It's not the most inspiring thought at first,
but actually I think it becomes profoundly inspiring
if you think about it the other way.
- I think about how often I go into my wallet,
either to put a receipt away or take out a credit card,
and that it's always there.
You can see and it's worn in tied leather
and not only does it inspire me,
but if I'm ever at a counter
and I'm having a playful conversation
with the person who's across from me,
or I'm with a friend and I have it,
I just hand it to them.
It always starts a fascinating conversation
that I feel like, even if you're on the other side
of the counter, I'm like, remember, you're gonna die.
Then that will stick with them, if it's with a friend
or something, it's always an inspiring conversation
that comes out of it.
- And look, that's obviously very cool for me
creatively and philosophically but then,
if we were talking about something
that wasn't so meaningful at the same time,
that's all the hallmarks of what you want
when you're making something,
which is that it becomes part of a discussion,
it becomes part of people's lives.
It becomes something that they talk about to other people,
that they recommend to other people.
Not only is that what you want because it's fulfilling,
but that's what you want as a business, right?
It's not like I privately took this CreativeLive class,
I'm really embarrassed about it
and I don't want anyone to know,
it's like this thing changed me and I need to change you.
- Yeah, you can hand out--
- Yeah.
- Thank you so much, congratulations
on the most recent book, Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday.
He's got five others too, so it's an amazing body of work.
You talked about building a body of work,
I think you're well on your way.
You've published more books
than everybody that I know basically,
besides maybe Seth Godin, but congratulations.
Thank you so much for being on the show,
keep inspiring us.
What's the best place for people to stay in touch?
It would be @ryanholiday most places?
- Yeah, and then it's ryanholiday.net.
- Thanks, bud.
- Thank you.
- Of course.
- Awesome.
- See you again next time, bye guys.
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