- Hey, everybody, what's up?
Chase Jarvis here, your good friend.
Welcome to another episode of the Chase Jarvis Live Show
here on CreativeLive.
You guys know this show.
This is where I sit down with amazing humans,
and I do everything I can to unpack their powerful brains
with the goal of helping you live your dreams
in career, in hobby, and in life.
My guest today is a multi-
New York Times bestselling author.
He's also built an amazing startup,
raised more than a hundred million dollars,
and is democratizing access to space, to physical space
with a company called Breather.
Lots of other things, lots of other accolades
we could hang on this guy, but before we do,
I need to introduce him, my man Julien Smith,
back for a second show.
(gritty rock music)
(audience applauds)
They love you!
- Hey, thanks for having me.
- Thanks, bud. - Yeah.
- Two shows. - Yeah.
- It's been a couple, maybe three years since?
- Maybe, I don't even remember.
- Something like that.
- It was a long time ago.
A lot has changed, and that's one of the reasons
I'm very excited to have you back.
I'm gonna go back in time.
I'm gonna take us back for a second, okay?
The way back machine has begun,
and I'm gonna go back to little ol' me,
sitting, I can remember where I was sitting.
I was sitting on this white pleather couch
that we had a couple houses ago that I lived in
with my wife Kate, sitting on this pleather couch.
It was about two in the morning,
and I don't know how long ago.
This is like, long time ago, and I read this blog post.
- Right.
- Called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
(Julien laughs)
And it had unicorns, like, shitting rainbows.
It had like, it was just an amazing thing
that you just did not see on the internet.
This was maybe 10 years ago.
- Maybe, yeah, a long time ago.
- Eight years ago?
And it was just, it was an amazing, I would say,
act of vision, of vulnerability, of access to the mind
to creators and a reflection on pop culture.
And to me, it was, and I'm gonna hand this to you in just
a second, 'cause you hadn't said a word, and we're like,
we're 10 minutes into the show here.
We're going like, do you actually have a guest right now?
That's what you're saying.
But before I let you speak,
and I remember just like, this is so cool.
This is what, the internet has the ability
to connect people with people, whether it's a creator
with their fans and followers or two people
in the same community from thousands of miles apart.
You wrote a blog post that spoke to millions of people,
and it's since been made into a book by someone else.
(both laughing)
But take me back to it.
So, again, we're gonna cover a lot of ground.
We're friends, so we can just like,
it's gonna be a little bit random today.
But take me back to this blog post you wrote
however many years ago, 'cause it was amazing.
- You know, thanks.
It's weird what will catch on, is I guess what happens,
and like, there's so many lessons
from when you do things on the internet.
You know, just the other day, there was this whole thing
about Warren Buffett on Twitter,
and so someone who was not Warren Buffett at all,
I don't know if you saw this, started tweeting just like,
the most generic aphorisms, like, you know,
you should be good to other people,
and it accumulated 250,000 followers in six days.
- [Chase] Wow.
- And it wasn't Warren Buffett.
It wasn't Warren Buffett at all, and Warren Buffet
has his own account with 1.4 million followers as well.
And so, it's just fascinating
to watch things fly on the internet.
That's something that flew on the internet.
And at the time, I was writing a book called Flinch,
which was a book that gratefully, something like a million
or something people have read over time,
and then I started working on Breather,
which is my company that I co-founded.
And meanwhile, what you really discover about that process
is ideas really can't be owned.
Anywhere that you go, you're choosing something every day.
And so, that book went, excuse me, that blog post
went crazy, and it went crazy for years.
And then one day, someone was like, I'm gonna make this
into a book, and they did.
(Chase laughs)
And I was like, what?
- Wait a minute. (both laughing)
That's my blog post.
I should have written the book.
I've got the same thing
with this little thing called Instagram.
- Right?
Yeah, you invented it, and then someone else invented it.
You were telling the other day about the guy
who started Atari, and he also started
Chuck E. Cheese, which is very strange.
(both laughing)
And, but, you know, the theory was really interesting,
'cause after he created the video games,
he was like, no one's gonna buy these.
But, if I put them in a thing, and then there's pizza,
and the reason it's great with pizza,
is because you have to wait for pizza.
So what are you gonna do while you're there?
- [Chase] You're playing video games.
- You're gonna play the video games.
And so he invents these two companies
of both pretty successful things,
but the sort of apocryphal story in the background
is that Steve Jobs offered him, for $50,000,
something like 30% of Apple, and he was like, no thanks.
- Yeah, it was like their seed round
or something like that, right?
- Yeah, that's right, exactly, in 1975, of whatever.
- Which is roughly 300 billion dollars today.
- That's right, today, which is not a big deal.
- Not a big deal.
- And that's the history of the internet right there.
- But let's go back to your blog post.
So, an idea is not ownable, but go back to you
writing that blog post, because it was amazing.
What was the inspiration behind it,
and can you sort of encapsulate what you said?
- I mean, you just, you discover that you cannot
go on living a life that is, that other people's
feelings are in control of what you're doing, right?
- [Chase] Yeah.
- And so, everyone has experienced something like that,
and you've experienced it in various ways.
Like, you know, I used to go to church to the age of 16
because my parents told me to do that,
when one day, you have to have, and I don't
go to church now, but it's like, someone will say,
why are you still doing that, or you say why you're
still doing that, and right there, you have to choose.
Like, you're either choosing your feelings,
or you're choosing your parents' feelings.
So it's like maybe that's a very relatable example,
but you're doing this, a hundred times.
You're doing it everyday, you know,
if you're the CEO of a company.
Then you have to make decisions every day that are gonna
displace some people, and that's an inevitability.
So, it was about choosing, I think it became,
like for several people, James Altucher's another one
who would be like, you have to choose
yourself and choose your own feelings.
- Yeah.
- And that's like the moment where I kind of realized that.
- It was very impactful, and what it just felt like
was this amazing act of authenticity and vulnerability.
I'm gonna put my words to it now.
You don't have to own these at all, and that's just,
what I read was like, hey, look it.
I've been too focused on what everybody else thinks,
and it's time I need to start taking care of myself
and putting my own oxygen mask on before assisting
other passengers or whatever the sort of analogy is.
And it was just, to me, you know, in a way,
it sort of stood for what the internet
and all of the democratization of these processes
and activities and tools, it could stand for it.
So it was very anthemic,
and I was like, this dude's awesome,
and then I followed you on Twitter for a long time
and we started communicating there, and then,
lo and behold, we got to spend
some time together in Seattle a while ago.
- And then Twitter became a hellscape website,
but we're somehow still on it, and I don't know why.
- Right, right.
(both laughing)
But it's fun to cross paths there.
We've both raised some money to help our startups grow,
you with Breather, me with CreativeLive.
But I'm gonna take us on a little journey.
So we've got that; we went to the way back machine,
me sitting on my white fake leather couch,
which is now since at my former assistant Norton's house.
(Chase laughs)
But, if you go to the central kernel there, to me,
that was sort of you, you said
you were writing a book at the time.
You then wrote Flinch.
You co-authored a book
called Trust Agents with Chris Brogan.
Talk so me about that phase of your career
and a little bit about each of those two novels.
And give me the top line sort of each,
and then we're gonna dive into each one independently.
- Yeah, so, I wrote two books with Chris.
This was during the phase when the social media
was really not much of a thing at all,
and we were noticing things that did not really,
that are common sense today.
It's crazy to watch things happen on the internet
that became a standard, and you kind of don't know
at the time, but you're like, well,
someone had to invent it, you know?
And so, having been through several phases of that now,
I had the good fortune of being, I'm 39 today.
But really, like, for something like 15 or 20 years,
it's like, people were inventing things,
the same way that, I don't know, maybe some people
think of cryptocurrency or whatever,
decentralized apps as the future or something like that.
And there's people out there,
men and women, inventing those things.
And so, there was a time when there were no best practices
around businesses and social media
and how they were supposed to behave.
So what you see is, you know, Wendy's talking shit
on the internet to like, whoever
that likes McDonald's or something like that.
And so, we were out there in 2008, 2009,
kind of doing those best practices.
We wrote a book about it.
- [Chase] That was Trust Agents.
- Yeah, that was Trust Agents,
and that became an instant New York Times bestseller.
And we were very fortunate, and it's really, like,
I think the core thing that I've figured out.
It was just like timing really
is the main thing in your whole life, right?
And so, that led to a career doing speeches,
being a public speaker.
I then wrote a book called Flinch, which is broadly
about why people say that the want to do things
and then never do them.
They have certain goals that they want
or they have certain things they want out of their life,
but for some reason, even though they have
all the information to do those things,
they don't actually do them.
And there's just a fundamental sort of paradox
that is inherent in everyone's life,
and how to come to grips with that.
And this was a period of time where you was really,
I don't know, I was trying to discover the core things
that mattered to me, and during this time, after I wrote
a third book as well with Chris, I was like, huh,
I'm really kind of just a talker,
and I haven't really ever actually done anything.
You were not a talker,
but you were principally an artist, right?
And so I guess in a way, I was,
I guess writing, if you define it
as art or craft or something like that.
And I was like, but can I actually operate a business,
and am I just a phony?
It's like, coming to grips with this thing
and then going, I'm gonna go out and start a business,
and I did, and so that's what I do now.
- All right, so, I'm gonna go,
let's stay in the book world for a second.
We'll get to Breather,
which is the business that you just spoke of,
which is an incredible business, by the way.
- [Julien] Thanks.
- So, Trust Agents, in an age where you're writing something
before it's common knowledge, you are in large part
staking out sort of big claims.
I think one of the things that you claimed in Trust Agents
was that social media was here because in 2008,
it was like, because it couldn't be measured
at that time, it was seen as much less useful.
And so, most of the big, you know, agencies and corporations
were largely talking shit about it, because they didn't see
the application or they undersold the application.
But it's important to acknowledge that that's literally
because it wasn't measurable, and then now, obviously,
it's a huge, multi-hundred-billion-dollar business
in and of itself, the business of social media.
Maybe more than multi-hundred billion, I don't know.
But sort of how did you, how did you sort of decide
to put rules and ideas and best practices in place
in a world where you're just making it up?
And I think the underline is like,
aren't we all just making it up?
- Yeah, that's right, we are.
And then some people are chosen to like,
write books about it or become authors,
or become experts, and in fact, all of us
are just kinda making it up as we go along.
And it requires a certain arrogance,
(Julien laughs) I think,
that either you have to have naturally
and that you have to tame, or the opposite,
that you don't have it and you have to fake
the arrogance or something like that.
- [Chase] Which one are you?
- Both, I'm really both.
A combination of, like, who are these people
that are writing rules, and why don't I become a person
that writes rules, and then I'll go home and I'll like,
put my head on the pillow and be like,
I have no idea what I'm doing, you know.
So it's a combination of those two things,
which I think probably some people can relate to.
So, at that time, you're just like, you know,
the core thing that I think if you're a creator
or you're someone who's trying to invent something
is what you really want, you wanna be able
to look at something with fresh eyes
and say, but why does it work this way?
And I don't understand why
lots of people are following these rules.
They don't seem to make any sense to me,
and to be able to have the courage or have the,
you know, audacity and arrogance or whatever
to attempt to recreate something, and then not just that,
but actually, like, to withstand the assault of people
telling you that you're wrong, over and over again, right?
Yeah, there was this funny thing with Jeff Bezos
when the Kindle Fire came out, and you watch him do,
you know, we all know who this person is.
But in 2000, I don't know, 2010, I have no idea,
he comes out with the Kindle Fire, and it's literally
him on stage just being angry about other people
not believing him, and he's already like, the third
richest person in the world, but he's still angry.
(Chase laughs)
And he's like, okay, so you remember
when we came out with the Kindle,
and no one believed that we could make it work.
And then here's what happened.
Then he's like, and then 2009, here's what we did.
And he's just like, you can tell that there's this,
just this insane, you're about as good of an entrepreneur
as the chip on your shoulder and the size of it.
And so he has the biggest chip on his shoulder.
He's like, in his mind, I can tell
because I felt this feeling, what's it gonna take,
guys, before you take me seriously?
Like, what's it gonna take?
And that's the thing that kinda propels you
relentlessly in that direction.
- I think the quote that somehow emerged
on the backside of that tantrum was, you have to be,
as an entrepreneur, a creator, you have to be
willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
- [Julien] Yeah, that's right, yeah, the exact thing.
- And I think that's a beautiful, like, nutshell
for capturing, and so, for the folks watching and/or
listening at home or on the road or wherever you are,
if there are elements of your life where you feel
like you've got ideas and you wanna put them
out in the world and people don't get it,
they don't get you, your parents, your close friends.
In some cases, these are people who you trust and admire
and appreciate and value their opinion, and when even they
are dubious, or they're like uh-huh, yeah, good luck
with that photography thing, yeah, nice job, good luck,
or whatever it is, that there's hope, because basically,
all things in some way, shape, or form have that immediate,
truth goes from sort of not possible to obvious?
Those are like the three, I think,
Schopenhauer or something like that.
There's three stages of truth.
And you just have to find a way to get your idea
to the stage where other people, and that's where
I think your comment about the chip on your shoulder
is directly proportional.
- Yeah, if you don't have enough
of a chip on your shoulder, you'll simply give up.
- Yeah.
- Because you're like, okay, you know what,
fuck these people, like, who cares.
Okay, I'm over it, you know?
- I don't need to solve this problem.
Let someone else solve it.
- That's right, or some version,
like I've done that part that I needed to do.
Like, I'm done.
And then the other side is just like, you don't understand
how it's something that is so obvious to you.
It needed to be obvious, fairly obvious,
for you to put your, just like what we're all doing,
like putting a reputation on the line, putting
our name to something, signing to it every day,
right, and saying, yeah, I still believe it.
Yeah, that's right, I'm gonna tell you
about it right now, yeah, that's right.
And so, how you're relentlessly doing that.
You really need to believe in it, but still, like,
90% of the world doesn't care.
Nevermind believing it; they don't even know
that it exists for something.
- How about how important it is believing
the idea that you're trying to get out there?
(Julien sighs)
- I think it's the core thing.
You know, it's funny, 'cause what you discover,
I don't like this about myself, but it's like,
one of my core things that I think I can sell
an idea really well.
If you wanna be something in life,
you really do need this skill, but it's not like, it's not
a great quality to be like, I'm a great salesperson.
Like it's really, I wish that it was something else,
(Julien laughs) you know, something more.
- [Chase] Great philanthropist.
- Holy or like, pure, you know, like, some other quality.
(Chase laughs)
But you really do need that, and in order to,
most people who are able to sell really well,
they sell because they believe in something.
And if they don't believe in something,
then I think the whole thing falls apart.
- Well, I think there's a, let's throw rocks
at Microsoft for a second, no offense.
I love Microsoft, Apple, everyone for their own thing,
but if you're Apple and you've got the iPod,
and then a couple years later, you're Microsoft,
and you have the Zune, and for those of you
who don't remember, this was Microsoft's attempt.
It was an answer to the .mp3 player,
and I remember reading or hearing an inside baseball
kind of idea where the people at Microsoft
who were tasked to sell the thing are like,
just make me a fucking iPod.
I can sell that.
You made me a fucking Zune.
Like, I can't sell the Zune.
And what is implicit in there is not the product
and whether it's good or not good;
it's the belief or lack of belief in the thing.
And if the people who are supposed to be driving this thing,
in your case as an entrepreneur or a creator,
it's like, if you don't believe in you, who will?
If you don't believe in your ideas, your passion,
the things that you care about, who will?
And that's a very, very hard I think
thing to come to grips with, and for those at home
who are trying to think about why the thing isn't working,
I think maybe that's, this can be a call to arms.
Like, do you believe in it?
- Yeah, and it's so challenging to simultaneously,
'cause you have to hold all these ideas
in your head at the same time.
One of your ideas is, I could be wrong.
You cannot discount that, 'cause at some point,
someone's gonna say something to you.
I remember having a hard deadline, I think it was,
I don't know, some day in June of 2013,
and being like, if I can't raise money and finish it
by this day, I'm just gonna drop this.
And actually on that day, where I announced my company
at LAWEB, which is I think
our collective friend Luck who runs that event in France,
and I'm Francophone Canadian,
so that was an appropriate place for me to do that.
And being like, if I can't raise money
by that day, I'm done.
And actually like I, literally,
the day of, I was able to close the money.
And I was like, well, I have to announce this, even though.
(Julien laughs)
And so, you have to hold this, you have to have some
vague, objective measures of, by X time with Y thing,
if Z thing doesn't happen, I quit, or something, right?
It can't be, I'll go on forever.
But at the same time, it needs to be,
but I believe in this so much that I'll write the checks,
that I'll do these things, and I really, and it's funny,
because at some point, it's vision; at another point
in that same line, that vision is craziness.
These are qualities that people like in entrepreneurs
and really love in entrepreneurs,
but they actually don't like in people normally.
(Julien laughs)
- [Chase] Yeah, totally.
- So, it's a funny thing to be one of those people
that is trying to reinvent fundamental things
about the world that other people take for granted.
- Yeah, like space, for example.
- Yes, like commercial real estate.
Commercial real estate is one of these really funny things
that you just presume that you were born,
that it works, buildings work one way, you know,
and you're gonna die, and it's never gonna change, right?
And so, I didn't realize at the time
that one of the best ways to know if you have an idea
and your idea has some, you know, legs or whatever,
is that it actually propels people in a different way
than you originally suspected that it would.
When I came up with this company,
me and a co-founder Catarina came up with this idea
of, space should be useful and accessible by mobile phone.
We didn't realize that we were reinventing a section
of commercial real estate, like a whole section of it
that now is sitting at over 120 million raised by some
very good funds, 250 employees, like, all of these things,
and going okay, well, I'm reinventing something.
I don't know what I'm reinventing, but here we go.
And then, it's just propelling you, years later,
and that's wild, because most ideas, you start with them,
and the world stops you in some way.
And I happened to choose an idea
and I happened to come up with a thing,
that, you know, could continue to grow for 20 years, right?
And that's obviously like, a weird blessing.
- Yeah, and a curse, so we're gonna talk
about both sides, the blessing and the curse.
So, on the blessing side, I observed, I mean,
I remember talking to you, maybe even it was on this show
a couple years ago, when Breather was really, really early
or maybe had not even been announced yet, I don't know.
Man, maybe we've been a little bit
longer than we think since you've been on the show.
- [Julien] Yeah.
- But the prototype that I understood was,
oh, well of course people, and the concept with Breather
is you wanna rent space in a city
for a meeting or a conference room,
or we've used it for recording these podcasts.
- [Julien] Oh, thank you.
- Yeah, happy to do it.
And any other number of reasons, and you wanna pay
by the hour, and you wanna have access to the space.
It wants to be clean and all of these things,
and then you wanna be able to close the door and walk away,
not dissimilar to an Uber, renting a car.
You were part of the, hit the sweet spot
of the Uber of, fill in the blank.
- Yeah, right, taking a thing and making it pay-per-use
instead of making it commitment based, that's right.
- Hmm, interesting, I hadn't thought of that distinction.
But I just found it really useful.
And I think part of what I've seen in this idea,
for example, hey, I've got this great idea
where you should be able to take pictures of anything,
add cool effects via these things called filters,
and then share it direct to social media, and I think this
is gonna be an interesting idea, I think.
In the future, you know, photography's gonna be
a universal language that you don't have to worry about,
and that people are gonna be taking pictures,
you know, the best camera is the one that's with you.
You're gonna be taking pictures of receipts and where
you parked your car and pictures of your kids, and you're
gonna be sharing them, trillions and trillions of images.
And that was, like, you talked about timing.
That was very early.
It was in 2007, '08, and '09,
and it did go on to be app of the year.
But I still have all of this resistance and red tape
and lack of understanding, and then this little company
called Instagram came along, used a lot
of the same information, not dissimilar to your book.
And they built a great business.
Let talk about Breather, though.
So, when you have this idea,
so, I know just enough about this experience
to talk about it, but not enough to be you.
What was the initial concept when you had the idea
of Breather, and was everybody immediately onto it,
or did you get a lot of no's,
and if so, what did it sound like?
- No, no, no, yeah.
I had a meaningfully successful career as a writer,
and it was like, but you have a good thing.
I don't understand why you're doing this.
My lawyer actually brought me, it's weird.
By the way, it's very weird to have any lawyer at all.
Now I have like an army of them.
It's really strange, even that I had one at that time.
And my lawyer brought me to a breakfast place,
and we make fun of it now, and he brought in
like a property manager or something like that, and the guy
was like, this is not gonna work, all these things,
and I remember leaving that room and being like,
I'm still gonna do this.
I literally do not care.
(Julien laughs)
And I'm happy that I did.
So, so, there is, you know, it's just, in this process
of just constantly being exposed to an idea,
the idea morphs as time goes on.
So, for me, at the very beginning,
I was like, well, space is very scarce.
So I just thought, my experience in coffee shops,
my experience traveling, being a public speaker or whatever,
you're stuck between a Starbucks and a hotel room.
And there's no space that's really for you, right?
And so I was like, well, people are gonna need them.
And I remember talking to early people, early investors,
that were like, I think this is just meeting rooms.
And I was like, no, it's not just meeting rooms,
that actually, it was, it was commercial real estate.
It was largely about productivity and all those things.
I know when you used in Los Angeles and other cities
that it's largely about you and a team
getting work done, of course.
But at the time, you start with this.
It's funny, you know, Andrew Mason, who started Groupon
and then went on to start Detour and Descript,
still an entrepreneur that I really respect,
he really started Groupon as like a way to collect the set
of people who want to donate something towards a cause,
and then next thing you know, it becomes a coupon app.
And so it's funny how the market will take on,
you're lucky if you have a project
and your project has any market at all, right?
That's a blessing regardless of what it is.
But it's funny how someone will or the market will take
an idea and just say, well, this is what I want out of it,
and then you just kind of follow that in whatever direction.
So, it was just, people will need space,
and people do need a lot of space, it turns out.
But then it becomes a reinvention of a section
of commercial real state, not a reinvention of Starbucks
or a reinvention of, you know, I don't know,
meditation spaces or like whatever other pure
sort of version of that that I thought at that time.
- Got it.
How do you think about, there are other folks
who've tried to enter the market.
Is this a winner-take-all, compared to...
- [Julien] No, that's the thing; many are.
- An Uber or a WeWork.
How do you think about what it is that you're in?
- Yeah, so it's funny.
I think many markets are winner-take-all,
or they seem that way at the very beginning,
and people tell, there's almost like a religion,
and when I say a religion, what I mean is it's a belief
that is universal in tech that network effects
progressively will destroy every competitor.
It's taken a long time for Uber and Lyft
and for you to discover that actually, probably neither
of them is gonna die for like, a very long time.
In commercial real estate,
these things are mostly true in large markets.
In very, very large markets, you have multiple winners.
So in actuality, even in my industry today,
you know, if you think about Convene,
Convene has raised something like 150 million for event
spaces, and then WeWork has raised, I don't even know.
- 20 billion.
- Or five billion dollars, you know, via SoftBank
and more in debt, right?
And we have raised over 120 now.
And so there's like meaningful players at scale,
but that's only possible in markets that are insanely big.
And in most cases, there probably is
like a major winner, right?
We just happen to be in a market that's so large
that it doesn't really apply.
- Got it.
So, we've talked about books.
We've talked about companies.
We've talked about a little bit of history
that you and I have together.
I wanna talk about you,
something I've noticed that you don't do very much of.
You tend to shift all the conversations into your businesses
or your products or your projects.
(Julien laughs)
So, just ride this one with me, ride the wave.
Was there something in, and the reason for going here
is the folks who are watching are largely creators
and entrepreneurs, and you know the audience very well
from being on the show.
I think what we all wanna know is that
this is doable by people like us, or people like me.
And if you're sitting at home in your underwear
in Ohio right now or you're on a bike somewhere in central
Colorado riding up a steep hill trying to get in shape,
or wherever you're listening or watching,
that you can put yourself in this conversation.
To me, that's the most important and first step, is like,
wait a minute, you need to be able to put yourself there.
And I think one of the best ways
of doing that is through personal stories.
So, Brene Brown has what she calls gold-plated grit,
and we tell these gritty stories about how hard it was,
and then we immediately kick back over to our successes,
because it's more universally sort of lauded,
that we, aw, yeah, and it was so hard to raise the money,
but then we did it!
And I'm trying to sort of find
that other side of that same coin.
So, talk to me about some of the things
that were hard, in A, you starting.
What are some of the gritty underbellies
of self-doubt and grit that you had to have
in order to create some success.
- For sure.
I mean, the answer is everything is hard, you know?
That's the part that's really fucked up about it.
And it's really, you know, I don't know.
You know, maybe Elon Musk is not popular right now
because of how weird he is on Twitter or something.
But isn't it amazing to you how relentless,
like, how anyone can be that relentless at all?
Like, look at you and me.
Like, we are, we are pretty relentless, but are we like,
really dying on the inside by anxiety and stress?
I don't know you in that way,
but I'm gonna guess you're not, and I'm not.
Like, of course I feel stress,
and I feel of course anxiety and all these things,
but I'm not like dying from it on the inside.
But the first thing to figure out is, is humans are,
by their very nature, people that are incredibly good
at long-term suffering, (Julien laughs)
and do you just kind of have to accept it,
and you just have to accept that that's a part of the human
experience and the part of you doing anything of substance.
The biggest thing that really drew me in was that I put
myself on the line and I put my reputation on the line,
and once I had raised some money
or put up some of my own money in my company, if you use
the example of the company I started, then I was like,
then I used the negativity to really fuel me.
I was like, I am afraid of being a loser or being an idiot
and wasting, and I was like, so I have to continue.
And so, that's one way, you know,
and then, then you're in it, and you're like, okay,
you know, I remember waking up and being like, midway
between maybe our series seed and our series A round,
and I would wake up, like any entrepreneur wakes up
in the middle of the night.
I don't wake up and I freak out.
What I do is I just wake up and I'm thinking,
and I just won't stop thinking, and so, a quality
that I had from my book writing days and I still have
is I write a thousand words every morning,
and I do that every morning.
I've been doing it for 10 years or something, a long time.
That's a lot of words.
And I woke up, and I was like, we are running out of money.
And I was like, oh, well, shit, you know?
(Julien laughs) And so, you will find yourself
with heaps and heaps and burdens
and just these insane burdens that you take on.
And really, it's about whether you're able
to persevere through them, you know?
And what you figure out is actually like,
you really wish that it were over already,
like the person in Chicago who's going up the hill
and who's trying to get in shape.
It really is just about whether you quit or not, you know?
- So much of success is just,
just like one mile past where you got off your bike.
- Yeah, and you're just like, okay,
I guess I have to keep going.
And so there are, you know, it's really fascinating,
and I love, you do see all the success stories.
Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix,
who ish the CEO currently, still, and he says something
along the lines of, oh, I just love competing.
I love being in the ring, and I love all these things,
and how excited he seems about it.
And it's like, is he just excited all the time?
No.
We can talk about it; he's not excited all the time.
He's super stressed out all the time.
It's just that there's more
positive in it for him than negatives.
But it wasn't always that way.
But at least we have the good fortune, in our case,
of having this relentless attitude and being able
to continuously persevere and succeeding,
and that, that's some luck, that's some hard work,
that's some support from family members,
like all the alchemy that needs to get it to, has to work
together in order for you to get to the other side.
- All right, so you wake up at three in the morning,
and you're like, we're running out of money.
What's the tactic that you do?
You mentioned writing a thousand words,
but like, bridge the gap for me between waking up
and realizing that you're running out of money,
and how do you get through it?
- Yeah, so, I think I just, in the early stages
of a company, you don't have a lot of people
that you can be like, hey, what do we do?
In my case, we had something like nine employees,
maybe, something like that, and I had the good fortune
that we had a decent team of people,
and those people, I was just like, guys,
you guys need to run the company.
It needs to grow at this rate.
Just figure it out.
I probably said like, at the time, it was like,
you need to grow eight percent a week, which is a well-known
Y Combinator thing, or 20% a month, or whatever.
And to their good fortune,
and it worked out really well for everyone involved,
I could focus on doing this one thing,
and we were successful at doing that.
We raised six million dollars series A,
and we did it because of the, this is something
that I didn't understand at the time.
I think what people believe is they believe that individuals
that are successful are successful because they just
have this relentless drive, and I accidentally
just reinforced that with what I just said.
And I'm sorry; that's not true.
What really happens is that there's a successful
safety ecosystem around them, and that ecosystem
is a combination of your co-founder and your early people
and all these things, and the people that will wake up
when you wake up in the middle of the night and like,
will lean over to you and be like, you're okay,
is everything fine, you know.
You're actually not doing it by yourself.
You never are.
You're just getting the credit.
- The myth of the lone founder.
- Which is a complete illusion, but it's reinforced
by the fact that there's one guy on the show,
not like a whole team of people behind them.
And in actuality, when I wrote that book The Flinch,
I believed that it was all about grit and perseverance
and just going and doing the hard thing.
What I didn't realize was in order to do that,
you need an amount of underlying safety.
That safety can come from, and in a lot of cases,
I'm sure it comes from these really crazy things.
- Spouses and partners.
- It can come from having a lot of money in the bank.
It can come from your loved ones that you have.
It can come from other people that you trust.
- It can come from not having a lot of other expenses,
- Right, yeah.
- So your means to live are very few and very simple.
- So like, at worst, I return to X,
which is a pretty good option.
It comes from, yeah, your BATANA,
your best alternative to a negotiated agreement,
which is another alternative other than your success here.
And so there's lots of different things
that you do to produce safety,
and then that basis of safety allows you
to take the risk and feel like I'm okay,
because regardless, I've got this stuff.
- I love that.
I'm gonna do a slight little detour here, and I had
the good fortune of being mentored by Sir Richard Branson.
He's an investor in CreativeLive, amazing legend,
and I think everybody thinks,
and he tells, he told me this story over lunch.
He's like, you know, people, they romanticize
about, they romanticize about entrepreneurship.
Like, all right, all my chips, I'm betting it all.
(Julien laughs)
And the reality is that, you know, whether you're,
who invented the light bulb, Thomas Edison?
- [Julien] Sure.
- Or, you know, who had a thousand,
you know, misfires, or, as he says it, like,
I found a thousand ways not to invent the light bulb,
that it's always about sort of living to fight another day
and trying to, what Sir Richard says
is sort of mitigate the downside.
And there are so many things you can do
in order to protect yourself, whether it's a rainy day fund,
whether it's reduce your living expenses
so that you're very happy with very simple things,
and therefore, if I blow everything and you have nothing,
then you can start again, because, you know,
you don't need these material things, or in his case,
the example he used with me was negotiating
that when he started airlines, that he would negotiate
with the manufacturer of those airplanes to buy them back
at a pre-agreed upon price if it didn't work.
Like, that's just crazy.
Nobody does that, but even folks like the most successful,
iconic entrepreneurs in the history of the planet
are doing this at all times.
And I think in there, there are lessons for us to learn.
- I totally agree, and when you tell these stories,
and you're like, oh, he started SpaceX,
the more successful stories to me are the people
who risk it all again.
In actuality, the last time that I risked it all
was actually maybe never, right, because I started
with a small success when I was 25 or something,
and then another one later when I was 28, and so,
progressively, it's never been all in.
And, you know, for Richard Branson,
I'm sure it's not fucking all in either.
He's not an insane person.
So, you know, the stories that are the craziest to me
are the people where someone is, they go from,
they're the, you know, like Jack Dorsey, and he's like,
yeah, and I invented Twitter,
and now I'm gonna invent a completely other thing.
And then there's people that are putting
all of their money into some new, crazy thing.
- [Chase] Hundreds of millions, yeah.
- 'Cause those are people that they're going,
actually, I am putting it all in.
- Yeah, 'cause they have had a life
of multi-hundred millionaire or billionaire.
- All of it is going in, for real.
Then you're like, wow, that's unbelievable,
'cause most people, they are rational to a degree
about their lack of rationality.
It's a buffer, and most people have it.
They just don't talk about it in the story.
- And I think it's a thing.
Like, right now, I'd imagine there's a bunch of listeners
saying, wait a minute, I got a family and a mortgage
and a whatever, and so, to me, as a creator,
this is the way my creator brain goes, is like, awesome.
Those are called creative constraints.
The client says, I want you to draw me a picture, and it
needs to be four foot tall and six feet wide and purple.
Then you don't make it seven feet tall,
and you don't make it red.
Or, wait, is it don't make it purple?
(Chase laughs)
I already forgot what I just said.
But these are creative constraints.
And so, if the creative constraint that you have
is you're trying to get your design business off the ground
or you're trying to, you know, create a product that you're
gonna bring to market, then don't quit your day job,
but what can you do between, instead of the nine to five,
what can you do between five and nine, and I know.
I mean, even successful entrepreneurs,
I'll use Ryan Carson, who's a friend.
He's been on the show, founder of Treehouse.
He gets up at 4:30 in the morning every morning,
100% of the time, because he needs at least
two and a half hours to do his most important work
before his small children get up.
Everyone's like, I got small children.
I understand.
Less House of Cards, less, you know, whatever, sleeping.
It depends on how bad you want it.
But these are constraints that we can
all place on our time, our money, our assets.
Of course, you increase the chance of success if you put
more of what you can put in into the business, whether
that's time or money or energy or resources or whatever.
But, to paraphrase Richard Branson,
what can you do to protect the downside?
It sounds like you've done that.
- This is why Gary Vaynerchuk is a great,
you know, he's gone to a point of celebrity
that it's almost like a parody of himself.
But, he's right, and he's just like, you need to work hard.
And everyone is working hard, and it's like,
you simultaneously need to be able to say, yes, you are
working hard, but in actuality, you need to work harder,
because it's not a pleasant thing to hear, it's not.
And what you wanna hear is you wanna hear a little formula.
One of the most dangerous parts about self-help
is that it puts the burden on the person to be like,
well, you didn't use my formula, so of course you failed,
which is absurd and offensive, and to talk about it
as being, oh, it's actually your, no, no.
There just never was a formula in actuality.
You know, the sunlight happened to reflect upon the ooze
in such a way that it created life, right?
The sun just wasn't in the right place at the right time
for you, but it was for this guy or whatever.
So, it is this thing where the life
and the choice is not glamorous, but at the end,
there is this weird sort of honor that you have
where you're able to say, even though my goal was to be A,
and actually, I turned out to be the A minus one,
but you know what, I went out and I did it.
And there's something like you're not gonna get
all the glory that you want, and you're not gonna get
probably all the money that you want.
You might get none, you know?
But, at the end of the day, you look at yourself
in the mirror, and you know what kind of person you are.
And that's an amazing thing to have,
and you can get that from anything.
This is a very frivolous example, but I'm learning to surf
with like, a really good friend of mine in Santa Cruz,
and me and my girlfriend, Helen, whom I love deeply,
we go down there on a consistent basis.
And I've been trying to surf so hard for like three years,
and I'm 39, and it's like, I'm not meant to do this at this
age, but finally, it's like, it finally clicked for me.
And it's such a trivial, meaningless example.
It has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
- [Chase] It has everything to do.
- You get to look at it like, I did it,
I did it, and it's, what people don't realize is well,
just like everyone, we're mostly quitters.
We do mostly quit things.
It's just that when you don't quit, then it's like,
oh, something actually happened.
So you put yourself in a situation, as I did,
where I was like, I just can't quit.
- [Chase] Outlast.
- I just can't.
I need to outlast my own bad habits
and just relentlessly pursue it.
That's why I have this little rail saver here on my thing,
as a reminder that I'm not gonna quit surfing,
which I didn't, in order to be able to get decently good.
So it's those little daily habits
and reminders that will get you there.
- So, I think that's a powerful lesson, obviously.
What have you quit?
I think that was one of the things that I found early on,
is I would speak in front of people that like,
letting 'em know that oh, wait,
I quit a career path in professional soccer.
You know, I was on the Olympic development team,
could have played in Europe, decided, not for me.
Nine out of 10 people are like, dude, what are you doing?
Very hard to quit that, especially in the face
of social convention where like, dude,
if you can play pro soccer, you go.
Tomorrow, now, go.
- [Julien] Go.
- Dropped out of, or, yeah, bailed on medical school
and dropped out of a PhD halfway through it.
So, these are three things that I quit.
Basically four years, I quit those three
major, major life sort of missions or visions
for myself, because I wasn't feeling it.
And I found it very hard socially, culturally,
and to be fair, I'm white, male, born in North America.
These are all like, radical privileges to be even
in those camps and to say like, oh, if you're smart
and hardworking, you can become a lawyer or a doctor.
Taking all that with a grain of salt and just saying,
dude, don't be a dick, but to be able to do that in the face
of a lot of sort of shame around not being the successful
things that other people have in mind for you.
Those are some of the things that I've quit.
Those are some of the reasons why I've quit them.
Please share with us, what are some things
that you have quit and what are some of the reasons
that you quit those things.
- Yeah, so, I quit being, I was one
of the first podcasters in the world.
I was in the first 10 podcasters that was ever
paid to do it at the age of 25 or some number.
And I was like, I could keep doing this,
and now, if you look at, I mean,
2018 is the craziest year for this of all time.
Podcasts have literally taken over the world.
- [Chase] Yeah, right, they're everywhere.
- And here you are, and you're 14 years early.
It was like 2004, and I quit doing that.
And then, I was a, and still am, 'cause you can do it
for a week and still be a New York Times bestselling author,
and so you can be a New York Times bestselling author.
You get to call yourself that forever,
but I did that, and then I quit after five years, you know?
And so, it's funny how you're gonna quit something,
but actually, you're pretty good at it, you know,
and it's just that you have to follow,
and it's okay to like different things.
For a certain period of career,
you're like, well, I did this.
A buddy of mine, Terry Fallis, he ran a PR agency in Toronto
for many years, and then he became a novelist.
And he has a book that is actually just coming out
in the next six months that I'm trying to get an advance
view of, and the book is called If At First You Succeed,
which is a flip on the aphorism,
if you at first don't succeed, try and try again.
I think everyone is successful at something, and midway
through, they're like, but is this really what I want?
And the answer should sometimes be no, it isn't what I want.
And, 'cause it's weird.
You have a choice, and if you're an entrepreneur especially,
it's so hard, because you're like,
but I was passionate in 2006 about this, and now it's 2011,
and I'm passionate about this new thing.
Am I supposed to keep going?
And that choice is very difficult to make.
I have chosen to quit over and over and over again,
and in so doing, I have always felt
like there's more around the bend.
And I think that understanding of,
there is a future past this is very, very important.
It has a certain amount of self-reliance built into it.
You have to feel like you can make a future, again,
within the confines of the many privileges that we have.
But you have to feel like you can build
another future for yourself.
Even though your present is actually pretty good,
that's just not meant to be, or something.
- Or if it's really shitty.
- Or if it's really shitty.
Then you should definitely quit, yeah.
- And, you also should believe that you
can make a new thing that is not shitty.
- Yeah, there is a law of diminishing returns,
which is just like, is it really gonna get better from here,
10% better, and just like, where is there a good upside,
you know, versus like right now, it's kind of downside
production or some kind of thing like that.
So you do have to make those choices pretty wisely.
- So, thank you for sharing a couple things you've quit.
What about a couple places where you've decided not to quit?
You had every reason to, all of the urges,
so tell me about something you didn't quit and why.
- Mmhmm, yeah.
There have been so many things that I've quit.
- Well, just take a second.
Think about it.
I'll take a sip of water, and we'll let
everybody at home just like, adjust their AirPods, mmhmm.
This is delicious water, thank you.
Something that you decided not to quit
that you persevered with, and why did you decide that?
- I think that there are a certain set of things
that you feel like you should psychologically quit.
There are things that are inherent in like,
you cannot give up your own body; you just can't.
You cannot give up your own mind; you just can't.
There's a set of outside factors.
Figuring out the difference between the inside
and the outside is really hard, 'cause sometimes
your identity is like, I write books,
or I'm a CEO, or I am an entrepreneur,
you know, there's a set of things like this.
But recently, I've come to grips with this idea
of, there's a certain set of things,
and you just cannot give up on them, ever.
So I got really hardcore into meditation,
(Chase laughs)
- [Chase] I like that.
- And really recently.
- I got violently, hardcore into meditation.
- Very hardcore.
Yeah, I sound like a tech bro.
But in order to, you realize that there's a certain,
if you're just doing a minimal amount of it, it's useless.
And if you, like, if you go to the gym every month,
or every couple months, it's useless.
And so, there's a set of things like that that at some
point, you figure out, I need to actually commit.
You don't quit those things, 'cause you kind of can't.
But your choice at some point becomes, I'm just gonna take
this for granted and I don't care, or I'm doubling down.
And, when I started to double down is when you start
to see actual results, and you start to see that you can
actually change your, you know, you can change your mind.
You can change your horrible mental habits that you have,
like, all of these different things.
- [Chase] Self-talk.
- Yeah, if you're an entrepreneur and you have
a set of mental habits that are fundamentally,
the thing that's screwed up about being an entrepreneur
is every quality, every negative quality that you have
is a negative quality
that's gonna be reflected into your business.
So if you're lazy, then that's
gonna be reflected in your business.
If you don't like to do A, B, or C thing,
it's gonna be reflected in your business.
There's obviously much more obvious ones.
Like, if you're dishonest,
then it's gonna be reflected in your business, right?
So, it's really weird to see
your own personality cause problems.
This happens to everybody that's an entrepreneur.
So I'm talking about myself, but it applies to everyone.
So it's like at some point, you just have
to work on the core, and I think that that
is something that I recently realized.
As you get older, it's more natural,
and I discovered, it's like, instead of half-committing,
my father taught me to meditate when I was 16.
I went to a zen temple in 2008 or 2009 in Japan,
and I stayed there for a while.
And still then, I was not committed, and then I was like,
okay, well, I need this to become a real thing.
It's amazing how habits, just daily habits,
will just change everything, and you're like,
oh, I'm gonna overcommit, and I'm gonna do this thing,
and I can do it for six months.
No, you actually just need to stop and just do it every day,
and that's very important.
- What is your mindfulness practice,
your meditation practice now?
- Every day, 30 minutes or longer, and then sometimes,
half days or full days of meditation that just go on for,
and actually, it's ironic, 'cause I do it not far from here
in Tribeca with an ex-zen monk
who used to run a zen temple in upstate New York.
And I don't know, yeah.
It's very basic things,
and this is another thing that we hear.
We always hear, oh, you should do this thing, you should
do this thing, and then we're like, eh, not for me.
In actuality, it is for you.
(Chase laughs)
You're stuck in your own habits.
You're stuck in your own set of things,
and you just need to give them up, you know?
And one day, you figure that out.
Hopefully it's not too late.
- So meditation is a thing.
What are some other daily habits?
I'm a bit freak on daily habits.
- You were just talking about it,
and I'm noticing how my posture is relentlessly bad.
Took me 39 years to finally listen to my mother
and just be like, fine, you know.
- We both just sat up, if you're listening.
(Chase laughs)
- And so like, I have a set of, I have an app
that's called Streak that would normally sync to my watch,
but I lost it in the ocean a couple days ago,
that is a set of 12 different habits
that you can set up for yourself and just
check, check, check them off every single day.
And so the ones that I have now are just remembering
to eat a certain amount of protein and then always being,
having a good posture, and then meditating every day,
making sure to do yoga every day, and like,
making sure to connect with me girlfriend and making sure
that we have, like, actual connection, real, actual
connection every day, making sure that I exercise,
like a set of other things like that
that are just essentially like, if you're in your 20s,
and I wasn't even a partier, but during that time,
I was like, you almost figure out like,
I can ignore my physical body and just not even
pay attention to it, and then when you get to our age,
you're just like, oh, I need to do this on purpose.
- I need to have some intention behind physical fitness
(Julien laughs)
and health and wellness and eating, yeah.
- It's not gonna go well, yeah.
- How many habits do you track, 12?
- The maximum in the app is 12,
which is probably way more than you should anyway.
But each one of them is very simple.
- I do 10 every day.
I usually have an app called Habit List.
I'm gonna check out Streak, I think that's cool.
Do you then review the data and see what you're doing well?
- I just, I forgive myself for the mistakes or whatever
when I don't do them, but just the fact
that they exist on my phone, and mostly on my watch,
means that every day, I'm always paying attention to it,
so even if I forget for one day, it doesn't matter.
So it's not about castigating yourself,
like in the Da Vinci Code or whatever, you know.
It's just like, oh, I did not
do it today, and just moving on.
'Cause you can really, like, that's another thing
about like, when you're starting up some project.
You can become extremely self-hating as a result
of your failures, and it's not like, worth it.
Because what can you do?
You can't do anything.
So you might as well just give it up and just be like,
okay, like I'm just gonna put this guilt to the side
and just work on today.
John Maxwell, who's like a well-known preacher and author,
and how he talks about like, just work on today.
Just every day, work on today.
Forget about everything else, and just focus on that current
moment and doing the best that you can with that moment.
I think that is a great quality if you can achieve it.
- So, three other habits that you employ
on some sort of regular basis
that we can leave our friends with here?
- Yeah, I mean, I would say the one that I don't talk about,
it's not even in my habits specifically,
the one that I've been doing for decades is,
and that other people have based their whole careers on.
Like, they have always said, oh, it changed my life
when you told me to write a thousand words every day.
And this is a habit that is so ingrained in me
that I do it as a co-founder of this business.
I did it as a bestselling writer.
I did it when I had no projects and when I had a lot
of self-doubt, and just like, relentlessly doing that.
I did it this morning.
I did it before.
I'll do it tomorrow.
And the reason why it's because it's a moment
of self-reflection in a world that is otherwise
extremely focused on what it looks like you the outside.
So you never review these words.
You take them, and if you're writing them on paper,
you throw them in the trash, or you put them in a file,
as I do on my computer, and I've never looked back at them.
And just the thousand words allows you that reexamination,
and allows you to do that and feel really good about it.
Now, these habits are good enough for other people
that they've gone, oh my God, it changed my life.
For me, I guess maybe it changed my life,
but I just don't think about it much.
Another one is just to focus on your energy levels
for the time of day when you are best at certain things.
So, in the morning, I'm very good at certain things.
In the afternoon, I'm good at others.
And I just allow myself to be that way,
and I don't try and fight who I am fundamentally.
And then I would say probably a third one
is just making sure that I read every single day,
because no matter how much you, even if you read
like a page, out there in the world,
The Vow Will Have a Conscience wrote about this on Twitter.
All of human wisdom is accumulated
inside of books, everything.
And it's all accessible, and it's really cheap, and/or free,
and it's mostly not on BuzzFeed or on The Verge.
- Where you're spending your time.
- Or TheBlaze or whatever, you know?
- We could make up 10 names of radical media news sites
right now, and they would all sound the same.
- Nobody would know if they existed or not.
And they would go look for them.
So the other one is just if you are relentlessly learning,
and it's really easy if you have a project,
and I've noticed this a lot, if you already have a project,
you're a CEO of something or you're working on something,
you just like, drop the habits that are hard.
But the ingrained wisdom that just occurs as a result,
you read many bad books.
You read lots of things
that are complete filler and worthless.
But over time, you just accumulate
a set of things that you know and that other people don't.
And the longer you go on, the better it is.
And those things, I mean, the most amazing thing to learn
is really habits will make you into the person that you are,
and you try, I can do it!
No, you literally need to become the person that will
have the right qualities to get to the other side,
and you don't start that way, 'cause nobody does.
And so, habits will get you there.
- I think that's a weird and cool thing,
is that you literally sort of are the habits.
You can look backwards and connect the dots.
Like, oh, I am someone who does X, Y, Z,
and you know, thoughts are one thing, but actions
actually determine, you know, so much about who you are,
because what you do, and do is not a career thing.
It can be love your children.
But those things are actually manifested in the world,
and what's up here, this is, you know, this is separate,
largely separate from the physical reality.
The irony is that this controls your mental state.
Your mindset can control your sort of level of happiness,
which is directly correlated to all these things,
but actions, I find that if you start with actions,
like, the doing of the things.
I have a, I mentioned these 12 things that I track.
I do not have an example of, no matter how good,
quote, classically things all right going in my life,
or how poorly, and, you know, on one end is like,
friends passing away and struggles in relationships
or business or whatever, and on the upside, like,
having a wildly successful professional project,
landing a new deal, winning, fill in the blank.
Whatever camp I'm in doesn't matter
that I have the experience of, is if I do
these 10 things every day, I am a happy person.
- [Julien] Right, mmhmm.
- Doesn't matter if, I mean, shit can be going sideways
in this other camp when things are not,
but if I'm doing these 10 things every day,
I literally do not have an experience of doing these things
and not being my best self.
- [Julien] Right, yeah.
- And so I think there's this cool mystery that you
can unlock with what are those behaviors for you.
You know, you've listed a bunch here.
Thank you for sharing.
I've gone on record many times sharing mine,
so I won't here, but it's interesting
to understand how powerful you find habits.
So, last, this is just a little
sort of quick, a bell to ring.
You mentioned reading.
Anything that, I know I hate the most, -est, the best.
What are you reading?
- Right now?
I have two ways of thinking about what I read.
- [Chase] BuzzFeed?
(Chase laughs)
- What? - BuzzFeed?
- Buzzfeed is not.
Some of my best friends work at BuzzFeed, but no.
I would say one is
you need something that is not productive.
For me, that turns out to be true crime books.
I read a lot of them, and it's just very,
some people have video games.
I also do that, but like, you need something
that is just gonna allow you to just
not think about anything, and that's very useful.
And then, there's a set of books
that people always think about them,
and they have different levels of density.
There's this dude on Twitter right now
who's talking about Jean Daujat,
who's like a very famous French philosopher.
So you can go all the way to these insanely dense books,
or you can go low on density.
But you need to figure out what your optimal thing is.
And for me, I figured out a long time when I was reading
a book a week for many years is there's this pop
business thing, and there's hundreds of books there,
and most of them are not worth it.
And I've written a few of them.
Hopefully you think they're worth it.
But I've written a few of them, and so I know,
and I know the people that wrote them.
Just above that level, you start to hit the Brene Browns,
you start to hit these other things that are just, like,
that are about fundamental human things
and very good quality and worthwhile.
So you just need to find your density level
that will allow you to stay motivative and not feel
like you're reading 280 pages of the same thing.
And once you've found out that level,
it doesn't even matter what the book is anymore,
just as long as you don't stop.
- [Chase] Consuming, lifelong learning.
- You just continue; you consume it.
I used to keep them on a spreadsheet.
That's very helpful, what day I started, what day I,
'cause I'm, you know, I wanna be productive or something.
I would try to convince myself
that I was doing something valuable.
My day that I started, the day that I finished,
and I would try to do one every seven days.
And I did for years, and I kept these spreadsheets.
- Are they published anywhere, or are they private?
- There's a blog post about them from a few years ago,
but I can update it.
And so, as long as you have those, just keep going.
It does not matter how slow you go
as long as you don't stop.
- [Chase] Keep going.
- And that's it.
- Where do people find you online?
Where do you want 'em to go?
- On Twitter, it's @julien, J-U-L-I-E-N.
Name of my company, breather.com, you can look it up there.
I used to blog inoveryourhead.net.
There's a lot of stuff there, including that blog post
that was great inspiration to a lot of people,
and just relentlessly just being out there
trying to provoke and understand the world for what it is.
- Thank you so much for being on the show.
(Chase claps)
I'm grateful for your time, bud.
- Yeah, great to have.
- Keep crushing. - Take care.
- Bye, have a great day.
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