How can you break free from fear-based choices that leave you feeling unfulfilled? What if choosing safety is actually the riskiest decision you can make?
In Never Play It Safe, Chase Jarvis challenges the conventional wisdom that safety leads to happiness. He reveals how fear-based decisions create lives that look impressive from the outside but feel hollow within.
Read more to discover how to live a riskier, yet more fulfilling life with our Never Play It Safe book overview.
Never Play It Safe Book Overview
What if the safest paths are the least likely to make you happy? In the book Never Play It Safe, Chase Jarvis argues that the most rewarding aspects of life lie beyond your comfort zone. Fear can lead you to prioritize safety over your true desires, but when you make safe choices—like staying in a prestigious job you don’t like—you create a life that looks good on paper but feels unfulfilling. He provides practical suggestions for prioritizing your true desires rather than what’s safe or conventional so you can experience life’s adventures and reach your highest potential.
Jarvis is an entrepreneur and award-winning photographer who has worked with brands like Apple and Nike. He’s also the founder of CreativeLive, an online learning platform that has reached over 50 million students, and he hosts a podcast called Chase Jarvis LIVE. Before Never Play It Safe, Jarvis wrote the best seller Creative Calling, a guide to unlocking your creative potential.
In this guide, we’ll start by exploring why fear drives many of your decisions. We’ll then discuss how to commit to your true desires by developing your intuition, reclaiming your attention, and managing your time. Next, we’ll examine how to grow through obstacles by embracing limitations and viewing failure as a learning tool. Finally, we’ll show how to put in the work through consistent practice while maintaining a sense of fun and playfulness. Throughout the guide, we’ll compare Jarvis’s ideas to those of other self-improvement authors and offer more tips for choosing a fulfilling life over a safe one.
Why Do We Choose the Safer Option?
Jarvis writes that fear guides many of our decisions, leading us to choose the safer option over what we truly want. Though these choices might feel smart and practical, you’re compromising your true desires each time you make them. Over time, you’ll realize you never did the things you wanted to do.
Why do we let this happen? Jarvis explains that we have a basic survival instinct to seek safety and avoid uncertainty. Society reinforces this fear by teaching us to conform to expectations of what’s “normal”—for example, that we should get a standard office job instead of starting a business, or that we should go to college instead of pursuing art. When we hear these messages over and over, we start to believe that following unconventional dreams is too risky or unrealistic.
Jarvis adds that we also have a tendency to copy what other people want. For example, you might pick a career path because your older sibling pursued it. This tendency, called mimesis, made evolutionary sense because staying aligned with our tribe’s desires helped ensure we weren’t alienated from the group and left vulnerable to dangers. However, Jarvis argues that in today’s world, this mimetic tendency prevents us from discovering or acknowledging what we truly desire for ourselves.
Recognize Your True Desires
Once you understand how fear and social pressure influence your choices, you can make decisions based on what you truly want instead. In this section, we’ll explore two things you must regain control of to pursue your ideal life: your decisions and your attention.
1) Regain Control Over Your Decisions
First, Jarvis writes that you must regain control of your decisions by trusting your intuition, even when it contradicts what other people expect from you or tell you to do. He explains that we often ignore our intuitive signals because modern society has conditioned us to favor rational thinking. However, your intuition is a better guide for important life decisions because it quickly processes all your past experiences and knowledge, while your conscious, rational mind works slowly and can only focus on limited data.
For example, you might get a nagging feeling that a job offer isn’t right for you, even though it seems prestigious. If you ignore this feeling and take the job purely because of rational reasons—like the offer of a high salary and good benefits—you may feel unhappy months later because the day-to-day work doesn’t suit you.
How to Reconnect With Your Intuition
To trust and recognize your intuitive signals, pay attention to how your body feels in different situations. When you’re excited, you might feel your heart pounding in your chest. When you’re making a bad choice, you might feel sick or tense. These physical sensations are your body’s way of sending you messages.
Jarvis writes that modern life fills your mind with constant noise from technology and busy schedules, which can make it hard to notice your intuitive signals. To hear these messages better, take breaks from distractions. Go for a quiet walk, spend time alone without your phone, and ask yourself what you want to do at that moment, not what you think you should do.
As your intuition helps you identify dreams you previously ignored, start acknowledging and exploring those dreams. When following your instincts leads to good results, you’ll learn to trust yourself more. Each small success helps you make bigger decisions with confidence.
2) Regain Control Over Your Attention
Jarvis argues that you must also regain control over your attention. He explains that most of us have normalized a chaotic, distracted way of living that prevents us from focusing on and devoting ourselves to the things we care about.
Two types of distractions steal your attention:
Environmental distractions: Your phone, computer, and other devices constantly vie for your attention with notifications and updates. When distractions cause you to switch between tasks (like checking your phone while writing), you can’t concentrate long enough to do good work and move toward your goals.
Mental distractions: Worries about the future, regrets about the past, or self-doubt can interrupt your concentration even when you’re in a distraction-free environment. For example, you might be reading an important document for work, but your mind keeps drifting to a presentation you need to give next week, making it hard to focus on the words in front of you.
How to Protect Your Attention
According to Jarvis, when you let distractions, negativity, or societal pressure consume your thoughts, you have less mental energy to pursue what you want. To protect your attention from distractions, focus on what matters to you and ignore everything else. To do this, Jarvis recommends strengthening your attention through meditation or journaling.
Meditation: Practice focusing on one thing and catching your mind when it wanders. Each time you notice your thoughts drifting and bring them back, you strengthen your ability to focus.
Journaling: Jarvis recommends recording your thoughts once in the morning and once at night. Writing in the morning helps you get focused for the day by clarifying your thoughts and prioritizing what matters. At night, write down things you’re grateful for to shift your focus from the negative parts of life to more positive things.
Find Growth in Hardship
Once you’ve learned to recognize your true desires, you must learn to deal with the hardships you’ll face as you pursue those desires. Jarvis writes that you shouldn’t try to avoid mistakes and obstacles in life, but instead, learn to bounce back and keep moving forward when things go wrong. Hardship can even help you grow and succeed if you approach it with the right mindset.
In this section, we’ll explore two tips for turning hardship into an advantage: Work with limitations instead of fighting them, and treat mistakes as lessons instead of failures.
1) Embrace Limitations
While working toward your true desires, you’ll likely encounter limitations like tight deadlines or scarce resources. While we may often think of limitations as bad things, Jarvis argues that they can be helpful for two reasons:
1. Limitations force you to be creative. When you have no limitations, you tend to do things the same way you always have, but when you’re faced with restrictions, you find clever solutions you wouldn’t have stumbled upon otherwise.
2. Limitations help you make choices. It can be hard to choose among too many options, but when choices are limited, you make decisions faster and focus more on what really matters to you. Having fewer options helps you focus and take action instead of getting stuck trying to make the perfect choice.
How to Design Helpful Limitations
Jarvis explains that there are two types of limitations in life:
First, there are limitations you can’t control—for example, health conditions that limit your mobility or unexpected events that disrupt your plans. You can’t eliminate these limitations, but you can change how you think about them and view them as opportunities instead of roadblocks. Many successful people turn their unchangeable limitations into fuel for creativity and motivation rather than using them as excuses to give up.
Second, there are limitations you create yourself—such as setting specific work hours or reducing your social commitments. Jarvis writes that creating helpful limitations can make you more focused and creative. For example, when you decide to stop checking work emails after 6 p.m., you create better boundaries between work and personal life. When you limit your social events to one per weekend, you protect your time for rest and other priorities.
However, cautions Jarvis, don’t confuse helpful self-imposed boundaries with harmful limitations you set for yourself. Harmful limitations are false beliefs like “I’m too awkward to make new friends” or “I’m not smart enough to start a business.” Identify and challenge these beliefs since they’re not real limitations—they only exist in your mind.
2) View Failure as a Learning Tool
In addition to taking advantage of limitations, Jarvis encourages you to acknowledge failure as a necessary part of creating a meaningful life. We’re naturally afraid to fail because we worry about what others will think of us. For instance, it’s normal to feel uncomfortable when you make a mistake in front of your friends or coworkers. This feeling comes from our biology—we’re wired to be social creatures who want to belong to our groups. When we fail or make mistakes, our brains trigger a fear response because failure threatens our acceptance in whatever group we’re trying to fit into.
Today, social media makes this fear worse by only showing people’s successes, not their failures or struggles. When we only see others succeeding, we start to think success should come easily. This leads us to view our mistakes as shameful rather than what they really are: normal steps in learning something new.
Jarvis argues that failure teaches more valuable lessons than success does. When you fail at something, you have to figure out what went wrong and adjust your approach. For example, if you’re a writer, you might write several mediocre books that teach you to better structure your plot, leading you to eventually write a successful novel. Failure also makes you more resilient. The more you face smaller failures and recover from them, the more capable you’ll be of handling bigger challenges later.
How to Learn From Failure
To learn from failure, Jarvis says you shouldn’t pretend failure doesn’t hurt. Popular self-help advice often tells us to openly embrace failure or act like it doesn’t affect you, but this isn’t realistic. Instead, accept that failure hurts while recognizing that it helps you grow. This mixed feeling toward failure—not loving it but not completely fearing it either—allows you to take worthwhile risks, learn from your mistakes, and keep trying.
Jarvis suggests two ways you can start using failure as a learning tool:
1. Experiment: Treat everything you do as an experiment where you come up with a theory, try it out in a controlled way, record what happens, and learn from the results. This way, you can start viewing failure as a learning tool rather than a source of shame. Jarvis notes that successful innovations often come from people who are willing to fail many times while learning what works.
2. Get rejected on purpose: Intentionally make requests that people will likely say “no” to, like asking for free dessert at a restaurant or requesting an upgrade at a hotel. This exercise teaches you that rejection isn’t as devastating as you may think. It also helps you build the confidence to take chances with less fear holding you back.
Put in the Work
Once you’ve identified your true desires and learned to handle hardship, you need to put in consistent effort to achieve the life you want. In this section, we’ll explore three of Jarvis’s strategies for doing the work required: being consistent with your practice, making the most of your time, and maintaining a sense of fun.
1) Be Consistent
Jarvis writes that to succeed at anything, you must practice consistently, even when you don’t feel motivated. While beginners often look for quick and easy ways to improve, experts spend a lot of time mastering basic skills. For example, a professional artist might warm up by sketching volumes and studying anatomy each day, while a beginner artist might jump straight to complex character poses without practicing fundamentals.
How to Practice Consistently
To practice your craft consistently, Jarvis suggests that you:
1. Enjoy the journey. High performers find enjoyment in practicing their craft, not just succeeding at it. When you find joy in the everyday work, not just the result, you’re more likely to stick with it even when you hit rough patches or experience failure.
2. Make practice part of your identity. Instead of seeing practice as something you must force yourself to do, make it part of who you are. For example, instead of thinking, “I want to run more,” think of yourself as a runner. When you see yourself as a runner, you’ll want to run on a regular basis because it matches who you believe you are. This shift from seeing running as an external task to seeing it as part of your identity creates a natural motivation that is stronger than willpower alone.
2) Make the Most of Your Time
We all have limited time in the day to work toward our goals. Jarvis argues that getting more out of your time isn’t just about better scheduling or working faster—it’s about understanding how you experience time and learning to use it more effectively. He offers strategies for stretching your perception of time and organizing your work schedule to maximize productivity.
How to Stretch Your Perception of Time
Jarvis explains that time can pass more slowly or more quickly depending on your mental state and how present you are. For example, if you’re bored while waiting for an appointment, minutes can feel like hours, but when you’re playing video games with friends, hours can feel like minutes. You can work with time’s elastic nature to be more productive and get more hours out of the day.
To stretch your perception of time, Jarvis recommends you:
1. Live in the moment. Jarvis explains that we often waste time thinking about things we can’t change (the past) or things that haven’t happened yet (the future). He suggests you focus on what’s happening right now—the conversation you’re having, the task you’re doing, or even simple things like the food you’re eating. When you put all your focus into what you’re doing, you can savor the moment, work more efficiently, and make the most of your time instead of letting it slip by as your mind wanders elsewhere.
2. Choose to see life as long instead of short. When you think life is too short, you’ll feel stressed about making perfect decisions and avoid exploring and taking risks to avoid wasting your time. Jarvis recommends you instead recognize that you have decades ahead to learn, grow, and try new things. This longer view allows you to explore different careers or interests with less pressure and anxiety. You’ll be OK with making mistakes since you have time to recover and start fresh in a new direction, even later in life.
How to Schedule Productive Work
In addition to stretching your perception of time, Jarvis also recommends working in blocks of 90-120 minutes. This timeframe matches your natural attention cycles while still being long enough for you to tackle complex problems or creative challenges. When you work this way, you’re more likely to enter flow—a state of deep focus where you become completely absorbed in your work and lose track of time.
Jarvis suggests you take a 30-minute break after each work period because your body needs rest to work well. Rest allows your brain to make new connections and come up with fresh ideas. Beyond daily breaks, take longer rest periods too. Schedule days off for fun, take breaks from technology, and go on vacations where you completely unplug from work. Many people think they need to be available for work 24/7, but Jarvis disagrees. He warns that if we don’t choose to rest, our bodies will eventually force us to rest by getting sick.
3) Bring More Fun Into Your Life
Lastly, to work sustainably toward your goals, make life more fun. Jarvis writes that many people think fun is optional—it’s something you do only after you finish your work. School and work both teach us to focus on goals and deadlines, so we learn to rush through our days, checking off tasks rather than enjoying what we’re doing. Because of this, we feel empty and drained even when we succeed at work or school because we’ve forgotten how to slow down and appreciate what’s happening in the moment.
Thus, Jarvis argues that having fun is vital to living a good life. It helps us learn, grow, and stay mentally healthy, making it just as important as work or other responsibilities. Instead of taking life too seriously, focus more on being playful and having fun. This mindset allows you to venture more bravely from your comfort zone and engage with life’s challenges with curiosity, creativity, and openness.
How to Make Everyday Tasks Fun
To add fun and playfulness to your life, Jarvis suggests you transform mundane tasks into playful experiences. You can do this by being completely engaged in what you’re doing instead of rushing through tasks while thinking about other things. For example, instead of scrolling on your phone while walking your dog, tune into your surroundings and explore different paths together. Being mindful about simple activities can make everyday tasks feel less like work and more like play.
Exercise: Identify and Overcome Your Fear-Based Decisions
Jarvis explains that fear often leads us to choose safer options over what we want, and these choices compound over time until we realize we never pursued our authentic desires. In this exercise, you’ll consider how fear might be influencing your choices.
- Think of an important decision you’re facing (like choosing a career path, starting a business, or moving to a new city). What’s the “safe” option that feels more practical or socially acceptable?
- What decision would you make if fear weren’t a factor? Write down any physical sensations you feel as you consider this decision.
- How might society’s expectations or other people’s opinions be influencing this decision?
- Imagine yourself five years in the future after having taken the safer path. How do you think you’ll feel about this decision? What might you regret not trying?
