Book SummaryNever Play It Safe, by Chase Jarvis

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Never Play It Safe

What if the safest paths are the least likely to make you happy? In Never Play It Safe, 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...

Never Play It Safe Summary 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...

Never Play It Safe Summary 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.

(Shortform note: While...

Never Play It Safe Summary 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...

Never Play It Safe Summary 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.

(Shortform note: In The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin says there are two benefits to practicing fundamental skills first: You build resilient skillfulness, and you learn to appreciate the process of growth. By drilling basics until they become...

Shortform 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?