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Chase Reeves

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Top categories:

  • Creative Process — Collections of quotes, links, pictures and stories about doing your best work more often, with more heart and easier followthrough.
  • Editor’s Picks — The posts I most want to remind myself of, be they quotes or pictures or articles I’ve written.

Rumi on Death

I died as mineral and became a plant.
I died as plant and rose to animal.
I died as animal, and I became human.
Why should I fear anything?
When was I ever less by dying?
Rumi

John Lame Deer on Savage Civilization

“Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutly necessary to make a civilized society.”

John Lame Deer

6 Lessons: Leaving the White Picket Fence for Travel Life

Chase and Mellisa Reeves discuss lessons learned on leaving the white picket fence for a lifestyle of travel as a family.

CONTENTS:

  • 1:13 How long we’ve been travelling
  • 5:38 Point 0: knowing what you want… do you know what you want? Are you heading out on the road to discover what you want?
  • 6:52 Point 1: uncertainty is not the same thing as insecurity.
  • 20:25 Point 2: intimacy concerns…
  • 25:52 Point 3: Everyday relationships are as important as the place you’re living and the things you regularly use.
  • 26:25: PaktBags.com/chase
  • 27:48 Trade Coffee Monthly Deliveries (affiliate link): http://bag.gg/Trade
  • 33:41 Point 4: insights about finding time for creative projects and taking care of your self.
  • 47:07 Point 5: your default rhythms will show themselves on the road… (the real beginning happens when you burn through your fantasies and expectations).
  • 54:08 Point 6: traveling helps you find out which relationships can thrive in what conditions.
  • Get this email from Chase: https://chasereeves.co/mm

James Clear on What You Want

In this episode Chase and NYT bestselling author James Clear pull apart the question “what do you want!?” and discuss life after success (and how James got there).

CONTENTS:

  • 7:46 what it has been like to become successful. How he began.
  • 10:03 James’ worry for content creators.
  • 15:10 the challenge of relevancy.
  • 21:02 “Volume/consistency before intensity.”
  • 27:10 “I’m starting to think the most important thing is to know what you want.”
  • 29:00 Where we waste our energy: chasing status symbols, continuing status quo.
  • 31:27 Let your life speak by Parker Palmer
  • 32:15 what makes a good answer to the question: what do I want?
  • 36:04 The enneagram.
  • 44:55 On setting directions instead of goals.
  • 50:23 James’ minimal travel setup
  • 51:07 Big if true: every thought you have is downstream of what you consume.
  • 58:21 “Life is short, but it’s also long… and you have to live with your choices.” See also: “life begins after 40. Before that it’s just research.”

Chase Lynks:

Corbett Barr & The State of the Creator Economy

On this week’s show Chase and Corbett Barr discuss media, independent digital business, and the state of the creator economy. (Table of contents below)

CONTENTS:

  • 3:00 Why are people easy to trick, and how is it that creators rule the world?
  • 5:54 “Successful digital media.” One example: The Social Dilemma. Jaron Lanier is the name we were looking for.
  • 13:00 Expertise is the product (still).
  • 17:19 Proving relevancy in a world without gatekeepers.
  • 18:03 Owning your content vs renting platform space: 3 digital elements you can actually own.
  • 20:00 Working the Work: developing consistent creative rhythms and the “Viability Ratio.”
  • 28:00 Resonance resonates… but how does it work? Example Corbett describes.
  • 33:00 Book publishing is the archetype (still).
  • 37:00 Working the Work: developing rhythms of accomplishment.
  • 44:07 “I have an opinion” as a prerequisite for platform.
  • 49:00 Artist fires and the John Baldessari documentary you need to watch.
  • 53:47 You are waiting too long to get started (or not waiting long enough).
  • 58:00 Digital authenticity: making your outside look like your inside.
  • 59:20 Organizing, conscientiousness and this Rectix SNL commercial.
  • 1:01:00 Working the Work: STARTING it working vs KEEPING it working.
  • 1:03:23 Francis Bacon on Arena is a thrilling piece of 70’s media.
  • 1:06:00 Are you (still) imitating other platform successes?
  • 1:08:00 Speaking with your own voice… is simple, not easy (still).
  • 1:11:00 Completely deleting your public history on the internet… here’s how Corbett did it, how it’s going.
  • 1:22:00 What Corbett and Chase got right when they built Fizzle.co.
  • 1:29:00 Corbett’s productivity tools mentioned: Bear (notes), Trello (projects) and Front (email). RoamResearch also discussed
  • 1:41:00 Jobs to be Done is (still) a worthwhile framework to grok. Here’s a primer
  • 1:42:00 Corbett’s Jura espresso machine

Chase Lynks:

Terrence McKenna on Spiritual Food

“I’m amazed what thin soup is dished out as spiritual food.”

Terrence McKenna


Really great 8m bit here on Terrence’s own way of seeing his history of “drugs”, thinkers, competing ideologies and experiences.

“I think it was the pursuit of beauty that served me best.”

“You do not have to sell out to any form of airhead-ism. You can be as demanding, analytical, rational as you want, and the thing is bigger than you are. It’ll take you apart, you’ll be weeping like a baby. It kicks in the front door and takes you prisoner.”

“You’ll never get anywhere if you believe in stuff because, you know, it’ll take you 6 months to get through Baba G and then you have to go on to someone else and life is just not long enough to give all these guys a crack at your enlightenment… so you sort of have to goose it along.”