Chase Jarvis joined Sean Kelly on the Digital Social Hour for a wide-ranging conversation about creativity, risk, and building a career on your own terms. Jarvis, who built his reputation as a photographer before founding the online education platform CreativeLive, has spent decades studying what separates people who take creative risks from those who play it safe, and that theme runs through the entire conversation.
The two dig into Jarvis's early career, including the years he spent building a following before social media existed, and the fear and self-doubt that come with any creative pursuit. From there, the conversation opens into broader territory, touching on travel, healing, disconnecting from technology, and the tools Jarvis believes every creator needs to do meaningful work.
About Chase Jarvis
Chase Jarvis is a photographer, director, and entrepreneur best known for founding CreativeLive, an online education platform built to make creative and business skills accessible to a global audience. His own career as a working photographer gave him an early, ground-level view of what it takes to build a sustainable creative practice, long before the creator economy became a common phrase.
Jarvis is also an author, writing about creativity and risk-taking in books including Never Play It Safe, which explores the mindset shifts he believes are necessary to break out of comfort zones and pursue meaningful work. Through CreativeLive, his books, and his own YouTube channel, he has become a widely followed voice on creativity, entrepreneurship, and reinvention.
What Chase Jarvis and Sean Kelly Talked About
- How Chase Jarvis built a photography career years ahead of the social media era
- Why he believes overcoming fear is essential to any genuine creative breakthrough
- His reasoning behind founding CreativeLive to make creative education more accessible
- The central argument of his book Never Play It Safe about embracing risk
- His take on standing out versus fitting in within a crowded creative field
- Why Jarvis considers regularly disconnecting from technology essential to creative work
- His list of essential tools he recommends every creator have on hand
- How travel and global experiences have shaped his creative perspective over time
Why This Conversation Matters
Chase Jarvis has spent his career studying the gap between playing it safe and doing meaningful creative work, and his conversation with Sean Kelly distills decades of that thinking into practical, grounded advice. For anyone weighing a creative or entrepreneurial risk, it's a grounded look at how one of the field's most respected voices thinks about fear, reinvention, and building a lasting body of work.
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About Sean Kelly & the Digital Social Hour
Sean Kelly is an entrepreneur and the host of the Digital Social Hour, one of the fastest-growing interview podcasts in the world, where he sits down with entrepreneurs, athletes, creators, and cultural voices for candid, long-form conversations. The show draws over 100 million views a month across platforms. Explore more guest features on SeanKelly.io.
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