In this episode of The Amberly Lago Show, I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with Chris Jarvis, a best-selling author, entrepreneur, and visionary who’s all about helping others see and do business differently! We dove into his incredible journey from financial struggles to coaching billionaires, and the life lessons he’s learned along the way.
Here are some key takeaways that I know will resonate with you:
Get Your Head Out of the Weeds:
Chris stresses how important it is to step back and really evaluate what you’re doing—both in your personal and professional life. He challenges us to ask ourselves: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? And is it still serving us? This reflection can open up profound insights and help you align your actions with your true goals. It’s a reminder that sometimes we get so caught up in the daily grind that we forget to assess if our efforts are meaningful.
The Power of Vulnerability:
One of the most impactful parts of our conversation was when Chris shared how vulnerability can actually strengthen business relationships. He found that being open about his struggles made him more relatable, allowing others to connect with him on a deeper level. Shifting from wanting to be the “smartest” person in the room to embracing vulnerability changed his approach to coaching and speaking. Authenticity fosters trust, and Chris proves how transformative it can be in building meaningful relationships.
Find What Costs You Little but Means a Lot to Others:
Chris also shared a powerful lesson about the importance of small acts of kindness. He believes that the key to life is doing things that cost you very little but have a significant impact on others. Whether it’s offering help or sharing your knowledge, these small gestures can make all the difference and create lasting connections.
Chris’ insights on entrepreneurship, vulnerability, and meaningful connections are invaluable. If you’re looking to thrive in both your personal and professional life, this episode is packed with wisdom you won’t want to miss.
Tune in now and start reflecting on how these lessons can transform your own journey!
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Transcript:
Amberly Lago:
Welcome to the Amberly Lago Show Stories of True Grit and Grace. Hey there. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Amberly Lago Show. I have a very special guest today. So you are, you’re going to want to grab your notepad and pen because especially if you’re an entrepreneur and you want to make some more money, you want to be successful. You want to thrive, not just survive. I have Chris Jarvis with us today. Y’all, he helps us see differently so we can do business differently. We can live differently. He is a best-selling author. In fact, he’s got 19 books. You may have seen his TED Talk. It’s got millions of views. I think it’s almost 5 million views on his TED Talk. He speaks, he consults, he is the entrepreneur to look out for to help you with your business. So thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for being here, Chris.
Chris Jarvis: Thank you, Amberly. I appreciate you reading the bio as my mother wrote it. So it’s perfect. Thank you very much.
Amberly Lago: Well, you are amazing. So we met when we spoke. We both shared the stage at Rene Rodriguez’s AMP Con event. And I was not only blown away by all that you shared, but then you were so generous and giving information and your books, which Everybody in the Mastermind, by the way, is so excited that you are going to come in and speak to them. Be the Giraffe, I have listened to on Audible as well, and I was just blown away at all the information that you gave and how smart you are. And so I’ve written down all these questions, but I’m like, I need to, like, I feel so privileged because I need to learn from you and, and how to do business better. And you had a business, a very successful business, but you felt like a slave to your business apparently. And we’re like, how do I exit this? And it took a couple of years for you. But how can we start first? But first of all, let’s start with. How you were, because you didn’t have a lot of money and now you coach and you’re on like you help billionaires to better their business. So let’s start first with how you started, because there’s a lot of people that are struggling financially right now.
Chris Jarvis: Started with not a lot. So single mom raising three kids. I was the latchkey, you know the oldest kid so taking the other kids home getting dinner ready doing all that good stuff, but You know parents have just gotten divorced. I’m at a new school. I’m trying to balance my you know, the responsibilities of raising kids, you know, the other kids, the kids in the family with trying not to get beat up every day. So, you know, we all have our struggles and things that we went through as kids. Um, my dad had been a professional baseball player, so I had in one side of my mind, it was, you can do anything. And so my plan was not to be an entrepreneur and not to be I thought I’d be an athlete. I loved basketball more than baseball, but I was pretty gifted in baseball. Yeah, because how tall are you? 6’2″, 6’3″. Shrinking by the day. Gravity is not our friend as you get a little older. Like any kid, I thought I’d play baseball. I had no aspirations of business or finance or anything like that. I went to, in college I majored in math, basically to get into law school, because I heard that law school loved math majors and I was the kid who would get one or two questions wrong on the SAT. So I had a gift. It was nothing I worked on, but I was truly gifted in math, so. Really? Yeah.
Amberly Lago: Because, oh, I suck at math.
Chris Jarvis: It’s genetic. I always placed high in math, so it was always… It comes easy. It comes very easily to me. So, I mean, I know I have a high IQ. I know that I’m super talented off the charts of math. So it makes sense that I’ve written 19 books, right? Because every mathematician writes a lot of books. So I went to college, became a math major, went into the insurance world, was an actuary, decided I didn’t want to be an insurance executive. So I mortgaged that, got into a top 10 business school, went out to the West Coast. And in the first week of school, best laid plans, I found out that I was infinitely unemployable. So my Myers-Briggs was, for those of you keeping track at home, ENTP at the time. It’s changed a little since then, which basically meant I was not gonna be a great employee.
Amberly Lago: Why, why? What does that mean for people listening that they’re like, I don’t know what that Myers-Briggs?
Chris Jarvis: Yeah, so there’s extrovert, introvert, there’s intuitive, there’s… sensing, there’s thinking and feeling, there’s perceiving and judging. And each one of those 16 different combinations has a certain avatar stereotype. And this one was the person who’s going to want to do things themselves, is going to question things, is going to just not really fit into a box very well. And so I thought, great, now I’ve given up my executive career in insurance. I’ve gone back to business school. I borrowed a lot of money. I thought I was going to take a job. And now I have to figure out, now I have two years to figure out what business I’m going to start. And that was a bit of a surprise. So I dove into that and ended up meeting somebody who was from my hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. He had just written a book for doctors. We started a company that Changed so many times it was a pharmaceutical ad agency trying to help Pharmaceutical companies get in front of doctors because there was a malpractice crisis. So we’re helping people Protect themselves from lawsuits. Then we thought who the same legal tools will also be good for estate planning So we became an estate planning law firm marketing machine then we became a financial marketing machine then we became a financial firm then we had 70 offices around the country then and all these things happened and
Amberly Lago: You had 70 offices around the country?
Chris Jarvis: Yeah, we had 18,000 doctors actually called us. Oh my God. For those of you who think nobody likes your business plan, our business plan was a finalist in business school. We were the only company that was operational and making money. In my class, I was the only person to actually launch a business. Wow. One of my classmates, Susan Wojcicki, who just passed away, they started Google in her garage, and she ended up being the CEO of YouTube. But her entrepreneurial journey started much later. But in school, we started a business, and we didn’t win money. Every other business plan won money. We didn’t win money when we needed it, which really upset me, and I had a chip on my shoulder for a long time. People said, you’ll never get to the doctors. But we were writing financial articles in medical journals that were being delivered to every doctor’s office in America. And we’d be the only financial article. So when there’s a lot of ophthalmology articles or gastroenterology or cardiology articles, there’d be one financial article, guess what happened? All the doctors read it. Wow. And they would call us, or they would write us, or they would do, you know, this is way before social media. This is 96, 97.
Amberly Lago: Oh my goodness, you were already doing this in 96. You must have been like- January of 97. You were a baby. 26. Oh my goodness.
Chris Jarvis:
- And I was like, this is what I’m going to do. And, but the business kept changing. So people said, you weren’t going to do it. We found paths. And then as we talked to people, we realized what the big thing about asking questions is, is paying attention to the answer. And so when we would be in rooms with pharmaceutical companies, with doctors at hospitals, at medical associations, I just had a knack for paying attention to what was really going on. Pharmaceutical companies needed to get in front of doctors so they could detail them about the drug so that doctors would prescribe the drug. The medical association people were overworked and underpaid. And so they needed, they often needed somebody to write their newsletter because they were so busy running around, chasing, getting a meeting set up or doing something that we said, well, we can make this easy for you. We have articles.
Amberly Lago: Well, see, I think I want to stop right there. And that’s so important. I have, uh, people that I coach and people in my mastermind that they don’t like social media. And I’m like, social media is your opportunity not to just connect, but you get feedback and you learn what your audience needs. And I pay attention to whether it’s my story or whether it’s a post I’m doing, What are people resonating with? What are people asking questions about? And that’s all feedback. And it’s really helped me go from when I first started on social media, I talked so much about like chronic pain and complex regional pain syndrome, and then it has really driven me into what I have true joy about is, which is entrepreneurship. And that’s why one of the reasons I’m so excited to have you on the show, because you are like king of just helping people with their companies, with their, with their careers. Were you doing, were you doing this? And this is the company that you were like, okay, I need to exit out of this.
Chris Jarvis: No. So we built this company and I will get back to the social media. We have different views on social media.
Amberly Lago: Okay. Yes. And by the way, you don’t follow me back on Instagram. I’m just saying.
Chris Jarvis: I’ll make sure that happens today.
Amberly Lago: Okay.
Chris Jarvis: I’m just saying. I haven’t checked my social media in a week, so it’s a different. Oh, really? Yeah. It is the point wherever you’re getting your feedback from is fine. I think the danger of doing it on your phone, on your laptop, on your tablet, on your computer, is you don’t get real time. Like for people watching, if we did this virtually, people might say it was great. It’s a way different vibe when you’re actually in the room with somebody. You can look into their eyes.
Amberly Lago: Oh, that’s why I wanted to have you in person.
Chris Jarvis: And I insisted on, and when I do things, I travel if I have to. I’d much rather be in the room to have a real experience rather than sit there with the, you know, when I meet people I’ve only met on zoom, I was like, you’re so much bigger in person and so much less flat because you’re not a box. Right. And So as long as you’re getting the feedback from somebody, I believe live feedback is way better. So I spent years during COVID building assessments, writing three books, building all this stuff and having my master plan.
Amberly Lago: You wrote these during COVID?
Chris Jarvis: This book came out in July. This book comes out on Tuesday. It’s a present to the world that’s coming out on my birthday. This book comes out two weeks later on 9-17. Happy birthday. So thank you. So I mean, these three all are coming out now. And so, yeah, so.
Amberly Lago: Well, I love your Audible. Thank you. This, I mean, I like being able to look and, you know, take notes. Yeah. Take notes. But I love listening to Audible as well. So.
Chris Jarvis: So there’s value in going into the lab. I call it going into the lab. I have a separate building attached to my house, which is like the gym, my garage and. in my office, and it’s where I do all my filming, but I also have, you know, one side it looks like this, it looks very professional, and on the other side of the camera it looks very chaotic, and I have whiteboards and stuff everywhere. But you can do a planning in the lab, but you have to get out and test everything live. You know, the Mike Tyson plan, if someone has, you know, someone said, famous quote of Mike Tyson’s, when they said, this person has a plan, he said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. And the military adage is, no plan will sustain contact with the enemy. So as soon as you contact the enemy, whatever plan you had is out, because now things happen, right? So you have to get out and have the conversations. People need to have live feedback to see what really works. So you can plan something out, but until you get on stage and actually have the talk, You try a joke, nothing, it falls flat. Okay, wrong place, wrong delivery, wrong joke, wrong audience. Like it could be any of those, but it’s like, or you say something you didn’t know was that funny. Or you learn where to put the pauses in.
Amberly Lago: Exactly.
Chris Jarvis: You can only learn that on stage. You can only learn that by being on stage.
Amberly Lago: I’m so glad you said that because my first big talk was my TED talk. And most people speak for years before they go stand on the infamous red circle. I remember my first big talk was my TED talk and everybody else had a PhD except for me. I was the only person that didn’t have a PhD and it was a big one. It was for the Berkeley 10th year anniversary, which was a pretty prestigious stage. And I remember getting on stage and saying my talk in front of people for the first time. And when I showed a slide and they all gasp, And they all laughed. I was like, oh, oh, oh, like you could feel the room. I’d never experienced that. It’s so different when you do it in person. And and yeah, your TED talk, by the way, has almost five million views.
Chris Jarvis: That’s a lot.
Amberly Lago: Yeah, you’re famous. Thank you for being on the show.
Chris Jarvis: Well, you know, so the reason why the talk is called Surviving Ain’t Thriving.
Amberly Lago: That’s a great title, by the way. And I wish I would have known more to create a better title for my talk. Because it comes with time. Yeah, maybe I’ll do another one.
Chris Jarvis: You do enough talks and you do enough. It was your first big talk and you’re complaining that you didn’t perfect it. You did great. But the surviving ain’t thriving, that whole idea. The story behind that TED Talk was a friend of mine at London, Derry, London, Derry, who put this together, Gary Daugherty, who runs Think Network and he’s a wonderful entrepreneur and coach out in Ireland. He said to me, I’m giving up my TED. Commission like I’m gonna stop doing TED talks. You can be my last one. I said, okay He’s like you won’t have to apply for it. I’m happy to do it. It’ll be great. I said fantastic. He said you have nine days I Said nine days to write a talk deliver a talk and Okay. No pressure. No pressure. And I had just come off stage. I’ve just done two days, 16 hours in a million dollar advisor bootcamp. So I had just done 16 hours of content. I was like, I got to get 16 hours down to 16 minutes. He said, no, you have 12 minutes. So lovely. Okay. So we’ll go a little further.
Amberly Lago: Yeah, that’s what it was for me. 16 minutes went to, at the last minute, they said, actually, no, you have 14 minutes. And I was like, okay, let’s do this.
Chris Jarvis: Yeah. Not so pregnant pauses. You have to cut all the, yeah. But yeah, so, so it’s, but the reason isn’t necessarily the delivery. Because, but I think the title, the fact that it resonated that people feel like they’re surviving. They’re so focused on being canceled. They’re so focused on not being bought. They’re so focused on the negative feedback on social media. That’s the reason I don’t like social media. It’s very easy for somebody to be mean. I don’t mind constructive criticism. I like constructive criticism. And I got to a stage in my life where I realized that I also don’t have to agree with all of it either. Sometimes it’s okay. I appreciate that’s your position. I can’t please everybody. I know that some people aren’t going to like my stupid shirt. They’re not going to like my bald head. They’re not going to like my shoes. It’s fine. I can’t You can’t account for everything. And if you try desperately, there’s another book, a previous book to these three called Six Secrets to Leveraging Success. And there’s a chapter, Stop Being Beige. And it’s the idea that if you take 10 people and you ask them for a color, for a wall, for a couch, for a rug, you will always get beige. Because nobody loves it, but nobody hates it. Because you might say pink. Someone’s like, I don’t want pink. So people will pick the thing that’s safe. So the problem is when you get into big group speak, everybody goes to safe, nobody goes to exciting.
Amberly Lago: Well, you really share how to stand out.
Chris Jarvis: I try.
Amberly Lago: and how to be different in your business. And that takes me to, I want to go right into your book. Yeah. Be the giraffe. So I, first people are like, be the giraffe. What does that mean? I love how you use the giraffe as like an example of how to be different in your life and your business and all that you do. So what made you, what was that aha moment that made you go, you know what? I’m gonna be the giraffe and I’m gonna teach other people how to be the giraffe. What was that?
Chris Jarvis: I spent a lot of my life looking for an explanation. So I’ve been asked a couple times, what advice would you give a younger self? And my advice is, and if it’s on a panel, I will always grab the mic quickly because I’ve done this more than once. And it’s to stop trying to fit in. Stop looking for the box, the title, the frame, the… Everybody wants to belong, right? That’s part of belonging. But I heard Brene Brown say that the opposite of belonging is fitting in. And that belonging is you’re accepted for being who you are. Fitting in is you change who you are in order to meet some other group’s norms. And I thought that was brilliant. And I just heard that two weeks ago, so obviously it was long after I’d already adopted this whole story and this whole brand. But for me trying to figure out who am I, what is it? I always like metaphors. I love telling stories with metaphors and images, because they just seem to land better. And I could never find the metaphor for me. And so when I got kicked out of a company I started, so the one that I started talking about earlier, we grew it to a company that was managing $300 million in assets. The partners were taking out three quarters of a million dollars a year. I went through a divorce, lost everything. The lawyers took everything. And then my partners kicked me out of a company that I had started. And I had no money to defend myself.
Amberly Lago: Oh my gosh. Yeah, I got sidetracked and we totally missed that.
Chris Jarvis: But when they thought I had nothing left, and they’re like, so much so that they’re like, we’re going to try and put him out of business, bankrupt him, ruin him, because they thought that there was no situation where I would add any value to them. And this is in 2010. I did a deep inventory of, do I have anything left? Am I washed up? Has my time coming gone? Am I a piece of crap? You know, like, I mean, I asked all those questions. Wow. This was 2010. 2010. Yeah, it was broken. Starting over again. 10-11. Oh my God.
Amberly Lago: This is exactly when I had my motorcycle accident. It was a big year for me too.
Chris Jarvis: Crazy year. And so I don’t remember much. So you started… Over again in 2010. Yeah. And so after years of making $500,000, $600,000, $700,000 a year, which, you know, it’s not billions of dollars, but it’s, you know, it’s a hell of a living for somebody in his 30s. Yeah. So my 30s were really good. And then I got into my 40s and it was Let’s shake the Etch-a-Sketch, for those of us old enough to remember that toy, and start from scratch and start building again. But part of that building was, well, who am I and what do I do and what happens when I talk to people? And what I learned was people said that when they left my meetings, they left my seminars, they left any kind of consulting, they were thinking about things differently. Like that’s the feedback I got from actually asking people, what do you get from working? It wasn’t, I looked for cool names on the web. Like I was, I really had to ask, I just went out and asked everybody, what do you get? And they said, I get a different perspective. So when I got to this whole elevated perspective, like what am I going to use for elevated perspective? Is it a tall tree? Is it a tree house? Is it an eagle? Is it a, somewhere I stumbled on a giraffe.
Amberly Lago: Really? That’s how you, you just stumbled?
Chris Jarvis: I had been to Africa, I had seen giraffes in the wild on a photo safari, and somewhere in the back of my head perhaps, I can’t say that I was sitting there watching this giraffe mating ritual, which was cool. I can’t say that something triggered and all of a sudden I couldn’t wait to get back. It wasn’t quite that immediate, but somewhere in the back of my head, I remembered some of the stuff about giraffes. And then I started doing research. And the more you look into what’s the symbolism and the fur is like a fingerprint, it’s unique to every giraffe. Okay, that’s kind of cool.
Amberly Lago: So that’s different.
Chris Jarvis: That’s different. The biggest one is the neck, obviously. So predators and prey, predators try and eat the prey. So they’ve evolved to be one so they can kill more easily, whether it’s big fangs or claws, or they hunt in packs, or they have night vision, or whatever, tigers and lions. Other animals have. The prey have all learned how to protect their neck. Some have shells. Some have quills. Some have poisonous secretions. Some have patterns that you can’t see them in a herd where one begins and one ends, like the way the zebra will kind of blend together. Some can burrow underground so you can’t get to their neck. Some can climb trees. The giraffe just has this big giant neck and there’s nothing it can do. You can’t hide at 18 feet tall. The giraffe, in my observation, is the only animal that has evolved to be more vulnerable, yet it still survives. And the reason why is the cost of sticking its neck out, literally and figuratively, is that it eats leaves, not grass. And so if you watch animals in the grass, where do you think that phrase, get your head out of the weeds, comes from? It’s all the other deer, wildebeest, zebra, what impala they’re all eating grass all the time and their head is in the weeds they can’t see what’s going on around them because they’re so busy eating and when they lift all they can see is the ass in front of them yeah so they’re they’re oblivious to what’s going on because they’re doing which i think is the perfect metaphor for business owners and people in general is we’re so busy doing something how often do we stop to ask ourselves, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? Should we still be doing it? Or is the reason we’re doing it even important to us anymore? Like that’s the first chapter of the book. There’s 14 lessons about giraffe. The first one is get your head out of the weeds. So it’s get yourself to the place where just stop and look around.
Amberly Lago: Can you just ask those questions again? Just state those questions again for the listeners. Cause I want them to really take note and ask themselves these questions. Can you just ask that?
Chris Jarvis: Yeah, just, What are you doing in your personal life and in business? What are you doing? Make make a list of the things that you do even keep track Like a lawyer would have six minute increments like really deeply in your calendar What are you doing every six or fifteen minutes of the day and then you ask yourself? Why do I do this? right the story of the it’s a sexist story, but you know, the woman who asked her mom, like, how do you, when you prepare a pot roast, how do you cut? And she’s like, well, I cut the ends off and I put it in the oven. She’s like, why do you do that? I don’t know. Well, let’s go ask grandma. And they go ask grandma, do you do it? Yeah. Why do you do it? I don’t know. Let’s go ask the great grandma. Why do you cut the two ends of the pot roast off before you put it in the oven? And she’s like, cause I had a really small pan. So sometimes we just do things because because we’ve done them. Stop and think, does this still serve me well? And maybe it doesn’t. And if it does, then you’re reassured that I’m doing something well. But that moment, the first chapter, get your head out of the weeds, is what do I do? Why do I do it? Does it actually give me what I think? Do I get out of it what I really want? And does it still serve me? I had a lunch yesterday with a former partner of KKR, very high level person making a ton of money, who just quit and wanted some more purpose out of life, didn’t just want to work to make money. And he’s on a bit of a journey to see what he wants to do next. And he said, I got to figure out what I want to do next. And I said, I asked, can I offer a different question? for you to ask yourself. He was very open to it. I said, ask what you want to get out of what you do next. Because he could go do all the things. He’s a very successful private equity partner. He could go raise money, build companies, sell companies. But the question isn’t, what can you do? The question is, what do you want to get out of what you do? So that question is going to become I mean, it just came out of my mouth at lunch yesterday, and here it is to you. What do you want to get out of what you’re going to do? That’s the question. Because the thing is just, you do something. Why do you do it? So you do a podcast. Why do you do a podcast? Well, you have your own answers, but reasons people might do a podcast is, I want to reach more people. I want to get to know people and introduce people so I have a chance to talk to them live so I can build a connection. They could be a number of things, but at least know what are you doing and is it working. And then compare it to other things you could do and how much they would cost, because obviously studio time is very expensive, so you start figuring out, I could do a podcast or I could do I could be a guest on other people’s podcasts or I could go on the speaking tour, but then I have to be on a plane all the time and that might not be great. And, you know, just figure out what is that thing. So I just think that people don’t ask. They, they often see things and we get sucked into, I saw somebody do this. I can do this. I’m going to go do it. And there’s not a lot of thought.
Amberly Lago: I think it always works best when you have a reason, like, like what is your why focusing on what, what, why you started in the first place? Because I know sometimes I’m, tired. I live with chronic pain daily. There’s a lot of people that don’t even realize that I’m in chronic pain all the time. And I don’t even like to own that. I don’t like to talk about it a lot. But what helps me is to remember why I started and what my intentions are. And that’s what keeps me going to have that purpose. But to always tap back into why I started, because there’s times I’m tired and I’m like, oh, I do not feel like posting today or I don’t feel like flying to that city to go give a talk. But it’s like why when I focus on why it helps me get through, get through the howl. And after we when we take a break and y’all, we are going to have two episodes. He’s got so much wisdom to share. This is the first time I’ve ever done this, that we’re going to have this episode. And then you will also hear from him next week. And I’m going to show you a video because I got kissed by a giraffe just saying, and it was pretty recent. So I got to, I got to show you this video, but giraffes are so they’re majestic. And I love that you describe how they’re there for everyone is different. It’s like a fingerprint. But I want to get back to the vulnerability part because you talk a lot about how that vulnerability can actually strengthen your connections in business. And I think that there’s a lot of times in business that a lot of ego gets in the way and you don’t want to share that. when something’s wrong or something’s not going right, you don’t want to open up and be vulnerable. Can you speak a little more on how you discovered how that vulnerability can strengthen your relationships?
Chris Jarvis: Yeah. I’ve done a lot of speeches and I don’t know, more than 500, it’s less than a thousand, but it’s a lot. And But when I started at 26, I was trying to get people who were 40 and 50 and 60 to trust me with their money. So I had to show off what I knew. because no one in their right mind wants to trust their financial future to someone half their age.
Amberly Lago: Yeah, yeah.
Chris Jarvis: For good reason, mind you. So you couldn’t have told me that when I was 26, but I had to prove that I was smarter than everybody else. So that was the path that I learned so much. I really dove into learning about the material, the tax, finance, business building, selling, legal structures. I know the stuff so well because I had to, right? I mean, I had to know the stuff. But I remember doing a talk and meeting someone in the audience who came up and had a bunch of questions for me. And I answered the questions.
Amberly Lago: And this is when you were 26 years old?
Chris Jarvis: No, no. I was much older. I was probably in my 40s and I spoke as a keynote. I think I had won an award. I do a lot of financial work for clients, and sometimes there’s investments, and sometimes there’s insurance, and sometimes there’s legal work, and sometimes you sell a company, and there’s a lot of pieces to it. But I worked with a couple really big companies where I did really, really large insurance transactions, like making millions of dollars. And one client made me the number one salesperson at one company. It’s happened three or four times. And so there’s like 9,000 sales people.
Amberly Lago: No big deal.
Chris Jarvis: So anyway, it was one transaction that I just happened to do something, but, but I’m playing it’s amazing. I’m playing in a different. These other people are working very hard every day, trying to sell a couple of policies a week. And I just happened to sell one. It just happened to be really, really big. So I was speaking because I had done so much. They wanted me in front of some of the salespeople. So I did a presentation, a young man from California came up to me and we chatted. And he had some questions and I was happy to give him some advice and we exchanged numbers and he didn’t call me. And I was just odd because it seemed like this kid was in a place where I think his mom was sick and his sister was special needs and he was taken care of. It was a heartwarming and heartbreaking story and so I really felt for the kid and I wanted to help him. And after he didn’t call me for a while, I just picked up the phone and called him because I always have a response form at every speech because I want to know how I did, but I also want to get the contact info and I exchange it for a free gift, a book or something. And so I looked up the kid, I called him, no answer, called him, got sent a voicemail again, called him another time. I was like, all right, third time, I’ll just give him one more shot. And he picked up and he was uncomfortable. And I just said, what’s up? And he said, I just don’t even know what to say to you. You’re so unrelatable. And I get chills just in that moment saying that because I thought, I’m trying to be helpful. And this kid is saying, I don’t even want your help because you’re so unrelatable. I can’t be you with the mathematician and the MBA and finance and the books and all the other stuff that I realized, wow, the bio part that gets people really excited. And then you go upstage and talk about how effing fantastic you are. It just separated me from the audience. And I realized if I want to inspire people, I don’t need to pull myself apart. I need people to see themselves in me, not see nothing of themselves in me. So it was at that moment that I literally went from I want to be the smartest person on stage to I will be the most vulnerable person they talk to. You’ve been through the book. I don’t know how many stories there are in the book about me hanging out with billionaire families. I don’t think there are any. And I don’t think there’s any stories about.
Amberly Lago: I felt so connected with you at the event because, hey, look, I don’t know if you realize, but I was the only female speaker at the event. I thought maybe Maddie was going to speak because she was on the graphic. And I’m like, hey, when’s Maddie getting up here? You know what I mean? And there’s a lot there were a lot of highly, highly successful entrepreneurs and I just really appreciated that you were so kind to me. And I love that we took a picture together. We did. And then I you signed my books for me. And then I was like, I don’t have my books. I left them in the room. And you’re like, well, I’ll give you other books. And you gave me other books like you with all your luminous success. You are so down-to-earth and so humble and so inviting. But I appreciate you sharing that you learned that lesson from someone that taught you, like, I wasn’t relatable. And now… It broke my heart.
Chris Jarvis: It did. It’s horrible. Because that’s not why… I’m not doing it for the standing ovation. Yeah. It’s nice to get one.
Amberly Lago: Yeah. Do you know at Rene’s event, I was walking off stage, he goes, Amberly, Turn around, you gotta stand up. You gotta enjoy this. And I was like, oh, wow. Like, I wasn’t thinking of that.
Chris Jarvis: Just like your TED Talk.
Amberly Lago: Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Chris Jarvis: Yeah. But that’s, so this is, this is for the audience. All I did was hand three books that cost me $3 each to print to you, extra books that I had. And the fact that I took 10 minutes to chat with you and I signed them,
Amberly Lago: and took a picture with me and were so kind.
Chris Jarvis: Nine minutes, 10 minutes. We didn’t spend three hours together. I spent minutes with you and a couple dollars and you were touched by that. I was. So the key to life, I believe, is finding things that cost you very little, but are very meaningful to other people. So important. Find things that don’t cost you much, that mean a lot to somebody else. So like taking a picture, giving a book, handing something out, doing something. I was at a big dinner this past week. And some of this comes from my mother and my father, for sure, who were extremely gracious people who took wonderful care of everybody and didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t even know that my dad was, like when my parents were divorced on holidays, if I was with my mother, so he would spend every Thanksgiving in a soup kitchen, feeding people, because he didn’t have anywhere to go. So he would do that. But he didn’t tell people he went there. He just did it. And my mother is still super gracious to this day with everybody. And I’m at a table, and the gentleman across from me broke his elbow. And we’re at a dinner, very much like the dinner you and I. I was on a panel, just very similar to the one that I was at with you. Group was probably a similar size, maybe a little bigger. And I just watched this man struggling to cut a steak and said, can I cut that for you? Can I help you?” And he’s like, no, no. I said, no, really, can I help you? And then I walked over and just cut his steak like I would have for my six-year-old. And the people looking at me was like, the guy can’t, would you rather he eat it with his hand? It was just such an odd thing. I mean, anybody who’s a parent, I would think you’d think to do that, but for whatever reason, they just didn’t. But you are so now I’m on his show Monday live, you know, it’s like, but I mean, he’d already asked me before I cut his steak, but the, but, but there’s just a moment of just, can, if you can do something for someone, um, I’ve started the whole way over tipping thing. where they have these tipping dinners where everybody puts in a hundred bucks and you just change the life of your, so you have the thing, you tip tip 20% to the, you know, to the house cause you know they’re going to split it, but then it’s a hundred dollars cash to every, you know, from everybody at the table to the, you know, hand it to the waiter or waitress.
Amberly Lago: Do you know who Jimmy Rex is?
Chris Jarvis: You’re the second person who suggested introducing me to Jimmy Rex.
Amberly Lago: Yeah, he’s a great guy and he does that and same thing. Yeah, he’s a beautiful just and he records it and it’s just beautiful to watch. Right. So we are going to take a little break from this episode. We are going to go dive in deeper to everything about Be the Giraffe on the next episode. I’m just so glad to have you here and to let people get to know who you are and what you do and the kind of person you are. You’re amazing. So y’all stay tuned. Listen to the Amberly Lago Show. If you, you know what, it’s the Chris Jarvis on Instagram, or is it just Chris Jarvis?
Chris Jarvis: Chris Ray Jarvis, which is a long, funny story.
Amberly Lago: Okay, we’ll get into that. We’ll get into that.
Chris Jarvis: But Chris Ray Jarvis on Instagram, chrisjarvis.me is the website and there’s a whole lot of resources there.
Amberly Lago: Yeah. And I’ll have all the links for you to read his books. 19 books in total. Y’all have to check out his TED Talk and take a screenshot and tag us. And when I say that, I always reshare it in my story. And thank you for tuning in. We’ll see you next week.
