Jack Conte shares 3 rules for life
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evolving your brain is possible. There's a lot of people say people never change, blah, blah, blah, bullshit. You can absolutely change your brain at a core level and become the way you want to become.

Hey there, I'm Matt D'Avella and welcome to my short form podcast, Three Rules. Each episode, I ask a guest to share three rules that help them find success and happiness. Today, I'm joined by Jack Conte, musician, creator, and CEO of Patreon, the platform that's helped thousands of artists and creators build sustainable businesses. From co-founding Patreon to leading a band and creating his own content, Jack has spent his career pushing the boundaries of creativity, entrepreneurship, and what it means to make a living as an artist.

Yeah, let's jump right into it. What's rule number one for you? Rule one: be the pilot in command.

This is something I learned from paragliding. I started paragliding about four years ago. I love paragliding. You're up in the air by yourself with a thing that kind of looks like a parachute, but it's a little thinner and a little longer. And you're sometimes 2,000 feet in the air more. I was in Colombia last year inside a cloud, you know, paragliding by myself, literally in a cloud. They call it the white room because everything turns white and you can't see shit. And you're in a cloud up a mile in the sky by yourself.

It's pretty insane. And there's a concept in paragliding, I think with flight in general, called the piloting command. And what this means is, like, if you're learning to paraglide and you're 200 feet in the air and your instructor gets on the radio and the instructor says, hey, you should go north now. You're too far south. Turn and go north because you're coming out of the lift band. So turn and go north. Now, at that point, if you turn and go north...

and you hit a tree or you hit rotor or wind that like has a lot of sink and you crash and you break your back or whatever. That's your fault, not your instructor's fault. And it's counterintuitive. You say, oh, the instructor told me to do that. I'm following instruction. But when you're paragliding, if you make a mistake, your instructor doesn't die. You do. You are the pilot in command.

Your decisions are your own and you are the only person to blame or to celebrate for your success or your failure in the air. You suffer the consequences of your own actions. And they drill this into you when you're learning to paraglide because it's so important, right? We're talking about life and death here if you're 200 feet in the sky. They drill this concept into you, or at least my instructors drilled it into me. And there's a way to extrapolate, of course, beyond paragliding into your life.

Nobody controls my hands but me, but me. Nobody controls my mouth but me. Nobody controls my tongue but me. I say what I want to say. My body is my ship and I am the pilot in command. I can't blame anything on anyone. It is on me. My choices are my own to make. I have agency. If you start thinking about it, when I've started thinking about my life like that, it is painful.

and hard, and it creates conflict. But for me, it's created profound happiness and enjoyment of life because I'm not betraying myself anymore. I'm not doing what other people want me to do. And there's a wonderful book called The Courage to be Disliked that's sort of about Adlerian psychology.

And it's a book that's sort of written in narrative form, almost like a Socratic dialogue between a pupil and a student. One of the things that this book talks about is the separation of tasks. What is your task and what is my task? I'll give you an example of that. Hypothetically, if you decide you don't want to go to college, you want to be a creator, you want to be a musician.

You don't want to go to grad school. You want to be a musician. This actually isn't hypothetical for me. This is what I did. And suppose somebody else, maybe somebody you love, is disappointed by this decision. One way to think about it is that you disappointed them. Another way to think about it is that disappointment is not in you and not because of you. That disappointment is in them. That disappointment is their suffering.

Not your responsibility. You don't cause someone else to feel things. The feelings exist in them. That's called separation of tasks. And there's a mind state that you can get into where I do the things in the life that are true to me, that don't betray who I am. And other people may have reactions or emotions around those things, but those are their tasks, not my tasks.

That's similar. It's a similar concept to being the pilot in command. When I've started thinking about my life that way, my decisions that way, emotions that way, even my own emotions, I've felt a stronger sense of agency, a stronger enthusiasm to do things and to go about my life and make decisions and be fast, and just a more grounded sense of well-being and fun.

Do you think that your experience running Patreon has helped to influence this rule a little bit? I imagine working for a company or I imagine running a company like yours, you can't play the blame game. If something goes wrong, you have to take ownership of it or else you won't be able to adapt and change and make the right decisions that are going to help course correct. Because I imagine you've probably made tons of

incorrect or wrong decisions that maybe didn't lead where you thought it was going to or didn't lead you in the right direction. But if you continue to be ignorant to that and didn't take responsibility, I imagine eventually the house of cards would completely fall apart. Hard lessons learned. Everything is on... I don't know how to say this. The buck stops with me as the CEO. It's

Everything in the company is my fault. Everything. It's just true. I'm the CEO. It's all my fault. Every bad thing that happens in the market, inside the company, outside the company, if there's a product decision that creators are upset about, it's all my fault. It is. Because I am the CEO. That's terrifying. It's also incredibly empowering.

And so has that had an influence on my thinking about my life? Yes, absolutely. I will say I'm so glad that you shared that rule because I think that's just one of the most important rules that all of us need to take to heart. And it's something that I find myself often forgetting. Eventually, you need to come back to this rule and you need to realize that you have ownership over your thoughts, your feelings, your beliefs. So yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. Let's

keep this thing moving. What's rule number two for you? Rule number two is actively evolve your brain. Around 10 years ago, I had to go to cognitive behavioral therapy because I had fear of flying. I didn't like flying. Are you serious? This is crazy. Yeah. I couldn't get on a plane. I literally couldn't get on a plane. I tried once I had a full panic attack, meltdown, sobbing, unable to communicate, navigate the world.

I couldn't get on a plane. I developed this fear in my mid-20s as my mom was dying. My mom died from pancreatic cancer. And I think something happened to my psyche through that stretch of my life. It was a very difficult battle with cancer. And in that period, you know, where she struggled for about two and a half years, I just...

got this insane, deep-seated fear of flying. I had never been scared of flying before that. So it was totally irrational. And one day, my wife was just like, she like really gave it to me straight. She was like, Jack, are you going to like, like when we have kids, like, are you going to tell them dad's too scared to like get on an airplane? And I was like, fuck, I don't, I don't want to be that person. I don't want to, I don't want to

have that complex. I don't want to have that fear. And so I went to about 18 months of cognitive behavioral therapy. And I'll skip the details of how it works, but it is... It takes a long time. It's not like programming, but in some sense, it's like reprogramming your brain. Fear of flying, turns out, was like a software module in my brain. And I could take it out and replace it with a different software module. Um...

And it also turns out lots of things in your life are like that. They are little heuristics or complexes. Sometimes people call them baggage. Psychologists sometimes call them complexes. But the idea is they're little shortcuts that our brains take. They're little patterns that we develop over time that affect how we operate in the world. They construct these real-time narratives and guide our actions. And what I realized through this conversation

cognitive behavioral therapy stint is that you can actually alter your complexes. You can alter the like operating system level of your brain to have a different approach and narratives about the world and your life and yourself. These are projections that we make onto the world and you can you can alter the light bulb that's making those projections.

And so I try to do that now. And how do I do that? Well, I get really clear on like what it is that I want to alter.

And then I like market it to myself over a long period of time. Like, for example, being the pilot in command. I was not like that my whole life. I was kind of wet noodley for my whole life. I'm like easily like convincible, always caring about what other people thought about every action and over rotating for, you know, if I disappointed people, if I made somebody sad or like just like so concerned with other people's feelings and wanting people to like me and wanting to be liked.

And I was like so sick of being that wet noodle and being that person. I didn't want to do that anymore. And I wanted to evolve that complex in my brain that was so desperate for approval and evolve that part of my brain that had an external sense of authority. What I wanted was to develop an internal sense of authority. Evolving your brain is possible. There's a lot of people say people never change, blah, blah, blah. Bullshit. You can absolutely change your brain.

You can change your brain at a core level and become the way you want to become. That is possible. And learning how to do that for yourself, it might be different for other people, but learning how to do it for myself has been a really important piece of my life. Just like me, I can visually see that.

That change, that is unreal. The fact that you were so terrified to go on a flight that you broke down and then probably, I guess, within a few years, you're paragliding by yourself through a cloud. Like if that doesn't show you that anything's possible, I don't know what is. Like the fact that, yeah, like you said, so many of us feel like we are next.

in terms of our growth. And I think that that belief itself is probably what holds people back from changing. They think that they're a certain kind of person, so they will never be able to start their own business, start a podcast, lose weight, go to the gym, get strong. And so I think that people need to realize how important just doing those small things

can truly build up to huge milestones and, you know, huge personality and behavioral shifts. I'm going to be back with the third and final rule in a moment. But first, one of the ways I'm supporting this podcast is through Patreon. By becoming a patron, you get access to the full unedited episodes of the show. I think it's something like over 50% of listen time is still radio. All of that.

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Thanks for considering. Let's move on to rule number three. What do you got? Rule three, change is an opportunity, not a threat. I remember when I was 10 years old and I discovered the camera for the first time. It was like a scene in the movie Ratatouille where it like zooms into his face and it's like, oh,

Like it's just insane. You know, I was like this camera is the coolest shit I've ever seen in my life the same feeling when I discovered the ability to record my songs onto a laptop computer I was like this is Earthshakingly beautiful and amazing and I'm so excited about this. Um, I remember showing my work just like some audio engineers I knew some like engineers at the time because of some work that I was doing and they were like dude That's not real music like

digital audio recording, that shit sounds cold. That's not warm. That's not analog gear. Like you're not using a compressor. Like you're not, you know, there's no analog signal going like that's all fake music. That's like fake recording. Like you want to make a record, go to a studio, hire an engineer,

Like, use real gear, record on tape. Tape is much warmer and sounds better and like, these laptops like, have no soul. Like, you're not making real music. Now that turned out to be a metaphor, Matt, for basically every time I saw technological change in my life. And I was reminded of a story that I learned years later. It was like,

when in like the 20s when filmmakers sort of discovered that you could record light onto celluloid tape and you could make motion pictures not just like pictures but pictures that moved started like filmmakers were making early films the same attitude existed back then people thought this new technology was crazy the real art the real storytelling was happening on Broadway live with theaters that was real storytelling those were real

you know, real plays, not this sort of fake celluloid technology thing. And so those, that group of people, those groups of directors like got together, like we need some way to like pat each other on the back for like making great stuff. Cause we think this is really good art here. And so they started this thing called the Oscars where they would like celebrate each other's movies at the end of the year and give each other a statue and say, great job. You're a real artist. That was good. And now, you know,

80 years later, however long later, we all think of the Oscars as the mainstream. And that's just how life works. The new technology that feels cheap to the old school, to the people who you did it the old way and who look down on that new way of doing it, those people are loud voices. And

It's hard to embrace that change. And it's scary to embrace that change. But every time I've...

leveraged it and thought of it as like, how can I use this new technology to help me achieve my dreams and help me achieve my goals? Every time I've thought of it like that, it's been so beneficial and helpful to me. And the trick is just ignoring the people who claim that you're for some reason not the real thing for doing it a different way. I remember distinctly

I guess the perplexity from some of the decisions that I made early in my career. I think early on as a filmmaker, I got very lucky and I got my first documentary on Netflix, which was just like at the time probably still is for a lot of filmmakers, like a huge goal and a huge milestone.

And then I decided I'm gonna start making YouTube videos. And I just remember a lot of people in my life were like, what are you doing? Like, why would you go to make YouTube videos? - You're going backwards, Matt. Why are you going backwards? - You're going backwards, yeah. But I saw it as, this is actually me taking ownership

and control over the things that I create. I can't wait for a Netflix to approve my next documentary. You can't rely on them to give you permission to do anything. And I just saw an opportunity where I'm like, I don't care if it's an hour-long documentary or a one-minute-long video. I just like making videos and I want a platform to be able to make it. But those voices, I think,

to your point, can really hold people back from making those decisions that are contrarian. Luckily for me, and I'm sure for you as well, it's like I'm a bit of a contrarian. So it's like part of me actually enjoys the fact that people think that this is insane and that I'm doing something completely unexpected.

But I do think there are a lot of people out there that are a little bit too much too susceptible to the critic and the snob, the people that say you're not doing it the right way. I think we're going to look back, you know, in in many years and we're going to realize that these new forms of art making and communication are profound problems.

moments for culture and storytelling and innovation in how we communicate and express ideas and express feelings and express ourselves. And some of the early figures back then who were doing that and who maybe took a lot of shit from their peers

are now kind of celebrated as historically important artistic innovators. I think the same will be true of this moment in time. If people want to learn more about your work, where can we send them? You can search for Pomplamoose or Scary Pockets anywhere on the internet. I have multiple Patreon pages for all my bands. Just search my name or any of my bands and you'll see all my stuff.

Thanks for tuning in to Three Rules. Want to see every rule from the show? Get the full archive at mattdavella.com slash three rules. For my weekly bite-sized self-development emails where I share insightful lessons, practical tips, and personal experiments, sign up at mattdavella.com slash newsletter. And if you want to learn more about today's guest, check out the description for this episode. See you next time.