"I realized that Inbox Zero lessens my anxiety around everything that's going on in my business life. I have a lot of stuff going on, and I feel like I'm super well aware of everything when I'm at inbox zero. It's helped me kind of find that balance, and just to be more productive.” – Chris Zarou
Chris Zarou (@ChrisZarou) is Founder and CEO of Visionary Music Group, which helped shape the careers of artists like Logic, Jon Bellion, and Jeremy Zucker. Chris is also an angel investor, and he’s currently starting a fund which will be announced in the coming months.
Chapters
- Web3 and the rabbit hole approach to learning
- Emotional intelligence and organization
- Morning exercise and sunlight
- Inspirations and tools
- On success, failure and gratitude
Chris Zarou's Favorite Book
Transcript
Daniel Scrivner:
Chris Zarou, thank you so much for coming on 20 Minute Playbook. I'm super excited to have you.
Chris Zarou:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Daniel Scrivner:
This should be a lot of fun. It's a totally different interview than our longform one. This shows a little bit faster pace. So I'll ask you the same 10 questions we ask every guest. Let's jump in it. The first one, we always ask every guest, if there's something you've been excited or fascinated about recently. Just like, what's been living in your brain that you can't stop thinking about?
Chris Zarou:
This wasn't recent. It's probably been 18-month fascination for me. I went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, which led me to crypto, which led me to Web3. So that curiosity has kind of evolved. But I'm just enamored by it. I can see the ways it's going to change everything. It's so exciting to me, the disruption that it's going to create, which is better for everyone. So it's probably just entirely Web3, if I could boil it down to one thing. I don't have enough time in my day to learn as much as I want to learn. But I'm very excited about that space.
Daniel Scrivner:
That's a deep, deep, deep rabbit hole [crosstalk 00:53:22].
Chris Zarou:
Oh, it's so deep. It is.
Daniel Scrivner:
In the last interview we had, you talked a little about your process for learning. And I feel like I can't not ask you to share a little bit of that here. So if we could maybe just roll back the tapes on whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's Web3, whether it's DeFi stuff, you're interested in this. What is your process for taking that from zero to one and feeling like you really understand it and you're going down the rabbit hole?
Chris Zarou:
Sure. I try to reach it in my network and find a connection or an introduction to what I've identified as subject matter experts in the space. And I think you'd be surprised, and maybe people aren't fortunate to have a network that I've been fortunate enough to build over the decade of my career. I think you'd be surprised is cold reaching out to somebody, they love to talk about what their passion is. And people love to talk about what they love. And I think just being able to sit across from them over Zoom, on a phone call and I just pepper them with questions that I have going on in my head.
Chris Zarou:
And maybe it's, when I started to develop my thesis on what I believe Bitcoin was going to represent in the world, talking to three or four or five of the people that I thought were experts on the subject. Basically, spitballing them my thesis and seeing if they thought that was right, which it could be that simple. And I don't care how I'm viewed. If I'm looked as ignorant or I'm looked at as silly or stupid, it doesn't bother me. I'm going into that conversation completely selfishly to try and learn everything I can about what I'm interested in.
Daniel Scrivner:
And so coming out of that, I'm sure you leave with so many questions, so many sites to visit, so many things to go and pull up. Do you then also have some process where you're focused on finding height? Because I feel like there's two phases. There's like, you're kicking it off and you're really trying to understand it. And then there's the, now I need to keep my pulse on this thing. What is your approach to that?
Chris Zarou:
Yeah, I think keep my pulse, I care less about because once I fundamentally believe I understand something, I can kind of let it go and move on to something else. So I'm not in daily Bitcoin stuff as I used to be because I spent months going down that rabbit hole and learning everything I needed to learn.
Daniel Scrivner:
And that frees you up for the next thing?
Chris Zarou:
Yeah. And then it's compounding knowledge because then maybe I'll understand other stuff up in the Web3 space much better. Then I went down the Ethereum rabbit hole and started it. It's just compounding.
Daniel Scrivner:
Yeah. And there's new rabbit hole is every day. It's in crypto?
Chris Zarou:
Sure.
Daniel Scrivner:
I'm super interested to hear your answer to this. So one of the things that we always ask every guest, talk a little bit about their superpowers, superpowers, and then also just some of the things they've struggled with. And so in that first camp, what do you think of as your super power? And this can be you as a manager or this can be you as an investor, you as just Chris Zarou. And how do you harness those strengths?
Chris Zarou:
If I had to boil it down to one thing, not just as a manager, I think me as a human being, which has enabled any piece of business success that I was able to have, it's probably emotional intelligence. It's kind of how I navigate my daily life from people that I want to surround myself with, to people that I call friends, to founders that I invest in, to clients that I want to manage. It's simply just reading people. I have this intuitive way of doing it from reading situations.
Chris Zarou:
When I was stepping into the music business at 19, 20 years old, completely blind in business in general, but even how the music business has worked, I just kind of navigated it using my intuition and IQ. That kind of led me to everything, like picking clients. A lot of my clients are really disciplined, really hardworking people. And there would be people in the music business who would made comments, would go, "Oh, you're so lucky." Well, no, I'm not. Really, I chose who I wanted to work with. It's not a coincidence. I'd to say emotional intelligence is number one for me.
Daniel Scrivner:
Super interesting. No one has given that answer. On the flip side, we all have things that we struggle with, and this could be just the way your brain's wired, or just the way you like to work, it could be the industry that you find yourself in. What do you feel like you've struggled with and how have you either improved on those things or worked around those things over time?
Chris Zarou:
If I had to come up with one thing, I'd probably say, being organized. I tend to have a monkey mind a little bit and jump all over the place. So I've had to create that discipline out of feeling that I owe it to people who work for me, owe it to my clients. I can't let things slip through the cracks. So that's something, from when I first started to now, I've completely, it has been night and day in terms of... I've put things in my life in terms of just keeping track of tasks and notes. And I play inbox zero now, which is funny because there was periods in my career when it was just the madness of it. I didn't do email at all. I know that sounds funny, but if someone wanted to get a hold of me, they would have to text or call me. I just couldn't keep up with it. It was too much. I felt it slowed me down. And to the evolution of it now I play inbox zero.
Daniel Scrivner:
Yeah, it sounds like now you've got a lot more discipline, I guess. And maybe that's another way of saying it. You just have a lot more discipline about process.
Chris Zarou:
When I started I was a kid. So I've gone through a lot of maturity too.
Daniel Scrivner:
Unsurprising. On the habiting routine side, and you can kind of take this in two veins. I think one could be, do you have set habits and routines that you've refined over time that you do every day? And if not, then are there things you've experimented with that you would tell others, "This was great. This had a great impact on my life. This had a great impact on my performance." How do you think about that?
Chris Zarou:
The one under lying thing that has been constant, it's dramatically helped me and every aspect of my life, especially businesses, just morning fitness time. So I've always been into fitness and now I've become a distance runner. So I'll do, minimum an hour, maybe an hour and a half run in the morning that centers me. I generally get up, will have a coffee, take 30 minutes to get ready and then I'm out the door. And that has been imperative to me because it's one of the only times, it's less about the fitness. I really enjoy feeling fit. I really enjoy feeling healthy. But for me it's more about the mental health component of it.
Chris Zarou:
I couldn't explain or articulate why it was so important to me throughout my career. It was my one non-negotiable. I don't care. I haven't took a breakfast meeting, God, in 10 years maybe. It's just not negotiable for me. And I couldn't figure out why it was so important. What I realized is, being an entrepreneur or just even being a human being in 2021, you're constantly being pinged. And it was the one time in my day where my thoughts got to just roam freely. And I realized, I thought out issues in my life and career and business and found solutions just by being able to think freely without being pinged.
Chris Zarou:
Well, you don't realize when you have your phone attached to you, or you're sitting in front of your computer and your emails are popping up, or your text message are popping up, you can't even have a free train of thought because you're constantly getting pulled out of that moment. So it's like getting to that flow state every day is so productive for me that it's a non-negotiable.
Daniel Scrivner:
Do you run and listen to music or do you run and just, with nothing, no phone, no music?
Chris Zarou:
50-50, depending on how I'm feeling. So I do podcasts or I do music. If I found myself lacking the motivation that day, I'll generally do music. If today, where I have a high, low motivation, I can do a podcast. And then I'm also fluid. If I'm listening to the podcast, because I really try to take it in, and I notice my thoughts are just going and I'm tuning out of the podcast, I'll flip over to music.
Daniel Scrivner:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, we talked about this non-negotiable of running in the morning. On fitness, is there anything you do with diet and sleep that's been an amazing unlock for you and, or how has that evolved over time, just your approach to fitness in general?
Chris Zarou:
Great. I've always tried to be very conscious of my diet. And I think when you're working out to the level and degree that I do it, so I did my first marathon in 2019. I also lift several times a week. There's a lot of days a week. I know it sounds odd, I work out twice. I'll do two days. That was a habit that I started during COVID because of the extra downtime that I had, that I realized has improved my life so much, and also my business so much that I didn't want to let it go. So a couple days a week, I don't take a lunch and I'll use a lunch hour to go lift. And then in terms of sleep is a area of my adult life that I've tremendously struggled with.
Chris Zarou:
And I think it's part of what I just said about a monkey brain. It's hard to shut down and wind down for me. So one of the things that has dramatically helped me, and this may sound odd. I can't stop talking about it to people in my life because it's such an easy hack, is getting sunlight early in the morning directly into your eyes. So I live in Manhattan. I'll go on my balcony and have a coffee all year round. And I started doing this about a year ago, and it's been the only thing that has been able to help my sleep schedule. I know it sounds funny. It helps you set your circadian rhythm. So what I noticed is at night, I'll actually be tired and it's easier for me to fall asleep. When, if I wasn't getting that sunlight in the morning, I tended to feel tired at night.
Daniel Scrivner:
Is there a set amount of time? And are you looking at the sun [crosstalk 01:01:44]?
Chris Zarou:
No, you're just making sure that there's sunlight in eyes. If it's cloudy day, it doesn't matter. 10 minutes is all you need. It was actually from a neuroscientist that I follow who has a great podcast. His name is Andrew Huberman, where he gives that advice out a lot. And I tried it and it worked tremendously.
Daniel Scrivner:
I'm blanking on the name of the artist, Rick Rubin, I think talked about doing that as well too. And that was a major unlock for him. It just goes to show how amazing your body is this fine-tuned machine, you just need to give it the right inputs. Making sure it knows that the day started. On the idea side, you talked about podcasts, what books and podcasts have had a biggest impact on the way you thinking work? And is there any that you give away to others, recommend?
Chris Zarou:
Yeah, there's a handful of them. I'm not a huge reader, but there's actually been one book that I would say has profoundly changed my life. It's called Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. And it's about the power of networking. And I didn't realize the power of it. I tended to be head down focused all the time. And one of the issues that I found, it was coming from a place of insecurity, where I wouldn't network with people as much, because I feel like I wasn't accomplished and couldn't add any value to their lives.
Chris Zarou:
And what I realize now, is being a little further along in my career, I'll take meetings all the time. If a young person reaches out, wants to get together, wants this, I may even leave that meeting with just the energy from them and I got something out of it. And I didn't realize, that is a beautiful part about being collaborative and networking with people. And that book had completely opened my eyes to it. it changed my life, changed my business. And podcast is a handful, and that's like the best, how I built this, that I'll kind of go through. Anthony Pompliano has a great podcast that I really enjoy. This is a handful of them.
Daniel Scrivner:
That's awesome. I love that you brought up Never Eat Alone because that's a book that I believe I have. I don't think I have ever read it. So [crosstalk 01:03:27] good nudge.
Chris Zarou:
It's fantastic.
Daniel Scrivner:
On the software and tool side, you talked about inbox zero. Is there just broadly in tools, this could be pieces of software, like Superhuman Notion. This can be physical. Just things that you rely on. What do you use? And what's helpful to you in terms of tools?
Chris Zarou:
I've started. Like I said, inbox zero is a newer thing. It's probably two and a half, three years now. What I realized that did, it lessens my anxiety around everything that's going on in my business life. I have a lot of stuff going on and I feel like I'm super well aware of everything when I'm at inbox zero and it's helped me kind of find that balance, and just to be honest, be more productive. And in terms of task, I use a pen and paper. It's right here on my desk. I'm very old school with that. It works for me. It really does. It's a little to do checklist for me and I keep it on a daily basis. When it's done, I'll move on to a fresh page.
Daniel Scrivner:
I found myself switching to that a couple of years ago. And I still will use Things, which is the app that I use just to be able to put stuff in almost to get it out of my mind if I'm just not near that piece of paper, but there's something, just one really gratifying about being able to check something off physically and seeing that page start to fill up throughout the day. Is that what you like about it? What is it that you think is so helpful about using pen and paper?
Chris Zarou:
Yeah. Because it's kind of a business journal of my week. The same paper is in front of me, the same notepad is in front of me when I'm on calls. And I might jot certain things down. And it could be an issue if you're not in front of it all the time. So one of the things that I've done is I email myself. So if I'm out and about, and I have something that I need to remember or remind myself of, I just drop myself an email. So when I am going through my email, when I'm in front of my computer, I could jot whatever I need to down on that paper.
Daniel Scrivner:
One question that we like to ask everyone is, which is a question that I just want to ask it because I wish this was a more common conversation, which is, obviously, on this show, we try to get people that have achieved incredible success in something. And one of the insights there is everybody fails. And why aren't we asking people to share a failure more often? And so this is my favorite question and it really is just really broadly, if you can share a favorite failure. And I think what we're trying to get across there is something that I'm sure in the moment was probably painful, but that after the fact, that just ended up being really valuable experience or propelled you in a better direction. Is there anything there?
Chris Zarou:
Listen, there was hundreds of them, millions of them throughout my career. I was fortunate enough not to make a tragic mistake in any one of my client's careers. I'm very grateful for that. I don't know if there's one in particular that stands out to me. I think, so I can answer in a different way, I think part of what's played into my success, I have zero fear failure. Just zero. Has never crosses my mind, does not bother me, has never deterred me from starting anything. And I think that's part of the reason I've been successful is I will dive in without any fear of failure. And that's probably why I've failed so much because the more you're trying things, the more you're trying to build, I think the more you're going to fail. And to me, I look at it as a positive thing because I learned so much from it. Right?
Daniel Scrivner:
Yeah. I think that actually makes a ton of sense because that's also why you're like, "That's not a failure. I tried it, just didn't work." It's like, it's not even in your vocabulary.
Chris Zarou:
Sure. Sure. And I have this unique ability, and my business partner, Harrison reminds me a lot. Literally, probably why I can't answer the question right. I don't think about it ever again. It's over. Just move on.
Daniel Scrivner:
It's amazing. I wish I had that. On the success side, how do you think about success and just what that means to you personally? And do you have a definition of success for yourself? And that can be super loose, can be super refined.
Chris Zarou:
Success means something different to everyone. Personal life success for me is dramatically different from my business success. But I think where I'm at now in my life and career, if I can feel like I'm competing in a field and get this competitiveness out every single day and truly enjoy the process of it, that is success to me. It's not attached to any financial outcome. It's literally like, can I achieve both those things on a daily basis? Not every day is going to look that way. Am I feeling like I'm being competitive in this field that I'm playing in? And number two, am I enjoying the process? That's it.
Daniel Scrivner:
I think that's kind of a wonderful combination. Last question, what are you most grateful for in this phase of your life?
Chris Zarou:
My family and friends. I think that should be everybody's answer coming out of the year that was COVID. That's certainly reminded me and highlighted that for me.
Daniel Scrivner:
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I know anyone can find you on Twitter, @ChrisZarou. You're also at Visionary Music Group. People can Google that, people can find that. This has been a ton of fun. Thank you so much for coming on 20 Minute Playbook.
Chris Zarou:
Thank you.
