Eric Chow’s Adventures.
Addicted to adventures & good questions. The places Eric has gone, the conversations he went looking for, and the books he keeps recommending, from his own episodes and essays.
This page is written from the record. Eric has told these stories himself, on his podcast and in his essays; where he is quoted, the words are his, and each quote links to the moment he said it.
Go Somewhere.
Eric opened his first social media account, Instagram, in early 2017, and he is clear about why: a trip to Japan later that year, and the photographs he meant to bring home. For most of 2017 and 2018 the feed was his travels, from Japan to somewhere closer to home like Monterey, and the family outings to Cirque du Soleil shows in between.
Japan gave him the story he still calls a great one. On one of his trips there he was stranded alone, without family and with no cell service. He wrote it up in two articles on Medium, and it was remembering those articles that later pushed him from captions to longer writing.
Iceland was a July trip, with a photo beside a towering hut of stacked stones that he captioned months later with a joke about his college applications. Point Lobos State Reserve, on the coast near Carmel and Monterey, was the weekend version: a photo of him lying along a tree, captioned as his mood for the weekend.
“Basically, I was stranded alone, completely without family and with no cell service, in Japan.”
“It was just pictures from my travels.”
Come Back With Something.
Italy is where the photographs started carrying lessons. On November 2, 2018, he posted a photo from the top of Capri with a longer caption than usual, a reminder to be grateful for what you have instead of always focusing on what you do not. The comments that followed surprised him.
On February 1, 2019, he tried it on purpose. The photo was Venice, a canal, the water far from clear, and the caption turned the city into a point about people: Venice is loved for its history and its character, not for perfect water. He asked his followers whether they wanted more posts like it. They did, and the Friendship Appreciation Posts and his articles on Medium followed from there.
He is just as candid about the other side of travel photos. Friends told him he was lucky to travel the whole world; he had to explain that the Iceland photo was posted in December from a trip in July. It took him until later 2019 to see the larger point, that people compare their lives with somebody else’s highlights.
“Like Venice, we don’t have to have everything.”
“I often had to explain: okay, first of all, I’m not actually traveling every time I post these photos.”
Good Questions.
The Eric Chow Empowers Podcast began, in his telling, because he wanted a space for conversations he could not have anywhere else: with people he respected and loved, on subjects a regular conversation would skip. Over 68 episodes from 2019 to 2023 it was listened to in 100+ countries.
His method was simple and demanding. He assumed the person across the table was fascinating, and made it his job to find out why. After more than fifty episodes, and many more conversations off the air, he had reached a conclusion he states without qualification.
“I go into every conversation believing that the other person is absolutely a fascinating human being, and that it’s my responsibility to figure out what is fascinating about them.”
“I’ve had enough conversations with enough people to know everybody is interesting.”
“Okay, I want to start a show because I really want a platform and a space for self-expression, a platform where I can have conversations with people I respect and love, and talk about topics and subjects we may not otherwise be able to talk about in a regular conversation, and provide some value to an audience.”
The Reading Habit.
Eric reads every day, fifteen to thirty minutes. He writes down any line that resonates, from a book or even a show, reviews the notes daily and weekly, and saves an idea for the friend it would help or the episode it belongs in. By October 2021 he had finished 23 books that year. In the foreword to the Manifesto he describes nearly a decade of reading on personal development, across business, communication, emotional intelligence, leadership, productivity, psychology, sales, and wealth.
At the start of 2020 he shared the books that had given him the most in 2019, mostly lives told with the lessons drawn from them, which, as he put it, is what he likes to do: Everything Is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo, The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha, Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Advice Not Given by Mark Epstein, Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life by Gisele Bündchen, and, as an honorable mention, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.
“Another important habit is that I’m reading 15, 20, 30 minutes every single day, and I do the same with those books.”
“I’ve applied more from this book than most, simply because I think I read it at the right time.”
Be Curious.
Listing what has driven the things he has enjoyed most, Eric names curiosity, and the permission you give yourself to experiment and have fun with it. It is the thread through the travel, the reading, and the questions, and it is the same habit he brings to Mashman Consulting Group, where his job is to test an idea until it holds.
“So be curious, be open, try things, and have fun with it.”
From the Road to the Room.
Travel, books, and conversations are where Eric’s ideas come from, and where Identity Positioning™ was tested before it was a method. The firm is where they are put to work.