Chase Jarvis Quotes

Put bluntly, too many of us spend years, even decades, in pursuit of someone else’s plan for our one precious life.

This is one of the biggest secrets of the most creative, happy, successful people: Just start.

We’ve been trained to avoid creative obstacles rather than risk trying to surmount them.

It’s never very clear what you’re supposed to do instead—only that pursuing creativity is lofty, selfish, or even naive.

The new obstacle is figuring out which dream to pursue and then cultivating and applying the necessary energy to engage in that pursuit. The internet provides access to all the world’s libraries, but it also provides access to World of Warcraft—limitless knowledge but also limitless distraction.

working on what you love is like salt, it makes everything taste a little better.

Every aspect of you is fuel for your creative fire.

That’s why we call it work,” he said. “We’re not here to make sure things already rolling downhill keep rolling.

Your goal should always be to become the best you, not a pretty good—or even damn good—version of somebody else.

The problem is that the human brain evolved to keep us safe, not happy—it will resist your efforts to walk your own path because creativity challenges certainty.

Little did I know at the time that I was developing a rare but powerful tool: quitting stuff I wasn’t meant to do. This is a tool you must wield to create the life you want.

let’s face it, the quality of your life is determined by what you think and feel.

Ultimately I realized that there was nothing noble or romantic about being busy all the time. It just meant I didn’t have my shit together.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower often said that what is important is rarely urgent and what is urgent is rarely important.

identifying the psychological clutter that has you weighed down—and clearing it out—can free you to be more productive than ever.

Do you have a spot in your home that can be dedicated to your craft? If possible,

Always aim to reduce the friction involved in starting.

ambient sounds, or even white noise while you’re working. I wrote 90 percent of this book listening to the Productive Morning playlist on Spotify.

with no lyrics. Don’t neglect your other senses, either. Visual clutter in your space can be creatively fertile or a huge distraction

The things that made you weird as a kid make you great today. —JAMES VICTORE

Rebellion is always a reaction. That means it’s just another form of control—you are controlled by the thing you are rebelling against. It’s not a choice; it’s a trap.

The more you narrow your creative focus, the faster you will learn and the more effective your work will become.

People respect a wrong move made with confidence far more than a correct one made without conviction.

Time is precious. Never risk it blindly. Do a risk assessment there as well.

Hedging your bets frees you up to play.

For Starters, the excitement about the next idea masks the reality: they are abandoning their current idea.

The frustration, boredom, or resentment you might feel now is just your intuition’s way of telling you that there’s a turn up ahead.

No, a calling is an intuitive hint, a tug we experience when we’re doing something that feels right: This is awesome! I’m going to keep doing this and see where it takes me.

Turning an idea in your head into a tangible reality is one of life’s great satisfactions, whether the end result is a story, a photograph, a meal, or a business.

When we create, we give of ourselves freely, adding value and expecting nothing in return.

there is always a point at which more fiddling begins to eat away at the vitality of the work. Learning when to accept that you’ve done all you can is a key creative capacity.

The author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn once said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Choose wisely.

Mastery is never an end in itself; it is always a by-product.

As Richard Branson once told me, “Opportunities are like buses. There’s always another one coming.

This is the danger of any collaboration. Sometimes the collaborators don’t share the same incentives or the same vision. Their vision was based on their experience.

The only way to “fail” at creativity is to stop walking the path altogether.

My answer to her was simple: Begin. Rekindle your creative craft for a few moments every day. Don’t worry about the rest right now; simply sit down and make something.

Though it was nonlinear and nonsensical, my path made perfect sense once I truly started walking it. I’d finally discovered an outlet for everything that had been trapped inside me.

Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There’s no other route to success. —PABLO PICASSO

When you bring your genuine self to bear on what you do and how you do it, you can’t help but stand apart from everyone else. There is only one you—you are the highest value you can contribute.

You’ve heard poets talk about, poems flowing out of their bodies; painters, they get on a roll. You all have seen the musician, when they are in that state, the guitar, the piano, whatever instrument just becomes part of their body, their ego is completely gone and it is just their connection to the art, their connection to the emotions they are trying to share with the audience- that is pure flow.

Imagine what you want to create—without limitation. Design a strategy to make your dream a new reality. Execute your strategy and smash through obstacles. Amplify your vision to create the impact you seek.

I’m also a collaborative learner. Once I’ve absorbed new concepts in quiet reading, I need someone to bounce ideas off to help them sink in. I absorb much better that way than by simply engaging in quiet reflection.

If we keep using our creative energy by making new things day after day, month after month, something incredible happens. We feel better: awake, fulfilled, whole. By creating regularly, we access a new source of vitality.

Making space for your work is important, but it isn’t the same as doing the work. Get yourself set up, give yourself the time, tools, and whatever space you can, and then, for the love of everything holy, start. Just start.

As you look to your own inspirations, try this: Deconstruct other people’s methods. Emulate the different elements. Analyze those parts to see which ones work for you. Then put the winners together and Repeat with the new formula.

Ever seen Warren Buffett’s calendar? It’s mostly blank. “Yeah, well, he’s a billionaire,” you might say. If you ask him, though, he’ll tell you that his time isn’t free because he’s rich; he’s rich because he made time for what mattered to him.

The “soft” intuition we’ve been taught to ignore is actually the most vital gift we are given, not only as creators but as human beings. After a lifetime of being conditioned to ignore your gut, however, it may be difficult to tap into and trust your intuition.

you can learn how to focus on and fully execute your vision through any resistance, how to capture new ideas and act on them in a manageable way. That way, you can tackle them methodically, one at a time. The scale of the output that follows will be breathtaking.

Listening for the call is easy, but only if you know what you’re trying to hear. Is it the murmur of the crowd—your parents, your peers, the tired cultural narrative as a whole? No. It’s that quiet voice inside. Your intuition, your heart. You know the difference.

All schools are prep schools in a way. They prepare you for Industrial Age careers. Your teachers and parents meant well, but our educational system was designed using a twentieth-century factory as a model, with efficiency in mind, not creativity or diversity of thought.

It requires discipline to maintain boundaries and not let other kinds of work spill in, but batching is a masterful way to protect creative work from the day-to-day interruptions that feel urgent but actually aren’t and can easily wait until you’re ready to deal with them.

Your point of view is the highest value you can bring. Once you can create work with a distinctive and recognizable personal style over and over again, the world will unlock itself for you. Even if your work is not recognized, you will have unlocked something precious in yourself.

My own preference is to set aside at least ninety minutes to tackle a small creative task. If I’m doing any heavy lifting, I prefer a three-hour block, at minimum. I aim for one three-hour creative push per day, more under duress—but then I have to double down on rest and self-care.

recently suspected that I was traveling too much for work. This can sound like a first-world problem, but the reality is that many of us have to travel for work in one way or another, that it often isn’t 100 percent necessary, and that it can suck up an extraordinary amount of our time.

remember this: A-gamers work with A-gamers, B-gamers work with C-gamers. If you want to be great, surround yourself with awesome people doing their best work, even if it keeps you on your toes more than you’d like. The best way to level up your own game is to level up the team around you.

You’re never going to get everyone you know (let alone every random person on social media) on board with your decision to pursue creativity. You’re certainly never going to have unanimous positive feedback for everything you make. In fact, if the work you put out is only celebrated, beware.

It’s in the lulls between flow states when we start noticing all the shiny distractions. If we don’t develop the discipline of writing those unrelated ideas down and then ignoring them as we continue our work, we will never find our way back into the flow state. We won’t finish anything, either.

Stop glamorizing being busy. A hamster on a wheel is busy—where does it get him? I had grander ambitions. I resolved to stop doing whatever came up, whatever highly visible activity created a false aura of productivity and glamour, and instead to focus on being effective. That shift made all the difference.

To become a creator, you have to be willing to forge healthy, supportive relationships with amazing new people and reexamine any toxic relationships you’re already in. The author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn once said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Choose wisely.

We always want to find ourselves pulled into our work. Continuous pushing leads to burnout. The absence of any pull toward your work is a sign that you’re pursuing the wrong thing. In fact, it’s possible that the lack of a pull toward your creative project is one reason you picked up this book in the first place.

Do not check your email at the start of your day if you can help it. This is one of the biggest killers of critical morning energy and momentum. Email is a petition for your time; it’s not a demand that you must respond to immediately. Rarely are there mission-critical obligations to address between 6 and 8 a.m.,

Batching similar tasks makes everything more manageable and less daunting. You might set aside a specific time each day for processing emails and one for making phone calls rather than allow these activities to proliferate throughout your day, stealing precious time from work that requires sustained concentration.

What is truly possible for you? Whatever your answer is, whatever success, accomplishment, or fulfillment you’ve only imagined might be within your reach, let’s pause to acknowledge that you’re likely thinking too small. We all do that at first. Small is comfortable and familiar. It feels safe—even though it’s anything but.

Once I was walking my path, once I’d found my creative niche, my photography—and my life—had focus. The difference was dramatic. Suddenly I went from wandering the woods to sprinting like a track star. I dropped out of grad school and went from my first few local clients to working with some of the world’s biggest sports brands.

Then I transition into visualizing myself in a world where I have just achieved my three most important goals. I live through the feelings that come along with each achievement, imagining all of it in as much detail as possible: sounds, smells, emotions. What would it look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like to accomplish those goals?

There used to be a prescribed path for entering any particular career. This is no longer the case. Beyond a handful of professions, many of the most rewarding jobs today are intrinsically creative. They involve doing things that didn’t even exist when the people doing them were still in school. The prescribed paths are crumbling away.

No one is coming to save you. Experts are valuable when you’re learning new skills, but neither experts nor institutions are going to nurture you, guide you, or make your creative dream a reality. You’re on your own path. It’s all up to you. This isn’t a bad thing, either. Your creativity gives you the capacity to design the life you want.

When we are operating in shame, we too easily believe the awful thoughts about ourselves that we hear in our head. But that is not who we are. Meditation has taught me that I am not my thoughts. Practicing meditation over the years has made it much easier for me to observe and identify the voice of shame and call it out for the fraud it is.

In the words of the choreographer Twyla Tharp, “Skill gets imprinted through action.” Assign yourself daily drills to practice the mechanical basics of the skill, whether reviewing flash cards or working with a kitchen knife. Learning all the recipes in the world won’t make you a great chef if you can’t chop, dice, and julienne those veggies.

At this stage in my life, it’s become impossible to ignore the fact that the good days—when I’m feeling great and doing my best work—have common elements. For one thing, they’re intentional. On those days, I’m in the driver’s seat, with clear objectives in mind and a plan for achieving them, even if the objective is simply taking time to think through a problem.

There’s a reason it’s so hard to follow our calling. The whisper of intuition telling us what we’re meant to do and how we’re meant to live comes from within, but it leads away into the unknown. Once I finally started listening to the call, I found myself on a new path. Not the path designed by my career counselor, encouraged by my parents, or suggested by society. My own.

Except on a rare day with extenuating circumstances, I’ll follow my meditation with a three-minute gratitude and visualization practice. I begin with my eyes closed and make a short list of three genuine and heartfelt moments I’m grateful to have had in my life—and I relive them as if watching the experience through my own eyes and feeling those moments as fully as possible.

What most of us are really doing when we try to anticipate every possible failure is masticating our once playful, powerful, smart idea into a lifeless paste. As the life of an idea is leached away by “preparation,” we become overwhelmed. Trying to avoid every possible pitfall before your idea has any substance either neuters it or leads to its abandonment before anything even gets made.

Your life has two big arcs. The first is about acquisition; acquiring knowledge about yourself and the world—figuring out how to meet your own needs. What am I going to do to make a living? Will I get married? Buy a house? Have kids? The second arc is about contribution. You start thinking about how you can serve others and make a lasting impression on the world. We take, and then we give.

common destructive element in the life of any creative person is doing the wrong work—in other words, spending too much of your time on things that don’t matter or don’t come naturally. We flourish by leaning into our strengths more than by “fixing” our weaknesses. Delegate, outsource, or avoid the tasks that call on your weakest areas. There is no benefit in being so stubborn that you do it all.

A fresh idea will always be more appealing than the grind of a project that’s already under way. The insidious thing about a new idea is that it feels productive to stop what we’re doing and tackle that instead. After all, we’re creative—we have to act when inspiration strikes, don’t we? The discipline lies in getting the new idea down onto paper and then going back to finish what you originally started.

When it comes to creativity, no effort is ever wasted. Ever. Every unfinished manuscript, sunk business, crumpled charcoal drawing, or abandoned musical instrument represents another step forward. Once you understand that your entire creative journey—every clueless mistake, every stinging failure—is an essential part of your path, you will see that there is nothing to lose by taking the next step, no matter where it leads.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott offers advice for writers that applies to every creative person: “For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” Shitty first drafts. It’s as simple as that: you have to give yourself permission to make anything, without judgment, no matter what the critical voice in your head has to say about

Think different” isn’t just a slogan. It’s a credo, one that made Apple the most profitable company in human history. People accused Steve Jobs of creating a “reality distortion field,” but he understood that reality is already distorted. Apple would never win by trying to build a better mainframe computer. That would have been playing by IBM’s rules. Instead, Apple created a personal computer because that was what it wanted the future to look like.

About a decade ago, Jeff Bezos declared that Amazon was “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” It was expanding from selling everyday goods such as books and brushes to selling “cloud services.” Talk about castles in the sky. What the hell did Amazon know about “Big Data”? The collective reaction was: “Stay in your lane, Bezos. Leave this brainy digital stuff to companies like Google and Microsoft and go back to selling lawn mowers.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott offers advice for writers that applies to every creative person: “For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” Shitty first drafts. It’s as simple as that: you have to give yourself permission to make anything, without judgment, no matter what the critical voice in your head has to say about it.

When I grew up, and even as an adult learning photography, pursuing learning was seen as a sign of weakness and vulnerability. Needing to learn something meant admitting you didn’t already know it. There was shame there. You tried to keep it quiet. “Hey, if you’re a photographer, why do you need to take that Photoshop class? Don’t you know your job?” Since then, willingness to learn has gone from a weakness to a strength. But the number of options can be overwhelming.

As you develop a new skill at your own pace, you’ll start to identify your learning preferences. Do you prefer to start with details and work your way up to larger concepts? Or do you need to make a mental map before you can absorb specific facts and figures? You’ll have to discover that for yourself. When the information doesn’t gel right away, it doesn’t mean you’re bad or you don’t have the necessary talent. It just means you need to try another approach to the material.

Next time you aren’t able to do something as well as you’d like, simply enroll yourself in Me University, plan out your semester, master the information, and award yourself a PhD in The Problem You Just Crushed. You’ll rarely be intimidated by another learning challenge once you’ve done this a few times. It’s empowering. In fact, it’s addictive. It’s the secret weapon of the highest performers. There is nothing you can’t learn, no matter where you’re starting from right now.

today’s learners face new challenges. Their primary hang-up is understanding what they want to do. Our career options have expanded so far beyond traditional options that they didn’t even exist when you or I were in school. Now a learner can choose to be a firefighter or a coder, an accountant or a YouTuber, a veterinarian or an Etsy seller. With so many possible directions to choose from, so many new skills and new careers and new creative pursuits available, deciding what to explore must come first.

Starters can put years, even decades, of work into a creative practice and come away with nothing concrete, nothing done. Worse, all those unfinished projects linger in their minds, taking up creative bandwidth. Over time, many of the “new” ideas start to look like variations on the old ones, though usually this is more obvious to everyone else than it is to the struggling Starter, who is constantly reinventing the wheel instead of, you know, rolling anywhere. In this endless chase of the new, things start to get old.

Achieving mastery, as I use the term here, doesn’t mean you know it all, only that you know how to navigate the material. You know what you know and what you don’t. At the beginning, it’s hard to enter a subject because you have to draw a mental map as you explore the territory. Once you’ve mastered the rudiments, you’ve drawn the mental map; you don’t know everything, but you know where everything goes, how it fits together, and why. Your learning accelerates. And the flywheel begins to spin. Masters know this. Now you do, too.

like to think of mindset as the ground floor, the bedrock. The wrong foundation crumbles quickly when loaded with challenges, and we become trapped in the rubble. The right foundation can support a rocket launch. The core principles of a stable creative mindset are: You are a creative person. The world is abundant and full of possibilities. Your situation can always be changed. You can use your creativity to create the change you seek. Creativity is natural and healthy but requires practice. Creativity is ultimate personal power.

Adversity is intrinsic to creative work. You will never be able to avoid it completely. The more you try to avoid problems and optimize your process before you do the work, the more distant your goal will become, until it seems almost unbelievable that you’d ever actually start. When facing creative adversity, you could, of course, walk away, but most people walk away too soon. Instead, try leaning in. How? By taking action. Failure may or may not be in your future, but all the growth, opportunity, and reward will be found on the path, not around it.

this one habit is nonnegotiable. Whether you’re a hobbyist or a pro, learning the technical skills of your craft is essential. And if you aspire to move into a creative profession, core skills are the price of entry. Practicing these skills once you’ve acquired them matters deeply and will unquestionably contribute toward creating the outcomes you seek. Become so good at the fundamentals of your craft that they become automatic and effortless, like breathing, walking, or chewing gum. That’s when you’ll experience the real fun and prizes of a creative calling.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott offers advice for writers that applies to every creative person: “For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” Shitty first drafts. It’s as simple as that: you have to give yourself permission to make anything, without judgment, no matter what the critical voice in your head has to say about it. The first photo, the first wireframe of the website, the first stab at that venture pitch—just starting is the hardest part.

A book can’t give you the experience of how to direct a photo shoot. “Now tell the model to lift the left hand three inches.” But you can learn this in one minute by watching a professional photographer do it. There is no substitute for watching mastery in action. This is the new college. The difference is, you don’t just drink from the fire hose; you come to the resource with specific questions in mind based on your experiments. This is a much more effective way to approach new material than “beginner-intermediate-advanced.” Let curiosity and inspiration guide your exploration.

I’ve found that the most badass people I know, the ones who are the best in the world at their craft, are rarely busy in the way we’ve been taught to think of it. Being busy is a disease, a terminal one. It destroys your precious time. Being effective is about using every minute thoughtfully and mindfully as you make steady progress toward your dream. The biggest surprise to me has been that those people, those creators who are so deliberate and planned in the way they work, are also incredibly joyful and playful while they work. Planning and play aren’t opposites; they complement each other beautifully.

When you consider a new project, take out your notebook and answer the following questions: What is the goal of this project? Why am I doing it? What do I hope to get out of it? What is the worst thing that might happen if I fail? What steps can I take to reduce risk and mitigate failure? Is it worth it? Every big creative project calls for a risk assessment because most of us risk too little to truly stand out. It’s only once you sit down and write out all the worst-case scenarios that you realize that the shadowy fears circling around your head aren’t really all that concrete or overwhelming. They’re just manageable obstacles.

Without even realizing it, this woman had bought into a huge lie that so many of us accept. We internalize the idea that our calling is too risky, too impractical to even consider pursuing. That doing so would be selfish, deeply unwise. Deep down, we know we’re selling ourselves out, so we carry this regret with us into each new phase of life. These faulty beliefs work their way into our bones as dogma, making it harder and harder to undo the damage as each year goes by. The only antidote, for this woman and for you, is to stop the madness right now. With love and empathy for yourself, gently summon the courage to make a change.

Too many of us start our days consuming instead of creating: browsing the web, watching TV, whatever. We become audience members and critics. Our thoughts get sucked into what other people are doing, how well they’re doing it, and the response they’re getting from the world. This is supertoxic, especially if you haven’t made any of your own stuff lately, and a surefire way to undermine all the creative mindset stuff I wrote about earlier in this chapter. Creating before consuming is a seemingly minor shift that will have a profound effect on your daily outlook and creative capacity. So please, create first. Make something (and ideally share it), no matter how small.

Looking back at that undeveloped view of creativity, it’s obvious to me that my beliefs were informed by the dominant cultural narrative around artists as wild mystics, people who go off into the woods or a loft in Soho or some other sacred place and return with a finished masterpiece—somehow. In reality, this romantic myth has next to nothing in common with the true working methods of professionals in any field, especially the creative ones. Today I know what gets results: establishing a consistent creative practice and sticking to it. Building even a basic framework for creative work will save you a lot of disappointment and put you on the fast track to the success you seek.

School teaches us that life is a game to win against our peers. We’re graded on a uniform scale no matter our background, our strengths and weaknesses, or our future goals. Sometimes we’re even graded on a curve relative to our peers. This inane, pointless system of competition is baked into the twentieth-century educational model. We’re taught that life is a game of musical chairs and that if we don’t hustle, we’re going to be left standing without a seat. This in-it-to-win-it mentality is the polar opposite of a creative mindset, which is abundant, resilient, and full of potential. Aiming to be “better” is a dead end because it means you’re walking in someone else’s footsteps and trying to catch up.

As the philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius said, “The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.” As true today as in Roman times. The state of your mind, body, and spirit is the direct result of all the decisions you’ve made in your life up until this moment. Physical health, cognitive performance, happiness, and well-being—these are driven almost entirely by our beliefs and behaviors. Day after day, choosing to exercise or watch Netflix, pull an all-nighter or get some sleep, eat clean or binge on mint chocolate-chip ice cream—all these decisions create our days, and our days create our lives as a whole. Each of us faces unique physical and mental challenges, but no matter what hand you’ve been dealt, your mindset makes a massive difference.