Chase Jarvis > Quotes

“It’s never very clear what you’re supposed to do instead—only that pursuing creativity is lofty, selfish, or even naive.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“This is one of the biggest secrets of the most creative, happy, successful people: Just start.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“We’ve been trained to avoid creative obstacles rather than risk trying to surmount them.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis

“Put bluntly, too many of us spend years, even decades, in pursuit of someone else’s plan for our one precious life.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“Creators create. Action is identity. You become what you do. You don’t need permission from anybody to call yourself a writer, entrepreneur, or musician. You just need to write, build a business, or make music. You’ve got to do the verb to be the noun.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“A creative rut is a bit like a finger trap, that little wicker tube that holds your fingers tightly until you stop pulling and bring your fingertips together. Then it slips right off. We get stuck in a rut by trying to think our way out of it: “This project is stalled. Maybe I don’t have the talent. I should probably take another class, sharpen my skills. Or just hit ‘pause’ on this for a few weeks until inspiration returns.” You’re probably very familiar with that voice. We all hear it whenever the flow comes to a stop. The way to get out of the trap is to relax. The path changes as you walk it. You can pivot only as you move.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“You are not your art. The greater the separation between your ego and the products of your creative efforts, the happier and more productive you’ll be. So let go of all your assumptions and think. Ask yourself what creative activities you might enjoy. Don’t worry about the product yet or where it will go.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“The only way to “fail” at creativity is to stop walking the path altogether.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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?”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“You don’t have to be good at anything yet. You can learn. In fact, you’ll begin to see the process of learning as a joy, not an obstacle. The only question that matters here is, what would you be excited to try?”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“Life is messy, and without creativity, it’s incomplete. Creativity is not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have. Think of it as putting your own oxygen mask on before helping others in your row. If creativity keeps getting bumped, it’s flawed prioritization.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“President Dwight D. Eisenhower often said that what is important is rarely urgent and what is urgent is rarely important.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“working on what you love is like salt, it makes everything taste a little better.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“it all starts with the volume of your work. Repetition is the mother of skill.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“Whatever else you take away from this chapter, remember that you’ll get better only once you stop fiddling and start making. Quality will come over time, but only if you make a lot of stuff while minimizing self-criticism and not letting yourself fritter away valuable minutes optimizing a workflow with no actual work flowing through it.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“In creative expression, unlike any other arena of human behavior, there is no objective measure of success, no One Right Way to do something. This means we’re always vulnerable to the lure of the easier, safer road. It’s counterintuitive, but if you value money, comfort, or convenience over your own creativity, you jeopardize all four.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life