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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chase Jarvis
Read between
October 7, 2019 - January 20, 2020
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.
Creativity is the practice of combining or rearranging two or more unlikely things in new and useful ways.
You are creative by nature, endowed with a near limitless capacity to make and grow new things. Accessing this capacity requires a kind of creative muscle that must be strengthened to achieve your full potential. By identifying as a creative person, accepting the world around you as your canvas, and manifesting your ideas regularly, you will intuitively create the life you truly want for yourself.
Creativity is a natural force. It’s our culture that trains it out of us. Creativity connects our default modes: thinking and doing, open and closed.
John Cleese, “Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating.”
The words of parents, peers, teachers, and employers have a dramatic effect on our creative identities. A word of praise has inspired more than one creator. A word of negation has undermined many more.
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.
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.
Step I Imagine Imagine what you want to create—without limitation.
1 Hear Your Call
No artist tolerates reality. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
That’s by design. Traditional schooling irons out our creative impulses in order to prepare us for the factory and the cubicle. Our educational system was made this way with the best of intentions, but that way of operating is wildly obsolete.
Only over the last few decades have researchers begun to discover that reason is far from perfect: everyday human cognition is limited, slow, and distorted by unhelpful biases. Meanwhile, intuition has increasingly revealed itself to be a mind-bogglingly quick, sensitive, and perceptive tool, rapidly picking up on subtleties and patterns in the world that the conscious mind isn’t powerful enough to spot.
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.
The first and most powerful step in reopening your creative channel isn’t learning a certain skill or uncovering a hidden talent. It’s just identifying—remembering, ...
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Who is a Striver? Someone with a burning ambition to be farther along than he is right now, to grow and change and perform to his full potential. Isn’t that beautiful? Once you escape the trap of “compare and despair,” once you realize that the only path to walk is the one right in front of you, your progress will catch up with that limitless ambition.
The call rarely comes in the form of a ready-made career ladder with an internship to get you started. Your intuition provides directions, not destinations. Listening to the call will point you toward your path. It’s your job to walk it.
2 Walk Your Path
Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. . . . One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you. —CARLOS CASTANEDA
What matters is that you start. All you’re deciding to do is to try. Do whatever you can with what you have. It will never feel like the right time. You will never be “ready.” Avoid preparing too much. Start before you are ready. Start with fear. Start with uncertainty. This is one of the biggest secrets of the most creative, happy, successful people: Just start.
sounds simple, but it’s shockingly powerful: Deconstruct Emulate Analyze Repeat DEAR for short.
Creativity is essential to your health and happiness. When you are creatively fulfilled doing work you believe in, you become a better spouse, parent, sibling, employee—it feeds into it all. Those who are willing to prioritize their creativity reap endless rewards in every area of life. It’s transformed mine.
Following your own path is like writing a script for a film. You can decide to write an indie flick or a summer blockbuster. Set modest goals or the loftiest ones imaginable—it’s your world to create. You establish the settings, you develop the characters, and you work out the plotlines.
As a photographer, I quickly learned that selling my work for a hundred dollars took about as much effort as selling it for ten thousand—the difference was who I was selling it to. The limiting factor was my vision and ambition, not the infinite world of possibilities around me.
In fact, the creative path is far more resilient and ultimately safer than any soul-sucking job. Creators learn to mitigate risk, make smart bets, and always protect the downside. In practicing their craft, they learn to be flexible and proactive in all aspects of life. With their ingenuity and drive, it’s impossible to keep them down for long.
As such, I’d be remiss not to share what I call “The Big 3.” These challenges crop up in nearly every creator’s journey: money, creative control, and the company you keep.
The fact is, creators hold wildly different attitudes toward money. Begin to examine yours. Don’t get precious about it. Have an open mind when it comes to cash and creativity, and do what is in alignment with your calling—and your path to getting there.
Creative Control
at some point you’re going to need to negotiate with others and advocate for your vision. You don’t have to be willing to die for your art, but you do need to begin the process of deciding what matters to you and why.
The Company You Keep
3 You Stand Out
The things that made you weird as a kid make you great today. —JAMES VICTORE
The cycle never ends. 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.
Creative thinking can be hard. It takes energy—your three-pound brain burns 20 percent of your entire body’s calories—and the new ideas we generate are disruptive to the people around us. Most of them are just trying to “get things done.” That’s why the Industrial Age had no time for creative thinking by the mass of individuals—it would have lowered the efficiency of the factories.
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. Before I knew it, I was doing major photo shoots with renowned celebrities and athletes in remote locations of astonishing beauty. Focus made it possible. I’m
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.
Casper liked this
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.
Jobs was playing a different game—his own. And today, in large part because he played his own game from the start, his company sells millions of phones that can outcompute any of those old IBM behemoths.
As soon as I was old enough to understand that my interests were weird, I ran as far as I could in the other direction. Looking back, that is one of my few big regrets in life.
Through therapy, I came to understand that it was my acceptance of the doctor’s label, not the infection, that had done the real damage. Overcoming the label of “sick person” and getting back to being me took a tremendous amount of work. This is the power of labels to steer us off course. Think about some of your own labels, the ideas you have about yourself or that others have put on you. A few unexamined words can stand in the way of your becoming the person you want to be.
We improve as artists by taking chances. If you never fail to do what you set out to do, you’re not learning and you’re not growing. Mistakes are a sign that you’re pushing yourself to your limits by tackling meaningful challenges.
At home and at school, we’re taught that mistakes are “bad” and that people who are “good” at things don’t make mistakes. The truth is that the best performers in any field are the ones who routinely take risks, the ones who are willing to face rejection and gamble the money and the acclaim to keep growing, to stand out.
Even if we accept the idea that a safe life is a small life, many of us reassure ourselves that we’ll take the real risks later, one day, when we’re rich enough, successful enough, popular enough. In other words, we’ll take risks when it’s safe to do so. I can tell you from personal experience that that magical day will never come. You will begin to take risks only when you realize it’s more dangerous not to. Success only raises the stakes, making risks harder to stomach. Once you have popularity and money, the necessary creative risks become scarier than e...
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But what about when the stakes are high? Does that mean you shouldn’t try? People get stuck in dualistic thinking here. It’s either risk it all or play it safe. Successful people got where they are by taking huge swings, right? So if you’re not willing to take out a second mortgage on the house to fund your startup, you might as well give up. That’s a false dichotomy! The most successful performers weigh the merits of every risk before taking it and they protect their downside, often invisibly.
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?
Creativity is about reps, about building your creative fitness. You’ve worked your conditioning to peak levels. Now you can continue getting up early if you enjoy it or try something else for your next bet.
Contrary to what you might think, big shoots are usually about the execution of a previously conceived idea. There is very little creativity involved. You have to produce something that looks a certain way. There’s very little joy in checking the boxes; it’s all about executing according to the brief.
In my experience, it’s the small risk taken to satisfy a creative whim that is more likely to lead to a real-world success than the triple-down, bet-the-house investment with some enormous hope at the other end of it. If you’re struggling to get a big project off the ground, you may need to lighten up and try something smaller.
Think only. There’s only one of you. Only you have lived your life. Only you have your point of view. Figure out how to share it with the rest of us. 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.