Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

by Chase Jarvis

Don’t sit around and think about it. Work and work and work, and your style will arise naturally, organically. Make it till you make it.

Step II Design Design a strategy to make your dream a new reality.

4 Develop Your Systems

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

But by developing basic strategies, systems, and frameworks to support your output, you’ll relieve yourself of the burden of waiting around for lightning to strike. In the process, you’ll become much more effective. Trust me—I wish I’d learned this sooner.

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.

The important thing is to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. Then do more of the good stuff and less of what turns you off.

I 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.

Entire books have been written about goal setting, but to get you started, here are a few key principles. Write your goals down and refer to them regularly. Every day. Keep your goals few in number—three or four at most—so that you can focus on them. Assign each goal an appropriate window of time. The clearer the goal, the more likely you are to achieve it.

Habits are the path to your goals—whatever they may be.

I call it the Creative Pyramid. A goal that is not supported by the right mindset or the necessary habits is just a pipe dream—it’s never gonna happen.

start thinking about how you can cultivate the state of mind and actions that will unleash your creative power. Creativity—the power to make your ideas manifest—is never a waste of time. It’s the lever that matters the most.

Creativity Zappers

Bad Medicine

Social Media

News

Email

Overwork

There comes a time in every day when you will begin to achieve diminishing returns. Use this section of the book to help develop this awareness. When you’re truly sunk for the day—simply walk away. Rest can work wonders when we’re stuck.

The Wrong Work

You may still not be ready to embark on a full-time creative career, but if you hate your job, how will you marshal the necessary enthusiasm for creative work?

Creativity Boosters

Creative Cross-Training

Meditation

Gratitude and Visualization

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. They can be big life moments, such as my wedding ceremony, or small delicate moments, like when our family pet did something cute—any moment that brought joy or awareness to how awesome life can be. 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? The subconscious mind can’t clearly distinguish between visualized experiences and actual experiences, so by focusing on the feelings in the body of achieving these visions, we’re priming our neurology for success.

Movement

Cold Therapy

Good Nutrition

Proper Hydration

Creating Before Consuming

The simple act of creating something with intention first, before consuming the work of others, alters the dynamic. This is a small-but-mighty behavior I learned from a podcast interview with my friend Marie Forleo, and I’m grateful for that wisdom every day. 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.

Good Organization

Adventure and Play

Art

Quiet

Sleep

Remember, creativity is not a skill, it’s habit, a way of operating.

5 Make Your Space

You don’t build the life you want by saving time. You build the life you want, and then time saves itself. Recognizing that is what makes success possible. —LAURA VANDERKAM

It’s time to retire the tired idea that your creative practice is a “nice to have.” This isn’t just fun, healing, and restorative; it’s also critical to your success and well-being.

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.

without a specific audience-building strategy, you’re not going to make much progress.

If you want to understand your true priorities, look at two things: your calendar and your bank statement.

Traveling for work makes us feel important and busy—it’s a classic time-wasting Trojan horse.

I was allowing my most precious resource to be squandered by what felt productive instead of what actually, measurably was.

Ask yourself: What do you have on the calendar that you love? And where do your hours feel wasted?

It’s the mindless use of time that needs to change, not the intentional, important stuff.

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.

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.