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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chase Jarvis
Read between
October 7, 2019 - January 20, 2020
How much are your dreams worth to you? Your behavior needs to match your goals. This is not about productivity; this is about aggressively doing what you need to do to be successful as you define it. It’s about showing up for yourself.
I recommend creating every day, even if only in small amounts.
This daily practice doesn’t have to be in your primary medium, either.
What is the smallest effective amount of creative work I can do?
Batch Similar Tasks
Batching similar tasks makes everything more manageable and less daunting.
Instead of looking at a creative project as a monolithic, overwhelming chunk of time that has to be filled with magical inspiration, break it down into different types of tasks, categorized by different demands.
Work When You’re Most Effective
This isn’t true of everyone, but if you’re not sure, start early. Listen to your body, and see how it works. You know yourself best.
Sometimes you have only a small chunk of time available each day, and it isn’t the time you’d choose.
When things do get easier, having kept the fire burning through tougher times will make a larger practice feel easy by comparison.
identifying the psychological clutter that has you weighed down—and clearing it out—can free you to be more productive than ever.
Don’t get so finicky about where you can get some work done that you never do the work at all.
Think about modifications or purchases you might make to become “creative ready” in as many environments as possible.
If at all possible, you deserve a clean and orderly physical work space.
Some people are sensitive to any noise while they work.
Music, of course, is one of the most powerful cognitive enhancers available without a prescription,
Don’t neglect your other senses, either. Visual clutter in your space can be creatively fertile or a huge distraction.
Archives are where you put your work when you’re done. If you work digitally, you’ll want to create an orderly system for organizing your output;
don’t let the lack of ideal conditions stop you.
for the love of everything holy, start. Just start.
When you’re feeling stuck, recognize that you’re not waiting to be able to create, you’re waiting to feel like creating.
“Cal,” his adviser replied, “I’m going to tell you what you need to hear. You’re not good enough for writer’s block. Not yet. Get back to work.”
When my motivation flags, I find it helpful to switch projects. Five is a number that works for me: one big, one medium, and three small ones, all going at the same time. When I run into resistance on one, I can switch to another, and it feels like a huge relief.
Block Your Time
Work in Microbursts
If you aren’t able to assemble the ideal amount of time to create each week, it’s still up to you to be creative.
Quit Your Day Job. Or Don’t.
One of the most important gifts of a creative practice is the sense of agency and empowerment it gives us over our lives as a whole.
a day doing creative work much more restorative than a day spent drinking margaritas at the beach.
The legendary designer Stefan Sagmeister is famous for taking a one-year sabbatical every seven to recharge his creative mojo. He doesn’t lose clients during that time, either. Instead, they stack up while he’s gone, each one anxiously waiting for his return because they know he’ll be so wildly creative once he gets back.
Don’t quit your day job until you’ve designed and built a better one.
6 Do Your Best Work
Inspiration is for amateurs—the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will—through work—bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great “art idea.” —CHUCK CLOSE
Imagine a child’s reaction if you snatched a crayon out of her hand just as she began drawing a picture. Happy toddler? Not quite. But we do something similar to ourselves every time we refuse our creative calling.
Creativity is like fitness. Developing it to its peak isn’t actually all that mysterious, if you’re willing to take advice and put in the effort.
All you have to do is follow instructions and do the work.
Whatever else you take away from this chapter, remember that you’ll get better only once you stop fiddling and start making.
No one is coming to give you the commission of a lifetime without seeing work from you that’s similar enough to the commission that illustrates you can do this work. So how can you avoid this catch-22? You assign yourself work that looks like the work you want to get hired to do.
By giving yourself deadlines to tackle tough creative challenges that are in tune with your imagination, you’ll do your best work.
In your creative practice, what is the smallest thing you could possibly finish and share in some form?
The best creators start work with a plan.
What does a session plan look like?
The amount of detail depends on the stakes and the players involved. Ideally, a session plan sets out a piece of work you can manageably tackle in the time you have available.
The objective of your session depends on the nature of the work. It might be a quantity:
It might be qualitative:
Some professional creators I know swear by deciding on a plan the night before. This gives their ideas a bit of time to ferment and coalesce so that when they get down to work, they’re ready.
keep your plan 100 percent creative. Stay out of the back office.
Your prime creative sessions should be devoted to your creative practice. No scrolling Instagram to review similar work, no doing “research,” no reviewing the analytics on your website.
Beware of Inspiration
