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

by Chase Jarvis

Unfortunately, for too many people, school becomes something you endure in order to get a J.O.B.

We show up for class and stick with it through graduation, eager to get our credentials and move on with our lives—the very opposite of a lifelong learning mindset.

When you’re learning for a reason, when you actually have a goal for that knowledge in mind, learning paths become very important.

If you haven’t yet acquired the meta-skill of learning how to learn, this process can be very mysterious, even frightening.

Teaching myself to take photographs without a program or any mentors to guide me was a painful process. I progressed in fits and starts, with plenty of dead ends. But it was also more liberating and far more effective than school ever was.

Finally, no one was telling me how or what to learn. Instead of being taught a subject according to some textbook’s priorities, I could just try to take the photos I wanted to take. When what I tried worked, I’d learned a new technique. When it didn’t, I would attack the mistake like a puzzle, going through out-of-print photography books from the library, asking random salespeople at the local camera store, and experimenting diligently until I figured out what had gone wrong. Ultimately, small actions done regularly had a way of showing me what I didn’t know. Lightweight failures highlighted techniques I needed to learn and exposed opportunities to deepen my craft. Slowly, my learning path took shape. I didn’t know everything I needed to know yet, but I began to see a rough map of the areas I needed to develop and to understand the logical progression from one thing to the next. Now I could start planning my self-education, taking a deliberate approach to mastering each of the component skills of photography related to my chosen specialty. This potent mix—books and videos, self-directed practice, and in-the-field experience—dramatically accelerated my progress. I never would have leveled up as quickly in a school environment. Not even close.

But today’s learners face new challenges. Their primary hang-up is understanding what they want to do.

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.

When I grew up, and even as an adult learning photography, pursuing learning was seen as a sign of weakness and vulnerability.

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.

As a photographer, I needed to start taking photos before I read a pile of books about how lenses work or what depth of field is. Without a body of experience to draw on for context, one f-stop would be just as good as another.

Now that you know what you want to do and you’ve actually started doing it, it’s time to develop the master skill: how to learn.

Everything comes down to crawl, walk, run: anything is learnable, though each person’s path will look different.

break learning down into three phases: personal, public, and practice.

In the personal phase of learning, you’re tuning in to your own internal wants, needs, strengths, and motivations. You need to cultivate these things:

CURIOSITY.

TRIAL AND PLAY.

INSPIRATION.

Public Phase In the public phase of learning, you use outside resources to start answering the questions you’re only now ready to ask by using the following resources:

SCALED INSTRUCTION.

COMMUNITY.

INDIVIDUAL OR GROUP INSTRUCTION.

learning is expensive. That’s why it should happen after the other steps. You need to learn enough to understand your own particular needs, interests, and challenges.

the practice phase of learning, you’re iterating and honing your skills to a razor’s edge by using:

REPETITION.

JUST DEAR IT.

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.

When you’re able to complete your own personal objectives, you’ve learned the material.

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?

Traditional school is often far too rigid; it doesn’t allow for variations in learning styles. You’re expected to adapt to the teacher’s teaching preferences, not the other way around. After all, once you’re at the factory, it’s rare that allowances will be made for you. You’ll just have to adapt to the system. Thankfully, the “take it or leave it” era of traditional education is coming to a close, and new ideas are taking root.

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

In fact, if you train in a martial art such as karate, you’ll learn that the revered black belt doesn’t indicate any sort of perfection or completion at all. Instead, it is only the first step in a whole new progression of learning. It’s just another white belt.

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.

You don’t need experts. You probably don’t need school. What you do need is to create, learn, repeat.

9 You Must Fail to Succeed

When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important. —ELLEN DEGENERES

Failure is baked right into making new stuff.

If you let each mistake tear a chunk out of your peace of mind or self-esteem, you’ll never last long enough to succeed.

Ask any physicist, and she’ll tell you it takes work—force exerted over a distance—to change any system.

You will make mistakes, run into obstacles, and downright fail at each and every phase of the creative process from idea all the way through launch. Together, let’s get better at it. Let’s fail better.

When you realize what a photograph can do, when you see what a master—even a proficient amateur—can accomplish with the most basic camera imaginable, the importance of the tech fades.

That was the “scratch your own itch” moment that occurs at the start of so many businesses. I had encountered a personal pain point that was so obvious, the solution demanded itself: I could fix this!

The best camera is the one that’s with you.

three stages of truth. First, it’s ridiculed. Second, it’s violently opposed. Third, it’s accepted as self-evident.

Scott Belsky, the author of The Messy Middle, warns that “great opportunities never have ‘great opportunity’ in the subject line.”

Whether it’s you against you or you against the world, overcoming resistance is part of the creative process.

The only thing we can ever know about the unknown is that it’s where all amazing opportunities await.

Spoiler alert: the seeds of our failure were sown in the terms of our agreement.

The process of doing something, anything, over doing nothing at all is the path to growth and opportunity.

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.