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

by Chase Jarvis

It’s outrageous that so many of us tolerate so much hostility and negativity in our personal lives and label it “honesty.”

Stop tolerating cynicism and doubt from your so-called friends. Tell them straight up, “This is the new me. I am a creator on a mission. I will fall down and make mistakes along my path, but I’m going to get back up again and again and again until I’ve made my vision a reality. And when I’m done doing that, I’ll be on to the next one. I have room in my life for supporters and cheerleaders and believers. If you can play that role, great, grab your pom-poms. Wet blankets can go back into the drawer and grow mildew.”

the resistance you experience from others is directly proportional to how deeply they’ve stamped out their own creative sparks.

Instead of telling them about what you’re going to do and how great it’s going to be, focus on showing them.

Go and do the work, whether they pat you on the back or not. Get up before your family does, and go to work at your drawing table.

Demonstrate your passion and commitment. Make progress. In writer lingo, “Show, don’t tell.” The people who love you are far more likely to be convinced by new b...

11 Build Your Audience

You get to choose the tribe you will lead. Through your actions as a leader, you attract a tribe that wants to follow you. —SETH GODIN

Then you start looking at other creators enviously, wondering how they manage to get so much traction for their work when yours—which is just as good if not better—struggles to get attention.

the magic ingredient for getting traction is simple: audience.

This chapter is all about building that audience and leading it through contribution and service.

This is how you form your tribe.

Your second follower represents a 100 percent improvement over your first. (You’ll likely never see a growth spike like that again.)

community, tribe, or following—it doesn’t matter. To find a home for your ideas and your creative work, you need to cultivate and inspire a group of diverse but like-minded people to receive and ultimately Amplify that work.

the biggest mistake I see emerging creators make is thinking that their job is to just make stuff and immediately promote it.

Promotion should happen only once you’ve laid a real foundation.

For your work to make an impact, creation and promotion together should represent half the energy you dedicate to your objective. The other 50 percent should go toward building your audience.

Build a genuine audience that loves what you do, how you do it, and why.

Community building runs parallel to your creative work, and it requires the same degree of consistency.

They didn’t find communities; they built them.

There was a time when nobody paid any attention to what they did. They spent years participating in other communities, establishing a base camp, and patiently adding value to it until people started to notice them and their unique contributions. Slowly they built direct connections with those people.

Success just tells you that your audience-building activity is working—so keep doing it.

To be clear, audience isn’t about being famous. The size of your community—audience, client base, tribe, following—is important only relative to the nature of your calling.

I’d done plenty of academic writing in grad school, but I needed to learn how to communicate my beliefs in plain English, no BS.

My point of view slowly took shape. Through writing, I started to figure out who I was and what I was all about.

I learned my point of view through doing my work and—importantly—connecting with others around what I was thinking and feeling.

If I’d just kept my head down and done client work like most other photographers at the time, I’d probably still be a working photographer, but I would never have scratched beyond the surface of my creative potential.

Sharing my work taught me to take criticism.

The way I saw it, my community was one big dinner party, and I wanted to bring the most fascinating and delightful guests to my table to meet the regulars.

When you don’t need your clients, your clients get way more excited about working with you. You can be really picky. I could say no to jobs I otherwise would have taken, which meant I could double down on doing what I loved and making things in support of my audience—a powerful virtuous cycle.

Nothing is more valuable than the trust your community places in you. You have to earn it and then you have to protect it with all your might.

When new people enter your community, their trust in you, their trust battery, is at a 50 percent charge.

As Tobi describes it, every single interaction you have with the people in your community either charges their battery or drains it.

In Rising Strong, Brené Brown points to a number of key factors that build trust, including reliability, accountability, integrity, and generosity. Every action you take with your community is an opportunity to build this trust or damage it.

First and foremost, tell the truth. Tel...

It means show up and be seen.

It means keep your promises.

It means give, give, and give some more. Your audience isn’t something you leverage.

It’s something you cultivate, nourish, and sustain.

The details of execution are always changing as new tools spring up and fade away, but the philosophy of community building remains the same: give.

What you give doesn’t have to be educational, but it does have to provide value to others.

The most effective way to improve the effectiveness of your community-building efforts is to look at the people who are succeeding and then DEAR it: deconstruct, emulate, analyze and repeat

Don’t be the next Rihanna, be the first you.

I always seek a balance between commercial work and personal work. The personal work becomes a playground to see which ideas get traction, and the commercial work pays for my ability to play in my desired domain.

way: I don’t create art to land high-dollar commercial projects, I do high-dollar projects so I can create more art.

If you shoot portraits and you want to start shooting cars, go do a car shoot. That’s how you invest in your business today.

Determine Your Smallest Viable Tribe

Do only what you can commit to doing regularly.

When sustaining your community, keep it sustainable.

Trust your gut.