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

by Chase Jarvis

Without a resilient creative practice, supportive creative peers, a thriving community, and a powerful mindset, life just does not have the same vibrancy.

A good life is designed. Created. And this book is about living a better life through creativity. By expressing yourself regularly in small ways, you will discover the agency and drive necessary to create the life of your dreams. Creativity is as essential to health and well-being as exercise, proper nutrition, and mindfulness. Only with this potent energy unleashed will you be capable of living your life to its fullest.

There’s no such thing as creative people and non-creative people. There’s just people who use their creativity and people who don’t. And not using it doesn’t go without penalty. As it turns out, unused creativity is not benign, it’s dangerous. —BRENÉ BROWN

When we make something, this vast inner resource gets activated, even if the thing we make is simple and small, even if it’s a halting, first attempt that is quickly abandoned. Our creativity doesn’t care. It’s awake now. Energy starts to flow in every direction. If we keep using our creative energy by making new things day after day, month after month, something incredible happens. We feel better: awake, fulfilled, whole. By creating regularly, we access a new source of vitality.

Your future rests on three distinct premises: 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.

According to the wildly creative actor, comedian, and author John Cleese, “Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating.”

Taken as a whole, Creative Calling offers a structured, robust, repeatable system for the creative process. Each chapter is carefully designed to build on the one before it. I’ve divided the chapters into four acronymic parts: 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.

Along my journey helping millions of people pursue their creative passions, I have found that each and every one of us has been granted gifts. Yours are unique and specific. Job one is finding out what they are. Job two is bringing those unique gifts to bear. How? Pursue your own path, wherever it leads. Develop the skills to be successful in this pursuit. In moments of self-doubt, adopt a new mindset: stop avoiding the things you don’t want and start chasing the things you do. The goal isn’t to create a masterpiece; the goal is to make a masterpiece of your life.

Without even realizing it, this woman had bought into a huge lie that so many of us accept. We internalize the idea that our calling is too risky, too impractical to even consider pursuing. That doing so would be selfish, deeply unwise.

My answer to her was simple: Begin. Rekindle your creative craft for a few moments every day. Don’t worry about the rest right now; simply sit down and make something. Once you’ve rekindled your practice, you can decide if you want to take it further and earn money on the side or even change careers.

No artist tolerates reality. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

If you accept what I’ve said so far—that creativity is a boundless source of energy—then it follows that stifled creativity is an enormous energy drain. All that uncreated work and unexpressed self sit inside of you like a lead weight, dragging you down, sapping the satisfaction a healthy person finds in day-to-day life.

If you give yourself permission to trust the process and use these methods, you can obliterate whatever inhibits your capacity for sustained creative expression. The more you commit to the work, the more dramatic the results will be. It’s a chain reaction: the more you give, the more you get. It won’t be easy at first, but imagine how light you’ll feel when you’ve finally begun making your ideas a reality, one after the other.

Some people say, “Fake it till you make it.” Forget that. Make it till you make it. Creators create. It doesn’t matter who you know, what schools you attended, which parties you’re invited to, or what you’re wearing. Creators create. Action is identity. You become what you do.

Do you start many projects without actually finishing any? You may be a Starter. Do you rework the same piece ad nauseam until you’re sick of it? You may be a Noodler. Have you been derailed by external forces? You may be a Prioritizer. Do you object to the idea of being an artist? You may be a Resister. Are you an active creator who isn’t meeting some internal standard of quality, quantity, external recognition, or compensation? You may be a Striver.

It is possible, even necessary, to prioritize your creativity alongside other essentials, such as your health and your family. You don’t have to postpone creating until you’re 100 percent ready or until conditions line up perfectly. Those things will never happen. Life is messy, and without creativity, it’s incomplete. Creativity is not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have. Think of it as putting your own oxygen mask on before helping others in your row. If creativity keeps getting bumped, it’s flawed prioritization.

Prioritizing creativity elevates everything you do. If you’re a Prioritizer, the passion you have for performing at your best and supporting the ones you love will be your superpower—once you accept the value creativity has to offer.

Creative lives and creative careers are each designed. They happen intentionally. The so-called lucky ones, the people who live wildly creative lives or are paid to do what they love, built what they have deliberately and strategically. They created a vision and worked toward achieving it.

You are not your art. The greater the separation between your ego and the products of your creative efforts, the happier and more productive you’ll be.

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

Once you’re able to tune in to this calling and take action to follow your own path, amazing things will begin to happen. First, you’ll feel a new power. You’ll be swimming with the current, instead of against it. Second, you’ll understand why no one else could tell you what your calling is. Only you could ever hear it. Third, you’ll start to trust yourself in a new way. You’ll realize that going after what inspires, intrigues, or interests you will always lead to the progress and growth you seek.

For each image, I’d ask myself: What are the elements that make this good? Why did someone choose this image over the hundreds that must have been available? Technique was critical, that was obvious, but at this level, technique was a given. What elevated an image? The first and most obvious element was the location. The photos were nearly always taken in well-known or aspirational places—you’d see the background and think, I’ve always wanted to go there. That factor alone winnowed out many aspirants.

The second element of each winning photograph was the subject. It’s common sense that famous athletes would feature prominently in magazines and ads. But so many aspiring photographers can’t, or won’t, figure out how to find and photograph these icons.

The final element was the action happening in the photo. It had to be impressive, even astonishing, to work. Nobody wants a photo of the latest snow hero on a bunny slope.

That method of deconstructing what works into its component elements has been the key to my success as a creator and an entrepreneur. You put the elements together in the best way you can and see what happens. Remember what works, forget the rest. Keep homing in until you’ve figured out the winning formula. Then use that formula consistently. It sounds simple, but it’s shockingly powerful: Deconstruct Emulate Analyze Repeat DEAR for short.

It’s counterintuitive, but if you value money, comfort, or convenience over your own creativity, you jeopardize all four.

What’s so exciting about this moment in history is that the gatekeepers no longer hold the keys. Your career is less about the options at the job fair and more about exploring the call you hear when you lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling.

Since that’s the case, my question to you is: Why settle for anything less than a glorious surround-sound epic? 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.

Though the details of any struggle will be particular to your situation, the fundamental challenges are pretty much universal. 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.

Ask yourself whether the ideas you cling to about money and art are based on reality or are part of society’s script. If the latter is true, have those limiting beliefs held you back from the prosperous, productive creative career of your dreams? Or even from making a little extra scratch with your hobby? If they have, why are you holding on to them?

The things that made you weird as a kid make you great today. —JAMES VICTORE

So explain to me, where’s the glory in failing to get something we never really wanted? If we’re going to get a dose of failure along our path, shouldn’t we taste it while going after what we really want in life?

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. Instead of rebelling or conforming, simply choose. Choose yourself.

All schools are prep schools in a way. They prepare you for Industrial Age careers. Your teachers and parents meant well, but our educational system was designed using a twentieth-century factory as a model, with efficiency in mind, not creativity or diversity of thought.

James Joyce once said, “In the particular is contained the universal.” Your story is unique, weird, particular. When you share your truth with others, they connect with a universal truth within the particular. That’s the real reason it resonates with them.

Zero In The more you narrow your creative focus, the faster you will learn and the more effective your work will become.

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.

Make meaning, not money. Pursue your values. Pluck something straight from your own authentic weirdness and share it with the world. Forget about some blogger’s three criteria for commercial viability. The zeitgeist is not something you chase, it’s something you create.

Even if your genuine expression doesn’t shift the mainstream or your vision fails to create commercial success—if that’s what you sought—could you ever really have made something worthwhile if it hadn’t come from your heart? The answer is most likely no. The road to recognition is lined with the souls of those who chased recognition alone. Ironically, the people we celebrate as cultural heroes are those who blaze their own weird and winding trails.

The central relational paradox, a concept developed by the noted psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller, is simple but profound: we all want close, intimate relationships. That means we need people to like us. The problem is, we worry that they won’t like all of us, so we hide the parts we consider bad or just different. When our true selves are hidden, other people find it very difficult to connect with us. They can tell we’re closed off, and they don’t feel safe opening up to us. Therefore—cue the paradox—we end up without any close, intimate relationships. See the problem?

This self-protective hiding takes many different forms. Sometimes, making a lot of different things at once is a way of hiding. If we scatter our energy and never finish anything, we never have to share our creations and risk rejection.

It’s simple: you can’t stand out and fit in at the same time.

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.

Think big and be prepared to mitigate any losses.

When you consider a new project, take out your notebook and answer the following questions: 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?

You will never reach the next level as a creator if you don’t develop a personal style. Unearthing authenticity and expressing it in high fidelity is the most valuable thing, the single most important creative aspiration you can have.

If you keep making lots of stuff, you will develop your style. It always goes back to your authentic self, the stuff that makes you weird. Forget better or even different. 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.

Find yourself. The deliberate cultivation of your signature style should be a key priority in your journey. Focus until you’ve developed it and in the process you will achieve a degree of mastery. The act of mastering one thing will enable you to master many others.

In short, anything that bucks the status quo—whether on your team inside a big company, at a startup, or within a personal art project—will be an uphill battle. These are the battles worth fighting. If you put something out there and it meets no resistance, chances are it isn’t as vital and worthwhile as you think it is. When it generates a reaction, you know you’re onto something. Then the job becomes nurturing that little spark, especially when some of those around you are trying to blow it out. The haters will be your compass.

I explained that my philosophy was always to work on things that were deeply personal to me and on either end of the spectrum: gritty, cheap, and raw or polished and precise. To me, everything in the middle—“best practices” and “industry standards” and “whatever the competition is doing”—created forgettable results.