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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chase Jarvis
Read between
September 25 - October 14, 2019
Set a Vision In chapter 4, I discussed the power of visualization to help achieve goals. Visualization can also aid your creative process. Visualize the work you want to create in your mind’s eye before doing the actual work. Research shows that simply picturing a task in your mind before physically doing it reduces errors and improves performance. Since you already have a plan to create something today, this means spending a moment seeing yourself creating the work in as much concrete detail as possible, before you begin.
Tame Distractions Pare away any digital distractions, preferably so that you can’t return to them easily. Activate “Do not disturb” on your phone or turn your phone off and leave it in another room altogether. The simple presence of your phone in the room has been shown to reduce concentration and effectiveness.
Log and Clock I know many designers who put themselves on the clock to both keep work on schedule and learn how to estimate their time (and its value to clients) properly. Keep a log of the time you spend working and what you accomplished in that time.
Be Accountable
accountability separates professionals from amateurs.
Public radio host Ira Glass refers to this disconnect as the creative gap; it’s the distance between what we see in our mind’s eye—what we want to create—and the work we are actually able to create with our current skill set.
“You gotta know it’s normal, and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work,” Glass advises. “It is only by going through a volume of work [emphasis mine] that you will close that gap and your work will be as good as your ambitions . . . you’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Permission to Suck
Step III Execute Execute your strategy and smash through obstacles.
The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work. —OPRAH WINFREY
This is the creative mindset at work. The same thing happens when you have a project under way. You can’t help but see the world through an entirely new lens.
doing ought to precede thinking when it comes to baseline creative work. Too much planning is a trap. Don’t fall into it. Instead of trying to plot out the perfect novel before you start writing, accept that it’ll take a few shitty drafts to get things sorted out and just start writing. Play. Enjoy the process. Write six different intros and throw five into the trash. You’ll figure a lot of it out along the way.
Andy Warhol was well known for the way he steadfastly kept making work, never letting any one project’s success or failure slow him down. “Don’t think about making art,” he said. “Just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even
A photographer takes photos. A professional photographer sells photos.
The reason it started to work? I was working.
The work you do when no one is watching is the work that matters most. Pros don’t wait until they are pros to act like pros. The people who make it—whatever your definition of success might be—are the ones who are willing to show up and do the work without approval, permission, or praise. Don’t fake it till you make it. Make it till you make it.
You can’t think your way out of a rut. Start by taking action, changing your environment, putting words onto a page, whatever the next step might be. Eventually you’ll be back in the flow state. No matter what’s blocking you creatively, your best bet is always to just turn up the volume: make more stuff. The default is action.
David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking,
Your conscious mind is a critic. If you rely on it too much while you’re working, you’ll struggle to make progress. Instead, stick to a simple, repeatable process: Day 1: Finish one piece of creative work today, without judgment—whether it’s a story, a photo, or a minimum viable product. Just complete the work, create it quickly, and be good with it. Day 2: Iterate on the work you did yesterday. Do a new draft or update the old one. Put the photo into Photoshop and make it better, add some polish to the lines of yesterday’s poem; just take yesterday’s baseline and make it
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Stop thinking, take action, and the results will take care of themselves.
When you’re learning for a reason, when you actually have a goal for that knowledge in mind, learning paths become very important.
I break learning down into three phases: personal, public, and practice. Whether you’re learning to cook, play the piano, or write compelling copy to drive more traffic to your website, this pattern applies. Personal Phase 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.
There is no substitute for watching mastery in action. This is the new college. The difference is, you don’t just drink from the fire hose; you come to the resource with specific questions in mind based on your experiments. This is a much more effective way to approach new material than “beginner-intermediate-advanced.” Let curiosity and inspiration guide your exploration.
COMMUNITY. Seek out other people who are learning the same skill; you can discuss what you’ve learned and practice together.
INDIVIDUAL OR GROUP INSTRUCTION. If it’s feasible, find a teacher.
Practice Phase In the practice phase of learning, you’re iterating and honing your skills to a razor’s edge by using: REPETITION.
JUST DEAR IT.
As you look to your own inspirations, try this: 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.
Scott Belsky, the author of The Messy Middle, warns that “great opportunities never have ‘great opportunity’ in the subject line.” Don’t be so quick to shoot yourself, or others, down. Cultivate the discipline of open-mindedness. This is harder than it sounds. Whether it’s you against you or you against the world, overcoming resistance is part of the creative process. The more others push back—or the more you resist your own idea—the greater the odds that you’re pushing into the unknown. The only thing we can ever know about the unknown is that it’s where all amazing opportunities await.
DAMN
What most of us are really doing when we try to anticipate every possible failure is masticating our once playful, powerful, smart idea into a lifeless paste. As the life of an idea is leached away by “preparation,” we become overwhelmed. Trying to avoid every possible pitfall before your idea has any substance either neuters it or leads to its abandonment before anything even gets made.
This is the point in any project when you have to remind yourself of two important things. First, risk is inevitable in creative work, and no amount of preparation can completely protect you. You’ll develop the capacity to make these decisions well only by making lots of them and, yes, failing from time to time. Even failing big. Second, there is a sane middle ground between leaping off a cliff and hoping there’s a net at the bottom and planning the leap for three months before becoming distracted and wandering over to some other chasm.
My dear friend Brené Brown put it best: “To strip failure of its real emotional consequence is to scrub the concepts of grit and resilience of the very qualities that make them both so important: toughness, doggedness, and perseverance.”
Step IV Amplify Amplify your vision to create the impact you seek.
Become a Joiner Maybe you’re not a joiner. I can’t say that joining has ever been easy for me. But it’s worth being vulnerable and putting yourself out there.
To drive change and awareness, I needed authority. To gain authority, I needed to participate authentically—for a sustained period of time. So I stopped turning up my nose and dived in headfirst, writing op-eds and other articles, appearing on national TV and elsewhere in the media, and attending and keynoting at conferences all over the world. If I threw rocks from the outside, none of the people building the future of online learning would ever listen to me. If I wanted to help define that vision, I’d have to roll up my sleeves, participate, and add value from within.
Of course, you’ll also want to engage in the digital side of your community; just don’t use doing so as a crutch to avoid social interaction. Use social media to follow the top names in your field as well as your peers. Then jump in and join the conversation online. A thoughtful comment or question that adds to the conversation always goes further than a like or an emoji. This is an easy win, a huge opportunity to expand your network at no cost other than a few minutes of your time each day. It might seem as though you’re an anonymous blip among many, but the vast majority of people don’t
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A little-known secret that shouldn’t be one: creativity is largely about collaboration.
The people in your family are an important part of your journey, and you don’t want to leave them behind. So do what you can to bring them along instead. Here’s how. 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.
A creator’s audience is your single greatest asset for creating impact. It will bring as much color to your world as creativity brings to your life.
Every significant creator you know—even the ones who are manically focused on their product or craft—invests disproportionally in cultivating community. None of them just publish and hope for the best. They know the why behind their work and they do a lot of great work, but they’re also tuned into who their work resonates with, where that community spends its time and attention, and how to get their work into those spaces.
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. So what does this mean for a creator? First and foremost, tell the truth.
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.
Put another way: I don’t create art to land high-dollar commercial projects, I do high-dollar projects so I can create more art.
Keep charging those trust batteries. You will never, ever regret charging up your community’s trust. And you will always regret draining it—trust me. My team has an expression for when a potential gig raises a red flag: “Don’t squish the puppy!”
