Creative Calling Quotes

“Creators create. Action is identity. You become what you do. You don’t need permission from anybody to call yourself a writer, entrepreneur, or musician. You just need to write, build a business, or make music. You’ve got to do the verb to be the noun.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“This is one of the biggest secrets of the most creative, happy, successful people: Just start.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“We’ve been trained to avoid creative obstacles rather than risk trying to surmount them.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“It’s never very clear what you’re supposed to do instead—only that pursuing creativity is lofty, selfish, or even naive.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“Put bluntly, too many of us spend years, even decades, in pursuit of someone else’s plan for our one precious life.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“Achieving mastery, as I use the term here, doesn’t mean you know it all, only that you know how to navigate the material. You know what you know and what you don’t. At the beginning, it’s hard to enter a subject because you have to draw a mental map as you explore the territory. 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. Masters know this. Now you do, too.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“I’m also a collaborative learner. Once I’ve absorbed new concepts in quiet reading, I need someone to bounce ideas off to help them sink in. I absorb much better that way than by simply engaging in quiet reflection.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“The new obstacle is figuring out which dream to pursue and then cultivating and applying the necessary energy to engage in that pursuit. 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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“You’re never going to get everyone you know (let alone every random person on social media) on board with your decision to pursue creativity. You’re certainly never going to have unanimous positive feedback for everything you make. In fact, if the work you put out is only celebrated, beware.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“When we are operating in shame, we too easily believe the awful thoughts about ourselves that we hear in our head. But that is not who we are. Meditation has taught me that I am not my thoughts. Practicing meditation over the years has made it much easier for me to observe and identify the voice of shame and call it out for the fraud it is.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“remember this: A-gamers work with A-gamers, B-gamers work with C-gamers. If you want to be great, surround yourself with awesome people doing their best work, even if it keeps you on your toes more than you’d like. The best way to level up your own game is to level up the team around you.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“To become a creator, you have to be willing to forge healthy, supportive relationships with amazing new people and reexamine any toxic relationships you’re already in. The author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn once said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Choose wisely.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“The author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn once said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Choose wisely.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“This is the danger of any collaboration. Sometimes the collaborators don’t share the same incentives or the same vision. Their vision was based on their experience.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“Adversity is intrinsic to creative work. You will never be able to avoid it completely. The more you try to avoid problems and optimize your process before you do the work, the more distant your goal will become, until it seems almost unbelievable that you’d ever actually start. 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. Failure may or may not be in your future, but all the growth, opportunity, and reward will be found on the path, not around it.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“As Richard Branson once told me, “Opportunities are like buses. There’s always another one coming.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“No one is coming to save you. Experts are valuable when you’re learning new skills, but neither experts nor institutions are going to nurture you, guide you, or make your creative dream a reality. You’re on your own path. It’s all up to you. This isn’t a bad thing, either. Your creativity gives you the capacity to design the life you want.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“Mastery is never an end in itself; it is always a by-product.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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? You’ll have to discover that for yourself. When the information doesn’t gel right away, it doesn’t mean you’re bad or you don’t have the necessary talent. It just means you need to try another approach to the material.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“In the words of the choreographer Twyla Tharp, “Skill gets imprinted through action.” Assign yourself daily drills to practice the mechanical basics of the skill, whether reviewing flash cards or working with a kitchen knife. Learning all the recipes in the world won’t make you a great chef if you can’t chop, dice, and julienne those veggies.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“A book can’t give you the experience of how to direct a photo shoot. “Now tell the model to lift the left hand three inches.” But you can learn this in one minute by watching a professional photographer do it. 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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“Next time you aren’t able to do something as well as you’d like, simply enroll yourself in Me University, plan out your semester, master the information, and award yourself a PhD in The Problem You Just Crushed. You’ll rarely be intimidated by another learning challenge once you’ve done this a few times. It’s empowering. In fact, it’s addictive. It’s the secret weapon of the highest performers. There is nothing you can’t learn, no matter where you’re starting from right now.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“When I grew up, and even as an adult learning photography, pursuing learning was seen as a sign of weakness and vulnerability. Needing to learn something meant admitting you didn’t already know it. There was shame there. You tried to keep it quiet. “Hey, if you’re a photographer, why do you need to take that Photoshop class? Don’t you know your job?” Since then, willingness to learn has gone from a weakness to a strength. But the number of options can be overwhelming.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“today’s learners face new challenges. Their primary hang-up is understanding what they want to do. Our career options have expanded so far beyond traditional options that they didn’t even exist when you or I were in school. Now a learner can choose to be a firefighter or a coder, an accountant or a YouTuber, a veterinarian or an Etsy seller. 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.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“A creative rut is a bit like a finger trap, that little wicker tube that holds your fingers tightly until you stop pulling and bring your fingertips together. Then it slips right off. We get stuck in a rut by trying to think our way out of it: “This project is stalled. Maybe I don’t have the talent. I should probably take another class, sharpen my skills. Or just hit ‘pause’ on this for a few weeks until inspiration returns.” You’re probably very familiar with that voice. We all hear it whenever the flow comes to a stop. The way to get out of the trap is to relax. The path changes as you walk it. You can pivot only as you move.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott offers advice for writers that applies to every creative person: “For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” Shitty first drafts. It’s as simple as that: you have to give yourself permission to make anything, without judgment, no matter what the critical voice in your head has to say about it. The first photo, the first wireframe of the website, the first stab at that venture pitch—just starting is the hardest part.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott offers advice for writers that applies to every creative person: “For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” Shitty first drafts. It’s as simple as that: you have to give yourself permission to make anything, without judgment, no matter what the critical voice in your head has to say about it.”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

“In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott offers advice for writers that applies to every creative person: “For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” Shitty first drafts. It’s as simple as that: you have to give yourself permission to make anything, without judgment, no matter what the critical voice in your head has to say about”
― Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life