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Episode 169: Chase Jarvis — Discover Your Creative Calling
170 Plays5 years ago
Chase Jarvis is here to talk about his incredible book Creative Calling.
Chase is a world-class photographer, CEO and founder of Creative Live, and a riser of tides.
I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod and Instagram @cnfpod. If you dig the show, share it with a friend.
Thanks to our sponsors in Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Also a shoutout to River Teeth.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm just slow and a very raw writer. So I think maybe that's what played into pretty, pretty simple translation from what's going on in my head and my heart to the page.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to CNF, Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, and audio producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. And I am your host, Brendan O'Mara.
Featuring Chase Jarvis
00:00:27
Speaker
Today's guest is none other than the incomparable, the unbeatable Chase Jarvis. But before we hang with Sir Jarvis, a word from our supporting sponsors, Creative Nonfiction Podcast, greatest podcast in the world.
00:00:41
Speaker
is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts and Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two-year low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere while on-campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have Pulitzer Prizes and best-selling books to their names.
00:00:57
Speaker
The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni, which has published 140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit goucher.edu slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA for nonfiction. Also, creative nonfiction.
00:01:22
Speaker
podcast is also brought to you by Bay Path University. Discover your story with Bay Path University fully online and a thane creative and nonfiction writing.
00:01:33
Speaker
Recent graduate Christine Brooks recalls her experience with Bay Path's MFA faculty as being filled with positive reinforcement and commitment. They have a true passion and love for their work. It shines through with every comment, every edit, and every reading assignment. The instructors are available to answer questions, big and small, and it is obvious that their years of experience as writers and teachers have made a faculty that I doubt can be beat anywhere.
00:01:59
Speaker
Don't just take your word for it, man. Apply now at baypath.edu slash MFA. Classes begin January 21st. You got like four months, man. Hmm. Anywho, there is a good chance, a solid chance, a more than 50% chance that there are some new bios to the show this week. You might be one and done, but if you're gonna pick one mosh pit to jump in, get into this one. Let's hit it.
00:02:37
Speaker
Oh, that's right, CNFers. We talk about the art and craft of telling true stories around this podcast. Leaders in narrative journalism, memoir, essay, doc, film, podcast, radio. All these cats, they share their tools of the craft so you can get better at what you do. You're going to want to keep the conversation going on Twitter at cnfpod and Instagram at cnfpod.
00:03:00
Speaker
And you can find the show wherever you get your podcasts. So I'd love it if you stuck around for a while. Beer's on ice. Chase Jarvis, he of world class photography. He of creative live. He is a riser of tides, man. And he's got a new book out.
Creative Calling: Establishing Practice
00:03:18
Speaker
Creative Calling. Establish a daily practice. Infuse your world with meaning. And succeed in work and life.
00:03:25
Speaker
It is out now and I swear friend, if I had the money, I'd put this book in all of your hands. This thing is like the infinity gauntlet with all the stones. Snap your fingers and you can wipe out half the universe or create a life and living doing what you love. You know, your choice.
00:03:44
Speaker
I say read it twice back to back and call me in the morning. The first time your brain is going to be firing too much to do much about it. But the second read is where the marinade of Chase's principles seep into the meat. So throw this bad boy on a flame, man, and it's going to light up.
00:04:02
Speaker
This will give you an idea of the kind of guy Chase is, okay? So two years ago, I was the very first live call-in to his YouTube show, The Daily Creative. But that's not the coolest part. The coolest part was when his colleague, I believe his name was Finn,
00:04:19
Speaker
was setting up the call with me. We were going back and forth over text and Finn told me how important Chase was and how Chase effectively changed his life. Unprompted, I mean that is total impact right there. Can you imagine being like that to someone?
00:04:34
Speaker
I feel like I'm a damn tar pit for people around me, but when you get to hear Chase speak and the way he motivates people, you're like, yeah, I'm gonna make something of myself, man. So I've been familiar with Chase's work for 10 years. Been listening to his podcast, Chase Tarver's live show, and reading his material, and buying germane creative live classes. I can't vouch for the company he founded there enough. It's an amazing resource.
00:05:03
Speaker
So to hear him in my own headphones engaging with me in a way he's engaged with the world's greatest leaders in art and business, you name it, I mean what a total thrill. Little shout out to River Teeth, a journal of narrative non-fiction for the promotional support, digital fist bumps, go check them out and submit your CNF and work.
00:05:25
Speaker
So we break open the pinata that is creative calling. And it is, there's too much to tease. There's just too much to tease. So I hope you'll strap in, get out a notebook, and please enjoy this conversation I had with the one and the only, Jace Jarvis. I really appreciate you.
00:05:50
Speaker
I don't know, having me on the show and helping give some oxygen to this thing that I've been putting my life into. You know, I talk about the actual writing process was a couple of years, but like anything, right? If it's a couple of years worth of process, you're really, I feel like I'm putting like
00:06:09
Speaker
30 years worth of brain power into it and so it's just to get it out in the end of the world is it means the world to me to get your support and thank you of course and I think one of the the best compliments I can pay you about the book is that it is so distinctively chase like your your voice really just pops off the page and
00:06:30
Speaker
And for when you were writing this book, like how, you know, sometimes it's very hard to really drill down on your voice and make it really elevate. And so how much of a challenge was that for you to really make this distinctively, you know, your voice popping off the page?
Writing and Authenticity
00:06:46
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Well, I like to, my process is a little bit of a, well, I guess, following my own advice in the book, it's basically it's a process where I just
00:06:57
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sit down and do the work and I do it regardless of whether I'm motivated or not or tired or not or happy or not and I just get words on the page and oftentimes that's early in the morning and late at night and it's almost where we have no choice but to be ourselves and I just I take Anne Lamont's cue from bird by bird and just
00:07:20
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put out shitty first drafts and the benefit of shitty first drafts is that it's raw. And I do think that my voice is a little bit raw. I'm not a fast writer. My medium is primarily photography, moving pictures, video, and building businesses.
00:07:41
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I can write, I have a history of writing a couple thousand blog posts, and even way back in graduate school in the philosophy of art, you have to write a lot then, but I'm just slow and a very raw writer, so I think maybe that's what played into a pretty simple translation from what's going on in my head and my heart to the page.
00:08:05
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And what kind of maybe inner dialogue did you have to maybe grant yourself that kind of permission to don the writer hat, given that you are primarily, you know, made your bones as a photographer, entrepreneur, and then this is a slightly different pivot in terms of, and of course you've done a lot of blog posts too, but to be into this sort of bookosphere, if you will,
00:08:31
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What was that like for you just to give yourself permission to go ahead and go forth and try to package this together? Well, let me take one step back because it was a very amazing process to be writing a book about creativity and my life's experiences and the experiences of the hundreds of guests that I've had on the podcast, the top creators and entrepreneurs in the world, and to be writing about the thing that I was doing and to have the thing not be my native, fluent,
00:09:02
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craft. So it like I was basically taking my own medicine the whole time I was writing and it was allow yourself just like put stuff onto the page and as soon as the censoring and the judging comes in, that's when sort of we leave that intimate, that real space in us and we
00:09:20
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we become outside of ourselves. And then the work, there's this gap between what you can create and what you see in your mind and this gap between your authentic self and the one that you think you should have. And so for me, it was really, and this is throughout the book, which that's one of the reasons I think it's a powerful, I think it's a powerful little pill to take this book.
00:09:43
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It reinforces that just putting it on the page and creating without judgment is ultimately the key to harnessing our creative power and most importantly our voice because we can create something. But ideally we wanted to say something say something about ourselves or the world or you know we're putting
00:10:04
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putting ourselves and our creativity out in the world to manifest something, to be able to do that in a raw, non-judgmental way, that's where you typically get the best product. And that advice is littered throughout the book, and I often found myself just, I've got to confess, Brendan, trying to shape it and trying to like, oh, it would be so much more poetic if it went like this or looked like that or smelled or felt like this.
00:10:33
Speaker
The reality is I couldn't do that because as soon as I start walking on someone else's path, it reeks of somebody else. It was a lot about giving myself permission to suck, which is a section of the book. Embrace the suck. Yeah, embrace the suck. In doing so, again, you create enough shitty first drafts and there's a little nugget in there and it's those nuggets and then expanding on that. That's where just sitting down every day. It was really, really a lot of early mornings.
00:11:03
Speaker
and late nights and weekends. I'm currently in our family, a little beach house that's an hour north of Seattle. It's reasonably secluded. It's been in our family for 95 years. We paid $10 for this piece of dirt on the ocean. Yeah, I'm looking at the deed on the wall right now, $10 in 1925.
00:11:24
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I just come up here right and you know there's no one to judge it's just me and you know often my wife is amazingly creative and super supportive and you know I'd float things by her but the permission to suck allowing myself the process of just sitting down and doing the work every day and you know here we are whatever a couple years later and you know 30 years worth of ideas later and I'm so excited to get the book into the hands of the world.
00:11:51
Speaker
Part of what makes the book so engaging too, everything about what you do, it's not that you just tease out a lot of people's origin stories and everything. You tease out a lot of very tactical things, of course. This is part playbook, but there's also this sort of memoir component to it that I found really engaging and learned a lot of things that I never knew before.
00:12:12
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specifically in you dollop it throughout the entire book which makes for a very sort of engaging structure. It's like here's some playbook stuff and then here's some personal anecdotes. So how did you come to that conclusion that you wanted to sprinkle in the personal stories throughout the course of the book as you're giving the reader things to act on as well? That's a great question. I guess here's how I think about it which is
00:12:42
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I can only really account, you know, recount truly authentically my own experience of life. And I feel like I lived this arc that so many of us live. I think most of us, which is as a kid, we're born to create, right? You go to any first grade classroom and say, who wants to come to the front of the room and draw me a picture? And every single hand goes up.
00:13:07
Speaker
That is just a reminder that we are born, we're creating machines, it's innate in us, it's a natural human condition or habit or desire. And, you know, creativity is this heartbeat that we have, just like, just I think this is John, John, yeah, John Cacioppo. It's like, if thirst is the thing that reminds us to drink and hunger is this thing that reminds us to eat in both cases, if we don't do that, we'll die. There's this
00:13:38
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this innate desire to create things. And by creating, I'm not talking just painting and, you know, art in the classic sense. It's creating anything that we're creating machines. And we have this calling inside us and the creative calling, it sort of reminds us to express ourselves to be human. And we, we've got this culture that unintentionally, either unintentionally or accidentally sort of drives this out of us. Cause if you ask that same classroom when they're sixth graders,
00:14:06
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Who wants to come up and draw me a picture? It's like 50% or less, and then ask them when they're 20, and it's just one or two people. My story was
Chase's Creative Journey
00:14:17
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very much like that. I was just so passionate about creating as a kid, and I think we all are. That's a really key component of the book. If you think back, the play and the free thinking and the free-spiritedness that we all had as a child,
00:14:32
Speaker
And, you know, and it's not just about growing up and getting mature and making decisions because that's, that's sort of a layer that, you know, responsibility and adulthood, but that doesn't have to, it's not a trade off for our creativity and our joy. So, you know, what I've learned is that through talking to, again, so many of the world's top creators and whatnot on my podcast and through, you know, creating creative live, that it's, this is a really common thing. So.
00:15:00
Speaker
If I can just share my story really authentically and raw and because I've basically have done, I've made all the wrong terms that you can make. I've done everything that everybody else thought I should do with my life. And after stepping in it for four or five different times, I mean, I, I dropped out of a career in professional soccer. I drive bail done medical school. I dropped out of graduate school, a PhD program in philosophy. And if you don't think those things are hard and, and if you don't think those,
00:15:26
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those things disappoint your closest friends and family members, then you're crazy, right? And we all have this pressure. So it was really this understanding that my arc was not special. And, and yet it's, it's all too common. So, you know, there's this, this phrase, I think it's a Voltaire that in the particular lies, the universal. So the reason my narrative is sort of woven throughout there is because I've made every mistake you can in the book and
00:15:52
Speaker
I'm still, I salvaged my own innate creativity and I salvaged, you know, I think this is an important part of the book. It's not just about creating in small ways every day. That's definitely, you know, whether it's cooking a meal or coding or playing the guitar or building a business. But what you really get when you start to do those things on a regular basis is that you realize you can create the arc of your life. And so if, if that's true,
00:16:18
Speaker
then if we deny our creativity, we're also denying our own ability to pursue the things that give our lives meaning and bring us joy. And ultimately, what is our highest calling. So, you know, the to bring it full circle, I could really only talk from my own experience. And when I realized you're talking to others that this is so common, that's to me what made hopefully what makes the story
00:16:44
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There's a lot of pop culture examples from those folks that have been on my podcast or on CreativeLive, but ultimately, I think it's this shared experience of knowing this is natural to us somehow through culture or training or parenting or experience or grief, we deny it, and it's only through reclaiming it that we can actually reclaim our personal power over our lives.
00:17:11
Speaker
When would you say you might have been most in danger of losing or seeding to societal pressures and maybe missing the train of your creative calling? Jeez. So here's the thing. It never stops. Like the pressure to ignore and suppress and deny
00:17:34
Speaker
It never stops it's constant and that's because the world needs to be in a little box to basically categorize and put you in a place and you know you have this job title you look like this you walk like this and you talk like this and that's the world's organizational structure and that's because we're social animals and there's nothing catastrophic catastrophic about that other than.
00:17:56
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that it's if you're not consistently staying connected to your creativity, it starts to be pulled from you and it starts to you start to be denied this natural gift giving life giving faculty that we all this this habit that we all need need to develop. So the long answer is it's it's constant. You know, again, even
00:18:21
Speaker
During writing this book, I felt it pulled for me several times and in several different ways, professionally, personally. But I guess to get specific and I think maybe harness this idea that you're trying to get at is there are specific times, usually around like when we have to just quote, decide what we're going to do for a living or what we're going to go to school or college or some of these life moments. And
00:18:50
Speaker
we end up getting talked into trading our authentic selves for some should, some cultural should. And so for me in particular, it was the earliest incarnation was when I realized, you know, that I didn't want to be, I came from a lower middle-class family. It was the first person in my family to graduate college, still to this day, only person in my family to graduate college. And so there was, and my parents, don't get me wrong, like I had,
00:19:20
Speaker
Despite being lower middle class, I had, you know, my parents were together. I was born white and male and relatively, I mean, in this day and age in the United States, like you can say that that's pretty privileged, but it was still so hard culturally to realize that in choosing to do your own thing, whatever feels authentic and natural to you, which is a thing that's inside every person, we get talked into doing the shoulds and the aughts
00:19:51
Speaker
And this runs totally counterintuitive to our limitless potential to create new things and to create a living and a life that we love. So for me, it was in school, disappointing my parents, deciding to bail on medical school to become a photographer. And that's to be clear, this is not a thing that the book requires, right? It's not about becoming a pro or this is just getting in tune with this innate piece of ourselves.
00:20:16
Speaker
And it is that innate peace that allows us through creating in small ways every day that allows us to create our life. So again, for me though, it happened, it's nearly constant, but there are big pivot moments in life. Like when you are telling your parents where you don't want to go to school or when you're changing careers or when you're in a career, it's run its course and you need to make a change.
00:20:42
Speaker
and people they see you in the box that you've been existing in for the past three years six years whatever and it's when you change something that it's very very hard and sort of society reminds you that it's risky and dangerous and all these things that it's really that's really not it's actually the i think it's the riskiest time in the world to play it safe
Brendan's Editing Services
00:21:08
Speaker
Hey, it's me, your CNF and buddy Brendan. Listen, we all need editing. We all need fresh eyes. You need someone who can objectively look at your work and coach it along. Whether that's developmental editing or even copy editing, hiring a great editor is one of the best investments you can make in your book and your writing.
00:21:28
Speaker
So if you want to take your book to the next level, consider working with me. I'd be thrilled and honored to help. Email Brendan at BrendanOmero.com if you want to take that leap together. And now, back to the greatest podcast in the world!
00:21:47
Speaker
I love that in your background that you were a competitive soccer player on that professional track. And I love talking to people, because I was a pretty competitive baseball player. And there's so many lessons embedded in sport. And I'd love to hear you kind of speak to how the lessons or just the process of training and going through a very rigorous athletic regimen
00:22:15
Speaker
kind of trained you in such a way, what principles that you transferred over with respect to maybe merit and even subjectivity in terms of athletics and how that's informed your artistic career. I think a lot of it falls under the heading of showing up for yourself. You know, again, this is like there's so many inbound messages that we receive about what we ought or should do
00:22:43
Speaker
And I have a handful of core beliefs that I talk about in the book. And one is that you are creative by nature. And I think there's the correlation here to your question about sports and teams and individual athletics or whatever. There's a really tight correlation here. You'll see this. So the first thing I believe is that we're all created by nature, that we are endowed with limitless potential to create the arc of our lives.
00:23:09
Speaker
And I guess an analogously is that we have bodies and our bodies are designed to move. The human joint can't be, despite us being able to fly to the moon and whatever, we can't replicate how smooth the human joints are. And we can make robots, but they're just the worst rough, rough approximation of what it is to be a human. So in the same way we're natively creative, we're born to move. And principle two is that
00:23:39
Speaker
you get better by creativity, for example, as a muscle. And just like any other muscle, the way you strengthen it and the way you develop it is through using it. Conversely, if you don't use it, it atrophies.
00:23:56
Speaker
And so you start to see this analogy of the sports analogy that you mentioned coming to life here. It's like practice is the way that you actually get, get good at something and whether it's tennis or, you know, your, your creative craft. Uh, and then this, the third principle that you have to, I think that we all must believe is that the more you do this and in my world, the more you create every day,
00:24:24
Speaker
the better you'll become at creating the life that you want or in the sports analogy, the more you practice, the closer you'll be able to be to do the things you want to do, whether that's how to hit a golf ball straight or to strike a soccer ball or in your case to hit a slider. So yes, doing those things on a small daily basis, cooking or coding or building a business, it literally rewires your brain, helps you shape your environment,
00:24:53
Speaker
And it gives you this unshakable sense of agency.
Creativity as a Skill
00:24:58
Speaker
And that's part of what makes this book very intuitive, I think, is that these are our experiences. We have the experience of we have this innate ability, whether it's to move or to create. We have this native ability. We understand that doing something more and doing it, it's like it's a muscle that, when using the muscle, it gets stronger. To me, those are just
00:25:21
Speaker
experiences that we have moving through life, why wouldn't it then be the same for creativity? Exactly and I think what's important to underscore too and this is where drawing a parallel with sport is really important and it kind of puts something a little more concrete in people's heads and I think when people like they listen to you and see you, they follow your various channels and they don't necessarily see
00:25:49
Speaker
the hard work. They kind of see the end product of a lot of rigor. So in soccer, like maybe before practice, you're taking 100 PKs or something. And it's for that one moment where you might be able to score under pressure. For a baseball player, it might be taking, in high school, doing maybe 100 extra swings a day in the basement every night off a tee is going to get you to maybe be a decent college player. But then that ratchets up. Then you've got to start taking 500 swings in college to get better.
00:26:19
Speaker
So with respect to hard work and ethic and having to ratchet up, over the course of your career, how have you learned to sort of measure and delineate what hard work means as you continually leveled up in your career? Oh, so that's a double-edged question or maybe a question that can go on two branches, one around like
00:26:45
Speaker
there is a sort of a tactic to practice, right? And that's, you know, you alluded to this earlier, that there's a lot of tactics in the book about how to stay tuned into this part of ourselves. And, you know, get the book so we don't get mired in the actual tactics. And then there's this other one, this other sort of, I guess, thread, which is
00:27:12
Speaker
If you're doing the thing that you are designed to do, if you can discover what calls to you, what is truly in your heart, and you can pursue that, it does feel effortless relative. I mean, don't be wrong, there's a lot of hard work that goes into it, but the way I talk about it in the book is effortless hard work.
00:27:35
Speaker
And so whether that's a sport or in this case, it's your love of cooking or, you know, building the next billion dollar startup or whatever it is. When you step back from all the noise in the chatter that is in our culture and you focus internally and you understand in your heart of hearts what you're supposed to be doing and you're willing to risk disappointing
00:28:01
Speaker
others to save that, you know, that eight year old kid that we talked about at the beginning of our talk here, the idea of ratcheting up or doing more work or whatever, it's almost it's almost it fades into the background, because because there's this inherent pull. I talk about it in the book about being on your path. The cool thing about your path is that only you can walk it.
00:28:25
Speaker
It doesn't have to look like everybody else's. In fact, you can only find your own path through, you know, if you've ever felt like it was a wrong turn. No, no, that was something you had to do in order to discover what you didn't want to do, for example. But if you listen to that little voice inside your head, I talk a lot in the book about intuition. There's some great science that's coming out around it. But, you know, sure, there's tactics in the book and there's tactics in life for working hard and what you should be doing to do anything. And now, you know, you can performance
00:28:55
Speaker
Concepts and but this is not a productivity book. This is not like how biohacking book this is way more about sure There's some techniques for that stuff But if you're actually attuned to the thing or the set of thing that make your life What you want it all? The concepts of ratcheting up and having to take 500 swings instead of 100 to make it to the next level What a guard whatever you want to do almost fades into the background
00:29:23
Speaker
I love how you really make sure that if you want to at least go down a certain path, that you're asking the right questions because there is an element of it can be strategic and you should be asking yourself the right questions. For instance, with new projects, you're right. What is the goal of the project? Why am I doing it? What do I hope to get out of it?
00:29:51
Speaker
by using those kind of questions, it really hones the focus and sharpens the knife. So it's really, I love that you you do that, because if you can think, think about it a little, it can actually kind of turn you loose, right? Yeah. And, and for the, I think thinking about it, if you if the answer comes quickly, that's that intuition, you know, it's like,
00:30:14
Speaker
What we're finding, what science is saying is that relative to intuition, like rational thought is actually slow and loaded with bias. And there's all kinds of negative versus that intuition, that gut feeling that we've been taught culturally. So this is like, don't, if you having these problems and you're listening to this show right now, it's like, don't worry, this is natural. And that's the product of our environment. You're trained to ignore your intuition and, you know, get in line and get a job at the factory and the cubicle and the, and if you can,
00:30:43
Speaker
If you can train yourself to stop for a second and follow that, that listen to the real voice in there and train yourself to pay attention to that intuition. Like to me, that's the thing that is, that creates the effortless hard work. That's the thing that, um, even if you have a plan, like, or sorry, even if you're able to, to listen to that, that intuition, like that, that's great for the people who don't, who can't,
00:31:12
Speaker
And just to be clear, like, Brennan, this is a big part of our culture. It's been trained so far out of so many of us that it's very hard. So if you don't have that intuition or that snap or that the way that you reclaim it, recapture it, is literally by experimenting. It's by doing. Most people try and think their way out of that corner. And that's a non, that's a, you can't. Like if you're sitting there,
00:31:42
Speaker
you know, I talk about it in terms of action over intellect. If you don't know if you should pursue the guitar or cooking, just do both. And it'll emerge really, really quickly. Or if you don't know if you should, you know, in terms of sort of life stuff, if you don't know if you should date this particular person or pursue this professional goal or try, you'll find out so quickly. And that's
00:32:09
Speaker
That's part of how you reactivate both your intuition and very, very importantly, your heart. Yeah, and that kind of gets to the point of what Seth Godin would call the dip too, like when to strategically quit or are you just approaching the moment when it's getting difficult.
00:32:32
Speaker
And in your experience, and you've probably encountered dozens upon dozens of dips in your life, and how did you know when you were approaching a dip worth pushing through or hitting a dip that you were like, you know what, it's time to pull the ripcord and move to something else. There's a really great lens that my friend Chris Guillebeau, I don't know if you know his work, he's an amazing author, read the $100 startup, so many great books, and he's got a new one coming out, so I should keep an eye out for it.
00:33:02
Speaker
He talks about a really simple rubric, which is, like, do I love it? And is it working? And if you can answer just a very simple two question framework, like, if you love something and it's not working, then you can keep doing it. If you don't love something and it's not working, well, it's obvious, right? And it's when those things are in conflict, like, I love it.
00:33:31
Speaker
But it's not working. And you should keep going because you if you're pursuing something that you love, you will ultimately be able to find a way to make it work in some capacity. And what you'll start to do is adapt. And Chris talks about it in a couple of his books, just like that's the number one predictor of success. It's not bullheadedness. It's not like just keep on trying and smashing your head against the brick wall. No, it's like adaptability and flexibility.
00:33:57
Speaker
There's a big thing on that in the book about how to get in tune with this part of yourself, and it has a lot to do with community.
Community and Creativity
00:34:05
Speaker
If you don't know what you should do, it's not about sitting back and thinking your way out of it. It's about getting involved and taking action, and the best and easiest way to take action is not necessarily, maybe a little bit by yourself, but it's also getting involved in a community that taps in and touches the things that you love. It can be casual that way.
00:34:24
Speaker
you can sniff it and you can touch it and you can get close to it without actually having to be all in. And that is a way to sort of spark that curiosity, listen to that intuition. And again, this is the cool thing about this, which is when you start to do these things, it's like a flywheel. The things that work accelerate and the things that are hard or complicated or that you don't love in Chris's little rubric that I just talked about, they fade away pretty quickly.
00:34:52
Speaker
And this is a, the creativity literature is kind of a crowded sphere. And so how did you set out to write this book and to kind of loosely quote you, to not be just good but different. So how did you approach that in this sphere? And you have really carved out what is uniquely you in this sphere.
00:35:17
Speaker
I'm just I'm going to speak my truth here. I love this question because to me this is part of what's broken about creativity. The other creativity there and there's some amazing books about creativity from some authors that are way more talented than I am. But what I would I really what I think this book why it's different and worthwhile is because it doesn't put creativity on some pedestal. It's it's not this
00:35:44
Speaker
romantic thing that is made for few and inaccessible and academic and there's no berets, there's no smoking the cigarettes and moving it is this this is a life sustaining function this is a practical this this tool this gift that we are given is the most practical if you've ever made anything anything in life just like you ever taken a picture if you've ever
00:36:11
Speaker
put, you know, if you've ever written a computer program, if you've ever built anything with your hands, anything, including a meal, that's creativity. And so it brings it down to such a simple fundamental level. It's almost, you know, it's almost like sort of so simple, it's bordering on pedantic, but it's in reclaiming the simple building block of our humanity that we understand that we can sort of
00:36:38
Speaker
you know, build brick by brick, a ladder or a staircase to anywhere that we want to go. So I take great pride in using really, it's like, it's pop culture oriented, it's, you know, it acknowledges the internet, it acknowledges things like money and choices and what our friends and family think when we're trying to, you know, pursue the things that we're supposed to do in this world. And, you know, if a book just tells you how to do everything right from the first step,
00:37:05
Speaker
like most business books do this, like here's how to do this and this and this and that's not real life, man. I like books that say you're gonna break here, you're gonna screw this up, and this is gonna be hard, and it's sort of a roadmap for navigating that. That's what this book is about.
00:37:26
Speaker
which is, I think, very different in the marketplace where everyone else is, not everyone, I don't want to start speaking too broadly, but by and large, creativity books are hyper-academic and it's very much like it doesn't, wouldn't dare talk about things like money or career or when your parents tell you you're stupid for pursuing something you love and that you should go be a fill in the blank. That's practical and safe and
00:37:53
Speaker
And I think this does a very, very simply debunks all that. There's a great line in Austin Kalyan's latest book towards the very end of that if books are made of books, and he gives a list of books that helped inform his latest book keep going, and you and I both have spoken to him at length about that. If books are made of books, what books helped inform creative calling for you? Oh my gosh.
00:38:21
Speaker
Of course, all of the books that you may be referencing on creativity when you're asking about the War of Art, Art and Fear, Big Magic, Artist's Way, Bird by Bird. There's just a litany of creative books that I think are more in line with the universe that I was just describing. I had to sort of consume all those and live in the trenches as a professional creative for virtually my entire life.
00:38:50
Speaker
or my entire adult life that is, in order to figure out what I wanted to put together. But it's way more, I think, this intersection of pop culture and acknowledging the world that we live in where there's an abundance of information where
00:39:07
Speaker
There's no longer other gatekeepers. A lot of those books were written at a time that those other books that we were referencing or I was referencing, they were written at a time where you had to get approval from the gallery person or the venture capitalist. There's these gatekeepers that said whether you could or couldn't do something, create a business or hang in an art gallery, and there were no other venues.
00:39:33
Speaker
And so what this book does, and it draws from, you know, like just other pop culture books from, you know, Tim Ferriss, his dear friend, the the the four hour, whatever for our work, we can bring a brown's, you know, all her world about vulnerability and bravery and authenticity. So it has this sort of pop culture element to it that is derived from the modern world.
00:40:03
Speaker
So it's putting these things together. Again, this, and this is what creativity is, right? You're putting new things together or not necessarily things that are new, but things that existed before, but you're combining them in new and different ways. You know, that's, and ideally it's, it becomes something useful. So that's, there's a history of, of creativity books, but in the same way that my photography really borrowed a lot more from pop culture and, and other industries.
00:40:29
Speaker
I wanted to bring in a broad section of pop culture literature of there's humor, it's practical and productivity oriented. It's spiritual and it's like Brene Brown talks about having a strong back and a soft front. You have to have a spine if you really want to live
00:40:55
Speaker
the life of your dreams, and if you go in to everything with just your spine and it's stiff and strong, then you're actually missing so much about what it means to be human and how do you connect with other people, let alone yourself. Again, I'm trying to bring an amalgam that I hadn't seen in the world that was based on my own experiences. There's no roadmap for this stuff, right?
00:41:21
Speaker
And that's in part what I was trying to create. This is not some treatise on creativity. This is like a practical guide to just acknowledging your own creativity and how to manage the lists of shoulds and the expectations and money and acknowledge that if you reject your creativity, or even just casually, what you're really rejecting is the life that you could be living.
00:41:51
Speaker
And I love the moment early on in the book where you kind of identify four different kinds of people, whether you're the noodle or the prioritizer, resistor, or the striver. And I love that part. I identified with the striver for sure.
00:42:07
Speaker
Embedded in that striver, of course, is someone who just feels like they've got some ambition, but maybe they don't feel like they're as far ahead as they want to be, and then tethered to this, sometimes is looking over your shoulder in that whole comparison and working through that. How did you arrive at those kind of four distinct sort of creator profiles, and maybe what do you identify with? I think there's actually
00:42:36
Speaker
five, if I'm not mistaken, there's the starter, the noodler, the prioritizer, six, the starter, the noodler, the prioritizer, the resistor and the striver. And, you know, this is such a fun process. I'm so glad you asked about this because this is, I literally just went through all of my friends and, and like,
00:42:59
Speaker
And it's it's quite easy if you know someone really well. And that's one of the things that I love. And the book has a really strong component of community to it because nothing happens in a vacuum. Right. You you if any time you see someone's success, it was not just because of that person. And so there's a big community element to it. And that allowed me to reflect on the community that I've been
00:43:23
Speaker
you know, living in other communities that existed before I got there, the community that I've built around my own living and life and my work as a photographer and an entrepreneur, the creative live community. And so I had some because I'm passionate about sort of connecting and connecting with others that
00:43:43
Speaker
I could really easily like end up lumping these people into like, oh, this person, you know, Tim Ferriss, he's a fill in the blank. Arlen Hamilton, you know, oh, she's definitely an ex. And, and he's definitely a Y. And, and then I tried to find people that didn't that I knew, you know, that I had collaborated with very, very closely.
00:44:10
Speaker
that didn't fit into one of those buckets. And when I got to the place where I feel like I named them all, that's when I knew to stop. And again, it's a fun part of the book. And the goal with that is helping you understand a little bit more about yourself. It's not too dissimilar from just like personality tests or there's a very, very way simplified version of that or like the Enneagram or some of these things like
00:44:36
Speaker
There are personality types, and I've just put you in a bucket. And the goal with understanding that is that it helps you navigate your own universe just a little bit better. Yeah, and with the Stryver 2, you write that once you escape the trap of compare and despair, once you realize that the only path to walk is one right in front of you, your progress will catch up with that limitless ambition. I love that line.
00:45:01
Speaker
And I wonder, what can people do who do fall into the compare and despair trap? It's very real. It's something I definitely wrestle with all the time. I wonder, how can people deal with that from your perspective? I'm going to call on a friend of mine, Marie Forleo. I'm familiar with Marie's work. I cite her in the book and wonderful human.
00:45:29
Speaker
Just a great takeaway for this compare is like if you can create on something in advance of consuming the work of other people. You will always be better off because here if you are sitting around comparing and let's just use Instagram as an example, right? If you spend the first 10 minutes of your day scrolling through your Instagram feed,
00:45:56
Speaker
What are you looking at? You're looking at everybody else's highlight reel, right? And it's a curated, has a very intentional point of view behind it. I want you to think this about me and here's my highlight reel. And you're busy immediately comparing your real world to everybody else's highlight reel. So if you're consuming before you're creating on a daily basis, you're going to start off in a bad place because that's instant comparison. That's what that does.
00:46:27
Speaker
Versus if you just flip the script if you didn't again, this is an oversimplification but just to use Instagram as an example if you woke up and you created something or you retouched a photo that you want to share on Instagram just to keep it brutally simple and Then went out into the world for inspiration You're gonna feel better because you already did something you you you did that work you again action over intellect you created something before you had the
00:46:54
Speaker
you gave yourself the ability to despair over your own situation. And that goes back to that sort of one of those principles that I believe so deeply in which about like, it's a process, creativity is not a skill. Creativity is a habit. And once you get in this habit, you're like, you it automatically brings less judgment and automatically, uh,
00:47:18
Speaker
We're never going to be completely free of compare and despair but when you're putting work out into the world again and work can be we can use any number of examples. The benefit of that is that it doesn't create this paralysis that's the despair and in taking action.
00:47:41
Speaker
Even if you make something that is obviously imperfect or there's a gap between what you want to make and what you actually are able to make, what you do is you tap into your agency. You tap into realizing that, oh, wait a minute, I just made something. And if I make something more often or if I take action, it's sort of like lifting weights. If I do that more often, I know that I can get better. And to me, that's that.
00:48:08
Speaker
There's this cure, whether you're, you know, to go back to Marie's example, whether you're creating before you're consuming and you're, you know, we're never going to be completely free from comparison, but it puts that comparison part of ourselves or our social animal instincts on a back burner and puts our ability to cultivate and create
00:48:32
Speaker
the life that we want. Literally, the more creative you are on a day-to-day basis, the better you'll become at building the life you want. All the muscles that you use to create small things every day, those are the same muscles that you use to create your life. In your world, my prescription, if you're a striper who's comparing and despairing, my prescription would be create something first, don't allow yourself, give yourself just a 10-minute window in the morning,
00:49:01
Speaker
or for morning pages or write something, and it does not have to be complicated. There's no beret. You don't have to have a license or a degree or anything to take 10 minutes and to create something. As tactical as a lot of the things are, and I think the big, big takeaway, and it's something you harp on all the time and how important community is. And if you take nothing away from this book, I think it's one of the core things to takeaway is that
00:49:30
Speaker
small or large, it starts small, of course, to grow something. So maybe you can speak to that. How important is community to building a platform if nothing else just to nourish the inner creator inside of us to share and build something a little bigger than ourselves? Whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, that has nothing to do with
00:49:57
Speaker
our required desire for human connection. Humans, that's the thing. We are social animals. Introvert or extrovert just means where you get recharged. If you're an extrovert, you get recharged. Your batteries are charged by being out in front of people and connected and social. If you're an introvert, they're recharged from coming back in and being quiet. It doesn't mean you can't go out. If you're an introvert, you can't be quiet and connect with yourself.
00:50:24
Speaker
But it's required that we acknowledge that we're social animals, first of all. If you look at any aspect of humanity, if you want to create a life that you love or a living that is doing the things that bring you joy, there are other people involved. That's just a fact, right? This is one of the ways that this book is so different than others.
00:50:53
Speaker
Let's just be really painfully practical here. And so if that's a fact, and humans are social animals, if you start to invest in the world around you beyond just yourself, if you are the fan for others that you wish you had, that cultivates a community that will in turn support the things that you were put on this planet to do.
00:51:21
Speaker
And the cool thing is like, when you start showing up for other people, other people will start showing up for you. And there's this, again, this sort of this cycle that is, is so simple, it's really simple, and yet incredibly powerful, especially when you realize that nothing is done in a vacuum, every
00:51:44
Speaker
individual athlete, any entrepreneur, even a family. A family is multiple people and we need one another in order to grow and support and contribute. I talk a lot in the book about a couple of different types of community. There's communities that exist out in the world. If you're a
00:52:05
Speaker
you know, a photographer, for example, there are all kinds of photography communities out there in the world, and it's very easy to contribute or participate both physically, as in like eyeball to eyeball and digitally. You know, you can be a member of Facebook groups and online forums, and you can learn remotely from mentors in an industry. But there's also the community that you build around your world.
00:52:30
Speaker
And what this does not mean is that you have to have a million followers on some social platform in order to be an influencer. That is horseshit. That has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Let's just say you're a blacksmith in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
00:52:45
Speaker
And if your community is the restaurateurs in and around Jackson and they come to you for their knives because that brings purpose and meaning to all of the blows of your hammer. Of course, you're doing it for yourself because you've done the work. You realize that this is who you want to be and do and how you tap into this personal power and it's your agency, your creative calling.
00:53:10
Speaker
It doesn't you don't need to do this for a thousand people or even a hundred you can do it for ten if all of the blacksmith or all of the restaurant tours and the chefs in the region love the steel that you make for them then that's the right size community if you want to.
00:53:27
Speaker
at the other end of the spectrum, if you want to make a change in some global policy, then, of course, bringing movement to a huge, you know, millions of people, then that's another way of building community. But the point is, and it goes back to your original question here, is creativity is, you know, it's a huge focus of the book, but nothing, nothing in life happens without other humans.
00:53:53
Speaker
So let's start paying attention to what it is, what it's like to be a part of a dynamic community. And there are many, you don't have to participate in just one. It's an imperfect system, but there's a little bit of a roadmap in the book that tells you how to do that. And I.
00:54:09
Speaker
talk about it as the other 50%, the 50% of success in whatever terms you used to define success. 50% of it involves other people and community. So what we're told is that if you're really good at your fill in the blank, you're going to be successful. And then if you actually do that thing, then you realize pretty quickly, oh, I have to do that thing and promote that thing. And then you think, okay, that's the whole pie.
00:54:39
Speaker
But then you realize that if you're promoting it and you haven't cultivated any community, whatever it is, you're promoting your knives or the vision that you have for an active, you know, a role in saving plastic from going in the oceans. If you just do that without a community, then it's just, you know, if you do it in your parents' basement, you don't really cultivate the impact. So there's this huge part, and this is the part that I talk about community, is the other 50% of success that is not talked about culturally.
00:55:08
Speaker
To me, it's critical. And I think that also highlights one piece of the book that I think anyone who's listening should know about is the goal.
Challenges and Gratitude
00:55:17
Speaker
The goal is. That that I want to show you the the what happens in slow motion so often in our culture, we cut from the it was hard and then, oh, my gosh, here's our success.
00:55:33
Speaker
You know, nobody talks about it in these books or the business books, they all talk about it like, here's how to never make a mistake. And it's not about sort of avoiding mistakes, it's about how to recover from them. And that you also see in these inspirational talks, it's like,
00:55:50
Speaker
How do you get from, you know, I traveled through Europe trying to teach myself how to use a camera and I ate cans of tuna fish and beans for like two weeks in a row so that I could develop a single roll of film. How do you get from eating tuna fish and beans to living the life of your dreams? Like that's in part, you know, in summary with this, what I wanted from this book, it's both the idea and the vision around it, but also sort of this practical
00:56:21
Speaker
inside the black box of how you actually make this stuff happen for yourself.
00:56:26
Speaker
Well, it's amazing. The book is it's such a gift and a gift to the creative community. Anyone, you know, fill in the blank. It's just it's a tremendous. Like I say, it's just a tremendous gift and everything you do with CreativeLive, your podcast and just a lot of the things that you that you generously, you know, give away in the spirit of rising, rising all the boats with a rising tide. It's just
00:56:52
Speaker
I can't thank you enough, Chase, for the time you're spending on the show here and all the work you do. So thank you so much. It's my pleasure. And I'm a fan of the show. I appreciate being on it. And thanks for having me.
00:57:08
Speaker
amazing amazing stuff right big thanks to chase Jarvis he's at chase Jarvis just about everywhere on social media he's a mandatory follow because of his generosity and he's one of those guys who actually replies to you and he's just stone cold inspiring I mean if he didn't gather that by the last hour you spend here I can't help you I can't help you I am done helping
00:57:32
Speaker
Go get the book, Creative Calling. Like I said, it is an amazing gift. Thanks to Goucher's MFA in Non-Fiction, Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Non-Fiction, and Riverteep for the support, of course. Keep the conversation going. I insist on Twitter, at cnfpod and Instagram at cnfpod.
00:57:51
Speaker
Social media is a lousy way to promote a podcast, but it's a great place to keep that conversation going. So I hope I've made something worth sharing. And if I did, please hand this off to a friend. Tell them to join up. Also be sure to go to BrendanOmera.com for show notes to this episode and 100 million other ones.
00:58:13
Speaker
And also sign up for my monthly newsletter. Great recommendations or reading recommendations of what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it. If you're feeling kind, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. I think that's it, CNFers. I'm in a weird place with my work, so it always makes me feel good to say, if you can't do interview, see ya.