Top 90 Chase Jarvis Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Chase Jarvis

52. “It requires discipline to maintain boundaries and not let other kinds of work spill in, but batching is a masterful way to protect creative work from the day-to-day interruptions that feel urgent but actually aren’t and can easily wait until you’re ready to deal with them.”

— Chase Jarvis

53. “The “soft” intuition we’ve been taught to ignore is actually the most vital gift we are given, not only as creators but as human beings. After a lifetime of being conditioned to ignore your gut, however, it may be difficult to tap into and trust your intuition.”

— Chase Jarvis

54. “Except on a rare day with extenuating circumstances, I’ll follow my meditation with a three-minute gratitude and visualization practice. I begin with my eyes closed and make a short list of three genuine and heartfelt moments I’m grateful to have had in my life – and I relive them as if watching the experience through my own eyes and feeling those moments as fully as possible.”

— Chase Jarvis

55. “Ever seen Warren Buffett’s calendar? It’s mostly blank. “Yeah, well, he’s a billionaire,” you might say. If you ask him, though, he’ll tell you that his time isn’t free because he’s rich; he’s rich because he made time for what mattered to him.”

— Chase Jarvis

56. “Whatever else you take away from this chapter, remember that you’ll get better only once you stop fiddling and start making. Quality will come over time, but only if you make a lot of stuff while minimizing self-criticism and not letting yourself fritter away valuable minutes optimizing a workflow with no actual work flowing through it.”

— Chase Jarvis

57. “You don’t have to be good at anything yet. You can learn. In fact, you’ll begin to see the process of learning as a joy, not an obstacle. The only question that matters here is, what would you be excited to try?”

— Chase Jarvis

58. “The more you narrow your creative focus, the faster you will learn and the more effective your work will become.”

— Chase Jarvis

59. “Time is precious. Never risk it blindly. Do a risk assessment there as well.”

— Chase Jarvis

60. “Making space for your work is important, but it isn’t the same as doing the work. Get yourself set up, give yourself the time, tools, and whatever space you can, and then, for the love of everything holy, start. Just start.”

— Chase Jarvis

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Though it was nonlinear and nonsensical, my path made perfect sense once I truly started walking it. I’d finally discovered an outlet for everything that had been trapped inside me.”

— Chase Jarvis

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “Mastery is never an end in itself; it is always a by-product.”

— Chase Jarvis

69. “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. So let go of all your assumptions and think. Ask yourself what creative activities you might enjoy. Don’t worry about the product yet or where it will go.”

— Chase Jarvis

70. “Another critical element is to keep your plan 100 percent creative. Stay out of the back office. Creative work always requires noncreative work to support it: setting up software, testing tools, learning new skills, and so on. Don’t get sucked in. Never let the admin get ahead of the real work, the making and the doing.”

— Chase Jarvis

71. “Think different” isn’t just a slogan. It’s a credo, one that made Apple the most profitable company in human history. People accused Steve Jobs of creating a “reality distortion field,” but he understood that reality is already distorted. Apple would never win by trying to build a better mainframe computer. That would have been playing by IBM’s rules. Instead, Apple created a personal computer because that was what it wanted the future to look like.”

— Chase Jarvis

72. “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

73. “My own preference is to set aside at least ninety minutes to tackle a small creative task. If I’m doing any heavy lifting, I prefer a three-hour block, at minimum. I aim for one three-hour creative push per day, more under duress – but then I have to double down on rest and self-care.”

— Chase Jarvis

74. “At this stage in my life, it’s become impossible to ignore the fact that the good days – when I’m feeling great and doing my best work – have common elements. For one thing, they’re intentional. On those days, I’m in the driver’s seat, with clear objectives in mind and a plan for achieving them, even if the objective is simply taking time to think through a problem.”

— Chase Jarvis

75. “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

76. “When you bring your genuine self to bear on what you do and how you do it, you can’t help but stand apart from everyone else. There is only one you – you are the highest value you can contribute.”

— Chase Jarvis

77. “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

78. “When we create, we give of ourselves freely, adding value and expecting nothing in return.”

— Chase Jarvis

79. “In creative expression, unlike any other arena of human behavior, there is no objective measure of success, no One Right Way to do something. This means we’re always vulnerable to the lure of the easier, safer road. It’s counterintuitive, but if you value money, comfort, or convenience over your own creativity, you jeopardize all four.”

— Chase Jarvis

80. “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.”

— Chase Jarvis

81. “President Dwight D. Eisenhower often said that what is important is rarely urgent and what is urgent is rarely important.”

— Chase Jarvis

82. “The only way to “fail” at creativity is to stop walking the path altogether.”

— Chase Jarvis

83. “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

84. “As Richard Branson once told me, “Opportunities are like buses. There’s always another one coming.”

— Chase Jarvis

85. “We always want to find ourselves pulled into our work. Continuous pushing leads to burnout. The absence of any pull toward your work is a sign that you’re pursuing the wrong thing. In fact, it’s possible that the lack of a pull toward your creative project is one reason you picked up this book in the first place.”

— Chase Jarvis

86. “Every aspect of you is fuel for your creative fire.”

— Chase Jarvis

87. “Then I transition into visualizing myself in a world where I have just achieved my three most important goals. I live through the feelings that come along with each achievement, imagining all of it in as much detail as possible: sounds, smells, emotions. What would it look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like to accomplish those goals?”

— Chase Jarvis

88. “What is truly possible for you? Whatever your answer is, whatever success, accomplishment, or fulfillment you’ve only imagined might be within your reach, let’s pause to acknowledge that you’re likely thinking too small. We all do that at first. Small is comfortable and familiar. It feels safe – even though it’s anything but.”

— Chase Jarvis

89. “About a decade ago, Jeff Bezos declared that Amazon was “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” It was expanding from selling everyday goods such as books and brushes to selling “cloud services.” Talk about castles in the sky. What the hell did Amazon know about “Big Data”? The collective reaction was: “Stay in your lane, Bezos. Leave this brainy digital stuff to companies like Google and Microsoft and go back to selling lawn mowers.”

— Chase Jarvis

90. “What does a session plan look like? It can be a note scribbled on a whiteboard to stoke a brainstorm with a creative collaborator. A to-do in an app. A sketch. A snapshot. The amount of detail depends on the stakes and the players involved. Ideally, a session plan sets out a piece of work you can manageably tackle in the time you have available. Again, estimating this properly takes experience.”

— Chase Jarvis

91. “Pros go to work whether they’re inspired or not. They allow for imperfection in their work. They finish what they start. They share their work when it’s finished. The exceptions only prove the rule.”

— Chase Jarvis

92. “Once I was walking my path, once I’d found my creative niche, my photography – and my life – had focus. The difference was dramatic. Suddenly I went from wandering the woods to sprinting like a track star. I dropped out of grad school and went from my first few local clients to working with some of the world’s biggest sports brands.”

— Chase Jarvis

93. “There used to be a prescribed path for entering any particular career. This is no longer the case. Beyond a handful of professions, many of the most rewarding jobs today are intrinsically creative. They involve doing things that didn’t even exist when the people doing them were still in school. The prescribed paths are crumbling away.”

— Chase Jarvis