Top 90 Chase Jarvis Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Batching similar tasks makes everything more manageable and less daunting. You might set aside a specific time each day for processing emails and one for making phone calls rather than allow these activities to proliferate throughout your day, stealing precious time from work that requires sustained concentration.”

— Chase Jarvis

52. “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

53. “Listening for the call is easy, but only if you know what you’re trying to hear. Is it the murmur of the crowd – your parents, your peers, the tired cultural narrative as a whole? No. It’s that quiet voice inside. Your intuition, your heart. You know the difference.”

— Chase Jarvis

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Chase Jarvis

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “Your life has two big arcs. The first is about acquisition; acquiring knowledge about yourself and the world – figuring out how to meet your own needs. What am I going to do to make a living? Will I get married? Buy a house? Have kids? The second arc is about contribution. You start thinking about how you can serve others and make a lasting impression on the world. We take, and then we give.”

— Chase Jarvis

65. “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

66. “Imagine what you want to create – without limitation. Design a strategy to make your dream a new reality. Execute your strategy and smash through obstacles. Amplify your vision to create the impact you seek.”

— Chase Jarvis

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Chase Jarvis

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

— Chase Jarvis

78. “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

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

— Chase Jarvis

80. “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

81. “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

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

— Chase Jarvis

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

— Chase Jarvis

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “Little did I know at the time that I was developing a rare but powerful tool: quitting stuff I wasn’t meant to do. This is a tool you must wield to create the life you want.”

— Chase Jarvis

88. “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

89. “Hedging your bets frees you up to play.”

— Chase Jarvis

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

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

— Chase Jarvis