Lessons

Lesson Info

Introduction

I want to cover, I want to tell you what we're gonna cover today in the class. So, we have a set of blockers in our culture. We get people who love us very much and care for us, like Miss Kelly, right? Like our parents, like our career counselors, like our bosses and our peers who do everything they can to help us succeed in life, but often what they do is they give us terrible advice. Anybody here ever been told that pursuing their creative calling in life in crazy, naive? Okay, uh... Whimsical, playful? Okay, we've all heard these words before but the reality is and what I wanna underscore today is that pursuing creativity and listening to that calling, who we are inside, is arguably the most practical thing that you can do because what is creativity if it's not the ability to put two things together, anything, and make something new and useful? I think culture assigns creativity equals art, but that's not the case. Creativity, our art is a subset of creativity. Creativity is the thi...

ng that separates us from every other species on the planet. The fact that we can create. Right now, we're creating, we're co-creating this moment. You created your morning, you decided what to put on, you decided how you were gonna travel to get here today. All that is creativity. And yet, we're made to believe that this is just a nice-to-have. Who you are, I have, through the course of my career, learned and after experiencing a lot of my own success and failures talking to so many crowds like this, standing on stages all over the world, CreativeLive, millions of creators and thousands of teachers, I've been able to deconstruct the fact that there's really only a handful of categories who would possibly be in this room or in my orbit and there are four. One of them, you're gonna see yourself in these four personas I hope. One of them may be an Ambitious Pro. Maybe you're already making money, you have aspirations to elevate your game, you're making income as a primary source and you wanna take it to the next level. These are people that identify as a creator and want to get better. Stuck. Anybody in here stuck? Put your hand up... This is, we're gonna get to know each other, so just... (audience laughs) Okay, I love this. Even Drew is stuck, you guys. (audience laughs) Here's the deal. I was stuck before writing this book. I stand up on stages and talk about creativity all over the world. We all get stuck. I consider myself a pro, but we all get stuck. So for those of you who are stuck, we're gonna work through that today. You wanna make this stuff, but you're not getting anywhere. A lot of us are stuck because of conformity, because of what someone else thinks about this one precious life and they're telling us how to live it. You're open to an awakening, though. Then there is the developing hobbyist. I do not recommend that everybody tries to make a living from their creative calling. I don't think it's realistic and I do think for some people, the ability to have a simple, stable job that allows them to look after their finances and their life in a way that's really, it's organized in a fashion that makes sense to them, but they use their spare time and their spare money to pursue their hobby and passions. I think that's amazing as well. And then there's what I call the Creative Curious. Some of you, anybody creative-curious in this room today? Yes, identify maybe not as a creator. You're like, I wanna see what this whole thing's about because there's something here. That's my hope. To me, this is untapped, a massive untapped research, a pool of people in culture. There might be some people that are outside of this that don't identify as a creator and don't want to. They're not here right now and that's just fine. I'm an advocate of show, don't tell. We don't have to talk those people into anything if we just lived our highest calling and tap into our creativity, they will notice and they will not be able to ignore it. But it doesn't matter where you are and I think that's something that's really important 'cause we all can move forward. Now, it's also important... I shared that I had been on this journey and got more than 10 years off course, and hundreds of thousands of dollars into student debt. And is anybody else get into student debt here? Anyone? Yeah. Turns out it's larger than credit card debt in our country. It's 1.5 trillion dollars. So you're not alone. I was one of those folks. But here's the cool thing, none of that journey is ever wasted, because what we want you to do and what this book is about and what this class is about is helping you become unapologetically you and that is a peace of who you are. I had to go through that in order to discover who I was and all of that what I would otherwise call baggage, now, those are some of my strengths. The resilience that I had to exhibit to get through those moments to carry me to where I am now, and it's not like I'm gonna have just the perfect trajectory. All of us are gonna go like this. That's the thing called life. So the cool part, none of it's wasted. All that matters and you are here right now. Now, there's a framework that I came up with after, anyone familiar with my podcast, Chase Jarvis Live? Anyone? Awesome. That's every single person. Cool, it's been going for, it's older than CreativeLive. After having hundreds of guests, people like Richard Branson, Brene Brown, Arianna Huffington, Tim Ferris, Gary Vee, Elle Luna, Debbie Millman and the list goes on and on, I was able to deconstruct the failures and successes of those people, deconstruct my own successes and failures and realize that with every failure, I discovered a particular framework that was used. These people might not even been aware of it nor was I. These were just things that were sort of floundering through, but looking backwards, as Steve Jobs said, you can connect the dots. And so the dots that I was able to connect was a creative process, and the creative process I've called the big idea. Nice little entendre there, right? The concept is this also is the framework for the book. It's divided into four steps. The first step starts with I and I stands for imagine. Imagine we have largely stopped imagining what's possible for our lives. We're spoonfed what we need to do and whether it's a presentation for work or whether it's baking a cake or making a meal or building a family, there's a bunch of prescriptions out there. I want you to throw that out the window for a little bit and imagine what's possible and this works, again, if you're baking a cake or you're trying to create a masterpiece of your life. We need you to imagine what's possible. The next step, is design. I pictured a house in my mind and then I just started hammering boards together and it didn't turn out very well. (audience laughs) We need to design a plan to get us from what our imagination says to that thing actually existing in reality and you can't do it without designing. Here's the cool thing. The lives of the people that you admire most, did they happen on accident? No, those people aren't corks bobbing in the tide. They're intentional. They designed this outcome for themselves and then, and then (laughs) they executed against that plan. See how imperfect this whole thing is? They executed the plan and right now you're thinking oh, that sounds so fun! Oh, this is cool and oh no (laughs). I actually have to do the work. Rest easy, we're gonna get through it. And the last one, I believe this is the most misunderstood part of the process, of the framework, of the book and of the success that you see in life. And by success, it's really important, I want you to know that I put success in there because it's a really common word that we can attach a bunch of feelings and needs to but I think a more important word is fulfillment. Right, 'cause success, if you have all the money in the world, all of the fancy cars, all the mansions, all the whatever, and you're not fulfilled, that's probably the scariest worst outcome, right? So when I talk about success, just know that fulfillment is right there with it. Amplify is community because you have an idea, you imagined it, you created a plan, you executed against it, and then if you don't have a community or you don't have a fertile place for your ideas to land, what happens, nothing happens. So this is so misunderstood. Our projects, like, I'm more talented than he or she, I'm just as good as I feel like I could and yet, I'm not finding success. I find that a huge way in which that experience is misunderstood is community is super, super key to that. My point is that most of us have a, we're like 60% big. We got something in there. We're gonna get to a specific vision for what it is that we wanna do in our life and again, this works for tonight at dinner and this works for the life that you wanna create. Is your ambition considered crazy or whimsical or impractical? I wanna see a show of hands. Anyone been told that their vision is any of those things? I'm calling that like 80%. I tell you what, there's this great Chinese proverb. The person who says something is not possible should get out of the way of the person who is doing it. (audience exclaims) So I feel like my humble life is a living example of people telling me that it wasn't possible, only to then not always achieve but maybe even just one out of 10, one out of 20, but that one out of 10, one out of 20, what does that do? It emboldens us. It makes us know what's possible for this one precious life that we've got and it's really hard for us to not blame culture. I'm here to tell like, let's stop getting upset about that and let's show, don't tell. Okay, because culture wants us to be average and it's fine. They want us to start first grade or kindergarten and then we go through second grade, third grade, and we all get the same information at the same time that system is based on the factory, which is a 19th century model, so that, I learned this in school, that means the 1800s. (audience laughs) And here with are in the 20-somethings, so the system that we're still programming our kids with is hundreds of years outdated. Now we can either spend all of our time worrying about that or we can take charge of our lives. That's what imagining is step one for doing is taking control of your life. The cool thing is when you start creating in small ways every day, which I'm gonna get you the sub-title of the book and this class, Establish a Daily Practice. That's what we're gonna talk about. Infuse Your World With Meaning and Succeed in Work and Life. The daily practice part, it's in creating in small ways every day. It's in baking a cake, it's in making a meal for your family, it's in choosing how you wanna show up in the world that you actually realize that you can create your life. It's just creativity, different scale. We talked about creativity being in every person. I also want to remind you that creativity is a muscle. Maya Angelou said it best. It's an infinite resource. The more you use, the more you get. Think about that. How do you build a muscle? How do you build a muscle, Sir? Work it out. You work it out. That's what we need to do with our creativity and it's, if you believe everyone's creative and that creativity is a muscle and you work it out and you do so in creating in small ways every day, that is the only way, that is not a way, that is the only way that you get to create the life that you want and when you look to someone who inspires you, whether it's your next door neighbor living in amazing, in integrity, or somebody like a Richard Branson or Brene Brown. Again, they chose that intentionally. They created it.