Everything I Know

by Paul Jarvis

  The less time you spend catching up on what you think you’re missing out on, the more time you can actually live your life, do your work, or connect with others in a present way.

  Flaws of perfection

  School teaches us that failure is bad. If we fail at what we try in a classroom, we typically fail the class. There are no rewards for breaking boundaries, experimenting or exploring new paths.

  This black-and-white approach closes off opportunities. It also doesn’t equip us for dealing with a crazy, complicated real world where boundaries need to be pushed and experiments need to be done in order to make meaningful work.

  Trying to be perfect prevents us from discovering our weaknesses and building on them. Trying to be perfect doesn’t push anything, nor does it expose who we really are. Because we’re not perfect.

  Thomas Edison tried to create a sustainable and affordable light bulb many times before he actually made one that worked. If he hadn’t experimented and failed hundreds of times, we wouldn’t know his name. Einstein wrote thousands of research papers and most were considered either awful or simply average. It wasn’t until he had tried several ideas and explored many new paths that he finally came upon his genius.

  There’s no innovator, inventor or creator in the history of the world who does something amazing without failing at least several times first. Failure is a requirement for success, so don’t shy away from it. Instead, embrace failure as a stepping stone to greatness.

  Practice makes closer

  Perfection is a myth, so practice can never make perfect. In fact, all that striving for perfection can actually lead you away from launching anything. The path to perfection makes it almost impossible to get your work out the door, because nothing will ever be perfect. Focus instead on great enough to launch and perfect enough for your audience to enjoy.

  The book won’t get finished if you’re focused on making every sentence a timeless quotation for the masses. The painting won’t get done if every square inch needs to be Louvre-worthy. Your work can be great enough.

  Great enough means you’ve sweated out every bit of inspiration possible. Great enough means you’ve left it all on the stage. Great enough means you can push your work to the finish line.

  Great enough isn’t settling; it’s launching.

  So practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes closer. Every time you work at what you do, you’re one step closer to the next step. A whole bunch of these steps add up to launching.

  Sometimes practice leads to failure and you have to abandon the work. In that case, try new variables or even try new work. Only more practice can lead you closer to success.

  Judgy

  Fear can also make us afraid of what others will think. It's not that people might judge you; they will judge you.

  I deal with this fear by showing up to it as often as possible. If I'm afraid of writing, I write. If I'm afraid that I’m not a strong enough web designer, I make more websites.

  Action is the only difference between someone who constantly creates and shows off their work and someone who doesn’t. Both people were afraid. Neither of them knew what the outcome would be. Neither knew how others would judge them, but the first person did it anyway.

  So why are you afraid of being yourself? What have you really got to lose?

  Every single time

  Whenever I send out an email to my mailing list, I lose subscribers. Whenever I tweet, I lose at least one follower. Whenever I write a book or an article, I get at least a few scathing reviews, pointing out flawed logic, a lack of skill or an easily refutable point.

  People email me about what I design or write and tell me that my work is awful or that my ideas are bad. I get at least one negative email, tweet or review every week. One time someone gave me a 1-star (out of 5) review for my cookbook because, “it was good, but not War & Peace good.”

  Maybe it’s because I like to push buttons or write about stealing ideas and swearing in meetings. Maybe it’s because I try to write in an honest voice that doesn’t resonate for some readers.

  So why bother putting work out into the world when I get figuratively slapped every time? I do it because I enjoy sharing who I am. I like connecting with people who like connecting with me (which is a small subset of the general population).

  I’m not too bothered with unsubscribes or unfollows or rude emails. I just swear at my computer screen and quickly move on.

  I don’t remember the last time a negative comment or piece of feedback actually kept me up at night or ruined a whole day. As long as I’m aligned with my values and being honest with myself about what I share, I keep sharing. I share because even if some people hate it, some don’t. And those people who don’t are the ones I want to connect with and help through my work.

  I’m not trying to please everyone all the time. I’m not even trying to please the people who like me all the time. We all have different values and even if they mostly line up, sometimes they don’t, and that’s okay. I’d rather focus on what I want to say and not how it might offend someone.

  What if

  Meg is a health coach who helps people struggling with food issues and teaches them how to make healthier choices. There are lots of health coaches out there and just like yoga teachers, they tend to have an agreed-upon language and approved tone. But none of these coaches have Meg’s story, and she’s not interested in posturing or putting on airs. She doesn’t care about being a good little Health Coach BotTM.

  Before she became a coach, Meg spent two years in federal prison for dealing drugs. You can read about it on her business website. It’s right there, for the whole world to see.

  At first Meg was afraid to connect with her audience in her own way – an audience that wanted to learn about food and health, but not in the same way most other health coaches were communicating. But she thought, “what if?” What if she was just honest in how she talked about her business? What if she was honest about her story, so her audience didn’t find out elsewhere, which could be awkward?

  Meg went from fear to experimentation into grace. The grace of doing work her way. The grace of loving life and doing a job that is both rewarding and also pays the bills.

  She began finding her voice in small steps. She added tiny bits of bravery to every post she wrote and to everything she did, until those little bits of bravery added up to a business that told her true story and aligned with her values.

  She’s now shopping her unique story to literary agents.

  Crisis of confidence

  Most days when I'm writing, I wake up with a huge knot in my stomach. What if what I write isn't as popular as my last post or book? What if people finally figure out that I don't know anything? What if no one buys my books, or worse, everyone who does wants a refund? What if that knock at the door really is the Creative Police?

  These are scary thoughts, but they won’t kill me or make it impossible to try again or to try something new. At worst, failure would bruise my ego (and my ego can take a gentle beating).

  I wake up thinking about all these things and then I get to down writing. Being afraid of everything means being very afraid of the big stuff. There are too many unknowns, too many variables, and too much of me involved if it fails.

  The only way I know how to proceed, though, is to keep going. Try, adapt, learn. Experiment first-hand.

  I have a crisis of confidence every time I see a blank page. But then I start writing. And each word is a small push against that fear. I'm fighting it as I write this sentence, and if you're reading it, I've pushed against my fear of publishing what I write, too.

  Show up

  If you frequently show up to your fear, you'll learn how to see it, acknowledge it, and then do what you're afraid to do anyway. You have to show up, probably every day – and especially if you don't want to or aren't feeling inspired.

  Showing up and doing your work when you don't feel inspired sounds, well, uninspiring. And that's okay, because inspira
tion is bullshit. Everyone I know who’s good at what they do isn’t good because they have magic fairy dust or shoot unicorns out their ass. They're good because they do what they do as often as possible.

  To become a better writer, I write around 500 words a day. To become a better designer, I design every time I’m hired to do a project. Sometimes it's awful stuff, things I wouldn't share with anyone. But sometimes what I write is worth sharing. If I work for long enough, my designs get to a place where I’m happy enough to share them with my clients. I increase my odds of doing better work by tackling it every single day. And sometimes when I don't feel like creating and do it anyway, I produce my best stuff.

  My best work wouldn't exist unless I showed up and did it as often as possible.

  Tiny pieces

  My job as a web designer requires me to be “creative on demand.” There are always deadlines and deliverables, so I need to develop original assets for every project I’m hired to do. Even if I’m not feeling inspired or creative on a particular day, I still sit down and do the work.

  I start small on those days, maybe by picking a typeface. Then I choose which colours are best suited for the project. Next, I put the colours and fonts together to see how they interact, and play around with different sizes and styles for headings and paragraph content.

  Breaking my work into tiny pieces makes it feel less like a huge creative job and more like small tasks that I can accomplish – even if the muse isn’t sitting on my shoulder. I start with tiny pieces and build from there, until what’s left is a finished piece of work.

  It’s amazing how often this tactic succeeds and how much easier it is to approach work, especially creative work, when you break it into the smallest of tasks. It feels less daunting, like you don’t have to twiddle your thumbs and wait for inspiration lightning to strike.

  The value of criticism

  Your work shouldn’t be so precious that it can’t stand up to criticism. If it is, you should probably hold it close and not share it (there’s value in creating work like this too—work that’s just for you). But if your work is meant to be shared with the world, know that it will face criticism.

  Feedback can only make you stronger. You need to be able to defend your ideas to see how they hold up to deeper investigation and provide value for others. Untested views are seldom worth holding, so facing a little criticism can only make your work stronger.

  It’s not easy, but most of the time, we need to separate our emotions from feedback on our work. I’ve had to do this for almost two decades now and face clients who may or may not like the ideas I present to them.

  I can do a website mockup that I feel is the best mockup ever. I can spend hours working on my client pitch to ensure they buy in and want to use it for their business. But sometimes, it still doesn’t work for them and I have to scrap it and start from scratch.

  If I got angry, offended or upset every time this happened, I’d spend too many days unable to focus. Instead, the criticism shows that my work didn’t provide as much value as it could, so I move on and try again. Yes, sometimes it sucks to work hard on something creative only to see it shot down, but I’ve never once dwelled on it for more than a few minutes.

  If my work was so precious that it couldn’t stand up to constructive criticism and feedback, I wouldn’t be able to do it as a job.

  A (fall out of) love note

  Listen to constructive feedback but ignore your inner critic. Fall of out of love with it immediately, because it doesn’t serve you. The world needs you to create, not to constantly edit what you make and dwell on your perceived shortcomings.

  We need you. Not the you that you’re supposed to be, not the you that you think we want you to be, but the real you. The you that scares us a little because it’s so honest (and even a little weird).

  Being the real you is important, because it makes it easier to align yourself with your values and easier to keep doing meaningful work. When the filters and masks are taken away, what’s left is unique and magnetic.

  You can’t wait until later to do this. You can’t wait until you’ve “made it” to show the real you. You owe it to yourself to start being you right now.

  We love dwelling on our shortcomings because it’s easier and less vulnerable than sharing our work with the world. It’s safer to make something and simply say, “This isn’t good enough” and hide it away. But, that deprives the world of our point of view and something that could make a real difference for someone else.

  Fall out of love with your inner critic immediately. Kill its voice before it kills you.

  Vulnerability is courage

  If you look up the word "vulnerability" in a dictionary, it sounds like an awful thing to be.

  Definitions range from “susceptible to being wounded or hurt, as by a weapon” to “open to attack or assault” to “capable of being emotionally wounded.” Those sound like horrible things. No wonder we avoid it.

  If you remove the negative potential outcomes from the definitions (stop jumping to conclusions, Webster’s!) then vulnerability is really just exposure. It's exposing yourself to emotions, to other people, to uncertainty, to risk. It requires showing up and sticking your neck out when you aren't sure of what comes next.

  Why would we do this? Why would we leave ourselves that open, since it can lead to failure, ridicule or any myriad of bad things, probably involving weapons? There's no guarantee anything good will come of being vulnerable. So why bother?

  Our society typically sees vulnerability as a form of weakness. Most of us think that strong people can't be so open. But in fact, the opposite is true.

  In order to be courageous, we must first take a risk without knowing the outcome. Being vulnerable is what drives us to make leaps, start new ventures, and most importantly, make and own our choices. A willingness to try new things is our greatest measure of bravery, because we have to open up and see what happens.

  In others, it’s easier to see how vulnerability might be strength. We admire vulnerable people because they take the risks we wish we could take. But when we focus the lens back on ourselves, we feel that social perception of weakness.

  If I'm open and I fail, then people will think less of me.

  We think that risk and courage are so much easier for others, or we rest in the safety of thinking (or writing!) about vulnerability, instead of actually putting it into practice in our own lives.

  Dr. Brené Brown (watch her 2010 TED talk) has studied vulnerability for over a decade. One of the key findings in her vast body of research is that there isn’t a single instance of bravery that doesn’t also require vulnerability.

  The more we understand the connection between the two, the more we can realize that they aren't opposites.

  To have courage is to be vulnerable.

  Putting ourselves out there, despite knowing that if we do it enough we'll eventually fail (or fail right out of the gate), is a true and grand act of courage.

  How will you be vulnerable today?

  It's all in how you frame things

  I make things and share them with others. Sometimes it's books, photos or websites, and sometimes it's food. I try not to get caught up in labels, expectations or what will come from what I make. That’s all in the future, and thinking about it before it happens does nothing but detract from my actual work.

  A few years ago, I wrote a cookbook without knowing anything about writing a book, self-publishing, or even the most important part... cooking. I have no formal training, I'm not a chef, and I've never spent any time in a professional kitchen. I just wanted to create a book of great recipes, while answering people’s questions about eating a plant-based diet. I didn't think of myself as a writer or a chef, and I still don't. I just like making things. And sometimes that thing is a vegan cookbook.

  This perspective takes the pressure off. It eliminates the need to create a goal around what I'm making. It also makes success irrelevant, because I'm not a chef publishing a coo
kbook masterpiece, I'm just a guy who loves food and has some great recipes he wants to share. There's no way to fail, because I'm enjoying the entire process.

  In the beginning, I didn't think too much about becoming a professional writer (which really means being paid for my writing). If I had, I might not have started, since that's a scary thought and a level of vulnerability I may not have embraced. What if my books flop? What if people say my blog posts are all wrong? Would I be good enough to be considered a real writer? I'm sure I couldn’t have held myself up to the weight of that label. So, instead I just wrote.

  If I live in the present while I create and don't worry about what happens once it's released into the public, then all I need to do is make sure the work aligns with my values.

  If my values are to do good and help people, the cookbook is full of delicious food and will help anyone who wants to learn some new vegan recipes.

  Failure is an experiment

  If you frame ideas as experiments, you can’t technically fail at anything. You're just going to prove or disprove a theory you've arrived at through experimenting. And if it doesn't work the first time, you can iterate and try something different. It doesn't work until it does.

  There's no formula that will ensure successful work. All you can do is generate ideas and test them. Succeed or fail, at least you’ve done the necessary work.

  Persistence is the most important trait of successful people. Hardly anyone is successful right from the start. Most try, fail, try again, fail, try again. Their backstories are full of errors, almosts and rejections – until they’re not. They picked up the puzzle box one more time. They kept choosing a new path until it led somewhere good.