Everything I Know

by Paul Jarvis

  Everything I Know

  By Paul Jarvis

  Copyright 2013 Paul Jarvis. All rights reserved.

  Paul Jarvis, Author

  Cheri Hanson, Editor

  Marc Johns, Cover Illustration

  978-0-9919186-1-4, ISBN

  Feel free to take passages from this book and replicate them online or in print, but link back to pjrvs.com/everything. If you want to use more than a few paragraphs, email paul@pjrvs.com. I built the Internet, so if you flat-out steal, I’ll find out.

  Portions of this book have appeared on my mailing list over the last few years.

  Other books by Paul Jarvis

  Eat Awesome

  Be Awesome at Online Business

  Rebels With a Cause (contributor)

  Mini-Missions for Simplicity (contributor)

  Contents

  Everything I Know

  Foreword

  Introduction

  It’s adventure time

  My one & only real job

  More of the same, please?

  The dragon in the room

  Choose your own path

  Your work

  Worth & values

  Promotion vs. doing

  Focus on the work

  The business of “different”

  Keep questioning. Stay curious

  Know it’s your path

  Just like everyone else

  A yoga teacher factory

  The difference between you & those you admire

  Professional profanity

  Learning vs. school

  One million dollars

  But money isn’t evil

  Jobs vs. hobbies

  When’s enough?

  No goals

  Start by stopping

  Start immediately

  Overcoming obstacles on your path to adventure

  The future isn’t now

  There’s no time

  Work is sacrifice

  Money to start

  Side projects are experiments

  A wooden puzzle

  Being afraid to die

  Grateful fears

  Acknowledge, then do

  Courage creates possibility

  Does fear even exist?

  Being afraid in public

  Why pushing is important

  Out there, in the distance

  The paradox of missing out

  Flaws of perfection

  Practice makes closer

  Judgy

  Every single time

  What if

  Crisis of confidence

  Show up

  Tiny pieces

  The value of criticism

  A (fall out of) love note

  Vulnerability is courage

  It's all in how you frame things

  Failure is an experiment

  How I experiment

  Intentions are evident

  No second-hand experiments

  How I validate an idea

  Super hero stuff

  Art, craft & passion

  Every entrepreneur is an artist

  Craft & passion

  Craft vs. value

  Connections are made between two people

  Find your people

  Rallying points

  Finish anything

  Know when to quit

  Renewable resources

  Expertise & obscurity

  Gatekeepers

  Be a maker

  Theft & iteration

  The difference between mimicking & theft

  The process is ugly

  Create bad first drafts

  Comparison is ugly

  The end?

  Epilogue

  About the author

  Thanks

  Foreword

  By Justine Musk

  I have a confession to make. As delighted as I am to write this foreword, I’m handing it in later than I said I would. I could rustle up some excuse (a serious case of strep-throat-complicated-by-crap-I-breathed-in-at-Burning-Man) or plead the Flaky Artist Defense, which god knows I’ve done before, but truth is it’s just downright unprofessional of me. It feels more so because I’m handing it in to Paul Jarvis, who is the ultimate pro. The dude is so fast that he’s responding to your email before you’ve even sent it.

  By the time I stumbled across Paul, he had figured out his story, which is a slightly more poetic way of saying that he knew who he was (online) and what he was doing (online). This was good for me, because I myself did not. I had been ‘blogging’ on LiveJournal for several years. I moved to wordpress.com thinking it was wordpress.org or not understanding the difference between them. After mutilating a template or four, I knew enough to develop a proper case of what Marie Forleo calls “website shame.” I needed a doctor, stat.

  Paul’s story is, like all the best stories, baked into his product. He markets himself through his work. It tells his story for him. After months of investigating the designs of various websites, I came back to the first blog that had visually resonated with me. It belonged to one Danielle LaPorte. A closer examination revealed the name of its maker. In the spirit of a writer who would like to be a rock star, but lacked actual musical talent, I went to Paul with the idea that I wanted my blog to feel like an album cover. When I found out that Paul was in a band, I figured that he was my guy. (Eventually my blog would have a black-and-white header of me posing topless, albeit tastefully, with a yellow ball python. His name was Angelo.)

  Once we’d unveiled my new website, an interesting thing happened. Having a stronger visual sense of who I was (online) and what I stood for – my ‘brand’ – worked its way into my writing. I grew bolder. I began to steer my subject matter away from what I’d been talking about… to what I really wanted to talk about. My traffic increased. I became better known.

  Although website design is something Paul does, it is not his real business. He’s in the creativity and self-discovery business. He’s in the finding-your-voice business. He understands that we want to do great work, that there’s a story struggling to speak through us, not just about who we are, but about who our clients or customers or readers want to be and how we can best help them become that. He doesn’t try to tell it for us. He asks questions and provides advice, tools and insights to unlock our story and let it flow.

  That’s why this book doesn’t claim to be a blueprint for success. Just like you can’t express your unique value when you’re copying someone else’s website, you can’t develop a stand-out brand and play to your own strengths and values if you’re copying someone else’s marketing, tactics and strategy. We all have our heroes, our role models, the people we look up to, but as Paul himself points out, we have to treat them as starting points that launch us more deeply into ourselves. Instead of trying to be more like them, we have to take note of those places where we can’t be – and then jump into those places, and build out from there. We leave the borrowed blueprints behind, and rely instead on our inner strengths, our deeper wisdom. That’s how we come to be original.

  Easier said than done.

  I’m often struck by the way people will toss off the advice to just be yourself without acknowledging that this is a slippery and complicated mission. It requires a vulnerability that our culture has trained us to avoid, so much so that we construct an entire ‘false self’ to protect our tender souls. In order to just be yourself, you have to crack apart that persona and expose the meat of who you are. You need the skills, and enough mastery of your craft, to project that truth of self in your work. When the gap between who you are and the projection of who you are (your ‘personal brand’) is as narrow as possible, you ring true. We call you authentic, and are that much more likely to engage with you or do b
usiness with you.

  Which is why the best stories don’t play off, and market to, our sense of inadequacy, but inspire us into a bigger, truer version of ourselves – a greater sense of the possible. You empower your clients by casting them as the hero of the story instead of you or the product or service that you wish to sell them (that would supposedly sweep in and solve all their problems). You cast yourself as the mentor. Your role is to provide the hero with advice, tools, gifts and insights to aid them in their quest for self-actualization.

  That’s what Paul does. That’s who he is. Like any good mentor, he’s been there and done that, and he’s brought back a few things to teach us.

  So I wish you all the best with your own story, and I’m glad that this book, this foreword, is a part of it.

  May you truly be yourself. May you be yourself on purpose. May your story be epic, your voice be true, and your business be badass. Paul Jarvis would tell you to settle for nothing less.

  It’s good advice. I think you should take it.

  Introduction

  I’m afraid of being arrested by the Creative Police.

  They’ll receive an urgent tip that I’m to be immediately brought up on fraud charges. They’ll break through the front door of my house and drag me kicking and screaming (more like sobbing uncontrollably) from my bed.

  I’ll be tried in a court of my peers, or at least by a jury of Twitter followers. They’ll show, in painstaking detail, that I don’t know anything; that I should never give another human being advice, and that everything I’ve created is utter garbage. There’ll be pie charts and expert witnesses. My expensive lawyer will spend most of the trial with her face buried in her hands, unable to raise any objections. The evidence against me will be so clear that the judge will start playing Angry Birds.

  I’ll be sentenced to wear a suit and tie in some beige office with a non-ironic water cooler. I’ll get four or five consecutive life terms, with no chance of parole. No visitation rights, either. I’ll never see my wife and pet rats again.

  I’ve played this scenario out in my head many times.

  In reality, I wake every morning without a warrant for my arrest. I’m free to go about my day and create new things. I’m free to share those things with the world, and to risk it all and do my work. So that’s what I do.

  My goal for this book is to illustrate the potential you’ve got inside you, right now, to do something unique and innovative. I know this because I have that same potential, and I struggle to let it out sometimes. You won’t know how far your potential reaches until you start experimenting with it and pushing its boundaries.

  I create things I’m scared as hell to share all the time, but I keep sharing them. I continue to make my own path in whatever I do, because I know it’s the only way to be truly happy with what I create. I try new things and constantly push myself because even though the Creative Police are always watching (possibly from that unmarked van across the street), I’m addicted to seeing how far I can take my work and how often I can experiment with new ideas. That’s how I find the most meaning in what I make. I don’t enjoy that nervous feeling in my gut, but I’m genuinely curious about how far I can go.

  This book is my challenge to you to take your own risks and stretch your own limits. Courage doesn’t come from an absence of fear; it comes from being afraid and moving forward anyway. I want you to see how far you can go. I challenge to you to stir shit up.

  I’ve created my business in my own unique way (without a criminal record) for almost two decades. And if this doesn’t work out, who knows, maybe we’ll even share a prison cell. But at least we’ll have taken a risk and tried to create something great and meaningful.

  It’s adventure time

  Long before I started working for myself and having visions of police raids, I loved reading Choose Your Own Adventure novels.

  If you aren’t familiar with this series (published by Bantam Books in the 1980s & 1990s), they put you, the reader, into the story and let you determine the plot. You’re the hero, in charge of making decisions and you’re constantly confronted with choices.

  Say you’re off to save the princess (the books were unfortunately gender biased) and you came upon a dragon guarding the path. If you wanted to fight, you’d turn to page 13. If you wanted to pivot and run, you’d turn to page 18.

  Each choice would lead you to a different page and eventually, to a unique ending where you’d either succeed (and save that princess) or fail (and get eaten by the dragon).

  I loved these books because I got to lead the action and I could always see the consequences of my choices. The plot wasn’t set in stone until I was actually in the story, reading it, deciding. The ending was never certain, but in order to get there, I had to keep making choices.

  Two people could read the same book and come away with totally different experiences, adventures and endings. You could also get stuck in plot loops that kept you in an unbreakable cycle until you made a different choice.

  I’ve always approached my work as if it were a Choose Your Own Adventure book. And if I look at how I live, the parallels are evident:

  I choose my own path.

  I stay true to myself and to my values.

  I experiment with choices.

  I might be afraid, but I don’t let fear stop me from trying new things.

  I can only live a meaningful life if I keep making choices and moving forward, pushing past my fears and testing my limits.

  We all face challenges (or dragons) on our paths —whether they’re paths we’re forging or well-worn routes others have taken. It’s okay if you’re scared to do new things or to put your work out in the world, because I am too. But, I keep making choices, moving forward and creating my own adventure, day by day. I hope this book will inspire you to do the same.

  My one & only real job

  I haven’t always been self-employed. I was a web designer for a Toronto ad agency at the beginning of my career, just to see how “work” worked. I didn’t like my boss or the job, but I was grateful to learn how I didn’t want to run my own business.

  I worked hard while I was there – so much so that the day after I quit, instead of figuring out how to write a resume, I ended up answering back-to-back calls from the agency’s clients. They kept asking where I was going to work next, so they could follow me there.

  After the third or fourth client call, I realized that I didn’t have to bring them to a new agency; I could just work for them on my own, and work in a way that made sense to me. From that point on, I knew that if I was going to be my own boss, I wanted to be a good one.

  In order to be that good boss to myself, I had to be clear about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to get there. I’ve now spent almost two decades working for myself and building a job that I enjoy.

  I’ve never put much stock in rules or formulas. I’d rather try things first-hand and learn from my own experiences. Sometimes I fail and I lose money or clients, but sometimes I don’t. Either way, I always learn something valuable.

  More of the same, please?

  Some of us have come from jobs where playing by the rules could help us get ahead. We could slowly progress to have different, bigger bosses. But, we’d still be governed by how someone else wanted to run their company, and that company might also be subject to rules enforced by investors, shareholders and boards – not to mention someone else’s vision of success.

  It’s so easy to apply that same mentality to your own work. Maybe you believe that if you build similar products to everyone else in your industry, you can have a piece of the same pie. But, that pie has a finite number of slices, and it might not suit your tastes. Sometimes it’s better just to bake a new pie. You can flavour it exactly how you want and even use a killer new recipe.

  The amazing thing about working for yourself is that you don’t have to follow the leader. You can carve your own path and establish your own rules. You can express your unique voice. You can align a job wi
th your values and create work that feels fulfilling and exciting. This is, after all, the reason most people go into business for themselves in the first place.

  The dragon in the room

  This might not work.

  I can only illustrate what I’ve learned and what I’ve seen others do to achieve their goals. It’s not enough to use these lessons to guide your work, though.

  There are lessons in this book, for sure, but I can’t stress enough that you need to experiment for yourself and forge your own path. Doing the exact opposite of everything I share could actually be what creates the most meaning in your life and work.

  We don’t know the consequences of our choices until those consequences become the present or the past. No one can tell you with any certainty that following specific steps will lead you to success. If someone claims to have a one-size-fits-all solution, run screaming in the other direction.

  This book isn’t meant to be straight-up advice. The world is full of “proven tips and tricks.” Everyone’s a teacher, guru, expert, or has an online course for you to follow. These experts probably (mostly) have good intentions, but they’re wrong – not because the information they provide isn’t sound, but because they’re telling their stories, and sharing what worked for them and why. I’m doing the same right now.

  But none of us advice-givers know what’s possible for you. We can offer insight, sure, but that’s about it. My best advice? Fuck advice and listen to yourself. Trust in your journey and learn as much as possible through first-hand experiments.

  There’s more than one way to reach your goals, and you probably won’t even know you’re on the right path until you’re looking back at it.

  BOOK ONE

  Choose your own path

  “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

  William Blake