Everything I Know

Have you ever felt like you're following someone else's script—doing things the way you're "supposed" to, chasing goals you're told to value, and living a life that feels more borrowed than owned? In Everything I Know, Paul Jarvis asks you to throw that script out and write your own. Through a series of candid lessons and reflections from his two decades as a creative entrepreneur, Jarvis argues that building a meaningful life and business comes not from copying others’ paths, but from choosing—every day—to forge your own adventure.

Jarvis’s core contention is simple but radical: you already have within you the ability to do something remarkable, but you'll only unlock it through experimentation, bravery, and an unwavering commitment to your values. He contends that advice may guide you, but it can never substitute for first-hand experience. To live meaningfully, you must question everything, push through fear, and make choices that align with what matters to you—rather than chasing external measures of success.

Living as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure

Jarvis compares life and business to those classic Choose Your Own Adventure books he loved as a kid. In those stories, every choice takes you down a new path, and your ending depends entirely on what you decide along the way. He argues that creative work should function like this—constant experimentation, learning through decisions, and embracing the uncertainty of what comes next. You are the protagonist of your own narrative. Every project, every idea, every setback is another page turned toward your unique ending.

This metaphor captures Jarvis’s philosophy perfectly: success isn’t predetermined. You create meaning not by avoiding dragons—your fears, your doubts—but by meeting them head-on and choosing, again and again, to keep moving forward.

Values Over Goals: A New Compass

Traditional success culture tells you to set goals: earn more money, grow your audience, hit performance milestones. Jarvis insists this approach leads to frustration, burnout, and a hollow kind of success. In contrast, he recommends living by internal values instead of external goals. If your values—like freedom, curiosity, and authenticity—guide your decisions, then success becomes an ongoing experience rather than a distant destination.

He illustrates this shift through his own story. Early in his career, Jarvis chased the dream of making a million dollars. The more he earned, the more miserable he felt. When he re-centered his work around helping clients he actually cared about and creating things he loved, he found the satisfaction that numbers never gave him. Values, not goals, became his compass.

Fear as Fuel for Creativity

What keeps most people from pursuing their own paths? Fear. Jarvis doesn’t try to eliminate fear; he invites you to see it as proof that what you’re doing matters. Fear signals growth—it means you're pushing your edges. From being judged online to stepping on stage as a shy musician, Jarvis repeatedly confronts fear and reframes it as curiosity. You don’t need courage to make fear vanish; courage means proceeding despite fear.

He demonstrates this in real stories—whether it’s emailing thousands of readers despite worrying they’ll unsubscribe, or working up the nerve to play in front of strangers. Each time he proves that fear only has the power you give it. By acknowledging it and acting anyway, you transform fear into momentum.

Work That Matters

Jarvis emphasizes that work is not simply about passion—it’s about craft and usefulness. Passion without skill or purpose won’t sustain you. You must find the intersection between what you love, what you’re great at, and what others value enough to pay for (similar to Cal Newport’s concept of “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”). This blend is where meaningful work lives. It turns creativity into contribution.

For Jarvis, this means designing simple, honest websites for creative entrepreneurs, writing books that challenge thinking, and exploring experiments that test ideas firsthand. His formula isn’t quick hustling—it’s consistent practice. Do great work, help others, and keep learning. That’s it.

Authenticity Above All

Being yourself is Jarvis’s ultimate rule. He swears in business meetings, refuses suits, and designs his career around his lifestyle rather than the other way around. Whether it’s yoga teachers incorporating their dogs into poses or health coaches openly sharing their past mistakes, he argues that honesty and uniqueness build trust far more effectively than professionalism or polish. The world doesn’t need more perfection; it needs more realness.

At its heart, Everything I Know is a manifesto for personal agency in a world that loves conformity. Jarvis isn’t writing pure advice; he’s sharing lived experiences—the experiments, fears, and values that shaped his career. He teaches not through certainty, but through curiosity. The message is clear: you already have the tools to create meaningful work. Choose your own page, fight the dragon, and write your story one decision at a time.

Paul Jarvis believes that experimentation isn’t just part of creative work—it is the work. Nothing meaningful happens without testing ideas in real life. Through repeated experiments, failure turns into data, and learning becomes personal rather than theoretical.

Learning by Doing

Jarvis’s own education wasn’t formal. He dropped out of university to make websites for fun, learning through trial and error. His first creation, the online “pseudodictionary,” was featured in WIRED and launched him into professional design. He explains that you can’t learn creativity from textbooks—you must get your hands dirty and see what happens. Real-world lessons stick because they’re earned through doing.

Failure as an Experiment

In Jarvis’s view, failure is simply an experiment that disproved your hypothesis. It isn’t a verdict—it’s feedback. He tells the story of building an eco-friendly ad network with two friends that collapsed after the 2008 financial crash. Instead of seeing it as disaster, Jarvis recognized what the experiment proved: great ideas require both craft and an audience willing to pay. The lesson shaped how he approached future projects—failing fast, adjusting variables, and never repeating unworkable experiments.

Side Projects and Tiny Experiments

Jarvis and his friend Nathan Barry turned side projects into profitable businesses by starting small and scaling gradually. Nathan built his first iPhone app while raising a newborn and holding a day job; Jarvis wrote his first self-published book with zero upfront costs. Both treated their projects as experiments—bartering, prototyping, and refining as feedback came in. Jarvis preaches that this iterative, low-cost approach builds confidence and skill without risking everything at once.

Fail Fast, Adapt Often

Jarvis’s method aligns with lean startup philosophy: test small, learn quickly, and pivot when necessary (similar to Eric Ries’s ideas in The Lean Startup). Don’t wait for perfect conditions or funding—perfection prevents action. He writes, “It doesn’t work until it does,” reminding you that real progress only comes from iteration. Every experiment teaches something, even when it fails.

Treat your creative and professional path as an ongoing experiment. Build prototypes, invite criticism, adapt continually, and see your work as evolving data. In Jarvis’s world, success is measured not by perfection, but by curiosity in motion.

Fear, for Jarvis, isn’t something to eliminate—it’s the compass pointing toward growth. The further you push into fear, the closer you get to your true potential. Courage doesn’t mean fearlessness; it means acting scared and doing it anyway.

Reframing Fear

Jarvis fills his book with stories of fear—the “Creative Police” that live in his imagination, the knot in his stomach before every writing session, the anxiety of sharing work publicly. Yet, he continues to write, perform, and publish precisely because fear accompanies meaningful effort. As he says, fear only has power if you let it stop you. Each act of showing up weakens fear’s grip.

Gratitude Hidden in Fear

One reader’s email inspired Jarvis’s idea of “grateful fears”—the realization that the things we fear losing are the same things we’re thankful to have. If you fear losing your partner, your creative work, or your health, that’s simply appreciation dressed as anxiety. Gratitude reframes fear as evidence of value. You fear because you care.

Vulnerability Creates Connection

Drawing from Brené Brown’s research, Jarvis notes that vulnerability and courage are inseparable. You can’t be bold without first being exposed. Sharing your honest story—like yoga teacher Caren admitting her depression or health coach Meg revealing her prison time—turns fear into connection. Their openness attracted audiences not despite their flaws, but because of them. Authenticity magnetizes people.

Public Fear and Practice

Jarvis also shows how facing fear incrementally makes it manageable. He went from playing guitar in a park to open mics to full tours across North America. He never stopped being nervous, but each small step proved fear couldn’t kill him. Courage grows through repetition—showing up again and again until fear grows tired of being ignored.

The antidote to fear is not confidence; it’s continuity. Keep showing up, and courage will follow. Fear is simply the shadow cast by meaningful work.

Paul Jarvis dismantles the belief that success is measured by financial growth. He argues that focusing on “enough”—rather than endless expansion—creates freedom. When your business serves your values, money becomes a tool, not a master.

The Fallacy of Fortune

Early in his career, Jarvis wanted to make a million dollars a year. He chased it relentlessly—working 80-hour weeks, accepting every client, and designing sites for professional athletes even though he hated sports. The result? Exhaustion and emptiness. Money as a goal disconnected him from meaning. Only when he refocused on projects aligned with his values—independence, creativity, and helping others—did he rediscover satisfaction.

Money Isn’t Evil

Jarvis doesn’t villainize wealth. Instead, he reframes it as amplification: whatever your core intention is, money magnifies it. If you’re self-centered, it fuels greed. If you care about people, it enables generosity (as seen in examples like philanthropist Bill Gates). He reminds you that financial success can be meaningful only when driven by honest purpose and used to do good.

Redefining “Enough”

One of his most enlightening lessons comes from a surfing accountant friend who stops taking projects once he earns enough for the year. After that, he takes months off to surf and live. Jarvis adopted this same principle—deciding how much is sufficient to live simply and creatively. Once he reaches that threshold, he stops chasing more and instead invests time in writing, traveling, and experimenting. “Enough” becomes liberation, not limitation.

Freedom Over Fortune

Aligning money with values gives you autonomy. Jarvis explains that when you’re guided by internal worth rather than external pay, you can choose freedom over accumulation. Say no to work that doesn’t serve your principles. Say yes to projects that feel right, even if they pay less. Each “no” protects your time—an unrenewable resource—and each “yes” strengthens integrity.

Your net worth doesn’t define your worth. True value comes from crafting a life that reflects what you believe—not what your bank account shows.

Jarvis is blunt about one thing: sharing your passions online isn’t a business. No amount of self-promotion can replace doing truly valuable work. In his world, creation always comes before promotion, and integrity beats virality.

Focus on Doing, Not Selling

He’s turned down clients who thought a better website design would fix poor sales, refusing to “put makeup on pigs.” A strong brand can’t disguise weak work. Jarvis teaches that the product itself—the craft—is what matters. Make something worth promoting, and the promotion will follow naturally. Social media magnifies what already exists; it can’t create substance where there’s none.

Great Work Is Simple and Reliable

Jarvis never used business cards or advertising. He built his reputation by delivering on time, on budget, and beyond expectations. Doing consistently good work is more powerful than marketing tricks. The formula is simple: show up, deliver integrity, and help others succeed.

Promote Through Teaching

Writing for Jarvis is both craft and contribution. He uses articles, newsletters, and books to explore ideas publicly. Each piece tests whether his thoughts resonate with others—tweets become blog posts, blog posts become chapters. This iterative approach transforms writing into a tool for feedback, not fame.

Work That Helps Your Audience

The core measure of great work is usefulness. Your success depends on whether your craft genuinely helps someone else. Jarvis reminds creatives that the end goal isn’t applause—it’s service. If people gain real value, payment follows naturally. Like Seth Godin’s concept of “shipping” work regularly, Jarvis champions productivity through contribution: help others consistently and trust that impact will lead to income.

In essence, stop chasing visibility and build excellence quietly. The world will notice.

Jarvis celebrates weirdness as the highest form of professionalism. Being yourself—your full, uncensored, occasionally profane self—is the ultimate business strategy. Honesty builds trust faster than polish ever can.

Rebel Against “Professionalism”

Traditional professionalism, Jarvis argues, masks individuality. We conform to corporate norms—neutral language, safe ideas, polished personas—and in doing so, we erase the quirks that make our work memorable. He refuses this façade. Whether it’s swearing during pitches or wearing tattoos openly, he treats honesty as brand currency. People hire him not despite his authenticity but because of it.

Being Weird is Being Human

Jarvis insists that everyone is weird, even if they hide it. In workplaces, we suppress that uniqueness under “professional masks.” But uniqueness drives creativity. His example of Caren, the yoga teacher posing with her dog and openly discussing mental health, shows how embracing individuality attracts loyal audiences. Caren’s openness doesn’t diminish her authority—it amplifies it.

Turning Flaws into Connection

Authenticity connects, while perfection repels. When you admit your flaws—your swearing, awkwardness, fear—you make space for others to do the same. This creates genuine relationships rather than transactional ones. Jarvis’s honesty earns respect because it’s rare. He’s proof that being real in business is profitable.

Your Weirdness is Your Superpower

For Jarvis, weirdness isn’t an obstacle—it’s differentiation. While most compete by imitation, originality wins because it can’t be copied. The difference between you and those you admire isn’t sophistication—it’s that they’ve fully embraced themselves. Jarvis dares you to do the same. In a world drowning in sameness, being weird is the most professional thing you can be.

So swear, experiment, and design your business around your quirks. It’s good for your soul—and, ironically, great for business.