This was read for September 2025 book club. Join to get regular posts on books.
While part of my is always inspired by these types of books they also seem to be extreme examples of survivorship bias. We only hear about all the people the author has met, and sometimes coached, that succeeded by following the ideas the author is writing about. Anyone else must not have followed the advice hard enough so we can dismiss them as outliers. It doesn’t matter if the outliers are around at a 10 to 1 ratio, the failures have some reason not related to the author/coach that they didn’t succeed. This allows the guru of the moment to keep their image as the sage that has answers while the followers that failed have a personal moral issue that caused the failure.
With that caveat as my thought towards these types of books in general, I do like the ideas that Jarvis writes about as his 7 Levers we can use to find our creative passion. Where we direct our Attention (Lever 1) is key to whether we’ll succeed and how we spend our Time (Lever 2) shows what we value.
Yes the world often beats the creative Intuition (Lever 3) out of us and far from being bad Constraints (Lever 4) can help us limit our possibilities in a way that allows even greater creativity to flourish. Adults have forgotten how to Play (Lever 5) in our productivity obsessed world, and we do try to hide our Failures (Lever 6) behind the gloss of a perfect life we show to the world. I agreed that Practice (Lever 7) is underrated and most people don’t bother with the fundamentals much, instead trying to go beyond them before they’ve been mastered, and never returning to them.
But, despite my agreement, Jarvis wraps it up in the common rhetoric that if you just “passion” hard enough and “risk” hard enough and follow your authentic self, success will seemingly come. At best he gives a cursory nod in the odd sentence to the luck that most will have to experience to get the type of success he speaks of.
Jarvis wrote a decent book and I like his ideas, but it falls into the common trap of telling you about all the successes and none of the failures. But maybe that’s all these books can be because Jarvis won’t hear from the hundreds or thousands of people that dive into their authentic self with abandon. He’ll only hear from the few that end up making it and they’ll be examples in his next book or talk.
Dead men tell no tales.
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