Whatever You Do, Don't Quit.
Every person, whether they’re a business owner or not, has come across a time when things don’t look like they’ll ever get better. A passion starts to become overwhelming instead of liberating, stressful instead of joyful, and a pain in the butt instead of a breeze. It’s during this time that you want to throw in the towel and quit, but I want to encourage you not to quit. You can adjust, step back and assess, even find other outlets to help you along the journey, but don’t quit.
Throughout the years there have been times where my own mindset of limitations caused me not to have successful periods in my business. I counted myself out with thoughts of “I’ll never be that big of a business anyway, so why try?” or “I’ll never be able to compete with those photographers, so why try?” Everyone has these types of thoughts, maybe not about photography, but about something in their life, whether it be parenthood, education, work place, or home life situations. It’s this inner dialogue that happens that seems to be protecting us from being a failure but what it actually is doing is limiting us from our potential.
But what if I fail?
What if we spent money, time, effort, sweat, and tears into this business? I mean, at this point we already have, but what happens if we have done all of this work for it to amount to just photographing the people we have already photographed?
Yes, it would be sad, it’d be heartbreaking. We would feel defeated and would probably need some time to heal and process everything however, what I do know is that we have already shared some amazing memories. We have already been able to witness people and their families on some of the biggest occasions of their lives! We have captured celebrations of newborns, kids being small and so adorable at a young age, young adults graduating and becoming their own person in this world. We have captured independence in women and freedom within their own bodies, and captured two people and families joining together and becoming one. We have danced and cried with families at occasions, hugged and broke bread with their families. We leave each session with a beautiful memory that we would’ve never been able to be a part of if it was not for this job.
“Comparison is thief of joy.” -Theodore Roosevelt
At times when I have felt that there’s no way that the business could become more than what it is now, I realize that I’ve been comparing myself more and more to what others around me are either producing, or it’s been that my own expectations of “what is success” is twisted. I have a business, I have walked with that business since 2013 and now have a man that walks it with me and puts as much time, effort, and thought into what we are doing as I am. We have gone through a lot already but there’s always more that we can do. There’s always room to grow in your craft, not because someone else is better, but because we want to keep pushing ourselves to become better. Comparison will instantly bring you to your lowest point, whether it’s with your personal life, relationships, business, or a hobby. Instead, I try to re-focus my mind on where I have come. Have I done more in the year 2020 than I did in 2013-2015 with this business? Absolutely. Have we continuously pushed ourselves to try new things that we haven’t done with the business? Absolutely. These are things that we find as “successful”, it doesn’t matter if someone else’s success looks different. Measure your success by what that means to you, how it relates to what you’re striving for, not what someone else’s measurements to success is. Someone else’s success in photography may be to get to a place where they only photograph celebrities, big names, people that pay them without even second guessing their price. That, although seemingly crazy-fun, isn’t what our business has in its sights as “successful”, we want the families, the small intimate weddings, the engagements, the craziness of the small things. It is in those environments where we find our success, so why on earth would we compare whether we are going anywhere to someone’s work that has a different “success goal” than us?
Times get hard.
That is true. Covid-19 and being quarantined with a business has been a great example of times being hard. It’s been a time where we feel like we have been sitting on our hands with our own lives, let alone our business. We could call it, we could say it’s too hard to even imagine picking things up and starting again after Covid-19 clears up or we could put our grown up pants on and get to work. It all relies on what is worth the struggle for you. If you have a passion as an artist, as an entrepreneur, as a parent, whatever it may be, the struggles that come with that passion are going to be worth it because of the “product/result” of your hard work. Our passion with this business is to capture the moments in life that slip by while you’re in the moment, whatever that may look like for you and your family. During weddings, it’s the moments that the bride sneaks a look at her brand new husband with so much love in her eyes that no one could put it into words. During graduation photos, it is the memory of how much you have walked throughout the years and how much you have overcome and accomplished. With family photo shoots, it is the moment of pausing time in order to forever remember how your family was right at that moment (silly faces and all). All of these results are worth fighting for, it’s worth the ups and downs of starting over in the middle of Tennessee, it’s worth feeling like we’re starting over in the aftermath of a pandemic, it’s worth pushing and pushing and pushing ourselves to take that next step, even if it’s scary, even if we fail.
This blog might fail. I’m not a wonderful writer, or at least I don’t feel that way. Spencer edits my work and together we put forth something that we think people will enjoy reading. Never in a million years would I have thought that I would be starting a blog and letting people in on all of the things that involves. However, we know that a blog helps people see into our hearts, into our passion, and into our business. It helps people see why we do what we do and maybe, just maybe, will help someone with their life or even just encourage someone to have a photo session with us. The thing is, even with the fear of failure looming over anything that you do, you can’t let it stop you. If you fail, get back up and try it again or reassess why you’re doing it and see if it’s something you want to fight for. This allows you to release things that aren’t worth it, while also allowing you to focus (and yes, fail) at things that are.
We might fail, we might have already failed (guess what, we have.) but we won’t give up. This is our dream, this is our passion, and no matter how small it may look right now, we are successful even just for the fact that we are doing it.
Don’t let anyone, even yourself, tell you that you can’t fail at something and be successful at the same time. Success comes with time but if you’re following what you love, what you feel your purpose is then you’re already succeeding for yourself.
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