INTRO
Hopefully you’ve noticed by now there are a couple new taglines floating around my brand: “Defy Mediocracy” and “Visuals for the Victorious”. My reasoning behind Defy Mediocracy was simple, I’m tired of people settling for good enough. We all know the saying “everyone gets a trophy”, well I don’t agree with that. Some people get trophies, the people who actually win. Before you log off this blog thinking “this guys a dick, I like getting free trophies” let me explain. Our market, photo/video, is saturated with crap. Scroll through Instagram, there is a lot of really bad imagery out there. If we’re being honest with ourselves, those people will not get hired. No trophies. If you don’t care about your clients you will not get hired. No trophies. If you don’t do what you say you’re going to do, and don’t deliver a high quality product in the timeline you were given, you won’t get hired again, or you’ll get fired. You get to polish one trophy forever, have fun with that. No matter what our culture tells us, we don’t all get trophies, and if someone gives you a trophy for nothing, you should give it back…you don’t want trophies like that.
Wow, that was a long intro, well it’s my set up for a series of blogs I am calling DEFY. I want to take a look at certain things that hold us back and talk about how I DEFY them. I don’t want you to settle for good enough, or getting meaningless rewards. I want you to WIN. Despite what people say, there are winners and there are losers, the first time you bid a big job and another photographer gets it instead of you, I won’t need to explain this. It sucks.
Let’s get started!
DEFY BURNOUT!
When I first started working in the photo industry I remember my boss at Sugar Digital telling me this was a “high burnout” industry, and they did everything they could to keep people happy and refreshed. In my naive inexperience I thought “I’ll never burn out, this is my dream!”, like I said, naive. It wasn’t more than a year later that I was hurting to do something else, anything else! It wasn’t my boss, or the job, it was that I felt uninspired and lost. I ended up going back to my career in scuba diving (that’s another conversation) and I kept doing my own photo/retouching work on the side. I did this for a while, often working 70-100 hrs a week to meet all my deadlines and manage a store. It’ll come as no surprise I found myself burned out again, and finally was able to quit my scuba job to become a full time free lancer.
There you have it, I quit my job, became a full time freelance photographer and I never struggled with burn out or inspiration ever again! JK, it was worse. Shortly after I quit we found out we had another kiddo on the way (we already had a 1 yo at home). I can’t totally explain the pressure I felt, scratch that, the pressure I feel. I’m the sole provider for our family, if I don’t make money we don’t have dinner, we lose our house and other horrible things that I don’t like to think about!
This is what you call a petri dish, a place where you grow bacteria…not the good kind. It’s the environment where burn out grows. As a result of the self imposed pressure I was working 70-100 hrs a week consistently, often working 7 days a week. This leads to my first point for fighting burn out: DON’T WORK 7 DAYS A WEEK. It’s soul sucking, it’s scientifically proven and it’s just not good for you. Lez be honest, I still have to do this sometimes, but after the crazy schedule I build in time off to compensate. It’s a different kind of tired, it’s exhaustion, and you will not be the creative person you always dream of being when you feel like this!
This leads me to my next thought, and that’s to HAVE SOME SORT OF SCHEDULE. I fought this for a long time, I thought “there’s no off hours when you’re a freelancer!”. Being honest again, that’s kind of true, but you also have control over how available you are. I tend to work from around 7 am - 6 pm Mon-Fri, and as needed on Saturdays. I try to avoid working on Sundays like the plague, that’s our day, that’s my time. I don’t even do social media on Sundays, and I try really hard not to use my phone as little as possible. I would also highly recommend letting your family know those hours, especially if you work from home. Let them know that “if daddy can focus on his work he will be able to be done faster and hang out!”. I use this kind of language all the time with my kids, that way they understand that I can be more efficient with my time if I’m not bouncing my attention from one thing to the next.
Bouncing…that’s a good segue. I grew up with this idea that “you need to learn how to MULTI-TASK”, that’s wrong. I still struggle to overcome this idea. It’s not multi tasking, it’s called inefficient. I have learned a lot about this over the years, and in a nut shell you’re brain is struggling to jump from one thing to the next, therefore making everything mediocre. It also trains your brain to under perform, so don’t do that. How does this relate to burn out? Two reasons. First, if you multi task you’ll get half as much done in twice the time. It’ll feel like you’re SUPER BUSY, and you are, but not in a good way. You’ll feel like you’re always behind, and you never finish what you start, these are very defeating emotions. Secondly, it makes for a messy brain. When you’re mind is always jumping around and can’t focus on something it’s very hard to be creative. When you can’t feel creative it’s easy to feel discouraged, which leads to faster burn out…because you’re busy all the time doing things you don’t want to do…and you’re doing them poorly!
This is a long topic for me, and I think I will make this a two part blog in the name of digestibility. I want you to know that this is a long because I have a lot of experience with burn out! Mine is greatly self inflicted, and I still struggle with it all the time. I just hope that in some small way my struggles can help you find the light in your own. Next week I will finish this blog with a few more tips and thoughts!
Until then I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR HOW YOU FIGHT BURN OUT IN THE COMMENTS BELOW!
DEFY MEDIOCRACY
