Personal Work

If there is one thing that I've learned from Chase Jarvis (among the billion things I've learned from him, of course) it's the importance of doing work on your own and getting it out there. I've been trying to build this little One-Man-Show of mine since September 2010 and I've been trying to hammer a ton of personal work. (OMG I realized I'm almost to my 1-year anniversary...) Why did I start doing so much personal work? Because Chase and Zack told me to.


At first I questioned using my time to do personal work. "I'm not getting paid, so I'm losing money," I thought. Then I realized that no one can hire me they've seen what I'm capable of. So I started shooting for myself, often taking non-paying gigs but taking creative control over the gig as payment. (Push-Pull). Then I started creating opportunities to start initiating personal work, even collaborating with other creatives... Like Leah D'Andrea (she's awesome, btw).


After being in Zack's creativeLIVE class, I realized I wasn't moving fast enough. My work sucked. Earlier photos in my short career were still on my site, and sucking the life out of me. I decided to put as much distance between me and my old work as I could... by doing new work. Then my new work was still falling into Ira Glass' "Creative Gap" so I decided to make newer work. Finally, I was able to show some of my new work to my good friend Carolina Yocom. She noticed a vast improvement in my work in the past three months. I finally felt that I'm getting enough distance between myself and my old work. So I stopped doing personal work.


Hell no! Are you kidding me!?


I'll never stop doing personal work, much to my lovely wife's dismay. I need to shoot for me as much as I possibly can! I've been told that when my business starts running like a freight train I won't have time to do personal work anymore. What I've decided to do is to schedule personal work on such a regular basis that it'll feel wrong to miss doing it: Like skipping a workout or dinner with my family.


So get out there and shoot what you want to shoot! You never know how long this ride might last, so take advantage of it!