If You Put In 15% Effort, What Level of Success Do You Truly Expect?
That old saying “You get what you pay for” comes to mind.
If I were to listen to the photographers who whine all day on the interwebs, I would think that there is no hope for any of us at all. We should all run for the hills, ditch our cameras, and learn to work in dry cleaners. Oh wait, they are all automated now.
“Nobody wants to pay”.
“There aren’t any jobs”.
“AI is making us obsolete”.
“Soccer Moms with iPhones are taking all the good clients”
For starters, this is pure, unadulterated bullshit. The stinky kind like down near the Stockyards in Maricopa… good lawd how do they stand that pervasive stink?
I know these statements are not true, not true at all. I work with photographers every single day. And I watch what happens when they start to pay for their success.
It’s HYUGGGG!
Look, ya gotta pay for it. Success ain’t free. I don’t care what all the click baiters with their “sales funnel you can run in only 30 seconds a day and make millions selling 30-second sales funnels” shit say — NOTHING WORTH ANYTHING IS FREE.
Let me repeat that for the cheap seats.
Nothing, I mean NOTHING that is worth ANYTHING is free.
There is always a cost.
Always.
Do you want to pay it or not is the only question before us.
Do you value what you want enough to pay what it is worth?
How high a fee is too high?`
Remember those ads that used to tell people “you can have it all”… well, they lied.
You cannot “have it all” until you have worked for it all.
Some folks decide to pay too much, and marriages fail, friends fail, and occasionally health fails.
I know I won’t pay that much, although I come very close to the line on many occasions.
Perhaps you are single and unencumbered. You have a huge resource from which to pay the gods of freelance.
But if you are 47, 3 kids, with 2 in college… well, that deep resource is not really available to you, so you have to be extremely deliberate with what you give up and what you want to get.
But that is not as hard as it sounds.
OK, maybe it is as hard as it sounds… the thing is, it can be done.
It IS being done. By people who know they must sacrifice something to get something back.
Just like in photography… you can get a faster shutter speed… IF you can open up a stop — or IF you can raise the ISO a stop. And with each of these decisions, there is a tradeoff of sorts.
Yep… that is how life is.
You can have that space in the co-op studio IF you drive a paid-off, slightly dented old car.
You can get that Z9 (yeah, I’m obsessed… sue me) but you have to get rid of the boat, or the jetski payments, or the motorcy… hmmm…. yeah, I don’t want to get too crazy.
But you get my drift, right?
Watch a shit ton less TV and have an equal shit ton more time to shoot, edit, write, design, or whatever it is you want to be really great at.
Work with what you have in order to build the assets to get what you want.
Push yourself to do the stuff no one likes to do.
“Personally, I just love to get up in the morning, hit the showers, and begin cold calling strangers who may actually yell and hang up on me…” said no photographer EVER.
(True fact: there are no recorded deaths of photographers caused by cold calling an irritable editor. And in the vast majority of calls, there is no shouting or curse words, and nary a vile curse put on the poor, unsuspecting caller. Except for that guy in Toledo, but the courts prevent us from speaking about that so forget I mentioned it.)
But then you find out that one of the best photographers in the business did just that. Joel Grimes speaks about calling every agency in the southwest to show his book. If he wasn’t shooting, he was calling.
Was it exciting and wonderful and blue skies with clouds of pure silver?
No. It sucked. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t supposed to be fun.
It was necessary.
A word that people fear too much.
Some things are not necessary and never were.
HBO (or any cable network)
A new car (always a bad investment)
The latest and greatest camera or phone or … (use what you have)
Entertainment (Andrea Bocelli tickets started at $900!!!!)
And some things ARE necessary.
Marketing, PR, getting your name and work out there
Constant and consistent creating… make more and more art
Learning stuff like sales, time management, accounting
A new Indian Chieftain with shiny hard saddle bags… err… no, sorry… this was for my wife if she happens to read the article — in which case it IS INDEED NECESSARY
Clients… the kind you get with marketing and consistently creating. The kind who pays you for your work and your tenacity.
One of my members did a shot for an assignment in class. She took the shot with borrowed merch from a local small business. Upon returning the merch, she brought an 8x10 of the image.
She left with a purchase order for 10 more shoots, and a request to bid on even more work. She will make back more than 4X what the class she is taking costs.
She realized that getting out and asking folks to borrow merchandise risks being told no, and she was a few times, and nobody likes to hear no.
But she paid for the win by sticking with it until some shopkeeper said yes, and now she is going to do a very nice gig for them — and more throughout the spring.
We all want success. You, me, that guy over there eating the cheeseburger… all of us.
But we all have thresholds of what we are willing to pay in order to get to where we want to be.
If you only give 15–30%, you are going to get back even less, since there is no pure quid pro quo.
When you give 70–80%, you may start to bring in a couple of percent, because there is no pure quid pro quo.
So know that success is out there. And it is willing to accompany anyone who puts in the time, patience, and effort to court it.
So take a few minutes, a piece of paper, and a pencil, and go somewhere quiet. It’s list-making time, baby.
What do you want?
What are you willing to pay?
When you are finished, you have your plan right in front of you.
Making it stick… well… that takes more work.
Sigh…
(All photographs are by me, and the model is Briana Austin, San Diego)
I am a photographer, designer, and photo editor. You can find me at my self-named website or at Project 52 Pro System (enrollment begins January 6, 2023) where I teach commercial photography online. This is our tenth year of teaching, and it is the most unique online class you will find anywhere.
Check out my newsletter and community at Substack. We are new, but growing.
You can find my books on Amazon, and I have taught two classes at CREATIVELIVE.