In The Frame: Who's Gonna Be Held Responsible For Your Success?
I know who will be responsible for your... well, less than success.
Have you noticed that the biggest thing going right now is figuring out how to get out of doing actual work?
Chat GPT can write 3 books a day, and you can become a millionaire on Amazon.
MidJourney can make you rich without having to waste time actually learning art.
There’s a “done for you” coaching kit that makes it easy to get high-dollar clients without having to do anything on your own to get high-dollar clients.
Do you think any of this is possible?
Of course it’s not.
There are courses promising instant riches with little to no effort.
It is now considered a waste of time to practice photography, or learn how to do watercolor, or write every day to get better.
That’s for suckers, baby.
Nobody don’t wanna fukn work anymore.
The tech-bros believe we should totally focus on the truly important aspects of our life… making the asshatted tech-bros rich.
And we flock to give them our money only to find out we bought a big stinking bag of nothin’.
But to keep us in line with our wallets out, they fill our heads with fear.
Devastation awaits unless you send them $27.95 on a book about how to sell books for $27.95. Or sign up for their platform. Or buy their software. Or become delusional.
It is reaching a feverish, almost hysterical pitch.
But let’s get real.
No, ChatGPT is not going to take over the world and do everything for us.
No, MidJourney is not going to destroy photography or any sort of art.
No, you don’t have to go to college and amass massive debt to succeed.
That’s tech-bro marketing, fearmongering, and occasionally something much worse.
But we know what we have to do.
What we have to do is focus on our work.
The reality is that in order to have a strong foothold in a creative business, it takes constant vigilance, constant refueling, and deliberately working harder than most in order to sustain it.
I know those shortcuts look amazing. “Book Yourself Silly” courses are created by photographers who have never booked themselves silly, or even booked themselves mildly tipsy. “Triple Your Income in 30 Days” books that rehash the same cut-and-pasted business advice they got from a random free ebook - you know, the one that came with some guru’s email subscription.
If we spent just half of the energy we spend looking for shortcuts actually working on solid business growth, we may be too busy to actually need the shortcut.
One of my photographers printed up an outstanding mailer, sent out only 6 copies, and got two requests for gigs.
Another began emailing clients in close vicinity to her studio, and has pulled 5 gigs from a very short list.
Another has gotten Google certified in AdWords as well as SEO, and is now offering those services along with photography for merchants wanting to get their businesses and products online.
Coolio.
So how do we get off the couch and start to push our collective asses to get stuff done?
Here are four simple thoughts for today.
1. Promise Yourself-and your friends - to Get it Done
If it isn’t on the calendar, it doesn’t get done.
“But Don, I don’t use a calendar.”
Start. Don’t tell me you can’t work a Google Calendar or any competing product. No calendar, no urgency. No urgency, no growth.
Make big, huge plans. Promise yourself maximum production.
Give the work a name: “Project Intensify”, “The Big Push”, “Desert Storm”… whatever. This is a motivational tool that can keep you focused like a laser on getting it done.
Need ten new images by next week.
Put it on the calendar.
Prepare the shoot.
Shoot it.
Done.
Sweet.
When you make promises to your friends, they may hold you to a little accountability.
Good.
Ask them to.
2. Work with urgency in mind
Most people spend about 35 - 42 hours per week working. Self-employed at the higher end, hourly at the lower.
Elon Musk works 100 hours a week.
I don’t really give a damn if you like him or not, he is massively successful and he gets things done.
And while I’m not telling you to work 100 hours a week like Musk, I am asking you to examine the number of hours you work and compare that to the results you expect.
Look, we all get the same hours in a day.
And we think that continues forever.
“There’s always tomorrow…”
Think about this.
If I gave you $4000 would you think you were rich beyond belief? Would you expect that $4000 to be there forever as you frivolously spent it on worthless crap? How long would it last?
Yeah, not that big of a deal, $4000.
Most of us humans get about 4000 weeks.
That’s it.
Four thousand fkn weeks to get what we want to do done.
How many do you want to just throw away?
And remember, the first 1200 or so are spent learning what to do with what remains.
Yes, you need “down time”, and relaxing time… but you don’t have a lot of time to simply waste.
Spend it with a sense of deliberateness, mixed with a good dose of urgency.
3. Connect with new people every day
“People,
People who need people,
Are the luckiest people,
In the world…”
People hire people.
They don’t hire cameras, or business plans, or sensational value propositions.
They hire people.
Meet new people every day.
Contact someone you have been following on Facebook.
DM someone whose work you admire on Instagram.
Reach out to a possible client on Linkedin.
Email an art director, picture editor, or even another photographer you admire.
Keep it short, and don’t try to sell them anything.
Life is not a transaction.
Meeting new people is a net gain for you in so many ways that are not necessarily work-related. And many times those connections turn into other connections that may have never been possible.
(One day I said yes to a free shoot for a PR client and ended up spending 20 minutes talking one-on-one with Mohammed Ali. Yes, I was as giddy as a Dustin Beaver fan.)
I didn’t make a nickel.
It didn’t lead to more jobs.
But it was 20 minutes I will simply never forget.
4. Do more of what feels scary
You know the stuff that scares you is the stuff you should be working on, right?
That new technique that you have been perfecting but not sharing, or perhaps that project you want to do that keeps eluding you for reasons you cannot explain.
Perhaps what scares you is more mundane.
Cold calling. Yeah, everyone is scared of cold calling.
If you are afraid of cold calling, do five tomorrow. Don’t stop to allow yourself to be scared, just pick up the phone and make the call.
You aren’t afraid of email, or direct mail, or even sending a handwritten note (super effective, BTW), so now you just gotta get over being frightened into stagnation by the simple act of cold-calling someone.
I Googled it and as of today, no one has died from cold calling. Nope, not even a sprained ankle.
Afraid to start a personal project?
OK.
Send me a note tomorrow with what scary project you will start today.
Maybe all you get is a project title and a few scribbled notes with a projected schedule. That’s cool.
It is a hell of a lot more progress than you have made in the previous couple of thousand weeks.
Then work with deliberate attention and a strong sense of urgency.
And share your results with us here.
Look, the bottom line here.
There is no shortcut, no easy button, no simple path.
ChatGPT, MIdJourney, Notion… they cannot save you.
This is a damn hard thing we choose to do.
But as challenging as a creative life can be, it still beats sitting on a lumpy couch watching endless reruns of “Hell’s Kitchen”.
Just watching the weeks tick by.
We are having another 30-Day Portfolio Slam. Working as a team, we will put together an entire portfolio in a little over a month. The last time we did this, the seven photographers created powerful portfolios for their websites.
And you can take the methods we use and scale them to any portfolio project you may be working on.