Do You Want The Photography Life or the Photography Lifestyle?

If you blog regularly, you know that many blog posts come from reading another one, and an idea is implanted that you just can’t let go of. That’s where this post started from this morning. Through Twitter, I ended up following a variety of links, and ended up on a discussion of Life Versus Lifestyle.

In this post, Randy talks about the one thing that people continually think is holding them back: time. If a person is working full time, they argue they simply don’t have the time necessary to start and succeed at a side business. Then he makes an interesting statement:

It isn’t the business that is eating up so much of your time. It’s your job!

Those two sentences say it all perfectly.

Ultimately its how you think about your current life, how you apply yourself, and the goals you set for today in order to achieve a certain lifestyle in the future.StudioPress Premium WordPress Themes

Sometimes you need to sacrifice a little today in order to grow into something new down the road. If you had a heart attack today, you would spend more time exercising and planning out your meals. Your heart attach would become your wake up call.

So if you have a full time job, and are looking to photography as a way to earn extra income, ultimately that is all it will ever be. If you put all of your focus on working full time to earn money, and spend just a little bit of time per week thinking about where you want to be in the future, and actually taking the steps necessary to put that future into place, it simply won’t happen. If you see photography as something you do on the side, that’s all it can be.

But if you begin to put away the money you make from your current full time position, and treat your photography business as your full time career, you’ll be more motivated to make it succeed. You’ll spend an extra hour designing a marketing piece, attending a networking event, or using a social site like Facebook to make connections. If you know your photography has to make money to pay the rent, you’ll look at it differently. In the end:

It isn’t the business that is eating up so much of your time. It’s your job!

One of my favorite quotes is:

“Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.”

I keep that right next to my computer and read it every day. I’ve definitely put in my share of 20 hour days early on, implementing all of my ideas to make my business succeed. Even today, when I come up with new ideas to implement, I may spend a few hours in the evening working on a new product or goal. I use time outside of my normal “work” in order to plan for the future.

It’s the only way you can grow. It’s the only way you can succeed. So if you are willing to sacrifice a little bit of time in your current life, in order to build up the lifestyle others can only dream of, congratulations!

You’re almost there.

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About Virtual Photography

We're the co-founders of VirtualPhotographyStudio.com and have been writing on this blog since 2004. We started Virtual as a way to help photographers stretch beyond a part time income, and develop strategies to become a Five Figure Photographer or a Six Figure Photographer. Ultimately its all about lifestyle, and if your goal is to live as a photographer 24/7, we think you should have the knowledge and the tools to do so. Welcome!

Comments

  1. I like the concepts of this post alot. It reminds me alot of the approach in “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”. We can place so much energy in the job that we lose sight of the business. Thank you for sharing!