I know many of my readers are working at photography as a second job – an income source – while they pursue their passion in photography.

That’s how we started too.

When we first decided to become professional photographers, we were working in corporate America, handling the 9 to 5 during the week, and working at our photography nights and weekends.

We did that for several years as we learned more about photography, more about being an entrepreneur, and discovering that we wanted to move beyond part time into the full time status.

When we first started out, photography was our “fun”; it was something we did together on the side. We didn’t think it would become a business. We just enjoyed doing it and wanted to be the best we could be.

Then Andrew lost 3 jobs in three years.

I watched my Dad die – constantly living with the stress of worrying about whether his 30 year career would be there the next day.

And I started listening to the people around me. I remember working with people my age saying things like “3 years down, 30 to go”. And even then I knew deep inside that was wrong.

So I started thinking about me. Actually, Andrew and I started thinking about we.

And we decided we didn’t want life in the normal way.

When you look at it, you have around 80 years on this planet. That’s 960 months. Or 4,160 weeks. If you take away your childhood years, school years, and retirement years, its more like 2,080 weeks. That’s it.

It  doesn’t sound like much when you say “I have to work 2,080 weeks in my lifetime.”

And watching other people hate what they did, or actually counting down their lives as quickly as possible wasn’t doing it for me. So I looked at it differently. Even while I had to work at the corporate job while we built up our photography business, I decided to do things a bit differently.

Motivation Secret #1: Stop Caring So Much

Many people today work 50, 60 hours a week because they are worried they might not have a job tomorrow. They commit to overtime, weekend work, and even forgo vacations, all because they are worried “the boss” may lay them off due to budget cuts and financial problems. They want to “look good” in the company’s eyes.

Guess what? I know many, many people that had that attitude and ended up with a pink slip anyway. [Read more…]