I’ve used this quote before for a post, but it’s still worth saying.
Say your goal is to be a photographer, you can start, TODAY!
Watch videos online, read blog posts, and practice picture composition with your little raggedy camera or cell phone. You can even study and comparison shop the kind of camera and lenses you want, now.
Line your goals up with your choices. When the opportunity to go out eat with a friend comes up, and you know your goal is to be a photographer, decide. Will spending my money on eating out help me get to my goal? If not, keep your butt at home of go over your friends house and eat for free. Just that one simple decision to keep your $20 in your pocket means $20 more for you to put towards your camera.
And don’t be silly, it doesn’t mean you can’t have fun, or that you can’t ever go out to eat. But until self control and discipline are your habit, it will mean saying no to things you want to do but that don’t get your closer to your goal.
Buy a lens at a time, buy a tripod before you ever have a camera. Ask a photographer if you can tag along with them, be an apprentice, people love to teach. And most people don’t take young adults seriously anyway, so if you show up and prove you’re willing to learn, they’ll teach you more than any classroom experience ever will.
And, yo…
I get it. I lived it. I was your age. But me and the dozens of other people I talk to all wish we’d of done more when life was simpler, when times were easier, when we were younger. There is absolutely nothing wrong with kicking it with friends, watching TV, spending time with your boo, or talking on the phone or Twitter. But, everything in balance, that stuff shouldn’t consume your life. I just don’t want you to look back in ten years wishing you’d of tried. Wishing you’d of just started or that you had spent your free time more wisely.
If you don’t think you can start today doing what you want to do in the future because you don’t have the time, that’s a lie. If it’s because you don’t have the money, find the free way people are doing it, trust me, someone is. If you just don’t know what to do, find someone who’s doing the job already and ask them what they wish they would have done sooner, where can you start, and what they wish they could have known then that they know now.
Learn something. Teach yourself how to edit videos, learn photoshop (you don’t have to buy photoshop, use free editing software online, like pixlr). Learn code and make your own website. Add something to your life, your resume, your experience that increases your market value.
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” TODAY!