Admit it: you can’t always be great. Despite what “influencers” want you to believe, not everything in life is perfect, and certainly not from the get go.
We all mess up sometimes. Or to be honest, most of the time. First time success is a lie that is peddled in complete dishonesty on social media because failure doesn’t sell. You have to buy in the dream, and every day failures are not part of it.
It’s just possible to be great all the time, to succeed all the time, and to achieve everything first try. As a species, we do things wrong a lot. A LOT. There is a reason why we came close to extinction twice already.
I see it at work: I have a team of developers working for me. Most of them are in their 20s and only have a few years experience after university. But we had one last year that left because he couldn’t accept that he wasn’t the guy in charge of a team after two years in the company. He was 26 and 3 years out of the university.
I’m used to the unreasonable demands of late Millenials/Gen Z, but I was blindsided by that one. When I started my career, it was normal to work for 10 years to be called “senior”. Not being in charge, just to stop being considered a newbie. Then another 10 years to start making your mark and gaining the respect of your peers. And eventually, after a good more number of years, you might be in charge (if you wanted to be; that wasn’t my case, I’m a reluctant VP).
A side effect of that weird, superficial view of the world is that a lot of young people I see don’t accept failure. To them, they’re born great, with a magical ability to be good at everything they do from day one, and they can’t fail. If there is failure, it’s other people’s fault. Never theirs. The message they’re exposed on social media doesn’t help.
But failure is important. That’s how you learn. If you always succeed, you have a very narrow view of the world. You haven’t strayed down the wrong paths. You haven’t discovered endless possibilities round the corner of having done something wrong. One wrong decision, and you end up learning a new skill. One bad choice and you meet interesting people.
Each step in the wrong direction is an opportunity to learn. Do you think that the most important inventions in the world just happened to come out perfectly formed one day just because someone decided to make it so? Most inventions take thousand of hours of failures before they get somewhere. How many times do you think the Wright brothers crashed before they managed a tiny flight that by today’s social media standards would be considered insignificant?
Recently, I got interested in coffee making. I got a reasonable but entry level coffee machine (because I knew the machine wouldn’t be the limiting factor), and started learning the process of making espressos the right way.
I mess up a lot. I expected it and I use it to get better. And having learned from my photography journey, I know not to buy all the latest gadgets that we’re told will solve all the problems and make your coffee great, no matter how much you really try. I know it will be difficult, that it will take time, that I won’t be great at it for a while.
To help, I keep a spreadsheet of the various parameters for each coffee I use, to know what works for what coffee, because being rational and keeping track of all failures is important for progress.
That is true for photography too (finally to the point!). Whether it’s your hobby of your job. It’s normal to take bad photos. You underexpose, you shake, you create compositions that don’t work or are boring, you take an image of a subject matter nobody cares about (not even you). Out of the maybe 300,000 photos I have taken over the last 20 years, 299,900 are failures (and I’m being generous). Not the images I had in my head. Or badly taken. Or simply nonsense.
That’s normal. Keep those images. Look at them. Analyse them. Learn why they are failures. Don’t hide them like they never happened. They don’t reflect badly on you. They’re part of your learning process. They’re the witnesses of your progress and of the betterment of your understanding of the craft.
When I fail, I always remember Adam Savage’s (from Mythbusters fame) saying: “failure is always an option”. And he’s right.
#Photography #Opinion #IMayBeWrong #Theory #PhotographyTheory