30 Life Lessons for Inspiration and Creativity: Day 19

Lesson 19: Hard work is inevitable

The sun just slipped behind the skyscrapers. Overlooking the nighttime city, the wedding vendors toasted to yet another successful wedding. I was just starting my career in wedding photography and was curious about everything. How did photographers make it in the industry, when did one eat at a wedding, what if the bride and groom are late? The wedding creatives started a small talk about other successful people in the industry. “Oh, that person, just happened to live in a rich neighborhood and the referrals never stopped.” “Well they couldn’t fail in that type of market.” “And that person, is so good at business.” They attributed location, luck and knowledge as the secrets of success and I simply agreed to these factors as a reality. Perhaps my luck still has to find me. It didn’t even cross my mind that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” -Seneca.

Watching a workshop one day of one of those professionals in the industry made me realize something I’ve completely overlooked. After listening to all that they do to stay afloat, the words “hard work” kept popping in my head. What they do is not simple SEO coding for their blog post, those people build their business by sweat, legwork and hours of giving, asking, and moving forward when they fail. Somehow I visualized their lifestyle as free from stress, hard work, and complete with vanilla lattes on a lazy afternoon, fun mixers at night, and a vacation trip to Aruba for that perfect sailboat shoot.

If there was one thing I thought I should know is hard work, yet the longer I’m in business the more I realize just how much more harder I can and need to work. All good things come with some toil and the more effort I put into something the more benefits I’ll reap. Hard work is inevitable when it comes to anything worthwhile.

And because posts are better with a photo here’s one of me from last weekend’s wedding at Miner’s Foundry, thank you to my lovely sister and second shooter for capturing this!

And one of my favorite photos from that set up.