Obstacles are those frightful things you see, when you take your eye off the goal.
Obstacles are those frightful things you see, when you take your eye off the goal.
HANNAH MORE
Do you see obstacles or do you see a clear pathway?
In the course of how you are opting to pass your years on planet Earth, do you have a vision that guides you through the consistent messaging that is trying to dissuade you?
If you don’t, you had might as well be a ball in a Pachinko machine.
Life is compounded with obstacles. Sometimes they appear so ominous as to drown out any sunlight that remains of your intended goal.
You want to see that goal, and there is only a sliver of light remaining, while the obstacles are raining on your parade. So what do you do?
You focus on that sliver of light and you never let it extinguish.
In any free moment you can allocate, you get right back to it. You postulate, formulate, and create ( but not ate – as that will make you overweight).
You work on any aspect of the vision that has propelled you.
I discovered at an early age that I was obsessed with championing projects that had not been accomplished prior. In doing this, I was working with every new, cutting edge technology that emerged. But the world was working so fast, that no matter how far into the future my explorations took me, the more the world would catch up and soon, “everyone was doing it.”
In the beginning this caught me off guard. I had studied and practiced to be a photographer from 5 years old forward. I learned the craft. I read the magazines. I tried every trick that Peterson’s Photographic would publish and master those skills. I worked in the darkroom and processed my own film, made my prints.
My partner, Jeff Ringer and I had mastered the art of photo composition in 8×10 film back in 1983. There were shots that Jeff composed that had well over 75 elements. We were very unique at that moment. But within a spate of 10 years… autofocus, auto exposure cameras came along. Suddenly everyone knew how to take decent pictures. They knew nothing about ASA, ISO, F-stop, shutter speed, depth of field, focal length of lens, etc. And suddenly, one of my major skills was democratized.
By the time the computer came along, the photo composition technique that Jeff and I had mastered was also gone the way of the dinosaur.
But here’s the thing… in that wave of early obstacles (and with the increasing pace of tech innovations, (they come much faster now) the lesson was clear. It was not to be the most creative photographer who understood cameras…. It was to be the most creative person who understood technology. I embraced this paradigm and turned it to my advantage.
I have an entire museum in my office of more than 100 tools I have used in the past and which have since become unnecessary. I keep them to remind me to study everything new and incorporate that into my goal… And that is where Sizzle came from.
If your obstacles are more apparent than your goal, then you need to take a hard look at your goal and evolve into the goal that is truly best for you and never, ever lose sight of it.
Happy Wednesday!
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