Devil on your shoulder

“What are you even doing. Who cares about this? You spend all this time and money, and for what?”

All the creative people I know talk about it: The Voice. That little bastard that sits in your head all day and tells you that you aren’t good enough, nobody likes your work, you’re wasting your time, and, wow, look how amazing that other person’s work is. Why can’t you be more like them? Then you look at your stats to see exactly how many people liked your photos, how many shared it, favorited it, or saw it briefly and chose not to engage with it. That’s just throwing gas on the Voice’s fire. It reads out the numbers, talking about impressions and engagement, and telling you how much these things matter.

But then it’s time to move on to the next project. Post the next photo. Get back in the studio. Jump out of bed and shoot that sunrise. Sometimes you stop and take a deep breath, and you realize that The Voice is totally silent. Doing the work is so rewarding that even your ugliest, loudest doubts vanish. You don’t care about likes or followers, and even if you do, it’s with the excitement of sharing your work with them and not keeping score against yourself.

You realize that you do this because you love it and you want other people to love it too.

Shut up, Voice. I have work to do.

Be good,
-Dave

this is what we trained for