Would You Do Photography Full-Time if Money Were No Object?

Here’s a thought-provoking video making the rounds online — one that you might want to watch if you love photography and have been thinking hard about your career path. It’s based on a lecture given decades ago by philosopher Alan Watts, who poses the question, “What would you like to do if money were no object?”

What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? […] It’s so amazing that as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say, “Well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers, but as everybody knows, you can’t earn any money that way.”

[…] if you do really like what you’re doing — it doesn’t matter what it is — you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to be a master of something, to be really with it […] And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is.

Just substitute “photographer” to that list and you’ll get the advice that people often tell aspiring photographers.

Watts brings up an interesting Catch-22: if people stay at a job because they think they’re not good enough at what they want to do, they might never master what they want to do enough to leave their job. He’s saying the way to break the cycle is to simply take the plunge.