Don’t be a Jerk. Be Interesting
As someone who has spent more than a decade freelancing as a visual creative, new freelancers trying to make it in the field like to ask questions like “how did you get to where you are today?” This is a question which I have a pretty simple short answer for:
Don’t be a d!ck. Be Interesting.
It’s something which I realized in hindsight while evaluating where my career was going after the first five years in business. Something that was drilled into me by every business mentor using different verbiage and concepts.
A big one that I heard frequently was to not burn bridges unless it absolutely had to happen. It’s something I’ve only done three times in my career. These also happen to be when a client decided to not fulfill their end of a contract resulting in lawsuits (hint: I won all 3). In fact, I am still friends with many of my former clients from living in Upstate New York even though working together no longer makes sense.
At the same time, being an average joe-schmo with a similar story to the next creative then there’s no real special reason for potential clients to remember you. I’ll never forget working on a personal project with some friends when I met a now great friend Sean. We were filming at a parade the day before I was leaving for a project in Burkina Faso, and his mind was blown by the trip I was about to embark on. After I got home a few weeks later, we met up and 11 years later are good friends.
I stuck out because I wasn’t just another person at the parade that would go about their 9-5 daily routine around town. It’s something that has been consistent thought out my life because of all the random crazy wild adventures which I didn’t realize in the moment were such an out there concept for most people.
Doing a little reflection while writing this blog, I stumbled upon a keynote speech from 2017 which I opened with “raise your hand if you remember the exact moment you learned how to use a faucet?” It’s an action which is so simple that anyone growing up in the developed world wouldn’t even be able to put a specific moment to it because they were so young. Myself included.
The question stems from that 2014 trip to Burkina Faso where I was documenting the installation of a solar powered water irrigation system. Once we got everything connected and began testing, there were a few young ladies (probably about 14 & 20 years old) which couldn’t figure out how to get water from the spigots. Their entire lives were spent drawing water from hand dug wells with buckets on strings or hand pump wells. They’d never just had water accessible to them at the flip of a switch. In that moment, I opened the faucet not thinking twice only to realize that I’d actually just taught these women how to use said faucet. It didn’t fully hit me until I was home and editing photos when I realized exactly what that moment really was
Why did this moment immediately come to mind? Well, Burkina Faso is a West African country that I’ve been traveling to since 2007. Most people couldn’t place it on a map, never mind know much else about the region. Subsaharan West Africa has gotten a bad rep over the last decade because of terrorist activity in the region making it a much more dangerous place to visit even though some of the most kind and incredible humans I’ve met live there. It’s a place which without any real effort makes me interesting to most people because of the stories which I tell from being a part of communities there.
The reason those stories stick in my brain are because the people I’ve met are also following the same principles in their life…