It Is Time To Hang Up The Tool Belt

It is Time to Hang Up the Tool Belt.

Was that heading click bait or was there some truth in it? You will have to read on to find out.

5 Weetabix, warm milk and a spoonful of honey, a standard start to my day. Across the table sits Ellis (he’s my two year old son/mate) with his toy cars lined up perfectly in line to witness the carnage that is him placing his breakfast everywhere but in his mouth.

My attention span that was half asleep was switching between the Weetbix performance and my phone.  I am not a quote guy, but I was scrolling through Instagram while sipping on my coffee and this one just jumped off the screen and resonated with me.

“We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.” That’s a quote by Trevor Noah, comedian and author.  I don’t know the guy, can’t say I have watched him perform or read any of his work but that just hit home for me.  I read it through a couple more times and put my phone down.

Every year I say to myself that this will be the last year on the tools. I will finish up swinging a hammer and commit my time to photography. I understand that financially I may need to take a couple of steps backwards to eventually move forwards but that is all right, I have accepted that.  The year ticks by and instead of moving closer towards the goal that I have day dreamed of for such a long time I add another speed bump to the photography path and throw in another excuse as to why I will not succeed.

Fear of failure is such a crippling feeling; it will keep you trapped in so many scenarios in life when there is most probably a simple way out.

“I am not good enough, I will not make enough money to pay the bills, I should be working at least five days a week, I should not rely on my partner to carry the load, I do not have the right equipment, what if nobody purchases my work or employees me? What kind of idiot quits his decent paying full time job when he is 35 with two young children to follow a hobby?” As time goes by you build these excuses into such a beast that the thought of following through with your dream becomes increasingly cloudy until that dream transforms into a distant memory that is near unreachable.

I do not own a crystal ball and I do not need one to tell me that if I keep going with this thought process, I will be another 10 years down the road and that dream will be over. 

I contacted a couple of professional photographers for advice. Some feedback I received was that if I was in it for the money, I should stick to carpentry. I asked another guy for some tips on different framing and printing options and he politely told me it had taken him 20 years to get a supplier and systems in place and to piss off.  I had to have a laugh at his honesty and thought that was fair enough. I will have to do it my own way.

We are taught from such a young age that you work five days a week and have two days for the weekend. That is what’s considered normal. We are taught to save money for retirement or a rainy day but I find myself wondering, ‘what if right now is actually that raining day?’ The future is not guaranteed but we continually plan that it is.  What if you look back one day and say, ‘I wish I had done it differently but I didn’t have the courage.’

I was on the jobsite the other day and a contractor was talking to our electrician. He was asking what it took to be a sparky because he had a son that was interested. He mentioned that he told his son he needs to be 100% committed because this is something he will do for the rest of his life. “The rest of your life.” Just hearing that sounded daunting, I cannot imagine the pressure the young lad felt upon hearing that also.

Did you know that many hikers get lost in the woods or in the mountains and perish due to the simple reason that they don’t want to turn around? I read this in a survival book once and then experienced firsthand myself a few years ago on a long distance hike. You are afraid to turn around because you will have to admit you are a little lost.  Instead, you continue to push ahead on the wrong path only to wander further into oblivion. The brain does not want to admit it is wrong. It would rather push ahead providing false hope than admit defeat, turn around and find the right path again. I find that life can be very much like this as well. Turning around and changing course can be one of the hardest things to do.

I read that quote over breakfast and decided I would finally tell my best mate and boss that I plan to finish up at the end of the year, something that I had been dreading for such a long time. To say that I have spent more time with him than the rest of my family and friends combined over the years is an understatement. I sincerely felt like I was going to let him down. I stood in the work shed and delivered the news to the reply of, “yeah no worries, I thought that might be the case anyway.” I had built this process up in my head into something that it wasn’t.

I have had front row seats to watching how many hours are put in to running the building company and if you didn’t love it you wouldn’t do it. Safe to say he loves it. For a long time I have worked for Taiga Build, a building company that is located on the west coast of South Australia specialising in passive building design and construction, something that I am also very passionate about myself and that we tried to incorporate into our own build.

This is not just a company that pumps out that everyday green washing bullshit in a society where that seems like the morally cool thing to do but a company that puts its money where its mouth is.  From donating time and materials, to building a greenhouse for a local school, to having recycling set up on site enabling trades to split building waste into metals, cardboards, soft plastics and general landfill, to supplying labour and materials to plant 600 trees offsetting the carbon emitted from a recent build. You do not see this splashed all over social media to get the green social tick of approval, it is just done because it is the right thing to do.  A small country building company setting the standards to which other companies should follow is something I have been proud to be involved with.

I can honestly say that I have loved building. The lifestyle, the mates, the clients and the projects I have worked on. It is rewarding seeing an idea over a couple of wines turn into a set of plans and then seeing that set of plans come to life. I have no doubt I will return to it at some stage, be that a day or two a week to pay the bills or in some other format but right now, I feel the need to try something new.

The wheels for change have been set in motion for a long time but really started turning at the start of the year. Trying to juggle working full time, recently becoming a father and building our own home during my spare time in 2022 was the closest I have ever been to tasting burnout, if not actually reaching it. I have enjoyed mentally and physically pushing myself over the years but there is a limit and I think I found it.

The start of the year is meant to be a time where you feel refreshed and recharged for what the next year throws at you but I already felt like I was so far behind the starting line coming into 2022.  I felt emotionally and physically drained and needed a prolonged break. Instead of voicing that, I knowingly did what I shouldn’t have done. I kept those feelings to myself and battled through the start of the year. It took me five months to feel some form of normality again. I should have known better but I felt that stopping and taking time off would let others down. Experience over the years should have taught me the right way to go about it but my stubborn thought process won out and getting up in the morning and going to work started to become a tough slog.  

I feel that positive change only occurred when I realised I was only competing with myself. I was of the belief that I could only be proud of my accomplishments once they were all completed. If I continued with that thought process I would never reach the happiness finish line and would forever be chasing the next project or the new goal. I realise now that the house is finished and the backyards can wait, the weeds can grow and it does not matter.  

I currently put around 10-15 hours work into my photography a week. I do all my online sales once the kids have gone to bed, get up extra early if the weather is looking good on the weekends to capture the sunrise and take my camera equipment with me to work just in case I spot something on the drive.  I believe that with the right amount of time and effort I can turn this hobby into something more.

The garage that was originally designed for a little office in the corner now consists of racks of clothes and equipment everywhere with little space for anything that resembles a motor vehicle. I have dreamt of what is possible if I give myself some more time and space and that is what I plan to do.

I am going to chase photography and try my hardest to make a living from it through 2023 and beyond. I plan to expand my website, build on the current merchandise range, offer an increased range of photography inspired products, put my hand up for commercial and private photography gigs and commit to my passion of writing more frequently and see where it all leads.

I plan to enjoy life as a broke photographer for a while because quite simply, I will regret it if I don’t.

Cheers,

Doddy