It's Your Job to Blow up the Barricades Too!
When taking on a job, a project or simply pursuing a goal, you will not face perfect circumstances. Never. That's why your job includes removing or overcoming barriers and barricades that lay in your way. These things don't come with the job description or the original demand and it's up to you to be creative and find a way.
Also, nobody asks if you put the obstacles there yourself, if your competitors or the big bad world did. If you want to make something happen, you better figure out the rules and try to play by them.
If you're a painter or photographer and you want to create a wonderful portrait, people will not sit in the right light for you, they will not have the pose you want by default, so it's foolish to believe your job is limited to be good at one thing. Get a lamp or find a location with natural light, train how to make people look the way you want them to look, then take she shot or paint them.
Your job is not putting a brush on paper or pulling the trigger on your camera, it's everything else too.
- Make Capital
- Pay for Gear
- Find the Model
- Find the Location
- Pay the Model
- Communicate your Idea
- Core Part of your Job (painting / shooting)
- Retouch / Details
- Delivering / Publishing
Yes, there's a long list of things and it's just an example, you'll meet chains of tasks that require the previous in many lines of work. If you feel helpless about things once in a while, it may help you to just accept that these are your responsibility.
Everybody who tells you that some circumstance were not optimal and their environment was not tailored for them is making up excuses and refused to adapt, improvise and fix. This is a hard truth and maybe I'm just promoting some kind of workaholic mindset here, but it's the way things work in my experience.
Besides all this, also try to avoid being a jerk, walking over people, because you really don't need to be. If you find yourself in a position where you REALLY CAN'T do what ever it is you want to do, and you know that it's your issue, ask your peers for help and be honest about your weakness.
This idea is generally called ownership and it gives you an advantage over the semi interested, doing semi well or getting semi-frustrated every day of their lives.Do you recognize this?
Where do you feel you take most ownership in your life?photo by Montecruz Foto