The Grass Is Always Greener

The grass is always greener on the other side.

Cliché? Perhaps.

But in my experience I couldn’t have found this to be more true.

I very luckily get to produce both videos and still photos for my clients and often this variety helps keep work fresh and exciting. When you’ve been producing videos for several weeks, being able to completely switch your mindset to that of a photographer is hugely refreshing (you’re probably thinking they’re the same thing but the two require very different approaches).

Recently I noticed a thought that was ever increasingly popping up in my head. I’d be filming a video and would think “this is great but I really wish I was taking photos today instead”.

And on the days I was taking photos, all I wanted to do was be filming.

I love both, but whatever I was doing at the moment, the other one seemed the far more exciting option.

The grass was always greener on the other side.

I’ve tried to get to the bottom of this in my head and my intuition says it’s all wrapped up in the concept of trying to live a perfect life, to do the best thing everyday, to be working at your absolute maximum.

I’m still so young and have much to learn, but I don’t think life is like that.

Whilst studying for my Sports management degree I became fascinated with sociology (the study of people) and a key sociological concept is that everything is defined in relation to its other (and what it’s not).

Essentially we only define the sky as being the colour ‘blue’ because it’s not red, green, yellow or any of the other colours.

And so we need to have days where perhaps our work isn’t the most enjoyable otherwise we can’t enjoy the days when it is.

If every day was good, no days would be good, they would all just be the same. We need opposites and extremes.

Sadly for the little Lego men and women, if everything is awesome, nothing is awesome.

I hope your life has a ratio heavily weighted with a lot more enjoyable and rewarding days than the alternative. But to me it seems even on the good days, there will still be an inkling that you could be doing something better.

This whole blog has been a lot of thoughts so I want to finish on something that’s hopefully a lot more practical and is a little bit of value for you in return for your time and attention reading this.

Chase Jarvis is one of my favourite photographers and businessmen. I forget which article it is, but he talks about how everyday he does one piece of work for himself. Whether that might be as simple as going out to take a photo purely for his own personal enjoyment. But in a busy day when perhaps you’re doing lots of client work, to know you’ve got a little part of it where you’re doing exactly the thing you want to do (the greener grass) I’ve found personally to be a real help.

So remember, the grass is always going to seem greener on the other side and I wish you every success.

Jack

012

You Never Actually Make It

You never actually make it.

Casey Neistat said this once.

And my intuition says it couldn’t be more true.

If you haven’t seen Casey, he’s an incredible example of where hard work in the video industry can get you. Go watch his work before he started vlogging and you’ll see he’s incredibly talented at his craft as well.

In a video reflecting on his career path, he explains how he landed a television series with major American TV network HBO and at that time he thought he had “made it”. So then sat back for two years while the show ran its course, not pursuing any further opportunities.

After the show finished he’d realised he was still exactly where he’d started and in order to start his next project, he now needed to do even more work than he’d done previously to land his next opportunity.

What’s more although he’s achieved some fantastic success since, even now just like all the rest of us, he still needs to keep working to find his next film job or opportunity.

The idea of making it, centres around getting to a point in your career where you’re so successful that work will just keep coming your way and you can relax and sit back while increasingly better and better opportunities flood into your inbox.

But in actual fact, even for people like Spielberg and Scorsese, sure they’ve had unbelievable success but yet they still need to keep improving and making better films to secure their next job.

It might seem disheartening and make you wonder if it’s actually worth dedicating so much of your life to pursuit of a goal if in the end you’re never actually going to make it. But my intuition says that fully embodying the idea is hugely motivational. It draws your focus right on to your next project, exactly where your ambition needs to be.

Maybe you want to make Holywood Feature films, but focusing on making your next passion project the best it can be is definitely a more attainable goal. And you only need it to get one view from the right person to springboard you to Hollywood success.

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have some amazing opportunities in my career so far, and 18 year old me would definitely have thought that where I am today is making it. But in actual fact, today I still feel like I’m just getting started.

So remember, you never actually make it and I wish you every success.

Jack

011

Here’s the link to Casey’s video, it explains the idea far better than I have… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaGKf6266PY

Also as usual I’ve paraphrased Gary Vaynerchuk’s ideas, you should check him out now because I think in our lifetime he’s going to be the most well known person in the world.

Are you really giving 100%?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot recently.

Over the last few years working freelance, I stupidly felt if I wasn’t working a minimum of 12 hour days, then I wasn’t fully committing to my work. I only allowed myself 4 full days off last year and tried to cram in as many shoots as I possibly could, ending up working on well over 100 film projects.

I’ve seen some incredibly hard working and talented filmmakers find their breaking point. When something makes them stop in their tracks and seriously re-evaluate their working life. From close friends to leading YouTube filmmakers alike, seeing this industry all get too much sadly hasn’t been an uncommon site.

Recently I found mine.

In an effort to give 100% commitment to my work, I wasn’t giving anywhere close to 100% commitment to my friends and family and I’ve seen firsthand how for many colleagues, the filmmaking business can take a serious toll on relationships.

If you’re a young filmmaker reading this make sure this piece of advice sticks…

The work will always be there, don’t forget the important people in your life.

Looking introspectively at my working routine, it’s easy to get caught up in a false notion that you are giving 100% effort. Spending time in an edit day watching the latest YouTuber’s, looking at gear reviews of new kit or seeing what some of my favourite production companies were up to, all seemed like necessary pieces of work, when in fact giving full dedicated focus to the edit I was working on, would have been a much more productive use of time.

It’s this work ‘productive’, that I’m now working towards.

Rather than focusing on perhaps the unattainable goal of giving 100% effort,100% of the time, I’m now focusing on trying to spend 100% of my time being productive.
 
 What’s more, this doesn’t mean just being productive at work. Sometimes being 100% productive can mean fully focusing on resting and relaxing, and not meaninglessly scrolling through my phone. Simultaneously it can also mean making sure I’m taking enough days to see friends and give 100% focus to socialising and enjoying their company and not just catching up in between shots whilst we’re working on a new film project.

To be 100% productive at work often means you need to be well rested and ready to give your work the effort it deserves.

My intuition says that if you want to be truly successful in business you’re going to be running a marathon, not a sprint. Sure you can go off at full pace but it won’t be long before you burn out, need to stop and seriously rest before you’re properly ready to go again.

I hope you haven’t reached your breaking point and after reading this blog it will be a little thought in the back of your mind to make sure you never do.

So remember to ask yourself, are you really giving 100%?
 
 I wish you every success.

Jack

009

One View Is All You Need

Do you stress about the number of likes your Instagram posts are getting?

I know I do.

I also know that I need to stop.

I need to stop endlessly refreshing, seeing how many likes my post got in the last four seconds and instead use that time for something more productive.

My intuition says, the amount of views you get or the number of followers you’ve accumulated, doesn’t really matter.

One is all you need.

If you use social media as a tool to market yourself and work towards your career goals, then like me, you’ve probably spent time stressing over how many people decided they wanted to tap their phone screen twice in reaction to content you’d created.

Don’t get me wrong, it would be absurd in today’s modern marketing landscape to say that social media marketing is not important. It’s where all our attention is and therefore the place we need to be if we want our work or our message, to be seen and heard.

Going even deeper, it matters even more who the person receiving this message is.

Although thousands of views and likes give your ego a nice boost, I think you really need to consider what you’re goal of posting the content is.

Are you trying to make it as a professional photographer? Then all you need is one editor from a major magazine to see your work, fall in love with your style and give you your big break that springboards your career.

The same rings true for so many professions. Artists, musicians, graphic designers, bloggers, models, athletes.

You are always just one view of away from achieving everything you want in life. As long as that view comes from the right person.

Next time you post, worry about the quality of your content and not how many views it getting.

And also worry if you’re posting it in a way that allows the right person to see it.

So remember, one view is all you need and I wish you every success.

Jack

008

To contact me about sports content marketing and how Southpaw Sport can help you please email me…. jack@southpawsport.com

*Once again this article is an amalgamation of thoughts and ideas that I’ve paraphrased from Gary Vaynerchuk, you should check him out if you haven’t because he’s the man.

His content will be far more of a help to you than mine will.

The Most Important Lesson I Ever Learned

My Mother has the best moral compass of anyone I’ve ever met.

She’s a lawyer who believes strongly in the Christian faith and I will be forever grateful for the sense of right and wrong that she has instilled in to me as I grew up.

During my childhood I did a lot of foolish things which my Mother was not too pleased about, however there is one occasion I vividly remember where she was more upset and disappointed in me than she had ever been.

It was this day I learned perhaps arguably the most important lesson in life and in business.

It was the summer holiday and two friends stopped by to go out on a bike ride. Leaving the house my Mother said to me… “You can only go if you promise to wear your helmet”. Not wanting to miss out on the fun, I duly agreed.

At that time, I naively and stupidly thought that wearing a helmet wasn’t the ‘cool thing to do’, (I now wouldn’t go near a bike, skis or anything similar without one) and as we turned the corner past the house I took my helmet off and clipped it behind my saddle.

For whatever reason, soon after we doubled back past my house and I thought nothing of it. But the moment I returned home I knew instantly that I was in big trouble.

Having seen us all ride past on that second time around, my Mother was furious at me, not because I’d taken a risk in not wearing one, it was because I had given her my word and broken it.

I knew I had done something seriously wrong.

Gary Vaynerchuk talks about how growing up his Father taught him that in business “your word is your bond” and in my industry of content creation, although we often have contracts in place, a lot of business is done in good faith often without documents to specify certain agreements.

And I’ve seen over the past decade the most successful employers and freelancers are those who keep their word.

Having integrity is tough. It’s probably why it’s such a widely respected trait. What’s more, on most occasions maintaining your integrity is often the harder decision to make.

Maybe you’ve committed to helping out a friend or finishing a piece of work by a certain deadline and all of a sudden it’s become the less attractive option and following through on your promise means you have to sacrifice another opportunity or time that you really don’t want to.

But in the end, my intuition says that you’ll always be glad that you kept true to your word. Trust can’t be built overnight, but it can most definitely be lost.

My intuition says that integrity is by far the most valuable asset any person or business can have.

So remember, your integrity is all you have and I wish you every success.
 
 Jack

007

Don't Complain

I learned this lesson was 18.

Straight after school I landed an incredible job working for a company called Mark Warner, working on a beautiful beach in Greece and teaching sailing and windsurfing all day every day.

In so many ways it was a real dream job, but there some parts were incredibly tough too. We spent hours each day shifting heavy sailing boats in and out of the water, carrying them up and down the sloping beach, always trying to give the best possible service to our guests.

During those summer months I learned many life lessons, out of all of them, ‘don’t complain’ has perhaps been the most helpful in the world of business.

(Before I get any further too, I know that there are serious injustices and situations in everyday life that you most definitely need to stand up and complain about. This article focuses on the tiny, non-serious annoyances of everyday life. I strongly urge you in any unjust situation you truly can’t accept to speak up).

Like any company you’ve worked in, as a part of the beach team there were great jobs and those that were much more arduous. Some afternoons you’d be assigned to drive an expensive powerboat around the sailing area, sitting around soaking up the sun, on others you’d be expected to be up to your neck in water, fighting against the strong waves of the shore break, bringing boats safely back in and lugging them up the beach.

We had incredible managers who did all they could to make sure jobs were assigned and rotated around fairly, however often you’d get weeks in a row where you ended up with the short straw and spent all your time doing the tougher, less glamorous jobs.

I was a shy, nervous 18 year old (some things don’t change, well the age has) and always too afraid to speak up and complain, but after a few times seeing colleagues complain that once again they’d been handed a less preferable job I quickly realised that you could complain all you wanted but you were still going to have to do the job anyway.

So you could either moan for half an hour, get yourself in a really negative mood, and then have to do the same job anyway. Or just get on with it.

Since then, everything I’ve seen in business has reinforced this idea. My intuition says that in every job there are going to be less glamorous parts for the day to day operation, what’s more as humans we have little sympathy and empathy when people complain, especially about day to day banalities.

Next time you’re faced with a small task that’s not your favourite, just grit your teeth, get it done and put the time and energy you’d use to complain into getting the job done faster.

So remember, don’t complain and I wish you every success.

Jack

Things could be a lot worse

This phrase has been as true in the best moments of my life as it has in the lowest.

Until Gary Vaynerchuk mentioned the odds of actually becoming a person are something like 400 trillion to one, I’d never really thought how lucky we are to get a chance to live a life, however good or bad that may be.

Nowadays it only takes a few taps on our smartphones to endure a deluge of images from friends and celebrities reminding us of all the things we wish we had and falsely convincing us our lives aren’t good enough. But if you really stop and think about it, things could be a lot worse.

For me, an experience that really shaped my thinking on this topic was spending a week creating content for the charity Supporting Wounded Veterans, who every year take a group of wounded service men and women to a Swiss ski resort to kick start their rehabilitation into successful civilian life.

I have no business talking about what they’re going through as after a week I probably only understand 0.01% of the challenges they face in life, as for many their promising careers in the army were literally blown apart in war torn countries thousands of miles away from home.

Spending time with them and hearing their stories, you learn that after these traumatic experiences the most simple of everyday tasks, that we fully take for granted, to them can be an arduous challenge. Even things such as going to a crowded place like a shopping centre or even to their children’s school assemblies can be a terrifying experience, one that many can’t yet overcome.

What’s more, in the year since the trip, so many of the group have gone on to achieve amazing success in countless different areas of life.

So now on days when I start to feel down, I remind myself that I’ve no right to complain as things could be so much worse and in the game of life I’ve somehow been fortunate enough to have been dealt a pretty incredible hand.

I’ll finish on another Gary Vaynerchuk quote, because let’s face it, he’s far wiser and more qualified to give advice than I am…

“Gratitude is an unlocker”.

Those words have really helped me, and I hope next time you’re feeling down, I hope they pop up in your head and bring to mind all the positive things you have in life. We all face challenges and difficult times, I hope you’ve had experiences that demonstrate and remind you that as human beings we have the inner fortitude to conquer incredibly difficult things and overcome intense challenges, particularly within our own minds.

So remember, things could be a lot worse and I wish you every success.

Jack

005

Fail Better

“If at first you don’t succeed”

When I was 18, I lived with a friend who had this tattooed around his wrist and although this phrase may be a little cliché nowadays, my intuition says the premise underlying it, is of huge relevance and importance for success in today’s world.

My friend was a professional snowboarder and told us the words imprinted on his wrist referred directly to the idea of not giving up when repeatedly hitting a jump and attempting to land a new trick. “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again”.

Indeed in any extreme sport, picking yourself up and trying again is so deeply embedded in the culture.

“Falling is so integrated in to us … falling becomes normal and picking yourself up becomes normal”

That’s a quote from legendary skateboarder Rodney Mullen and in several interviews he discusses how in the ‘real world’, this facet of extreme sports mentality is such a powerful mindset to have.

In the short time I’ve been running a business, I’ve seen firsthand how easy it is to get discouraged when you fail. I’ve lost count of the number of times that on days when I’ve metaphorically fallen down and failed, I’ve stopped and questioned if I even want to pick myself up and try again.

When it all goes wrong, the idea of actually getting it right seems an absolute impossibility.

So nowadays when I fail, I don’t try to get it right. I try to fail better.

I forget the video in which I first heard this idea, but to me these two words perfectly capture the mission statement of both the business owner and extreme sports athlete alike and I hope they can be a help to you in whatever you’re working towards in life.

Because let’s be honest, if you get a 0% on a test and then try it again hoping you’ll score 100%, you’re not doing yourself any favours. If you think in this way, it’s unsurprising that quitting will be the most attractive option.

But if you revise for an hour and try again, you might just be able to get 1%.

Sure you’ve failed, but you’ve failed better.

Keep working at it and percent by percent you can get to 100.

So this is the process I work on these days. Looking at what’s not working, identifying what you need to do to improve and then doing that. Most of all, just like an extreme sports athlete, you can’t get dismayed, you can’t think negative thoughts. Don’t try to get 100%, just try again and try to fail better.

Getting to the top of the mountain is hard, it’s even harder when you expect to do it one step.

So remember, try to fail better and I wish you every success.

Jack

004

Rodney Mullen “A Beautiful Mind” Interview — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgEbxU5tZu4

It’s Funny How Things Work Out…

It’s funny how things work out.

This is a statement I’ve thought many times in the past year.

If you look back on your life, hopefully you’ve also experienced many instances where you’ve thought it too. Moments where, if you travelled back in time and told your younger self what would happen, younger you wouldn’t have ever believed it.

As I write this I’m currently on a plane heading to Austria to do a week’s work for all my time favourite company in the world of sport, Line Skis. This isn’t a goal or objective that I would say I’ve definitely been working towards in life but unsurprisingly it’s an opportunity I’m incredibly grateful for.

(It would also be remiss of me not to thank my good friend Row Emery here for the big part he played in making this happen, thank you Row!).

One of the key beliefs in the Christian faith is that “God works in mysterious ways” and regardless of your beliefs, to me it’s a sentiment that has great value in life. It’s so easy to get so focused on the day to day happenings and very easily get down or discouraged, particularly when things aren’t going your way, especially when you’re faced with something unexpected that makes you re-evaluate your whole plan in life.

Increasingly over the past few years I’ve seen friends go through hard times and have to deal with problems and issues that have completely thrown them off the path they had planned to walk in hopes of achieving their goals.

But looking back a few years later, the challenges they had to face and difficult decisions they had to make, have completely altered their approach towards life and they’re now far happier and more successful than they most likely would have been if they’d carried on with their initial plan.

I’ve had the song “God’s Plan” by Drake on repeat recently, if you’ve seen the music video you’ll know that half way through, the music stops and cuts to this quote…

“Thank God for what’s happening right now. It might not be good, but thank God”.

I think this quote perfectly sums up the idea that although you might be going through a struggle right now, hopefully in a few years time you’ll look back and be grateful that you had to go through it and be glad that things worked out the way they did.

I’m far too early on in my career to be giving out advice, but in my experience so far, for me and many others, it’s been really funny how things have worked out.

It’s debated who actually said this next quote, but it’s stuck in my head from the moment I heard it…

“It’ll all be all right in the end. And if it’s not all right, it’s not the end”.

So remember, it’s funny how things work out and I wish you every success.

Jack

003

Be Brave

Be Brave.

Recently these two words have been the guiding mantra in every decision I’ve been making and I hope that this ostensibly simple statement can be a reinforcement of confidence for you when you need it most.

I’m 27 now and just to about to embark on a new stage of my career. If you’re a similar age to me, I hope you’ve been lucky enough to experience lots of different working opportunities so far in your life and when thinking back to the beginning of each of mine I remember feeling exactly the same way.

My gut feeling was that it was the right thing to do but at the same time I was filled with trepidation and an inner monologue questioning whether I had the ability to do it.

It’s all too easy to convince yourself to fall back in to the safety of your old ways and that you don’t have the potential to do something new.

One of my favourite ever quotes from Gary Vaynerchuk (go check him out by the way) is…

“You didn’t grow up driving, but you figured that out!”

In my head I deconstruct that statement to the point that essentially everything we do on a daily basis now, at one point in our life we had no clue how to do and apart from breathing, we’ve learned how to do every little thing we do every single day.

So now whenever I start to question myself and find myself on the fence whether to take a step forward or fall back into comfortable old habits, I try to block out everything except the advice “Be Brave”.

Because it seems to me if you find yourself nervous, you’re probably doing the right thing.

One of things I’m most nervous about is writing this blog. I haven’t achieved yet anywhere near the level of professional, financial or personal success many great authors on this platform have so it feels massively audacious to be writing a blog giving my thoughts and opinions on life. I’m still really young and hopefully have a lot of time ahead of me to figure things out. In my head I’m justifying it again with another thought from Gary Vaynerchuk in that “one is better than zero”. If somehow by writing this article it helps one person to achieve one little thing it’s better than not writing it all and helping zero people do nothing.

So I’m reminding myself of those two key words and carrying on with this series, I hope that in some minuscule way it’s making a positive contribution to your life and next time you have that voice questioning whether you have the capability, the skills or the inner fortitude to achieve the task ahead of you, you’ll want to be brave and find out.

So be brave and I wish you every success,

Jack

002

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to start…

Just start.

Like you I have thousands of ideas that float in and out of my mind every day and every now and then one of them keeps popping back up, it’s at that point I think it’s worth doing something about.

This blog was one of them.

I wanted a place to start sharing my professional experience in the hope that one or two people will gain something useful from it and it will help them with their career.

I have no business writing a guide pretending that I know everything, because I don’t. But I’ve had nearly a decade working in the sports video production industry so I can talk about that. I can also talk about my intuitions and thoughts. I hope they’ll be informative and at the very least, entertaining.

One of the theme’s that will most likely keep reoccurring in this blog is thoughts and ideas referenced from Gary Vaynerchuk. If you haven’t come across him yet, stop reading this blog and go and watch him on YouTube, he’s incredible. Much of my content will likely be paraphrasing and sharing my take on his ideas.

One of my favourite of his concepts is “clouds and dirt”, pulling from two extremes, everything is constructed from a contradictory dichotomy. Lately, my intuition is that every single thing in life has this concept at it’s core.

For example, starting something new is both the easiest and hardest thing in the world. All you have to do is take one simple step but sometimes this action can seem the most difficult thing to do.

Writing this first blog should have been really easy, I had no time pressure, no expectations but at the same time I thought it had to be perfect and make a great first impression and so I held off until waiting until I was ready to write something of that caliber.

But in actual fact, this first blog will be both the best and the worst I’ve ever written. So far it’s the best one but in years to come it will most likely be my worst, hopefully the next one will be better.

Most likely it won’t be until blog number 78 that it’s good and will probably take until blog number 152 until it’s great, maybe not even then.

There’s a few things in the world of content I’ve started in this past few months and have been through the same thought process with all of them. My intuition says that media production is going to be very important in the coming decade, so if you’re thinking about doing something, just start. Because you can’t get better unless you start.

And you shouldn’t worry about what people think, because people’s opinions both matter intensely and don’t matter at all. Worry about what the people that care about you and want you to succeed think. Anyone who is going to be negative doesn’t matter.

So just start and I wish you every success,

Jack

001