Finally, a decade later, people are willing to pay me fairly for what I do. And then I go and get cancer! Do I turn down a job that can pay a month’s mortgage? 2 months? 6 months? Where do I draw the line? Could that money go towards a much needed vacation for my family? Or maybe a trip for a new cancer treatment center abroad?
Is there a better way to make money that utilizes my skills to the fullest?
I struggle with those decisions. But, looking back at it, I’ve been in similar situations before. I remember my wedding videographer days. This was over a decade ago, just before the DSLR revolution. My heart was never into filming weddings. At the time, I had a feeling that we (the videographers) were the last ones on the totem pole. We would get hired only if the couple had it in their budget after hiring everyone else. I also felt like we were aggravating the guests at the wedding by being very paparazzi-like. It just wasn’t for me.
Even with knowing that, it was extremely hard to resist that down payment check. The real problem with that is, sometimes the wedding wasn’t for another year! So in order to get out of the wedding game, you have to kind of do it cold turkey otherwise you have obligations for a long time. Shut it down totally, no matter how good that down payment check looked. One day I made up my mind that I wasn’t happy doing weddings and I decided to not take any more reservations. Of course, this left me very broke for a while. So broke that my gas and electric got turned off at one point and I was routinely taking cold showers in the dark. My girlfriend at the time thought I was a “fucking loser” (those words verbatim) and couldn’t understand why I was giving up thousands of dollars of down payment money. I didn’t have all of my priorities in line back then, but in the long run, my decision to quit wedding videography was one of the best ones I ever made because it eventually opened up doors that weren’t going to open up otherwise. Also, I didn’t like doing weddings, so I naturally felt better about my life in general.
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