About a decade ago, I had the idea that going into technical product photography would be where I’d make a ton of money because it’s so very specialised. Imagine, with all kinds of specialised equipment, me taking photos of precious jewels of which the retail prices range from AUD5,000 to AUD20,000! For that, I spent a small fortune setting myself up.
It’s not hard to guess what happened, right?
I hated the repeated, monotonous, and tedious aspect of that type of work. There was plenty of troubleshooting to do, but it was painfully dull and scary at the same time because the pieces were so small and easy to drop on the floor – OMG! My stress level was through the roof whenever I had to shoot a batch of rings.
There was only one thing for it. I had to give up that niche. Hang on, but I’d spent so much on the specific equipment already! I kid you not about being in a terrible quandary. Looking back, it’s so evident that I had to walk away from it, but I struggled to make that change. The reason is nothing more than the problem known as sunk cost fallacy.
All of us, to a certain extent, suffer from loss aversion. When we invest any kind of resource into something, we tend to hold onto it, sometimes to our detriment. Jewellery photography was one of those things for me. I took some fantastic pictures! But I hated every bit of the process. On the flip side, it was a great experience because I learned a lot from it, in a multitude of ways. At the end of the day, however, that was that. The money/time/other resources were the price I had to pay for that learning, and I have no regrets.
So I moved on, and the rest is history.
Remember, you can’t brand a business if you don’t enjoy the process of that business.
What are you holding onto that you really should have moved on from?
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