A modern trend that is taking over every freelancer is hustling. The mantra is repeated by some of the most popular productivity “gurus.” The more hours you put in, the more outcome you will get. However, following this hours = improvement idea is dangerous for your health, creativity, and ultimately, photography.
Toxic Productivity
As someone who is fairly young, I believed in the idea that the more hours I put into one given thing, the more outcome I will get. That was my work ethic for pretty much everything from learning to being a photographer or writer. Starting the day at 5:30 in the gym and finishing off at 11 PM in the office was the dream lifestyle. Luckily, it never got to that point, as my natural laziness took care of my stability as a young freelancer. Beating myself up for wasting an hour watching Family Guy was part of the problem. Of course, how dare I watch Family Guy if I didn’t update my Facebook page bio or make a new killer business card that would impress everyone who got it?
Unfortunately, many photographers who are starting out fall into this trap of hustling. They watch motivational videos on YouTube with people explaining how they did it: shooting photos every day, 365 projects, working 17 hours a day to buy the best camera, having three side-jobs unrelated to the industry, and so on. The reason behind the hype around Hustle culture is that many believe that the amount of time spent on any given task translates into useful work done. That is simply not true.
Productive Work ≠ Useful Work
A silly example is on order: any fidget toy. The whole purpose of it is to press a rubber button, then flip the thing and press the button again. While keeping you busy, it does not result in any useful work done. It feels like an engine on idle: fuel is consumed, parts are moved, but the car is stationary.
Applied to photography, it is suggesting that not everything you do photography-related is useful in terms of helping you be a better photographer. A 365 photo project, where you take a photo every day is meaningless and wastes your time if you do it for the sake of doing it. Designing a new business card will not get you any more bookings if there is no one to hand it to. Working 17 hours a day to make the most creative website anyone has ever seen will end up harming you because no one likes a complicated website. I built my website in a few hours, and my logo took me only an hour to make with a fancy font in InDesign (I spent too long on finding the font). The takeaway should be asking yourself if the task you’re doing has any meaning to it at all. As a fashion photographer, I don’t take landscape pictures unless on a trip and for recreational purposes.
Hustle Culture Ruining People's Health
A key danger of Hustle culture is being overworked. It has been proven by scientific studies that being overworked takes a toll on both your mental and physical health
Mental Health
Speaking from personal experience, hustle culture at one point led me to being unable to relax. The to-do list always had more items than I could get done, and at the end of the day, I would dread the photos I didn’t edit, articles that I didn’t write, phone calls I didn't make. This ultimately led to being constantly irritated, closed to any emerging opportunities, and short-sightedness. There was a daily to-do list, but no yearly plan. On a grand scale, this means focusing on the details more than on the journey. What use is a perfectly functioning machine going in the wrong direction? Fortunately, it never got to the point of serious consequences. Lastly, poor mental health results in a lack of creativity: a true evil in creative industries.
Physical Health
The primary effects of overworking or hustling can leave you undernourished. Naturally, a healthy lunch that takes time to consume can feel like a waste of time when there are energy products readily available. The health effects of poor diets are well known. Another one is lack of sleep. Feeling guilty for not completing the “necessary” work, especially when it’s not enjoyable, leads to being sleep-deprived. Lastly, the work hard, play hard mantra puts unnecessary stress on your body. Working hard means poor diets and lack of sleep, while play hard entails unnecessarily high alcohol consumption and late-night meals. While I am not a health expert and can’t tell you every detail, I am speaking from personal experience with hustle culture.
What To Do About It?
Hustle culture is detrimental, possibly deadly, that is clear. Let me tell you how I got over the idea of working for the sake of working.
1. 80/20 Rule
It is probably overused, but it is true. When I analyzed my annual income, I noticed that around 20% of all jobs brought in 80% of the income. The same applies to gear: only 20% of what I own was used on 80% of the jobs. The general consensus is that 20% of input translates into 80% of output. Monitoring your daily tasks and their impact on your income and excitement will help you to find out which 20% to focus on.
2. Not Watching Motivational Videos
There are a lot of YouTube videos that will make you want to go and work 17 hours a day every day. I know for a fact that they give an endorphin boost and inspire you to work on anything, just to be someone who is “doing it while others sleep.” However, watching them is the most ridiculous way to waste time because you haven’t done anything beyond watching a video in your shorts for 20 minutes. Those 20 minutes could’ve been spent on learning something that will improve your work.
3. Realizing That Time Is the Most Valuable Asset. Full Stop.
The only thing that is non-renewable in your life is time. If doo-doo hits the fan and you lose your job, McDonald's is always hiring, if you’re sick, your body can recover to some degree, and so on. the only thing you cant recover is time. Therefore, being cautious about where your time goes is crucial to becoming a more successful photographer.
The Only Thing That Matters
As photographers, we are selling our work, not personality, not the fancy website, nor anything else. The only thing that matters about you as a photographer is having great work. Being likable plays into that a little, but good work overshadows it. Although my website took me a few hours to make, the pictures in it took me weeks to produce. In order to produce them, I didn’t use a sub-par crew but instead sought out the best models, retouchers, and stylists I could get my hands on. Although I’ve spent a load of time on learning, taking meaningful photos, and so on, I did it while also giving myself breathing space. Being able to sell your work comes from producing good work, producing good work comes from having breathing space where you can get inspiration and come up with ideas. Don’t spend days at a Starbucks telling people you’re an artist, but give yourself breathing space between projects.
Model @mirinkoli
Agency @annelise_arieli @facemodelmanagementhungary
Makeup: @karinajemelyjanova
Retouch @justlike_magic
Styling: @nagyemesestylist
Closing Thoughts
Hustle culture is the most dangerous trend that is infecting freelancers, especially young ones. With its effects on everything from creativity to health, it must be combated with smart and meaningful work. I always ask myself if what I’m doing is fun, meaningful, exciting, or helping me improve in photography. While not always, I try to get at least three of these factors to align.
I agree with pretty much everything but the bit about "the only thing that matters." I'm actually of the belief that quality of work actually is not super important for your average pro photographer. You need to have work that meets a certain threshold and be able to reproduce that work reliably. Beyond that, the value of higher quality work actually has a tremendous diminishing return with the exception of a tiny few competing at the top of the commercial photography world. The vast majority of photographers who are shooting common stuff like headshots, events, menus, real estate, catalogs, etc need to be able to make a passable image, that's it.
What actually really matters is sales, marketing, and negotiation. In the business of photography, it isn't the photographer who can make the best image that wins the job, it's the photographer who is able to make the sale.
It used to drive me nuts until I figured it out. I'd see photographers around town with horrendous portfolios yet they are able to maintain very healthy businesses for years on end while I saw other photographers who had breathtaking work not being able to make a penny. It was listening to Scott Bourne that made me finally realize why. The business of photography is about consistency and salesmanship. Those who can master those two things will find success.
that's my sweet spot, passable work at best! :-) but seriously I agree, my commercial work has won many awards and I could personally pick the crap out if it... but combined with catchy concepts, headlines and graphic treatments, the work keeps the clients happy.
For sure being a good businessman is important, however having good work is what ends up getting you jobs. For sure, no one will hire an arsehole, but still good work is never a bad thing haha.
Thank you for reading, Dana! I try to set aside as much time as I can to further my skills in photography, as it is what matters to me a lot.
9 times out of 10, self-proclaimed hustlers are doing 1 of 2 things:
-Lying
-Wasting time on nonsense
99% of the time, it's humblebragging bullshit.
These idiots will claim to work 18 hour days but they won't have lifted a finger to do something that makes business sense, like reach out to potential clients.
Reality - they are confusing being sleep deprived with working hard. Sorry, but watching YouTube and screwing around on Instagram is not real work.
Oh god, absolutely yes, Michael. Nowadays being sleep-deprived is a sign of working hard. When did being healthy and relaxed go out of trend haha. I for one enjoy a schedule that doesn't make me depressed 24/7.
Needed this today. America has some effed up ideas of work. I just quit a job where I literally couldn’t use the bathroom unless it was at lunch…and my coworker wouldn’t take a lunch the entire day. Like…we are human beings too. We aren’t robots.
Good article.
The idea of Work hard=be successful has to go. Work smart (with a degree of hard) translates to sucess.
haha, perhaps.
The "hustle culture" is an artifact of American culture that posits that lack of success is a moral failure because you were lazy/entitled/stupid etc.
Thus many leap frantically into activity that they hope will result in the success promised by the Youtube grifters.
Sure, some of the advice is sound. However so much is noise that makes one feel inadequate. The fake happy talk and straight up lies people tell online are part of the problem.
One does need to learn a field and how to approach a market but that can be done without enriching some online cultist wannabe.
Many years ago I was turned off by the portrait and wedding community as promoted by PPA. The key to success (allegedly) was tons of online gushing about how everyone was beautiful and Awesome!! and soooo in love etc that I knew I could never have that business model.
I am myself and deal with people as I am because I am too lazy to be someone else. I am about to retire after 40+ years in the business and am moving to the beach house I always wanted.
And I didn't have to kill myself being someone I was not.
Thanks for commenting and reading, glad to hear that you are being yourself!
Hustle culture is a scam that's been perpetrated on Americans since the beginning of this country. Even growing up, I had that same kind of viewpoint (and still do, actually, but not because I want to - but because it's so deeply ingrained). My father works almost every day of his life, first at the NCR cash register company while he built his shop, where is where he has worked since 1973. Still today, at the age of 79, he goes to work every single day doing fiberglass boat repair. Both of my (much older than me) brothers work excessively.
Hell, my dad went up to his shop and worked on a boat almost as soon as we got back from the funeral of his mother. I think part of it is that work helps him take his mind off stuff, but the origin of why he is a workaholic is the same reason so many millennials (and others) are workaholics.
There are Subway signs in New York that promote not sleeping so they can hustle. Our entire society views someone who sleeps 3-4 hours a night and works 18 hours a day as an inspiration. But if you dare to get 10 hours of sleep a night a few times a week, you're a lazy piece of sh*t.
When something is so pervasive like that, ingrained into us all of our lives growing up, it's very very very very hard to break out of that.
I still haven't figured it out. Except when I crash hard after working non-stop without sleep for 72 hours straight.
Maybe someday rich billionaires and their companies will view us as humans.
yes, absolutely, the question I have is when sleeping and being healthy stop beign a sign of a sucessful himan being?
A very very very long time ago. Obviously, centuries ago, most able-bodied men couldn't afford to not work constantly. They broke their backs because they needed the money and also you had to put a lot more effort into life in general back then. Even what is now simple stuff was a massive undertaking. Most time was spent in agricultural work. And people who lazed around were ostracized or possibly just murdered, I dunno, they really hated people who took even a small amount of time to just do nothing and rest.
Eventually, because of the industrial revolution, we got to a point where people were earning fair wages that allowed them to own a house and feed a family of four on an average salary. I'd say that was sometime in the late 40s or early 50s - after the war ended, basically. Minimum wage became a thing in the early 20s I believe when Henry Ford realized that paying people more money and only making them work 5 days a week instead of 7 actually resulted in increased productivity. But then we had the depression and the war.
And so it's no surprise that the 50s became an explosion of traveling and vacations. That period is considered when we established the idea of leisure time. The economy was booming, unemployment was at an all-time low and people were actually making fair money and by then the idea of a weekend was firmly a thing. So people began filling their time with hobbies and travel and stuff.
But some of them just clung to the idea that if you stop working you'll die or something. Which I get it - if you grew up in the early 1900s and experienced two wars and a great depression, it would be extremely difficult to suddenly change.
Anyway, I could go on, but the answer really is: that stuff has always been looked down upon, and if you took a nap or weren't working on Sunday, you were a bum. The only way it really changes is once older people die off. I mean, that's just true about a lot of things.
Another thing that these same people do: they look down on any kind of job that involves, for example, sitting at a computer. That's not a real job to them. Specifically it's older folks who do that obviously, but they're largely the ones who look down on leisure time too.
Actually it is the opposite. Whilst peasants in England, for example, had a generally tough life, they only worked when they needed to work. There was no work culture, as such, until the Industrial Revolution. It was then that workers were widely exploited for the profit of owners. This is the attitude that many people have now still.
Working hard never bothered me. I have always seen the illusion of hustle culture. And I have never cared about what anyone thought. If we have one life to live, I'm uninterested in using it to make money or gain fame. And I especially don't care to waste my life making money for a business owner or large conglomerate.
Whilst this maybe can't be applied to photography (I have a normal job with contracted hours), my Dad always said to me when I was younger that I should 'work to live, not live to work'... it may seem quite lazy in the outset but after 24 years in work of doing my job then learning to switch off when its home time, I can honestly say he got it right.
The people I come across who are trying to look ultra focused, highly motivated etc, are 99% of the time nothing more than a con merchant, thinking being at work for long hours is going to impress someone, when in fact their output is abysmal.
focus isn't necessarily a bad thing when applied to the right task. Still, working long hours on anything is detrimental to heath and mental stability.
Oh yeah, I have nothing against focus, its those that make out they are focused, when they aren't.
But fully agree with you on the long hours.
More like sucker culture.. Only one cashing is the one making such videos to get you believe
Great article and I agree with virtually everything in the article. Sales and marketing is the key to success and I'm a failure at that. I love to create but hate to sell it.
Thanks for reading!
Nice article, the hustle culture is toxic, and often fake. Most of these "gurus" aren't working that hard at all, its a scam to increase views and get paid for their youtube channels.
At this point I am much happier having a normal 9-5 and working on photography as a side passion, when and how I like
The whole concept of a guru who is telling you how to do stiff versus telling how they did it is often misleading. ONe cant assume a hypothetical scenario and work from there, one has to have experience in that scenario.
Ironic this was posted on Fstoppers…
Very good article and the comments took the words out of my mouth as Youtube, The Social Experiment, Work 17 hours hard, etc... I see and hear of people working harder in those areas than I did my entire Career and I have yet to hear of the benefit plan that they have in place for working such. You will get more out you by being you and not following some Con train down the rabbit hole.
Happy photographer, stay healthy and safe
Thank you so much for reading, Ivan! I'm really happy that this article was helpful and useful. Stay safe and excited ;-)