THE MAX LIFE:004
THURSDAY, JULY 4TH 2019
Happy Independence Day! Most of you are probably out in the sun right now, pounding some Budweiser, and shoving wieners in your gullet. MERICA! That’s cool. The other small percentage of us will be on the couch watching our boy Will Smith in Independence Day! Fuck it, might even throw on the sequel as well. I don’t know. I wasn't sure what to talk about today. Since it is a patriotic holiday and everyone is filled with passion, let’s talk about passion.
I talked yesterday about doing what you love to do. I guess you could say being passionate about something is the same as loving. From what I was reading they overlap but are different. Either way there is something that came up in a discussion I had yesterday with a friend that neither of us had the answer to. It involved well known “successful” people preaching and telling their stories. You hear it all the time from some of these “gurus.” Find the thing you are passionate about and find a way to make money from it. Oh, how about this one. What is the one thing you enjoy so much that you would do for free? That one right there sounds like an easy one to answer. 4 years ago I would have said video production. As I sit here in the present, I think that question is just fuckin unrealistic. There is a place for doing free work for a short amount of time. I went past the line a long ass time ago and I’m starting to think it came with some consequences.
“What is the one thing you enjoy so much that you would do for free?”
Everyone has to start somewhere. When you have a new skill or service to offer someone you need proof. This is where working for free comes in handy. For me my skill I was developing was video production. My mom had bought a video camera when I was like 6 years old. When I got into my junior high years, my friends and I would use it. I always wanted to make skits and one day we did. We made a few. For some odd reason it was alway us acting really ghetto, jumping someone and taking their shoes. Yeah I don’t know what the fuck that was all about. We thought it was fun. Fast Forward to my late teens, early 20’s I still had visions of doing comedic skits. Again, I made a few, but most of what I did were vlogs from trips my friends and I took. I enjoyed filming all our crazy behavior and making a video out of them. I never thought about doing it as a career. It wasn’t something in my reality at the time. Not until 2014 when I kept walking by the video room at my community college to get to my massage classes. That was when the positive voice in my head was like “oh you should do that.” I moved to phoenix that year and decided if I was going to go back to school it would be for video production.
“I never thought about doing it as a career. It wasn’t something in my reality at the time.”
I found a school called Alpha Pacific Institute. It was a 7 month accelerated course for video production. Everything was hands on which is what I liked. Sitting in a boring class all day always made me want to wash my mouth out with a shotgun. I had this crazy motivation at this time. I was new to Phoenix and trying to make everything work out. The passion I had for video was as high as could be. I was learning new stuff everyday and creating. When I graduated is where I think the passion started to decline. I was working 2 jobs and didn’t have much money left over after my bills. That made saving up for a camera pretty tough. Since I had no camera I couldn’t really practice. I didn’t get a camera until a year after I graduated. That was a lot of time that went by not practicing. The universe tends to send you things in weird packages. Shortly after getting my camera, I got brought on to shoot video for Rush Club. This was exciting because of what I thought I would learn. The passion started to go up again. I got to shoot with higher end dslr cameras and had the freedom to shoot how I wanted. Rush Club also got me connected with a guy named Danny Page. Danny had a program he was doing with clients that he needed video for and came to me. I did a few videos for him before that ended. It was the first time I actually had demos to create and use for my own. He also paid me too! I didn’t even ask for that. These two gigs eventually came to an end. On top of that my car had died on me and again the passion was starting to decline.
“The universe tends to send you things in weird packages.”
A mile down the road from me was a gym called Crossfit PHX. The owner is Mycal Anders. Mycal (known as Derz) was also the head judge of Rush Club. I had messaged him about doing video for the gym in exchange for a membership. Since spring of 2017 I have been doing all of PHX’s content. In August of 2018 I then started doing video for Derz’s podcast called Feed Me Fuel Me. At this time I still had some big blocks in my head to get past. The main one was thinking my work was not good enough to make money. Over this last year I have been able to get out of that mindset. The new problem is all the free work I have done I think has taken a lot of the passion away. That is all my fault, and I’ll own it. This is why I think the question of asking someone what they would do for free is dumb as fuck. At the end of the day you have to make money to survive and do the things you want to do in life. I had money backing me up while I was working at the restaurant. Free work isn’t a big deal when you have financial security. It wasn’t until that long ago I started understanding my value. I have pretty much done nothing but give, give, give. It took a long time for me to get where I am and finally it is time to ask for the money. From now on every time I pick up my camera, I have to get paid or else I’ll be looking at my max life from a distance. Let’s be honest with ourselves. When you are free financially everything is better. It won’t solve all your problems, but it will take a few away. It will let you focus on what you love and are passionate about so you can actually live.
