The gear you can't afford is not the barrier keeping you from success. Gear has very little to do with photography.
Interpretation
Success in photography depends more on skill and creativity than on expensive equipment.
In this quote, Chase Jarvis emphasizes that the tools and gear you use are not the primary factors that lead to success in photography. Rather, it is one's ability to envision and create captivating images that matters most; relying too heavily on equipment can cloud this fundamental truth.
In practice
In a photography workshop, to inspire students about creativity over equipment.
It's the first time in the history of the world that creatives are also distributors. And that's very profound if you think that up until the recent history, permission was required for us to be able to share work at any sort of scale. We had to get permission from galleries, from ad agencies or photo editors to be able to have our work out there. And now anybody with access to a computer can show their work in 200 countries around the world.
When you have a challenge and the response is equal to the challenge, that's called 'success'. But once you have a new challenge, the old, once-successful response no longer works. That's why it is called a 'failure'.
You are not your resume, you are your work.
It's insane to me to ask anybody to be what they're not. Know what you know the best, love the most. That's always going to be the answer to the thing that you have the best shot at winning at.
I will not allow yesterday's success to lull me into today's complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure.
Think in terms of what's good for the other person and success will seek you out.
When I talk about money. All you see is the struggle. When I tell ya, I'm livin' large, you tell me, its trouble.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.