207 Days on the Road & How It All Started
I’ve always loved reading travel blogs and I’ve always thrown around the idea of starting one on my own. Simple stuff, right? Plan a trip & write about your experiences. Wrong…..well, right. But there are a heap of things to get done before you actually get any of your work to go live. The most difficult part of making this dream a reality was deciding how I really wanted to present my stories. At first I plainly bit off more than I could chew. I thought that more automatically meant better. In reality we all know that in most cases quality trumps quantity. I already had a decent dslr as a gift from my father a few years ago (thanks dad!). But that wasn’t enough to compete with the world’s top bloggers. So I went out and pre ordered a drone and upgraded my Go Pro accessories to meet every occasion. I got a new computer and a subscription to Lightroom. Because all of these tools were going to catapult my content to the next level, right?! Haha. Once again I was wrong. All it did was discourage me. It allowed me to end up 207 days into my trip (domain and website hosting paid) and constantly come up with excuses.
I was a decent photographer but, I had no idea what I was doing in post editing. I’ve never been super computer savvy. I’m more of an email and netflix kind of guy. Customizing the website engulfed my entire energy. Not being able to get it to do what I wanted or look the way I wanted just added to the self doubts. “Is this really for me?, maybe I should give up”? And then there was the drone I spent a small fortune on. No matter how many of the advertisements preached about how easy drones are to fly it is simply not that true (at first). It’s like driving a car, once you learn you are good to go. But in the meantime it’s definitely a learning curve. Actually making your footage look cinematic is another beast of its own! Then there is the content itself. All these great experiences but how to present them in an original way and captivate readers? Just grounds for more excuses. All these excuses created this all encompassing self doubt. I tricked myself into believing I didn’t want to blog anymore. I was and still am having the time of my life just exploring. No need to complicate things I thought.
Those thoughts followed me until around day 203 when I scrolled down my facebook page and saw this inspirational movie clip. All of a sudden it was like this little ray of sunshine broke through the clouds of doubt and excuses. I started to remember why I wanted to do this in the first place. I love to travel, write and take pictures. I told myself why should anything else matter? I simply wanted to show my friends and family some of the things I was experiencing. Maybe inspire some people to get out of their comfort zone and visit some of the rest of the world. I told myself there is no need to try and perfect everything from the gate. Everything will come together with time. The first footstep is the most important one, the rest will fall into place.
Day 207. This is the day I threw away all excuses. The world is my classroom. I hope that you might consider getting out there and making it yours as well.