My love for photography was born out of a love for food.

Or maybe it was always there, and the food just helped bring it out.

Before I took photos professionally, I spent years taking photos for my food blog and eventually for this private underground restaurant that I ran out of my apartment.

It was a lot of fun and I really loved doing it, but I didn’t have enough money saved up to make a go of it. I learned a really powerful lesson there about demanding too much from your passion

I was extremely passionate about food and cooking, but I asked way too much of it too soon.

We hear all these stories of, say, an attorney who’s fed up with law work so she quits and starts a wildly successful pie baking business. What you don’t hear about is the runway of success that she had selling pies for a long time before realizing she could make enough doing it to quit her job.

Yeah, I didn’t do that.

I just said “I want to do this and I’m going to make it work” and tried to force it into being.

Could I have been successful? Eventually. But only if I had income from another source supporting it, or a long enough runway from savings to make it work.

Sean McCabe talks extensively about how to do this in his book Overlap. A big part of why that message resonated with me so much is because I had this exact experience, where I demanded my delicate little sapling of a passion bear me fruit immediately.

It doesn’t work like that.

Nature dictates that things needs time to grow organically.

So I learned my lesson. When I started to get paid photography work, it was a very gradual thing, where I SLOWLY got more and more work to the point that I could afford to stop doing my current job (real estate agent) and move over to photography full time.

I made less at the photography, but I enjoyed it significantly more, and that has always propelled me forward. I’ve always been careful to protect this little seedling, and not demand too much of it too quickly, because the pain of losing my last passion is always in the back of my mind.

But when my old days of cooking came up in conversation, I started to remnisce about the fun I had, and finding my old listing of Foursquare and thumbing through the images took me back. I miss it.

I wonder if I’ll get back into cooking professionally some day?
I always liked the idea of running a bed and breakfast.
Maybe it’s still in the cards.

When the time is right.