How You Can Become a Great Photographer

To become great is to become big, strong, magnanimous. Anyone and everyone can become great. What is required?

Time
Patience
Great industry
Perseverance
A spirit of playfulness
Curiosity to continue
Continual editing of your work and portfolio
Always striving for more.

What is a great photographer?

A great photographer:

A great photographer is large, grand, and strong.

A great photographer strives for excellence and greatness. A great photographer is continually hungry for more. To constantly augment his or her abilities; to always consume the best great master photographers of the past, and to augment themselves with great visual intelligence and with great industry.

Ten years is sufficient

To become a great photographer, you only need around a decade of continuous focus and work (10,000 hour rule). This means hustling hard everyday for around 10 years. Consider Michael Jordan; he was able to master the game of basketball in around a decade.

It took me countless hours of shooting, analyzing the greats, reading and writing photo books, teaching, and blogging to become a master photographer. Even though right now I don’t consider myself the greatest of all time (yet) [that title is still reserved for Henri Cartier-Bresson], I still consider myself a great photographer. Why? I have high visual intelligence for photography, I have a strong portfolio, and I have deep wisdom and cross pollination between photography, visual arts, philosophy, and entrepreneurship. Truth be told right now for me at age 32, I don’t see any photographer even in my stratosphere.

Greatness is open to all

The extremely optimistic thought I have:

All is allowed and able to become great.

If we think that industry, effort and hustle are essential to greatness … isn’t this the ultimate optimistic idea? This means it doesn’t matter who you are, where you came from, what your lineage is, or what your background is. If you are hungry enough and want to hustle hard enough, you can become great.