Honesty Is Your Competitive Advantage

This is a chapter from the book A Lesser Photographer.

This is the everyone-is-trying-to-teach-you-something era.

The quickest way to make money these days is to tell people what they want to hear. Package it in as many appealing formats as possible and launch it to the masses.

Honesty is a much more long-term proposition. It’s about reputation. It’s about building trust. It’s rarely neatly packaged and satisfying, because that’s not what the real world is.

If you discover your form of sharing your work with the world is incompatible with the current norms—good! That’s what we hope for from artists.