This morning was a bit of a slow start for me. I needed some warm up tasks to get into the real work of the day so I spent a few minutes touring around Facebook while I sipped my coffee.
I came across this video and was blown away. Clark Little is a professional photographer. His speciality is shooting the inside of waves. When the enormous breakers come crashing down on a tropical beach, he is likely to be under the thing taking pictures.
The images are breathtaking and it was a neat find this morning but as I thought about it further, I thought about it as a career choice. He did not wake up as a four year old dreaming of this. He kind of stumbled in to it as a teenager and grew along with it.
I bet wave photographer was not on his parents’ minds either. Imagine that dinner table conversation. “Sorry, dear. You want to do what when you grow up?”
But clearly, his family and friends provided support to him along the journey even thought they could not predict with certainty that he would be successful enough to earn a living.
I think we owe this to our kids, nephews, nieces and friends. There are lots of career choices that we cannot imagine – either because they have not been invented or because our experience is just too narrow.
We need to stop being discouraging and get on the cheerleading bandwagon. Clark Little is proof that careers can be created and develop into a successful and satisfying living in a very short period of time.