Are You Willing To Pay The Price For Your Dream?

What is your dream?  Do you dream of being a great musician, a great leader or a great photographer to name a few?  Ever since I was little I always had dreams.  We then go through life being told you can't do that, or you don't have the money to do that and so on and we lose sight of our dreams.  Many times to achieve our dreams we have to be willing to pay the price for it.

As John Maxwell states in his book, "Put Your Dreams to the Test" the dream is free, but the journey isn't.  We get to some point in our dream where we need to be the buyer of our dream.  What is the price we are willing to pay to make our dreams come true?  My dream has always been to be a great photographer.  Night after night I would research how to use my camera, understand composition and lighting and watch what other photographers were doing.  I would imagine me producing such beautiful images that they could be a piece of art and maybe even one day be hanging in a gallery.  What was the price I had to pay to get there?  Time and money.

I had to be willing to give up my free time to continue to learn and grow in my photography journey.  I had to invest more money to buy good lighting equipment if I wanted to produce beautiful portraits without using natural light.  I already had an awesome camera and lenses and just needed to add a few more things to my toolbox.  My issue was more about time.  I am always the person doing many different things and thrive on this, but at times I get overwhelmed and know that I need to take a break.  So I had to be willing to let other things go to continue investing in my time relating to photography.

I can see a huge difference in the quality of work that I produce and I know it is because of the time invested in growing and developing my craft.  So what is your dream?  What are you willing to pay to achieve this dream?

So here is an example of how investing in my dream has paid off.  This is a before picture from 2009 in TN of the Smoky Mountains.  Nice photo, but a little flat, boring and just really doesn't do anything for me.

This next photo is from TN, again in the Smoky Mountains in 2012, but you can really see the difference from photo 1 to photo 2.  Photo 2 the colors are amazing, you can see the depth of the mountains much better and overall it is a much more appealing photo to me.  I actually had this blown up on canvas and have it hanging in my office.  One of my favorite locations to visit!