How To Keep The World in Focus

Staying On The Journey

Perfection sounds like a wonderful goal, until you realise how exhausting it is.

To be perfect is to assume you’ve arrived. That you’ve learned everything worth knowing. That you’ve somehow achieved guru status.

I don’t buy that.

I’d rather remain a student, especially when it comes to photography. There’s something far more rewarding about being on the journey than pretending you’ve reached the destination. You make mistakes, discover new ideas, meet interesting people, and occasionally create something you’re genuinely proud of.

Life works much the same way.

Too many people spend their lives watching from the sidelines while the years quietly disappear. We tell ourselves we’ll travel “one day”, take up photography “one day”, write that book “one day”, or chase that dream “when the timing is right”.

Then we wonder where the years went.

I’ve certainly had moments where it felt like everyone else was racing ahead while I was standing still. Usually those moments came after I’d made a wrong turn somewhere in life.

But wrong turns aren’t failures. They’re how we learn.

Human progress has always been built on mistakes. I doubt someone deliberately sat down one morning intending to invent the wheel. More likely, countless failures slowly became one successful idea. Every invention, every discovery and every breakthrough exists because somebody was willing to get it wrong often enough to eventually get it right.

The same applies to our own lives.

One of my favourite books, Secret Men’s Business by John Marsden, points out that hard work doesn’t always bring financial rewards. Life simply isn’t that fair. A person can work tirelessly for decades and still lose everything in a fire, a flood or a run of bad luck.

That doesn’t make hard work pointless.

The real reward isn’t always money. It’s the satisfaction of knowing you gave something your best effort. It’s looking back at the end of the day and seeing that you created, repaired, built or improved something, however small it may seem.