In the same afternoon, I have been the best photographer in Texas and a complete fraud.
Not as a figure of speech. Actual sequence of events.
I’ll deliver a gallery at 2pm that I know is some of the strongest work I’ve ever made.
By 6pm I’m sitting in my truck genuinely wondering what the fuck I’m doing. How am I actually running a business. Am I even good enough to live off of this.
Nothing happened in between. Nobody said anything. No client complained. Just my own mind playing tricks on me.
That’s the part people don’t get.
The internet turned ADHD into a personality
There’s a whole genre of it now. Quirky. Scattered. Silly-fuckin-goose energy. Forgot my keys again lol, ADHD brain.
I’m not mad at it. Humor is how a lot of us get through the day. I’ve made the joke myself and I’ll keep making it, because why get mad about something you already know is going to happen.
But somewhere in there the real thing got sanded down into a bit, and I want to be honest about it, because I run a company with it.
ADHD isn’t just being a sillygoose. Sometimes it’s a real struggle bus.
It’s a blessing and a curse, and I’ve never been able to have one without the other.
The blessing is real and I’m not going to pretend otherwise
It’s why I’m still learning.
Twenty-six years after I picked up my dad’s Canon camera, I’ll still get an idea in the middle of a wedding and try it live. On somebody’s actual wedding day. Because I want to know if it works.
New light. New angle. Something I saw in my head and can’t stop thinking about.
That’s a big no-no in this industry, by the way. You don’t experiment with new gear or new techniques on a live gig. So I have a rule about it: only if the timeline allows, and only once I already have every shot the gallery needs. Then I’ll play.
I get bored doing it the same way. That boredom is genuinely useful in an industry where most of the work looks identical.
“Never satisfied” is the blessing and the curse in the same sentence
This is the cleanest example I’ve got of how this actually works, because it runs both directions at once.
I am never satisfied with my work. That is exactly why the work I did last year should look worse than the work I do now. It’s the engine. It’s the whole reason I’m any good.
It’s also why I’m terrible at posting on social media.
I’ll look at a genuinely great photo, one I know is great, and immediately start tearing it into pieces. Shoulda shot it wider. Woulda been better ten minutes later. Coulda moved her hand. Then I get overwhelmed and post nothing at all.
A photographer who doesn’t post is a photographer nobody finds. I know that. I literally sell that advice to other business owners. I’ll still sit on a gallery full of work I’m proud of for three weeks and put up nothing.
Same exact trait. It makes the work better and it keeps the work invisible.
You don’t get to pick which one you get. That’s the part I’d want somebody to understand.
The curse is everything that isn’t the camera
Here’s what nobody tells you.
The same brain that will chase a shot up a rock bluff in West Texas is the brain that has never once saved a file correctly.
For years my whole business ran on whatever I felt like doing at that moment.
Not a system. Not a process. A damn mood.
- Files saved wherever, named whatever, on whichever drive was plugged in
- Workflows that existed in my head and nowhere else
- Follow-ups that happened if the lead happened to cross my mind on a Thursday
- Pricing that lived in six places, none of which matched
And it worked, right up until it very much didn’t.
Here’s the trap, and it took me way too long to say it out loud:
ADHD hates structure. ADHD hates routine. And ADHD fucking needs both.
That’s not irony. That’s just the deal.
Motivated as hell for about eleven days
This is the one that costs the most money.
I will get genuinely, unreasonably excited about something. I’ll build the entire thing in one sitting at eleven at night. Whole new system. It’s perfect. This is the one.
Then it just… turns off.
Not gradually. It’s a switch. And I cannot flip the son of a bitch back on by wanting to. I have tried. Wanting it has nothing to do with it, which is the single hardest thing to explain to somebody who doesn’t have this.
There is a folder on my desktop called “Ideas” with nineteen things in it and that folder is basically a graveyard of nights I felt like a genius.
Then there’s the whiplash
Best in the world at this.
Complete fraud who’s been faking it and is about to get caught.
Same day. Sometimes same hour.
I don’t say that for sympathy. I say it because I’ve talked to enough other business owners at this point to know a bunch of you are reading this going oh, that’s a thing other people have?
Yea. It’s a thing other people have.
I sell this for a living. I just wasn’t doing it for myself.
Here’s the embarrassing part.
I audit brands. That is literally a service I sell. Business owners pay me to go through their whole operation and tell them exactly where it’s leaking, what’s inconsistent, what they’re not doing, and what it’s costing them.
I’m good at it. I’ll find things in an afternoon that somebody’s been walking past for six years.
And my own business was held together with duct tape and vibes.
I knew every single thing I was doing wrong. I could have written the audit myself. I just could not make myself sit down and do it, because there was no client on the other end, no deadline, nobody waiting.
Turns out the thing I’m worst at is being my own client.
What actually changed
Two things, and they happened at the same time.
One. I finally ran my own brand through my own process. Same lens I put on everybody else. It was not fun. It was also the single most valuable week of work I’ve done for this company.
Two. AI. And not in the way people assume.
I don’t use it to write my galleries or make my photos. I’ll get into where that line is, because I have a hard one.
I use it to be the part of my brain that doesn’t work.
It keeps track of where I left off. It breaks a giant task into small enough pieces that I’ll actually start. It remembers the follow-up on day three and day ten so it isn’t sitting in my head all weekend. It maintains the CRM I paid somebody to build for me.
And the biggest one, the one I did not see coming:
It showed me what I was weak in.
Not what I forgot. What I kept forgetting. The pattern. The same category of thing, dropped over and over, that I’d never noticed because I was too close to it and too busy feeling bad about it to look.
That’s not a productivity hack. That’s the first time anything ever handed me the audit I couldn’t make myself write.
Best way I can describe what it actually is: AI is my organized brain. It’s also kind of the nagging, overprotective mom who makes damn sure you packed your lunch before you get out the door.
I need that. I did not want to need that. I need it.
The permission I had to give myself: hire it out
This one took reading a stack of books by people way smarter than me before it sank in.
It is okay to hire out the things that take you forever. Especially the ones that give you paralysis, where you sit down to start and just… don’t. For an hour. For a month.
Sabri Suby puts it as straight math: take the task, apply your own hourly rate to how long it actually takes you. If it’s cheaper to pay somebody else to do it, pay somebody else to do it. Then get back to the work you’re good at and the work that makes money.
That’s solid advice for anybody. For an ADHD brain it’s something bigger than efficiency.
Because the real cost of that task was never the hours. It was the three weeks of avoiding it. The low-grade dread every time it crossed my mind. The other four things I didn’t start because that one was sitting there.
You’re not paying somebody to save two hours. You’re paying to take the thing off the shelf in your head.
I used to read hiring out as admitting I couldn’t do it. It’s not. It’s the same call as buying a lens instead of building one.
What’s still broken
I’m not going to end this pretending I fixed it.
I have a site I’ve been building to sell prints of my landscape and fine art work. Ridin’ Shotgun. Years of shooting across Texas, New Mexico, Chicago, Mexico City, Europe.
It is not done. It has not been done for a long damn while.
I also have personal work from 2019 still sitting unedited. Years of my own photos I have never once made myself sit down and finish.
You know why? Because no client is waiting on any of it. Nobody’s going to email me about it. There’s no deadline, no consequence, and no one to disappoint but me, and it turns out I’m the easiest person in my life to disappoint.
It’s the one project that’s purely mine, and it’s the one that doesn’t exist.
That’s the curse, right there, in one sentence. Not a metaphor for it. The actual thing, happening currently, while I write a blog post about it instead of finishing it.
Where this leaves me
The chaos didn’t go away. It got contained.
What reaches my clients now is a follow-up that showed up on time, a price that matched what they read, and a question that got asked before it turned into a problem on a wedding day.
What stays on my side of the wall is a folder called “Ideas” with nineteen dead ones in it, and a print shop that doesn’t exist yet.
That’s not a cure. That’s containment.
Containment turns out to be enough to run a real business on.
If you’re building something with this brain: stop asking whether a system is good. Ask whether it survives you at your worst. Not you on a Monday with fresh coffee. You in week three, tired, with something more interesting on fire in the next room.
That guy is running your business most days. Build for him.
I get asked constantly what I actually use, so I wrote it all down. Every tool, what job it does, and the one I bought purely because buying it felt like solving the problem: What I Actually Use AI For.
