I’ve been wrong a lot in my life. I made mistakes when I worked at a newspaper. I made mistakes when I worked as a photo editor for a magazine. I made mistakes in my marketing job. And I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my photography career.
A few weeks back I wrote a piece on internalization versus externalization and where we place blame for our mistakes. Perhaps it is my lack of self-esteem but I cannot help but to always blame myself whenever something doesn’t go right.
I’m certain there is a healthy balance that we should strive to achieve but I also believe having that barometer keeps me working hard and striving to right the wrongs.
Several months ago my team was contacted by one of those pointless Instagram collection pages. You know the ones; they will post all your photos and pretend to be a community for the purpose of absolutely nothing.
This particular one wanted to host a transformation contest giving prizes to someone who lost a lot of weight and got in shape. They reached out to our team to see if we would donate any prizes.
Normally I would question the validity of a contest being held on Instagram by a page, which is not even a real company. But we burnt a few calories and looked into it and came up with a large bevy of prizes that included:
A photo shoot with the James Patrick Photography team
A free admission into our annual FITposium conference
A free copy of both of our e-books FitModelGuide.com & The Professional Model’s Playbook
At the time we felt really good about sending these off and potentially forming a new collaborative partnership.
But, despite what was really an overreaching generosity, we heard nothing back. Weeks went by. Weeks turned into more weeks. Finally I was getting angry. We were asked to come up with something and we offered all this and this “page” couldn’t be bothered to even respond to say “received” or “got it” or “we will review” or, hold your breath, “thank you.”
So I fired off a message to this page’s owner who contacted us demanding to know what was going on. Guess what, still no response.
Flash forward several more weeks and the owner reaches back out to us asking if we would be willing to sponsor their contest.
I responded immediately to say that we sent a proposal months ago offering several prizes and never heard back. That we followed up and still never heard back. So at this time, how could it be in our best interest to support this contest now?
The response “ok thanks”
He didn’t say “I’m sorry I must have missed that, let me look into it” or anything of that sort. Just “ok thanks”
Don’t apologize, whatever you do. Don’t accept blame, whatever you do. Just say “ok thanks” and see where that ends up.
Perhaps we should consult a magic 8-ball to predict your future.
“Will you succeed with this approach?” Shake shake shake.
James Patrick
jamespatrick.com
IG @jpatrickphoto
