Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero - Creative Hibernation

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

In this episode, I discuss a concept from photographer Ahndraya Parlato on the importance of temporarily stepping away from your craft in order to reassess what matters and why you did it to begin with, a process she calls hibernation.

Welcome to Your World Within Daily. I'm Eddie Panero, and in this episode, I want to talk about some advice from a photographer on the importance of what she calls hibernation, stepping away from your craft, stopping, essentially, so that you can see it from a different perspective, so that you can reacquire your inspiration, ask yourself the tough questions, and come back more energized than you've ever been. So I talk a lot about the carryover, right, between. sports, the arts, business. There are some very important parallels there

that if you understand in one arena, you understand everywhere. That's why I can make the argument all day. People ask, and someone asks on a podcast I was on last night, is college a good investment in 2020? And I'm like, I don't know the answer to that. I think there are no one-size-fits-all. If I could go back in time, I wouldn't change a thing.

And one of the reasons for that is because when I was in school, I was on the crew team. And I was a D1 athlete. And I learned things there that I don't know if I'd be able to acquire in other aspects of life. I mean, I imagine I would and I hope that I would. But they were sort of the building blocks for everything. So for me, it's invaluable, you know. And when I was talking to my buddies, Zach and Morgan, about this book, I started flipping through it and opened right to a page where there was a little paragraph. I'm like, oh, my God, that's it right there.

Everyone can learn from that. And the idea is it's by aperture who makes the light that's shining on my face right now. And basically, every page is a little bit of a tidbit from a different photographer on. something that helped them. And so I wanted to read you this one in particular by Andrea Parlato, I think I'm pronouncing that right, and the idea is hibernation. And it's a couple sentences. I'm just going to read it straight from the book. She says, stop actively looking at photographs and stop making them for a period of time. No blogs, no books, no websites, visually hibernate. try to forget what you think a good or cool photograph is.

Try to forget what you've been taught in school. After forgetting all that, try to remember why you wanted to make pictures in the first place. Do you still feel compelled to photograph? What do you want to photograph? Write down your answer. When you feel hibernation is over, begin making images again. And the reason I think this is so valuable. The reason it popped out at me is because of,

of, you know, something I allude to from time to time. It's the rules and routines of the day-to-day take over the rationale for why we're doing what we're doing. Right? There's that phrase, remember why you started. What brought you to it? You know, because it's important to scale. It's important to have processes. It's important to automate.

But when it becomes the reason for doing what you do, you lose what's important. You know, I use a metaphor of a city. When you're in it, it's a different world than when you're outside it. And you can see the beauty and the magnificence of the lights. And you understand, wow, that's really something special. And I think that carries over to a lot of things. A lot of things we do. If we paused, like she mentioned, if we stepped away,

if we cut off, we'd remember what was important and why we're doing what we do. And then when you re-approach that thing, because you've had time to breathe, because you've had time to assess, hey, what's meaningful to me, you will have had an opportunity to adjust and do things for the right reasons. And so that's really the takeaway there. and that's, you know, what I hope to communicate today is, you know, don't do things just to do them. And that's not like a preachy point the finger. It's something we all do, right, particularly in the day to day. Like, what's interesting is if you don't automate and you don't plan and you don't have routines, you fail. But if you don't step back, if you don't pause, if you don't hibernate, as she says, then, like,

becomes the routine. The routine no longer is a bridge to get you from point A to point B. It becomes the essence for doing what you're doing. It becomes point B. And there's a very big difference. It seems subtle, but it's very important. If you don't do that, you burn out. If you don't do that, you lose yourself. If you don't do that, you forget the joy and the happiness that comes from jumping out of bed, doing things because they matter to you. So maybe we take that advice. Maybe we we hibernate on something, one or two things that we do every day, and we ask ourselves, hey, why do we do this and how can I come back and make it more meaningful? All right, I hope this podcast added some value. If it did, please subscribe, rate, review. Helps me get it out to the world.

Guys, I appreciate that more than you know. So thank you, and I will catch you tomorrow.