Got a chance to sit down for coffee with a super cool friend on Monday. Esther Havens. She’s an ultra legit humanitarian photographer who works with companies like TOMS, Charity: Water, and Warby Parker. She’s also speaking at #Echo13 – the conference I’m directing in July.
I’ve had the chance to sit with her a few times and hear some of the stories from her many trips. They’re pretty incredible. So naturally, when we got on the topic of what she should blog and write about, I told her she should write about her stories. Being held at gunpoint, playing international scavenger hunt with her friends…stuff like that. Very cool stories.
She hesitated at my suggestion, though. She said, “But everyone has stories like that.” False.
99% of people in the US have no stories at all – at least none like hers. Her life seems exotic and adventure-filled. But she doesn’t always see that because most of her friends are people with similar stories. She hangs around other humanitarian photographers and world travelers that have pretty incredible stories as well. She was totally disconnected from the majority of the population.
I’d like to call that beautiful blindness. That’s the only sort of “out of touch” that’s acceptable. That means she’s hanging around the type of people who inspire her to greater and greater things. She’s hanging around people who are going the same place she wants to go and have visions for the same things she wants to see.
I wish all artists could be out of touch with their audience – not looking down on their audience – but reaching for greater heights because they don’t know better.
The majority of the world has small vision – maybe around 99%. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find the 1% and be counted in that same number. It’s important who we hang around.