I was listening to a podcast recently with memory coach Jim Kwik, and one thing he said stuck with me: your brain grows through stressors, and athletes, musicians, and pilots all keep rehearsing skills they’ve already mastered — not because they’re unsure of themselves, but because they don’t want to think about the fundamentals when it counts. The practice is what makes the performance automatic.
That idea maps directly onto photography, writing, videography, and storytelling. We tend to think our skills are “locked in” once we’ve shot enough weddings, filed enough stories, or edited enough video. But a skill you’re not actively using is a skill that quietly gets rusty — and the moment you need it most, under deadline, under pressure, in front of a client, is exactly the wrong moment to discover that.
The Photojournalist Who Kept a Side Story Running
I had a friend who covered assignments for a magazine, and like many photojournalism jobs, the schedule wasn’t steady. Coverage came in bursts, then stretches of downtime between assignments. Instead of treating that downtime as empty space, he used it to find and work on his own personal stories — projects nobody assigned him and nobody was paying him for. He sent this to his agency, but they did it regardless of whether they reaped financial profits.
He did it partly to stay sharp. Shooting only when an editor calls means your visual instincts, your ability to read a room, your timing — all of it — only gets exercised in short, high-pressure bursts. A self-directed project lets you keep those muscles moving in between.
But there was a second, less obvious benefit: those personal projects became a testing ground for skills he didn’t already have. Because no client was watching and no deadline forcing a “safe” choice, he could experiment — a different shooting style, a new interview approach, a way of structuring a narrative he hadn’t tried before. Some of that experimentation didn’t pan out. Some of it became a new service he could offer the next client who needed exactly that.
That’s the real value of a self-assigned project. It’s not just practice for the sake of practice — it’s R&D. It’s how you show up to your next paying job with a new capability instead of the same toolkit you had last year.
Finding Your Own “Training” Projects
If you want to build this habit, the hard part usually isn’t the shooting or the writing — it’s finding a story worth spending your downtime on. Here’s how to go looking:
- Follow what you’re already curious about. The story that keeps tugging at your attention on your own time — a place, a person, a subculture — is a better long-term project than one you have to talk yourself into.
- Look in your own community first. Local businesses, nonprofits, churches, community events, and neighbors almost always have stories nobody’s documenting. Proximity makes it easy to return again and again, which is what most good stories require.
- Pick something that stretches a skill you want to sell later. If you want to add video to your services, choose a project that forces you to shoot and edit video. If you want to get better at long-form writing, pick a subject that needs more than a caption.
- Set a loose but real timeline. A project with no deadline tends never to finish. Give yourself a rough finish line — a gallery show, a blog post, a pitch to a publication — even if you invent it yourself.
- Ask people if you can follow them. Most personal project ideas die because the photographer never asked. A simple “I’m working on a story about X, could I spend some time with you?” opens more doors than you’d expect.
- Revisit assignments you didn’t get to finish. Sometimes a client project only scratched the surface of a bigger story. Ask if you can go back and tell the fuller version on your own.
- Keep a running list. Every time an idea crosses your mind during a normal workday, write it down. When downtime hits, you won’t waste it deciding what to do — you’ll already have a list to pull from.
The goal isn’t to fill every quiet week with a new project. It’s to make sure that when the quiet weeks come, you have somewhere to point your camera or your pen instead of idling. That’s what keeps the instincts sharp, and it’s often where the next thing you get to offer a client actually comes from.
