Travel Blogger Gary Arndt talks about the Travel Biz, Photography, Podcasting and more [EP 251] - a podcast by Rick Saez

CreativeLive

Jack Black Dragon Ice

Everything-Everywhere

National Geographic

Suck Less Motto- the motto I always have is from when I would coach debate. I would always tell my kids. All you have to do is suck less. You don't have to be good. You just need to suck less than whoever you're debating, you know, competing against. So the goal was always just incrementally suck less than you did before and to just get better.

Advice

The best time to get into this was probably 10 years ago. And the second-best time to do it is today. Right? So you just need to start doing it. And you really do kind of need to, you know, get an obsession for it. The first year that you're doing it, If you look at most podcasts, for example, they never reach episode seven, right?

They just give up and most blogs are abandoned. So people have these dreams, they don't see success right away and they quit. And if you look at an exponential growth curve, there's this period where it's flat for a very long time. And then it turns up and it becomes almost vertical. And that flat part really sucks because you don't know how long you're going to be in the flat part.

I was just reading an article yesterday about, this guy with a tech newsletter, stratechery I think is the name of it. And it's become really successful in the last few years, he's making a lot of money from it. And I didn't realize he had been doing it for. Basically a decade. And you know, there were years where he's been doing this and it didn't get a lot of attention. And then all of a sudden it just kind of became a big thing. And there's a lot of things that kind of work that way, where you have to do it for years, photographers have the same thing, you know, that you suck at the beginning, but then as you improve your photography, people continue to follow you and like your images more.

Favorite piece of gear under $100

I don't even know where to find it because I got it for free. I went up to, Churchill, Manitoba to photograph polar bears, and the company that runs the excursions up there Frontiers North gave me a hat, just a plain old stocking hat, except it has an led light built-in. So you just like, press a dot on your forehead and then it turns this light on. So it's like a headlamp except it's built into the hat and it pops out and you can charge it via USB. So there are no batteries. I use that all the time and you have a flashlight and you could pop it out if you want and use it as a handheld flashlight. It's just the niftiest little handy thing, and I don't even know where you can buy them, but it was the best swag I've ever gotten.

21:49 - 22:11 Motto- Suck Less
22:50 - 24:40 Advice
38:03 - 37:09 Favorite Gear under $100