One of the greatest traps that any creative person can fall into is comparing their progress against someone else’s apparent success. It’s a common human behavior, but in the the realm of the artist, it can be incredibly self-sabotaging, leading to procrastination, paralysis and a pernicious undervaluing of one’s work.

As Zack Arias says so eloquently in his video, Transform, every one’s photographs sucked when they first picked up a camera. Great photographers who have achieved a level of public name recognition in and out of the photographic world all began with little knowledge of the difference between an f-stop and a shutter speed.