The end of "the worst year ever"

2016.  So many people have apparently been fed up with this year.  (It's the same people every year, am I right)?  

Right now it's officially 3:15 am on the first day of 2017, and you know what? I feel amazing.  

I know this year has been filled with the deaths of celebrities that are "impacting" people's lives so deeply, and that our country is apparently going to crumble under out new president elect (whatever), but this year has been great to me.

I started off this year working 7 days a week, trying to balance my day job with my career, while barely getting to spend any time with my girlfriend or my son, because I was literally never not working.  The money was awesome.  My head was not awesome.  My anxiety was at an all time high and my depression was soaring through the roof on every night that I sat at home, wishing that my girlfriend and my son weren't spending the night at her parents' house for the fourth night in a row.  *Side note* We were doing fine, I just never had a day off so we had to make arrangements for someone to watch our son while we worked, and she was often too tired to wake up the baby, bring him home, and get him to go back to bed.

Running a business is hard work.  Anyone will tell you that.  For anyone that doesn't know, it averages out to making about 9 dollars an hour, while working roughly 80 hours a week.  At least in your first couple of years.  Often times you're working for almost nothing.  You stay up late (it's 3:30 am as I write this), you spend countless hours editing, and then re-editing.  You spend a few hours every day exchanging emails with potential clients, going over every possible thing you offer, just to have them sometimes decide to go elsewhere.  

Let me get back to the point.  

All of that aside, this year was still amazing.  I have been really pushing the video aspect of my business pretty hard this last year.  I can remember pretty much the exact day that I really saw things start to change and progress in the direction I wanted to be going. 

I was shooting a video for one of my friends' bands.  Halfway through the shoot, I had another band drive in from four hours away to meet with me about their video.  I had to wait two months before the actual shoot, but that one video changed everything I was doing.  It changed the way I looked at every single project I had.  It made me re-evaluate the quality that I was putting out for everyone to see and share. 

2016 was the year that I finally found my stride.  It was the year that I finally did something right that helped to put me on the map (if you're from Arizona you already KNOW the other amazing film makers we have here).  2016 for me will always mark the year that I got my foot in the door in the industry that I went to school for almost 10 years ago.

I absolutely cannot wait to see where 2017 takes this for me.  

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to every single person over this last year that has reached out to me, that has let me shoot promos for you, or that has let me do a video for you.

Let's keep it up!