The Timing is Never Better

The Timing Is Never Better

By: CHU Photographs

Last week I wrote about negative space — how the difficult parts of a creative life aren't interruptions to the work, but part of the composition itself. Stillman's argument in I Don't Want to Grow Up was that we cannot have light without dark, left without right, growth without resistance. That the struggle is the point. I want to extend that idea this week into something more specific: what happens when the resistance isn't internal — when it's external, sudden, and completely outside your control. What happens when things change before you're ready.

Change doesn't ask for permission. It shows up when you're mid-plan, mid-build, mid-comfortable — and it doesn't care. The instinct is to resist it, wait it out, or convince yourself you'll move when the timing is better. I've been rebuilding CHU from the ground up this year — new brand structure, new positioning, new service model, new website, new content strategy — and none of it happened because I sat down one day and decided everything was perfectly aligned. It happened because the version of the business I had wasn't working the way I needed it to, and staying still felt worse than moving in a direction I wasn't fully certain about. Every version of CHU that has gotten closer to what it needs to be came out of something shifting unexpectedly. A pivot in the business model. A service I didn't know I'd offer. A conversation that opened a door I wasn't looking for. None of it was planned. All of it mattered.

Staying positive through change isn't about pretending the uncertainty doesn't exist. It's about training yourself to ask a different question. Not "why is this happening to me" — but "what is this making room for." That reframe sounds simple and it is. The hard part is remembering to use it when you're actually in the middle of the disruption rather than looking back at it from the other side. This is exactly what Stillman means when he talks about approaching life with the curiosity of a child — not naivety, but the genuine openness to not knowing what comes next and being okay with that. He argues that true fulfillment comes from engaging in one's passions and creating a life that resonates with individual values, regardless of societal expectations — and that a satisfying existence isn't confined to a single, predetermined path. For a creative entrepreneur, that isn't just philosophy. It's the operating model. Yelp

The other half of this is recognizing opportunities when they appear — and understanding that they rarely look the way you expected. Opportunities don't always announce themselves. Sometimes they look like a slow week. A canceled shoot. A plan that fell through. The space that opens up when something doesn't work is the same space where the next right thing tends to appear, if you're paying attention instead of panicking. I've found that the moments that felt most like setbacks in this rebuild were almost always the ones that forced a decision I'd been avoiding — a clearer niche, a sharper offer, a conversation I needed to have with myself about what I was actually building and for whom. The disruption created the clarity. Resisting it would have delayed both. Stillman writes for the artists, the life seekers, the people who doubt conventional wisdom and continually search for newer, better ways to live — and argues the world needs them now more than ever. That's not a comfort statement. It's a call to actually move. CHU Photographs, LLC

Taking opportunities before you feel ready is the part nobody likes to talk about honestly. There's a version of preparation that is genuinely useful and a version that is just fear with a more respectable name. The line between them is worth examining. Send the email before the portfolio feels complete. Take the meeting before the pricing is finalized. Say yes to the project that scares you slightly — not the one that terrifies you, but the one that's just outside your current comfort zone. The people who build things aren't the ones who waited until they were certain. They're the ones who decided that uncertainty wasn't a reason to stay still. New week. New room to move.

Next week I want to get into something that ties both of these posts together in a more tactical way — because embracing change and staying open to opportunity is one thing, but at some point you need a system that converts that energy into actual results. I'll be breaking down the content framework I've been building for CHU — how SEO, content marketing, and conversion work together as a single machine — and what that means practically for a small creative business trying to grow in a local market. It's the behind-the-scenes of how this blog, the newsletter, and the social strategy are all connected by design, not by accident.

Sources Stillman, Scott. I Don't Want to Grow Up: Life, Liberty, and Happiness. Without a Career. Wild Soul Press, 2021.

-CHU (Colin Harmon-Ulmer)