It’s Saturday morning and as my regular readers know, I like to keep it light on the weekends.  I like to stay away from heavy business and marketing concepts…all the serious stuff.  That’s why it seems ironic today that I’d want to ask the question, “Are we all getting too serious?”   I could boil every challenge in the photographic industry down to one problem, we don’t laugh enough!

I can already see a couple of trolls out there rolling their eyes and getting ready to blog something like “Cohen is nuts!” He has suggested the problem with digital work flow, Uncle Harry stealing your business, photographers not knowing enough about photography, print competition not judging your prints fairly and people copying our photographs has been reduced to a theory that we need to laugh more!”

Yup, that’s what I’m saying!   For years I’ve listened to photographers analyze images.  One relatively well known lecturer used to do a whole program on what the composition in his images really meant.  A particular image represented a daughter’s climb to success.  A father’s hopes and dreams represented by an out of focus tree in the background.  My good buddy Tony Corbell, put it the best, “A hundred years from now it’s just going to be a pretty picture!”

Okay gang, let’s pick a week during the year where for seven days in a row we just laugh at everything!  We’ll laugh at images that are out of focus.  We’ll laugh at all the challenges in our business.  We’ll laugh at people who disappoint us.  We’ll laugh at growing older.   We’ll laugh at winter weather that leaves us dreaming of Hawaii. 

We’ll even laugh when life or a bird dumps all over us!  blog(Notice the mess on my left shoulder – and yes, we laughed until there were tears running down our faces!)

 Now, on the second week it’ll be catching and we’ll laugh with our family and friends.  We’ll laugh with our clients.  We’ll laugh with our vendors and the world just might start to loosen up.  Then, once it’s loose enough, maybe we can really accomplish something – talk more to each other, share ideas, grow our businesses and live healthier more productive lives.

I actually thought I had a unique thought with all of this - all mine, until I went looking for a quote in Google that would wrap this up this morning.   With a big smile on my face, I’m proud to announce my Saturday morning blog is hardly original and apparently been bouncing around the world for centuries, but I’m in good company!

“It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there’s nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.”
Dr, Wayne Dyer

“The human race has only one effective weapon and that is laughter!”  Mark Twain

“God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh!”    Voltaire 

“Laughter is the shock absorber that eases the blows of life!” Anonymous

Happy Saturday everybody – keep laughing!