“I couldn’t sleep last night knowing it was going live today,” he tells me. “The video is the most revealing thing I’ve ever shared.”
I reply the only way I know how… with an inspirational quote by someone much wiser than me: Neil Gaiman.
“The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself…
That is the moment, you might be starting to get it right.”
“I think not being able to sleep, revealing so much of yourself, is a great thing,” I say to Elia Locardi, one of the most successful travel photographers on 500px and the last person you’d think would be nervous about sharing his story. And then I watch the video:
The problem with admiring successful people is that we only ever see the results of their struggle, the heights that they’ve reached. We don’t see the struggle, because sharing that struggle with the world is an incredibly scary and stigmatized step.
But as you can see from the video above and the burst of inspiration you feel when you’ve finished it, sharing that story can be incredibly empowering for the hundreds or even thousands of people who are facing those same struggles right now.
40 months ago Elia and Naomi decided to put all their things in storage and become “location independent,” but that was just a step in a much more difficult journey that began long before they bought their first one-way plane ticket.
Elia and Naomi actually started out on that path so many of us aspire to without a second thought, and ended up bankrupt and burnt out. That, sadly, is not an unusual situation. What they did AFTER that is extraordinary.
When I asked Elia what he thought this video was about, he told me it’s about, “not being scared to change your life and shift your priorities towards what’s really important to you.”
For the Locardis, that was travel photography. It was turning a dream life into a very sustainable reality… into a box of plane tickets and baggage tags. Is it time to evaluate what’s truly important to you?
To read the full story behind this video, why Elia and Naomi decided to share so much of themselves, and catch some behind the scenes glimpses into their life and journey, head over to FStoppers where Elia shares their story in his own words.
And if you want to see more from Elia or Naomi, be sure to follow them on 500px here and here, and then visit their website Blame the Monkey.
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