How many times do you have to quit to succeed?

I often feel like quitting, like I am not good enough, that my work isn’t enough, and that I am wasting my time. I push as hard as I do because it is the only way to prove I can make it. Relentless doesn’t cut it. I work seven days a week most weeks, taking a few hours off here and there. I was working full-time and trying to grow this. I love everything and feel great about it most of the time. But I worry it will all be for nothing, and I have periods where I feel worthless. I have a therapist, I journal, I eat well, I look after myself; I’ll be ok. But the younger me wasn’t ok; he struggled in a way that was absolute torture, and I know many other creatives do, and we tend not to talk about that, so I want to talk a little about my background and how many times I’ve quit, to remind you, that’s ok, but that leaving doesn’t mean giving up.

I quit assisting when I was 20; I was told I didn’t have the talent for photography, my dad was shutting his studio, and I wasn’t getting jobs anymore. I didn’t have my driver’s license, so I made a good assistant, but being unable to transport equipment or get to locations made me unemployable.

I bought my first DSLR using the $1000 I was given for my 21st and started shooting music photography and parties for fun. Then, I quickly moved into doing it for money for the dance music news website InTheMix. I was very fortunate for that! I don’t know if I would have ever really tried without that initial gift.

A video by MyMedia of an embarrassingly drunken trip to Melbourne, we landed, shot, and flew back all in the space of twelve hours.

I started my website Voena when they stopped paying us, and nearly quit when the street press and smaller jobs disappeared, as things went to Facebook, clients stopped seeing the monetary value. Especially as a company, Munkey, popped up, employing people to go to parties, making it harder to find those jobs. I never really liked the parties, but I loved the music; I liked finding interesting people and creative ways to turn these moments into stories!

Once I started Voena, I quit every few months, overwhelmed with working full time and trying to run a photography collective using my savings for cash flow. I wasn’t cut out for the stress of people calling me at all hours of the day and night whilst working full-time as a digital producer for Foxtel.

I’d landed my dream job! Channel [V], working in their digital team with this amazing team, who were supportive, chilled out, and looked out for me, even though I was a young bratty kid, and an absolute pain in the ass, especially if I drank.

I quit when I was 23; my girlfriend cheated on me, and we broke up after trying to make it work. A few hours before my 24th birthday party day, she called me and told me she had been sleeping with him for months. It crushed me; she said it was my work and lack of life balance and time for her; she said I could never do both, and I’d have to choose to be alone or to quit. I’d later learn I needed therapy, and a diagnosis from my psychiatrist explaining I was on the Autism spectrum really helped.

At the time, I’d just done press pics for Coldplay and Kings Of Leon; my work was on buses and billboards around Aus. Someone offered me money to sell my website. I had a trip paid for by Vice magazine to NYC, so I had to stick it out.

The trip made me change my mind.

I quit when my small agency, Voena, fell apart. I wasn’t ready to run a business. Impulsive and immature, I was drinking too much and out late every night. At twenty-seven, I was burning out, trying too hard to look successful; I’m glad I took a break now. I needed a fresh start, but it was soul-crushing five years of my life washed away. I didn’t get out of bed; I went into a deep depression and a rut and didn’t know what to do with myself. My Dad looked at my work, in his office at the time, and at my team members, and said to me, I don’t have an eye for it; with disappointment, he said to move on, and I did

It was surreal having now had clients like Adidas, Spotify, Sony, and Universal, working with some of the most prominent artists in the world like Flume, Mark Ronson, Brodinski, and Diplo, and all because I had such an exceptional team, who have gone on to do incredible things.

I kept shooting, but only for money because that was how I made my living, not for art or love.

I quit during COVID-19 after shooting campaigns for Tinder, Benefit Cosmetics, Tempus Two, and a lot of PR work for Audi, NRMA, Bacardi, and others. My family told me that if I didn’t quit, I couldn’t live with them, and my chosen career path was dead. My Dad called me pathetic, and my mum said I needed to stop trying to turn my hobby into a career.

This brand, OfOliver, came to me because my personal Instagram handle had always been Offoliver. After all, it was all my off-cuts, silly things, drinking, partying and the ilk.

OfOliver was because Of is about expressing the relationship between a part and a whole. 

This body of work is an expression of that.

I say this for everyone who has ever given up: don’t; you don’t have to be successful to enjoy something; find beauty in it.