When I was a few years into the lighting part of my life, moving lights started to become a big deal. There were quite a few people on the team, my boss included, who wanted us to look into buying some moving lights. This sounds like a dream come true! My boss is asking me to spend money on new gear! Get out!
Even with it being such a rare occurrence, I pushed back pretty hard because I knew that I didn’t have the time necessary to devote to programming them…did I mention I was also shooting and editing all the videos at the time? Well, I finally gave in and we bought 2 spot fixtures. But except for Christmas and Easter, I never used them.
Just as I thought, I didn’t have the time necessary to really get the most out of them. They collected dust. And the whole time they were getting dusty, I kept thinking that we hadn’t been ready for this step. It was probably time to move in this direction, but we didn’t have the capacity to succeed at it.
Looking back, I would have continued to push back and figured out a way to spend that money on something else; something that would have moved us to the next step; the one we were actually ready to take.
Since we all have limited resources, it is important to spend them as wisely as possible. Sometimes saying no to something really cool is the right answer.
