Ever had this feeling that you're the only one working hard at something and everyone else just seems to be taking shortcuts? I have.
I've been in a situation where I had to update some yearly documents for a company and when I started updating the items, I noticed that when I would delete the text, the whole line would go out of alignment. I didn't understand what was going on at first. I thought it was the program, it wasn't. I thought I was doing something wrong, until I realized that it wasn't me that was the problem. Whoever had worked on this document used the space bar to align everything. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. How could someone do something that takes so long instead of using the tab key? Tabs can be your best friend when you're creating documents.
What I had to do took me so long to fix, but I fixed it. I told the client if they had let me create the document in the first place, it would have saved them a lot of money. Not only did they have to pay that employee money to hide their mistakes on the document, they had to pay me to fix it. That one document cost them almost 3 times the amount it was worth because someone didn't know how to properly create the document.
That's the problem with people these days, people do what they can to hide their mistakes not knowing that eventually their mistakes will stick out like a sore thumb.
In business, the mistakes aren't really trivial, they're pretty massive if you aren't careful. One thing that I constantly see from other people in this field is the inability to coexist. If someone I run into constantly talks about how great they are and how knowledgeable they are about all the equipment they read about on the internet, that tells me that they either just started doing this, or they're trying to compensate for something important, like talent.
If you look at a company like Pennylane Productions, you'll see some very flawless videos. That company is what inspires most of the people in our field of work. There is a reason people spend over $10,000 on their work, they're worth it. Since their company became so known, people try to imitate their work as much as possible to give the consumer the same feel and look of their work without having to pay their prices. The only problem with that is most people don't know how to recreate it. They don't know how to produce the same quality shots as Pennylane gets, even if they go to their seminars and buy their online classes. The practice in the field and the constant experience is what produces the perfect shot.
When companies fail to produce the same quality product as someone who has years of experience, it sticks out like a sore thumb with a giant spotlight on it. It not only tells the customers that they aren't that good, but those same customers tell everyone else. Word of mouth is important in business, so much in fact that it can either make or break a business.
I've seen many businesses rise and fall, all because they decided to use the space bar to hide their mistakes instead of using the tab key to do things right the first time. There's always ways to redeem yourself and correct the problem, but some mistakes just cost you too much.
-Adam