Meet Drew Hill

We recently connected with Drew Hill and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Drew, thank you so much for opening up with us about some important, but sometimes personal topics. One that really matters to us is overcoming Imposter Syndrome because we’ve seen how so many people are held back in life because of this and so we’d really appreciate hearing about how you overcame Imposter Syndrome.

Partway through my career, I decided to take a lifelong hobby of photography, and start bringing it into the work we do with my design firm. While I was really insecure about my skills, I had a strong feeling I could produce better images than the ones our clients provided us for their projects. But I constantly worried that I’d missed some key element — technique, composition, lighting, color grading, posing my subject — and that any professional photographer would see right through me. So I used two strategies to overcome imposter syndrome. One was to listen to and talk to my amazing parter, who regularly encouraged me. I shared with her both my successes and my insecurities, and we talked about them. Having another set of eyes, from someone who really believed in me, helped tremendously. My second strategy was to fake it til I made it, and to produce as much work as I could along the way. Fake it, and quantity. Doing more than the bare minimum of work needed (for clients, for example) let me make more mistakes and learn from them. It raised questions I had not thought of before (i.e. I tried some weird technique, and that led me to read up on how to make that technique work better). And it produced a LOT of work that I still have, and can look back at to see my progress. One interesting thing, looking back, is finding a photograph I think is really strong, that I did not see the strength of when I first shot it. What was I thinking when I shot it? Was it a happy mistake? Why do I see something new in it now? It’s a very tangible way to see that I’ve learned or at least evolved in my practice.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’ve been a marketing and communications designer for 30 years. Over that time, I’ve mostly been self-employed, and have serviced small businesses and non-profits. In the last 10 years, my focus has become environmental, educational, and social justice nonprofits, and I LOVE the mission driven work I get to do. I spend a lot of time in person with my clients, much of that over videoconference, because my clients are spread all over the US, and I travel a lot. I realize that I am energized by the friendships and collaborations that happen with my clients, so I’ve led with that over the last many years: relationship first, project second. That’s been a recipe for success for me, because often the project they (or I) had initially envisioned was much smaller than what we could actually accomplish together, and a strong relationship has allowed us to explore broader horizons. As a result, I’ve build countless websites that forward my clients mission-driven work. I’ve been able to build in a photography element to the work, that grows as a client trusts me and my ability to tell a story. At the end of the day, that is what I get to do: be a storyteller. And the more I can engage my client, and engage their audiences, the more success we have. As a result, I’ve been able to assist farmers who might otherwise have lost their farms, or help food banks maintain a steady stream of funding, or teach the world about regenerative organic agriculture, or help an arts program thrive in the face of steady budget cuts. These are just a few examples, but they are so exciting and rewarding.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1. Seek to help others, just for the sake of helping them.
– Even when I’ve been low on income, or stressed about bills, I’ve always tried to keep a large part of my business focused on helping others before even thinking about getting paid for it. The result is that I work with people and organizations I care deeply about. For many of them, I began by volunteering, and then was honest when I could no longer afford to give away my time. In a lot of those cases, the client found a way to pay me so we could continue to work together, and those working relationships have lasted many years.
2. Be proud of your work, but humble and open to learning.
– In my business, there can be a lot of egos. I’ve been bullied by CEOs, I’ve had my work insulted by self-professed experts, and I’ve been wrong about things I asserted. Finding a balance was key for me. Don’t put work in front of a client unless I’m proud of it, and ready to defend the decisions I made in creating it. But also, try to keep my ears open to constructive criticism and opportunities to learn from my clients. Especially as a self-employed consultant / business owner, I don’t have a lot of chances to have a mentor. So I try to listen to and learn from my clients to achieve growth I would not find within my own business.
3. Don’t focus too much on just one track that you miss other opportunities along the way.
– I went to a liberal arts college, and have always believed that was a good choice. It taught me that while I might *think* I wanted to major in, say French Literature, that in fact the drawing class I took on a whim turned out to reveal my life’s passion, and ultimately my profession. I thought I would be working in the technology sector when I started my business, but I soon found that the nonprofits I worked with were much more interesting, and that I slept better at night when I worked with them and their mission-based projects. So many times, if I opened my eyes to what was NOT right in front of me, but maybe off to one side or another, I would see something that was an unexpectedly better fit for me.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I would love to find others who want to experiment and do good in the world. At this point in my career, I want to focus on work that will heal our society, heal our environment, and have a measurable impact. I would like to work on projects that are not underfunded, if possible (a constant issue in my line of work). I want to do work *with people* — collaboration —  and I’d like photography/illustration/image-making to be my primary deliverable in the work. I would love to work with people different than me, and cultures different from my own (I’m a white, male, heterosexual, English-speaking person who grew up with privilege, and I have no need to forward those aspects of my persona). So, different from me is good, if you are willing to work with me. I’m looking for activists, copywriters, programmers, philanthropists, creatives, (non-creatives!), neurodivergent, minority, physically or mentally challenged, you name it — people who are young or old who have an idea they may not know how to realize alone. People who want to help others and better our world.

I can be reached by email at drew@pharos.net, or through my photography website, jdrewhill.com.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jdrewhill.com, https://pharos.net
• Instagram: @jdrewhill

Image Credits

Images credit: J Andrew Hill