Meet Heather Willensky

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Heather Willensky. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Heather, we are so happy that our community is going to have a chance to learn more about you, your story and hopefully even take in some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way. Let’s start with self-care – what do you do for self-care and has it had any impact on your effectiveness?

My mother was a pediatrician, and whenever we were out in town together we’d run into the parents of her patients, who invariably stopped to chat. My father had long term health issues and alongside caring for thousands of children, she also managed his care, and somehow found time to be an incredibly loving and nurturing parent.

While my mom was an incredible person whom I’ve tried to model most of my best behaviors upon, her selflessness took an enormous toll on her health and wellbeing, and I’ve had to work hard to remind myself that I need to look after my physical and emotional health in order to look after my family and clients.

I spent years practicing yoga, but more recently began training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu daily. The physical exertion helps with my emotional stability, and the cerebral nature of the sport keeps my brain active. Once I week I also play competitive pinball on a team with my friends – I think regularly confronting loss and victory is an important exercise since so much of life is rebounding from highs and lows.

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’m a professional food and beverage photographer – I predominantly work with restaurants, bars, brands and publications in and around New York City.

I love my work because my job is to convey the deliciousness of food without two of its key metrics – smell and taste. Creatively I have to strategize how to convey that information through visual means, which is always a unique challenge.

In addition I always want to bring a sense of place and narrative into my work, and it’s really satisfying to develop a unique voice for each of my clients to tell the stories of their restaurants and brands through my images.

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

1. Finding your voice – The goal of a creative career shouldn’t be to be the best artist in the world. Your greatest asset is what makes your artwork uniquely yours.

2. Not all metrics are financial – you will have jobs that pay very well and jobs that do not. Don’t dismiss a job just because it isn’t high paying – sometimes those are the opportunities to create something great that might open doors down the line.

3. Your work along is not enough to be successful – You need to take the initiative to market yourself and reach out to the people you want to work with. It is unlikely that work will spontaneously come to you without building your network.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

I don’t think it’s necessary to be a jack of all trades, but it is important to be a master of some. I’m an advocate for hanging one’s shingle on one main service, but developing skills in adjacent areas that will support that business.

For example, as a photographer I think it’s not unreasonable to learn how to shoot and edit video, and to learn different strategies to market your own services. This does not mean that I will pitch video services to every client, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I will be offering digital marketing services to them.

Trying to do too much can spread our efforts too thinly which makes it easy to become overcommitted. Switching between projects that require very different skill sets can be difficult and result in much lower productivity.

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