What Two Stalled Years Taught Me About Patience

There was a genuine stretch of roughly two years in this career where nothing much seemed to actually move forward. Not the client roster, not the follower counts, not the actual revenue, not really the sense that the work was actually building toward something larger than just the next individual shoot. From the outside it probably just looked like steady, ordinary, unremarkable progress. From the inside it felt like standing still while watching everyone else's own timeline appear to accelerate steadily past my own.

That whole stretch was genuinely uncomfortable to live through, and I don't think there's much value in pretending otherwise or dressing it up as some kind of secretly productive hidden phase. But looking back now, with real distance from it, that period taught me more about patience, and about what patience actually requires in practice, than almost any other stretch of this career. If you're in a similar plateau right now, the Adventure Travel Photographer's Playbook covers the fuller framework for building a sustainable business through exactly these kinds of stretches.

What the Stall Actually Looked Like From the Inside

The two stalled years didn't look like an obvious crisis from the outside. Client work continued at a reasonable, steady pace, bills got paid, nothing catastrophic happened. What actually stalled was the sense of forward motion, the feeling that each month was meaningfully different from the last, that specific effort was compounding into something larger over time rather than simply repeating the same patterns without any real accumulation.

That distinction matters because a genuine stall is often invisible to people outside the business, and sometimes even to the person living through it, if they're only measuring against the most obvious metrics like whether bills are getting paid. I had to develop a more honest, more granular way of assessing whether real progress was actually happening, since the surface-level numbers alone weren't telling the full, honest story of what was genuinely going on underneath them.

Recognizing the stall clearly, rather than staying vaguely uneasy without naming the problem directly, was actually the first real step toward eventually working through it, since a problem you can't name clearly is much harder to address deliberately than one you've actually sat with and defined honestly.

Part of what made naming it difficult was a genuine fear that acknowledging the stall out loud, even privately in my own head, would somehow make it more real or more permanent than simply continuing to push forward without examining it too closely. That fear turned out to be backwards. Naming the stall honestly was what actually created the space to start addressing it deliberately, rather than continuing to operate on a vague, unexamined discomfort that never quite resolved into anything actionable on its own.

The Temptation to Make a Dramatic Change

During the stalled years, the loudest internal voice pushed toward dramatic action: a complete platform overhaul, an entirely new niche, a radical repricing strategy, anything that promised to break the stall quickly rather than requiring the slower, less satisfying work of simply continuing to build steadily without a visible payoff yet in sight.

I made a few smaller changes during that period, but I resisted the urge toward a truly dramatic pivot, partly out of genuine uncertainty about whether a dramatic change would actually help, and partly out of a growing suspicion, in hindsight correct, that the underlying work was actually sound and simply needed more time to compound rather than a fundamentally different direction entirely.

That restraint was genuinely hard to maintain, especially watching other photographers who did make dramatic pivots during roughly the same period, some of whom seemed to see faster results. I've since learned that survivorship bias plays a real role in how those stories get told publicly, since the dramatic pivots that failed quietly rarely get shared as prominently as the ones that happened to work out.

I've since talked with several photographers who did make the dramatic pivot I was tempted by during that same stretch, and the results were genuinely mixed, some found real success, others simply traded one plateau for a different one under a new name, having spent real energy and resources on the pivot itself without actually addressing whatever was genuinely causing the stall in the first place. That mixed track record has reinforced my sense that a dramatic change is rarely a reliable shortcut around the harder, slower work of simply continuing to build with patience and real attention to detail.

What Was Actually Happening Beneath the Surface

Looking back at that stalled period now, with the benefit of real hindsight, I can see that genuine, valuable groundwork was actually being built during those two years, even though it wasn't visible in the metrics I was watching most closely at the time: a deeper technical mastery, a more refined sense of my own visual voice, and quiet relationship-building with people who would later become significant clients and collaborators, none of which showed up as an obvious spike in any single metric during the period itself.

That groundwork became visible only in hindsight, once enough time had passed for it to actually compound into results that were clearly attributable back to that earlier, seemingly unproductive stretch. In the moment, none of it felt like it was building toward anything specific, which is precisely what made the stretch so genuinely uncomfortable to live through without the reassurance that hindsight eventually provided.

I've thought a lot since then about why that groundwork stayed invisible for so long, and I think part of the answer is that the specific skills and relationships being built during that period simply take longer to compound than more immediately visible activities like posting frequency or follower growth. A technical skill refined slowly over many shoots, or a relationship built gradually over repeated small interactions, doesn't produce a clean, visible spike the way a viral post or a single big client win does, even though the underlying value being created might ultimately be just as significant, or more so, over the longer arc of a career.

How I Kept Showing Up Without Visible Reward

The hardest practical challenge of those two years was maintaining consistent effort, consistent posting, consistent outreach, consistent quality, without the visible reward that normally reinforces that kind of consistent behavior. Motivation built on visible progress is relatively easy to sustain; motivation sustained through a genuine plateau requires a different, more internal kind of discipline.

I leaned heavily on process-based goals during that period rather than outcome-based ones, measuring success by whether I'd shown up and done the work with real care and attention that day, rather than by whether that day's work had produced any visible external result.

Building that process-based measurement into something I actually trusted took real, deliberate practice, since the instinct to check outcome metrics for reassurance is strong and hard to fully override even when you know intellectually that outcome metrics won't be moving for a while regardless of how much good process work is genuinely happening beneath the surface. I found it helped to keep a simple, private log of specific process actions completed each week, a tangible record I could point to on the days when the absence of visible outcomes felt most discouraging and hardest to sit with.

That shift in how I measured my own daily success made the stretch considerably more survivable than it would have been if I'd continued measuring purely against outcomes that simply weren't moving during that specific period.

The Specific Moment I Recognized the Stall Was Ending

There wasn't a single dramatic breakthrough moment when the stall ended, it was more of a gradual recognition, looking back over several consecutive months and noticing that the metrics I'd been watching had actually started moving again, slowly at first, then with real, accelerating momentum that made the earlier plateau feel, in retrospect, like a genuine buildup rather than wasted time.

That gradual, retrospective recognition taught me something important about how progress actually works in a business like this, that it rarely announces itself clearly in the moment it's happening, and that the clearest confirmation of real progress often only becomes visible well after the fact, once enough time has passed to see the actual pattern clearly rather than guessing at it in real time.

Looking back at that gradual reemergence now, I can point to a handful of specific things that likely contributed, a body of work finally reaching a critical mass that made it easier for potential clients to recognize a consistent style, relationships that had quietly deepened over the two years finally producing genuine referrals, and a cumulative technical improvement that had simply crossed some threshold where the work started looking meaningfully more polished than it had two years earlier. None of these individual factors would have explained the shift on their own, but together they formed a plausible, if imperfect, explanation for why the momentum finally returned when it did.

What I'd Tell Myself During Those Two Years If I Could

If I could go back and offer myself advice during those two stalled years, I'd say that the groundwork being built, even though it wasn't visible yet in any metric worth watching closely, was genuinely real and genuinely valuable, and that the discomfort of the plateau didn't mean something was fundamentally wrong with the underlying approach.

I'd also tell myself to be more deliberate about documenting the specific work being done during that stretch, since having a clearer record now would make it easier to identify exactly which specific efforts eventually paid off, rather than relying purely on a general, somewhat fuzzy sense that the whole period contributed to what came afterward.

I've since built exactly that kind of documentation habit into how I run the business now, a simple recurring note capturing what specific effort went into a given month, regardless of whether that month produced visible results at the time. Having that record available now means I no longer have to rely purely on memory to understand what actually happened during any given stretch, slow or otherwise, which has made it considerably easier to distinguish real progress from mere activity when evaluating any period after the fact.

How This Changed My Relationship to Slower Periods Since

Having lived through one genuine, extended plateau and come out the other side of it with real, tangible results, I approach slower periods differently now than I did before that first experience. A slow month or a quiet quarter no longer triggers the same level of alarm it used to, since I now have direct, lived evidence that a plateau doesn't necessarily mean something is fundamentally broken in the underlying business.

That doesn't mean I've become complacent about slower periods, I still evaluate them honestly and look for real, specific signals of a genuine problem versus normal, expected fluctuation. But the baseline anxiety attached to any period without dramatic visible progress has decreased meaningfully, replaced by a more grounded, evidence-based patience that simply wasn't available to me the first time through a genuine plateau.

That grounded patience has also made me a calmer, steadier presence for people I now mentor, since I can speak from direct, lived experience about the fact that a plateau doesn't necessarily mean the underlying approach is flawed, rather than offering only secondhand reassurance drawn from something I read or heard about but never actually lived through myself in any real, personal way.

Why I Talk About This Period Openly Now

I didn't talk about this stalled period publicly while I was actually living through it, since the instinct at the time was to project confidence and forward momentum rather than genuine uncertainty about whether the business was actually working. Looking back, I think that instinct toward silence was somewhat counterproductive, since photographers earlier in their own careers rarely get to see the honest, unglamorous middle of someone else's journey, only the polished highlight reel that comes after the fact.

Talking about it openly now, well after the fact and from a position of real, demonstrated success on the other side of it, feels like a useful corrective to that pattern, offering a more honest picture of what building a sustainable creative business actually involves, including the stretches that don't make it into a highlight reel.

The response to sharing this story openly has consistently been more positive and more genuinely useful than I initially expected, with several photographers reaching out directly to say they were living through something similar and had felt genuinely alone in it before hearing that someone further along the same path had experienced roughly the same thing themselves.

What Patience Actually Requires in Practice

The biggest lesson from those two years is that patience isn't a passive quality, quietly waiting for something to eventually improve on its own. Real patience, the kind that actually gets a person through a genuine plateau, requires active, deliberate maintenance of consistent effort and quality even without visible reinforcement, which is a genuinely harder discipline to sustain than patience as most people casually imagine it.

That distinction, between passive waiting and active, disciplined patience, has become one of the more useful frameworks I carry forward from that stalled period, applied now to any new challenge or slower stretch that doesn't show immediate, visible results despite genuine, sustained effort being consistently invested into it.

Two years felt genuinely endless while I was living through them, but from where I stand now, they've become just one chapter in a much longer career, a chapter that ultimately mattered more for what it quietly built than for what it visibly produced in the moment itself.

Reflection Questions

1. Are you currently in a stretch that feels stalled, and have you named honestly what specifically feels stuck about it?
2. Are you measuring your own progress purely by visible outcomes, or do you have process-based goals that sustain you through slower periods?
3. What groundwork might be quietly building right now that won't become visible until well after the fact?
4. How would documenting your current efforts more deliberately and consistently change how you understand this specific period later, looking back on it with real distance?

If you're navigating a similar plateau in your own work, the Adventure Photographer's Playbook covers how I think about building a sustainable business through the stretches that don't show immediate results.

Dalton Johnson is a professional adventure and editorial photographer with over a decade of experience creating images on all seven continents. His client work includes Patagonia, GoPro, Arc'teryx, Four Seasons, Nike, Rivian, Big Agnes, Ford Bronco, and 160+ other brands. He runs Dalton Johnson Media as a full-service studio, from pre-production through post and distribution.

If you're in the middle of your own version of those two stalled years right now, the most honest thing I can offer isn't a shortcut around it, but the honest assurance that the discomfort itself doesn't necessarily mean anything has actually gone wrong beneath the surface.