Sean: So what gave you the sign? Like 'Hey, because a lot of people don't like doing things to just throw in the towel and quit, right? It's not for me. Hey, I don't like doing this. I feel so tired afterward. Cause I feel like this is something that, you know, I could hire someone to do this,' but in your case, you went ahead and took the grind. I mean, how did you know that this was something that was going to direct your future and you’re going to build your business with this even if it's not something you really love doing?

J Haleem: I never even knew. I'll be honest with you, I never knew. Again, I sold my camera. When we got back here, my son, my wife was pregnant with my son. She couldn't get a job. She was making a lot of money in the DC area. And down here, you know if you make a lot of money like that, so people didn't want to pay her.

Plus she's pregnant with a kid and I am still a felon at that time, so I can't get a great job. And again, once I saw it I'm like, listen, I have no money, so let's sell this camera. I want to have no 2000 out of the camera and I can do nothing with it. Let's make the money, we can pay our rent.

But literally, this man gave me the camera back and was like, I said, “Okay, well, look, this is what I do. I'll take pictures for you, no matter what.” And so he's a pastor of a church. I took pictures of the church, but then people started asking me to do it. And I was like, “Okay, I needed the money.”

So I take the money. I worked at a crappy job for like $8 an hour job for a little while. And I was taking pictures. I had a college friend who had a car dealership. I would go with him to get cars from the auction. And, you know, I started hustling. So while I'm going with him to get cars from the auction, I got smart in watching him and I said, “Okay, well, listen, I know how to do it now.

So his business is picking up, so he was like, “Well, you go by yourself, you can take the guy.” So now I would get a hundred dollars for a car. He'd pay me $200 a day, you know, just to go ahead and go get, go with the guy. Then it went from that to, we go on that one day, we going to three days a week. So now I'm working like three jobs.

I'm taking pictures, I'm working at a hotel for $8 an hour and I'm running, working at a car dealership. And so I'm doing all this stuff at the same time, but the pictures is starting to pick up. And then it was about 2015 when we had a, it was a lot of stuff happened in South Carolina. You probably heard about the Emmanuel 9.

When the guy shot the nine people in the church in Charleston, South Carolina that happened and we're in the Capitol. And so they had to bring the Confederate flag down. I was there for that. I shot that. We had a historic thousand-year flood here. I shot everything for that. And I got on the mayor's radar and the mayor had me do work for him.

We knew we were getting relief, help from other cities, other major cities in the region. He would have me as the only photographer shooting. And so I got to put on the map from there. Then I started working with a lot of big-name companies and big-name law firms and stuff like that. And my career just took off from there.

But I never knew I was just, you know, using it. I wasn't going to put it down because I felt like one spiritually, I was like, God was in the midst of that because I never asked for paying me the money. I even asked, "you want the money back?" He says, "no, I want you to use the camera." I said, okay, cool. And I did so, and it worked out.

Sean: So that's like a Divine intervention right there.

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack

Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack