Ramit Sethi hires local photographers when traveling to capture candid moments instead of staged shots. He thought it was wasteful at first, but the photos became memories he revisits constantly and shares with others, teaching him that some spending feels pointless until it delivers real value later.
Whenever we go to a new city, we will hire a local photographer to take us around and take photos of us. We've done this in Copenhagen, we've done this in Tokyo, and I'm not talking about these influencer shots or anything like that. We're kind of wearing our normal clothes, we're doing the things that we would normally do, we're walking around, we're grabbing a snack. What I love about this is it takes us to different parts of the city that we would not know, and when we come back, we are not just looking at selfies of ourselves standing in the same exact pose in 10 different places. We actually are in context. We're eating, we're talking, we're laughing. These are beautiful memories that elevate every time we look back at the photos. I gotta tell you, at the time it felt a little indulgent. Like, I remember thinking, who the hell does this? Like, why would we get a photographer? I don't really wanna be one of these influencers, but I'll tell you something. Years later, we love these photos. We look at them, they pop up all the time. We share them with friends. They're not buried in our camera roll. They're actually part of our lives. So this is an example for me that some spending does not reveal its value immediately.
