October 2011, From the Editor
"We Bought a Zoo"
In the movie, “We Bought a Zoo,” the character played by Matt Damon uproots his family to renovate and re-open a struggling zoo. And he tells his son, “All you need is 20 seconds of insane courage and I promise you something great will come out of it.”
As I write this I’m taking my 20 seconds of insane courage to follow a dream I’ve had for a long time.
Since 2009, I’ve run my own portrait studio while doing editorial work on the side. As the economy tumbled, my business grew, and grew, and grew, until I found myself at a crossroads. I either had to give up my editorial work or give up my photography.
In “Follow Your Passion Find Your Power,” the author Bob Doyle encourages readers to “find the truth of their soul’s desire to contribute to the world and find their passion.” As I read his words, I realized, I was really lucky because I’d already found mine.
My photography work — whether it be photographing a magazine cover, an executive, a wedding, a high school senior or creating new works to hang in a gallery — fuels my soul.
Thus, it is with regret, but also a great deal of excitement, that I announce I’m stepping down from Corporate Report Wisconsin to wholly focus on Garrett & Co. Studios, my photography business. While you may see my name in the magazine from time to time, it will likely be in pictures rather than in words.
I leave the magazine in good hands. Marie Rohde has been hired to take the reigns of CRW with the November issue. She comes to the magazine with a wealth of business writing experience as a freelance reporter with Bloomberg News and more than 14 years as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel where she covered legal affairs, construction, environmental issues, governmental affairs and more.
As I leave this post, I’m excited to see the great things that come out of my 20 seconds of insane courage as well as the great things that happen to CRW with Ms. Rohde at the helm.
In closing, it is my wish that all of you running businesses of your own are able to summon your own 20 seconds of courage to follow your dreams and “buy that zoo.”
Because as Andre Malraux once said, “Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.”
Ronnie Garrett