Cheating in Yellowstone

I cheated this week while stuck in Yellowstone during a snowstorm.

I was making s’mores by a fire when I heard wolves howling suspiciously close.

I mentioned this to someone at the hotel and they informed me we were right next door to a wolf sanctuary for animals that weren’t fit for the wild anymore.

Some had become too dangerous for humans and rather than being put down, they house them here.

Wildlife photography is a passion of mine, and I haven’t been able to spot a wolf yet. So I paid my $15 admission fee and got closer to these alpha predators than I could have ever imagined.

These beautiful animals played in the snow well within the reach of my 200-600mm lens.



At first I felt like I was taking a shortcut, or what some people might even call, “cheating”.

In reality, I was leveraging the advantage that was given to me and photographing the subject matter in my own style.

In entrepreneurship, we want to identify our “unfair advantage”.

The same goes for content creation.

In football, we’d say, “the harder you work, the luckier you get.”

I might not have been hunting these animals in the backcountry, but I do spend months working remotely from the wilderness and find these opportunities pop up more and more often.

Sometimes we need to ask ourselves these 3 simple questions:

– What’s my unfair advantage?

– What simple perspective do I have that others find fascinating?

– What is so easy that it feels like I’m cheating?

This will likely lead you to a sub-niche in which you can create content and provide value to others.