The blog section of this website is updated and maintained by the founder of Culture of Creatives: myself, Jamie Mackrill. This blog is centred around telling my personal story of life lessons, successes and failures and offering helpful tips and ideas in my chosen fields of travel, photography, blogging, and being a travel influencer on Instagram.

Jamie Mackrill - founder of Culture of Creatives

My background is nothing out of the ordinary. I come from a lower-middle class family and grew up in the outer suburbs of a small city in a geographically isolated part of Australia, I have dedicated my life to travel, photography, personal growth and self-development. As of now, I have lived in four different countries and traveled throughout Australia, North America, Africa, Asia and Europe to 40 different countries. I want to share with others all the lessons that I have learned along the way.

My greatest pleasures are found in nature, in history, in photography and travel. I love good coffee and tea, delicious wine and beer. I love experiencing different cuisines and immersing myself in different cultures. I love hearing people’s stories and seeing how they go about their daily business in their little corner of this incredible planet. I’m inspired by things as simple as a beautiful sunset, by the sounds of a nearby waterfall or birds singing out to one another in the trees. I’m uplifted by a simple smile given by a passing stranger, and I’m humbled by the generosity and outlook on life by those who should seemingly have very little to give in the first place.

I myself dropped out of college and, since then, have had a variety of everyday jobs. I have been a kitchen hand, a factory concreter and pool boy, and have worked in road works, customer service and building maintenance. I have unblocked more toilets than I would like to admit, I have ruined my back moving heavy furniture as a removalist or while being an offsider in a couple of different mines. I have pulled hair clumps and other things that make me shiver out of hundreds of sink and shower traps, and I have scrubbed and chlorinated countless green swimming pools until they turned blue again. I have worked in sub-zero temperatures while getting snowed on but have also left shifts drenched in sweat after countless 40-45+ degree Celsius days. I have been plagued with and overcome many years of mental health issues and the loss of close family members. I have terrible memories from school, bullying and an upbringing in a broken family.

Until I discovered photography, I thought I was useless and did not have a creative bone in my body. I had no path in life and no foreseeable future that didn’t scare the absolute hell out of me. Whilst everyone around me was pursuing their own careers, planning their future, studying, having children and getting married, I chose a completely different path and started traveling the world, searching for myself and going from job to job in a desperate attempt to keep moving forward—to not give up and go backwards.

I have no love for self-pity; please do not mistake any of these words as a yearning for pity, as I am fervently and expressively against it and after none. A quote from Stephan Fry can summarize my views on this better than I ever could: “Your self-pity gets none of my sympathy, because self-pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity. Get rid of it. Because no one is going to like you if you feel sorry for yourself. The irony is that we’ll feel sorry for you if you stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

Everything that I’m sharing with you now, and that I will share with you in future blog posts, is explicitly because I believe that the average person going through turmoil and despair in their life, or someone lacking guidance and support from those around them and wavering motivation from within including setbacks championed by a lack of belief in themselves.

In the interview section of this blog, you will find that a lot of these people who have found success were and are just like you and me. In fact, you can always find people who have had it even worse, who have faced more setbacks and tragedies in their life and still become successful. What I am trying to champion and expose on this website is that whatever stage you are at in your life, whatever level of suffering or disorientation you are currently affected by, however high the mountain in front of you is: you can do it. People have done it before you, average, everyday people—even people with heartbreaking life stories have done it. It is not always pretty, and it is definitely not easy. It is not always obvious what you have to do next, but you are not alone and there are plenty of amazing people out there. You just have to knock on enough doors and put in enough time and effort until some of those doors start opening up for you.

Remember, everyone that has succeeded has been rejected countless times and failed countless more.