How long would you fight to build something you believed in? Would the answer change if you had to make it up as you went along?
In car photography, Larry Chen is about as big as it gets. He has nearly 800,000 Instagram followers*. He is a Canon featured artist whose clients include Toyota, Hoonigan, and Monster Energy. Over 20 years in the business, he has worked in more than 50 countries, shot every form of motorsport imaginable, and covered every 24-hour race on earth. If that weren't enough, he is the only person behind in a camera in this industry whose name means anything to kids in small-town America. And he worked his way up to all of it from a job selling computers out of the back of his Nissan S13.
I wanted to talk to Larry because he believes, in a very specific way, that he is not any good. The way he sees holes in his work, his constant drive to move past a weakness—they make him who he is, both in car culture and as a person. And they're why he's made the difference he has.
Driven to Fail is a podcast about what happens when things go wrong. What we do when life falls apart, and what we learn when we try to put it back together. Brought to you by the Hagerty Podcast Network.
*Note: This episode’s intro gives Chen’s follower count as 675,000—that number was correct at tape time but has since grown to more than 790,000.
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