You might be adventurous. But you’re very likely not “take the buyout, sell all your stuff and wander the earth until you figure some your life out” adventurous.
For that kind of adventurous, it helps to be David Simchock, photographer, teacher, artist, budding disruptive entrepreneur, ex-expat and all-around sharp tack with a head for business you might not expect from someone who took the Caine-from-Kung-Fu route to happiness.
Some readers might remember Simchock’s name gracing the gracing the pages of the Ewing Observer in the past. His post-corporate renaissance involved a stint as an editorial photographer for Community News Service about a decade ago, before Simchock found his current (though likely not last) home outside of Asheville, North Carolina. He was also the subject of a story in the paper.
Today, Simchock still shoots a lot of editorial work and he recently started Front Row Focus, a new online music magazine at frontrowfocus.com that featured his concert photography.
Aside from the new endeavour, a lot has happened between the time Simchock made a daily morning commute in New Jersey and the day he bought his current house in a little town called Weaverville and adopted several distinct-yet-weirdly-complementary professional identities.
Since leaving New Jersey, he has traveled the world, met a girl and reinvented his life through the magic of the camera lens. None of which seemed likely when he considered not taking a job offer in England back in the 1990s.
Perhaps a little background will help. Simchock was born in Trenton at Helene Fuld Hospital. He grew up in Ewing, where his parents still live, and became the captain of the boys’ soccer team at Ewing High School. When he graduated in 1982, Simchock went to Rutgers to get his degree in mechanical engineering.
After graduating, Simchock took a job in New York City as an engineer with Con-Edison and spent close to a decade living in northern New Jersey, attending night school at the Stevens Institute of Technology for his master’s degree in technical management.
Simchock’s life changed, though, when in 1994, at the age of 29, he was offered a job in England. Although he had some doubts about taking the position, he figured he’d regret not trying more than he’d hate being overseas, so he hopped a jet and eventually landed in a town of 2,000 people, many of whom were American expats.
“It was the biggest, boldest move of my life,” he said. “I packed up my whole life and went.”
Simchock spent two years in York — “a beautiful residential city” — before heading to Birmingham and then onto the most Englishly-named little town in all the land, Chipping Campden, a small market town in the Cotswold district of Gloucestershire.
Being out in the country, Simchock said, gave him a new perspective on how differently people live compared to places like New York and London. Before long, he had moved further away from his original engineering job and more into the business operations side of corporate life, where a vague sense of displeasure with his job began to seep in.
At the end of 1998 a friend invited Simchock to be part of his wedding, which wouldn’t seem so monumental were it not happening in New Zealand and were Simchock not asked to be the toastmaster. To put that title in perspective for American readers, imagine having the duties of best man, emcee at a roast, and a middle manager all rolled into one.
It seems New Zealanders take the role of toastmaster quite seriously, and Simchock found he was not just a guy making toasts, he was the master of ceremonies, keeping people on schedule, and making sure the celebration was actually celebratory.
“I was an American guy living in England at a wedding in New Zealand,” he said. “And I had a bigger role than the best man.”
Simchock spent this three-week vacation travelling around the island, staying with some friends and fishing. “I’d always wanted to see New Zealand,” he said. “They’re known for trout and I’m a big trout fisherman.”
When he got back to England, his only thoughts were how much he needed to get back to the land of the kiwi. By this point, though, he’d been promoted to sales manager and was in charge of launching a new energy technology to the world. “Turns out the technology didn’t work,” he said.
So the company fell on hard enough times to start offering buyouts, and Simchock recalled his vague displeasure with his safe corporate life and his surprisingly high amount of wanderlust after having seen the literal other side of the world.
“I took the buyout, sold everything and went off travelling,” he said. “I had no idea where I was going to end up, but I went.”
For the next three years, Simchock travelled through Asia, Europe and North and South America. He had expected his earthly sojourn to be about a year and a half, but it turned out, he just couldn’t stop. Towards the end of his travels, he found himself in Santiago, Chile, where he met some people who ignited his interest in photography and taught him some Spanish.
When Simchock got back home, he lived in north Trenton’s Eastern European neighborhood, where he met an artist named Richard Bruch, who asked Simchock if he could teach his students about photography.
“I thought, ‘I’d better learn to do it myself first,’” he said. “It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Teaching has become a major part of his professional life, along with the photo work he did for several publications in and around Trenton.
All through his time abroad, people had told the decidedly single Simchock, “Ah, you’ll meet someone,” he said. “I joked, ‘I’ll probably meet someone from New Jersey.’”
He was right. Eight years ago, Simchock met Beth Baldino, a holistic health professional from Titusville who knew about Asheville and its place as one of the most holistic health-friendly communities in America.
The couple moved to Asheville, where she could be closer to the holistic health community that thrives there and he could be near what has become a major cultural events city, especially for music. Simchock started teaching photography courses at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and began offering classes through his original photography business, Vagabond Vistas. Vagabond Vistas offers photo tours, photo workshops, and private instruction and is still going strong, but it’s only part of Simchock’s growing creative empire.
One thing Simchock learned by being in the business development and sales end of life for so many years was how to brand the different parts of his professional personas differently. There is David Simchock, photographer, and its corresponding website, DavidSimchock.com. There’s Vagabond Vistas for David Simchock, teacher and photography expert. There’s davidsimchockfineart.com for his fine arts photo pieces. And, of course, there’s Front Row Focus, which offers rather striking images of Asheville’s red hot music scene.
Simchock as of yet makes no money on Front Row Focus and does mostly editorial work for a living. “I’m very much a photojournalist,” he said. But he’s working on the more artistic side of business as he goes.
Indeed, the wheels are spinning in his restless head. One of the other things his life pre-wanderlust taught him about business was that sometimes you need to be disruptive in your thinking. Now that he’s at the half-century mark for his life, Simchock recognizes that he needs to start setting up his future in a way that makes him an income without having to rely on doing just project work.
That plan, of course, is easier wanted than attained. He knows there’s a way, though, and he’s absolutely certain he’ll figure it out. In fact, he’s just about to head to a small cabin in the woods, cut himself off from life for several days, and think about how to make money as an artist, beyond point-of-sale income.
One thing he’s planning is a series of books. And not just for the vanity of having a book or two, but as “the go-to guide for all things photography,” he said. He’s already cobbling material to do it and expects to work his way to the point of letting his books, courses, and whatever else he comes up with be his employees. He knows he can’t work every day of the rest of his life, but he’ll still need to eat and pay the taxman.
After all this heady, admittedly romantic talk of chucking it all and following your heart, you might think Simchock would advise anyone to follow his path around the world. Hardly.
“It worked for me,” he said. Anything past that, he doesn’t specifically recommend, save, perhaps, the most important lesson he would like to impart:
“Do what you love and love what you do,” he said. “Ask yourself, ‘Why are we here?’ Do you really want to spend your life unhappy? Because I don’t.”
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