Olivia Bee is not your average teenager. At age 18, she is financially independent and living in Brooklyn, N.Y., away from her home in Portland, Ore. Bee’s hallmark is shooting dreamy ’70s-inspired photographs of her life and often of her friends. Her personality screams out of her photos in a brilliant way. So brilliant in fact, that The New York Times has published her; Subaru, Nike, and Fiat have commissioned her; and she has been asked to shoot covers of books for four publishers.

It seems Bee has become a successful photographer because she doesn’t let others tell her how to shoot her photos. This helps Bee set herself apart from the millions of other photographers that dream to live a life like hers. If you follow all of the rules and apply all the things you have learned directly to your work, your work is sure to be good, but not sure to get you very far. Greatness is what gets people places, and to be great, you have to set yourself apart by doing something different from what everyone else is doing.

For example, Bee often does not even observe the rule of thirds, as any photography school would teach her. The rule of thirds states that composing off-center make photos more interesting. She leaves her subjects in the dead center of her photos, which gives a distinct feel to her photos. Perhaps this is because she chose not to continue her education after high school after she didn’t get into the only college she applied to: Cooper Union in Manhattan. From there she decided to begin her career as a full-time photographer. She later said in her blog that “I didn’t want to go to photo school, because I didn’t want to change the way I saw my work.”

Bee is obviously very self-assured, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, it seems to be working out pretty well for her. In fact, she didn’t go to big-time companies looking for work — they came to her. She was first discovered by Converse’s ad agency, VSA Partners, when they came across her Flickr account. VSA Partners “kept emailing me saying they wanted to work with me. I thought it was spam — I didn’t know what an ad agency was, let alone VSA Partners,” said Bee, who was 15 at the time.

The series of opportunities that have been presented to Bee are incredible to hear about. All she had to do was be herself, and companies the size of Nike started bending over backwards for her to work with them. This is a point that photographers work their whole lives to get to. In fact, these jobs usually go to 50-year-old men. As you might imagine, this sparks some jealousy amongst pro photographers in such a competitive field. When asked by The Guardian how other professionals reacted to her getting the job, she says, “When I got the Fiat 500 campaign, a lot of men were very angry because a girl who had just turned 17 got that job and they didn’t. When I turned 18, it was a little less of a problem — I was then a very young adult. But often people think I’m a PA or a very small model.”

“I’m an assertive person and I know what I want. And I’m going to get what I want if I can. I know how to do that,” said Bee when asked by The Guardian about what her secret to success is. This attitude has gotten Bee very far, and I think there is something to be learned from this.

You won’t find success like Bee’s unless you figure out what you really love to do. Something you think about all the time and something you know that you’re really good at. YouTube sensations such as Wheezy Waiter or Syndicate Project don’t get millions of views because they upload lots of videos, but because it is evident that they love what they’re doing, and are great at it because of this. There’s a shine about these kinds of people that is very attractive to their ever-growing audiences. It’s not about how much time you put in, but how passionate you are about it. The time commitments and hard work required to achieve a goal doesn’t necessarily have to be hard for you — it’s best to keep the goal in sight and just keep doing what you love.

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Austin Wolf is a junior in mechanical engineering from Excelsior, Minn.