We recently connected with Joey Cheng and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Joey, thank you for joining us today and sharing your experiences and acquired wisdom with us. Burnout is a huge topic these days and so we’d love to kick things off by discussing your thoughts on overcoming or avoiding burnout
First of all, I think it’s a tolerance. That’s my theory at least haha. I like to workout and train really really hard because if I can withstand the high intensity of training, my body can easily survive a really stressful week or month.
I recently just had a super-productive and tiring June. Lots of social events (because well I’m a Gemini Baby and some are networking events for work), lots of wedding photography sessions, and my Mon-Fri job. So basically my hours were 10am-12am, hitting bed at 2 or 3 am then up at 8 or 9am, it’s been like that for a few weeks in June. Plus most weddings sessions are on the weekends, I basically had no weekends off this month thus no rest breaks in the between a packed working week. Am I burntout? About to, but I’m keeping it positive and trying my hardest to strive through and not let it get to me.
So how do I really keep myself from burnout? Well, I really do enjoy working out. And no matter how busy or tired I am, I like to just take a good 2 hours away from work and hit the gym to clear off my mind. I like to put it at the end of the day to really clear my mind. And I try to balance myself during the weekend to definitely hit the gym or jump in the pool for 20-30 laps to get away from work or relax my muscles from swimming.
That’s my balance and my routine. Everyone has his/her own different approach. But I find mine to be really effective from getting burnout or balancing out between work and life. “Train your mind, and your body will follow”. It’s all you make of it in your head.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Hello again, my name is Joey Cheng. My social existence is Joeytheteenadult. Why the name TheTeenadult? When the story goes back to when I was 17 turning 18, it was a moment of adulthood crisis haha. I was very lost and scared of turning into an adult because what if my family doesn’t want me anymore so I have to work very hard and pay my own bills and something else! So an Uncle just told me, “so why don’t you be The Teenadult so you can always be our teenager but an adult on your own”? This really hits me, and gave me hope into adulthood. haha
All jokes aside, the name The Teenadult really means that work and dream ambitiously as our teenage selves but also work as hard as an ambitious adult. That’s my mentality on things that I do now. I work as a freelance filmmaker (particularly in producing) and wedding photographer, these are the things I love doing and I dedicate myself 110% into the work that I do because at the end of the day what the hell are we doing if these are not the things we love? As a creative, it’s hard to do something you hate and provide supreme quality of work without passion for it. Although I’m more like an entrepreneur on set and at work, I still yearn for the sentimental attachments/values in the stories we tell, so the combination of both the creative world and the realistic work drive really push me to my fullest potential. And I’m enjoying every day in expanding my limits. So it’s really a Teenadult Mentality in how I work, give it my all and beyond for the best possible result ever.
I finished film school in Hong Kong when I was 18, and started working briefly in the industry there then. Moved to LA in 2015 to further my education, and now started working in LA as a creative freelancer. My specialty is in Producing because that’s where I really started and trained for with my previous experiences in Hong Kong. Even though I love the business side of things as a creative (which is very rare), the more I grow the more I feel the need for good story and good storytelling (aka communication). Me and my production team aim to provide high-quality commercial services with a short film approach or storytelling/cinematic approach. Since last year til now, we’ve done about 4 to 5 commercials together, some are for mobile games advertisements, and some are local small businesses marketing videos; upcoming we have a few music videos and documentary in the planning, and most of our crew in the team are developing our own scripts in hopes of winning some fundings from major filmmaker campaigns by end of this year or next! Not a lot on the plate yet, but we’ve been busy!
On the other hand, I started doing wedding photography since 2021. It’s been a really fast track of moving in this realm for me. I only started as a photographer because it’s been my hobby since I was a kid (another story for another time haha). And during the Pandemic, entering my quarter-life crisis, I was really scared of being a failure in life. So I thought what could be something that I’m good at? And my lightbulb blinked and decided, “Hey if I’m good at photography, why don’t we start trying to make it a career”? So that’s how I started. Of course, I started off in a different category of photography, I was a lifestyle photographer and concept art portrait photographer, but throughout I started outgrowing and found it not satisfying because the lack of stories to be told there. So I tried weddings, and I immediately fell in love with it. It’s very much like a film set but more spontaneous and there’s that love story to be told. So it’s really satisfying. I think in my first year of wedding photography, and when I really started going on my own solo photographing wedding (I used to bring my 2nd with me all the time, but she went home to China) then I enjoyed it even more. I remembered after my first SOLO-Photographing a wedding, I looked up to the sky and flashed back to a moment of truth when John Mayer said “even if one day I were to sing in a small local cafe with just 20 people watching, I’d still enjoy it as much as I am at the Bowl”, and I had the same feeling after photographing my first solo-wedding. That’s when I knew I really LOVE being a wedding Photographer.
I think what really sets me apart as a wedding photographer is that I strive to provide a “beyond satisfaction” experiences to my lovebirds. Obviously, by this time now my clients trust me on my judgement for weddings. So we often plan (y)our timeline or logistics or coordinate the events together but with the understanding of “making it YOUR day” so it’s really a tailored experience to each couple on their big day. Simply saying, serving you with compassion, empathy, and understanding is what sets me apart from the others.
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There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
1. Empathy or Compassion. What really sets a NBA superstar to regular mid-leveled tier NBA players apart is their attention to detail, and their dedication to improving those little details that’s what makes them superstars. In this modern age world, all of us share a high-level of skills that has become super regular, but in the service based industry or communication based industry, I think the little details in us would be our empathy and compassion to our clients or to the person on the other end of the conversation because this allows us to be flexible and adaptive to our surroundings. To be genuinely flexible and understanding is very difficult because often times clients are just your clients, what are them to you to worthwhile for compromising and bending, right? So I really thing being empathetic and compassionate is the superpower in us to seperate us from regular competitors in the market.
2. Endurance
No matter how good you are in your game, I think 85-90% of time in our society now most tasks or jobs are in a teamwork-based environment even though it might seem like an individual mission on your own. For sure you can have a super out-of-this-world ability in your field, and you can finish 10x more than a regular person from time to time. But how long will you last for with this high-intensity of output? With time proving me over and over again, I now believe slowing down to build my team or community is much more worthwhile than sprinting on my own. So yes, Endurance is SUPER important. Look at GOAT players like Roger Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Steph Curry, Tom Brady, they have unbelievable endurance. Endurance is a mind-cap capacity game, in another word, it’s just a mental game. I like the thinking of winning over myself every-single-day.
3. Skills
The top two makes you a great person, and with knowledge it really makes you unbreakable. But it also comes down to your ambitions on “never enough” to keep broadening and expanding your knowledge of skills and in life. For me the more I grow, the more I realize how small I am. I’m not trying to be huge or great or a giant like the models I look up to, but I just want to be at least worthwhile to hang out with them or eat at the same table with them one day hahaha. Realistically speaking, in our creative fields nowadays, there are lots of people who started with just passion but no school backgrounds in film, photography, music, creative writing, painting, etc., so it’s really an interesting time of age now where the academics crossover with the non-academia, we’re not back to a Renaissance period. But what’s really dangerous is the knowledge of aesthetics, I feel like people’s knowledge on aesthetics could be decreasing because of the conveniencey of modern tech. But there’d be more people like us filling the industry or the society up to remind everyone again, “hey, the rule of third matters. Golden Ratio is very golden. If you place your protagonist in the middle, it means something. What does it really mean to you”? So in this sense, I think consciousness x creativity is really important to our modern days.
To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?
Freedom. Not that they were strict although as far as I know I was sort of a spoiled brat when I was a kid. But as I am truly entering my adulthood and facing my quarter-life crisis now, there are lots of things I want to control in my life but failed. I started asking their opinions on my next step, what do they think? They’d provide ideas and suggestions and potential outcomes, and eventually they’ll be annoyed by me so they’d let me be and figure it out on my own lol. So they have helped me set the boundaries and expectations of “what’s worst could happen”? And “what’re the potential ideal outcomes?” Then I’ll prepare myself for it.
Maybe I’m a Gemini, I’m like a cat – I need lots of freedom but give me attention and love when I need you to. It takes a lot of understanding and unconditional love to give me that, and I really appreciate it. And it’s really hard for me to be just like them because I’m a very impatience person. But more and more often, when I get insecure of an unheard lead or a cold email or text from my friends or co-workers, I think of my parents and their actions towards me hahahaha. Then It’ll be easier for me to get by. And it really helps on work and in my relationships as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.theteenadultprod.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/joeytheteenadult
