Name: If you're finally burning out, watch this.
Uploaded: 2025-06-21T15:58:23.000Z
Duration: 8 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Sometimes you don't realize you've been holding your breath until you finally exhale.

Past simple

I didn't come here looking for anything, I just came here because it was quiet.

And I hadn't felt quiet in a really long time.

And before that stillness, there was noise.

It's not that I didn't want to make something.

If I'm being honest with you, I wanted to create something more than I really wanted to breathe.

It's just that I had no idea what to make.

I thought that if I just kept moving, the idea would come to me, that if I wrote enough, scrolled enough, shot enough, maybe something would stick.

It was like a thousand half thoughts pretending to be something deeper.

The more I chased it, the further it got.

I thought passion meant being ready at all times, always having something brewing, always obsessing and like pretty much never taking breaks.

I mean, that's the version of success that we're sold.

Romantic struggle, constant momentum, whatever.

But now I was starting to wonder if passion is just self-inflicted pressure.

But the problem was that to me, breaks felt like failure.

So instead, I decided to meet with someone who seemed to know how to let go.

But he never appeared to be stuck or desperate or burnt out.

No matter what the ideas were, he just let them flow straight into reality.

My name is Thomas, or TJ, and I'm a cinematographer.

The things that I feel like always take me out of filmmaking and out of being behind a camera is being in my room with my electric car and just jamming out, taking a canvas, putting it on the ground and just painting.

If my bike needs maintenance, I'll get on that too and be able to work on that and learn from those things.

There are definitely probably nine out of ten projects where I need time to go back to it, to take a step away from it.

I never once thought I would look at painting or drawing as an escape.

I think I did like drawing more as a downtime between edits and renders and stuff like that.

Seeing other friends of mine do huge paintings, and it just looked like they were just carefree and spilling out what they felt at the time.

I was like, I know I can do something halfway decent.

The moment I started was the moment I was like, okay, wait, holy shit, this is actually an escape.

It totally dissipates everything else that's around you.

My biggest advice or thing to think about would be that no one, or at least I hope, no one's ever told you that life is just one thing.

You can live more free, attach yourself to a few things, see what sticks and see what makes you feel a certain way.

I just stopped looking at needing to be one thing because life is way too short just to be one thing.

I wanted to know what that felt like, to do something just because it felt good to do, not because I thought it would lead somewhere.

I tried to take a break, and it turns out I suck at breaks.

If I played the guitar, then maybe I could make a video about me learning to play guitar.

If I started drawing, maybe I could do a 30-day drawing challenge, but like cinematic, of course.

And on top of that, I sucked at these things.

You try to find more than just the same 50 songs you always listen to, but whenever you start adding new songs to your playlist, you just end up skipping them.

And finding music for your videos is even more difficult since you can't really use the good stuff.

Or maybe you're just looking in the wrong place.

Just for the shallow, generic, royalty-free music to flop the whole thing.

Good films resonate on an emotional level.

That kind of emotional depth, you only get it with curated, authentic music.

Authenticity equals emotion, and emotion equals connection.

And after the countless hours of searching I've done, I can confidently say you're only going to find this on Musicbed.

They make it extremely easy for me to find the right songs that actually have the quality and emotion that I'm looking for.

Ditch the cheesy, generic, royalty-free music and make the switch to Musicbed.

Start your 14-day free trial with the link in the description.

But my point is, when I make videos, I know what I'm doing.

But when I try to play a new song on the guitar, I feel like an idiot.

And maybe that's like an ego problem, or maybe it's just being human.

But regardless, it usually makes me quit.

There's comfort in doing what you're good at.

But growth almost always starts where that comfort ends.

I had not played since I was a kid, and for good reason, because I was ass.

For the first time in a long while, I wasn't thinking.

Just trying to get this ball in that hoop.

But something was shifting, quietly, beneath the surface.