We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Grace Wong a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Grace, appreciate you joining us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

A lot of people think being successful is along the lines of earning a lot of money or climbing to the top of the corporate ladder. Being hailed as a top elite figure of authority in your workplace. Or being able to generate profit for a start-up. Or when you ‘make it’ in the industry. Or perhaps it’s being “stable” in your career or finances. People equate success to career achievements all the time. However, I believe that stability is an illusion. Nothing is truly permanent or stable. You never know what could happen. So instead of pursuing ‘stability’ I believe in pursuing security and resilience. Thus, I think success really comes down to your intentions, your heart posture, and most importantly, your character.

Intentions: Here’s an example: you go into a networking event and you set intentions – or achievable mini goals. “I intend to have a conversation where I pitch my service to 5 different people. By the end of the event I must have gotten 5 interested people’s contact and promoted interest in my service.” At this event, no matter how socially anxious you are, no matter how awkward all 10 of your conversations go, no matter if you ran to hide in the bathroom when it was your turn to give a public speech about your service to 100+ people, (this totally didn’t happen to me), as long as you met your intention of speaking to five people and getting interested leads, I would still call that a success. Setting intentions is a healthy way to measure success and also builds a better relationship with yourself by encouraging and allowing a lot of grace to yourself. Which leads me to my next point…

Character: I believe the way someone carries themselves is crucial to defining success. I’m not talking about facades or masks that are put up in public, giving illusions that aren’t fully true behind closed doors. How you behave in your private life is how your public behavior will translate too. I believe finding security and confidence in yourself first before anything and anyone else sets the precedent for how you’ll interact with others especially in your work – be it clients, teammates, employees, etc. When you’re a positive influence to everyone else around you, it’ll come right back to you. If you’re able to achieve a good relationship with yourself first, you build a really good foundation for whatever is to come – trials or achievements alike and you’ll be better equipped to handle anything unexpected.

Heart Posture: Where is your heart posture? Is it focused on making yourself money rich? Or is it others oriented? I find too often when people do things and take action for the self it can grow to be anxiety inducing and stressful. When your focus is on ‘me’ there’s a standard you want or have to keep up and for so many people, that becomes exhausting and incredibly draining. Instead, shift your focus to others. “Who needs my help?” “Who needs to be served?” “Who should I ask how they’re doing?” “Who can I give advice to?” There is so much freedom when you take the focus off yourself and put it onto others. When you do that, I call that success because you are helping people and in return, you make the world a better place. And Making the world a better place is ultimately the greatest success, right?

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve always been someone who appreciated variety and excitement. Growing up, I was one of those kids that couldn’t sit still past 4 minutes answering math problems or reading history books, but I really enjoyed connecting with other people and connecting them to each other. I valued quality time and quality conversations, and I appreciated curiosity in myself and in other people. I liked asking questions and hearing others’ life experiences. I realized as I got older that this was a strength I could leverage in my work, which I knew had to be centered around variety and interacting with lots and lots of different types of personalities. I started my business in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, back in 2020. At the time I was still a student studying Film & Television back in Boston, and my spring semester was cut short due to lockdown. COVID threw a wrench into all plans, including plans to study abroad, work an internship, and film projects. Summer hit and I lost all sense of direction. Knowing it was my last year before graduation, I began to ponder about how I was going to address my job situation post-grad. The entertainment industry took a huge hit – and as if it wasn’t already difficult to find job stability in the market, COVID made things even more challenging because the industry is very collaboration and in-person heavy, and there were a lot of rules and regulations about in person activities.
I felt like I needed to create something for myself, and fast, as the future of the industry seemed bleak. I knew it wasn’t wise to wait around till everything blew over, but at the same time, I felt confused on what to do, and any guidance I received was rather unhelpful or irrelevant because COVID didn’t just hit one industry, it hit all industries. It was around that time that I met my now business mentor, who happened to run a production company in Beverly Hills and taught me everything I know today about starting a business and running your own agency. Before I knew it, I was thrown into creating my own agency with 0 experience in entrepreneurship. Little Joy Media was birthed right then and there without further rumination.
Four years later, Little Joy Media is a video production company-ad agency hybrid that helps businesses build strong and meaningful relationships with their clients by leveraging video storytelling. We take a multimedia approach in our strategy, which is how we set ourselves apart from most other production companies out there: We combine video + strategy to help our clients optimize the content we create for them. Any production company can create lovely and beautiful videos, but we don’t just want to put them out in the wild. What you do after with the video is equally as, if not more important than the video itself, and that’s what we address.
Most importantly, We excel at building and managing a curated video and media content team for businesses to support them in their business growth. Businesses approach us for this reason, to help them reduce one more thing on their already full plate of things to address.
Examples of content we create include narrative projects, mini documentaries, brand videos, commercials, web series, podcasts, and social media reels.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A big thing had to unlearn was believing that other people’s strengths are always more useful than my own. How others can seem to do the things that I can’t. The modern day term for this is probably imposter syndrome. It goes back to growing up as someone who struggled with reaching a standard of academic prestige and was surrounded by an environment that praised and valued academic achievement. There was very little knowledge or interaction about anything beyond an academic world. I struggled to blend in to an environment like that, and nothing about the standards in that world came easy to me like it did to my peers. However, I later realized that different types of work actually required a different set of strengths. As a business owner, you want to avoid spending all your time and energy on ‘improving’ your weaknesses. This is the opposite of how we’re taught in school growing up, to focus on the subjects and areas you’re weaker in so you can score better on tests. However, in entrepreneurship, your strengths are your key to wealth creation. As humans we will always default to what comes natural and easiest to us. Knowing your strengths and what you’re best at, then focusing on your energy in making that stronger, and ultimately leveraging that to propel you forward will help you feel much more in flow than pulling your teeth out doing something that you *feel* like you should do or focus on because other people are too. Focus on your strengths and use it vigorously to your advantage, because you’re the only one that can offer it. Just because you find it so easy to do does not mean it’s easy to other people, and there is value in that. As Albert Einstein once said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”

Any advice for managing a team?

Appreciation is one of the most underrated point in team management. Often when someone gets a gig or gets hired, or when a company hires an employee or contractor, thank yous can get lost in the shuffle but they can go a long way. It’s also important to verbalize it. For hirees, meaningful and personal appreciation and praise helps boost motivation and inspires hirees to give their best and to work harder. For hirers, appreciation for the opportunity shows respect and gratitude, and can increase your chances of being hired back again. Always appreciate!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://littlejoymedia.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/littlejoymedia/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/littlejoymedia/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grace-littlejoymedia/

Image Credits
Dane Bruhahn