Being Geek Chic is a blog about one woman navigating the male-dominated industries of production and tech. It's written by Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder, CEO and Director of Mighteor - one of the world's first internet video production companies. Learn more about Mighteor here.
When you start a business, you have a lot of ideas of what success might look like. Dollar amounts. Ideal clients. Industry awards. Funny enough, after three years working on Mighteor, I have discovered that the feeling of success often sets in at the most bizarre moments. Sure, the big checks feel great. And the brilliant clients keep you motivated. The awards, well, they’re awfully nice too. But lately, I’ve been feeling hugely grateful for something else entirely.
Last Friday, I had breakfast with a fellow lady boss CEO and we laughed wildly about the weird things we never expected to face. The fact that we always feel pressure to have a perfect hair day. How we spend an obscene amount at Sephora right before we have to do press or big presentations. And truth be told, it could have made me sad. Being a female CEO comes with a whole host of expectations that are placed on you, both from within yourself and from exterior forces. This breakfast, however, wasn’t a “holy shit” moment because it was funny. It was a “holy shit, we made it” moment because she and I could share that truth. We could look at each other and not question our mutual success or commitment and still peel back our veneers of attempted perfection to connect with one another.
I left that breakfast energized. But I was also in a rush, because I had to get on a plane for a shoot with my team. When I arrived on set just a few hours later, I was ragged. My hair was no longer perfect. My makeup? A mess. But when I walked into the studio and set eyes on the perfectly crafted set my team had lovingly put together - I nearly cried. Talk about a “holy shit, I made it” moment. You don’t think about these things when you start your dream business. But when you’re standing in front of people who are excited to show you HOW they have carried out your crazy vision with technical expertise and artistic genius - you FEEL successful. Deep in your bones, you feel a sense of: “Holy shit, I am doing something right.”
Since starting this business, I acknowledge that I have routinely failed to recognize my own wins as a business owner. Oftentimes, I feel most comfortable when I overhear a client say something good about us - because it doesn’t require me to “gloat” about what we’ve done. In 2016, I’ve been focusing on that more and more, because my team deserves for me to be braver. To look at what we do and stand on our metaphorical roof and say: HEY, WE’RE AWESOME.
That’s why that moment on set hit me so profoundly. It’s not like we haven’t crafted sets together before, but this one, this one made me feel like climbing our actual ladder, getting on the roof and shouting: HEY, WE’RE AWESOME. The people who have chosen to call themselves Mighteorites, THEY ARE AWESOME.
Maybe it’s my midwestern upbringing. Maybe it’s the fear that if I get too proud, we’ll lose what we’ve worked so hard for. Maybe it’s just sheer silliness. Whatever it is that has been holding me back from owning our talent and work ethic - I need to be done with that. I need to give our “Holy Shit” moments the credence they deserve. And if you’re biting your tongue about any aspect of your life that has earned a little credit - I encourage you to do the same. I promise, it doesn’t feel as icky as you think. In fact, it kind of feels like a warm hug with a friend who knows just how hard it is to do what you’ve done.
Origin stories aren’t just for superheroes. My origin story, if crafted carefully by me, sounds something like this: Raised on the water of the northern woods. Paddled and painted with her family. Star-gazed where the skies were perfectly suited to the task. Took up cameras and never put them down. Wrote thousands of pages in her journal for therapy. Started a business and worked diligently at building a legacy. Still paddling. Still star-gazing. Still creating. Still writing. Still building.
The trouble is that at some point, I started to feel unstoppable in this life. I knew I wasn’t Wonder Woman - but I broached nearly everything in my life with that level of vigor. My daily world so vibrant with work and friends and love and creativity and adventure - that my newly diagnosed insomnia was actually starting to resolve itself. For the first time in nearly a year, I was sleeping through the night - every night. I thought it was because I was stupidly, pleasantly happy. (I am. I was.) But more likely, I was just damn tired.
Three weeks ago, I’m standing in my kitchen, paralyzed with pain. I have variations on the thoughts that every unmarried woman does when she is alone in her apartment and things aren’t going well: “Shit. This is why people get married. Someone checks on married people.” What I had thought was a nagging flu had suddenly taken a scary turn. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t move my head. The pain in the back of my skull and neck was so hot, that I passed out on the floor.
In this moment, I am not a girl boss. I am not a badass. I am not Wonder Woman. I am a scared fucking human. Just a simple human woman with a very bad illness. And I don’t know what to do.
In my life, there are exactly three people who I allow to see me weak. I don’t mean sad and bummed out. I mean, completely and embarrassingly destroyed to the point where I might cry. I don’t cry often. And when I do, things must be real bad. I’ve chosen these three people carefully, but even they seem shocked and dismayed when I’m not myself. This compounds the fear. This is what prevents me from getting help when I need it. This is what stops me from calling someone. But as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m working on this.
Fifteen minutes later I’ve managed to peel myself off the floor to get into a Lyft to the hospital. Immobile from pain and wincing from the mundane task of blinking, I find myself making small talk with this Lyft driver. It’s so absurd to me now that I can hardly wrap my mind around why I felt the need to be nice in this moment.
“Yeah, I grew up in northern Minnesota.”
“Mhmm. Near the Canadian border.”
At some point, the fact that I hadn’t eaten all day catches up with me and I’m so weak I can hardly muster words. So I just say:
“I’m really sorry. But you’re taking me to the hospital, so I really can’t engage right now.”
For years, I’ve attempted to be the kind of woman that rejects social expectations and does what she likes, says what she feels and doesn’t back away from her convictions. Yet, in this moment of weakness and discomfort, my desire to be likable overcame my ability to protect myself. I was not Wonder Woman. I was someone she needed to save.
Women do this. I don’t know men that do this. Alright, I won’t speak in broad, sweeping strokes, but I will say that most of the badass women I know don’t practice their limits. They still push even when they know that they’ve neared a scary precipice. They still attempt to “make it happen” when they’re fainting from exhaustion or illness. They stay up all night for their work and their clients to the point of mental, physical and emotional damage. I did this. I worked an absolutely insane 80 hour work week. And then I got so sick, I fainted on my kitchen floor. This is not part of my origin story. This is not the kind of person that I aimed to be. This is not Wonder Woman.
After endless tests, a temporary quarantine and a stack of prescriptions, I went home with strict orders: I was not to leave my home for 72 hours. I was not to work. I was not to go out. I was to sleep. And rest. And get better. I was seriously sick. And if I wanted my life back, I had to force myself to get it back by being motionless and obedient. So I did.
Three weeks later, I am starting to feel normal. Starting. I am decidedly human. And if I want to hold onto this life, which I am so grateful for, I need to remember that more often. There is a danger in trying to be Wonder Woman. I will stand with my hands on my hips and approach every single part of my life with passion and purpose. But there are only a limited number of hours per day when you can do that realistically. There are only a limited numbers of days per week when you can fight the fight and actually win. Your origins should remind you of this. That once upon a time, you painted. You paddled. You pursued life with equal parts heroics and humanity.
Heroics AND Humanity. That is your origin story. That is your how your story continues.
On five separate occasions this year, people have asked me some variation of this question: How did you find your mentors?
And usually I stammer out some combination of: I met them through a job. Or through a recommendation from a boss. Or through a networking organization. But the truth is, really, how I met these people is that I put myself out there to meet them. And then, I really, really talked with them. It was like I was dating them. I courted them. I complimented them. I asked them to “be mine,” in a sense.
As one of my last professional acts of 2015, I was on Levi Weinhagen’s Pratfalls Podcast. It’s a wonderful show about the literal and metaphorical pratfalls of being a creative person living a personal life, which can come with relationships and children and parents and siblings and friendships. On the show, we talked about mentors and it strikes me that there are two kinds of mentors in my life. The ones that I’ve talked about above were a certain type of valuable relationship, but the ones I’ve been exploring more recently have a different kind of makeup. I call them, Mutual Mentorships.
It’s sort of like the concept of the squad, but blown up even bigger. It’s this notion that we can break down the structural expectations we have about what mentorship looks like (one person with all the knowledge comes in and provides someone else with knowledge) and expand it to be about a more collaborative exploration of everyone’s unique talents.
Mutual Mentorship says: No matter what your title, role, salary, bonus plan, career path, education - you have something to offer others professionally.
It’s funny, in all other areas of work and play and love and relationships - we stray away from the concept of top-down hierarchy because it’s largely considered ineffective at best and downright foolish at worst. It disincentives listening because it communicates that some people have more to offer than others. And it perpetuates traditional power structures by reinforcing the idea that you have to have a certain amount of it in order to be worthy of giving other people advice.
Deconstruct that idea and suddenly the available talent pool for “mentors” grows exponentially. People that have asked me to “mentor” them have often taught me just as many things about myself. Defining our relationship under traditional power dynamics limits what I can take away, which frankly, is a lot. It undermines mentors too, because it suggests that we don’t have the ability to expand into bigger roles or evolve our thinking even on topics which we are considered to be the “experts.” Perhaps challenging who can be a mentor would allow us all to broaden its value.
Now back to the question of finding mentors. I suspect the reasons this question comes up is because many a person is looking to improve their network in 2016. New Year’s has that effect of making people want to be more goal-oriented. And finding those powerful mentors is important and can change your life. But don’t let that be the only network you build this year.
Consider investing just as much time and effort building a mutual mentorship society in the circles you already live and work in. Invite former colleagues. People you’ve hired. Vendors you’ve collaborated with. Friends who you admire professionally. Old professors. Your yoga instructor. The diversity of the group will help to establish a powerful sense of “We” - and what the “We” can offer one another is beautiful.
If fear could blow up my phone, it would be. Imagine text after text with fire emojis, angry faces and large, bold Xs. When I go to work each day. When I go on dates. When I think about my next professional move. When I talk to my family and friends. Me and fear, we’re kind of seeing each other. Way too much.
But this isn’t a toxic relationship. It could be. But instead, I’m accepting it. I’m willingly looking it in the eye and saying: hey, come hang out over here. This is a conscious choice and I’m not blocking fear on my phone anytime soon. Sure, sometimes, I’m still terribly scared, but most of the time, I’m aware, willing and participating in the relationship.
Let me get away from the metaphors and just narrow in on it: I’m seeing fear because I’m dating again. I’m seeing fear because I’m trying to grow my business in a huge way. And I’m seeing fear because my heart feels totally capable of being broken again. You only get there when you’re healed.
There’s no point in pretending like it’s a mystery: I was really, really unstable and unhappy for at least half of 2015. But what’s weird about being unhappy is that you don’t really fear being any more unhappy when you’re in it. You dread it. But you don’t fear it. That’s how you know you’re truly fucking sad. You can’t imagine being sadder.
So imagine me now… laying in bed talking about my favorite pre-Pixar Disney movies and trying to bask in the happiness. All the while, knowing that pain is likely on the other side. I write stories for a living - and MOST of the ones that real people live don’t close with happy endings. That’s why we write them. Because we are always trying to even the score.
At the same time, I am writing checks with lots of 0s after the comma to build a next iteration of my dream business. The comfortable home, the expensive bottles of wine and the addiction to the nice makeup at Sephora has to go on hold while I build a new room in this career castle. Before the addition, we were doing just fine. But I also wasn’t chasing after happy while having a love affair with fear.
I guess what I’m trying to say is; If you’re flirting with fear, maybe ask it to hang out. You might be surprised how happy accepting it can make you.
Beating the Original Super Mario Brothers. Writing and directing my first narrative film. Reading the book about Pixar. Getting the high score on Galaga on the machine in my building. Traveling to Italy and drinking insane amounts of wine. Finally getting that tattoo.
It’s easy to want to do things. It’s harder to actually do them.
And yet it feels so good when we do things. When we wake up and realize: damn, I did that big thing. And I did it well. So why is it so hard to commit?
I have always wanted to be known as the kind of person that got shit done.
It started in high school, when my ultra competitive nature meant that I wanted to get into my choice colleges. It transitioned into that first year in the dorms, where I challenged myself to become a freshman staff reporter at the largest daily college newspaper in the country. (I totally did that too, by the way.) And it continued early in my career, when I decided to teach myself how to be a film editor to expand my creative professional options. That bet paid off immensely.
Then adulting got in the way.
And grocery lists.
And dating.
And all the things that don’t really have “dream” attached to them. Instead, it’s more like “obligation” with a dash of social expectations.
For me, so much of my growth this year has been about getting back to that girl. The one that said she was going to do something and then actually did it. It started simply: seeking out the challenges I’ve always wanted to achieve and forcing myself to make progress, no matter how small. Initially, this was about the simple task of crossing things off my to do list. Anyone who has ever had an absurd collection of post-it notes knows this: There is a sick level of self-satisfaction that comes from crossing things off of your to-do list. Imagine that tiny little personal pleasure being amplified by 10 or 100 when you do something truly life changing?!
Before I knew it, the dreams got bigger: write a script in the Wes Anderson cafe. Done.
Create my own start-up and actually hire some people. Done.
Write and direct a film. Done.
The point is: if you want to be the kind of person who feels fulfilled, work to fulfill yourself through goal-oriented ass kicking. Be the sort of woman who says: I want to do this. And then actually do it. Make the list. And do it.
You’ll be happier. Trust me. I know, because I am.
