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.
Here’s a fact that will probably surprise no one at all: I have had some pretty mixed job reviews in my career. There has never been any doubt about my work-ethic, passion and commitment to my various jobs. Most of the critiques over the years orbited around my ability (or lack thereof) to “tone down my personality” or “be sensitive to other people” in my workplace.
I want you to try to put aside any thoughts of blatant or subliminal sexism today, so we can talk about just exactly how these kinds of comments shaped me for the better. And I also want to be fair to the people who gave me those good and bad reviews and say that they were all really incredible human beings who helped me reach my goals in my career under their leadership.*
Now that we have gotten all that pretense out of the way, all of this is to say that it would be easy to sit here and suggest it was all bullshit. That being told I was "bossy, harsh and aggressive” was all worthless. But since starting my own business and having my job reviews come in the form of happy or unhappy clients and joyful or disgruntled employees, well, my perspective has shifted monumentally. And that’s exactly what my first Ignite talk was about.
In five minutes, I manage to outline exactly how those negative job reviews gave me the fuel and the insight I needed to have positive, open and transparent dialogue with the people in my working cirlce today, whether they are peers, partners, clients, contractors, employees or vendors. I truly believe that the open dialogue we have built together has been the key to Mighteor’s success to date.
But what I want to talk about here today is something that was scratched from my Ignite talk because of time and because it just needed a little more depth and consideration than a slide and a 15 second sound bite. It’s this very challenging idea: Even the worst things ever said about us can serve as a mirror for discovering our best qualities.
The funny thing about living and working in an honesty vaccuum is that you can truly start to see yourself as a business person and as a leader with more self-awareness and more conviction. Authenticity is something I’ve explored at great length, in large part because I’m not impervious to negative comments, and I often find myself in something my best friends and my therapist call: “Liz’s Analysis Paralysis.” To quickly put a non-medical definition around the term: My particular breed of analysis paralysis usually involves me turning over a question or a problem over and over again in my head until it hardly resembles the actual issue at hand and becomes an amorphous blob of painful, debilitating confusion that is so large and so perplexing I’m literally incapable of making a decision or putting together a coherent sentence. In other words, I spend a lot of time in my head thinking about this shit.
The thing about being authentically aware of yourself is that you should be able to look at yourself with harsh realism and acknowledge when you could have been better. I am aware that my greatest flaws in my career have often coincided with my stubborn insistence that other people just needed to “check their feelings at the door” and focus on the task at hand. For example, I process my feelings deep in the quiet of my mind until I can’t move or speak. (Ahem, analysis paralysis.) Knowing that other people absolutely need to talk through things and emotionally process with others, out loud, has helped me to be a much more patient leader.
This came to a head and became something I need to face because of my employees. In one of my worst moments, I said out loud to an employee that “I didn’t care about his feelings.” It wasn’t true. I did care. But in that moment, all I could think about was solving the problem in front of us. From where I was standing, I could only see why we needed to fix it. I didn’t give enough thought to how we were gonna fix it. For him, part of that equation was processing the problem emotionally. I have been forced to learn how to be sensitive to that. It’s something I can honestly look back on now and say I heard when I was 22 years old in my job reviews, albeit in different forms. Talk about taking a while to change.
The fact of the matter is: Truly listening to someone or truly taking the time to hear something that is hard is not easy to do. But this act can be profound in its ability to make us better leaders. I’ve come to believe that listening is one of the most powerful forms of reflection. And since, it’s become one of my most intense areas of focus and growth over the last year. Coincidentally, I have also been accused of being an “over communicator” recently because I’ve tried so diligently to over correct.
It would be easy to just throw a “LOL. FML.” at that accusation. But the fact is, I’ll take it. I would so much rather be known as the boss who communicated too much instead of the boss that didn’t communicate at all.
In the Ignite talk, I asked: What would you learn? Whose trust would you earn? How would you grow? If you chose to listen. Today I would add: What hard, ugly, painful thing are you not listening to that could help you unlock your potential if you only chose to hear it?
—
*And in case you were curious, my two worst job reviews ever both came from women who felt that if I “toned things down” - I would be considerably more successful. The issue of policing women’s personalities are never as simple as they seem.
I only do laundry once every 60 to 90 days. For some people, that may seem totally insane. Maybe even gross. Quite honestly, I feel a little embarrassed that I know this about myself. But ever since I started my business, my life has become all about efficiency and reducing the amount of shit I do in my life that is totally and completely time consuming for no good reason at all. Laundry and dry cleaning was one of those things.
It all started when I went to go pick up my “go-to” suit jackets and sheath dress from the dry cleaner and the bill was $89. For three damn items. In case you didn’t know this already: there is a lady-penalty at the dry cleaner. A men’s shirt will get the steam and press for anywhere between $3.99 to $9.99. My silk shirts? The absolutely absurd price of $19.99. It’s the opposite of economical. And it just caused me a lot of stress always trying to figure out when I was gonna pick up my wardrobe.
And then I discovered this big secret: what if I didn’t even need to own nice clothes? Besides the basics, of course. What if I could avoid understanding trends and just let someone else do that for me?
Well now that is exactly what I do. I rent roughly 75% of my work week wardrobe and it’s awesome. No laundry. No dry cleaning. No unexpected dry cleaning bills. And no worrying about what to wear. New clothes just show up at my front door. Then, after I wear them, I send them back. I don’t have to wash them. I don’t have to steam them. I just wear and return.
This is how I do it:
From Monday - Wednesday, I wear my Rent the Runway Unlimited items. These tend to be my most busy “meeting” days, so it’s a lot of high end Diane Von Furstenberg dresses and Vince and Theory jackets and blazers. These things going extremely well with my existing accessories, so it’s super simple to just throw on a DVF sheath dress with a pair of heels and nice earrings and that’s that.
Then, on Thursday morning, the UPS guy picks up my RTR items and I pick my items on Friday for the next week. The nice thing about RTR is that you don’t have to send everything back at once, so you can hold onto that romper that makes you feel like a badass and send back the other items and just get two more items that week.
For Thursday and Friday (and the occasional Monday when UPS fails to deliver on time) I wear the items from my Le Tote. Le Tote is a funny thing. It allows you to rent the whole gamut of wardrobe items from gym attire to dressy dresses. Because you get five items at a time, I tend to be a little more adventurous with my Le Tote and have even bought one of the sweaters I had in one of my first Totes. The types of items I generally get from Le Tote are things like a sassy French Connection sweater or a Free People blouse. They tend to be my Friday items, when I’m not as likely to have a bunch of meetings but still want to look good just in case something does come up.
Le Tote does require you to send everything back at once, so I do have to plan a little better and there have been a few times when I did send something back without wearing it because the fit was bizarre or I just didn’t like the item on me. But I figure, in the big picture, it’s not a big deal.
The other really unexpected bonus of this system is how much simpler traveling for work has become. These days, I pack my LeTote and RTR items on every trip I go on, wear them for the work excursion, and then have my hotel ship the items back for me. I go home with a super light bag, which means I usually just fold it up into my laptop purse, and within a few days of being home, a new wardrobe is on the way.
What does this cost me? Altogether, I spend $200 per month on these two services combined. I don’t shop anymore. I do less laundry. And I’ve eradicated my twice monthly dry cleaning bill. I am pretty confident when I look at the numbers, I’m saving money.
Of course, most of my friends are baffled by this. But here’s the thing: there are SO many things I have spent a hundred bucks or more on in my closet that I’ve worn once and then I felt tremendously guilty forever because I never wore it again. You know what items most commonly suffer that ending? Yeah, they are the things that are colors. The blue dresses. And green skirts. And that one pink blazer I bought because I was losing my freaking mind. And while I don’t think this is for everyone, I do think it’s for people who like to dress up and want to look chic and polished for their job, but just don’t have the capacity to actually pull it off.
To put it in concrete terms, these are the things I most commonly rent: Really bold patterned shirts and rompers, sheath dresses in all kinds of colors, special event dresses for parties, networking events and big deal sort of activities, blazers and skirts.
And these are things that I don’t rent: Bras and underwear, accessories and jeans or my black skinnies. Socks, obviously. Shoes or footwear. Also, my purses usually last the whole year or two, so those I skip too.
The last, and perhaps, the most emotional reason why I just can’t imagine stopping this lifestyle switch any time soon is because fashion is so, so wasteful. When I think about how many crappy items I have purchased from Forever 21 and H&M over the years, only to donate those items one season later, it makes my stomach hurt. While wasting money sucks, ultimately, it’s the fact that most of that clothing winds up in a landfill somewhere that really gets to me. I literally can’t handle it. So while some people might be weirded out that I’m essentially “sharing” a wardrobe with hundreds of other women - that doesn’t bother me one bit. The way I see it, we share our cars, our homes and now, we share our closets.
Never in one million years did I think this would be a topic on this blog, but it’s turned out to be this great thing in my life. I love how it simplifies my life. And I love how it gives me space to free my brain of wardrobe questions and instead look at how to spend my energy on my business every week.
If you want to try one of these services, I’ve got coupons, because why the hell not ask, right?
Le Tote will give you $25 off your first tote (50% off) if you use THIS LINK HERE . OR the first three people to email me with the subject line GIVE ME A TOTE at elizabeth(at)beinggeekchic(dot)com - I will send a free tote to you!
Rent the Runway will give you $30 off your first rental or $30 off your first month of Unlimited if you use THIS LINK HERE.
Share economy, FTW.
I’m sorry this week is just one giant promotion fest for all the things the Mighteorites and I are working on. I promise, very soon, we will get back to the business of talking about entertainment, feminism, business and life and career. But for now, I need to promote one more thing. And if I’m being honest, I’m very excited about this thing.
Today I am introducing the Internet Video Masterclass. A new web show that my team and I have brought into the world to help give brands, businesses, nonprofits and everyone in between, the tools they need to make better internet video for any and all platforms.
You can watch all of the videos here on our website.
Or, better yet, you can Subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you get all the latest. If you like these, I’ve already written season 2. And Beyonce may or may not be the theme of one of the episodes.
This is what we do every day at Mighteor: we make great internet video and we come up with ways to get it seen. I would be kind of failing myself and the entire premise upon which my business was formed if I was not growing and continuing to expand the usefulness of video content. Many of the things we talk about in the series are topics that we regularly discuss with our clients in planning their video strategy, and while I’m nervous about giving away all our knowledge, I’m truly hopeful that it opens the doors of possibility for other big things in Mighteor’s future.
So here is how you can help me out this week. Share the series with your friends. Your professional contacts. Your Twitter feed. The more we get this out there, the happier I will be.
And yes, I am aware that I’m a total goober in these videos.
No. I don’t know how to be less of a goober.
One of the things I’m working on this year is “putting myself out there more” - which translates to: more speaking engagements, more pitch competitions and more media appearances. Add to the list: more putting myself in Mighteor video. And not just when we have been able to highly edit me either. So perhaps there could be nothing more bold or brave in this category than putting out a live show. On Facebook!
Mighteor Mondays is a live show that will stream on the first Monday of the month of Facebook Live. We’ll talk about current trends in internet video, how you can take advantage of them whether you’re a big brand or a budding vlogger and we’ll take your questions and answer them! All you have to do is “Like” our Facebook page and join us on the first Monday of the month at Noon EST/11AM CST/10AM MST for about 30 minutes. I promise it’s gonna be a good (and informative!) time.
Of course, if you just want to join us so we can talk Live about the latest issues in gender representation, our shared excitement for Sherlock Season 4 or wax poetic about our favorite animated shows of the 90s, we’d be happy to have you for that as well!
The first episode will air Monday, August 1st. We hope you’ll join us. Especially cause I don’t think it’s going to be very fun if I’m just sitting on Facebook Live by myself for an hour!
And just in case you are wondering, yes, we will be recording the show and saving each episode for playback later in case you want to hear more about that topic and aren’t available when we are live.
I started a creative company. One would think I spend most days being CREATIVE! Go ahead: Imagine confetti and balloons wafting around the word. For my sake. Can you see them? Good. Me too. Now imagine all the balloons popping at once and the confetti getting stuck to your face. Yeah, that’s how I feel about spreadsheets.
Over the last three years, I’ve watched other companies like mine startup and fail. I’ve also seen others startup and succeed far beyond Mighteor. And I’ve seen lots of companies do something kind of in-between the two. Over time, I tried to watch carefully at what made the companies that failed, well, fail. Because avoiding their destiny is key to our future.
What I noticed again and again was that many companies failed to build a structure and promise around their creativity - and as a result - their business failed to grow. They loved their equipment and tech and beers on Fridays - but they didn’t see how the really boring tasks of balancing budgets and doing proper legal led to meaningful outcomes.
Structured creativity says that fanciful doodles and spreadsheets can coexist.
And so this has become my ethos as a creative, as a CEO and as a leader. In fact, it’s on the second page of our Mighteor company handbook: “While we are a creative company, we are still a business. Our creativity is how we make our money, but without structure and management - it is impossible for us to do our job well, deliver product on time and consistently produce at a high level. Creatives get a bad rap. In all areas of creative work, the people that do it are often stereotyped as inconsistent, unprofessional and difficult to work with. At Mighteor, we must always strive to be the opposite of this stereotype.”
My stringent worship of structure does not come easily to me. It’s a forced skill I find tiresome at best and, at its worst, makes me not want to do the work at all. But when I’m in my darkest corners of resentment for my own self-imposed point of view on how we do business - I occasionally see just how magical it can be.
Creativity is not a math equation. There are not right answers. There are not wrong answers. There are many paths that can lead to artistic and strategic success. And while the spreadsheets help us keep track of budgets and how much we can spend on locations and talent - it doesn’t tell us where to shoot or who to cast. There is freedom to having a clear picture of what the resources will allow us to dream up. And I appreciate how much opportunity that provides each project to adapt and grow.
Creativity is not nearly as random as people may suggest, either. Every new client with my company goes through a creative briefing, a process where we ask all kinds of questions about their company, their video, their aesthetic preferences. We take a metaphorical microscope and assess their strategy or vision. Part of the creative process is coming to a place of shared goals and objectives. If we know what we need to achieve with our creativity, we can be all the more brilliant.
And constraints are actually your best friend. When I think about the client projects I love most - I always come back to the projects where the sky wasn’t the limit, but rather, where limits were everywhere. In fact, the limit was something like 6 inches above the baseboards for a few of these projects. And yet, again and again, we found a way to make a vision come to life. We used a skate park in the suburbs instead of the city - or we got the wardrobe from Target. When you stop focusing on just how BIG YOU CAN BE and instead focus in on just how effectively you can creatively stretch - you find new limits.
However, those same constraints can make things scary. Add the risk and the money and well, suddenly we’re making video by checklist. As a client, it’s really important not to lose sight of the gray areas where creatives need to live and work. The mind has a remarkable ability to stretch and adapt. Part of our jobs as creatives is to develop a vision so compelling and vacuous in how it draws you in - that the viewer can’t help but watch. So often, when projects go wrong, it’s because our clients lose faith in the viewers ability to stretch. When we treat viewers like they need to be spoon-fed, we immediately lose their trust. And there is no amount of money or resources you can throw at that. You must be willing as a creative and as a client to take the risk of allowing the viewer to explore the gray space with you.
I call it Structured Creativity. On my best days, I call it Magic. Whatever you call it, if it works, embrace it. At least, it does for me.
But here’s the thing: like any good thing that works (like Starbucks, Instagram filters and kisses) it can be killed. And it’s not by the things you would expect. It’s not by being bold. Or by getting too excited. It’s not by being risky. Or by being willing to try new things. Creative magic is killed by fear.
Fear that it won’t work.
Fear that people won’t like it.
Fear that the client won’t be happy.
Fear that we can’t technically pull it off.
Fear that we don’t know what platform it belongs on.
Fear that it’s too risky.
Fear that we won’t have planned enough.
For all the years I’ve been doing this work in one capacity or another - I have met hundreds of people pursuing creative passions and if you ask each of them why their project failed, why their painting didn’t sell, why they never finished the screenplay - not one will tell you that fear killed their project. But the number of times someone has told me they ran out of money or ran out of time or just ran out of whatever was inside them - well - nearly 100% will say because there wasn’t enough of something.
But if you ask me, the hard truth most creatives won’t say out loud is that fear killed them.
Fear of rejection.
Fear of failure.
Fear of mediocrity.
And there won’t be a spreadsheet to point to that outlines said fear. Or explains it’s existence. Or how to overcome it.
Here’s my point: As creatives we must learn to control two things - our process AND our fear. Our process is possibility. It makes it humanly achievable to take our creative dreams and turn them into creative realities. If we can control that, we can actually break down our beautiful brains into something tangible - an actual, finished product.
And then we must learn how to control our fear. The fear that the process won’t be enough. The fear that we won’t make the client happy. The fear that we will fail to deliver. And in turn, we must ask our clients and creative collaborators to not bring fear into the birthing of ideas that we are trying to bring to the table. No successful creative project was ever formed out of fear. And no creative person can possibly sustain a career formed on a foundation of fear. Let me say that again in all caps just to make it very clear: NO CREATIVE PERSON CAN POSSIBLY SUSTAIN A CAREER FORMED ON A FOUNDATION OF FEAR.
I could type for hours on the topic of how fear destroys so much more than just our creativity - but I’ll leave you with this final thought about the power of structured creativity when we choose to be fearless: When you stop worrying about failing and start working toward succeeding, what will you have left to be afraid of?
