Morning Glory

There's a 2010 movie called Morning Glory. I don't remember it too well. It's been a while since I've seen it.

I think it's one of the better movies I've seen about a young woman wanting a serious career. Wikipedia describes it as a romantic comedy-drama and in the plot overview talks about a love interest and her breaking up with him at some point because she feels he doesn't really support her career.

I don't really remember anything about the romance in question. I guess it was a minor footnote to me.

In contrast, the 2004 movie Little Black Book is strongly focused on the neurotic, unhealthy love life of the main character and she almost inadvertently gets dramatic career improvement as a direct consequence of deciding to walk away from this situation.

It is the norm for narratives in movies to pit female career aspirations against so-called love and to place a very strong focus on the relationship part of the equation. Morning Glory focuses much more on her career experience, career aspirations, her mother discouraging her from staying in this same field, and how she's young and tech savvy and how this leads to social friction in the job hunt because she knows the people she's talking to are lying or whatever because she has the technical expertise to know they got her email and opened it and didn't reply or something like that.

I especially like this scene which initially looks like a disaster and like she will go down in flames because everyone is talking and asking her questions and no one is giving her time to reply before the next person speaks. But then she does answer all or most of the questions.

Some of that is flat out short term memory of a sort I no longer have, but I love this scene in this movie because she actually makes decisions that are clearly based on something substantive.

For example, she says "All size models, skirts not too short." She clearly has some ideas about women's equality and women's identity she wants to promote and it informs her decisions.

She doesn't want to promote traditional beauty standards that everyone needs to be reed thin and plump women should just be invisible in the media and also doesn't want to promote women as sex objects.

In my youth, I could calculate numbers in my head faster than many people could enter them in a calculator and repeatedly told people the correct answer before they got done calculating. I don't have that anymore but I still have a solid understanding of a lot of math concepts many people lack and are unlikely to ever have.

I'm seriously medically handicapped and I am unlikely to ever be able to perform like the character in that scene. I don't do well with that kind of rapid fire social interaction anymore and never handled certain aspects of that well.

With being older and not having strong short term memory, I have more need to be able to deal with one or two decisions at a time, but I typically have strong reasons for the judgement calls I make and there is typically a lot of context for why I wish to do it a certain way.

I blog and no longer participate on any social media. "Live" conversation is no longer a strong point for me and I no longer really care.

I no longer feel it's important that I be good at that or engage in that way very much. I feel I've done a lot of research in a lot of different areas and my interests and goals are better served by taking the time to write a blog post that pulls various things together.

I have tentative plans to make clothes and I want to approach that in a particular fashion that I think accommodates my weaknesses and also serves business goals. 

It's not necessarily important for other people to understand why I want to do it a certain way. Hypothetically, I might be able to get funding if I can adequately communicate my reasons and goals, but:

1. I'm physically handicapped. No matter how well I manage my condition, I need to first and foremost accommodate my physical limitations or I'm dead in the water anyway.

2. I don't think anyone is doing anything remotely like what I want to do. It's an unproven model and it's more important for me to "aim small, miss small" than to worry prematurely about scaling issues. AKA "I'm going to scale my foot up your butt."

Most people use various rubrics for all kinds of things. This is a large part of social interactions and people vastly overestimate how well they recognize people or how well they judge all kinds of things.

One way this is problematic for women is that people are used to men being in decision-making positions and there are all kinds of studies saying that various male traits get interpreted as "leadership material" that have nothing to do with leading.

Leading is about having executive function: ability to make good plans, execute them and make decisions in line with those larger plans.

But all people, regardless of gender, tend to view things like physical height, deep voice and broad shoulders as proxies for authority because those are male traits and we get used to seeing them in people in leadership positions.

If you have plans to do something "big," that only happens if you routinely make good decisions that are in line with those goals. It will not be obvious to most other people how your decisions further your goals for a thing that is currently a dream and not an accomplished fact.

If you are a woman or have any personal issues that in any way impede your ability to do that "in the line of fire" or on the fly while twelve thousand other people pull you this way and that and actively try to derail your goals and use whatever you are doing to further their agenda, look for ways to move that interference out of the way.

Because in many cases, it's not actually essential for you to pull off this impressive stunt of rapid-fire replies to a dozen people clamoring for answers in under five minutes.

I had a job at a Fortune 500 company and I was mystified by the ability of my coworkers to somehow pounce on our immediate bosses to get quick answers in person. I largely gave up on trying and just emailed them.

I needed answers from them, but I rarely needed those answers right this minute and it wasn't actually important that I do this face to face.

If you have a thing you want to pursue and you can't figure out how to run with the big dogs in whatever way they seem to usually do that, stop and think about which parts matter.

The reality is men also do that without anyone acting like it makes them less serious about business. 

The founder of Playboy typically worked in his pyjamas. No one much talks about that fact. I bet they would harp on it constantly if it were a woman and pretend that's why she's failing.

Stop believing that's why you are failing. Figure out the real reason this piece of junk isn't flying and work on that.

When men have personal quirks or personal shortcomings, they typically pretend "That's beneath me. My secretary handles that." When women do, everyone, them included, says "This is why you fail."