Elenore Pan

I actually think it's mental health and self-awareness. I really think self-awareness is the most valuable thing in this world, and you cannot be self-aware without mental health. I started doing yoga when I was young and got my yoga teaching certification, and even till now, I do yoga all the time, play tennis, and go hiking. Staying on top of your physical health is so relevant to your mental health. I think people who work in high-stress industries, it's very easy to lose adrenaline and serotonin, and then you just get into the groove of having so many meetings and things to do. It's very hard to reserve spaces for you to just focus and meditate and reset, and be aware of the things that you are currently doing and how some of them are most likely working better than others at any given point in life and professional life alike. When you talk about any kind of success or influence around anyone's career, people look at those highlights of the moments where things are working, but everyone goes through phases where some things are just not working the way that you think, and people don't see that. You couldn't get to the brighter side of it if you don't have the mental health and the mental strength to go through challenging and hard times, and to not be jaded or have bad stress management. It's very crucial for the longevity of any career. I always say that persistent people will always win in the end, and with a lot of creativity, it is a marathon, not a sprint. Finding ways to keep yourself mentally healthy, to feel grounded and not overly worried - that's the only way that you can gain clarity and start to become better.

The best career advice I've ever received is really that you don't know until you do it, and to have a beginner's mind no matter how many times you've done something. Especially after people have been working in certain industries or things for a while, it's very easy to approach new projects with a lot of assumptions - this should be done this way, or this is gonna work, this is not. Sometimes you're right, but there are more than enough times that things will just not go the way that you expected at all. That's one of the fun parts of media industry as well - what people consider as good, there's almost no set answer to it. You have to do it, and you have to learn it from reality. A lot of things sound really good theoretically, but when you put it to practice, a lot of elements would change. The ability to stay with the change and constantly learn, even when things don't go the way that you expected, and to do it over and over again and adjust as you go - it takes real mental tenacity. You might think A, but if B happens, you not only need to embrace B, but also figure out what are the missing links, and there might be other things beyond B that you don't see because you were so busy thinking about A. To really approach every single project with enough fresh perspective and open mind is actually a very hard thing. The more you do something, you just couldn't help but have certain habits. But sometimes a project will just tell me, oh, I was wrong about this and that decision, and it's okay, and I'll be wrong again in the future too. Just to really stay on top of it and be open enough to listen and respond is something that I find extremely valuable, especially now when the industry is changing every few months.

You gotta trust yourself. That's really true. For me, I had a sister - it's us two girls growing up - and I grew up in a fairly female-empowered household. So growing up, I never had the feeling that it would be harder for women, or that there are things that I couldn't do because I was a woman. I think a lot of the dialogue we have today around females, both as far as social justice goes and everyday professional performances of women, has a lot of undertone of women being in a disadvantaged place to start with. I mean, there are challenges for sure, and I'm a woman and I'm a minority, so I get more of it still, but the fact is, if I can do it, then more people can do it. If you don't even trust yourself, no one else is gonna believe in you. You're just gonna make mistakes along the way, but even if you try your hardest to avoid it, even if you doubt yourself and don't make any changes, you're still gonna make mistakes. It's just gonna happen, so you just gotta trust that you can do it. Put in the work, and you will learn from doing it. It's really just a learning by doing thing. I really feel like with media and tech, both the intersection of it and even alone, a lot of schooling really doesn't matter as much once you're in the professional field. You have to have faith in yourself first - that's the starting point of anything.

I think it is a double-sided sword for sure. The challenge is the consolidation. The film and media industry had pre-streaming days and post-streaming days if you really want to look at the industry for the past few decades. We have just very few players in the industry consolidating over 90% of the resources and distribution outlets for traditional content, and it's inevitable that they're less and less willing to take risks because those projects are huge budget with really long development timelines. You really can't afford for something that you put 5, 6, even 10 years of work and all of those people's effort into to not work. Inevitably, they are gonna become more conservative about choices, and that makes total sense from a business standpoint. But the trade-off is really that we lose a lot of diversity in the content format. We used to be able to pitch to 50 different places, now it's probably 10. People are picking up less shows and less content. There's not a lot of space for people to try new things and take on risks. It's just really hard for the industry to have innovation. The industry today has a lot more similarity with broadcast days back in the 60s and 70s than the 90s and 2000s. But the flip side and the opportunity is that I think 20 years ago, people wouldn't take social media or YouTube content creation or different mini outlets into consideration as real content - people wouldn't take it very seriously 5 to 10 years ago. But with how the industry is now, in so many ways you can have a lot more reach and influence on people, and you'll see the results a lot faster with the internet. Internet distribution just gives people an insane amount of opportunity. With the media technology part, it's become more and more of an industry where if you are a creative, you can really show the world the vision that you have with very little budget and tools. You're not very dependent on a lot of people. Back in the day, even if you had this really amazing idea, you needed a full set of crew and so many people working very long hours to get one thing done, and then you had to sell it to a traditional distributor and wait forever. These days, there's really nothing preventing anyone, regardless of their background, from having access to really amazing tools that you can very easily pick up and execute tasks that you used to have to be dependent on other people for and pay a lot of money and wait a lot of time for. Those tools have become more and more accessible now. There is actually more democracy in content creation today, and it's really more about the creatives and the idea and the voice than execution, because now you really can get high-quality stuff executed with a very skeleton team.

I think accountability is really important to me and for the people that I work with. I need to be able to take your words at face value, and if we agree on doing something, I can trust that you would hold up your end of the bargain, and I would on mine. Especially when it comes to work, it's very easy - media is a very high-stress industry, and sometimes delegation gets really muddy because it's by nature so collaborative. You just have to rely on other people or be dependent on other people for some parts of it, so to be someone that other people can count on is very important to me. And vice versa - I want to be with people that I feel like if you say this will be done, I can trust that it will be done. Another quality that's really important to me is thoroughness or persistence. Sometimes when there is a task or a goal that we want to go after, there will be unexpected issues or hindrances that just come up along the way, and I don't like excuses. I work in a way that I don't stop until there is absolutely no way - I always pivot and find ways to get to our original plan and goal. I realize that for a lot of people, giving up is just always a lot easier when there is an issue, whether in a project or when there's a challenge. The people who have the quality to persistently try and don't stop at the first no or the first issue that comes up - there are things that just eventually cannot be done, obviously, but I think that quality really sets people apart.