International Women's Month Series

Liz Heller is a tech and media innovator, investor, and producer whose career has bent culture for four decades. She led artist development at MCA, where she commissioned more than 500 music videos for Tom Petty, Bobby Brown, and Belinda Carlisle. She became President of Island Visual Arts, then Executive Vice President of Capitol Records at the exact moment music, audio, and the internet collided.

She produced The Basketball Diaries with Leonardo DiCaprio. She executive produced the Good Will Hunting soundtrack. She built early growth engines for TOMS one-for-one, Product(RED), Microsoft, Intel, and Apple. USA Today called her the godmother of the women's cyber movement in Hollywood.

She calls herself a “multi-potentialite,” a word she found after I asked her to list everything she'd done back in the earliest episodes, when I first started The Power of Re:Invention. She sat in her office in New Mexico, started writing, and came up with more than forty things. She had no idea the list was that long. I love that.

What I love about this conversation is how clearly “little Liz” foreshadowed all of it. She didn't play house. She played office. She was an entrepreneur before she had the word for it. Her mother Billie was the blueprint. A true feminist. She worked on the UN doctrine for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and took Liz to marches at eight years old. Her father worshipped her mother and licked envelopes for her mailings. That is the household that made Liz.

Her operating principle in life was and is simple and it's the whole episode. "If I am not happy doing something, I am absolutely not in the place of my best work."

Some of her “tools” to live by:

Try it on. Walk into the room acting like you're already the person. She used it on a woman at a top-five company agonizing over a promotion. The woman took the job.

Conditions of satisfaction. Write out what would make you 85 to 90 percent happy. If what you have only hits 60, you have your answer.

Voyage of discovery. Sit with your iPad for an hour and click wherever curiosity pulls you.

Change your algorithm. Her feed is science, innovation, and knowledge because she made it that way. Brilliant, honestly.

Her advice for women is the part you need to hear. Don't go where you're not comfortable. Build your own rooms. Build your own board of directors out of your girlfriends. Build the strategy to change it.

Connect with Liz:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizheller/ memBrain: https://www.membrainllc.com

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