What Is Success Porn and How Is It Affecting Millennial Women?

Endlessly scrolling through other people’s accomplishments on LinkedIn, drinking your tea out of a mug emblazoned with "Girl Boss," while trying to ignore that creeping feeling that you’ll never be good enough to have what they have.

Sound familiar?

As a society, we have this obsession with a romanticized, polished, and ultimately, unrealistic image of what it means to be a successful woman. We see the blazers, the blowouts, and the power-posing hands on hips (although, sometimes, success DOES look like that). This obsession is what I like to call “Success Porn.” A term my friend Morra Aarons-Mele and I discuss in my podcast.

On the surface level, these images may seem empowering—like they’ll motivate that fire within us to go after our dreams (and sometimes they might). But for many of us, those images help to fuel the bubbling sense of self-doubt that so many women deal with in their careers (impostor syndrome, anyone?) It creates anxiety, it creates comparisons, and it makes sure you never feel content with where you are. Also, there just simply isn’t one way to define or demonstrate success. That is as individual as the entrepreneur themselves.

Millennial women, in particular, are more susceptible to the powers of success porn with the rise of the social media influencer phenomenon. It’s easy to scroll someone’s Insta and feel like we know their whole story. But it pays to look deeper.

Don’t forget that the Millennial generation has been raised on our confidence messaging (always being told to follow their dreams, no matter what it takes, and never settle for anything less than they deserve along the way). But sometimes putting that message into action can be hard. And when you aren’t shown a variety of examples of a what a successful life can look like, it tends to make creating a work/life harmony even more difficult.

You see, success porn is the easy way out. It’s the quickest way to sell an image of business victory, leaving out the nuances of what it takes to try, and fail, and try again. It’s a familiar trope. And that’s exactly why it’s so popular.

But these images belie the bigger journey—which is always circuitous, filled with false starts, and most of the time...eventually...rewarding.

With over two decades as an entrepreneur under my belt, I can tell you it has taken me much longer and it has been much harder than I ever thought it would be. My success didn’t happen overnight and it wasn’t just from the blowouts, blazers and power poses.

My journey has been gloriously messy.

And I’ve developed the courage to step into that mess.

Have patience with yourself to know that you can (and WILL) turn it around.

The missteps are often the most magnificent moments.

As my friend Jennifer Romolini says, “When one door closes, another door opens...but no one ever talks about the hallway in between.”