Meet Jeff Gomez

We recently connected with Jeff Gomez and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jeff, we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?

When I was a kid I had every reason to be withdrawn, anxious, second-guessing myself. At birth, a misapplication of forceps gave me a tilted smile, my family grappled with poverty, I was Puerto Rican at a time when that wasn’t cool, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan was a dangerous place to live.

I did have an odd skill, though, and that was the ability to fixate on what interested me. By 3 years old I was well on my way to becoming a dinosaur expert! I taught myself to read because I needed to know everything about theropods and sauropods. I was properly pronouncing “diplodocus” and by 5, was setting my sites on becoming a paleontologist. While this generated a good deal of mockery from classmates, it got the respect of my teachers. Ms. Goodman, Ms. Dinstein—they took me seriously and nothing felt better.

Nothing was certain in the world around me. Any minute, some kind of chaos could burst in front of me, hurting me, scarring me. But when I was certain about certain things, that put me in control of at least those things. I could tell you how Japanese filmmakers created Godzilla movies. How John Chambers applied the makeup to the actors who played simians in Planet of the Apes. How Ray Harryhausen moved the Ymir armature one frame at a time in 20 Million Miles to Earth. I didn’t have to be shy in those moments, because “the facts are these.” This would become a mantra for the rest of my life.

Facts dispelled fears. In childhood, bugs were used to frighten me into behaving. Then I started studying them and even though the fear never fully vanished, it became manageable. Bullies were a constant source of torment until I started figuring out why these kids behaved this way. I learned that there were different ways to deal with the violence and neglect that was passed down to us: you can keep it in or you can take it out on others. Both were ways to deal with trauma.

Sometimes, the cure for this—at least the one that I discovered—was in asking the bullies questions about themselves and then genuinely listening to what they had to say. The punches came less frequently when I did that. Sometimes the bullies even defended me from others. This ability to manage my situation through listening helped me to build a sense of self-esteem. There were values in the skills I was developing. Occasionally, they would make me feel less alone.

As I got older, I learned that mastery was the key to being able to stand up in front of others, to take the social lead, to speak truth to authority. If I learned all the rules to Dungeons & Dragons and then created an imaginary world for my players that was realistic down to the last detail, then I could suspend their imagination, enchant them, and have them beg for more. I literally became the Dungeon Master.

Possibly the biggest threshold I crossed when it came to self-confidence and self-esteem happened straight out of college when I became a school teacher. I was assigned to a difficult school in an impoverished neighborhood and there I discovered that not much had changed since I was small. Chaos persisted.

In those classrooms, I found that some of the little things I did: listening carefully, teaching with conviction, giving as much as I could to those kids, these all made a difference. But it wasn’t enough for me. What if I could scale my techniques and whatever wisdom I could impart so more could benefit? Lots more! What if my stories (and later my storytelling techniques) could lift thousands or millions rather than dozens?

I may never be fully free of the challenges I faced as a child, but standing for an idea, pursuing goals that just might infuse joy and wisdom in young people, applying my expertise to make the world just a little bit better to live in, that I could do. That, I had to do. I gave myself no choice because I understood and empathized with any kid who had been exposed to chaos. I gave myself no choice but to be confident because anything else was unacceptable. And it mattered to me not a whit that the full achievement of my goal was impossible. Shoot for the stars, you might get the moon! My accomplishments in media and entertainment, the “small happinesses” that I’ve brought to my audiences since that time, well, that’s what helped a bit with self-esteem!

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I’m a writer, creator, and producer. My specialty is in worldbuilding and in the development and extension of elaborate story worlds across multiple media—what’s called transmedia storytelling. My company Starlight Runner Entertainment works with movie studios, video game companies, and big brands to analyze intellectual properties and help preserve what’s best and most engaging about them for the audience.

Doing this work came out of my love for the elaborate story worlds of my childhood. Elements of the roleplaying game adventures I created for my players in high school and college started finding their way into my video game and comic book work in the 1990s, like Turok Dinosaur Hunter for the Nintendo 64 and the Magic: The Gathering comics and video games I wrote. The projects did really well and I was captivated by this model for favoring the world of my story over the medium in which the story was told.

Somehow, I managed to convince Mattel to let me use this technique on Hot Wheels and the results were successful. That allowed me to actually create a transmedia story from scratch, involving dozens of comic books, a Hot Wheels: World Race five-episode animated series that I co-wrote and co-produced, a video game, web site, action figures, the works! Disney came knocking not long after and my team and I got to work on Pirates of the Caribbean. It was exciting and unbelievable to me but there wasn’t much time to pinch myself!

Over the years, I worked on projects like Tron Legacy, Men in Black, Spider-Man, and Transformers. My team and I produced massive Mythology documents for each of these, used by all the major stakeholders to create accurate stories that adhered to the canon of the fictional universe. But what was even more exciting to me was diving deep into the creative vision behind each of these worlds to learn exactly what made them distinct and special. What were the mythic underpinnings of these characters and places? What aspects of human desire did they fulfill? What was the roadmap of wisdom that each world gave to its audience, even if the wisdom was subliminal?

What I tried to show my partners and clients is that if we don’t understand these things, then the stories we tell that are set in these worlds will lose their meaning. They become carbon copies and start to fade away. Those fires need to be fed in order to stay burning.

Most recently, I’ve gotten to fulfill a childhood dream of working with a Japanese studio on one of my all time favorite superhero characters, Ultraman! I get to help Tsuburaya Productions make the character popular in North America. In doing so, I’ve gotten to serve as a transmedia producer on live “battle” stage shows featuring performers in Ultraman and giant monster suits. I could cry every time I stood near these beautiful actors!

I’m also fulfilling another wish by working with Ashley Eckstein and the Walt Disney Company to create a brand new story world that will be announced in more detail later in 2025. The talent involved is amazing and the creative approach is a sparkling crown on everything I’ve ever stood for!

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Some of the most important skills that have impacted my journey include the following:

LISTENING – What started as a defense mechanism for me has become my greatest tool. When I was young, I needed to use all my senses to make sure that I wasn’t in danger or to avoid people who might bully me. Later, I realized that one of the most precious things for any human being is to be heard. Think about how many people genuinely listen to you. It’s not too many! Listening is a treasure that I give away freely and the reward I get is the information I need to make stronger connections with people, to give them what they’re looking for and ask for things back, and to understand how to make the world a better place.

HOW DOES THIS WORK? – To this day I’m shocked at how rarely I hear this question. For me, without understanding how stories work, how each medium works (films, TV, video games, novels), or how audiences interact with their favorite story worlds, my job would have been a fantasy, not a reality. Even more important is discerning how people work. What do you want? What do you need? What limitations have you imposed on yourself? How can I open possibilities for you? How can we both benefit from knowing one another? Knowing how things work makes action more impactful and meaningful.

HOW AM I A LENS? – There are millions of creators in the world, billions of ideas, so why would you pick me to work with you on a project? Why would I want to do it? The answers lay in the difficult task of figuring out who you are and what you stand for. When you get a grip on the specificity of your personal experiences and how you’ve responded to them throughout your life, you can become a lens of sorts through which creativity can come into focus. If I were to boil down the totality of my life it would be in my love for creating stronger connections between people. This was something that was missing for me as a child and I don’t want others to be deprived of it.

So, my focus is on the wisdom that leads to listening, reconciliation, and systemic repair. I’m drawn to projects where I can help fine tune and amplify those elements. The genre doesn’t matter. Whether its a movie, game or brand doesn’t matter. Healing the flaw in the system matters. I’m a lens that focuses on this and quite often this helps crystalize large, sprawling projects, and becomes the hallmark of my contributions as an artist.

Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?

This is not well known but a while back I was diagnosed with a serious illness. My doctors advised me to put my affairs in order because it was unlikely that I would live longer than 12 or 18 months. Very fortunately a proper treatment was found and I’ve been fully recovered for years, but during that period, I very much had to contemplate what I was going to do with the time I had left.

First, I needed to decide that every decision I made was going to be real and vital and absolutely committed. There was no time to mess around. The first decision I made was to dispel fear. It was useless and paralyzing and a waste, especially if I managed to get out of this situation!

Next, I decided to open the floodgates of love. To express love and receive love completely, whether the people I was loving knew about my situation or not. I did get some strange looks at times, but it was always positive. In retrospect, this was my best decision and I actually affiliate my ability to remain calm and heal and recover to the circulating flow of love around me.

I decided to stay true to the commitments I had. The show, after all, must go on! (And there were mounting bills to pay!) Close friends and colleagues stepped in to help fulfill those commitments when I was simply physically unable to do so. But by setting aside notions of fighting or being frightened and just taking care and flowing into my future allowed me to get things done that were pretty incredible for the time. I barfed into the gutter at First Avenue and 45th Street before walking in to the United Nations to discuss peace-building!

I then started preparing the next phase of my work. If I was going to be gone, I wanted to leave behind as much of my thinking and as much that could be actionable around my thinking as possible. I saw that so many stories, personal, national, those of our leaders, were fueled by feelings of disenfranchisement, fears of scarcity, and a deep-rooted anger. There is a great need to transform our global way of being, to repair the flaws in our systems. But when the motivations for enacting that transformation is fueled by personal gain, taking away from others, and the catalyst for change is based on fomenting anger and outrage, the results are almost invariably bad for most people.

We need to tell stories that model a different approach. We need to move away from individual heroes beating terrible villains. We need to move toward stories that illustrate how we might repair the flaws in our complex systems. So, I started concentrating on my Collective Journey work, observing and documenting how narrative can help us make the leap from the current waning age of humanity to the next rising age without annihilating ourselves. Figuring that out, infusing this into my work, becoming a lens for my partners and clients and audience through which we can reduce suffering and increase enlightenment—that’s what I’m going to do with the next decade of my life.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.starlightrunner.com
• Instagram: @slrgomez
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/transmedia
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffgomez/
• Twitter: @Jeff_Gomez