#750: Neil Gaiman and Debbie Millman

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4:43 My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal and those galaxy. Yeah. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers. From every field imaginable to tease out the habits. routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply.

5:09 and test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its tenth year anniversary, which is insane to think about. And past one billion downloads. To celebrate. I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites.

5:26 From more than seven hundred episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. To give you these super combo episodes, and internally we've been calling these The Super Combo episodes. Because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks.

5:42 But to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider Stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps They got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

5:57 Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests. You can find that and more at Tim.blog slash. combo. And now, without further ado.

6:11 Please enjoy. And thank you. For listening. First up Neil Gaiman.

6:17 Best selling author and creator of books Graphic novels. Short stories, film, and television for all ages. Including Neverware.

6:28 Coraline The graveyard book? The ocean at the end of the lane. The view from the cheap seats. And the Sandman series of graphic novels.

6:38 You can find Neil on Instagram at Neil himself. Back in about nineteen ninety seven. I read an article. By Ian Fleming.

6:53 Who wrote the James Bond books. About how he wrote the James Bond books. And you read this article and you realise something, which is Ian Fleming did not enjoy the process of writing. I was always fascinated by the fact that Several of Rold Dahl's most famous short stories. were plotted.

7:10 by him Fleming. And Fleming would Really? Yeah, he gave doll no idea. The two best short story twists.

7:19 Which are Lamb to the slaughter where the woman Kills her husband with a leg of lamb. And then cooks it. and feeds it to the detective who is going, I cannot figure out what he was hit with. is an Ian Fleming plot, and so is the one about the evil antique dealer.

7:36 Who finds this amazing antique. on some farm and decides to cheat. The farmers. And explains that well the thing isn't worth any money, but the legs. The legs are are worth some money, so I'll uh I'll give you a you know.

7:50 Twenty quid for the legs. and is about to take away this million pound Antique thing. And the farmers helpfully rip off the legs and throw the rest of it away. And those plots were both the end plannings. And you start realising ah, you really don't like writing when you read his thing on how he wrote the James Bond books.

8:11 You write a James Bond book in two weeks. You check into a hotel. You have to check into a hotel somewhere that you don't want to be, otherwise you might go out and walk around and become a tourist. You have to check into a not terribly nice hotel room, otherwise you might luxuriate and enjoy it.

8:31 And instead what you want to be is focused on getting out. And then You having nothing else to do in this town in this place. You settle down and you write like a fiend.

8:47 And you get your James Bond book written in two weeks and you leave this horrible hotel room. And that was how he did it. And I have tried it a couple of times. I did it with the American draft of Neverware. That was the first one I ever tried. And I did the entire

9:05 sort of American draft, which was the big second draft. The book had already been published in the UK. But my American editor wanted stuff. Done. Because she pointed out that The book as it existed.

9:19 was written for people who knew Knew that Oxford Street was a big Street with lots of shops on it. Or whatever. It was written for Brits and Londoners and she wanted something Expanded.

9:33 So I expanded it. And I was in a room With As far as I remember, no windows. In the

9:44 I think it was a Mariette in the World Trade Centre. Which Is no longer there. But writing in that hotel room you just wanted to be out. It it seems to me, and uh you can't believe everything you read on the internet, so I want you to s certainly fact check me.

10:01 As needed, but that you also Have or have had some internal rules. So you can use your external Environment. To assist but I read That

10:13 And again. Feel free to correct, but making rules, the importance of making rules. Rules like you can sit here and write, or you can sit here and do nothing, but you can't sit here and do anything else. That was always and still is when I go off to write. That's my biggest role. Could you speak to that? Yeah,'cause I would go down to my Lovely little gazebo.

10:32 Bottom of the garden. Sit down. And I'm absolutely allowed not to do anything. I'm allowed to sit at my desk. I'm allowed to

10:42 stare out at the world, I'm allowed to do anything I like. As long as it isn't Anything. Not allowed to do a crossword, not allowed to read a book. Plan to phone a friend.

10:55 Allowed to Make a claim model of something. All I'm allowed to do is absolutely nothing all right. And What I love about that is I'm giving myself permission to write or not write.

11:07 But writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing. After a while. You know, you sort of sit there and You've been staring out of the window now for five minutes and it kind of loses its charm. You're going, Well, actually Might as well write something.

11:22 And it's hard as a writer. I'm more easily You know I'm distractable. I have a three year old son. He is the epitome.

11:33 Oh Cuteness and charm. It's more fun playing with him. Then it is writing. Which means if I'm gonna be writing I need to do it somewhere where I don't have A three year old Sun

11:46 Singing to me, asking me to read to him, demanding my attention. I think it's a really just a solid rule. For writers. It's like yeah. You don't have To write.

11:57 You have permission. That you don't have permission. To do anything else. It reminds me of um

12:04 Another one of my favorite writers. You being The one who's sitting in front of me. John McFee nonfiction writer who

12:13 has spent much of his life in Princeton, New Jersey, but has written some incredible Pilzer prize winning nonfiction. And I was lucky enough to take a class with him. Yeah. And

12:24 His rule was very similar, although he didn't state it explicitly. He would sit in front of his first as a young man typewriter. You could sit in front of the blank page and from eight AM to six PM with the exception of a break for lunch. And swimming. It was the blank page you're writing.

12:39 Yeah. Are there any other That you also hold. sacred or important for your writing process? Uh some of them

12:52 Uh just Things for me. For example. Most of the time. Not always. I will

13:00 Do My first draft In Fountain pen. Because I actually enjoy the process of writing with a fountain pen.

13:10 I like filling. A fountain pen. I like uncapping it. I like the weight of it in my hand. I I like that thing. So I'll have a notebook. I'll have a fountain pen.

13:21 And I'll write. If I'm doing anything long. If I work on a novel, for example. I will always have two fountain pens on the go. At least with two different coloured inks.

13:33 At least. Because that way I can see at a glance how much work I did that day. I can just look down and go, Look at that. Five pages in brown. I I wrote that. Half a page in black. That was not a good day. Nine pages in blue. Co that was a what a great day. And you can just sort of get a sense of okay.

13:54 Are you working? Are you making forward progress? What's actually happening? And I also love that because Mm. emphasizes for me that nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails

14:09 Your first draft can Absolutely. Go up in flames, you can change The age, gender, number of a character. You can bring somebody dead back to life. Nobody ever needs to know anything that happens in your first draft.

14:26 Is you Telling the story to yourself. And then I'll sit down and type. And I'll put it onto a computer. Um as far as I'm concerned, the second draft Is where I try and make it look like I knew what I was doing all along.

14:40 Do you edit then as you're looking or translating from the first draft on the page As is. In the computer and then edit on No I I definitely that's my editing process. I figure that's my second draft.

14:58 is typing it into the computer. And also I love So backing up a bit here. When I was Twenty seven, twenty eight. In the days when we were still in typewriters.

15:11 And there were just a handful of people with word processors, which were clunky things with discs which didn't hold very much and stuff. I edited an anthology. Um Enjoyed editing my thoughts and most of the stories that came in were about three thousand words long. Move forward in time.

15:29 Not much. Five, six, seven years. Mid nineties. Everybody is now On computer.

15:40 And I edited an another short story anthology. And the stories that were coming in tended to be somewhere between six and nine thousand words long. And they didn't really have much more story than the three thousand words. ones and I realized that what was happening Is

15:57 It's a sort of a computery Thing. Is If you're typing Putting stuff down is work.

16:07 If you've got a computer. Adding stuff is not work. Choosing. Is work. So it sort of expands a bit like a gas if you have

16:17 Two Things you could say, you say both of them. If you've the stuff you want to add, you add it. And I thought okay, I have to not. Do that.

16:27 Because otherwise my stuff is gonna balloon. And it will become Gaseous and thin. So what I love If I've written something on a computer.

16:38 And I decide To lose a chunk, it feels like I've lost work. If I delete a page and a half, I feel like there's a page and a half. They just went away. That's a page and a half's worth of work I've just lost.

16:51 If I've been writing in a notebook. And I'm typing it up. And I can look at I mean go I I don't need this page and a half.

17:00 And I leave it out. I've just saved myself work. And it feels kind of Like I'm treating myself. So I'm

17:10 Just trying to always have in my head the idea that maybe I'm Somehow on some cosmic level pay somebody by the word. In order to be allowed to write.

17:23 If they're there they should matter they should mean something. It's always important to me. This might seem like a very, very mundane question. But what type of notebooks do you prefer? Are they large, like legal pads? Are they Leatherbound? What type of notebooks?

17:39 When they came out I've used a whole bunch of different ones. I bought big drawing ones, which actually turned out to be a bit too big. Well I kind of liked how much I could see on the page. Those were the ones I wrote Stardust and American Gods in sort of big sized.

17:56 But they weren't terribly portable. I went over To the moleskins. And I loved them when they first came out and then they dropped their paper quality. Mm.

18:07 And dropping paper quality Doesn't matter unless you're writing in fountain pen. Because all of a sudden It's bleeding through and all of a sudden you're writing on one page leaving a page blank because it's bled through and writing on the next page.

18:24 And Joe Hill about Six or seven years ago. Joe Hill. Wonderful horror fantasy writer. suggested the Loichturm.

18:34 To me. So my usual notebook right now is a Loichturm because I really like the way you can paginate stuff in them. And the thickness of the paper.

18:46 And they're just like sort of moleskins, but the Porsche of moleskins. They they're just better. And I also have been writing I wrote the graveyard book. And I'm writing the current novel. In

18:59 Beautiful books. That I bought In a Stationery shop. In Venice.

19:07 built into a bridge. Somewhere in Venice there's a there's a little stationary s shop on a bridge. And they have these beautiful leatherbound blank books that just look like hard back books, but Yeah. Blank pages.

19:21 And I wrote the graveyard book in one of those I bought four of them. And Now I'm Using the next one on the next novel. And it may well go into another.

19:34 One. I'm not sure. And then At home. I say at home. My house in Wisconsin.

19:42 Which Is where my stuff is. We live in Woodstock. But I have an entire life's worth of stuff. still sitting in my house in w Wisconsin and it it's become archives

19:56 It's actually kind of fabulous having a house that is an archive. But waiting for me in that house. is a book that I bought for myself about twenty five years ago. And before I die, I plan to write a novel. Amen.

20:13 And it's an accounts book. From The mid Nineteenth century. It's five hundred pages long, every page

20:23 Is Numbered. It's Line with Accounts lines but very faint, so

20:30 It'll be nice to write a book in it. And it is engineered so that every single page lies flat. And it's huge and it's heavy, and it just looks like a book. Yeah. Dickens or somebody would have written

20:45 A novel in And I've just been waiting until I have an idea. That is huge and weird and Kenzian enough. And Whether or not I actually get to write it in dip pen, I'm not sure, but I definitely want to write it in a sort of

21:01 Old Victorian something slightly copper platy, one of those old flex nib pens. That they stopped making when carbon paper came in. Just So I can get that kind of spidery Victorian handwriting.

21:15 I'm just imagining you putting pen to the first page when you finish the first page and what that will feel like. That's gonna be a good day. It will be either a good day or an incredibly bad day. But it is it it is the Young writers. And by young writers, and young writer can be any age. You just have to be sp starting out. Which is

21:39 Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix Is that Christine unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it,'cause there's nothing there to fix. Are there any particular fountain pens or

21:59 Criteria. that you would use in picking a good pen. You know the biggest criteria I would use In picking up If you have the choice. Is go somewhere like

22:11 New York's fountain pen hospital. Is that a real place? It's a real place. They have a it's called the fountain pen hospital. They sell lots of new pens. They recondition old pens. They they look after pens for you. And try them out. Because the lovely thing about fountain pens is they are personal. You go no, no, no, and then you find the one. I tend to suggest to people who are

22:34 nervously I've never used a fountain pen, what should I do? And I will point them at Lummy, L A M Y Who have Some Fabulous starter pens. And they're not very expensive and they're good. They do a pen called the Safari.

22:50 They have a bunch of Good start appears. And they're just nice. to get into the idea of do I like doing this? So I was doing prep for this conversation. And came across an interview in which you said that for nonfiction you can kind of write wherever it happens to fall. If it's a script or something else, but that for novels

23:10 very often you tend to write between, say, one and six PM where you'll handle email, maybe writing a blog post and so on in the morning. And I'd love to chat about that because many of the writers I've spoken to, and it I'm sure it differs person to person, but tend to write either very late or very early because they feel like they avoid distraction. When I started out

23:31 From the age of about twenty Two when I was a young journalist. Twenty six, twenty seven, are starting out. Comics writer.

23:42 All through there I was a late late night writer. Nothing really happened until the kids were in bed. Nine o'clock. I might have fafter out a little bit during the day, but now

23:55 It's all done, and now I'm getting down to work. And Uh. two or three o'clock in the morning and I'm writing in England at this point, I may phone a friend in America Just

24:06 To talk. Enough to make sure that I'm awake. So that's what I did. And I was a smoker and a coffee drinker and it was great. I moved to America in ninety two.

24:19 Gave up smoking ninety three. Stop drinking coffee, went over to tea. Um Try carrying on being a Late night writer. And

24:28 gradually realised that I wasn't really anymore what tended to happen. Was somewhere around one in the morning. I'd be writing away. And then I would lift my head. From the keyboard at Four o'clock in the morning.

24:43 And have three thousand pages of the letter M and just go, Okay, that This doesn't really work anymore for me. And then I started Rescheduling. Trying different things out. Part of

24:58 What I discovered Particularly about being a novelist. Is Writing a novel works best if you can do the same day over and over again. The closer you can come.

25:12 To just Brown Talk Day. You just repeat that day. You set up a day that works for yourself. The last

25:19 Novel. That I actually Wrote. I was at Tori Amos's wonderful house in Florida. She has this bright Lovely sort of.

25:28 House on the water that she's lent me. Many times to go and write in. And I went down there. And I would get up in the morning, I would Go for a jog.

25:40 Come back. Do my yoga. Get dressed. Get in the car, drive down to a little cafe. Where there were just enough people around that I knew that other people existed.

25:54 But nobody that I would ever be tempted to talk to. And I would Order myself. Large cup of green tea. Sit in the corner.

26:03 And just start writing. And I would do that day. Over and over and over and over. And you know Couple of months later looked up and

26:15 They had the ocean at the end of the lane, which was only meant to have been a short story anyway. Kept going. That I think works really, really well. I also think that the Most important thing

26:28 For human beings Is To be aware of the change. The biggest problem we run into is going, This is who I am, this is what I'm like. This is how I function.

26:40 While failing to notice that you don't do that anymore. I'm perfectly aware that I may one day become one of those people Who wakes up early in the morning and goes and writes. My friend Gene Wolf.

26:54 Who is Now in his late eighties and is one of Yeah, the finest writers that America has. For years.

27:03 was an editor of a magazine about Factories. I think it was called plant engineering. So he'd get up at four o'clock in the morning and write for an hour.

27:16 Before anything else. And before anybody else was up. And that was how he did it. I cannot imagine.

27:27 getting up in the morning and just writing. That's not how my head works. I need a while To get here. But I can absolutely imagine that one day All have become.

27:37 One of those morning writers. From having been a late night writer. In my youth and an afternoon writer. In my middle age, in my dotage, I could absolutely become a morning writer.

27:50 In your dotage. I think that's gonna take a while. What are the types of things that you learned from Terry or picked up The biggest thing looking back on it That I learned from Terry Pratchett. was a willingness To go forward.

28:07 Without knowing what happens. You might know what happens next, but you don't know what happens after that, but it's okay because You're a grown up. And You will figure it out.

28:20 There's lots of Metaphors. For writing a novel. And George R R Martin.

28:28 For example. Divides writers. Into architects and gardeners. And I can be an architect if I have to. But I'd rather be a gardener.

28:38 I would rather Plant the seeds, water them. and figure out what I'm growing as they grow and then prune it and trim it and Pleach it. Whatever I need to do.

28:50 to make something beautiful that appears intentional, but at the end of the day you have to allow For accidents and randomness and just what happens when things grow. So The joy of Good omens really

29:06 I mean the best thing about good omens was having Terry Pratchett as an audience. Because if I could make Terry laugh. It's like hitting the thing in the circus with the hammer. If you Bing the bell at the top. That's what I did when I could make Terry laugh.

29:22 Many, many of my fans are your fans. And Just as Terry shared his gifts with the world, you continue to share yours, and it has an impact. It helped me through some very tough times. It was able to transport me. Delight me.

29:35 shock me, scare me, and take me through a whole range of emotions I didn't at the time even know I had access to. So I wanna thank you for Making good art. And sharing it with the world. You've done a great job. You are so ridiculously welcome.

29:50 Thank you. Thank you. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. When you're hiring for your small business, you want to find quality professionals that are right for the role as soon as possible. That's why you have to check out LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs has the tools to help find the right professionals. Or your team faster.

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31:02 Faster and much simpler. So Hire professionals like a professional on LinkedIn. And now you can post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Tim. That's LinkedIn.com slash Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. I

31:22 And now Debbie Millman Host of the Design Matters podcast. Chair of the SBA Masters in Branding Program Editorial director for print magazine.

31:34 And one of graphic design USAs Most influential designers working today You can find Debbie on Twitter and Instagram. At Debbie Millman. Debbie, welcome to the show.

31:47 Thank you, Tim. It's really wonderful to be here. I have wanted to interview you on numerous occasions now over the last few years. So I'm thrilled that we are finally doing this. Point number one. And I thought I would start with a question. That someone like yourself who has explored so many different things in so many different formats.

32:08 When someone asks you what do you do? Let's say you meet someone at a party, they say, What do you do? What is your answer to that? That's a tough question.

32:19 What do I say? Well, now I say that I'm a designer. And Sometimes if I'm feeling Wordy. I'll say that I'm a designer and a writer and A podcaster and sometimes people look at me like, Huh? Like, huh?

32:36 Exactly. I found when I was working at Sterling Brands, which I did for over two decades I had resolved to just saying when I was filling out what I did on Passport applications and thus and things like that. I used to say executive and that made sense. Executive's a great catch all you can use. Executive is a great catch all. For a long time on Twitter I had Debbie Millman as a girl until enough people said Debbie, you've really got to change that. And then I did. Oh, the internet. Well, you could put anything there and I think about ten percent of the people who come across it will be outraged for one reason or another. Oh yes, I found that the very things that delight and excite some people are the same exact things that outrage others. It's really hard to please everybody all the time.

33:28 I think that if you try to please all the people all the time, you'll just end up displeasing yourself all the time. That's the that's the only guaranteed outcome there. Oh, Tim, I learned that the hard way. Well I want to talk about So many things, Debbie, but let's start with And for those people wondering, I always ask

33:47 My Guests. Beforehand, do there any particular say prompts? for stories that we could explore that that that might be Fun to dig into and one of them

33:57 Was Drawing you did when eight years old. And so I know nothing about this. And I just want to start there since it seems to make sense to begin at the beginning. Well, I have somewhat of a pack rat mentality. I keep things I'm a sentimentalist at heart. And I like to

34:19 keep things from all different stages of my life and I have boxes of Journals and drawings and All sorts of report cards and you name it, I have it. Well, apparently I got this trait from my mother. Who a couple of years ago Did what a lot of good old Jews do. She moved from Queens, New York to Florida. The great migration.

34:43 Yes. And before she moved, she unloaded several boxes of ephemera of mine that she had kept unbeknownst to me. And I went through everything quite gingerly. It was all sort of folded up very neatly and Very tidily. And came across An illustration that I did when I was about eight years old.

35:06 And After I admired my handiwork'cause I thought, wow, eight years old, I was like rocking the drawings. I realized that this particular drawing Had predicted my whole life. And so I will try to explain this drawing as best as I can.

35:23 And first and backstory. I am a native New Yorker. I was born in Brooklyn. When I was about two years old, my parents took me to Howard Beach Queens? I moved there before there were any sidewalks.

35:37 That will give you a a little bit of a sense of how old I am. I lived there until I was a b About I was I was in the middle of a third grade and we moved to Staten Island. And I lived on Staten Island until I was in the fifth grade, end of fifth grade. My parents got divorced. My mom took my brother and I'm two and a half years younger than I am to Long Island.

35:59 My childhood was spent in almost all of the boroughs except Manhattan. And For some reason I had a I guess a sense of what Manhattan looked like and felt like probably from television. And

36:15 At eight years old, I drew a picture. Of the streets of Manhattan. I'm walking, I'm a little girl. I'm walking along with my mother. My mother, by the way, is Wearing a very popular

36:27 Barbie outfit of the time, an outfit called Tangerine Dream. Which I I really loved. I put her in that outfit. And despite not having a lot of time on the streets or any time on the streets of Manhattan, I drew it in quite

36:43 good detail there were buildings and buses and taxis And I labeled everything. I labeled the cleaners cleaners and I labeled the bank. Bank. And I labeled the taxi. Taxi.

36:57 In the middle of the street there is a delivery truck. And I Not only labeled The delivery truck. I also drew

37:08 The sign on the delivery track. And the signal. was Lay's potato chips. I drew the logo at eight years old. And when I saw this drawing I realized that

37:22 I had predicted my whole life. I'm a native New Yorker now living in Manhattan. I've been living in Manhattan for thirty three years. I go to the bank, I go to the cleaners, I take lots of taxis, lots of buses. And at the time. I found this drawing I was Drawing logos for a living.

37:40 And you know, had I known that it would have been that easy just to follow that drawing, I would have saved decades of experiments and failure and rejection. This is

37:55 Fascinating to me for a number of reasons. I've had a few guests on the podcast. Chris Saka would be another example as an investor. And he at some point wrote in a journal. Well, I think it was one of these composition notebooks with the sort of model black and white zebra slash camouflage covers. Oh I love that. What he would be when he was forty years old. And he must have done this when he was ten or twelve, something like that. And he found it in his I think his parents' garage Later, around the age of forty two, or something like that. And it also predicted effectively exactly what he would be doing. But

38:29 It was lost in the slipstream. And he took this very meandering In some ways odd. seemingly fractured path to come right back to where he started in a sense. Did you then

38:45 It sounds like you didn't follow that plan that had It was so neatly summarized in this picture because there are folks out there who say, you know, when I was five, I knew I always wanted to be X. But what was your When did you figure out that you wanted to actually Do what was in that drawing on some level that you wanted to be a designer.

39:03 I actually Never set out to be a designer. I thought that I was going to be a journalist. The only thing that I knew for sure when I was in college was that when I graduated. I wanted to live in Manhattan. At that point, I had not ever lived in Manhattan.

39:24 And that was my big dream. And I came to Manhattan the summer of nineteen eighty three. I often say that that was the summer of David Bowie's Modern Love and the Police's synchronicity. I saw both concerts that summer. I moved into

39:43 a sublet apartment with a friend that had also recently graduated. She had found a sublet on the corner of Hudson and Perry Streets in the village. I didn't know it at the time, but moving into An apartment on the intersection of Hudson and Perry was almost as if I was entering the movie Gidget Goes to Manhattan.

40:05 Um I didn't know where I was going. It was quite serendipitous, my friend Jay Family apartment for us. Unfortunately, that wonderful summer.

40:17 turned out rather unfortunate because the women who Jay and I were subletting from With rather than paying the rent with the rent money that she was getting from us was keeping it and not paying the rent. So at the end of the summer we all got evicted. And Surprise.

40:36 Yeah, I ended up appealing to The landlord to please, please help me find some place else to live because I really didn't have any place else to go. And he ended up being able to rent me another one of the apartments he had in another building he owned on sixteenth Street, which was a fourth floor. Tenement walk up. a railroad flat that I couldn't afford on my own.

40:59 and ended up living with a couple, my roommates were a couple because it was a railroad flat, I had to walk through the apartment, which meant through their bedroom to get to mine. Which often meant I was stuck on one side or the other depending on their um nocturnal habits. Or afternoon delight, depending on you know what they were doing. And lived there for about five years before I ended up moving back into the village for a short period of time. So that was the one thing I knew that I wanted to live in Manhattan. I did not know that I could be a designer, that I would be a designer, and or that design was even A discipline.

41:39 Until my senior year of college, I Had worked my way up to be The editor of the Arts and Features section of the student newspaper at SUNY Albany where I went to school. And realized very quickly that

41:54 As much as I loved assigning articles and coming up with themes for this section of the newspaper. I was endlessly fascinated by putting the paper together by designing the paper. And thus a baby designer was born. I took all of one class in design while I was in college and really learned almost everything I knew. at that time working in the newsroom, putting the paper together, everything was done, old school layout, paste up, computographic machines, stat cameras.

42:28 And then when I graduated was both doing freelance editorial and freelance layout and pay stupid. for the first couple of years of my career. When did you Start at the student newspaper. Was that something you started at the very beginning and

42:44 follow throughout your I guess undergrad. Experience? I wanted to write for the student newspaper I think the very first issue I saw when I got to Simi Albany freshman year.

42:57 And went up to the student newspaper, which was on the third floor of the campus center. And approached the Editor At the time.

43:07 And asked if I could be a writer or offered my services, volunteered my services. And he looked at me and asked me If I had any clips. Yeah.

43:19 And I was like You know, I didn't say what I was thinking, but like hair clips. I mean I didn't know what he's talking about. And I didn't have anything and I didn't know what to do and I was embarrassed and humiliated and ashamed and sort of scurried away and Didn't go back until My junior year.

43:38 I was so Intimidated by the talent and the work that was coming out of that newsroom and it was at the time and very well may still be one of the best student newspapers in the country. It came out twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, and I would I was

43:54 Just enamored with this newspaper. And I fantasized about Writing really pithy area di letters to the editor in chief. That would then get published in, you know, the letters to the editor section, and they would realize what a great writer I was and then invite me to.

44:13 be a reporter and I'd sort of walk like Rosalyn Russell with a pencil behind my ear and my Heels click clacking in the newsroom and Of course that never happened. I never wrote one letter to the editor. And for some reason in I guess an aberrant moment of courage, I went back up to The newsroom, my

44:33 Second semester junior year. And there was a women's uprising. Yeah. And the student we're to the student health food store and they're like, could you go cover that? And I was like, Yeah, absolutely. And I went and did it and that was how I started writing for the paper. I then wrote a piece about

44:51 an exhibit in the art center and by the end of my Second semester junior year, only because I think no one else would take it. I was offered the job of being editor of the Arts and features section and began that Summer. That senior year in college was

45:09 One of the most exciting and Best years of my life in that for the first time ever. I felt like I had Purpose.

45:21 suddenly working on this paper, I felt like I was part of something bigger than myself. I felt like I was Had some reason for being and I loved Learning about design. I loved being able to work with writers.

45:37 And I felt for the first time in my life really excited about something. I want to talk about that aberrant moment of courage and dig into that a bit. So you were rejected from or maybe Rejected yourself or both. Initially when you approach the paper.

45:53 Then Years later. you have this aberrant moment of courage. What precipitated that? Was there a conversation, a realization, you watched a movie. What triggered That. Do you remember? I actually don't. I wish that I did. It would make up for a much better story and certainly a better interview.

46:11 What I can tell you is that All these years later, I have noticed a pattern in my life of Being very easily hurt. By an initial reaction.

46:26 Or an initial rejection. So much so that it thwarts any other attempt at making something like that happen. For a very long time. I am

46:39 Extremely sensitive and Any rejection. So Takes me. off of that path.

46:48 For quite a long time. It takes me a while to recover. Could you give any examples of that? I would say my entire life. I will give you I can give you forty three examples. Get get comfortable, Tim. Yeah, I'm definitely settling in with my water. I'm ready to go. Well, there I was rejected. That first year of college took me then three years to go back again. I might have been feeling confident about something else that had gone well in my life and thought, What the heck? Why not go back and try? And then took those steps up to the campus center and

47:19 Went back up to the third floor and asked again. I I'm somebody that has a very hard time taking no for an answer. But it takes me a long time to recalibrate and get my courage back to

47:34 Keep trying. And When I graduated Because I had such a hard time Finding a job.

47:44 Initially that I really loved it And because I was having so much trouble figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. I Kept bouncing around from

47:57 Opportunity to opportunity and Every time I would try something new and would ultimately get rejected. I use that first rejection almost as a permission slip to avoid having to try again. So when I graduated, I started working at a couple of different magazines. I worked for a cable magazine and I worked for a rock magazine doing layout and paste up and some editing. And at the time thought, oh, I'm really enjoying this, but I don't really feel qualified to be doing this. Maybe I should go back to school and get a master's degree in journalism.

48:29 And I lived in the neighborhood of a very good journalism school, the Columbia School of Journalism. And my dad had gone to Columbia and studied pharmacy. And I thought, why not apply to the Columbia School of Journalism? But that was the only school I applied to. I thought, you know, I want to consider getting a massive degree in journalism. There are a lot of good journalism schools in New York City, but for some reason I had my heart set on this one school. I didn't get in, I got rejected and abandoned my

48:57 Hopes or dream of going to get a master's degree in journalism shortly thereafter. Because I also am a painter. I had been accepted into a show at Long Island University, the Brooklyn campus, and got some good reviews and

49:13 Mm-hmm. Maybe I should become an artist. I love doing this. I'm getting some good response from it, but I don't feel qualified or or educated enough, maybe I should get an advanced degree in art. And I applied to the Whitney School The Whitney Museum of Art had an independent study program that would allow me to continue working during the day. I applied for that. I had really good references, wonderful clips at that point, you know, some good reviews.

49:37 And um got rejected to that and then abandoned that dream. And so It's been a a long history of Making an attempt Getting that early rejection, retreating.

49:50 And then finally sort of licking my wounds re sort of knitting my confidence or hopes and dreams together and then trying to Do something else. Trying again. So

50:05 A few questions. The first is what would you have Or what would you say to your College self. After that first rejection. At the newspaper.

50:18 Or what advice would you give someone who had the near identical experience and was hardwired the same way. Well It's an interesting question, Tim, because I have the benefit of hindsight and Looking back on those years.

50:35 Yes, I certainly could have Try it again sooner. And maybe had More of a runway to experiment and grow and learn.

50:48 In that Newsroom and in that environment. But I also think that Those

50:55 Years in between Learning and growing in other ways. contributed to my ability Appointed the

51:07 Editor of the Arts and Features section. I somehow had a lot more to pull from, and maybe this is my own sort of synthesizing happiness or calibrating to my own set point. Or looking back and thinking, well, it all sort of worked out so

51:27 Why give somebody advice that I wouldn't have necessarily taken at that point. What I would say is Don't accept. The first rejection.

51:39 Ever. Give yourself options. the timeliness of those options or the timeliness of those Retries. Do at your own pace.

51:51 You're not in competition with anybody but yourself. So If you are rejected to something that you want. Then think about what it is that caused that rejection. and work to better understand how you can

52:10 Present your best possible self. When you try again. Your clips mention where you're like clips, hair clips reminded me of a story I heard when I was a student. So you work with a lot of students, and we're gonna come back to that. Oh Tim, can I add one more thing? Of course. I'm sorry. I I this is an interesting thing. You can add many things, please.

52:29 So One thing that I haven't shared about this particular story is that the young man that rejected me that first year Is somebody that I then befriended In that experience of working at the paper.

52:44 that junior year. And I graduated in nineteen eighty three. It is now Two thousand and seventeen. And I have been friends with that man. His name is Robert Edelstein. I have been friends with him ever since.

52:59 So just because somebody rejects you doesn't mean That they don't like you. First of all, he didn't even reject me. He asked me for a very reasonable He asked me for something very reasonable. He asked me for some examples of my writing. I was so intimidated and was so embarrassed by not knowing exactly what he meant in the fact that I didn't have anything other than some things from high school, which I didn't feel were appropriate, that I was the one that rejected myself in many ways. One of the interesting things that I have found Is

53:32 And Rob is not the only person that I can point to. as being somebody that initially Provided some sort of obstacle or roadblock. That was a a a reasonable one. And then ultimately I befriended

53:46 And we've become we are now lifelong friends. He didn't even remember rejecting me. That Freshman year. And is mortified now by the notion that he might have done anything to hurt my feelings. So one of the other things that I would suggest that people consider If they believe they are being rejected, is consider what the perception

54:10 from the other person doing the rejection or the supposed rejection might be. And that sense of empathy might be really helpful in understanding where you're coming from and what you're bringing to that specific example or that specific experience. And I'd like to underscore this because it's such an important Point. And I In some respects like you

54:32 uh very sensitive. I still am in some respects very sensitive and My particular brand of that or my particular type of response is to Feel

54:46 some type of sense of injustice. And so I'll get rejected and looking back at what I see as a rejection either when I did this perhaps ten years ago, I looked at a number of instances where I felt like I'd been rejected via email and so on that A It wasn't a rejection for all time, it was a not now.

55:05 It was a very temporary impossibility due to logistics. And I took that as a no not ever and felt very hurt by that and didn't try a second time in many cases. Yeah, absolutely absolutely. So number one, no may just mean no. Not right now. And you can even clarify that.

55:24 You can ask that as a clarifying question. Number two is that At some point someone said to me, and this doesn't apply to your particular instance, but don't ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. And that didn't cover it all for me, though, but it would it really made profound impact on me when I was told this. I wouldn't read email. with inserting if I were doing an audio book of the other person's voice, some type of really

55:49 Angry. Or upset person. And nine times out of ten, that wasn't the tone at all. It was just I was misreading it. So I started to Assume for myself, don't ascribe to malice what can be explained by Incompetence or just busyness. The person is busy. If they send you a really short response to your mini novella of an email, it doesn't mean that they think you're worthless.

56:09 or not worth their time, it could just mean that they have 10 times more to do than you do. And it's sometimes hard to have that perspective when particularly you're starting out and you're a bit fragile and you're on wobbly legs. And you send this huge outpour of your emotion to someone you respect and then they respond with, sorry, kid, not right now. And you're like, really? That's it. And then you know I I I'm not gonna name names, but there's someone who I now I'm very close friends with. Extremely well respected writer. And I got one of these one line responses in two thousand

56:39 five or six when I sent an early manuscript of the four hour work week to this person via email. And the response was Effectively. Thanks but sorry, don't have time to read this right now. No dear Tim, no signature, just one line. And I felt so slighted by this that I held this subconscious grudge for years, and now we're really good friends, and the whole thing is ludicrous in retrospect. One thing that I find about human nature is that Ambiguity is always perceived negatively. So there might be nothing in that one line email that would be in any way

57:16 Disparaging. Or insulting or anything, but because we as humans perceive ambiguity negatively, we tend to read into things that aren't there in a way that makes us feel bad. But I also think that a lot of that for me Comes from having a a very sort of fragile center and Not

57:39 Necessarily thinking that They are specifically Upset with me. Because of something that I've done, but just because

57:50 Everything that I do is sort of bad. They're just cognizant of that. So it's not something specific, it's just something all encompassing. And so that's been something I've been struggling to overcome over the decades. So I have um how you came to Find your niche or the first time.

58:13 you clicked into place, so to speak, doing something that resembles what what you ended up doing. Up to this point. But before I get to that, just to Put a button in the anecdote related to clips. So you mentioned clips, clips, hair clips. I was told this story by a professor in college about Nantucket Nectars when it was just getting started and there were I believe two guys who were

58:36 really faking it until they made it in in a lot of respects. And at one point they're meeting with this distributor because they'd been selling these concoctions in Nantucket from boat to boat to boat. and they wanted to go into retail. And they met with this it was either a retailer or a distributor, but it was early on and uh they were really nervous and the mucky muck they were meeting with, at least in their eyes Said.

59:01 Do you have a lot of POS? materials and they looked at each other like oh shit. And they said Oh, POS. We're all about POS. And he's like good, good, good and then they walked out like what the hell is VOS? Point of sale.

59:16 Which of course you know plenty about. But I wanted to To before we get to when you've sort of First. clicked into your your niche and how that happened. You mentioned knowing that you wanted to be in Manhattan.

59:32 And I've been thinking a lot about the components of and this is a dangerous word sometimes, but happiness. And that Oftentimes we think of the journalist W's, right? The interactives, the the why, the what, the where and so on of happiness and

59:47 I think humans tend to at least put why at the top, then maybe what somewhere lower, and then Where is often an afterthought, but I've I've started to believe that the where is much more critical than we give it credit for and that you can actually start there. So I thought about this a lot for myself, but really the how important the geography can be because it determines in large measure who you're surrounded with all the time and what you're surrounded with all the time. But

1:00:13 I guess it's more of an observation than a question, but If you think about that, how do you think about sort of the components of happiness or well being for yourself. Well, there's sort of two parts to the question, I think, and the first is This notion of New York sort of being

1:00:31 The place that I wanted to be. And What I told myself at that time. And then ultimately how that leads to happiness or fulfillment and One of the things that I

1:00:48 struggled with when I first Moved. to Manhattan or when I first graduated really was What was I going to be? What was I going to do? I didn't have a lot of money. I didn't have any network.

1:01:02 And I certainly didn't have any type of connection to any inns for apartments or jobs or anything like that. And I Wanted very badly to be in Manhattan. That was something that I knew for sure.

1:01:19 In thinking about what I wanted with my life. I knew that I wanted to do something creative. One of my big Hopes and dreams. at that time was to work at Cond and I did apply and I did get a call back and I got rejected and then never tried again. Another example of that.

1:01:38 But One of the more high altitude aspirations was either being an artist or being a writer. So being more of a of a fine artist and not a commercial artist. But at the time. I did not

1:01:55 Think. That My chances of success at that. would either be possible and certainly if it were possible not fast. And

1:02:07 Because I wanted to live in New York City, because I wanted to live in Manhattan. I felt that I needed to be able to get a job. That would pay my rent. Because I didn't want to be a waitress and because I didn't want to be a bartender.

1:02:24 I needed to make some type of reasonable income in order to pay that rent. And so I have been Telling myself.

1:02:36 For decades now. That I decided that I needed to work as a designer. Because I needed to

1:02:48 that would give me some sense of self sufficiency. Self sufficiency has been enormously important to me. And I've said that for years and years and years. And that being safe and secure and being able to Manage the course of my own life having financial stability was something that was a bit of a lead gene for me in making the decisions that I did. And back in that summer of David Bowie and police. I remember coming home from a club one night and I was on the corner of Bleaker Street and Sixth Avenue, and it suddenly occurred to me

1:03:24 That I had to make a decision. And the decision was What was I going to do? And I realized that if I wanted to be an artist Or a writer. That I would likely have to take some type of job.

1:03:40 that would not necessarily be able to safeguard what I considered to be My financial future. And therefore made this little pact with myself in my head that I would become a designer.

1:03:55 so that I could make enough money to be able to Be secure. And I've been telling myself that. For decades. What I realized

1:04:06 І на ласка каплив єр. Was that I was unbeknownst to my psyche, my consciousness. I was lying to myself. I was absolutely positively lying to myself because. More than the self sufficiency. was the desire to be in Manhattan. I could have easily

1:04:27 Or more easily. become An artist? Or a fine artist or a writer. If I didn't want to live in the most expensive city in the world, I could have gone and lived with my mother in Queens.

1:04:41 I could have lived with friends in Albany. I could have had seven roommates in in a little commune in Bedsty. There would have been any number of things. That I could have done if my lead gene had been Artistic. Purity.

1:04:59 But no. I told myself that it was because of X, Y, and Z, but really What it was was the most important thing to me at that point in my life was being in Manhattan. And I lived in a fourth floor tenement walk-up. I had a walk through somebody else's bedroom to get to mine. I was living on a floor with people that were constantly the other tenants in the building were. locking each other out. It was an elderly couple and they were always fighting. There were a whole family of pigeons living on the fire escape outside of my window in my bedroom, which was so decrepit I couldn't even open the window in the summertime and there was no air conditioning in this apartment.

1:05:40 I mean the conditions that I lived in were deplorable. But yet That was the most important thing to me. So when I talk to people now about what do they want to do when they first graduate. I asked them to think about what is the one

1:05:57 most important thing to you. What is the one most important thing to you because if it is truly The one most important thing to you. You will likely do whatever it takes. To get it.

1:06:11 And the most important thing to me was not being a writer and it was not being an artist. It was living in Manhattan. And I did whatever it took and lived in whatever conditions. that I needed to in order to make that happen. I think that's a really important realization.

1:06:28 Oh definitely. By Hooker Crook. You're living in in Manhattan. And That is the

1:06:36 outcome. In part. of all of these decisions and the lead gene as you put it. Where does the the need for stability Security or the desire for that come from?

1:06:48 I do think that it's certainly in Maslow's hierarchy of needs a really important one. Yeah. For me, it takes on an extra level of significance in that I grew up in a really, really Challenging. environment. So My parents got divorced when I was very young. I was about eight years old.

1:07:11 And I had a very, very complicated relationship with my father. My father died last year unexpectedly. My father Sort of in my daughter eyes was

1:07:23 Brilliant. Charismatic. He was an incredibly well spoken man. He was also extremely turbulent. He had a lot of Anger issues.

1:07:36 And over the course of Our lives together. I had five different experiences with him where He rejected me and decided that he didn't want me in his life.

1:07:49 And so one of those periods was uh about nine years. So we had a very, very turbulent relationship. When my parents got divorced. I told myself at the time that I was really happy about that because I was so scared of his anger and so scared of the anger that they had for each other. About a year after my parents got divorced.

1:08:13 My mother married Again. And she married a man who was physician and sexually abusive. To me.

1:08:24 Фізикли обusive то май бро. and also sexually abusive to his to one of his two biological daughters and severely, severely beat us for four years. during that time was one of the times, the first time actually that I was estranged from my biological father and so

1:08:42 I had a lot of Brutality. in my life and After they got divorced, I was thirteen, my father came back into my life, my mother Then got involved with another man who was

1:08:57 ten years younger than her, so therefore only ten years older than me. And was also I guess I'll put it sexually provocative with me and also emotionally abusive. So for the first like eighteen years of my life, I lived in a state of constant terror. And

1:09:15 Compensated. Or self soothed. With art. With a lot of extra curricular activities in school. I was always an overachiever, probably in an effort to prove to myself and to

1:09:27 my family that I wasn't worthy of the abuse that was being inflicted on me. I wanted so much more for my life even back then. And grew up thinking that If I

1:09:41 Had the resources to take care of myself. That I would never allow anything bad to happen to me. Not quite um a realistic expectation. But was something that I felt was possible to do. Of course it's not. That takes decades to also figure out. But

1:09:59 At that time. I wanted very badly to be able to live in my own home, to be able to take care of myself and to be in a position where I would never be vulnerable again, you know, sort of Scarlet O'Hara. I'm never gonna go hungry again. Um, yeah, it doesn't always work out that way, but it was definitely the journey that I've been on. Well thank you for sharing that. I had no idea. It's not something I talk about a lot, mostly because I've had an enormous amount of shame about it, and that's a very normal thing, and I still do and

1:10:29 It's still very, very hard for me to share these types of things. But I do think it's important. That People do

1:10:40 See that there is Hope. For A better life. Even when

1:10:49 You are the victim of these types of situations. I've spent a lot of time working on Better integrating. those experiences into my life in a way to

1:11:01 Not only understand What happened, why it happened. what the aftermath then caused, but also how I can use that empathy and that understanding

1:11:17 To try to Help. And that's a lot of the reason that I've started to do the work that I do with Marishka Harkate and the Joyful Heart Foundation.

1:11:28 Which is a foundation that Marishka started. After she started working on Law and Order S V U shortly after she started working on that television program, she started to receive a lot of letters from people that The very victim she was

1:11:45 trying to find justice for on the television show and realized that this is way more than a television show. This is a huge opportunity to make a difference in our culture. And shortly thereafter started the Joyful Heart Foundation, which is an organization to help eradicate Domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse. And I've been working with Marishka and Miley Zambuto, the CEO of the foundation, now for the last five years. And this work, I believe.

1:12:16 the branding work that I've been able to do with them. taking into all the expertise I've had in repositioning and branding some of the biggest CPG companies in the world and now dovetailing that with my own really truly

1:12:35 Makes me feel like my whole life makes sense, Tim. That's beautiful. And I'm really glad you're talking about this because I can imagine a very different experience, but

1:12:49 I've had my own battles with darkness of different types and it's very easy to believe that you are alone or isolated or then things will never change. And I'm sure there are people listening who have had similar experiences.

1:13:03 to yours who have never talked about them or have never found a way to perhaps integrate or reconcile them. And this might be an incredible catalyst for them. I I would love to ask, if you're open to talking about it for yourself, have you found any particular Avenues or types of work.

1:13:20 to be particularly helpful. To you. Of course the the work that you're doing with the Joyful Heart Foundation, but apart from that Are there any particular types of exercises or or work or anything really that has helped you to

1:13:36 Be more at peace. with your experience. I think that the work that I've done in therapy has saved my life. I

1:13:48 have always been Really dedicated to my therapy and have Then

1:13:58 in therapy with the same analyst now for over two decades. What type of therapy is that, if you don't mind me asking. I know very little about The person who I work with is uh PhD. She was very involved in the psychoanalytic community in New York City. She's now

1:14:17 living in Santa Fe. I think that it's A combination of a number of different philosophies and theories probably at its foundation. psychoanalysis, but certainly with quite a lot of

1:14:32 variations. It's talk therapy. I started back in the early nineties, five days a week. And then move down to three days and now I'm usually two to three days. And it is enormously helpful to help me try to

1:14:49 Make sense of These experiences that I've had. For anybody that is either in the midst of experiencing them or Experiencing the aftermath.

1:15:01 There are a lot of resources. One of the things that I experienced when I was In the midst of these experiences was A sense of profound Aloness.

1:15:12 The worst experiences I had were in the seventies. And at the time The topic wasn't one that was as Understood. I

1:15:24 Didn't know. What was happening to me. I thought I was the only person in the world That this was happening to

1:15:34 Because it seemed So surreal. And unnatural. And Punishing.

1:15:42 It didn't occur to me. That this was pervasive, that this was a cultural epidemic. And I was told at the time by the perpetrator that if I told anybody

1:15:56 That He had the resources. to hurt my brother and my mother, that he would kill them. Horrible. And I believe that.

1:16:06 I was a little girl. I believe that. And I With Protecting them.

1:16:13 And I didn't know that I had any other resources. None. And didn't even tell my mother until after they got divorced.

1:16:24 Because Tim, I didn't want to be the reason. I didn't want to be blamed. And I also didn't think anybody would believe me and I didn't want my mother and my brother to be harmed. It wasn't until I was much older. that I realized That

1:16:40 This was pervasive. So for anybody that is listening. If you feel alone. Know that you're not. You can go to the Joyful Heart Foundation.

1:16:51 Joyful Heart Foundation dot org. And there are resources and phone numbers. You can also go to Nomore dot org, which is another organization that I've helped. And there are resources. and people that are there to help and listen. and get you out of the situation that you are in.

1:17:09 Thank you for that. Well let's talk about some of the really really important things that people are doing now to not only eradicate this type of violence, but also to change the world. One of the other things that Joyful Heart is doing that I am so proud of is ending the backlog. There are hundreds of thousands of rape kids that are not being

1:17:37 Investigated. That are sitting in shelves In police departments All over the country. And so the Joyful Heart Foundation, along with Vice President Joe Biden, has been very involved in getting funding to help.

1:17:52 Analyze those rape kits. analyze the DNA and get serial rapists off the streets and get justice for the victims of those crimes. So that's a really, really important thing that they're doing and something that I feel can ultimately change not only the sort of rape culture that we're living in, but also The Blaming a victim, so we can change culture.

1:18:19 by doing this work together. It's something I'm super proud of. And To those people listening, all of these resources that are being mentioned throughout this episode will be in the show notes. So you can certainly find links to

1:18:32 No more.org, the Joyful Heart Foundation, and so on at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out. Debbie I'd love to ask you. To shift gears just a little bit. Or perhaps a lot. The speak up story.

1:18:47 That's one of my favorite stories. I will let you run with it. I I would love for you to I would love for you to share. Okay. So I wanna start this story by letting people know that this was something That while it was happening I thought was the worst professional experience of my life. And it's turned out to be the most important and life affirming.

1:19:16 of my life. So let me tell you a little bit about the speak up story. So the year is two thousand and three. And the Time. in the world was quite different than it is now. So we were online, but we weren't quite online in the way that we are now. I think YouTube was just, just beginning It was a

1:19:37 video sharing site more than anything. We were online, but we were playing games and we were ordering from the J Crew catalog. I w I don't know if people remember when the J Crew catalog went online, people's heads exploded. You could buy things online and they can be shipped to you and you don't have to leave the house. Oh my God, that's so amazing. And we were playing games and we were emailing and and reading the news and there were forums where people would congregate, but they tended to be more niche forums and not so much mainstream cultural forums. Prior to that.

1:20:12 Leading up to that time in my life. I had joined Sterling brands in nineteen ninety five. And this was one of the first moments of that click that you had mentioned earlier where suddenly without even realizing it I had joined a firm where I was

1:20:31 hired to help grow the business via the acquisition of new clients in branding. And The Job was One of the first times in my life where I

1:20:45 Was Almost effortlessly successful. I think because of my Early childhood. in my father's pharmacy, being surrounded by brands, I had and my own sort of

1:20:59 obsession with things like laze potato chips. Exactly. I had this almost Magical Ability. To understand why and how people chose the objects that they did to

1:21:17 be part of their lives. mostly the brand that they chose. So I started working at Sterling brands and Had this Here to four Un

1:21:27 believable level of success financially. And I really enjoyed it. I am also endlessly fascinated by the choices make. for the objects in their lives.

1:21:40 what they choose to surround themselves with, the kinds of things they Buy and share and eat and wear and so forth. And In as much as I loved what I was doing, and in as much as I was relishing the level of success that

1:21:55 in my early thirties I was finally, finally getting I also was Still sort of longing for that artistic creative sort of part of my life that I felt was deeply missing. At that point, what department were you working in?

1:22:12 I was working in marketing and sales. Got it. So and I wasn't at that time doing very much design work. I was doing some work freelance I had been appointed the off air creative director at Hot Ninety Seven, which is a whole other sort of But I was working

1:22:32 to develop the identity and the graphics for the first ever hip hop radio station, which happened to be in New York and was called Hot Ninety Seven. That was the only thing that I was doing on the side. I started working at Sterling Brands and was longing for a design community and was longing for a feeling of being part of something bigger than I was on my own, but something that was much more creative and had no commercial

1:22:58 implications. And I found the AIGA, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and they had a special interest group within AIGA called the Brand Experience Center. And I was so excited. I thought, oh my God, this is the Venn diagram of my life. I can do branding and they they have designers and and all these famous designers are on the board and I could meet them and I could be part of this. Great community. And so I went and I volunteered and I became a member of AIGA and I was working with this brand experience group and I loved it and I was appointed to the board and I felt really, really part of something.

1:23:39 And The board term was I think two years. And at the end of the term If we wanted to be on the board again, we all had to reapply. And in that two years, I was very active. I went to all the meetings and we weren't funded by AIGA. We had to self fund. And so I made cupcakes for bake sales and we had a flea market. And I was very, very involved in the sort of day to day runnings of this little special interest group.

1:24:07 At the end of the two years, we all had to reapply if we wanted to be on the board again, and every single person reapplied and every single person was appointed on the board again, except me. I was rejected. Oh you set me up with the cupcakes. No, they were really good cupcakes and brownies. And I was devastated. I was just devastated. And Rick Raffay, who was then the executive director

1:24:35 he had been aware of how much I wanted to be in AIGA and how much I wanted to do and my aspirations. And I think he felt really bad for me. He asked me if I wanted to have lunch and he took me to a very expensive lunch at Eleven Madison and over the course of lunch. Yeah, it was super wonderful and generous of him. Over the course of lunch, he said, Please, please don't give up on AIGA. We need people like you and Don't give up. We'll find a place for you, I promise. And I guess as a bit of a consolation prize, he asked me if I would be a judge in the upcoming annual competition that AIGA had called three sixty five. And he asked me if I wanted to be a judge in the package design. Category.

1:25:19 This to me was almost worth being kicked to the curb by the special interest group of the brand experience. And this was like the biggest honor of my career at that point to be a judge in the country's biggest design competition was Unfathomable to me. It felt like a miracle. And so I went to the judging and there were two other judges with me. We had seven hundred entries that we needed to look at in one day. And when I got to the judging At AIJ headquarters.

1:25:50 I met with the other two jurors. One was a very well-known designer who had a bit of a boutique agency, very posh. She was very stylish. I did not feel nearly as stylish. Another guy was there from Apple and this was shortly after the iPod had been released and he was on his iPod the whole time and really didn't spend a lot of time paying attention to the judging. In any case, this other juror The other Jara looks at me when I get there and she's like, Just say you know. I don't intend to have any mass market

1:26:29 packaging in this competition get an award. And I was like Okay. And I didn't agree with that. I mean, I understandably had come I was working at a CPG package design firm and we had recently designed the Burger King logo and the Star Wars episode two attack of the clones packaging and merchandising and the Hershey bar and

1:26:51 So you know, I was coming from a completely different point of view. We ended up disagreeing so vehemently that at one point I thought we were gonna actually come to fisticuffs, but Was this was this behind the scenes or is this while you're on the panel? This is while we're on the panel and there's somebody that's trailing us writing notes for an article that's going to appear in the annual. It was mortifying.

1:27:15 In any case, we were only able to agree, I think, on seven. things that would go into the competition. Journal. Which is not a way to encourage Future.

1:27:27 applicants to apply for the competition. So AIJ was not particularly happy with us. This juror of mine, the fellow juror, hated me. And I felt at the end of that day that I would never ever be asked to do anything with AIGA ever again. And I remember walking back to my office, which was at the Empire State Building at the time. It was sort of dusk and I felt like oh This is never ever gonna work out. And resign myself to that.

1:27:55 Rick. Ask. For some work of mine to be included in the journal as evidence of my credentials for being a juror. And the two biggest projects that I had done at the time were the Burger King identity.

1:28:10 And the Star Wars identity and so I sent those in as my credentials. They were printed in the journal. And that was the end of that. Or so I thought. May second, two thousand and three.

1:28:23 I get it. Get a link. from a friend of mine, she sends me an email and she's like, read this In the privacy of your own home.

1:28:33 Preferably with a big drink. Oh boy, what a setup. I know, right? And I am not one that likes surprises or anticipation. I need instant gratification. So I don't wait to go home. I don't wait to get a drink. I click into the link at my desk in my office and come to A letter, an open letter to AIGA written by a designer named Felix Sockwell, on this thing called Speak Up. And Speak Up was one of the first weblogs.

1:29:03 And the first design blog. And the letter Chastises AIGA. Four. Including me.

1:29:14 Debbie Melman. As a juror in there. Annual competition. What is supposed to be the most prestigious competition in the country. and accused me of not only being a corporate clown But also because of the work I do.

1:29:30 They called me a she devil. A she devil. Wow. And proceeded to take my entire career down. And it was a pylon. So not only was the open letter quite harsh, but then there was the pylon of comments that happened in the early days of blogging. Remember that? Oh yes. So

1:29:51 I'm so glad that hateful comments are a thing of the past. But yes, oh yes. Intimately, intimately familiar. And I'm reading this, and my jaw is a gape, and I am just In a state.

1:30:07 Uh Catatonia? I couldn't move. I was Ashamed, embarrassed, terrified that people in my office would see it, that the reputation of the firm was being sullied by me.

1:30:24 And I didn't know what to do. I was despondent. I remember walking home from work that day. Crying? thinking that I had to quit, I had to leave the design business and my career was over.

1:30:38 This career that I had finally found for myself was now officially. Over. And I honestly did not know what to do, Tim. I felt like if I wrote in that it would seem defensive. that it would bring more attention to this story.

1:30:54 I felt that if I didn't write in that I would be missing an opportunity to at least contribute to the conversation with a point of view that might be different than theirs. I didn't know what to do. And looking back on it now, I'm actually really ashamed of what I did. because it was disingenuous, but at the time it was the only thing that I

1:31:15 felt I could do. And so a few days after the story broke and the comments piled in, I contributed and My first comment was You're not gonna approve of this. Oh we'll see. We'll see.

1:31:29 I wrote What a cool discussion. I love Ha I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I you know, the book Cool Girl had not come out at that time, but had it been out, I would have said, that's what I was trying to be. I was trying to be the cool girl.

1:31:46 Nothing matters. I can eat five chili dogs and I don't gain weight, you know. Um I'm quoting the book. So yeah, I came in and that's what I said, but I ended up having the best possible back and forth I could muster. I tried to talk about how we had constructed the Burger King logo and the amount of testing we had done around the world and how consumers really seemed to like it, and who were they to sort of declare that it wasn't worthy. And

1:32:18 I try to be as Opened and as Defenseless as possible. And Ultimately they continued to pile on some more insults and made fun of the practice that I had and

1:32:33 Then a couple of people wade in otherwise and The final comment was from a a man named David Weinberg, who I'm since who I've since become friends with as well, who at the time worked at Landor and Landor is uh one of the world's biggest and most respected brand consultancies. Started by Walter Landor about eighty or ninety years ago. And he wrote in you know.

1:32:57 Let's see what Felix could do with that Burger King logo and great work over there at Sterling. And that was sort of the end of that. Conversation. Nobody else came in with another comment. And what I thought was over really wasn't because Felix is the he was the original writer of this open letter. Felix Aquil, the illustrator designer. And then I thought it was over. I thought it had ended with some sort of a

1:33:23 Compromise and viewpoints. But To my chagrin. The writers at Speak Up kept writing about me. And the next article was called Is the Dark Side Prevailing?

1:33:36 So subtle. So subtle. Very subtle. At that point, Tim, I was obsessed. I was going to this site fifteen, twenty times a day, constantly refreshing, seeing what they were writing about me. And finally gave up and went to my IT person and said, put parental controls on my computer at work. I don't wanna be able to see this site. And he did. Sometimes you need a helpful pair of handcuffs. Yeah. Well said. But I'd still you know, I'd go home and and look, but whatever. Um, a couple of weeks later.

1:34:08 The Founder of Speak Up, a young man about twenty three years old. Named Armin Vitt. Reached out to me. You wrote me an email.

1:34:18 And he apologized. He didn't apologize for calling my work a pair of turds, which is what I didn't realize turds came in pairs. It shows what I know. Uh you but he so he apologized.

1:34:32 For the bullying and for the unprofessional way in which the conversation ensued, as opposed to He made it very clear that he still thought my work was a pair of turds. But he didn't feel that it was right the way that I had been Spoken to And I took a lot of care in responding to him. I accepted his apology, but at the time

1:34:53 I was really fascinated by this whole blogging thing. It was really interesting to me, this sort of real time communication, holding people accountable. And I wrote him this sort of diatribe about it. And he responded and said, Well, would you like to write for the site? And I was like, Whoa, didn't expect that one. So I said yes and I started writing for Speak Up.

1:35:17 The Darth Vader column. Well, what was so interesting about the experience, Tim, was that the What the speak upers were calling the precious design world, the AIGA world, they had already rejected me. And now the renegades, the anti AIGA contingent, they were rejecting me. So at that moment, I actually felt like the most hated woman in graphic design. Masterless Samurai. Exactly. Exactly. So what happened after that was it was really surreal. And this is why I say that what felt like at the time in May of 2003 to be the lowest point of my professional career actually became the catalyst upon which everything else has been built.

1:35:59 And so I started writing for Speak Up. And all of a sudden I started to have that sense of what I had been originally searching for in my efforts with speak up. I felt like I was part of something bigger than myself. I felt like I was part of this sort of renegade group of misfits that were trying to change the world through graphic design criticism and online conversations, we all decided that year in the fall of 2003 that we were going to go as a group of sort of gorilla speak up writers to the upcoming AIGA annual conference in Vancouver. And we were gonna give out this little brochure that Armin had put together called Stop Being Sheep, which was a riff on the great typographer Eric Speakerman's book Stop Stealing Sheep, which is about letter spacing.

1:36:48 Yeah. You know, thin slicing here to the very best of our ability. And so We went with this little brochure en route to the Conference. Accepting you? The the people who had previously vilified you. You were people that had previously vilified me not only accepted me

1:37:09 But over the years Armin and his wife Brianya. And I uh become such good friends that I am now the godmother to their eldest daughter. Wow. So sort of similar to that Robert Edelstein story back when I was in college, where he rejected me or what I thought was a rejection of me, then ultimately became one of my lifelong friendships and now Armin and Briany

1:37:34 are also family at this point. Family. Amazing. So I I I interrupted though. You're so you're en route with this group of heretics and a and a pile of brochures or pamphlets. Right, because brochures change the world. You knew that. And I'm sitting next to people that are also there was at that time one direct flight from New York to Vancouver. The flight is filled with design luminaries, Michael Bay Rude and Paula Cher and I'm sitting next to a woman who is beautiful and elegant and I'm wearing sweatpants and carrying a a bag of McDonald's breakfast, you know, and the only people that like the way McDonald's breakfast smell are the people eating it, not the people smelling it. True fact. That's that's

1:38:20 You know, I don't know why I didn't think that I would m see people that I knew on this flight. I was well, in any case. So I start talking to this woman next to me and turns out she's going to the conference as well. I ask her what she does. She says she's a writer of print magazine. I tell her about Speak Up. She's all interested in what we're doing. She gives me I tell her that we're having this get together, this party over the course of the conference. She's I like to invite her. She gives me a card. Without looking at it, I put it into my bag. We talk through a couple of hours and then we go off and do our own thing with Whatever else we were doing on the flight.

1:38:55 When I get to my room in Vancouver I take her card out of my bag and I see that she's the editor in chief, Choice R I invite her to the party. She comes. And we start a correspondence. I had I harbored this hope that maybe I could write for print magazine one day.

1:39:15 And a couple of months later, she writes me and asks me if I want to participate in something she's putting together for the upcoming Hell Conference the next year in San Diego. And at the time reality TV had just sort of burgeoned into culture and There was a very popular TV show called Iron Chef. about cooking in real time and the audience voting and she wanted to do a riff on that called Ironic Chef.

1:39:42 Where three designers would create work on stage in real time and the audience would vote. This to me sounded like the definition of hell. And just to clarify for people, print magazine

1:39:56 is actually called print. It is called magazine. It is called Print Magazine. It's the oldest graphic design magazine in the country. It's 75 years old. It has won, I think, five magazine awards, which is the highest honor and FE. that a magazine can win

1:40:15 And It's a remarkable magazine and I had this dream of some day writing something for it. Yes, ironic chef. Debbie Melvin's personal version of Hell. Yeah.

1:40:27 And I I'm afraid to say no. If I feel like if I say no, I'm never gonna be offered an opportunity to do anything with Joyce again. So I say yes and I'm further humiliated when I get to San Diego. When I realize that I have to wear a chef's outfit. On stage.

1:40:44 There are pictures of this, by the way. I'm not lying or exaggerating. So I go through with this. I am on stage with the MC Steve Heller, who I'd never met. Steve Heller is One of the world's foremost design critics. He was the art director of the New York Times Book Review for thirty years. He started numerous programs at the School of Visual Arts, graduate programs. And he's written about a hundred and seventy books about design and graphic designers. He is the judge. I am terribly intimidated because he is Steve Heller, one of the greatest people that has ever lived.

1:41:19 And there are three of us. I come in second, which is not terrible. I don't win, but I don't lose. And another aberrant moment of courage, I ask Steve. because he was nice to me that day. If he'd want to have lunch in New York City when we were back, he lived in New York City as well. He agrees.

1:41:37 We go to lunch. I was so intimidated I had a cheat sheet that I'd prepared of topics in which I could discuss with Steve, wrote it on a paper napkin, put it in my lap. And I could refer to it. If I choked and knew not what to say next. In any case, I had some book ideas.

1:41:55 Steve. Told me they were both bad. I went away a little bit discouraged, but still happy that I had met him and he told me that I'd get a book Tschüss.

1:42:07 Be patient. Four months later, a publisher calls at the recommendation of Stephen Heller. With a book? that he had turned down, they had wanted him to write. with the horrific title, how to think like

1:42:19 A great graphic designer. Once again. I think if I don't say yes to this, I'm never gonna be asked for anything again. And I take on this book. But I asked them if I could do it in a different way because I didn't believe that there was

1:42:32 just one way for a great graphic designer to think. There were myriad ways. And could I interview Great graphic designers. and reveal how they think. They agreed. And that became my first book. In the meantime.

1:42:45 Choice. Rider K, the editor of Critt Magazine reaches out and asks me if I'd like to write A review about Wally Olens. Then Upcoming book on branding.

1:42:56 I agree. I write my first piece for print magazine that year. And I've written for every single issue. Sense. Wow. Thirteen years later.

1:43:06 Two years ago, I was appointed the editorial and creative director of Print Magazine. Well, seems like those brochures did play a role. And that's just the start of it, Tim. If it weren't for Speak Up and that story, I was then contacted by a fledgling internet radio network called Voice America in 2004, shortly after a piece that Mark Kingsley and I wrote about election graphics that kind of went viral. And they wanted me to

1:43:34 host a show about branding. I was worried that if I said no, I'd never get another opportunity again and asked if I could sort of do it about branding, but maybe do it more about design and pitch this idea to them about Design matters, uh radio network. Show.

1:43:52 They said yes, just when I was beginning to think ooh. I might get rich from this. They told me that I Needed to pay them for the airtime.

1:44:02 Surprise. Another surprise. But I was really excited about this. And at that time, you know, everything I was doing was very commercially. Driven and felt that this would be a way for me to talk about graphic design and engage with people in a way that had no commercial value whatsoever. It was just all about

1:44:21 Had to satisfy Sort of our souls, our creative souls. And that's how Design Matters was born. My podcast was born on this sort of Waynes World esque. Internet radio network called Voice America. I did the show for four years on Voice America, paid them for four years to do it, and then brought the show to Design Observer. Bill Drentel, the late great Bill Drentel, the founder of Design Observer, invited me to bring the show over to Design Observer in two thousand and nine. With the proviso that I improve my sound quality.

1:44:56 I was doing my show with two handsets. You ever have a conversation with two people on the same phone line in your house and you're on different handsets in different parts of the house and the echo and all of that. Those were my early shows. But I had no idea what I was doing. There was no podcast when I started. I started to upload my show to iTunes just for the kick of it. Just to be able to share it.

1:45:18 And Yeah. Twelve years later. Three weeks I'm gonna have My twelfth anniversary of Design Matters. We won a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in two thousand and nine.

1:45:29 The end of 2015, iTunes and you know this because you're always on the list, but after 11 years, iTunes designated it one of the best podcasts on iTunes and I've transitioned the show from the show about how creative people design their lives. and the trajectory that people take.

1:45:50 Even from this conversation, you can probably tell how interested I am in how people make their lives, the choices that they make and how they live and what they dream about and what they become and so that's the direction that the show has taken. And I'm about to approach my Three hundredth episode. Congratulations. That's a huge milestone. And you being interested

1:46:14 in the way that you are And with the intensity that you are interested. I think it's very well reflected in The episodes themselves and We've spent some time in your studio.

1:46:27 Yeah. Lovely and engaging. conversations I've ever had in interview format. It was such a relaxed.

1:46:38 And fun experience for me, which is not the norm, as you know. So I certainly recommend everyone check out Design Matters but I want to talk about some of Your decisions and specifically We could talk for twenty hours, but I want to talk about a name that I had not heard in my life until very recently.

1:47:01 Milton Glazer. Mm. Yes. As you'd mentioned, you'd done I guess brand makeovers or branding for Burger King. Star Wars, I think you uh Hershey's Tropicana, I think was and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, but you know at one point if you walked into any grocery store, supermarket, et cetera.

1:47:20 you had a hand in, say, twenty percent of Everything that you saw. Something like that. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. And that's that's mind blowing when you consider the number of different products, right? The SKUs. And for people who are wondering what CPG is consumer package goods. And

1:47:36 Up some point your hand was involved in Just an incredible array and plenitude of different products. How did Milton Glazer enter the scene and could you describe for people who he is. Milton Glazer is the elder statesman of the design world and is the world's

1:47:57 One of certainly one of if not the greatest living graphic designer. He's in his eighties He is responsible for the iHeart New York logo. he did that iconic Bob Dylan poster of Bob Dylan in profile with the streams of colorful hair. He is one of the founders of New York magazine.

1:48:20 The list goes on and on. He's had more impact and created some of the most memorable well known and iconic brands and identities in the world. My relationship with Milton We began when I took a class of his at the Scul of Visual Arts a summer intensive.

1:48:38 In the summer of two thousand and five. I had already interviewed him for design matters. But it was over the phone and while I I cherish that interview, it was one of my very, very early interviews, so I'm somewhat gunshai to send people to listen to that one because it's so early in my journey as a podcaster. But in any case I took this class with him And that class

1:49:02 You know, it's interesting about how we started the show talking about my eight year old drawing and and you talking about Your friend who had written this essay that then predicted his life. Milton. taught this summer intensive, I think, for about 40 or 50 years. And he used to say that it was one of the most important things that he did. He's not teaching it anymore. He

1:49:24 had us do an exercise in that class where we had to envision the life that we could have. If we pursued everything that we wanted with the certainty that whatever it is that we wanted, we would succeed. I wrote an essay

1:49:41 in July of two thousand and five. It was supposed to be a five year plan. And He asked us to dream big. And not to edit.

1:49:52 And said that it had a bit of a magical quality that he experienced. with his students over and over, so to be careful what we wished for. And I created this essay. With long ranging far fetched goals. that I can tell you now, twelve years later, have

1:50:12 Almost all come true. It is spooky. spooky. And so that's an exercise I do now with my students. Milton has had one of the most profound impacts. On my life.

1:50:23 Aside from, you know, the profound impact he's had on the world, I feel really, really lucky that I have been a student of his and have gotten to interview him now numerous times. And feel that my relationship with him is certainly one of the luckiest things that's ever happened to me. W can you describe

1:50:41 the exercise as you do it with your students now. Well, I teach undergrad and graduate classes at the School of Visual Arts. I run a master's in branding program at the School of Visual Arts. Which I was given this opportunity via Steve Heller. who I again would not have met had

1:50:58 that whole speak up experience not happened. So yet another thing, every single thing that I'm doing now in my life, Tim. stems from that experience. So just to underscore another theme. He had in some sense you could interpret it as rejected two of your book ideas. Even though he's nice to you.

1:51:20 And went out to lunch with you. But now later on down the line, you kept that relationship and Land you at SVA. Absolutely. I mean, Steve is

1:51:31 One of the most generous And engaging people I have had the privilege of knowing. And I often tease Steve and say that he's my fairy godfather because He's the only person in my life, or maybe one of two people in my life now that I could say has just been He has this sort of generosity.

1:51:54 That is all about Here. Take this, do that. Make this happen. This is for you.

1:52:01 With no strings, no ties, no obligations, it's just Pure generosity. And he has done that over and over and over and over again. For me. Since meeting him back in two thousand and four.

1:52:15 So the exercise that I do now with my students because they're quite a bit younger than I was when I was doing this five year essay or five year plan. I asked them to do a ten year plan. And so this gives them a chance to really mature into who they are in their twenties and into their early thirties.

1:52:33 And it's this. ten year plan for what I call a remarkable life. And it's about imagining what your life could be. If you could do anything you wanted. Without any fear of failure.

1:52:46 And They are The most life affirming essays. They are so full of hope. And optimism.

1:52:56 And well being. And goodness. That it gives me a sens. That humanity.

1:53:03 Can be saved. And so I've borrowed that exercise from Milton and now use that both in my graduate program and the undergraduate classes that I teach. This is gonna seem nerdy. But I'm a nerd, so I'll run with it. And that is do you have any

1:53:22 For people at home who might want to try this, or recommendations, ways to start, is it blitz or is it pros and full point? Any recommendations for people who would like to give this a stab? So let's say it is Winter. twenty twenty seven.

1:53:41 What does your life look like? What are you doing? Where are you living? Who you living with. Do you have pets?

1:53:50 What kind of house are you in? Is it an apartment? Are you in the city? Are you in the country? What does your furniture look like? What is your bed like? What are your sheets like? What kind of clothes do you wear? What kind of hair do you have? Tell me about your pets. Tell me about your significant other. Do you have children? Do you have a car? Do you have a boat? Do you have Talk about your career. What do you want? What are you reading? What are you making?

1:54:14 What excites you? What is your health like? And right this day, this one day ten years from now. So one day in the winter of twenty twenty seven. What does your whole day look like? Start from the minute you wake up.

1:54:31 Brush your teeth. Have your coffee or tea. All the way through till when you tuck yourself in at night. What is that day like for you? Dream big.

1:54:42 Dream Without any fear. Write it all down. You don't have to share it with anyone. Other than yourself. But your whole

1:54:51 Heart into it. And right. Like there's no tomorrow, right? Like your life depends on it because it does. And then Read it.

1:55:01 Once a year. See what happens. It's magic. I love it. I love this sound. I need to do this. I'm not asking for some hypothetical listener. Listeners, I love you guys, but this is this is also for me. It is astounding. And I do this now with all of my students. And I can't begin to tell you how many letters I get from students. from ten years ago that are like, Debbie, it all came true. How did this happen? And I am so thrilled.

1:55:32 That these things Can Make a difference. And this goes back to the earlier part of our conversation about my own fears about what I could or would or should become.

1:55:44 And the idea that At that same time in my life, that intersection on Bleaker Street and Sixth Avenue, peering deep into my future and not knowing that anything was possible for me. To give Somebody at that same stage in their life. Or any stage really, but particularly at that vulnerable stage when you are so worried about what you can or can't become.

1:56:06 To give somebody that sliver. Of a dream of a hope that this could happen. And have them declare. What they want. I think is a remarkable exercise.

1:56:18 That's why I call it your 10 year plan for a remarkable life. How long was your essay? Is there any consistency to length or their guidelines or is it as long as it takes? And some are two pages, some are twenty pages. Some are two pages, some are twenty pages. I think the longer it is, the more likely it is to

1:56:40 be affirmed for some reason. I find the more care you put into it, the more care and detail you put in Oh doggy. That's that's doggy. Yeah. That's that's my Molly. Sorry, she's excited about this exercise. Please get it. I think that the more care you put into it, the likely the more success you'll have coming out of it. Mine was I wrote it in a journal that I was keeping at the time, so it was about five by seven and it was probably about Ten handwritten, big handwriting. I have big handwriting. Ten big handwriting pages. And it was the whole day.

1:57:13 And then because I was really excited about it and because I love lists, I made a list of everything. that I wanted to come true. Well, I tell you I think that might be a good place. To

1:57:27 Wrap up. This part one, which I think we may have more conversations in us. I have so many questions I'd still like to ask, but I think that is a given people have a primacy and recency bias. I want them to remember this exercise as one of The

1:57:46 actionable recommendations that they can certainly explore. from this interview and there's so much But let me ask before I Let you go the f the Yeah.

1:57:56 I'll ask where people can find you and so on. learn more about your work. But before that, is there any question anything that you'd like listeners to carry with them when they stop listening to this.

1:58:12 I recently went through a pretty major transition in my life. And It was something that I had to make a pretty big decision about.

1:58:27 And it was a somewhat prolonged agonizing decisions so much so that My friends and loved ones were no longer listening to my sort of machinations and making the decision'cause I thought

1:58:42 I never was going to actually make the decision. And so I can share that because I do think on the other side of that decision now is an important realization that I think can help people. I was working I've had a full time job. since I graduated college. And for the last twenty-two years, I was working at a branding consultancy, as I mentioned, called Sterling Brands.

1:59:05 And had been very lucky. To be able to Sell the company.

1:59:14 that I was a part of and and ultimately a partner in. after about thirteen years of working there. So in two thousand and eight, the two partners that I had, the man that of originally hired me, Simon Williams, and then Austin McGee, who was the third partner to come in after me. We sold our company to OmniCom. And at the time I had been offered this opportunity with Steve Heller to start the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts and

1:59:40 organized my time so that my day job at Sterling Brands wouldn't be impacted by what I was going to be doing at SVA, which was made possible by starting My branding program as an evening program. So I had two full time jobs, a day job at Sterling and my night job at S VA. And most people thought that I would go through my earnout at Stirling and then leave and transition to

2:00:03 working at S VA and doing All of the personal projects that I had been talking for so long about doing. So the five years. happened and we had a a really wonderful, successful earnout. So there was no excuse Tim for me to continue on the same path and

2:00:20 It was time to make that change. And the last thing I wanted was to end up like the characters in Revolutionary Road, that remarkable book where people talk about making these changes their whole lives and then Never ever do. But I became terrified.

2:00:35 I became terrified that if I made this change that I would not have financial stability anymore, that I would not be able to fulfill all of the dreams that I had and would have to confront that and so five years turned into six years and six years turned into seven years. And just at a point where I was starting to think about

2:00:57 really doing it. Sort of like El Pacino and Godfather Three. I was offered an opportunity to take over as CEO of the company. Simon Williams, the then CEO, was looking to become chairman and needed to appoint a new CEO and he came to me and asked me if I wanted the job. And here it was.

2:01:15 This is the big decision of a life. Do I become the CEO? And have this amazing continuation of money and career and security and Everything else that is conventionally approved.

2:01:29 Uh Or do I say no? Actually, I am Not going to double down. I'm going to Live. the way in which I have been saying I wanted to with more freedom and more opportunity to do personal projects and pro bono projects and give back.

2:01:47 And I had to decide. And it took me four months to decide. Simon Williams finally said to me Debbie, anything that takes you four months to decide probably means you don't want to do it. And it was the hardest decision of my life. But I turned it down. I turned the CEO job down.

2:02:03 And then two things happened. First of all. One of the things that I realized was that I was In this trapeze.

2:02:12 And rather than just let go of the trapeze and Do something else. I had every single crook of my body. Holding on to some other trapeze.

2:02:24 This sense of if I am not doing enough, I am not worthy. If I am not making enough, I am not worthy. If I'm not producing enough, I am not worthy. And suddenly I had to not just let go of the trapeze, but let go of the entire apparatus. And

2:02:44 I have realized now. Two things. One, most people live in a world of scarcity. We think that all we have now is all we were ever have, and if we give something up we will just have less.

2:02:57 What ends up happening is that We don't think about all the possibilities of things that could come up. if we give ourselves openings to receive them. And so now as opposed to having less than what I thought, I have way more because I have all these new things that I'm doing that I never would have thought possible. Second. Yeah.

2:03:17 Hard decisions are only hard. when you're in the process of making them. Once you make them They're not hard anymore. Then it's just life.

2:03:26 And freedom. And it's an extraordinary experience that I really would like to share with Your listeners with our listeners. It's such an important Discussion.

2:03:37 on many levels. And I I want I think it bear it's worth repeating a few things. And certainly this echoes in my experience as well. One That's Agonizing over the decision is often harder than whatever the outcome of the decision will be. Yeah.

2:03:55 And for that matter, if you make in many cases, not all, but in many cases, if you make a decision and you decide that it's not the right decision for you. You can quit. You can do something else. It's not a permanent sentence. Necessarily. And also this is something that I've had to learn and relearn many times in my life, which is

2:04:15 If it's taken you that long to make a decision. You probably don't and shouldn't. Don't want to and shouldn't do. whatever it is that you're agonizing over with pro and con lists trying to justify in some fashion. Uh it's in both of those points I think are so, so important.

2:04:34 I also think that if you're waiting for something to feel right before you do it, if you're waiting for a sense of security or confidence. that those things are Sort of like being on a hedonistic treadmill. If you think you need enough of this before you do that, when you achieve whatever that is you think you need, you're gonna then up the ante and you're never ever going to Be satisfied. with whatever it is you think you need before you do something, if it's not something that is real. If you think, Oh, I need this much money before I do this, when you get that much money, then you're gonna realize, oh, I actually think I need this much more, and it's just gonna be this carrot in front of you that you're agonizing over trying to reach.

2:05:18 And then the other thing is I'm gonna quote Danny Shapiro here, the great writer Danny Shapiro, if you're waiting for confidence and she I asked her once about confidence and she said that confidence is highly, highly overrated and that most confident people or overly confident people tend to be kind of annoying. And she said what she felt was more important than confidence was courage. And I fully fully agree. Taking that first step. Confidence really only comes from repeated attempts at doing something successfully.

2:05:49 But in order to take that first step. You need courage. And that's much more important than confidence. So for anybody that's waiting for the confidence to show up, take the first step in a moment of courage, even if it's Aber encourage to come full circle in this conversation. It reminds me of Something that

2:06:07 the brother, Kamal Ravakant, of another friend of mine, Naval Ravikant. told me he said Naval is a very, very successful entrepreneur. And investor. among other things, very, very good writer as well, as is his brother Kamal, who just had a novel come out. But Naval said to his brother.

2:06:24 If I always did what I was qualified to do, I would be pushing a broom somewhere. Well said. And I thought that was very, very encouraging. Touche. Uh Debbie, I have so much fun every time we get to spend time together. Where can people Find out more about you, where can they learn more about your work? Where would you like people to say hello on social, if that, and I'll put all of this in the show notes for everybody. Sure, absolutely. I'm Debbie Millman on Twitter and Instagram. You can see more about my program at the School of Visual Arts at SVA.edu and Debbie Melvin.com where you can listen to all my podcasts and see my visual essays and my books and so on and so forth.

2:07:07 For people who would be novices or new entrance into the world of, say, graphic design, recognizing that your podcast is about a lot more than that. Which episode or episodes would you suggest they start with? I would suggest that they start with Chris Ware. He is An extraordinary graphic novelist. It's one of the f most favorite episodes that I've

2:07:31 Ever conducted. How do you spell his last name? W-A-R-E. And from there, some of my favorite episodes over the last year. Aside from my episode with you, which I cherish, my episodes with Amanda Palmer. My episode with Alain de Botan, my episode with Krista Tibbet.

2:07:50 Niko Mouli, the great composer. Those are all episodes in the last year that I'm most proud of. Debbie. You're a rock star. Thank you so much for the time. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. And to everybody listening, As always, you can find show notes, links to resources, all sorts of things that we talked about, and maybe more at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast.

2:08:13 And until next time. Thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. Albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts.

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