[The Tim Ferriss Show: Reflections on Creativity, Resilience, and Life Design with Neil Gaiman and Debbie Millman]-[#750: Neil Gaiman and Debbie Millman]

And the true answer is invariablyAG1.

It simply covers a ton ofbases.

I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on theroad.

So what isAG1? What is thisstuff?

AG1 is a science-driven formulation ofvitamins,probiotics, and whole food sourcednutrients.

In a singlescoop, AG1 gives you support for thebrain,gut, and immunesystem.

Since2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high qualityingredients.

How manyingredients?75.

And you would be hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on themarket.

It has amultivitamin, multimineral superfoodcomplex,probiotics, and prebiotics for guthealth, and antioxidant immune support formula digestive enzymes and adaptogens to help managestress.

Now, I do my best always to eat nutrient densemeals.

That is thebasic,basic,basic, basicrequirement.

That is why things are calledsupplements.

Ofcourse, that's what I focuson.

But it is not alwayspossible.

It is not alwayseasy. So part of my routine is using AG1daily.

If I'm on theroad, on therun, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients atonce.

And to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of importantboxes.

So eachmorning,AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth part of theroutine.

It's also NSF certified forsports, so professional athletes trust it to besafe.

And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on thelabel.

It does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavymetals, and is free of 280 bandsubstances.

It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easyscoop.

So take ownership of your health and try AG1today.

You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscriptionpurchase.

So learnmore. Check itout.

Go to drinkag1.com slashTim.

That'sdrinkag1, the number one drinkag1.com slashTim.

Lasttime, drinkag1.com slashTim.

Check itout. This episode is brought to you by8Sleep.

I have been using 8Sleep pod cover for yearsnow.

Why?Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fittedsheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of yourbed.

8Sleep recently launched their newest generation of thepod, and I'm excited to test itout.

Pod forultra. Itcools, itheats, and now it elevatesautomatically.

More on that in asecond.

First, pod for ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below roomtemperature, giving you and your partner cool even in a heatwave.

Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heatsensitive.

I am always more heatsensitive, pulling the sheetsoff, closing thewindows, trying to crank the ACdown.

This solves all ofthat.

Pod for ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and yourbedframe, and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwindingexperience.

And for those snorkelingnights, the pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve air flow and stop you or your partner fromsnoring.

Plus with the pod forultra, you can leave your wearables on thenightstand.

You won't need them because these types of metrics are integrated into the pod for ultraitself.

They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleeptime, sleepphases, andHRV.

The heart rate tracking is just one example is at99%accuracy.

So get your best night'ssleep.

Head to 8sleep.com slash Tim and use code Tim to get $350 off of the pod forultra.

That's 8sleep all spelled out 8sleep.com slash Tim and code Tim Tiam to get $350 off the pod forultra.

They currently ship to the UnitedStates,Canada, the UnitedKingdom,Europe, andAustralia.

Hello boys and girls ladies andgerms.

This is TimFerris. 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 thehabits,routines, favoritebooks, and so on that you can apply and test in your ownlives.

This episode is a two forone.

And that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th yearanniversary, which is insane to thinkabout, and past one billiondownloads.

Tocelebrate, I've curated some of the best of thebest.

Some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the lastdecade.

I could not be more excited to give you these super comboepisodes.

And internally we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you toyes, enjoy the householdnames, the super famousfolks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I considerstars.

These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many ofyou.

Perhaps they got lost in a busy newscycle.

Perhaps you missed anepisode.

Just trust me on thisone.

We went to great pains to put these pairingstogether.

And for the bios of allguests, you can find that and more at Tim.log slashcombo.

And now without furtherado, please enjoy and thank you forlistening.

Firstup, NeilGaiman, best-selling author and creator ofbooks, graphicnovels, shortstories, film and television for allages, includingneverware,Coraline, the graveyardbook, the ocean at the end of thelane, the view from the cheapseats, and the Sandman series of graphicnovels.

You can find Neil on Instagram at Neilhimself.

Back in about1997, I read an article by Ian Fleming who wrote the James Bond books about how he wrote the James Bondbooks.

And you read this article and you realize something which is Ian Fleming did not enjoy the process ofwriting.

I was always fascinated by the fact that several of Rold Dahl's most famous short stories were plotted by IanFleming.

Ian Fleming wouldreally...

Yeah, he gaveDahl... Noidea.

The two best short storytwists, 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 isgoing, I cannot figure out what he was hitwith.

Is Ian Flemingplot? And so is the one about the evil antique dealer 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 thelegs.

The legs are worth some money so I'll give you 20 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 restaway.

It makes easier foryou.

And those plots were both Ian Fleming's and you startrealizing,ah, you really don't like writing and you read his thing on how he wrote the James Bondbooks.

You read a James Bond book in twoweeks, you check into ahotel, 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 atourist, you have to check into a not terribly nice hotelroom.

Otherwise you might luxuriate and enjoy it and instead what you want to be is focused on gettingout.

And then you having nothing else to do in thistown, in thisplace, you settle down and you write like a fiend and you get your James Bond book written in two weeks and you leave this horrible hotel room and that was how he didit.

And I have tried it a couple oftimes.

I did it with the American draft ofNeverwear.

That was the first one I ever tried and I did the entire sort of American draft which was a big seconddraft.

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 was written for people who knew that Oxford Street was a big street with lots of shops on it orwhatever.

It was written for Brits and Londoners and she wanted somethingexpanded.

So I expanded it and I was in a room with as far as I remember no windows in the I think it was a Marriott in the World Trade Center which is no longer there but writing in that hotel room you just wanted to beout.

It seems to me and you can't believe everything you read on the internet so I want you to certainly fact check me 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 and again feel free to correct but makingrules, 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 anythingelse.

That was always and still is when I go off towrite.

That's my biggestrule.

Could you speak tothat?

Yeah because I would go down to my lovely littlegazebo, the bottom of thegarden, sit down and I'm absolutely allowed not to doanything.

I'm allowed to sit at mydesk, I'm allowed to stare out at theworld, I'm allowed to do anything Ilike.

As long as it isn't anything not allowed to do a crossword not allowed to read abook, I'd allowed to phone afriend, allowed to make a claim model ofsomething, all I'm allowed to do is absolutely nothing or write and what I love about that is I'm giving myself permission to write or not write but writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing after awhile.

You know you sort of sit there and you've been staring at the window now for five minutes and it kind of loses itscharm.

You're going well actually it's all right something and it's hard as awriter, I'm moreeasily, you know I'mdistractable.

I have a three-year-oldson, he is the epitome of cuteness andcharm.

It's more fun playing with him than it is writing which means if I'm going to be writing I need to do it somewhere where I don't have a three-year-old son singing tome, asking me to read tohim, demanding myattention.

I think it's a really just a solid rule forwriters.

It's like yeah you don't have towrite, you have permission to notwrite, that you don't have permission to do anythingelse.

It reminds me of another one of my favoritewriters, you being the one who's sitting in front ofme, JohnMcFee, nonfiction writer who has spent much of his life inPrinceton, New Jersey but has written some incredible Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction and I was lucky enough to take class with him a thousand years ago and his rule was verysimilarly, it didn't state itexplicitly, it would sit in front of his first as a young man typewriter and he could sit in front of the blank page and from 8a.m.

to 6p.m. with the exception of a break for lunch andswimming, it was the blank page orwriting, it was disallowed from doing anythingelse.

Are there any other rules or practices that you also hold sacred or important for your writingprocess?

Ah, some of them are just things forme.

Forexample, most of thetime, notalways, I will do my first draft in Fountain Pen because I actually enjoy the process of writing with the FountainPen.

I like filling a FountainPen, I like uncappingit, I like the weight a bit in myhand, I like thatthing.

So I'll have anotebook, I'll have a Fountain Pen and I'llwrite, if I'm doing anythinglong, if I'm working on anawful, forexample, I will always have two Fountain pens on thego, at least with two different colordinks, atleast, because that way I can see at a glance how much work I did thatday.

I can just look down andgo, look atthat, five pages inbrown, I wrotethat.

Half a page inblack, that was not a goodday.

Nine pages inblue, that was what a great day and you can just sort of get a senseof,okay, are youworking?

Are you making forwardprogress?

What's actuallyhappening?

And I also love that because it emphasizes for me that nobody has ever meant to read your firstdraft.

Your first draft can go way off therails, your first draft can absolutely go up inflames, you can change theage,gender, number of acharacter, you can bring somebody dead back tolife, nobody ever needs toknow.

Anything that happens in your first draft is you telling the story to yourself and then I'll sit down and type and I'll put it onto acomputer.

As far as I cansay, the second draft is where I try and make it look like I knew what I was doing allalong.

Do you edit then as you're looking or translating from the first draft on the page to the computer or do you get it all down as is in the computer and thenedit?

No, Idefinitely, that's my editingprocess.

I figure that's my second draft is typing it into thecomputer.

Andalso, Ilove, so backing up a bithere.

When I was27,28, in the days when we were still in type writers and there were just a handful of people with web processes which were clunky things with disks which didn't hold very much andstuff.

I edited an anthology and enjoyed editinglines.

I thought you had most of the stories that came in were about 3,000 wordslong.

Move forward intime, notmuch,five,six, sevenyears,mid-90s, everybody is now on computer and I edited another short storyanthology.

And the stories that were coming in tended to be somewhere between six and 9,000 wordslong.

And they didn't really have much more story than the 3,000 wordsones.

And I realized that what was happening is it's a sort of a computer thing is if you'retyping, putting stuff down hiswork.

If you've got acomputer, adding stuff is notwork, choosing iswork.

So it sort of expands a bit like agas.

If you have two things you couldsay, you say both ofthem.

If you have the stuff you want toadd, you addit.

And Ithought,okay, I have to not do that because otherwise my stuff is going to balloon and it will become gaseous andthin.

So what Ilove, if I've written something on a computer and I decide to lose achunk, it feels like I've lostwork.

If I delete a page and ahalf, I feel like there's a page and a half that just wentaway.

That's a page and a half sort of work I've justlost.

If I've been writing in a notebook and I'm typing it up and I can look at something andgo, I don't need this page and a half and I believe itout, I've just saved myself work and it feels kind of like I'm treatingmyself.

So I'm just trying to always have in my head the idea that maybe I'm somehow on some cosmic level paying somebody by the word in order to be allowed towrite.

If they'rethere, they shouldmatter, they should meansomething.

It's always important tome.

So this might seem like avery, very mundanequestion, but what type of notebooks do youprefer?

They'relarge, like legalpans, are they leatherbound?

What type ofnotebooks?

When they cameout, I've used a whole bunch of differentones.

I bought big drawing ones which actually turned out to be a bit toobig.

Like I kind of liked how much I could see on thepage.

Those were the ones Iwrote, Stardust and American Godsin, sort of bigsize.

But they weren't terriblyportable.

I went over to the mole skins and I loved them when they first came out and then they dropped their paper quality 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 onepage, leaving a page blank because it's blood through and writing on the nextpage.

And Joe Hill about six or seven yearsago, JoeHill, the wonderful horror fantasywriter, suggested the Leuchtturm tome.

So my usual notebook right now is a Leuchtturm because I really like the way you can paginate stuff in them and the thickness of the paper and they're just like sort of moleskins but the Porsche ofmoleskins.

They're justbetter. And I also have beenwriting, I wrote the graveyard book and I'm writing the current novel in these beautiful books that I bought in a stationary shop in Venice built into abridge.

Somewhere in Venice there's a little stationery shop on a bridge and they have these beautiful leather bound blank books that just look like hard back books but they're blankpages.

And I wrote the graveyard book in one ofthose, I bought four of them and now I'm using the next one on the next novel and it may well go into anotherone.

I'm notsure. And then athome, I said athome, my house in Wisconsin which is where my stuffis.

We live in Woodstock but I have an entire life's worth of stuff still sitting in my house in Wisconsin and it's becomearchives.

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 25 years ago and before I die I plan to write a novel in it and it's an accounts book from the mid 19thcentury.

It's 500 pageslong, every page isnumbered, it's lined with accounts lines but very faint so 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 that Dickens or somebody would have written a novel in and I've just been waiting until I have an idea that is huge and weird and Dickensian enough and whether or not I actually get to write it in dippen, I'm not sure but I definitely want to write it in a sort of oldVictorian, something slightly copperplaty.

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 Victorianhandwriting.

I'm just imagining you putting pen to the first page when you finish the first page and what that will feellike.

That's going to be a goodday.

It will be either a good day or an incredibly badday.

I'll get to the end of the firstpage.

Oh no I have this pristine but it is it is the thing that I tell young writers and by young writers and young writing can be any age you just have to be starting out which is anything you do can befixed.

What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blankpage.

What you cannot fix is that pristine unsullied whiteness of a scream or a page with nothing on it because there's nothing thataffects.

Are there any particular fountain pens or criteria that you would use inpicking?

I'm a goodpen. You know the biggest criteria I would use in picking if you have the choice is go somewhere like New York's fountain penhospital.

Is that a realplace? It's a real place that it's called the fountain penhospital.

They sell lots of newpens, they reconditionalpens, they look after pens for you and try them out because the lovely thing about fountain pens is they arepersonal.

You go no no no and then you find theone.

I tend to suggest to people who arenervously, I've never used a fountain pen what should I do and I will point them atLAMI, LAMY who have some fabulous starter pens and they're not very expensive and they'regood.

They do a pen called the safari but they have a bunch of good starter pens and they're just nice to get into the idea of do I like doingthis?

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 tofall.

If it's a script or something else but that for novels very often you tend to write between say 1 and 6 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 I'm sure a differs person to person but tend to write either very late or very early because they feel like they avoiddistraction.

When I started out from the age of about 22 when I was a youngjournalist, 2627, I started out comics writer all through there I was a late late nightwriter.

Nothing really happened until the kids were inbed.

Nine o'clock I might have fathtered out a little bit during the day but now it's all done and now I'm getting down to work and at 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 to talk enough to make sure that I'mawake.

So that's what I did and I was a smoker and a coffee drinker and it wasgreat.

I moved to America in 92 gave up smoking 93 stop drinking coffee when over to tea and tried carrying on being a late night writer and gradually realized 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 and have 3,000 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 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 to just brown talk day you just repeat that day you've set up a day that works for yourself the last novel that I actually wrote I was at Torrey Amos's wonderful house in Florida she has this lovely sort of house on the water that she's lent me many times to go on writing and I went down there and I would get up in the morning I would go for a jog 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 but nobody that I would ever be tempted to talk to and I would order myself large cup of green tea sit in a corner and just start writing and I would do that day over and over and over and you know a couple of months later looked up and I had the ocean at the end of the lane which was only meant to have been a short story anyway it just kept going that I think works really really well I also think that the most important thing 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 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 Jean Wolfe who is now in his late 80s and is one of you know the finest writers that America has for years 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 before anything else before the day started before he had to leave for work and before anybody else was up and that was how he did it I cannot imagine 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 I'll have become 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 doge I could absolutely come a morning writer in your doge I think that's going to 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 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 there's lots of metaphors for writing a novel and GeorgeR.

Martin 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 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 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 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 but I could make Terry laugh 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 was able to transport me delight me shock me scare me and take me through a whole range of emotions I didn't at the time even I had access to so I want to thank you for making good art and sharing it with the world you've done a great job you are so ridiculously welcome 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 linked in 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 linked in jobs linked in jobs has the tools to help find the right professionals or your team faster and for free linked in isn't just a job board linked in helps you hire professionals you can't find anywhere else even those who aren't actively searching for a new job but who might be open to the perfect role in any given month more than70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other job sites so if you're not looking on linked in if you're not using linked in you are in the wrong place more than 2.5 million small businesses use linked in for hiring with86% getting a qualified candidate within 24 hours linked in those that small business owners leaders execs are wearing so many hats they're stretched then they might not have the time or resources to hire in any drawn out way so linked in is constantly finding ways to make the process easier in fact they just launch the feature that helps you write job descriptions making the entire thing a disease faster and much simpler so higher professionals like a professional on linked in and now you can post your job for free at linkedin dot com slash Tim that's linkedin dot com slash Tim to post your job for free terms and conditions apply and now Debbie Milman host of the design matters podcast chair of the sva masters in branding program editorial director for print magazine and one of graphic design us a is most influential designers working today you can find Debbie on twitter and instagram at Debbie Milman Debbie welcome to the show thank you Tim it's really wonderful to be here I've 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 when someone asks you what do you do let's say meet someone at a party they say what do you do what is your answer to that that's a tough question 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 too many hyphens what does that mean 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 now executives a great catch all you can executive is a great catch all for a long time on Twitter I had Debbie millman is a girl until enough people said Debbie really got to change that and then I did the internet well you could put anything there and I think about10% 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 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 no Tim I've learned that's a 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 my guests beforehand are there any particular say prompts for stories that we could explore that that that might be fun to dig into and one of them 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 keep things from all different stages of my life and I have boxes of journals and drawings and all sorts of work 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 and before she moved she unloaded several boxes of a femur of mine that she had kept unmanence to me and I went through everything quite gingerly it was all sort of folded up very neatly and very tidally and came across an illustration that I did when I was about eight years old and after I admired my handiwork because 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 and for some 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 that will give you a little bit of a sense of hold I am I lived there until I was about I was at I was 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 and the fifth grade my parents got divorced my mom took my brother and I was two and a half years younger than I am to Long Island my childhood was spent in almost all of the burrows 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 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 Barbie outfit of the time an outfit called Tangerine Dream which 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 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 in the middle of the street there is a delivery truck and I not only labeled the delivery truck I also drew the sign on the delivery truck and the sign was Laze Potato Chips I drew the logo at eight years old and when I saw this trying I realized that I had predicted my whole life I'm a native New Yorker now living in Manhattan I've been living in Manhattan for 33 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 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 in failure and rejection this is fascinating to me for a number of reasons that had a few guests on the podcast Chris Saka would be another example was an investor and he at some point wrote in journal well I think it was one of these composition notebooks with the sort of modeled black and white zebra slash camouflage covers how I love that what he would be when he was 40 years old and he must have done this when he was 10 or 12 something like that and he found it in his I think his parents garage later around the age of 42 or something like that and it also predicted effectively exactly what he would be doing but 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 the sense did you then 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 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 want it to be a designer 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 and that was my big dream and I came to Manhattan this summer of 1983 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 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 I didn't know where I was going it was quite serendipitous my friend Jay found the apartment for us unfortunately that wonderful summer turned out rather unfortunate because the woman who Jay and I were subletting from was 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 yeah I ended up appealing to the landlord to please please help me find someplace 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 16th Street which was a fourth floor tenement walk up a railroad flat that I couldn't afford on my own 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 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 until my senior year of college I had worked my way up to be the editor of the arts and features section of this student newspaper at SUNY Albany where I went to school and realized very quickly that 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 pasteout computer graphic machine stat cameras and then when I graduated was both doing freelance editorial and freelance layout and paste up 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 followed 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 SUNY Albany freshman year and went up to the student newspaper which was on the third floor of the campus center and approached the editor at the time 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 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 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 just enamored with this newspaper and I fantasized about writing really pithy aridite 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 be a reporter and I sort of walk around like Rosalind 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 and I guess an aburate moment of courage I went back up to the newsroom my second semester junior year and there was a women's uprising and the student read of the student health we had stored and I'm 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 an exhibit in the art center and by the end of my second semester junior year only because I didn't know when else would take it I was offered the job of being editor of the arts and feature section and began that summer that senior year in college was one of the most exciting and best years of my life in that for the first time ever I felt like I had purpose suddenly working on this paper I felt like I was part of something bigger than myself I felt like I was I had some reason for being and I loved learning about design I loved being able to work with writers and I felt for the first time in my life really excited about something I want to talk about that aburate moment of courage and dig into that a bit so you were rejected from or maybe rejected yourself or both initially when you're approached the paper then years later you have this aburate 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 it from much better story and certainly a better interview but 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 or an initial rejection so much so that it affords any other attempt at making something like that happen for a very long time I am extremely sensitive and any rejection sort of takes me off of that pass for quite a long time 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 43 examples 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 it 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 went back up to the third floor and asked again I am 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 continue to keep trying and when I graduated because I had such a hard time finding a job initially that I really loved and because I was having so much trouble figuring out what I wanted to do with my life I kept bouncing around from opportunity to opportunity and every time I would try something new and would ultimately get rejected I used 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 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 master's 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 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 thought 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 and I'm got rejected to that and then abandoned that dream and so it's been a long history of making an attempt getting that early rejection retreating and then finally sort of licking my wounds re-instead of knitting my confidence or hopes and dreams together and then trying to do something else or trying again so 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 or what advice would you give someone who had the near identical experience and was hard-wired the same way well it's an interesting question because I have the benefit of hindsight and looking back on those years yes I certainly could have tried again sooner and maybe had more of a runway to experiment and grow and learn in that newsroom and in that environment but I also think that those years in between learning and growing in other ways contributed to my ability to then when appointed the 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 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 ever give yourself options the timeliness of those options or the timeliness of those retries do at your own pace 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 present your best possible self when you try again your clips mentioned 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 going to come back to that oh Tim can I add one more thing of course I'm sorry I this isn't interesting you can add many things please 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 that junior year and I graduated in 1983 it is now 2017 and I have been friends with that man his name is Robert et alstein I have been friends with him ever since 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 reasonably 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 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 reasonable one and then ultimately I be friended and we've become we are now lifelong friends he didn't even remember rejecting me that fresh manoeuvre 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 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 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 have been a 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 some type of sense of injustice and so I will get rejected and looking back at what I see as a rejection either when I did this perhaps 10 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 it was a very temporary impossibility due to logistics and I took that as a no not ever and it felt very hurt by that and didn't try a second time in many cases yeah absolutely you know so number one you know they just mean no not right now and you can even clarify that right 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 it profound impact on me when I was told this so I would read email with inserting if I were doing an audiobook of the other person's voice some type of really angry upset person and nine times out of 10 that wasn't the tone at all I 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 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 outpouring 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 die I'm not going to 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 2005 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 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 very sort of fragile center and not necessarily thinking that they are specifically upset with me because of something that I've done but just because 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 a few questions about how you came to find your niche or the first time 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 you mentioned clips here clips here clips I was told this story by a professor in college about nantucket nectar when it was just getting started and there I believe two guys who are really faking it until they made it in a lot of respects and at one point they're meeting with this distributor because they'd been selling these concoctions via boats in nantucket from boat to boat to boat and they wanted to go into retail and it met with this it was either a retailer distributor was early on and they were really nervous and the muckety muck they're meeting with at least in their eyes said do you have a lot of p.o.s materials and they looked at each other like oh shit and they said oh p.o.s were all about p.o.s and he's like good good good and then they walked out like what the hell is p.o.s point of sale which of course you know plenty about but I wanted to to before we get to when you sort of first clicked into your your natch and how that happened you mentioned knowing that you wanted to be in Manhattan 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 interrogatives the why the what the where and so on of happiness and 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 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 I guess it's more of an observation than a question but if you think about that how do you think about 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 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 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 and I certainly didn't have any type of connection to any ins 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 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 Condé Nassden I did apply and I did get a call back and I got rejected and then never tried again another example of that 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 think that my chances of success at that would either be possible and certainly if it were possible not fast and because I wanted to live in New York City because I want 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 I needed to make some type of reasonable income in order to pay that rent and so I have been telling myself for decades now that I decided that I needed to work as a designer because I needed to have some sort of income 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 the police I remember coming home from a club one night and I was on the corner of Bleaker Street in 6th Avenue and it suddenly occurred to me 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 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 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 in the last couple of years was that I was unbeknownst to mypsyche, 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 become 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 I could have lived with friends in Albany I could have had seven roommates in in a little commune in Bedstuy there would have been any number of things that I could have done if my lead gene had been artistic purity but no I told myself that it was because ofx, 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 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 ask them to think about what is the one 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 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 oh definitely by Hoka Kruk you're living in Manhattan and that's that is the outcome in part of all of these decisions and the lead gene as you put it where does the the need for stability secure the desire for that come from 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 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 brilliant charismatic he was an incredibly well-spoken man he was also extremely turbulent he had a lot of anger issues 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 and so one of those periods was 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 my mother married again and she married a man who was physically and sexually abusive to me physically abusive to my brother 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 I had a lot of brutality in my life and after they got divorced I was 13 my father came back into my life my mother then got involved with another man who was 10 years younger than her so therefore only 10 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 18 years of my life I lived in a state of constant terror and compensated or self-soothed with art with a lot of extracurricular activities in school I was always an overachiever probably in an effort to prove to myself and to 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 had the resources to take care of myself that I would never allow anything bad happened to me not quite 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 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 that 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 it's still very very hard for me to share these types of things but I do think it's important that people do see that there is hope for a better life even when 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 not only understand what happened why it happened what the aftermath then caused but also how I can use that empathy and that understanding to try to help the world and that's a lot of the reason that I've started to do the work that I do with Marish Gharkete and the Joyful Heart Foundation which is a foundation that Marish Gharkete started after she started working on Law and Order SVU 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 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 Marish Gharkete and Miley Zambuto the CEO of the foundation now for the last five years and this work I believe 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 dovetelling that with my own background really truly makes me feel like my whole life makes sense tohim.

That's beautiful and I'm really glad you're talking about this because I can imagine a very different experience but 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 that things will never change and I'm sure there are people listening who have had similar experiences 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 forthem.

I would love to ask if you're open to talking about if yourself have you found any particular avenues or types of work to be particularly helpful to you of course the work that you're doing with the Joyful Heart Foundation but apart from that are there any particular types of exercises or work or anything really that has helped you to be more at peace with yourexperience.

I think that the work that I've done in therapy has saved mylife.

I have always been really dedicated to my therapy and have been in therapy with the same analyst now for over twodecades.

What type of therapy isthat?

If you don't mind me asking I know very little about the person who I work with is aPhD.

She was very involved in the psychoanalytic community in New YorkCity.

She's now living in SantaFe.

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 ofvariations.

It's talktherapy. I started back in the early90s, five days a week and then moved down to three days and now I'm usually two to three days and it is enormously helpful to help me try to make sense of these experiences that I've had for anybody that is either in the midst of experiencing them or experiencing theaftermath.

There are a lot ofresources.

One of the things that I experienced when I was in the midst of these experiences was a sense of profoundaloneness.

The worst experiences I had were in the 70s and at the time the topic wasn't one that was asunderstood.

I didn't know what was happening tome.

I thought I was the only person in the world that this was happening to because it seemed so surreal and unnatural andpunishing.

It didn't occur to me that this waspervasive, that this was a cultural epidemic and I was told at the time by the perpetrator that if I told anybody that he had the resources to hurt my brother and my mother that he would killthem.

It'shorrible. And I believedthat.

I was a littlegirl. I believed that and I was protecting them and I didn't know that I had any otherresources.

None. And didn't even tell my mother until after they got divorced becauseTim, I didn't want to be thereason.

I didn't want to beblamed.

And I also didn't think anybody would believe me and I didn't want my mother and my brother to beharmed.

It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that this waspervasive.

So for anybody that islistening, if you feelalone, know that you'renot, you can go to the Joyful HeartFoundation,thejoyfulheartfoundation.org.

And there are resources and phonenumbers.

You can also go tonomore.org, which is another organization that I'vehelped.

And there are resources and people that are there to help and listen and get you out of the situation that you arein.

Thank you forthat. To insert somelevity, I'm not sure how to segue fromhere.

Well, let's talk about some of thereally, really important things that people are doing now to not only eradicate this type ofviolence, but also to change theworld.

One of the other things that Joyful Heart is doing that I am so proud of is ending thebacklog.

There are hundreds of thousands of rape kits that are not being investigated that are sitting in shelves in police departments all over thecountry.

And so the Joyful HeartFoundation, along with Vice President JoeBiden, has been very involved in getting funding to help analyze those rape kits to be able to analyze the DNA and get serial rapists off the streets and get justice for the victims of thosecrimes.

So that's areally, 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 livingin, but also the blaming ofvictims.

So we can change culture by doing this worktogether.

It's something I'm super proudof.

And to those peoplelistening, all of these resources that are being mentioned throughout this episode will be in the shownotes.

So you can certainly find links tonomore.org, the Joyful HeartFoundation, and so on atfourhourworkweek.com, forward slashpodcast, all spelledout.

David, I'd love to ask you to shift gears just a littlebit, or perhaps alot, speak upstory.

That's one of my favoritestories.

I will let you run withit.

I would love for youto, I would love for you toshare.

Okay, so I want to start this story by letting people know that this was something that while it washappening, I thought was the worst professional experience of mylife.

And it's turned out to be the most important and life affirming of mylife.

So let me tell you a little bit about the speak upstory.

So the year is2003. And the time in the world was quite different than it isnow.

So we wereonline, but we weren't quite online in the way that we arenow.

I think YouTube was just just justbeginning.

It was a video sharingsite, more thananything.

We wereonline, but we were playinggames, and we were ordering from theJ.

Crewcatalog. I don't know if people remember when theJ.

Crew catalog wentonline, people's headsexploded.

You could buy things online and they could be shipped to you and you don't have to leave thehouse.

Oh mygod, that's soamazing.

And we were playing games and we were emailing and reading thenews.

And there were forums where people wouldcongregate, but they tended to be more niche forums and not so much mainstream culturalforums.

Prior tothat, leading up to that time in mylife, I had joined Sterling Brands in1995.

And this was one of the first moments of that click that you had mentioned earlier where suddenly without even realizingit, I had joined a firm where I was hired to help grow the business via the acquisition of new clients inbranding.

And the job was one of the first times in my life where I was almost effortlesslysuccessful.

I think because of my early childhood in my father'spharmacy, being surrounded bybrands, Ihad, and my own sort of obsession with things like lace potatochips.

Exactly. I had this almost magical ability to understand why and how people chose the objects that they did to be part of theirlives, mostly the brands that theychose.

So I started working at Sterling Brands and had this here to for unbelievable level ofsuccess,financially.

And I really enjoyedit.

I am also endlessly fascinated by the choices people make for the objects in theirlives, what they choose to surround themselveswith, the kinds of things they buy and share and eat and wear and soforth.

And in as much as I loved what I was doing and in as much as I was relishing the level of success that in my early30s, I wasfinally, finallygetting.

I also was still sort of longing for thatartistic, creative sort of part of my life that I felt was deeplymissing.

At thatpoint, what department were you workingin?

I was working in marketing andsales.

So I wasn't at that time doing very much designwork.

I was doing some workfreelance.

I had been appointed the Off-Air Creative Director at Hot97, which is a wholeother.

Sort of story to share at somepoint, but I was working to develop the identity and the graphics for the first ever hip hop radiostation, which happened to be in New York and was called Hot97.

That was the only thing that I was doing on theside.

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 myown, but something that was much more creative and had no commercialimplications.

And I found theAIGA, the American Institute of GraphicArts, and they had a special interest group within AIGA called the Brand ExperienceCenter.

And I was soexcited. Ithought, oh mygod, this is the bend diagram of mylife.

I can do branding and they have designers and all these famous designers are on the board and I could meet them and I could be part of this greatcommunity.

And so I went and I volunteered and I became a member of AIGA and I was working with this Brand ExperienceGroup.

And I loved it and I was appointed to the board and I feltreally, really part ofsomething.

And the board term was I think twoyears.

And at the end of theterm, if we wanted to be on the boardagain, we all had toreapply.

And in that twoyears, I was veryactive.

I went to all the meetings and we weren't funded byAIGA.

We had a self-fund and so I made cupcakes for bake sales and we had a flea market and I wasvery, very involved in this sort of day-to-day running of this little special interestgroup.

At the end of the twoyears, 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 exceptme.

I wasrejected.Oh, you set me up with thecupcakes.

Oh,no.Oh,no.Oh,no.Oh, they were really good cupcakes andbrownies.

And I wasdevastated. I was justdevastated.

And RickRuffet, who was then the executivedirector, he had been aware of how much I wanted to be in AIGA and how much I wanted to do in myaspirations.

And I think he felt really bad forme.

Asked me if I wanted to have lunch and he took me to a very expensive lunch at 11 Madison and over the course oflunch.

Yeah, it was superwonderful.

In generous of him over the course oflunch, hesaid,please, please don't give up onAIGA.

We need people like you and don't giveup.

We'll find a place foryou.

Ipromise. And I guess is a bit of a consolationprize.

He asked me if I would be a judge in the upcoming annual competition that AIGA had called365.

And he asked me if I wanted to be a judge in the packaged designcategory.

This to me was almost worth being kicked to the curb by this special interest group of the brandexperience.

And this was like the biggest honor of my career at thatpoint.

To be a judge in the country's biggest design competition was unfathomable tome.

It felt like amiracle. And so I went to the judging and there were two other judges withme.

We had 700 entries that we needed to look at in oneday.

And when I got to the judging at AIGAheadquarters, I met with the other twojurors.

One was a very well-known designer who had a bit of a boutiqueagency, veryposh.

She was verystylish. I did not feel nearly asstylish.

Another guy was there fromApple.

And this was shortly after the iPod had beenreleased.

And he was on his iPod the whole time and really didn't spend a lot of time paying attention to thejudging.

In anycase, this otherjuror.

What adick.Yeah.Yeah.

The otherjuror.Sorry,guy.

I don'tknow.Yeah. The other juror looks at me when I getthere.

And she'slike, justsay, youknow, I don't intend to have any mass market packaging in this competition gettingaward.

And I waslike,okay. And I didn't agree withthat.

Imean, I understandably hadcome.

I was working at a CPG package design firm and we had recently designed the Burger King logo and the Star Wars Episode 2 attack of the clones packaging and merchandising and the Hersheybar.

Andso, youknow, I was coming from a completely different point ofview.

We ended up disagreeing so vehemently that at onepoint, I thought we were going to actually come toFistacovs.

But was this behind thescenes?

Or is this while you're on thepanel?

No, this is while we're on thepanel.

And there's somebody that's trailing us writing notes for an article that's going to appear in theannual.

It was more tofind. In anycase, we were only able toagree, I think on seven things that would go into the competitionjournal, which is not a way to encourage future applicants to apply for thecompetition.

So, AIGA was not particularly happy withus.

This juror ofmine, the fellow juror heated me and I felt at the end of that day that I would never ever be asked to do anything with AIGA everagain.

And I remember walking back to myoffice, which was at the Empire State Building at thetime, it was sort of dusk and I feltlike,oh, this isnever, ever going to workout.

And resigned myself tothat.

Rick asked 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 Birken Identity and the Star WarsIdentity.

And so I sent those in as mycredentials.

They were printed in the journal and that was the end ofthat.

Or so Ithought, may second2003, I get a link from a friend ofmine.

She sends me an email and she'slike, read this in the privacy of your ownhome, preferably with a bigdrink.

And ohboy, what asetup.

Iknow,right? And I am not one that likes surprises oranticipation.

I need instantgratification.

So I don't wait to gohome.

I don't wait to get adrink.

I click into the link at my desk in my office and come to aletter, an open letter to AIGA written by a designer named Felix Sockwell on this thing called SpeakUp.

And Speak Up was one of the first web logs and the first design blog and the letter chastises AIGA for includingme, DebbieMilnan, as a juror in their annualcompetition.

What is supposed to be the most prestigious competition in the country and accuse me of not only being a corporateclown, but also because of the work Ido, they called me a shedevil.

A shedevil.Wow. And proceeded to take my entire careerdown.

And it was apylon. So not only was the open letter quiteharsh, but then there was the pylon of comments that happened in the early days ofblogging.

Rememberthat.Oh,yes.

So I'm so glad that hateful comments are thinking at thepast.

Butyes.Oh,yes.Intimately.

And I'm reading this and my jaw is a gabe and I am just in a state ofCatertonia.

I couldn'tmove. I wasashamed,embarrassed, terrified that people in my office would seeit, that the reputation of the firm was being sullied byme.

And I didn't know what todo.

I wasdespondent. I remember walking home from work thatday,crying, thinking that I had toquit.

I had to leave the design business and my career wasover.

This career that I had finally found for myself was now officiallyover.

And I honestly did not know what to do tohim.

I felt like if I wrote in that it would seemdefensive, that it would bring more attention to thisstory.

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 thantheirs, I didn't know what todo.

And looking back on itnow, I'm actually really ashamed of what I did because it wasdisingenuous, but at the time it was the only thing that I felt I coulddo.

And so a few days after the story broke and the comments piledin, Icontributed.

And my first commentwas, you're not going to approve ofthis.

Oh,see, we'llsee. Iwrote, what a cooldiscussion.

I loveit. I'msorry. I'm sosorry.

Youknow, the cool girl had not come out at thattime, but had it beenout, I would havesaid, that's what I was trying tobe.

I was trying to be the coolgirl.

Nothingmatters. I can eat five chili dogs and I don't gainweight.

Youknow, I'm quoting thebook.

Soyeah, I came in and that's what Isaid.

But I ended up having the best possible back andforth.

I couldmuster. 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 would they to sort of declare that it wasn'tworthy.

And I tried to be as opened and as defenseless aspossible.

And ultimately they continued to pile on some more insults and made fun of the practice that Ihad.

And then a couple of people weighed inotherwise.

And the final comment was from a man named David Weinberg who I'm since who have since become friends with aswell, who at the time worked at Landor and wrote in Landor is one of the world's biggest and most respected brand consultancies started by Walter Landor about eight or 90 yearsago.

And he wrotein, youknow, let's see what Felix could do with that Burger King logo and great work over theresterling.

And that was sort of the end of thatconversation.

Nobody else came in with anothercomment.

And what I thought was over really wasn't becausethe.

Felix is the original writer of this open letter Felix Aqual the illustratordesigner.

And then I thought it wasover.

I thought it had ended with some sort of a compromise andviewpoints.

But to mychagrin, the writers at Speak Up kept writing aboutme.

And the next article was called is the dark sideprevailing.

Sosubtle, sosimple. Verysubtle.

At thatpoint,Tim, I wasobsessed.

I was going to this site 15 20 times a day constantly refreshing seeing what they were writing aboutme.

And finally gave up and went to my IT person andsaid, put parental controls on my computer atwork.

I don't want to be able to see thissite.

And hedid. Sometimes you need a helpful pair ofhandcuffs.

Wellsaid. But I'dstill, youknow, I'd go home andlook, butwhatever.

A couple of weekslater, the founder of SpeakUp, a young man about 23 years old named Armin Vitt reached out tome.

He wrote me an email and heapologized.

He didn't apologize for calling my work a pair ofturds, which is whathit.

I didn't realize turds came inpairs.

It shows what Iknow. But he said he apologized 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 ofturds.

But he didn't feel that it was right the way that I had been spokento.

And I took a lot of care in responding tohim.

I accepted hisapology.

But at thetime, I was really fascinated by this whole bloggingthing.

It was really interesting tome, this sort of real-timecommunication, holding peopleaccountable.

And I wrote him this sort of diet tribe aboutit.

And he responded andsaid,well, which light to write for thesite.

And I waslike,whoa, didn't expect thatone.

So Isaid,yes. And I started writing for SpeakUp.

The Darth Vadercolumn.

Well, what was so interesting about the experienced him was that what the Speak Upers were calling the precious designworld, the AIGAworld, they had already rejectedme.

And now therenegades, the anti-AIGAcontingent, they were rejectingme.

So at thatmoment, I actually felt like the most hated woman in graphicdesign.

Masterlesssamurai. Whereto?

Exactly. So what happened after that was it was reallysurreal.

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 beenbuilt.

And so I started writing for SpeakUp.

And all of asudden, I started to have that sense of what I had been originally searching for in my efforts with SpeakUp.

I felt like I was part of something bigger thanmyself.

I felt like I was part of this sort of renegade group of misfits that were trying to change the world through graphicdesign,criticism, and onlineconversations.

We all decided that year in the fall of 2003 that we were going to go as a group of sort of guerrilla Speak Up writers to the upcoming AIGA annual conference inVancouver.

And we were going to give out this little brochure that Armin had put together called Stop BeingSheep, which was a riff on the great typographer Eric Speekerman's book Stop StealingSheep, which is about letterspacing.

Youknow, thin slicing heretoo, the very best of ourability.

And so we went with this little brochure and route to theconference.

So these people then ended up accepting you the people who had previously vilifiedyou.

The people that had previously vilifiedme, not only acceptedme, but over theyears, Armin and hiswife, Brianny and I have become such good friends that I am now the godmother to their oldestdaughter.

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 lifelongfriendships.

And now Armin and Brianny are also family at this pointfamily.

Amazing. So I interrupted the year so you're onroute.

So this group of heretics and a pile of brochures orpamphlets.

Right because brochures change theworld.

You knowthat. And I'm sitting next to people that are also there was at that time one direct flight from New York toVancouver.

The flight is filled with design luminaries Michael Bayrude and Paula Cher and I'm sitting next to a woman who is beautiful and elegant and I'm wearing sweatpants and carrying a bag of McDonald'sbreakfast, youknow, and the only people that like the way McDonald's breakfast smell of the people eating it not the people smellingit.

Sotruth. That's that'syeah.

Youknow, I don't know why I didn't think that I would see people that I knew on thisflight.

I was well in anycase. So I start talking to this woman next to me and turns at she's going to the conference aswell.

I ask her what shedoes. She says she's a writer at print magazine and I tell her about speakup.

She's all interested in what we'redoing.

She gives me I tell her that we're having this get together this party over the course of theconference.

She's I'd like to inviteher.

She gives me a card without looking atit.

I put it into mybag. We talk through a couple hours and then we go off into our own thing with whatever else we were doing on theflight.

When I get to my room inVancouver, I take her card out of my bag and I see that she's the editor in chiefchoice, red orK.

I invite her to theparty.

She comes and we start a carrespondents.

I had I harbored this hope that maybe I could write for print magazine oneday.

And a couple of monthslater, she writes me and asks me if I want to participate in something she's putting together for the upcoming How Conference the next year in SanDiego.

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 in the audience voting and she wanted to do a riff on that called ironic chef where three designers would create work on stage in real time and the audience wouldvote.

This to me sounded like the definition ofhell.

And just to clarify forpeople, print magazine is actually called printmagazine.

It is called printmagazine.

It's the oldest graphic design magazine in thecountry.

It's 75 yearsold. It has one I think five magazine awards which is the highest honor and Fee believe it's called that a magazine canwin.

And it's a remarkable magazine and I had this dream of someday writing something forit.

So ironicchef.Yes, ironicchef.

Daily melons personal version ofhell.

Yeah. And I'm afraid to say no if I feel like if I sayno, I'm never going to be offered an opportunity to do anything with Joyceagain.

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 onstage.

There are pictures of this by theway.

I'm not lying orexaggerating.

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 designcritics.

He was the art director of the New York Times book review for 30years.

He started numerous programs at school of visualarts, graduate programs and he's written about 170 books about design and graphicdesigners.

He is thejudge. I am terribly intimidated because he is Steve Heller one of the greatest people that has everlived.

And there are three ofus.

I come insecond, which is notterrible.

I don'twin, but I don'tlose.

And another aberrant moment ofcourage, I asked Steve because he was nice to me thatday.

If he'd want to have lunch in New York City when we wereback, he lived in New York City aswell.

Heagrees. We go tolunch.

I was sointimidated. I had a cheat sheet that I'd prepared of topics in which I could discuss with Steve wrote it on a papernapkin, put it in mylap.

And I could refer to it if I choked and knew not what to saynext.

In anycase, I had some bookideas.

Steve told me they were bothbad.

I went away a little bitdiscouraged, but still happy that I had met him and he told me that I'd get a book just to bepatient.

Four monthslater, a publisher calls at the recommendation of Stephen Heller with a book that he had turneddown.

They had wanted him to write with the horrifictitle, how to think like a great graphicdesigner.

Onceagain, I think if I don't say yes tothis, I'm never going to be asked for anythingagain.

And I take on thisbook, but I ask them if I could do it in a different way because I didn't believe that there was just one way for a great graphic designer to think there were myriadways.

And could I interview great graphic designers and reveal how they think theyagreed.

And that became my firstbook.

In themeantime,Joyce, writerK, the editor of PrintMagazine, reaches out and asks me if I'd like to write a review about WallyOlens, then upcoming book onbranding.

Iagree. I write my first piece for Print Magazine thatyear, and I've written for every single issuesince.

Wow. 13 yearslater, two yearsago, I was appointed the editorial and creative director of PrintMagazine.

Well, it seems like those brochures did play arole.

Yeah. And that's just the start of thetim.

If it weren't for Speak Up and thatstory, I was then contacted by a fledgling internet radio network called Voice America in2004, shortly after a piece that Mark Kingsley and I wrote about election graphics that kind of wentviral.

And they wanted me to host a show aboutbranding.

I was worried that if Isaid,no, I'd never get another opportunity again and asked if I could sort of do it aboutbranding, but maybe do it more about design and pitch this idea to them about designmatters, radio networkshow.

Theysaid,yes, just when I was beginning tothink,oh, I might get rich fromthis.

They told me that I needed to pay them for the airtime.

Surprise. Anothersurprise.

But I was really excited aboutthis.

And at thattime, youknow, 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 valuewhatsoever.

It was just all about how to satisfy sort of oursouls, our creativesouls.

And that's how design matters wasborn.

My podcast was born on this sort of Wayne's World Esk internet radio network called VoiceAmerica.

I did the show for four years on Voice America paid them for four years to doit.

And then brought the show to designobserver, BillDrentel, the lategreat, BillDrentel, the founder of Design Observer invited me to bring the show over to design observer in 2009 with the proviso that I improved my soundquality.

I was doing my show with twohandsets.

You ever have a conversation with two people on the same phone line in your house and you're on different handsets and different parts of the house and the echo and all ofthat.

Those were my earlyshows.

But I had no idea what I wasdoing.

There was no podcast when Istarted.

I started to upload my show to iTunes just for the kick of it just to be able to shareit.

And now 12 yearslater, threeweeks, I'm going to have my 12th anniversary of DesignMatters.

We want a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in2009, the end of 2015iTunes.

And you know this because you're always on thelist.

But after 11years, iTunes designated it one of the best podcasts oniTunes.

And I've transitioned the show from a show about why Design Matters to a show about how creative people design theirlives.

And the trajectory that people take even from thisconversation, you can probably tell how interested I am in how people make theirlives, the choices that they make and how they live and what they dream about and what theybecome.

And so that's the direction that the show hastaken.

And I'm about to approach my 300thepisode.

Congratulations. That's a hugemilestone.

And you being interested in the way that you are and with the intensity that you areinterested, I think is very well reflected in the episodesthemselves.

And we've spent some time in yourstudio.

Yes. It is one of the most lovely and engaging conversations I've ever had in an interviewformat.

It was such a relaxed and fun experience forme, which is not thenorm, as youknow.

So I certainly recommend everyone check out DesignMatters.

But I want to talk about some of yourdecisions.

Andspecifically, we could talk for 20hours.

But I want to talk about a name that I had not heard in my life until veryrecently, MiltonGlazer.

Yes. As you'dmentioned, you'ddone, Iguess, brand-makeovers or branding for BurgerKing, StarWars.

I thinkyou,Hershey's,Tropicana, I think was thebest.

Yes.Yes. Tell me if I'm getting thiswrong.

But youknow, at onepoint, if you walked in any grocerystore,supermarket, etcetera, you had a hand and say20% of everything that yousaw, something likethat.

Isn't thatcrazy?Yes. Itis.

It's mind-blowing when you consider the number of differentproducts,right?

Theskews. And for people who are wondering what CPGis, consumer packagegoods.

And at somepoint, your hand was involved in just an incredible array andplentative, differentproducts.

How did Milton Glazer enter thescene?

And could you describe for people who heis?

Milton Glazer is the elder statesman of the design world and is the world's one of certainly oneof, if not the greatest living graphicdesigner.

He's in his80s. He is responsible for the I Heart New Yorklogo.

He did that iconic Bob Dylan poster of Bob Dylan in profile with the streams of colorfulhair.

He is one of the founders of New Yorkmagazine.

The list goes on andon. He's had more impact and created some of the mostmemorable, well-known and iconic brands and identities in theworld.

My relationship with Milton really began when I took a class of his at the School of VisualArts, a summer intensive in the summer of2005.

I had already interviewed him for designmatters, but it was over thephone.

And while I cherish thatinterview, it was one of myvery, very earlyinterviews.

So I'm somewhat gun shy to send people to listen to that one because it's so early in my journey as apodcaster.

But in anycase, I took this class withhim.

And thatclass, youknow, it's interesting about how we started the show talking about my eight-year-old drawing and you're talking about your friend who had written this essay that then predicted hislife.

Milton taught this summerintensive, Ithink, for about 40 or 50years.

And he used to say that it was one of the most important things that hedid.

He's not teaching itanymore.

He had us do an exercise in that class where we had to envision the life that we couldhave.

If we pursued everything that we wanted with the certainty that whatever it is that wewanted, we wouldsucceed.

I wrote an essay in July of2005.

It was supposed to be a five-yearplan.

And he asked us to dream big and not to edit and said that it had a bit of a magical quality that he experienced with his students over andover.

So to be careful what we wishedfor.

And I created this essay with theselong-ranging, far-fetched goals that I can tell younow, 12 yearslater, have almost all cometrue.

It isspooky,spooky. And so that's an exercise I do now with mystudents.

Milton has had one of the most profound impacts on my life asidefrom, youknow, the profound impact he's had on theworld.

I feelreally, 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 tome.

Can you describe the exercise as you do it with your studentsnow?

Well, I teach undergrad and graduate classes at the School of VisualArts.

I run a Master's in Branding program at the School of VisualArts, which I was given this opportunity via SteveHeller, who I again would not have met had that whole speak-up experience nothappen.

So yet anotherthing, every single thing that I'm doing now in mylife,Tim, stems from thatexperience.

So just to underscore anothertheme, he had in some sense you could interpret it as rejected two of your bookideas, even though he was nice to you and went out to lunch withyou.

But now later on down theline, you kept that relationship and lands you atSVA.

Absolutely. Imean, Steve is one of the most generous and engaging people I have had the privilege ofknowing.

And I often tease Steve and say that he's my fairy godfather because he's the only person in mylife.

Well, maybe one of two people in my life now that I could say has justbeen, he has this sort of generosity that is all abouthere.

Takethis, dothat, make thishappen.

This is foryou. With nostrings, noties, noobligations, it's just puregenerosity.

And he has done that over and over and over and over again for me since meeting him back in2004.

So the exercise that I do now with mystudents, because they're quite a bit younger than I was when I was doing this five yearessay, or five yearplan, I asked them to do a 10 yearplan.

And so this gives them a chance to really mature into who they are in their 20s and into their early30s.

And it's this 10 year plan for what I call a remarkablelife.

And it's about imagining what your life could be if you could do anything you wanted without any fear offailure.

And they are the most life-affirmingessays.

They are so full of hope and optimism and well-being and goodness that it gives me a sense that humanity can besaved.

And so I borrowed that exercise from Milton and now use that both in my graduate program and the undergraduate classes that Iteach.

This is going to seemnerdy, but I'm anerd, so I'll run withit.

And thatis, do you have any parameters for people at home who might want to trythis?

Irecommend,foundations, ways tostart.

Is it bullets or is it pros andfull-past?

No, it's so it's allhairstyles.

How does itend? Any recommendations for people who would like to give this astab?

So let's say it is winter2027.

What does your life looklike?

What are youdoing? Where are youliving?

Who are you livingwith?

JeffPets? What kind of house are youin?

Is it anapartment? Do you in thecity?

Or are you in thecountry?

What does your furniture looklike?

What is your bedlike? What are your sheetslike?

What kind of clothes do youwear?

What kind of hair do youhave?

Tell me about yourpets.

Tell me about your significantother.

Do you havechildren? Do you have acar?

Do you have aboat? Do you have talk about yourcareer?

What do youwant? What are youreading?

What are youmaking? What excitesyou?

What is your healthlike?

And write thisday, this oneday, 10 years fromnow.

So one day in the winter of2027, what does your whole day looklike?

Start from the minute you wakeup.

Brush yourteeth. Have your coffee or tea all the way through to when you tuck yourself in atnight.

What is that day like foryou?

Dreambig. Dream without anyfear.

Write it alldown. You don't have to share it with anyone other thanyourself.

Put your whole heart into it and write like there's notomorrow,right?

Like your life depends on it because itdoes.

And then read it once ayear.

See whathappens. It'smagic.

It'smagic. I lovethis.

I lovethis. I need to dothis.

I'm not asking for some hypotheticallistener.

Listeners, I love youguys, but this is also forme.

It isastounding. And I do this now with all of mystudents.

And I can't begin to tell you how many letters I get from students from 10 years ago that are likeDebbie.

It all cametrue. How did thishappen?

And I am so thrilled that these things can make adifference.

And this goes back to the earlier part of our conversation about my own fears about what I could or would or shouldbecome.

And the idea that at that same time in mylife, that intersection on bleaker street and sixthavenue, appearing 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 stagereally, but particularly at that vulnerable stage when you are so worried about what you can or can't become to give somebody that's liver of a dream of a hope that this could happen and have them declare what theywant.

I think is a remarkableexercise.

That's why I call it your 10-year plan for a remarkablelife.

How long was youressay?

Is there any consistency to length or their guidelines or is it as long as it takes and summer twopages, summer 20pages?

Summer twopages, summer 20pages.

I think the longer it is the more likely it is to be affirmed for somereason.

I find the more care put intoit, the more care and detail you putin.

Oh,doggy. That'sdoggy.

Yeah, that's myMolly. So she's excited about thisexercise.

Please,please. Thatclearly.

I think that the more care you put intoit, the likely the more success you'll have coming out ofit.

Mine was I wrote it in a journal that I was keeping at thetime.

So it was about five byseven.

It was probably about 10handwritten, bighandwriting.

I'd bighandwriting, 10 big handwritingpages.

And it was the wholething.

And then because it was really excited aboutit, because I lovelists, I made a list of everything that I wanted to cometrue.

Well, I tellyou, I think that might be a good place to wrap up this partone, which I think we may have more conversations inus.

I have so many questions I'd still like toask, but I think that is a given people have a primacy and recencybias.

I want them to remember this exercise as one of the actionable recommendations that they can certainly explore from thisinterview.

And there's somuch. But let me ask before I let you go the and I'll ask where people can find you and soon.

Learn more about yourwork.

But beforethat, is there any parting piece of advice or recommendation question anything that you'd like listeners to carry with them when they stop listening tothis?

I recently went through a pretty major transition in mylife.

And it was something that I had to make a pretty big decisionabout.

And it was a somewhat prolonged agonizing decision so much so that my friends and loved ones were no longer listening to my sort of machinations and making the decision because I thought I never was going to actually make thedecision.

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 helppeople.

I wasworking, I've had a full-time job since I graduatedcollege.

And the last 22 years I was working at a branding consultancy as I mentioned called SterlingBrands.

And had been very lucky to be able to sell the company that I was a part of and ultimately a partner in after about 13 years of workingthere.

So in2008, the two partners that Ihad, the man that originally hired me Simon Williams and then AustinMcGee, who was the third partner to come in afterme, we sold our company toOmnicom.

And at thetime, I had been offered this opportunity with Steve Heller to start the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts and organized my time so that my day job at Sterling Brands wouldn't be impacted by what I was going to be doing atSVA, which was made possible by starting my branding program as an eveningprogram.

So I had two full-timejobs, a day job at Sterling and my night job atSVA.

And most people thought that I would go through my earn out at Sterling and then leave and transition to working at SVA and doing all of the personal projects that I had been talking for so long aboutdoing.

So the five years happened and we had a really wonderful successful earnout.

So there was no excuse for him for me to continue on the same path and it was time to make thatchange.

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 thennever, everdo.

But I becameterrified.

I became terrified that if I made this change that I would not have financial stabilityanymore, that I would not be able to fulfill all of the dreams that I had and would have to confrontthat.

And so five years turned into six years and six years turned into sevenyears.

And just at a point where I was starting to think about really doingit, sort of like Al Pacino and Godfather3, I was offered an opportunity to take over as CEO of thecompany.

Simon Williams that 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 thejob.

And here itwas. This is the big decision of alife.

Do I become this CEO and have this amazing continuation of money and career and security and everything else that is conventionally approved of or do I say no actually I am not going to doubledown.

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 giveback.

And I had a decide and it took me four months to decide Simon Williams finally said tome, Debbie anything that takes you four months to decide probably means you don't want to doit.

And it was the hardest decision of mylife.

But I turned it down and I turned the CEO jobdown.

And then two thingshappened.

First ofall, one of the things that I realized was that I was in this trapeze and rather than just let go of the trapeze and do somethingelse, I had every single crook of my body holding on to some othertrapeze.

And that there was this sense of if I am not doingenough, I am notworthy.

If I am not makingenough, I am notworthy.

If I am not producingenough, I am notworthy.

And suddenly I had to not just let go of the trapeze but let go of the entireapparatus.

And I have realized now twothings.

One, most people live in a world ofscarcity.

We think that all we have now is all we were everhave.

And if we give somethingup, we will just haveless.

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 receivethem.

And so now as opposed to having less than what Ithought, I have way more because I have all these new things that I'm doing that I never would have thoughtpossible.

Second, that hard decisions are only hard when you're in the process of makingthem.

Once you makethem, they're not hardanymore.

Then it's just life andfreedom.

And it's an extraordinary experience that I really would like to share with yourlisteners, with ourlisteners.

It's such an important discussion on manylevels.

And I want to think it's worth repeating a fewthings.

And certainly this echoes in my experience aswell, one that agonizing over the decision is often harder than whatever the outcome of the decision willbe.

And for thatmatter, if you make in manycases, notall, but in manycases, if you make a decision and you decide that it's not the right decision foryou, you canquit.

You can do somethingelse.

It's not a permanent sentencenecessarily.

Andalso, this is something that I've had to learn and relearn many times in mylife, which is if it's taken you that long to make adecision, you probably don't andshouldn't.

Don't want to and shouldn't do whatever it is that you're agonizing over with pro and conless trying to justify in somefashion.

It's in both of thosepoints, Ithink, you'reso, soimportant.

I also think that if you're waiting for something to feel right before you doit, if you're waiting for a sense of security or confidence that those things are sort of like being on a hedonistictreadmill, if you think you need enough of this before you dothat, when you achieve whatever thatis, you think youneed, you're going to then up the ante and you're never ever going to be satisfied with whatever it is you think you need before you dosomething, if it's not something that isreal.

If youthink,oh, I need this much money before I dothis, when you get that muchmoney, then you're going torealize,oh, I actually think I need this much more and it's just going to be this carrot in front of you that you're agonizing over trying toreach.

And then the other thing is I'm going to quote Danny Shapirohere, the greatwriter, DannyShapiro, if you're waiting for confidence andshe, I asked her once about confidence and she said that confidence ishighly, highly overrated and that most confident people or overly confident people tend to be kind ofannoying.

And shesaid, what she felt was more important than confidence wascourage.

And Ifully, fully agree taking that first step confidence really only comes from repeated attempts at doing somethingsuccessfully.

But in order to take that firststep, you needcourage.

And that's much more important than confidence over anybody that's waiting for the confidence to showup.

Take the first step in a moment ofcourage, even if it's aberrant courage to come full circle in thisconversation.

Such goodadvice. It reminds me of something that the brother Kamal Ravikant of another friend ofmine, Navale Ravikant toldme, his Navale is avery, very successful entrepreneur and investor among otherthings,very, very good writer aswell, as his brotherKamal, who just had a novelcommand.

But Navale said to hisbrother, if I always did what I was qualified todo, I'd be pushing a broomsomewhere.

Wellsaid. And I thought that wasvery, veryencouraging.

Tooshay.Debbie, I have so much fun every time we get to spend timetogether.

Where can people find out more aboutyou?

Where can they learn more about yourwork?

Where would you like people to say hello onsocial, ifthat?

And I'll put all of this in the show notes foryou.

Absolutely. I'm Debbie Milliman on Twitter andInstagram.

You can see more about my program at the School of Visual Arts at SVA.edu and DebbieMilliman.com where you can listen to all my podcasts and see my visual essays and my books and so on and soforth.

For people who would be novices or new entrance into the world of say graphicdesign, recognizing that your podcast is about a lot more thanthat.

Which episode or episodes would you suggest they startwith?

I would suggest that they start with ChrisWare.

He is an extraordinary graphicnovelist.

It's one of the most favorite episodes that I've everconducted.

How do you spell his lastname?

W-A-R-E. And fromthere, some of my favorite episodes over the lastyear, aside from my episode withyou, which Icherish, my episodes with AmandaPalmer, my episode with AlanDeBotan, my episode with ChristopherTippett, NicoMouley, The GreatComposer.

Those are all episodes in the last year that I'm most proudof.

Debbie, your rockstar.

Thank you so much for thetime.

Thankyou. Thankyou. Thankyou.

I really appreciateit.

And to everybodylistening, asalways, you can find shownotes, links toresources, all sorts of things that we talked about and maybe more at fourhourworkweek.com forward slashpodcast.

And until nexttime, thank you forlistening.

Heyguys, this is Timagain.

Just one more thing before you takeoff.

And that is five bulletFriday.

Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before theweekend?

Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my freenewsletter, my super short newsletter called Five BulletFriday.

Easy to signup, easy tocancel.

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 thatweek.

It's kind of like my diary of coolthings.

It often includes articles onreading, books onreading, albumsperhaps,gadgets,gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and soon.

They get sent to me by myfriends, including a lot ofpodcast.

Guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them withyou.

So if that soundsfun,again, it's veryshort, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for theweekend, something to thinkabout.

If you'd like to try itout, just go to Tim.blog slashFriday.

Type that into yourbrowser, tim.blog slashFriday.

Drop in your email and you'll get the very nextone.

Thanks forlistening. This episode is brought to you by eightsleep.

I have been using eight sleep pod cover for yearsnow.

Why?Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like fittedsheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of yourbed.

Eight sleep recently launched the newest generation of the pod and I'm excited to test itout.

Pod forultra. Itcools, it heats and now it elevates automatically more on that in asecond.

First, pod for ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below roomtemperature, giving you and your partner cool even in a heat wave or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heatsensitive.

I am always more heat sensitive pulling the sheetsoff, closing thewindows, trying to crank the ACdown.

This solves all ofthat.

Pod for ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwindingexperience.

And for those snorkevynights, the pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner fromsnoring.

Plus with the pod forultra, you can leave your wearables on thenightstand.

You won't need them because these types of metrics are integrated into the pod for ultraitself.

They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleeptime, sleep phases andHRV.

The heart rate tracking is just one example is at99%accuracy.

So get your best nightsleep.

Head to 8sleep.com slash Tim and use code Tim to get $350 off of the pod forultra.

That's 8 sleep all spelled out 8sleep.com slash Tim and code Tim to get $350 off the pod forultra.

They currently ship to the UnitedStates,Canada, the UnitedKingdom, Europe andAustralia.

This episode is brought to you byAG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole bodyhealth.

IVAG1 is comprehensive nutritional insurance and that is nothingnew.

I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 best seller more than a decadeago.

The four hour body and I did not get paid to doso.

I simply love the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while onrun, which is for me a lot of thetime.

I have been using it avery, very long time indeed and I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariablyAG1.

It simply covers a ton ofbases.

I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on theroad.

So what isAG1? What is thisstuff?

AG1 is a science driven formulation ofvitamins, probiotics and whole food sourcenutrients.

In a singlescoop, AG1 gives you support for thebrain, gut and immunesystem.

Since2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high qualityingredients.

How manyingredients? 75 and you would be hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on themarket.

It has amultivitamin, multimineral superfoodcomplex, probiotics and prebiotics for guthealth, an antioxidant immune supportformula, digestive enzymes and adaptogens to help managestress.

Now I do my best always to eat nutrient densemeals.

That is thebasic,basic, basicrequirement.

That is why things are calledsupplements.

Ofcourse, that's what I focuson, but it is not alwayspossible.

It is not alwayseasy. So part of my routine is using AG1daily.

If I'm on the road on therun, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and the sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of importantboxes.

So eachmorning,AG1, that's just like brushing my teeth part of theroutine.

It's also NSF certified for sports or professional athletes trusted to besafe.

And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on thelabel.

It does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals and is free of 280 bandsubstances.

It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easyscoop.

So take ownership of your health and try AG1today.

You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscriptionpurchase.

So learnmore. Check itout.

Go to drinkag1.com slashTim.

That'sdrinkag1, the number one drinkag1.com slashTim.

Lasttime, drinkag1.com slashTim.