Hey friends, it's Rosie from Radio Headspace here with the very special announcement.
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Hi, I'm Debbie Millman. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday morning.
I'm your guest host for the week and I just want to say I'm so excited to be here.
For those of you who might not know me, I'm a designer, a writer, an educator, a brand consultant,
and host of one of the world's first podcasts, Design Matters. I'm endlessly fascinated by how we
can work to create better careers and lives for ourselves. This week, I'd like to talk to you about
how to design a life and a career that is fulfilling, interesting, and takes advantage of all of your
natural talents. I'll cover things like how to uncover your interests, navigate a career, and deal
with rejection. Today we're going to start with the basics and I'll break down how I understand
my career and what I've learned over the years and I'd like to give you a few ideas and how you
might want to think about yours. I think the essentials to having a meaningful and fulfilling career,
first and foremost, is about understanding what matters to you most and oftentimes there might
be several things that matter to you. As you're building your career, it makes sense to take one
step at a time and try and fulfill what I call one non-negotiable at a time. And the non-negotiables
are the things that really help you decide what your priorities are. Everything that we do is a
constant balance of moving forward and taking risk as we're doing that. The more you can move forward
understanding that there is an uncertainty to the path that you're on, the more likely you are
able to live with that uncertainty. A lot of people often keep themselves from that feeling
thinking that it's too scary to live in that uncertainty. But honestly, frankly, moving into
that uncertainty is really the only thing that's going to allow you to create something that you
haven't created before. One of the hardest decisions that I've made in my life was transitioning
out of a full-time leadership position in a corporation. I had planned for quite a long time,
for about five or six years, that I was going to leave and do more creative work.
Well, that five-year mark came and went and I was still doing the things that I had already been
doing. So much so that I remember talking to my brother about the fact that I was ultimately
planning on leaving, and he said, oh, Debbie, you've been saying that for years. I don't think you're
ever going to leave. And I didn't really want to hear that from him, but as the sibling can often do,
he was telling me the truth. And so I really had to take a hard look at what I was telling myself
and make a decision. It was the hardest decision I think I've ever made in my life. But it was also
one of the best in that I finally was going to have to face what I've been saying for all those
decades that I'm now going to try to do all the things I've really wanted to do. And that's what
I'm doing now. I teach a class at the School of Visual Arts. I teach one undergraduate class
each semester. And in that semester, I try to help the seniors determine what the next steps
of their career could be, or these first steps. And one very common denominator that I find
is that they're already editing their lives. They're already deciding what is possible
before they experiment with what is possible because they also feel scared or insecure or that
they're not good enough. And I tell them, find that non-negotiable, determine what is the one thing
you want more than anything could be where you live. It could be what job you want. It could be the
way in which you want to engage with your career. But you must start from day one without compromising.
One thing that I've learned that is really more important than anything is to stay curious and to
stay open. I used to be the kind of person that felt that if I didn't know something, it maybe
wasn't worth knowing, which is so arrogant and so narcissistic. And so over the years, what I've
come to understand is that the things that we don't know are the things that we should try
to be curious about, at least for a little while, not to reject the new.
Okay, that's it from me today. If you want to hear more, be sure to check out my podcast,
Design Matters, anywhere you love to listen to podcasts. Tomorrow, I'll be back to discuss
how to understand what is most important to you. I'll see you back here soon.
