Seth Godin:
The failures, the things I forgot to do, the people I didn’t see, who I should have respected, the ways I wasted time and money. If I didn’t have those, I wouldn’t be who I am. And I’m okay with who I am.

Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. In this episode, Seth Godin talks about the importance of planning for a creative future.

Seth Godin:
We can’t get to edit the past. We get to edit the future.

Curtis Fox:
Seth Godin is familiar to long-time listeners of Design Matters since Debbie has interviewed him on several different occasions over the years. Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, a marketer, a blogger, a teacher, and a bestselling author. His many books include The Practice: Shipping Creative Work, and This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See. His latest is This is Strategy: Make Better Plans. Debbie spoke to him about it in December in front of a live audience at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. The interview was arranged by CreativeMornings, the monthly breakfast lecture series for creative communities throughout the world, founded by Tina Roth-Eisenberg.

Debbie Millman:
Welcome, my dear friend.

Seth Godin:
I am so lucky to be able to do this, and it reminds me of why this work is worth doing, but it also makes me better because then I go back to my office and think, “How can I possibly repay the generosity of the people in this room, and of you, and of Tina.” It’s just such a highlight. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
My absolute honor. The first thing I want to ask you about is what is behind us? What are we looking at?

Seth Godin:
Well, so the idea was we could put something in the background. We don’t want it to be distracting, but we want it to possibly be inspiring or metaphorical. It turns out it’s against the law to fly a drone in Algonquin Park, north of Toronto, Canada. And I have this phobia of being arrested in a foreign country.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Seth Godin:
But here I am-

Debbie Millman:
Who knew?

Seth Godin:
Yeah. I am flying a drone at six o’clock in the morning and paddling the canoe at the same time. This is a 70-year-old chestnut canoe that my mom gave me, and I’m in the middle of a 3,000-square-mile park. And I’ve taught many, many people how to paddle a canoe. But the thing that’s the metaphor here is this is double ultra slowed down, but it’s still moving. And it’s a lot like our careers. It’s a lot like the creative process, which is you never get across the lake all at once. You get across the lake one stroke at a time, and it takes a long time, but you make progress.

And the other thing that I remind myself all the time is when you paddle a boat, it feels like you’re moving the water behind you, but physically that’s impossible because if you move that water, it has to move the next water and the next water. It’s a million pounds of water. What you’re actually doing is using this thing that feels liquid, but is actually almost solid, to propel you forward. And when we think about the culture around us, everything we do touches the culture, changes the culture a little bit, but mostly it’s a lever that allows us to do our work. There is no first of anything. There’s just our next iteration of it day by day.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that combinatorial creativity.

Seth Godin:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I love that metaphor. And having been in a boat of yours, I can say that there’s something really wonderful about sharing the water with someone and sort of feeling the time go by. And we’re going to talk a lot about time today.

Listeners of my show know that I like to take a long journey into a person’s life. This is my fourth interview with you. We talked very much about how you have created your life and become who you are in my previous interviews with you, 2014 and 2017. In 2020, we talked about your brilliant book, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. And how we were managing through COVID. We did that online. It was a Zoom conversation. And today, I get the great good fortune of a deep dive into your brand new book, which you’ve generously given everyone here today. This is Strategy: Make Better Plans. Easy first question for me, maybe not so easy to answer, but why this book now?

Seth Godin:
A long time ago, if you talked to my grandparents and you said, “What are you going to do tomorrow?” The answer would be obvious, “I’m going to do what I did yesterday. That’s my job.” And there’s still some people that’s true for but not many of us. What we do tomorrow is largely up to us and there are all these tools, trillion dollars worth of tools that have been built for us, a connection of billions of people. What will you do tomorrow? And if you don’t think about that question, you’ve surrendered, you’ve given up agency to a system that doesn’t have your best interests at heart. And I’m surrounded by people who I care about, who do great work, who put love and heart into it, but they aren’t taking the understanding that is available to them of strategy.

Strategy is not tactics, strategy is not, “What should I do right now to get what I want?” It’s, “What do I want? And how is the system going to help me get it or keep me from getting it? And is what I want achievable?” And as far as I’m concerned, there are no books about strategy. There are books about tactics. There are books about MBAs or whatever. I needed to write something, and it’s a lot of work to publish a book, to bring to people who I care about to say, “Here’s 400 questions. Don’t answer all of them, but at least ask them, and maybe it will help you make the impact you want to make.”

Debbie Millman:
You start This is Strategy by stating that most books on strategy are for corporate MBAs or West Point generals. And I love the fact that so much … Well, I don’t know that I love it, but I find it quite interesting that so much of the vernacular around strategy is military-based.

Seth Godin:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Why do you think that these books are catering to that specific demographic?

Seth Godin:
So, a scarcity mindset is essential if real estate is what you’re playing with. Each acre of land can only be owned by one person at a time. So, scarcity drove the way people with power thought for a very long time, but now as creativity becomes more important, abundance is actually the key. Connection is actually the key. That if I have an idea and I share it with everyone here, I don’t lose it, they get it, and it benefits all of us. So, strategy has to shift from how do I take what’s yours to how do I create the conditions for all of us?

Debbie Millman:
I took a class with Milton Glaser almost 20 years ago, and he was the first person that really introduced me to the idea of scarcity versus abundance. And until that point, I realized without actually knowing consciously, that I was operating out of a mindset of scarcity. That if I don’t hold on tight to what I have, I’m going to lose it. I’m going to somehow be threatened with abandonment of anything, ideas, finances, love.

And he really challenged us to think about the idea that there is really enough to go around in this universe if we share. And the more we hold on to things, the more likely we are to actually crush them.

Seth Godin:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
And I thought it was really profound. It’s taken me a long time, I understood it intellectually, but to actually feel that was possible.

Seth Godin:
Yeah. It’s much easier to talk about than it is to do. And for fans of your podcast, if you go back to the episode you and I did 10 years ago, you can hear about when Milton Glaser threw me out of his class, because it’s totally related to this because-

Debbie Millman:
Oh, well, then tell us once again. It’s been 10 years.

Seth Godin:
Well, no, I mean, I won’t tell the whole long story, but the short version is Milton decided there wasn’t enough room in his class for both of us. And it was his class, so I had to go.

Debbie Millman:
It’s sort of un-Milton-like, though. I’m surprised. Every time I hear that, I think, “Really? He must’ve been in a bad mood that day.”

Your book contains a really beautiful narrative arc and includes 294 strategy maxims. What made you decide to create the book in this way? It’s a really unusual way of organizing a book.

Seth Godin:
I’m surprised at how many people, not you, but how many people were very unsettled by this.

Debbie Millman:
Unsettled?

Seth Godin:
Yes. But what I discovered is a few things. First of all, I had a lot to cover because I’m trying to articulate a whole philosophy that I couldn’t riff on other people’s version of, because I was articulate that there are four things involved in strategy. But if I had to do it in order, if I had to talk nothing but systems without talking about games till later, it all fell apart.

So, how do we learn something new, like when we’re three years old? Our mom doesn’t sit us down and say, “Here’s asparagus, here’s zucchini, and here are all the vegetables in between. We’re going to do vegetables today.” That’s not what happens, right? You bump into a vegetable and then later on, a couple of weeks later, there’s another vegetable. So, this idea that we could layer things, I think that’s how people actually learn, and I think that’s how we think about the world. So, as soon as I gave myself the freedom to tell the story the way I would teach it to someone sitting next to me, the book flowed. And forcing it into a traditional organization didn’t help, so I didn’t.

Debbie Millman:
Do you think that people were unsettled because they want specific instructions and a menu of how to do something?

Seth Godin:
Yeah, I mean, TLDR, which people are too busy to understand what it stands for, it stands for too long, didn’t read. We’re pushed to say, “I’ll just read the first three pages and then pretend I read the book.” So, if the first three pages don’t tell you the joke and the answer, you’re frustrated. But I couldn’t do that this time.

Also, the number of people who buy and read a book has gone down by a factor of 10, not just my books, but all books. And there are more and more books, but per book, it’s way lower. So, if you’re going to read the book, here’s the book. If you don’t want to read the book, read the blog post. Either one is fine with me.

Debbie Millman:
So, what I want to do, which is very unusual for the way I construct my interviews, I actually want to take some of the 294 maxims and talk a little bit about some of them, particularly the ones that really moved me. So, I want to share some of my favorite descriptions of strategy from your book and discuss them, at least at the beginning. And so first, you state that strategy is not what most people think it is.

Seth Godin:
Right. Most people think, if do some Google searching, “Here’s my strategy to get more Twitter followers. Here’s my strategy to do this.” No, those are your tactics. Tactics are steps, instructions, bullet points. There was a strategy long before you decided to do that at all. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It’s what will the me of two years from now be glad I did today? And if the world didn’t change, strategy and tactics would be very simple and very similar. But the world changes not just when you do things, but when other people do things. So, we cannot predict the future.

And so, if you think about a surfer, we think someone’s a good surfer when they have good waves. And we watch someone struggle and think they’re not a good surfer, when in fact, they just didn’t pick good waves. So, a big part of what we’re talking about here is making the decision to be a surfer, making the decision to go to which beach on which month of the year, and then picking which waves to let go by and which waves to surf. Those are things we skip over all the time because we got to go to work. But if you do those parts right, everything else about your work gets easier.

Debbie Millman:
I was really struck by how the surfers in the Olympics over the summer were waiting for the waves. And what’s interesting about the way that the Olympics manages the surfing competition is that there’s a certain amount of time you’re given and then you wait for your waves and you decide which waves you want to surf. And I learned so much the barrel of a wave and how people go through the waves. But it’s so interesting that this is something you have to choose once you have the option of participating with the wave, which was something I’d never thought about before.

Seth Godin:
Right. Exactly. But one of the sentences in the book is, “Don’t play games you can’t win.” But if we did a census of everyone here, I’m going to assert that 20% of you are playing a game you can’t win.

Debbie Millman:
What does that mean?

Seth Godin:
A game you can’t win. So, how many people are trying to make a living by having 30 million followers on YouTube? A lot.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Seth Godin:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Oh.

Seth Godin:
How many people will have 30 million followers on YouTube? Essentially zero to a rounding error. The chances that your work will pay off if that’s what you’re chasing, are vanishingly close to zero. If you still want to do it knowing that, that’s cool, you have the freedom to do that. But we’ve been seduced into thinking that there’s a certain kind of practice we should sign up for because we will get a prize at the end without analyzing, what are the actual odds? Someone’s going to win the lottery, but it’s probably not going to be you.

Debbie Millman:
And so, your recommendation is to not play the lottery?

Seth Godin:
Correct. Playing the lottery is a bad decision. You only get today once to invest. Why not invest it in a place with a strategy that is more likely to help you get where you’re seeking to go, and help the people you serve get to where they seek to go?

Debbie Millman:
You also state that strategy is a flexible plan that guides us as we seek to create a change. It’s scary and it takes time. Why is it scary?

Seth Godin:
Well, part of the reason it’s scary is because it takes time. So, you don’t know until later if that forest is going to have been worth planting. The other reason it’s scary is it might work and then you’ll be responsible, or it might not work, and then you’ll be responsible. And it’s so much easier to just do your job because then you’re not responsible.

And the biggest difference between someone who has a job and someone who’s a freelancer or an entrepreneur is the person who has a job gets to say, “I’m just doing my job.” And everybody else has to say, “I decided to do this today.” And that’s the leap that the kind of person who comes to CreativeMornings is either making or wants to make, is to be able to say, “I made this.” Not, “I did it because my boss told me to.” “I made this.” That is such a thrilling way to be a human.

Debbie Millman:
In terms of being a human, there’s a lot of different ways in which people think they’re being a strategic thinker or developing strategic planning. Roger Martin has pointed out that companies really like strategic thinking, I’m sorry, strategic planning.

Seth Godin:
Strategic planning. Correct.

Debbie Millman:
Strategic planning. But it has nothing to do with strategy.

Seth Godin:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
So, can you talk a little bit about that? I think that’s so fascinating.

Seth Godin:
So, Roger’s insight is brilliant here. Strategic plans mean if we do all the steps, we will get the result. And the reason that corporations like that is they are managers. Managers order people to do all the steps. So, therefore, all you need is a strategic plan. Now, we do all the steps, we get what we said we were going to get.

But that’s not what strategy is. Strategy is all of the complicated thinking we have to do before we decide. We come up with the list of the steps. And corporations don’t like that because it’s muddy and murky and it doesn’t come with a guarantee. And it’s easy to look after the fact and say, “Oh yeah, NVIDIA was brilliant.” “Well, yeah, but you had everything you needed to do that, Intel, but you didn’t because you didn’t think through strategy. You were busy doing your plan.”

Debbie Millman:
You write that a goal might be part of a strategy, but strategy is not a goal. Why not? And how do you differentiate between the two?

Seth Godin:
Okay. So, this would be a good time to talk about the four threads. The four threads are systems, games, empathy, and time.

Debbie Millman:
Games. And time.

Seth Godin:
And very few of those threads need to have a goal associated with them. So, the one that I keep coming to over and over again is systems followed by time. Systems are these invisible things that everyone takes for granted, that are there to reinforce themselves. We have a system anytime humans come together repeatedly to get something done. So, a simple cultural system is in the Western world, if you meet someone, you shake their right hand. Right? You don’t do the hokey pokey, or you don’t even reach out your left hand, your right hand. It’s so much easier than having every single time to start over. That makes sense. It’s super simple.

But another system is the college industrial complex. So, from the time you’re seven years old, your parents want you to get good grades. Why? So you can get into a famous college. Why? So that they can feel like they did a good job raising you. And it goes deeper. And then you’ve got people with tenure and you’ve got football teams and you’ve got campuses and tour guides. All of this stuff, a quarter million dollars in debt invented because the system built around it from 400 years ago with Harvard. And we can look at the elements of that system and understand it, which we better do before a 17-year-old decides to apply. Where are they applying? Why are they applying? See the system, it’s all pushing you in a certain direction, right?

There is the system of New York freelance creative work, and there’s a way we’re expected to have our portfolio and there’s a way we’re expected to show up and a checklist of things. There’s the system. I talked to a guy yesterday who desperately wants to be picked by a famous art gallery like Gagosian to show his work. Well, that system’s only 75 years old, but that system isn’t there for him. They want him to be there for them, but it’s not there for him. So, you got to think, “Oh, what am I doing here? Do I even see the system?” Before you announce you have a goal.

Debbie Millman:
I love the fact that you have designated the solar system as the biggest system that exists.

Seth Godin:
It’s certainly the easiest one to talk about, right? Because we can argue about Pluto and that whole planet thing, but in general, there are very few solar system deniers. That the Earth goes around the Sun. And it doesn’t go around the Sun because it wants to, it goes around the Sun because gravity, gravity is invisible. Gravity is this force that keeps things working the way that they do. So, we can all acknowledge that there’s this solar system and there’s the Sun, and there’s the rotation. Well, exactly the same thing is going on at your company and exactly the same thing is going on in politics, and the same thing is going on in our food system. Right?

The food system has gravitational forces. Why is it that 25 to 30% of all food is wasted? It’s not because five-year-olds aren’t clearing their plate. It’s because there’s a system in place that rewards farmers for leaving stuff on the vine or in the truck rather than putting in the effort to do something else. And we can keep going down the list. When someone sees the system, they can change it. So, most people here don’t know who Duncan Hines was. He was a real person. Great name. Duncan Hines was a print salesperson, and he used to drive around the northeast of the United States selling printing. This is in the ’20s. And there were no health departments then. That’s a system.

Debbie Millman:
I wanted to ask you about that.

Seth Godin:
And he would eat out. And the chances that you would get sick as a salesperson on the road without knowing where to eat were pretty good, because the good restaurants you didn’t know about, and the diners, you could get food poisoning.

So, he was pretty cheap. And one year for Christmas, instead of sending people a gift, he made a directory of a bunch of restaurants that you could eat in safely, printed it up and mailed it to people. And people loved the Duncan Hines directory. So, the next year he did it again, and then he said, “Why don’t I just do this?” So, he started making a living selling the first restaurant directory in the United States. And it did well, so well that the restaurants that were listed in it paid him money to have a sign in front of the restaurant saying, “Duncan Hines says it’s safe to eat here.” So, he was basically the health department for the country. And only after that did he get a phone call from some people who said, “We see that you’re into safe food. Can we put your name on canned goods?” And only after that, did we end up with the cake mix.

So, the arc of the story is Duncan was able to do all of those things and his business is now, he’s long gone, billions of dollars of value because he saw the system and a defect in the system. McDonald’s saw the system that cars were creating and realized the world needed a restaurant chain that would be everywhere. Walt Disney saw the system that was going to move from movies to TV and invented the TV show. And so, you can see when someone shows up and sees the system under stress, they’re able to walk in.

So, what’s the biggest system change we’re seeing right now, most of the people in this room? Is AI. You can say, “Oh, AI is a threat. It’s going to take away the livelihood of people who do illustration, like me.” And the answer is, yes, it will, but you’re not going to stop it, but you are going to see all the things it’s going to change, and it’s going to create all these opportunities because when the system is under stress and changes, it needs people to show up and do something in that spot. And so, if I can help people see systems, that will be a useful tool.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you believe that AI is the biggest shift in our culture since electricity. Why that comparison?

Seth Godin:
Okay. So, here’s an interesting thing about electricity. When they first brought electricity to people’s homes, they didn’t have electrical outlets, they hadn’t been invented yet. They just had the thing you screwed a light bulb into. It’s called an Edison Mount. And then, they invented the first real home appliance, which was the washing machine. And you would unscrew the light bulbs, you’d have to do it during the day, and then screw in your washing machine so it could get electricity. And washing machines are notoriously difficult to balance because they’re spinning, right? And dozens of people died because the washing machine would move itself around and then the thing would get around your neck. That had happened that slowly, but still people died from washing machine strangulation.

Debbie Millman:
Who knew?

Seth Godin:
So, there were only two kinds of businesses in those days, businesses that adopted electricity or businesses that were going to go away. And that is the shift that we’re seeing now, that there’s a huge swath of jobs where people are pushed to do average work. And average work is easy for an AI to begin to do, whether that’s reading a rudimentary X-ray or writing mediocre copy for an ad campaign. We don’t need to pay someone to do that and to wait for them because it can do it instantly and for free, and it will be distributed in lots and lots and lots of places. So, the devices, your watch, your toilet, whatever, will tell you things that we couldn’t afford to tell you before. And as a result, since we live in an information world and information is now going to be completely transformed, I think it’s that big a shift.

Debbie Millman:
You live long enough, you begin to hear some of the same fears over and over again with different content. The fear is the same, but the thing that people are fearing is different.

Seth Godin:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So, I came of age as a designer in the 1980s.

Seth Godin:
Letraset.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I still love Letraset. In any case, I hear some OGs in there too.

Seth Godin:
And some people say, “What the hell is that?”

Debbie Millman:
Look, Letraset is a type format where you have these sheets of letters and literally you press down one at a time. Back in the ’80s, type was very, very expensive. And so, I had certain clients, because the budgets were so small, I had to typeset everything with Letraset. So, you really learn a lot about kerning, very much in the kerning.

In the 1980s, we had the famous Apple ad, 1984, but computers really didn’t start making an impact in the design community until the late ’80s, which at the time, a lot of the OG designers of that era were vehemently, vehemently opposed to using the computer. They were certain that we were going to lose jobs, it was going to take all the creativity out of the process, out of the way in which we created, it was going to create soulless work. Sound familiar?

Seth Godin:
Mm-hmm.

Debbie Millman:
In fact, the computer provided a way for hundreds of thousands of people to get new jobs. When I was a little girl, I wasn’t thinking, “When I grow up, I want to be a podcaster.” I doubt that when most of the people here, if not everyone, thought when they were growing up, “I can’t wait to get on Instagram.”
And so, I think that there’s so much in your book that has an undercurrent of what we’re afraid to do because we don’t have a system and because we don’t have a strategy. How would you recommend that people start thinking about overcoming or leaning into, or doing something as if they’re not afraid, or if fear weren’t part of the equation? And I’m asking for myself too.

Seth Godin:
It’s a lovely question. I want to just highlight one thing. I’m not arguing that everything is going to be fantastic.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I know.

Seth Godin:
And just to use your example of desktop publishing and stuff, there’s more bad design in the world than ever before. That when you give people all these tools, the average probably goes down. And there’s also more great design in the world than there’s ever been before because the tools are there.

But to answer your question, the key is the smallest viable audience and the smallest useful contribution. That it’s so tempting to believe the media and think that you’re going to be discovered by an agent, that you’re going to have a breakthrough, that your startup is going to change everything. That’s never what happens. And the question is, can you change five people? Can you be of service to one community? Can you do any work that we would miss if it were gone? That anyone would miss who wasn’t related to you? If you can do that, just a little, the risks are really low because if it doesn’t work, no one will know. And if it does work, you can do it again.

And traction is the opportunity here. So, when I’m playing with Claude and when I’m playing with various AI tools, I am under no illusion that I’m about to have a breakthrough, nor am I believing I’m going to make Picasso-level work. But you know who also didn’t make Picasso-level work? Picasso.

Debbie Millman:
Picasso.

Seth Godin:
Right? He did 10,000 paintings and only 100 of them were Picasso-level work. So, what we get to do, not have to do, get to do is these small, private failures for small groups, and then we can seduce ourselves into something that looks like bravery.

And Herbie Hancock’s autobiography is so worth reading. And he opens with a story of he’s 20-something, 21, 22 years old. Dream come true, playing for Miles Davis. Miles Davis, right after Kind of Blue. The most important famous jazz musician in the history of the world. And Herbie’s on stage, and it’s the quartet, and they’re in Germany and they’re playing. And his job is to end this solo in a way that sets Miles up for the key solo of the show. And the last measure, he blows it. He plays two clunkers. Miles is trapped. It doesn’t lead to what Miles needs to play next. And Miles plays a totally different solo.
And after the show, Herbie goes backstage, ready to be fired. He apologized to Miles, and Miles says, “Look, this is jazz. This is what we do. You didn’t set me up for the solo I expected. You set me up for the solo I played, and that’s why you’re here.” Now, if Herbie had done it again, he probably wouldn’t have been able to keep performing. But the point was that the process of doing it, of working that out, that’s why we’re here. And afterwards, you’re the Herbie Hancock, but in that moment, that’s how you become Herbie Hancock by realizing it’s not fatal to play the wrong note.

Debbie Millman:
I think it’s really important for people that are looking to understand mastery, to look at the work of Picasso, because I recently went to a Picasso museum and I was familiar with the hundred best Picasso paintings, and suddenly, I was looking at several hundred Picasso paintings.

Now, there was something really interesting about that. First of all, you begin to see that not every painting was Picasso-level painting, but what you see that is so fascinating is the process or the system that he went through to get to each stage of his long career. So, the hundred great paintings aren’t all the same style of painting. So, what you begin to see, which I thought was incredibly fascinating, were the breakthrough moments, were the breakthrough paintings that led to this magnificent new way of looking at the world, which was really mind-blowing. And it also gave me a little bit of hope because if Picasso makes a shitty painting, maybe there’s some hope for some of the other people in the world, self included, to maybe make a not-so-bad painting.

Seth Godin:
Yeah. I mean, the problem with The Doobie Brothers Greatest Hits volume one is it makes us think that our work is this curated greatest hits thing. It’s not. But after the fact, someone might make a greatest hits album of yours, but you don’t make songs for the greatest hits album. You just make the next song and then sometimes it becomes the greatest hit.

Debbie Millman:
There’s so many things that I want to talk to you about, and I think we could go for hours, and I’m really concerned about how much I want to talk to you about-

Seth Godin:
Sorry. I’ll talk less.

Debbie Millman:
… and how much time we have. What did you say? I’m sorry.

Seth Godin:
I’ll talk less.

Debbie Millman:
No, no, no, no, no, no, please. I’m talking about time. Of the four pillars, time was my favorite.

Seth Godin:
Right. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I mean, systems really helps me understand frameworks and it challenges my own ways of thinking about strategy. And I’ve worked in strategy for 30 years now, but the time section was revelatory.
In the late 1880s, H.G. Wells started writing about time machines. And I learned from your book that there is no record of anyone ever talking about going back in time before that. Not Aristotle.

Seth Godin:
Isn’t that mind-blowing?

Debbie Millman:
Not Plato, not Copernicus, not Newton. I was like, wow.

Seth Godin:
Yeah, he invented time travel. How could that be?

Debbie Millman:
Right?

Seth Godin:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So, “In 1750,” I’m quoting you here, “if you said to someone, ‘If you can go back in time and change one thing, what would you change?’ They would not understand the question.” I remember asking you, there was a period of time a couple of years ago, maybe 10 years ago, where everybody was saying, “What would you tell your younger self? What would you tell your 30-year self?” And I asked you that, and I might’ve asked you that in a podcast interview and you said, “Nothing.” And I asked you why. Maybe you can just tell people what you said.

Seth Godin:
Because the failures, the things I forgot to do, the people I didn’t see, who I should have respected, the ways I wasted time and money. If I didn’t have those, I wouldn’t be who I am, and I’m okay with who I am. So, we can’t get to edit the past. We get to edit the future. And that’s a question that people don’t usually want to talk about.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Seth Godin:
Because you’re on the hook again, because you actually can edit the future. And what James Gleick’s beautiful book about time travel, which is where the H.G. Wells story comes from, helped me see we don’t even have vocabulary to talk about time. Right now is right now, but yesterday was right now yesterday. So, this idea of right now is this moving thing. So, most organizations only focus on right now.
I can give you a hundred examples of this. If there’s a customer service problem and the parking garage next door is full. I pull in, the guy says, “It’s full.” And now I have to drive a block out of my way. I said, “Why don’t you have a sign?” Said, “We don’t have a sign.” Because today they don’t have a sign and they don’t have a method to fix tomorrow, because they should put up a sign, “We’re full.” It would save him the hassle, save everyone else the hassle. When we see that whatever we do now is going to change something for tomorrow, it changes not just tomorrow, but what we’re going to do now. But as a creative person or an organization, we usually ignore that. We just focus on the urgency of this moment. That’s not mindfulness, it’s just the urgency of this moment.

Debbie Millman:
Just reactionary, really.

Seth Godin:
Yeah. And so, strategy has to be what is the me or the customer of five months from now going to say thank you to me today for? Because I’m here today. Five months from now, they’re going to be touching what I just did. What am I doing that they’re going to be grateful for?

Debbie Millman:
We, as a culture, live so much thinking about the future, “When I’m this age. When I get this much money. When I’m thinner.” What is the role of time in strategy?

Seth Godin:
Well, “When I’m thinner,” could just be, and then a miracle happens, right? Or, it could be, I have a goal. Okay, so let’s say I have a goal. No one ever lost without surgery, 40 pounds in one day. You lose a little bit at a time. That idea of committing to a little bit at a time makes sense if you’re on a diet. We don’t really understand if it makes sense when we’re talking about, “Am I a good writer? Am I a good illustrator? Do I understand how to compose differently?” Because most of us are so desperate to hang on to what little talent we believe we have, that we don’t want to examine it and we don’t want to add to it.

Debbie Millman:
Or abandon it.

Seth Godin:
Or abandon it. But if we incrementally explore, as the cowbell sketch goes, the space, we can’t help but improve. But so many of the people I know who are on a creative journey, are looking backwards or have this goal of a miracle occurring, without saying, “Who do I need to become to be the kind of creative that could make that?” And it’s not going to happen because the Gagosian Gallery calls me, it’s going to happen because I become the kind of creative that they want to call.

Debbie Millman:
The role of time in our work, in our culture, in our psyche and consciousness is fundamentally changing.

Seth Godin:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You can go to AI and get information, answers to questions, questions to ask in milliseconds, however, there then becomes an expectation that mastery and success come as quickly. And I was in a situation a little while ago where I was talking to someone about their building their community, their little tribe. And she was really feeling quite dejected in that she was having trouble building the community in the speed at which she wanted. And I said, “Well, how long have you been doing this?” And she said, “Six weeks.” I’m like, “Try six years.”

How can we best create a way for people to understand, without sounding too much like a Rolling Stone song, that time is really on our side when we want to make change?

Seth Godin:
Oh. So, everyone has an origin story, Peter Parker and the radioactive spider, or Superman and Krypton. But the origin story is the story we tell ourselves because lots of things happen to lots of people, but the one we rehearse for ourselves over and over again becomes our origin story. And I have a bunch of origin stories, but one of them is my first year in book publishing. So, my first book with Chip Conley, the first day for $5,000. He got half. I got half. I thought, “Wow, if I do this every two weeks, I’ll be okay.”

Debbie Millman:
Six weeks maybe.

Seth Godin:
And then, I got 800 rejection letters in a row. 800 times someone in New York book publishing bought a stamp, put it on an envelope, wrote me a letter and said, “We don’t like you.” And the thing is that if I had gotten the same rejection letter that many times in a row, I would’ve been a spammer and a hustler, and I would’ve been annoying. But that’s not what was happening. What was happening is the rejection letters were getting better. They were getting better because they were teaching me something and showing that I was learning something. That as that year went on, I had traction.

The traction wasn’t the traction of, “Here’s a check, please go write the book.” But it was the traction of, “I read the whole thing and this part doesn’t really work for us,” versus, “No.” And that interaction, which was socially acceptable on both sides, I wasn’t sending book proposals to people that didn’t want to get them, and they were responding to me as professionals. That traction is still available to all of us. The difference now is it tends to be seen, we think, by everyone, not true. And it happens much quicker.
So, my mom, who passed away way too young, was the first woman on the board of the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, a really important art museum. And she wanted to bring members of the community in Buffalo who didn’t come to the museum, to try the museum. This was before the Antiques Roadshow with Sotheby’s and all that stuff. So, I don’t know what made her think of it, but she reached out to the people at Sotheby’s and said, “Would you send two appraisers to Buffalo? And we’ll do a day where people can bring stuff from their attic, and Sotheby’s appraisers will tell them if it’s worth anything.” And she did a little bit of PR for it, and it was going to be on Saturday. And I remember that Friday, she got home from work and I must’ve been 13, and she said, “I’m a little nervous. What if no one comes? What if I’ve done this and I’m embarrassed?” And then, typical for her, she brightened up and she said, “Well, if no one comes, no one will know that no one came.”

Debbie Millman:
When no one comes, no one will know that no one came.

Seth Godin:
And the next morning there were 5,000 people waiting in line.

Debbie Millman:
So, let’s talk about that moment for a second, because if no one comes, no one will know that no one came, except you.

Seth Godin:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
And then-

Seth Godin:
So, you’ve learned one more thing.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve learned one more thing if you’re open to learning one more thing. If you’re open to the idea that failure doesn’t mean forever.

Seth Godin:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
But for a lot of people, and for me, when I was going through what was decades of what I now call experiments in failure and rejection, it becomes something that I think a lot of people feel shame about. And that shame does a couple of things. First, I think that it makes you feel like nothing is possible. It makes you feel or it allows you or causes you to feel powerless.

Seth Godin:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And it also is something that a lot of people hide.

Seth Godin:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
So, when I was, back in the ’80s again, I was rejected back to back from the Columbia School of Journalism for a master’s degree, and a master’s program in independent art from the Whitney. It was a program that they had just launched.

I spent a lot of time hoping, hoping that I would get accepted. And when I didn’t, rather than share my sorrow, heartbreak with anyone that would listen, the way I might now, I hid it. I was like, “Oh, I didn’t really know if I wanted to go anyway.” And I think that’s just, I used to beat myself up for that. I can’t believe that I was so duplicitous. Now, I just look back and I think, “Oh, I was just really sad and didn’t want to share that with anybody.” And now I feel better about sharing my sadness, for good and for bad for my wife.

Seth Godin:
Oh, there’s so many good things in this. And your generosity in the way you’ve talked about shame over the years is so important.

Debbie Millman:
I mean, I just feel that that is one of the biggest system barriers. I mean, shame is a system and it’s-

Seth Godin:
Yeah. It’s a dream killer, and it’s a life snuffer. And it’s not a choice, though sometimes it feels like it, but we can build a system to diminish the feeling, because if we can build a practice that helps us see that we are playing a game, you were not rejected, your application was rejected. Those are two totally different things. And so, we get back to traction and we get back to, who is this for? So, if you are busy trying to please your in-laws by bringing them back some trophy that proves that you are onto something, you’re making a mistake. It’s none of their business. We need to leave them out of the circle.

Here you are in this room surrounded by people in a similar setting. You, before you leave here, should find two or three strangers and start a circle where you can tell each other the truth, because they’re the people who can help you see where you are building a system that feels too personal. So, one of the four things is games, and I just want to bring it up briefly. I launched a game two weeks ago called Bongo.

Debbie Millman:
I love it. It’s really hard though.

Seth Godin:
It’s so much fun. It’s not hard. That’s my point. That’s my point. Okay?

Debbie Millman:
I set that up really well.

Seth Godin:
You can find it at bongo.fun or puzzmo.com. If you go to puzzmo.com, you can play this game. It’s free. It’s not hard because there’s no right answer. There’s just a better answer. And what I have discovered watching people play it is some people say, “I put down five words. I didn’t do very well.” As opposed to saying, “I put down five words. How could I move some letters around to make it better?” It is a game about traction that unlike Wordle, there is no right answer. You can just ask a friend, “How do I make this better?” The same thing is true for an oil painting or a symphony. How can I make this better? Better for who? Better by what standards? Where is the traction?

The leap of, “I got picked, I got in, I got certified.” That’s a trap. Don’t look for the leap. Look for the stepwise game process of, “I made a move. It didn’t work. No one showed up. What move could I make differently tomorrow?” “This system is looking for this kind of game strategy. Oh, when I do this, I learn that. I can do it this way tomorrow.” So, when we realize the strategy is about playing a game that dances with the system over time, now our work will be more productive.

Debbie Millman:
How does a game help us better understand time?

Seth Godin:
Well, no one makes all the moves in a game at once. So, your eighth move in a game of chess is different than your first move because the word has changed. The same thing is true with your work as a creative. The same thing is true in your work in social media. If you decided to try to make a meme out of Rick and Rickrolling people, it wouldn’t work today because we already have it. Whereas, if you had done that earlier, it would’ve made a difference.

So, all of this keeps unfolding. We make moves over time, and that means we have to forgive the old moves. Those are sunk costs. It doesn’t matter that you have a law degree. You needed that before. You don’t need it now. Forgive yourself. You don’t have to accept that law degree from the former you. You can go do the thing you need to do now. But it all comes down to service, to empathy. Who is this for? They’re not going to like it because it’s important to me. They’re going to like it because it’s important to them. So, given the world as it is today, with the assets you have today, with the world as you see it today, what moves will you make that over time you’ll be glad you did?

Debbie Millman:
That does seem like an apropos time to stop for now.

Seth Godin:
For now.

Debbie Millman:
But I am going to ask one last question because it’s something I really want to know. After those 800 rejection letters, or during the process of the time that it took to get 800 rejection letters, what kept you going? What gave you the sense that it was worth it not to give up?

Seth Godin:
It’s a little complicated, but here we go.

Debbie Millman:
Okay.

Seth Godin:
I, first of all, continue to encourage people, “Don’t quit your day job.” So, I had no day job, but I had enough side things that I was able to do that I wasn’t indigent. I don’t see that you don’t get any points, as far as I’m concerned, living in an attic somewhere. You should adjust your standard of living to match your approach, so that you can be resilient at it. It was a struggle because I was very close to bankruptcy for 10 years, but close because I got to the point where I had enough resources to try the next thing.
But the second thing I did was, I invented in my head that if I didn’t do this, I would have to be a bank teller, because I knew I could get a job as a bank teller. And a bank teller felt like something that I would hate so much that I, emotionally, would feel like such a failure, but also, I would be so bad at it that it made it easier to go get rejected again than to do that.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you, Seth. It is always such a joy and an honor to talk with you. And I want to thank you so much for being here, for your generosity in sharing your book with the entire audience here, and for being a friend.

Seth Godin:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you, Seth Godin.

Seth Godin:
Thank you, Debbie.

Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Design Matters: Seth Godin appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Some people think that race is a fiction, yet it is a fiction that our society has kept lethally alive for a long time now. How? Well, it is all about the details. To make a fictional world seem real, you have to fill it in with images and sensory information. You also have to leave most of the real world out. But if you succeed, the real world will look a little different for your readers.

In her new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, Sarah Lewis traces the visual history of race in America. She explains how art, photographs, movies, and pop culture turned the fictional idea of race into a destructive cultural fact. It’s a scholarly tour de force and a literal eye-opener.
Sarah Lewis is a celebrated art and cultural historian and a professor at Harvard University. She’s also the founder of Vision and Justice, a civic initiative to reveal the important role of visual culture in shaping how we think. Sarah Lewis, welcome to Design Matters.

Sarah Lewis:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s really an honor to speak with you.

Debbie Millman:
Sarah, I understand when you were in high school, you were a 400-meter sprinter.

Sarah Lewis:
How did you find this out? Yes, I was. I loved running. That was my race, hard, hard race.

Debbie Millman:
And so did you have hopes to be an athlete of some sort?

Sarah Lewis:
I did. I grew up in that era when Flo-Jo was running and made us understand that dreams were realized on the track, and those dreams I thought might be mine too. I thought I might run professionally, and genetically I was fast. But I didn’t love the training, I didn’t love the regimen. So in the end, I still run. I don’t run competitively, but I keep threatening I’ll do more marathons and things like that to keep it going.

Debbie Millman:
You were born and raised in New York City and you were named after your grandfather, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, with whom you share the initials S-E-L. In 1926 when he was in the 11th grade, he was expelled from a New York City public school for asking why his history textbooks only showed images of white Americans. Can you talk about what happened next?

Sarah Lewis:
My grandfather went through the experience that you described so beautifully, and I knew nothing about it until he died. When I was in college getting ready to go to his funeral, I asked my mother why he didn’t have a high school diploma. He was so sharp and understood so much. I didn’t understand. I was in college at Harvard at the time, and she told me this story.

She told me that what came next is, and that’s really what transformed my own understanding about the power of the arts, was it was startling to me. She told me that he dared to ask his teacher why he was perceiving that answer that African-Americans, in particular, had done nothing to merit inclusion in those textbooks. And he was asking about the whole world. He wanted to know where Asian Americans were, Latin Americans were, Indigenous folks were.

He didn’t accept her answer, and he was expelled from public school from high school for his so-called impertinence at refusing to do so. He became an artist, he became a musician. And in those paintings, drawings, he created the very genre scenes he knew he should have been able to find in those textbooks. He was consistent and insistent on ensuring that the whole world was present in those images. I grew up at his knee wanting to draw, learning to paint from him as stunned by this visual display that I described.
And so when I learned about what he did next, there really that day at his funeral, I realized, well, of course that in bearing his initials, S-E-L, my name is so much less cool than my grandfather’s though, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee. I was in lineage and I realized in that moment I could be in lineage with a set of questions that I now realize and occupy the mission of my life. What is the role of art for justice in American society? And that’s really what he was asking his teacher. And the answer is one that he lived out.

At that time in college, I think many of us studying the arts were not told much about the connection between culture, art and racial politics. So I began to teach myself and that work results in the courses I teach at Harvard and many of the publications that have come out since.

Debbie Millman:
As you were growing up in addition to sprinting, you also took salsa lessons and inspired by your grandfather. You also started painting. What kinds of things were you painting at that time?

Sarah Lewis:
I was painting the way that my grandfather did. I was in a class, I went to Brearley all-girls school in New York growing up. The program, the curriculum there really focused us on still lives and figurative painting. So I was doing what was asked of me as I learned to paint, but I was without knowing it making sure the whole world was present too. My mother showed me recently a very early painting I made when we were asked to paint pilgrims and it was maybe an eight or nine. My pilgrim was Black. My pilgrim was Black, but these same kind of black buckled shoes.

And I love that no one corrected me, that yuck age. No one told me about this history, and in so doing, they were letting me create a visual image that inserted my own identity as the center. And of course, I now deeply understand the tensions in the fabric of this country between slavery and freedom and teach on this of course at Harvard. But at the time, the paintings I made telegraphed that I understood that we all count in American society.

So that’s what I was up to. I thought I might, after I abandoned my running ambitions, be an artist. And even in my first year, not really after that, but first year at Harvard, I thought I would be a painter still, but love that I’m able now to think about the significance of the arts in a broader way than I probably could have if I was an artist full time.

Debbie Millman:
When you applied to Harvard, you wrote your application essay on failure. Why that topic?

Sarah Lewis:
Can I just say I need to salute the extraordinary research you do with all of your guests, and I’m feeling the benefit of it here myself. Oh my goodness, you know so much about the journey. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you.

Sarah Lewis:
I did. I wrote about failure from my application essay to Harvard, and it was, I thought without even asking anyone such an ill-advised idea, I didn’t tell anyone about it. I made this decision and I remember even asking my parents to leave the house one day over the weekend so I could write the piece in piece, and then it was a Sunday the next day and bring it to school and submit it.

It was about failure broadly, but really more about the gift of failure that comes and that we all know happens in the creative arts. I was interested in the improbable but irreplaceable foundations of these experiences we wish we didn’t have for the transformation and potentially the triumphs that could come.
I’d had this experience that was unique at the time, and I wrote about it, that experience. It was the NAACP when I was growing up had an Olympiads. It was this Olympic competition, multiple fields, so you could enter it in painting or the sciences, and every state had a competition and then there was a national competition and it would take place in an arena the size of a football field. The awards were given out to an audience that large. It was extraordinary.

And I had won in the painting category in one year and as a ninth grader and then won at the national level. The prize was a computer and some money, and so as a kid it had a huge impact on me and I didn’t think anything of my work on that level until that award. I tried again two years later and I don’t think I even placed enough to go to the national level, and it felt like a massive failure because of how public it was for my peers.

It began my own just pursuit, which led to other work, other publications about the gift of failure because I think especially when you’re going to schools that really condition you to believe in your own success, failure goes against your very understanding of who you are and can rock you to your core, especially as a young person. So I wanted to write a piece that was a vulnerable one for the application to speak to a kind of resilience that I thought I’d cultivated through the process. And I’m glad it worked.

Debbie Millman:
How did you cultivate, but how did you… I mean, that’s pretty young to cultivate. I’m still working on trying to understand my own rejections and failures in a more sort of productive, mature way. How were you able to do that at such a young age?

Sarah Lewis:
It’s a great question. I’m not sure that I can process it with you. I don’t know that I’ve asked myself that question internally. But at that age, I was 17, 18 young Black woman growing up in New York City and Manhattan at that, I think I had learned even then to take the gift of being underestimated seriously. And it’s connected to the idea of failure, right? Because when you’re underestimated, you are seen to be a failure in effect in the eyes of whomever is judging you as compared to who you actually are and who you could be, and you’re aware of that gap in their perception of you and the fact of who you can become.

And that gap is failure. That gap is a failure of imagination. It’s a failure of judgment. It’s a failure of the history of narratives that have told women who they can be, that told Black women who they can be.
So what I was already gleaning from what the world was telling me was that I was going to have to contend with this sort of environment, which failure was around me despite my successes. That experience is one that I drive strength from now still because I think the odds of me just walking a street and someone assuming that I do what I do if they look at me are pretty low still, right?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I hate to say yes, but yes.

Sarah Lewis:
Even though I’m a deep optimist.

Debbie Millman:
How do you feel about failure now?

Sarah Lewis:
I’m inspired by failure and try to push myself to that edge. As you know, I wrote about failure in the Rise nearly 10 years ago now. What that book taught me was just how little we speak about the importance of failure in our lives. And so on a personal level after publishing it, I challenged myself to try to be as brave as the entrepreneurs and athletes and explorers and artists that I profile in the book.

When you work as a writer or an academia or even in the arts, you have to secret away those experiences of failure. So what I try to do is create space for the innovation that happens only through failure. In, say, teaching with the students, I’ll ensure that there’s a gift-of-failure policy in the larger classes so they can experiment with, say, one piece of writing and then produce another piece of writing and drop the lower grade of the two so they can feel free in that sense.

So I think you have to build it in programmatically, and I build it into with my own experiments in writing in particular, but lately I’m trying to do it through pursuits. I used to mention salsa dancing. I used to dance a lot after work and things and just, I love taking classes and now I want to do that too. I’m going to try to pick up another form of dance. I know I’m not going to be good it at the start. I think that’s part of the point.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I mean, one of the issues that I contend with on the regular is feeling afraid to start something new because somehow I’ll humiliate myself with the lack of talent or knowledge or just sort of savoir faire, but I’m trying to work on that. I’m working on it.

Initially you went to Harvard pre-med, which I read and was sort of shocked at. But I understand a Proctor in your freshman dorm room gave you a copy of Richard Powell’s book, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. Is that what sort of motivated you to begin to shift your idea about what you wanted to study?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. Yes. That sweet Proctor, that spirit, she’s actually a dear friend of mine now, April Yvonne Garrett. That was a moment. I really hope and I know that people are, but I really hope people pay attention to those dewdrops on your journey, those moments that feel amplified in your own sense of what happened during the day because it matters. That moment mattered when she gave me that book and I sensed it, and I knew it at the time.

It mattered because, well now I think people privilege and honor the role of the artist even more so than they did say 20 years ago. But to go to Harvard and to be a young Black woman going to Harvard with the sacrifices my family made for generations for me to be there, being in the arts was nearly the last advisable path to take.

So yes, I was pre-med. I was thinking I would be a doctor that’s safe and I can help people and my spirit is to help and to help heal. So it was necessary for me to have lanterns on an alternate path, and that book was one of those lanterns. It was to say, this can be done, you can be a writer and do this. There’s a whole history that you could be part of. And this book really was the guide to looking at that path, Richard Powell’s book.

Debbie Millman:
You went on to get a master’s in philosophy from Oxford University and a master’s of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Sarah, why two master’s degrees? Were they concurrent? How did you manage this?

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah, so I received a Marshall Scholarship to go to study abroad for three years after college, and it gives you this opportunity. It’s fantastic to study anywhere in the UK that you can get in. And I decided to do two degrees, one in economic and social history at Oxford, and the other in art history. Hadn’t yet committed to a doctorate and at the time certainly wasn’t going to do it in the UK because I wanted to be around my friends, and so I wanted to come back.

But I hadn’t, you can see with the choice the sort of split between economics and social history and the arts. I hadn’t yet found a way to bring together this connection between art and politics. So I felt as if I had to go down two different paths to give myself the arsenal I needed to understand it more fully.
So it’s not an unusual thing to do on that fellowship, though. A lot of people end up with those two degrees, but it was also right after 9/11. And I think because I had lost a good friend in the towers and had a lot of friends just pass from accidents of different kinds, I really benefited from having a three-year period to figure myself out to understand how I could best contribute if I could to society.

Debbie Millman:
I understand that when you were in London, you saw Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project. I just interviewed Olafur about his current exhibits that he’s having in London, in New York, in Korea, about how we see what we see reflected back to us, which I think has some really interesting overlaps with your work. What was it about The Weather Project that inspired you so much?

Sarah Lewis:
My God, do you know, I think I’ve just put together for the first time when I became interested in studying vision itself. It was through that exhibition, it was through seeing that show.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, wow.

Sarah Lewis:
So at the time, I was curating at the Tate Modern in London, working with Donna De Salvo who came over to Whitney after that. And throughout the time of that, really was an internship as curatorial assistant, The Weather Project was up. So every day, I would leave my office and experience people having a Truman Show-like experience in effect. They were able to see themselves seeing and see the artifice of the world around them.

But what stunned me most and just for those who haven’t seen it, it’s in the Turbine Hall at the Tate. Olafur Eliasson created an extraordinary half dome that feels like a sun, and then with mirrors completes it so that it appears to be a circle. And you look up at it and can see the artifice, but the response to it was people lying on the ground as if they were on a beach somewhere underneath a sun.

And it was stunning to witness because of course it would be winter months and people were doing that and the floor is the floor. And you know what happens on the floor, people were just so… It was such an embodied response and it made me think about how seeing transforms being, how just the act of looking at something can change your, not just behaviors but your even rational sense of what to do in a space.
So that probably was the moment I wrote about that piece for one of the masters papers, and I loved, I still remember how much the research excited me. And it gave me a sense of just how much we miss when we don’t address the power of the arts for transformations in society. That was the beginning.

Debbie Millman:
In one of the interviews that I read, you said that that experience got you thinking about James Joyce. And of course my eyes and ears perked up because I’m a big fan, and you described it as a kind of wonder and aesthetic experience that you’re not moved to possess or critique or judge but simply to behold. And I think that’s such a wonderful way of thinking about what art can do, how you just behold it and it sort of takes you over in some way.

Sarah Lewis:
That’s it. I mean, even the words as you so well know to describe, the power of an aesthetic experience conveys that we’re in an altered state. We’re stunned or dazzled or we’re knocked out, these are the words we use because there’s a suspension in those judgments. It’s as if you vividly describe it with those words. And that’s why the arts have, I think, the capacity to transform how we see the world. In that altered state, you can revise what you see when you emerge out of it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. So you published The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery in 2014. And I believe that you actually began working on your book first from that experience writing your essay for your application to Harvard. But then when you were getting your PhD from Yale, you’ve said that writing that book was an audacious act. In what way?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. Well, for a number of reasons. Practically speaking, when you’re a graduate student, you’re supposed to be, and I was writing a dissertation. You’re not supposed to be writing another book alongside of it with, of all places [inaudible 00:22:12] publisher.

Debbie Millman:
Unless you’re Sarah Lewis. Sarah Lewis does that.

Sarah Lewis:
Apparently. Apparently, ignorance is bliss, I guess. So I did it and my commitment to myself was, you can do this so long as the excellence of the academic work doesn’t suffer. So in my mind, it was anytime I would say take a break from academic work and binge something, I would be writing instead. So I wrote The Rise instead of doing those other things.

And it gave me so much nourishment. My God, that process of writing that book is one of the greatest gifts I gave to myself. I had no idea what it would do in the world. I did not write that book thinking that it would go on to be translated into seven languages and take me around the world in terms of the conversations it would prompt. No idea.

I wrote it really to save my own sense of possibility and sense of becoming. It’s a book that looks at those improbable foundation’s so-called failure, near wins that artists of all kinds have that led to the works we celebrate, whether it’s a Kafka or a Faulkner or a Cézanne or you name it, and how that takes place in the lives of those who are innovators, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and explorers.

But it really is a book that is helpful for anyone who wants to understand the process of their own becoming, because no matter what our role is, that is going to be an experience that we have. We are going to fall short of a goal that we have. The question becomes how do you give yourself the propulsion to move forward to become the self you know can be.

So I wrote it because I wanted to understand that myself truly, and then realized that the guides and the different themes that were emerging through interviews and research were not just helpful for me, but apparently helpful for others. So doing all of that while being a student, I did seem audacious.
But I now look at the lifespan of an artist process and actually look at what’s happening in their twenties and thirties differently as a result. I think there is an increased risk-taking that can come when you simply don’t know what an endeavor entails, and so you’re willing to do it. If I really knew, I don’t think I would’ve, but thank God I did it anyway.

Debbie Millman:
There were some lines that I found in the book and also in my research that really sort of stopped me in my tracks. You said that failure is not something that might be helpful, it actually is the process. And it sort of made me reconsider how much I avoid doing anything that I’ll fail at in that process I’m avoiding actually doing the thing.

But then you also said that success is a hollow word, and it is typically a designation that someone else gives you. So it’s an evaluation, which also kind of took me, it seemed like I could understand the steps to get to the unseen truth in terms of what people tell you that something means.

Sarah Lewis:
I love that you’ve landed on the term evaluation. Evaluation and assessment, that really is the bridge between the projects. The term failure was once used to describe financial ruin, bankruptcy. It was never meant to be applied, I don’t think, to the human spirit, but we do use it, and it’s a term applied to us from others. So it’s an evaluation which never really takes into account someone else’s goals for themselves or who they will become after that moment.

In writing The Unseen Truth, I was interested in evaluations of other kinds to do with race and society, and it led to that book writing, The Rise. There’s a chapter in The Rise where I meditate on leaders like Frederick Douglass, thinking about societal failure. Frederick Douglass gives a speech that was really unknown when I began writing The Rise in 2010 about the power of pictures in the middle of the American Civil War, and it stunned his audience.

He delivers it in 1861 in Boston, and they’re expecting, you can imagine him to think about anything else but the power of imagery, this new technology. He became the most photographed American man of the 19th century because he understood the function and the force of images to change how we evaluate who counts and who belongs in society.

And so he’s thinking through the impact of this technology for societal failure, to not understand the dignity and humanity of all. That chapter, Beauty, Error, and Justice in The Rise led to the work Vision and Justice, but specifically The Unseen Truth, because I wanted to understand really the failures of evaluation in a more rigorous way, in a more detailed way.

Debbie Millman:
Well, what’s so interesting to me about your notions of failure and success, we do so much to avoid failure. Yet when we achieve success, for most people, they’re never content with just that. Then there’s the next success and then the next. And so there’s this really interesting tension between the sort of avoidance of failure and the pull towards more and more success, and it seems like you can’t really have one without the other.

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah, that’s exactly the irony, right? And the paradox. I love, there’s a parable and effect that opens the book, my barn having burned down, I can finally see the moon. There’s this way.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. I love that quote.

Debbie Millman:
In 2008, President Obama formed an arts policy committee and invited you to serve on it, and he was actually the first presidential candidate ever to form an arts policy committee during his campaign. What was that experience? How did that, one day like, “Hey, Sarah. It’s Barack.” How did that happen?

Sarah Lewis:
I do remember receiving a call from the co-chair. And around that time, I was up for a position at the National Endowment for the Arts that I accepted and then realized wasn’t exactly right for me as deputy director. And being, I think at that stage in my career, I had a sense that there’s more writing I wanted to do, curating I wanted to do, and not policy work just then. So at the time, it was probably natural for me to be part of it and he was the first. I think if we think back to the impact of Shepard Fairey’s poster, Hope poster, it’s probably really easy to envision why this extraordinary presidential candidate would understand the importance of visual messaging for politics.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. And language, just the word Hope and what that signifies. Was that the most important thing you learned from President Obama? You mentioned language, and…

Sarah Lewis:
His ability while speaking in conversation or in speeches to let silence speak and to allow himself time to consider how an idea will land, I think, was instructive for me as a young Black woman in particular because in those pauses, in that silence, there is a modeling of the mindfulness, I think, that’s still required in our civic life to ensure that especially I think African-Americans are not misunderstood.

Debbie Millman:
Or underestimated.

Sarah Lewis:
Or underestimated, exactly. So that model has stayed with me for some time, I will say. He’s a generational talent. There’s so much we learn from the Obamas: both the model of their partnership, their love, the bravery. But in terms of how we present ourselves as Black people to the public, I think that what I’ve just described he was able to do so effectively is I think the most salient lesson.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve stated that “In the history of the United States, perhaps the biggest question we have is how to tell the story of who we are. And in representational democracy, the answer has always been representation itself. The arts, images, culture, performance have long been a way to work through the blind spots of norms and laws that did not honor the full humanity of all those who in this extraordinary country.” Sarah, is that what first inspired your Vision & Justice project in 2016?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. Where would we be in our understanding of the United States without culture, without art? Try to explain it to someone and you really can’t. The project began with that idea, but it found its roots and I think its fire through honoring the legacy of which we’re a part. Frederick Douglass really first had this idea in American politics, and to see as I did this speech, he delivers about that in the Library of Congress untouched, as I did as a student, gave me a sense of lineage, made me understand that yes, the realization I had about the function and power of art and culture for justice was important, but I was certainly not the first to have it. And I’m not even speaking about my other colleagues who’ve written about this too.

Frederick Douglass states at the end of his speech so poignantly, “It might take over 150 years for this idea to be understood about the importance of representation in our democracy.” And it’s a humble line and it really was a call to action as I read it. It really was stating, will you be one of the individuals I had in mind to continue this work?

And so Vision & Justice was born of answering that call and pointing, as I did in the first “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture in 2016 in the publication, to the many artists who I know Douglass had in mind, whether it’s LaToya Ruby Frazier or Carrie Mae Weems or Awol Erizku, Deborah Willis, so many others, and the writers who give us a sense of the importance of understanding visual literacy for racial literacy like the late Maurice Berger, so many others. And that convening through the framework of Vision & Justice of makers who are transforming narratives of who counts and who belongs is really how Vision & Justice began.

Debbie Millman:
The Vision & Justice project is now part of your core curriculum at Harvard. Your Vision & Justice organization has become an initiative that marshals resources, whether it’s public-facing courses, publications, conferences, to educate the public about the urgent work of art and culture for equity and justice in the United States. And I think from my understanding of your body of work and your practice, all of this has led to the publication of your new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America. Would you say that’s correct?

Sarah Lewis:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Would you say that’s accurate?

Sarah Lewis:
That is accurate.

Debbie Millman:
Now, the book took you over 10 years to write, and in the process you had a near-death experience in a gruesome car crash. How did you recover? How did you survive? How did you recover? And how did that impact the journey of this book?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. That experience was a miracle, and I truly have nothing but gratitude for it. It is not a physical experience I would wish on anyone. It was a pandemic experience. It was pre-vaccine when I was driving on the West Side highway and a car hydroplaned after a long day of rains or hours into my vehicle, lost control of his car. And my own nearly flipped over, hit the concrete divider, and the airbags deployed in the car. And it’s really because of that fact that the airbags deployed when they did, and I’m sure divine intervention, that I’m still here. When the EMTs came, they kept asking at least twice, “Is there anyone else in the vehicle?” because of the speed of the impact that they registered and all the rest. And I didn’t have any… I think I have a minorly fractured rib, which we realized later, but really nothing that you would imagine would’ve taken place given that the car was totaled.

The gratitude that I have for that experience is to do with how intensely I experience this just love for the fact of life itself. It’s indescribable because I would walk around with gratitude for life before, but to come so close and know that unless there’s some kind of intervention, you are going to go. And you don’t and you’re all right and it’s painful. You can walk around, you can heal and continue to do this work. I don’t take a second of it for granted, a second of it. I look at a little flower on the street and I just think of just the gift I had to still be here to enjoy these small beauties, these large experiences of other kinds.

The Unseen Truth was on my laptop in that car. I was driving up to Harvard to keep writing. And as I healed, I realized that I had to include a lot more fire. The foundation of the book was there and the research was there. But when you crawl out of a burning car that has just crashed to save your own life, and I’ve seen way too many movies. You know what can happen when you open those car doors. I, despite thinking that, did that and are all right, changes your filter for what you think you’re actually afraid of. So this is a book that required me to be fearless, and I hadn’t yet arrived at that point when I began. So thanks to that experience, the book, I think, is what it needed to be. And I’m in the place I need to be be excited about life in all of its forms.

Debbie Millman:
The book tackles one of the greatest lies in American life, in American history, that there is no basis to the radicalized world of American society that puts white Americans on the top. And the true significance of this history has gone unseen until now. This all began for you with an image you discovered in your first week at Yale in the library. Can you describe the image for our listeners?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. I came across a photograph taken by the most celebrated photographer of the era, Matthew Brady, of a woman who was standing full-frontal to the camera looking quite powerful in a dress, the sash. Her hair is teased to look as if it’s in an afro. She herself was alabaster white in terms of her complexion. And I learned that she was a performer known as a Circassian beauty performer, a so-called exemplar of white racial purity put on stage by PT Barnum in the 1860s. And she would go on to become his highest-grossing performer at the time. I could find so little scholarship on what the real implications of that performance was for the American public that I decided I had to write. So that was the photograph I landed on. And there were others I did find that same day that showed the development of the performance into one that really lampooned the idea of race itself, women who looked like Angela Davis being put on stages as exemplars of white racial purity, that kind of thing. That’s what began.

Debbie Millman:
You begin The Unseen Truth by detailing the story of the Caucasus during the Civil War era in America. So, for our listeners that might not know, what was that, and who were the Circassian people?

Sarah Lewis:
We use the term Caucasian and we think we know what it means.

Debbie Millman:
Wrong.

Sarah Lewis:
Wrong. And that’s what American society understood in the 19th century. So we think we’re referring to a group of people that we consider to be white. Why do we use the term Caucasian? Well, it came about the work of a naturalist who designated the Caucus region in the Black Sea area as the so-called homeland of the white race for reasons that seem ridiculous to us today because there weren’t white people there. There were no white people there. Exactly. So how did that come about?

Well, this is how racial lore gets hardened into fact. The lore was to do with the beauty of the women, which became an indication of racial superiority. It was the symmetry of a skull is another indication of racial superiority. The lore of the skin and the complexions of the women there, which proved to be false, and biblical lore in the Bible and Genesis, Noah’s Ark, it’s claimed it comes to rest in the region. This was the so-called data that was used to define that region and inaugurate it as the homeland of whiteness, and the terms stuck for centuries. It was debunked, though still used, during the American Civil War. And this is what’s been forgotten in history, and it’s critical that we recall it now.

So at that same time, there was something happening called the Caucasian War. And not a metaphor, an actual Caucasian war. And it’s taking place because Russians and the Ottoman Empire are battling for access to the Black Sea and are creating incursions on the Caucus region itself. It results in what many now consider to be a genocide of the peoples in the Caucus region. But the reporting that comes out in the newspapers at the time debunks all of the different lies that had hardened into fact about the type of people that were actually there. So it became clear that there was no such thing as racial whiteness in the region. And you can see what could have happened next but didn’t. When you see a very lie at the basis of the whole regime of racial hierarchy, you realize that you must dismantle it. But we didn’t.

Debbie Millman:
So, an 18th-century German physiologist coins the term Caucasian as a synonym for white in color and claims that the Circassian people were the purest Caucasians of all. PT Barnum, who I think was reincarnated to Donald Trump, then brings these women we think, maybe, who knows if they were really Circassian, in 1864 to his museum on Broadway as the purest example of the white race. And this is the origin story of Caucasians in America.

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. And he puts them on stage as a visual exam and a prompt and a prodding to really ask the American public if they’re willing to hold onto this term, because the performers he’s putting on stage are meant to represent white racial purity but look nothing like that idea. We forget how central the world of performance and the entertainment complex was for dealing with racial politics. So Barnum’s American museum, which we think of as all these humbugs and fakes and curiosities, he was provoking the American public. He was creating a space to work out how these fictions had become fact. So that’s exactly what happened in 1865.

So that, seeing that image, made me think about what has been unseen in American life. I don’t know that I would’ve written the book though if not for stumbling across in the footnote of someone else’s book, Charles King. The fact that Woodrow Wilson himself was fixated and interested in this idea, and we can talk about that too. But at the end of World War I, he effectively creates a PT Barnum spectacle. He asks in 1919 from his chief of staff of the Army stationed and Azerbaijan if he can have a report about the look of the women from the Caucus region. And in the archive you see it, they produce a report. They produce a 70-person party of so-called Circassian women that they admit we’re not really Circassians, some were Georgian, et cetera, and they say no one can tell the difference anyway. It doesn’t matter.

But why? Why would he ask for this in the middle of the codification of a racial regime that seems to be absolute in American life. This is a period where the Klan is active. We have white racial supremacy dominating the land in terms of the history of racial terror. Why ask for a report? Well, it indicates the nervousness at the heart of the racial project about whether there’s really any factual basis for racial domination at all, and there is no basis for this.

Debbie Millman:
So essentially he got this information but ignored it.

Sarah Lewis:
Accident of history. He asked for the information, he suffered a stroke so he never could receive it. But it didn’t really matter because he threw his administration through the federalization of segregation and through his understanding of the power of visual culture cohered a regime to instantiate racial domination with impunity despite the fiction of it all.

Debbie Millman:
Woodrow Wilson authorized the widespread imposition inside the federal bureaucracy. He opposed women’s suffrage. He was very much an orchestrator of segregation at that time. Yet I discovered that and I learned from your book, scholars have generally ranked Wilson in the upper tier of US presidents.

Sarah Lewis:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
It’s another perpetuated misrepresentation of reality.

Sarah Lewis:
Exactly. And flies in the face of what he actually did, which was not to represent the type of racism that existed in the period but, in fact, to go steps further. Another way in which we distort our own history.

Debbie Millman:
So your discoveries show that there was really a widespread confirmation bias to secure very intentionally this vision of white, physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual superiority that were completely based on lies.

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. And to do one thing more, which is to instantiate that unspeakable idea that there is a basis for legitimating racial hierarchy without using outright decree. He inaugurates the idea that we’re working through today, that we can use tactics that are aesthetic, that are creative, that are about public and signaling through monuments to state what will never be said publicly.

So what I most was excited about in the book was being able to salute the Black clerks who work for Woodrow Wilson who see that he’s using visual tactics to cohere this racial regime. One of them is Freeman Henry Morris Murray, who’s an activist, a writer, and sees what Wilson is doing and writes the first book in the United States about the relationship between race, politics, and aesthetics. In 1916, on his own printing press, publishes this book, tries to get it published by others and they reject it. It really details and outlines the origins of the debates we’ve had about monuments today. He saw these Confederate monuments going up on courthouse lawns and understood what it meant and what it allowed politicians not to say because the monument spoke. So Wilson’s work was to marshal the force of this and signaling power of the arts to cohere this regime of racial domination. And that’s what’s so insidious and that’s what is part of the legacy we’re working through right now.

Debbie Millman:
I want to read a couple of paragraphs that you write in The Unseen Truth. You state, “The project of modernity requires that we modulate our understanding of how race transformed what we even call vision.” And you quote WJT Mitchell who said that, “Race is a medium and a frame, something we see through.” And you go on to state that race is a frame, a window, a screen or lens rather than something we look at, and you call this condition sight or visual conditioning. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about how we are conditioned to see the things that we see.

Sarah Lewis:
One of the avenues and case studies that might be most vivid is to think about how in fact the court system worked through these lies that became facts to think about how our sight was conditioned. So what happened when the lies the fiction of the Caucus region was laid bare through visual culture? The Supreme Court needed to figure that out because immigration cases were based upon the terms, these fictions themselves. Racial science created the term Caucasian, and you see Supreme Court justices trying to work out whether they could use this term anymore at all.

And what happens in the 1870s is they begin to state instead we’re just going to use, quote, common knowledge about the idea of who’s Caucasian and who’s not. Literally that’s the term, common knowledge. So what that comes to mean is that every day evaluative modes of determining who is who form the basis of Supreme Court cases regarding who is granted entrance into the United States.

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Sarah Lewis:
So when we describe in this seemingly abstract way, race is a frame, well, it’s a quite literal frame for the portal of entrance even into the United States. Visual tactics we use to determine who enters the category of whiteness that has stakes and consequences for who is demonized, who is exalted, who’s granted citizenship and who is not. Visuality is a deeply political tactic and we’ve been conditioned to think to understand how we utilize it best through this account of racial narratives over time.

Debbie Millman:
So when white people are filling out a form or a census, they really have no idea that the term legitimizes a racial regime.

Sarah Lewis:
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And those that fill out that form and happened to be from the Caucus region know it best. I went there to finish the book with Nell Painter, the extraordinary historian, and I heard a number of those stories of them, actual Caucasians coming to United States and being completely confused about why the term for their ethnic group was used as an umbrella for racial whiteness. And there’s the irony. And also when you look at the accounts of the attempts to make sense of the languages that those, the Adegui people in the Caucus region speak, it’s just, it’s comical because there’s the use of the term doesn’t match the understanding of what’s actually happening there. The details about the language are completely misunderstood.

Debbie Millman:
There is another term that I learned while reading The Unseen Truth, and that is an aesthetic encounter. If you can please, for our listeners, share what an aesthetic encounter is because I think anybody living in America has experienced at least one or two.

Sarah Lewis:
A way to consider it’s how many movements began when a work of art with extraordinary aesthetic force transformed our perceptions of the world entirely, and it’s more times than we could possibly know. I began The Unseen Truth after learning about a few of these aesthetic encounters. One most gripping for me was learning about the life of Charles Black Jr. who listens to Louis Armstrong, understands the genius and the lyricism coming out of his trumpet, his horn. And it’s 1931, it’s deep segregation in Austin, Texas where he’s hearing Louis Armstrong. And because of this aesthetic encounter, he is able to question the rational world around him that has legitimated segregation. He asks himself, “If there is genius coming out of the body of this Black man, can segregation be right?”

So much of what we owe the arts is the ability to understand and see what we don’t know we don’t know about ourselves and about each other. And Charles Black Jr. goes on in that moment after really processing what he doesn’t know he doesn’t know to walk towards justice as he describes it. He goes on to become one of the lawyers in the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, that outlaw segregation in the United States or works to. And he goes on teach constitutional law at Columbia and Yale and he holds this annual Armstrong listening night to honor the aesthetic encounter, to honor the power of the arts for the transformational moments that lead to justice with a capital J in public life.

These aesthetic encounters, I think we don’t honor enough because they are so often private, not discussed, unheralded. In The Unseen Truth, I write about these aesthetic encounters as moments which I myself was forced to reckon with, the false construction that legitimates racial hierarchy. In The Metropolitan Museum, I passed one day, actually after that miracle car collision, I was healing and taking my time doing things and walked through an area of The Met. I’ve never gone in fully the arms and armor collection in Wayne.

Debbie Millman:
Oh yes, this is a good story.

Sarah Lewis:
And there saw arms and armor that were labeled Caucasian armor. And I thought, because I had sustained a concussion, “Okay, I need to read this again.” And I read the label more closely and realized that it referenced armor from the Caucus region, but the term Caucasian was not being used to signal whiteness necessarily. But the label counts on my knowing the difference, counts on my holding and suspension that for the moment, we’re not going to think about racial whiteness. We’re going to look at the actual geography and ignore the fact that there is this contradiction in the two terms.

And there are other encounters. The MFA Boston had a painting called A Circassian from 1870 of the first that enters the museum collection, later called The Caucasian Soldier, and it’s just nested up in this wall and salon hang of other works by American painters who travel abroad. And I stopped in my tracks and thought, “Wait a second, is this meant to be a painting of a quote-unquote white person, or is it meant to be a representative figure from the Caucus region?” And where’s the arena to process this? There’s none. So, writing about these aesthetic encounters surface the way in which visual culture gives us evidence of these moments of fracture, when you see the breakdown of terms that we’ve used just to cohere this regime racially in American life.

Debbie Millman:
You write how seeing is not just a retinal act. It’s never been about observation only. Seeing is about reading the world. And it seems as if these experiences have really solidified how the world is presented to us and then the bias that we have in believing it all. How do we begin to create more representational justice?

Sarah Lewis:
So I find the most important way to slow down and ask yourself what you are seeing and why. What’s the strategy behind it?

I recently went to a building that made the importance of this seemingly simple act very significant, and it was the Washington National Cathedral. I went and I was asked to speak on a panel about the removal of the Confederate stained-glass windows that that cathedral had for decades. And after the killing of the Emanuel IX by Dylann Roof, white supremacist, the dean and canon decided to remove the propaganda that saluted the Confederacy in this building.

Now, this building is meant to be a place of worship for all, and it’s set on a mountain site in DC that really rivals the height of the Capitol. So you can imagine my surprise when I went into this building and saw something that seemed to contradict the very ethos of the building itself. The canon, Leonard Hamlin, beautiful spirit, he took me through and I wanted to see the site where the newly installed windows would be. These are now installed. Kerry James Marshall created the new stained-glass windows, and Elizabeth Alexander, the poet, offered the text and the tablets below. So we walked towards this site in the nave and I stopped because to the right directly next to these new windows was a tomb, and the tomb is that of Woodrow Wilson himself.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Sarah Lewis:
He’s the only president who’s buried there. And I was stunned by the juxtaposition, the redemptive, racially redemptive, new windows and his tomb. Now, when I say tomb was right there, I mean ground floor of the nave where parishioners worship is his tomb is to the right. So you could be in your chair and his tomb would just be directly next to you. It felt as if I was looking at an American portrait.

Debbie Millman:
You were, yeah.

Sarah Lewis:
And so you have to pause long enough to ask what you’re seeing and why. The tension though being willing to reside in that tension, in that moment was key for me. We could talk forever about the history of that church and just how many civil rights leaders were part of that work as well. It’s the site where Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his final Sunday sermon and where there was a memorial week later for him with 4,000 attending. But yet, and still we have a marker and a reminder of the extension of Jim Crow rule through Wilson’s tomb and the stained-glass windows that are meant to honor his regime.
How could that have gone unmentioned in all the reporting about the new stained-glass windows? I wondered. There was no article mentioned which Wilson’s tomb was there, and I wouldn’t have known myself unless I stopped and took the time to think through how we construct narratives to bolster regimes of who belongs and who counts through the visual landscape.

What we are seeing and why, well, this is a question that we see our politicians taking more seriously. Think of the work of Bryan Stevenson, the leader who is really focused on criminal justice reform, who’s argued successfully before the Supreme Court countless times. He has taken to what he calls narrative work. He has decided to marshal the resources of the Equal Justice Initiative to create a complex of memorials and monuments to honor lives that have not been saluted, that were taken unjustly from racial terror and lynching. This is a lawyer who’s seeing the importance of cultural work, of what we’re seeing, not seeing and asking why. Sherrilyn Ifill, the former NAACP legal defense fund leader, has taken to having conversations with artists from Mark Bradford to Glenn Ligon, to Carrie Mae Weems about the importance of the cultural narratives that they’re putting forward to right this balance.

So if we start to get away from the idea that as you know, culture is not a respite from life, design is not just a kind of luxury, but instead salute the indispensable work of visual culture for conditioning us to see each other justly, then I think we’ll be on a path to a more true sense of the levers that have been required for justice in the United States.

Debbie Millman:
In Susan Sontag’s book On Photography, she asked if we’ve become desensitized to images because there are so many around, and it seems like we’re also doing that with language and the general acceptance the public seems to have now more than ever for the racist language we’re experiencing from politicians that at one point would’ve outraged us, and we’re now just like, “Oh, boys will be boys, men will be men, politicians will be politicians.” Are we becoming more and more conditioned to not see and not hear what we don’t want to? What is around in surroundings?

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah. I share your same concern. I see it the same way. One of the questions though I have is whether we are becoming less tolerant of viewpoints that aren’t our own or whether we are letting the switches that shift through just technology itself with the algorithmic changes determine what we see and what we don’t. Meaning I don’t know that it’s will. I don’t know that it’s personal choice. I think it’s programmatic and platform decisions that by and large shifted our viewing tactics.

You would think given the coarseness of our politics, the teaching Vision & Justice as I do at Harvard would be a really contentious process that I would have a lot of rancor in the classroom. I’m teaching some of the most difficult topics in American life. That’s not the case for me. Why? Well, I should say it’s been difficult for a lot of us, but when you’re teaching from an object, when you’re teaching from an image, it depersonalizes the history or even the current event you’re dealing with. So it’s no longer a fractious debate about what I think and what you think. It’s about a fact in the room embodied by that object, embodied by that sculpture or that image. And it allows for, I think, the creation of a kind of arena as opposed to a conflict.

So if that can be the case just without the power of an Instagram or another platform transforming what’s in front of me, if I can have a conversation like that with 18 to 22-year-olds, with my colleagues, I have conviction still in the power of the image to elicit extraordinary conversations. The question becomes what happens when you are only given to see a certain set of images through devices that are not your own?

I was on a panel recently at the Boston Book Festival and one question came from an individual who wanted to know what I thought of photographs of conflict, and they were thinking about Gaza and Eddie Glaude, who’s also on the panel, added that there are decisions made to switch on and off the number of images you’re seeing about a political event. So at a certain moment, you remember the glut of images we were seeing about Gaza. I don’t see as many and I have not done a thing to my own algorithm, but we know the same amount of images are being taken. I think that just speaks to the invisible actor, which behind the question that you’re asking there.

Debbie Millman:
In the epilogue to The Unseen Truth, you described the foundations of racial hierarchy as a photograph with no true negative. Where do we go from here to correct this false narrative?

Sarah Lewis:
The book presents the evidence, the evidence of the fictions that we have chosen to live with. After seeing them, where we go from here is to ask whether we have the will to no longer willfully, deliberately ignore it and move forward, but to make a new choice to see each other justly finally.

Debbie Millman:
Sarah, my last question is, it’s about a new course you’re creating at Harvard on Beyonce. Tell us about that.

Sarah Lewis:
So there’s a class on Taylor Swift. Why not a class on Beyonce? That’s first one.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I told my wife about it, and we decided that we’re going to ask if we could sit in.

Sarah Lewis:
Come on. I love it. I love it.

Debbie Millman:
Well, no, I understand that it’s really not about her music as much as it is on the visual stylings behind her film and videos and so forth, which is always so extraordinary. And actually, once I saw that you were doing this, I was really surprised that it’s not been talked about more in a scholarly way because it is so extraordinary and investigating where she is inspired to find these images and use them and expand upon them is such an important part of understanding who she is.

Sarah Lewis:
Well, you just created the summary for the course description that matches on my computer. So there you go. It’s exactly why I’m changing a class. And it is a Trojan horse, right? To be able to think through all the ways that she’s referencing, sources that are focused on Black diaspora, broadly defined performance, visual culture, music. I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

Debbie Millman:
Sarah Lewis, thank you, thank you, thank you for writing your new book. Thank you for making so much work that matters in so many ways. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Sarah Lewis:
And thank you for your extraordinary work that’s really nourished me from many years. I’m excited to have this chance to talk to you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you.

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Sarah Lewis’s new book is titled The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, and you could read lots more about her at sarahelizabethlewis.com. I’d like to thank you all for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the Ted Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Design Matters: Sarah Lewis appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

We feed them, we go on long walks with them, we groom them and rub their bellies. We even share our beds with them. But do we really know who they are? Yes, they’re dogs, but do we know what’s going on between those two floppy ears? Alexandra Horowitz knows a lot more than most people. She is a professor at Barnard College where she teaches creative nonfiction writing and audio storytelling. As senior research fellow, she also runs The Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard. She’s also written some of the world’s best books about dog cognition. Her latest is the Year of the Puppy, How Dogs Become Themselves. She’s here to talk about the relationship between humans and our canine friends, and a bit about herself as well. Alexandra Horowitz, welcome to Design Matters.

Alexandra Horowitz:

It’s a complete pleasure to be here. Thanks, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:

Alexandra, you were born in Philadelphia. Your family moved to Golden, Colorado when you were a child, and I read that your dad was the sun you circled, and you were influenced both by his work ethic as a litigator and his humor. How were you influenced by his humor?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I think he saw levity in everything. He took himself seriously, and at the same time, he didn’t take himself too seriously. I mean, he was born of this kind of East Coast generation of lawyers and doctors who really felt like they were making a change in this world, and at the same time, he was very ready to find the silliness in a situation and the playfulness in the situation. And that’s definitely imbued my work and made it possible for me to do what I do.

Debbie Millman:

As you were growing up, I understand you not only like to watch your dog and your cat, you like to observe the ants in your yard and counted the prairie dogs in the field on your way to school. What motivated this early interest in animals and insects?

Alexandra Horowitz:

That’s some deep dive research you’ve been into my background there, Debbie. Yeah, I don’t know exactly what motivated it. When you’re growing up in Colorado, I felt very exposed to part of the natural world. We lived in a community which was, I guess, suburban by some definition, but also the community itself was enforced as a kind of natural community. People didn’t have lawns particularly. In fact, I think they were forbidden, and the mountains were kind of our backdrop ends. There were elk wandering through the foothills, and you just felt like that was part of your life, and so you observed it naturally. It was just the scene that was going by outside your window, and it was only later when I wound up moving to cities that it felt like that was quite unusual. But I retained that interest in looking closely, especially at animal communities.

Debbie Millman:

I know at that time, veterinary work didn’t interest you. At that point in your life, what were you thinking you might do professionally?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I wasn’t really on a pre-professional track. I think my father was an attorney and my mother had been trained as a lawyer as well. And I thought, “Well, that’s something that I could do with a kind of analytic acumen,” which I prided myself as a young Alexandra as having. It didn’t pan out. I didn’t, I think, have any special interest in law, although I applied to law schools. I wound up doing philosophy in college, and I also thought that that was a potential avenue, but I wasn’t an academic philosopher at heart. I wasn’t that driven by these arguments and conversations. My dad, one of the things my dad gave to me as a child was the freedom to not know what I was going to be. He really had confidence in both me and my brother that we would just wind up doing something that was appropriate for us and he would support whatever kind of thing that was.

As I say, he was a lawyer. He grew up around people with certain kind of very traditional professional roles. So for him, it was maybe a leap to say, but he did, “You should be an artist, you should go out and be an artist.” And I thought, “Well, I don’t have any particular artistic talent,” but I appreciated that for him, what that meant was you don’t have to follow a traditional path and will be there rooting for you, whatever you do. So I didn’t know. I just sort of went headstrong toward the things that interested me.

Debbie Millman:

You did study philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Why philosophy?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I had the fortune to have a philosophy class in high school, a teacher named Sean Smith taught philosophy. He was, in fact, now that I reflect back on it, a master student in philosophy himself. He was finishing a degree in Edinburgh and teaching at this Colorado school, and I loved it. I just loved the thought processes involved in setting out an argument and following in its path and the way the words kind of tumbled out a philosopher’s mouths and the things they got to think about.

So I pursued that as a degree. My mother had been a philosophy major. It was well, so it probably was a little bit my birthright to be thinking deep philosophical thoughts as a young thing. And I actually really fell in love with analytic philosophy and the philosophy of J. L. Austin, which actually led later to another career of mine. But again, it wasn’t with any thinking, this is going to pan out into a profession, a specific profession, more just this is a way of thinking that I want to encourage in myself, the ability to make an argument and follow it through to a conclusion.

Debbie Millman:

After you graduated, you worked at the Merriam-Webster dictionary. What was your job there?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I was a lexicographer, which is briefly a definer of words, which seems insane in retrospect. I was just out of college. I was a kind of dabbler in dictionaries. I was the type of person who liked to sit down, open up a dictionary and read several pages for fun. And somehow this led me to the notion that maybe a dictionary company would want to hire me as a philosophy major from Penn with no experience, particularly in linguistics or lexicography. And they did.

So I wound up being one of the maybe 20 definers on the 11th edition of the Collegiate Dictionary of Miriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which came out in ’91, and it was kind of a fabulous gig. You just are defining new words, making sure the old meanings are still consistent with how we’re using words. For somebody who’s at all interested in language, I was the type of person who would collect big words or fun fancy words and write them down and have little boxes of three by five cards of these things. This was like a dream come true. You’re just surrounded by big fancy words and also really quotidian ordinary words that are really tricky to define and therefore become intricate and fun. So yeah, I did that for the length of that addition of the dictionary.

Debbie Millman:

I thought it was a wonderful overlap to share with you at that particular moment in time. I worked at the graphic design firm that designed that particular edition of the dictionary.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Wow.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, Frankfurt gives all kind. So I spent a lot of time looking at page proofs of that dictionary.

Alexandra Horowitz:

That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. Well, it was well designed.

Debbie Millman:

And I should say yes, [inaudible 00:08:23] designed most of that. And I know he did the cover and he and I went on to work for many, many years at Hot97, the hip-hop radio station. But I understand that’s also where you met your husband, who I think the first question he asked you was what the etymology was of the word pumpernickel after hearing you mention your dog’s name, which was Pumpernickel.

Alexandra Horowitz:

That’s right.

Debbie Millman:

Is this true?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah, this is a kind of sorted but real tale. Well, I didn’t meet him at Miriam, although he now works at Miriam Webster. So it’s all come back round to Miriam. I was in New York and he was working as a mover, as a furniture mover, and I was helping my parents move furniture from one apartment to another and supervising this move. I barely had any furniture of my own at the time. I just finished graduate school and he came in the door and my dog Pumpernickel was barking, and I said, “Pumpernickel, you don’t need to bark.” And his response, the mover’s response at the door was, “Do you know the etymology of Pumpernickel?” And I said, “Well, I mean, I do. She’s my dog.” We had a little disagreement about the etymology because pumpernickel was this German bread, which is notoriously difficult to digest, and so pumpernickel comes from the words for flatulent goblin, but he thought that the more apt etymology was farting devil. So we had a little disagreement about the etymology of pumpernickel, and the rest is history as they say.

Debbie Millman:

Yes, you should have known instantly you were soulmates. I love that.

Alexandra Horowitz:

It was extremely unlikely.

Debbie Millman:

You then moved to New York and worked as a fact checker for the New Yorker. Now the New Yorker is one of the most notoriously difficult places to find a job, and fact-checking is one of the most difficult jobs there is. They are held to a very high standard. What was that experience like?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Also, a great experience. One of the things we did at Miriam Webster in the moments when we were not defining words was we were collecting words basically, meaning we would read prolifically and mark words that seemed to be used in such a way that it made their meaning quite visible, quite transparent, or mark new words or what seemed to be new uses of words. And one of the things that would go around that multiple people would read and mark, as we said, was the New Yorker. And so I became a New Yorker reader. I’d been a person who grew up just looking at the drawings as a kid, and one could forever just look at the drawings in the New Yorker, of course. And yet I started reading and loved the magazine as everybody around me did and just cold called them, just wrote to them and said, “Any job at the magazine, I will take.”

And it just so happened, I mean, I really don’t understand how some of these things happen sometimes, but I feel like one leans into one’s interest and it works. I mean, I guess I’m forgetting the times when I’ve leaned into an interest and it didn’t work or I tried to do something and the people, or the very many employment letters I wrote, which didn’t respond where Miriam Webster did. So it seems inevitable in retrospect but here too. I just wrote to them and they were interviewing for fact checker positions. It was right when Tina Brown had taken over editorial helm of the magazine and her interest in the magazine was in more topical articles. And of course, the New Yorker had been famously non-topical. You could do a three part 50,000 word series on bogs, but there wasn’t really anything on what had happened last week.

But when you do a topical magazine, you really need to be able to change directions quickly. New news comes out, you have a writer write something and the checker has to check it quickly or a whole team of checkers. So they were doubling their checking department, which had been pretty small, I think about eight people. And so I actually was hired freelance at first and then eventually got a staff position. And it was also terrific because a great comradery. My peers were so sharp and funny, and it was a great exciting place to be.

And it also was a really interesting place for me because as somebody who had this little bit of philosophy background, I was very interested in the nature of a fact, the nature of truth and what counted as confirming the fact, verifying truth. And that’s always been a motif for me, actually. The fact that I was able to define words in the dictionary. Sure, there were other editors who looked at those words, but it was interesting to me to be put in the position from being just a user of words to a definer of words. And here, maybe I wasn’t writing these facts, but I was confirming the truthiness of the fact. And so those turns were very interesting for me. And that was one of the, I think the things I take away from being a fact checker there was that somewhat of the slippery nature of facts and what it means to confirm fact and what knowledge is.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I mean, you’re sort of the last word on words, which is so philosophically interesting to me.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah. Right, right. So besides being just a very cool job, it had this sort of conceptual interest.

Debbie Millman:

While you were there, you worked on fact-checking several pieces by the legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote books including The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and the book Awakenings, which became a very popular movie. What was it like working with Oliver?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I was never the main checker on his pieces. I was a sort of ancillary checker. And of course, his pieces were full of facts of all sorts, facts about individual people, about neurological conditions, about philosophical histories, and he was a really generous writer. He was interested in working collaboratively with his checkers to find the truth there versus being antagonistic with the checker as sometimes writers could be, right? They didn’t want to have somebody else looking over their shoulder and saying, “Well, there’s another way of looking at this, or this other person says this thing.” But he was fabulous and he was quite an inspiration as a writer for me as well as somebody who had taken his scientific career and made a writerly career out of it. So that wound up being important in my life.

Debbie Millman:

Did working with him at all influence your decision to go back to school to get a PhD in cognitive science?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Completely. It completely influenced. Cognitive science was a kind of budding field at the time, which combined the types of things one would ask questions about in philosophy. Where is mind? What is a individual? Do we have free will? With neuroscience and psychology and anthropology and computer science, all these other people who were asking similar questions in their own methodological ways. And so it was this multifaceted field. It wasn’t something that Oliver had done, but his approach was his own kind of version of cognitive science. He was taking the William James and connecting it to the Raymond [inaudible 00:15:56] neurological experiments and then writing about it in his own sort of novelistic way using very strong narrative voice. So I felt like it was of a kind with Oliver Sacks’ work. And yeah, that’s why I went back to graduate school. That’s the first time I started thinking kind of professionally, frankly, that I would like to be a scientist who dabbles in these topics in some way.

Debbie Millman:

You got your PhD from the University of California San Diego, and you described the PhD in cognitive science in the following way. It’s basically an interdisciplinary degree. Philosophers ask what is the mind. Neuroscientists are interested in examining the brain. Psychologists want to look at behavior. So those fields plus computer science with an interest in artificial intelligence and anthropology converge in this one interdisciplinary field which wants to use different methods and approaches to tackle the questions of mind. And Alexandra, to me, this sounds like the most interesting PhD on the planet. Really, truly.

Alexandra Horowitz:

It really, really is fabulous. I think that so much creativity comes from interdisciplinarity, right? You have to be skilled and trained at the thing you’re doing, but also you need the perspective from outside of your field, it seems to me to really make movement in your own field. So cognitive science had that kind of baked in.

Debbie Millman:

Initially, you trained as an ethologist, which is the science of animal behavior, and you joined two research groups observing highly social creatures, the white rhinoceros at the wild animal park in Escondido and the bonobos, which are pygmy chimpanzees at the San Diego Zoo where you learn the science of careful observations, data gathering and statistical analysis. What are some of the things you learned about these species?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Both of these projects were ongoing projects of faculty members. And in the latter case, and in the former case researchers at the zoo who wanted to basically do basic research on the animal species. So even though we’re familiar with rhinoceri and bonobos and all the other animals who are common to see at a zoo, for instance, we don’t know everything about their lives. We might not know all about their social habits. We might not know how they forage or how they identify themselves, how they identify each other.

And so each project had its own interest. The rhinoceros project was interested in … well, the white rhinoceros is a fantastic species. I didn’t know much about them at all, just except for that they were an Africans species. There were many fewer of them than there used to be. They’re not endangered, I think, anymore. They are matrilineal. So they live in groups of women and the males who are usually smaller than the females only approach when they’ve received kind of advanced word that a female is ready to mate. Otherwise-

Debbie Millman:

How progressive.

Alexandra Horowitz:

… he’ll just get beat up. Yeah, they’re really not interested in his company at all. They don’t hang out with the males at all, but they’ll endure his company if they’re interested in mating. And the way they leave this communication that they’re interested in mating is through their dung, actually. And they leave these kind of huge heaps of dung. They’re like bulletin boards with all the information about all the rhinoceros. It has all the health and mating, reproductive status, et cetera. They’re basically leaving a message. Once they leave, the male can go and sniff and see if he can pursue one of the females. So we’re basically looking at how does their behavior relate to their endocrinology and that people would go in and gather samples and check their hormone levels, and then we would try to sync it with their behavior.

So it was the first time that I’d really looked at behavior of an animal over a long period closely where you start to think about them as individuals who have their own life histories. And you also think about the fact that their individual life history, while having interesting analogs to a human life history, it was full of its own complexities, some of which I might not be aware of. For instance, I didn’t use my sense of smell to do much in my life, particularly, certainly not to find out information about other people except for maybe accidentally and even then, really inadvertently. So it made me kind of aware of the types of things that would later drive my research, like the looking closely, looking over a long period of time, the importance of sort of individual animals and the perceptual world of non-human animals, which is in so many ways, much more expansive than ours.

Debbie Millman:

You also spent many hours at the local dog parks and beaches with your famous dog, Pumpernickel, where you began to see the interplay between him and other dogs in entirely new ways. And you wrote this about the experience, and I found it so moving and so vivid that I’d really like to share it verbatim with our listeners. It’s about a paragraph, if you don’t mind.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Sure, sure.

Debbie Millman:

Where I once saw and smiled at play between Pumpernickel and the local bull terrier, I now saw a complex dance requiring mutual cooperation, split-second communications and assessment of each other’s abilities and desires. The slightest turn of a head or the point of a nose now seemed directed, meaningful. I saw dogs whose owners did not understand a single thing their dogs were doing. I saw dogs too clever for their playmates. I saw people misreading canine requests as confusion and delight as aggression. I began bringing a video camera with us and taping our outings at the parks. At home, I watched the tapes of dogs playing with dogs, of people ball and Frisbee tossing to their dogs, tapes of chasing, fighting, petting, running, barking with new sensitivity to the possible richness of social interactions in an entirely non-linguistic world. All of these once-ordinary activities now seem to me to be an untapped font of information.

When I began watching the videos in extremely slow-motion playback, I saw behaviors I’d never seen in years of living with dogs. Examined closely, simple play frolicking between two dogs became a dizzying series of synchronous behaviors, active role swapping, variations on communicative displays, flexible adaptation to others’ attention and rapid movement between highly diverse play acts. What I was seeing were snapshots of the minds of the dogs visible in the ways they communicated with each other and tried to communicate with the people around them and too, in the way they interpreted other dogs and people’s actions. I never saw Pumpernickel or any dog the same way again. It’s like one of those pristine moments for me. I just love that whole vivid experience. I saw it so deeply and with such detail, and it felt like in that experience, your whole life changed.

Alexandra Horowitz:

It really did. It’s the thing that’s right in front of you that you’ve never seen. And in fact, that way of looking has infected me in other directions as well. But just with this one subject, it’s profound to see that something you thought you knew had all this dimensionality which was invisible and which in fact makes it run, makes it work and is essential to its existence. So thank you for highlighting that. It was profound for me, and it changed the course of … It created my professional career as well.

Debbie Millman:

How did the experiences with Pumpernickel translate into even considering this line of research? Before your work, there really wasn’t a cognitive science of dogs.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah, I was sensitive to and interested in dogs. I was a dog lover. I was like all the people who were dog lovers. Identical. I just was interested in and fascinated by dogs, had the same types of generalized questions that a lot of people direct toward me now. What is my dog thinking? What does my dog know about me? I had those questions, but I just didn’t think of them as scientific questions that were answerable potentially.

Debbie Millman:

Alexandra, I had those questions too, but hired a dog whisperer just to give you a difference in sort of life path.

Alexandra Horowitz:

That’s right. That’s a different avenue. So I think that that was meaningful to me, not just with her, but in sort of every direction.

Debbie Millman:

Why do we love dogs so much?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Their responsiveness to us, I think, is central to it. They are not unique as domesticated animals, not unique as animals who are tamable or friendly or have the cognitive capacities they do, but they are really unusual in their responsiveness to us, their interest in us, their agreeableness with us, and their seeming ability to read us so well. And frankly, we like that a lot. That’s a kind of responsiveness that I think I look for in other human beings, this kind of sensitivity that dogs seem to come with automatically. I think that’s the center of it.

Debbie Millman:

I think having now had dogs for most of my adult life, I’ve seen how for me and for others, they sort of are able to crack hardened hearts open in a way that sometimes other people can’t. And I don’t know if it’s because of the trust or the unconditional sense of love that they provide us, but I’m sure you’ve witnessed that over and over again.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah. And when you say unconditional, I think that’s such an interesting observation that you yell at a dog, get angry at a dog, accidentally step on a dog, and you turn around and they’re completely ready to start over again. And that’s maybe sometimes not to their benefit, but they are delighted every time you return home. And who is like that? Who in our lives is like that? And I think another element of this, being able to crack someone’s veneer for instance, is I’ve been thinking about it a lot because I worked in words for such a long time. Is there a word listeness? A lot of people like to voice what their dogs are saying and that that’s a sort of way of animating the quiet member of this conversation that you always feel like you’re having with your dog. But really I think it would be alarming if they said anything out loud. There’s something about just listening, which they seem to do.

Debbie Millman:

That’s so interesting. I had never really thought of it that way. When I first met the woman who’s now my wife, she knew that I was both a dog and a cat person. At one point, I had two dogs and two cats. Now I have two cats. At the time, I had just had two cats and told her that I’d always had dogs. And she said that she was definitely not a dog person and related a story how she was bitten when she was five years old and ever since then had been deathly afraid of dogs.

And over our years together, she saw how I responded when seeing dogs on the street or with other friends dogs and ultimately thought about getting a dog, which we subsequently have done. And this person who considered herself “not a dog person” is now buying clothes for Max, takes him everywhere, talks to him, drives with him. I would say that they are by far best friends. And as someone who is as verbose as she is as a writer, I find it really interesting that that worthlessness might also be rather comforting to her. I hadn’t thought about that. I think that’s so interesting.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Just letting your own words hang into space without a judgment.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Alexandra Horowitz:

While still having that feeling of a relationship of somebody who understands you at some level, right?

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. Yeah, they’re soulmates. I mean, I had a dog that was a soulmate for 17 years and I adore Max, I adore Max, but they are soul connected in a way that I was with Duff and just thrilled that she could have that experience.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Well, I’m glad because those early dog bite folks, it can be so traumatic and most people don’t recover from that, right?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Well, that’s why we got Max as a puppy, and I’m going to talk to you about that in a bit. But in the meantime, I want to go back to your history a little bit. Well, really your moment now even, you are a leader of a seat change taking place in science’s attitude towards studying dogs. And the transformation isn’t complete, but the landscape of dog research is remarkably different than it was when you first started 20 years ago. And you’ve said that the scientists doing this work have seen what you’ve seen, that the dog is a perfect entry into the study of non-human animals. Why is the dog the perfect entry into this study?

Alexandra Horowitz:

For the reason that I got interested in studying dogs, which is that they are ubiquitous, available and actually cognitively far more skilled than we’d given them credit for. So there was another researcher, Brian Hare, who was a grad student when I was a grad student, and who is now a leader in canine cognition who was doing research with chimpanzees where they were asking if chimps could follow a human pointing one direction or another. That human cue of a point, which all babies learn to follow very early in their life that we don’t come following a point, but we learn it pretty quickly. And it’s really essential. It seems like a simple gesture, but what it is, is an understanding that someone else’s gesture is referential, is leading to something else apart from themselves, that someone is showing you something. So understanding that is key and chimpanzees are not great at following pointing.

And that was surprising to researchers because there are closest non-human relatives and it was a type of thing that made people say, “There’s this huge cognitive gap between humans and non-humans.” And I was always dubious of this and Brian was as well, and he tried the pointing trick with his dog in the garage and his dog was perfectly able to follow his point. And many dogs, most dogs are quite good at following a point just like humans and just like almost no other animals, frankly. So dogs turn out to have some of these cognitive skills that we value because they are cognitive skills. They’re the things that make us human. And as a species we’re terribly interested and have been since the ancient philosophers in what makes humans human, what distinguishes us from non-humans. So dogs wind up being interesting cognitively, and then they’re also widely available.

These other animals whose the research projects I joined to sort of learn how to be an animal observer as a graduate student, they were with animals who were in zoos or wild animal parks. Other people study Jane Goodall, right? Find the animals in the wild. And both of those are very effortful. And in the case of studying animals in the wild takes many years just to identify animals and get them to acclimate to you. And also in some cases artificial. Studying an animal in a tiny little enclosure, even the best zoo is extremely unnatural environments.

So you’re probably not getting a lot of natural animal behavior. Here with dogs, we have an animal who is right in front of you, like widely available. People will come with their dogs to my lab and participate in studies and then go home with their dogs. I don’t have to keep dogs in a lab, feed them, have them in an artificial environment or find them out in the world. They come to us. So they wind up being terrific subjects and also at the end, you can play with them and give them a pat on the head and interact with them in a way you can’t with other non-human animals.

Debbie Millman:

Neanderthals didn’t live with dogs, but Homo sapiens have been in close proximity with dogs for thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years. How did this relationship with canines first come to be?

Alexandra Horowitz:

That is still being worked out. There is a lot of argument about how domestication started. We know that it happened multiple times in different parts of the world. One of the theories that I’ve always liked, but we don’t have complete confirmation for, is really that some wolves started to self domesticate in a way. In other words, they became less fearful of humans, more willing to approach. For instance, a village where people would throw out their trash and then that would be the bones that they couldn’t eat from their kill, for instance.

And then that would be another source potentially of food for the wolves. And that eventually those people have started taking in some of the young pups of those somewhat tamer, self-tamed wolves. And that over time found use for those wolves as guards, for instance, as giving them information about when a predator was about or even as food in a lean time, and then started selecting therefore breeding and thereby domesticating those wolves into what we see as dogs today. That’s one possible story, but honestly, we can’t know. And there is still a lot of interesting scientific discussion about what it might be.

Debbie Millman:

They are now between 700 million and one billion dogs in the world. Of those dogs, about 470 million are kept as pets. And you stated that through the artificial selection of domestication, dogs have evolved to be sensitive to the things that make up our cognition, including attention to others. How does that influence how we feel about each other?

Alexandra Horowitz:

For instance, dogs look us in the faces. One of the things that is key is central to the feeling of understanding and intimacy and connection with somebody is that you can look at each other in the face, look in each other’s eyes, right? Intimacy is in a held eye gaze. Dogs will do this with us. Now, this doesn’t seem like a big behavior, like a profound behavior, but it’s quite unusual. Eye gaze is usually a threat between animals. So a wolf, I recommend not holding long eye gaze with any wolves. If a wolf stares at another wolf, it’s considered a threat.

It’s a kind of demand to back down and one of them will, otherwise, they’re in a fight. Dogs somehow have suppressed that urge to feel like eye gaze is potentially threatening in that way and instead have started to use eye gaze the way we use it as part of forming a connection, a part of forming an understanding. And also then as information gathering, just as they follow a point, they can follow your gaze to what you’re looking at and find hidden food, find where you’re going, look at your gaze to see which direction you’re going next. Those little simple behaviors like that one have led the dog to feel like a co-conspirator with us and able to interact with us and use us to get information.

Debbie Millman:

It’s so interesting. I was thinking about how when used aggressively, a stare can, between humans, also provoke a fight with somebody saying something like, “What are you looking at?” Kind of a thing.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Right. Right.

Debbie Millman:

How did you like that little New Yorker in me come out? But it can also be used as a flirting device. So it’s interesting that we also can use more primitive notations with our eyes.

Alexandra Horowitz:

And I think that a stare could be too long with the dog as well, right?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Sometimes I just stare deeply into Max’s eyes and he just stops. He just looks away. He goes off and plays with a toy. Your work has been influenced by Jakob von Uexküll and Uexküll believed that anyone interested in understanding the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umvelt, their subjective self world. Can you talk a little bit more about the umvelt and how that has impacted how you think about animals?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Sure. Von Uexküll’s idea, which he proposed early in the 20th century using this word umvelt, which it’s my understanding in German just means world or environment, was quite novel. His idea was that one needed to consider the sort of subjective world, the self world of each individual and also of each species to really appreciate their experience. I must have come to Von Uexküll via some philosophers when I was in graduate school and not thought about it much until I was writing my first book, Inside Of A Dog, and dived into that material again and realized that what he was doing was this beautiful combination of subjective and scientific approach to other animals.

It was trying to understand the animal through not just knowing what their sensory abilities were and their cognitive abilities were, the types of things that cognitive scientists would do, but also through trying to appreciate their perspective, the things that were meaningful to them, what they were trying to perceive with those sensory abilities and what they were trying to understand or who they were trying to interact with, with those cognitive abilities. And so that approach of imagining the umvelt of another animal became really central to my thinking about dogs from that point forward. And in fact still drives, I’d say all of my research questions, my real ultimate aim is to understand what it’s like to be a dog. And that means to me to be able to imagine what it’s like in their world from their perspective and point of view.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve stated that research hasn’t confirmed that dogs are self-aware, but it also hasn’t confirmed that they aren’t either. And you’ve said that in one study you did, watching slow motion video of dogs in social play, led you to the conclusion that dogs act as though they’re thinking about the minds of other dogs. And I just found that mind blowing, no pun intended. Can you talk a little bit more about those findings?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah, this was my very first research study with dogs and I was interested in what kind of behaviors we could see in play. Play is very essential for human development, for human social development, and especially in thinking about others. Social play often involves pretend I’m pretending to be my dad. And I have to imagine in that role, what does he want to do? What kind of thing would he do? And it’s through exercises and games like that, that we start to appreciate. Not everybody knows what we know that other people have their own beliefs and knowledge different from our own. And we go from being like the piagetian ego to being someone who appreciates that others have minds and you have to think about others’ perspectives. And that leads to our social community today. Whether non-humans could do that wasn’t obvious, but I thought maybe in play you would see it because social play is this fast paced kind of rambunctious interaction where they’re using a lot of behaviors that in other contexts might be aggressive behaviors or mating behaviors or somewhat violent, biting and tackling.

And so the whole thing can only work if each of them is gauging whether the other participant sort of understands the game and is still in the game. And so I was looking at these behaviors that the dogs did called play signals, which basically frames the whole play. It’s something like a play bow, which most people live with dogs are familiar with, where the dog puts their front legs down and the rump up high and wags their tail. And it’s an invitation to play essentially, but it’s also saying something like everything that happens after this is play. So if I do that and you play bow back and then I bite you, you don’t think, “Hey,” you don’t get defensive and bite me back except for as a play bite. You realize it’s all in play. We’re now participating in a game. So it’s like this meta-communication that changes the nature of all of the things I say after that.

And I realized that dogs were using these play signals really intentionally. They were using them with attention to whether the other dog was able to receive the signal, for instance. It’s no good doing the signal if you’ve got your back turned. It’s no good doing the signal if you’re facing the other way, you’re engaged with somebody else, you’re interacting with a person. I have to get your attention, make sure it’s at me, and then do the signal. And that’s what dogs did.

And what I loved about that was that that is the type of thinking about other minds that we do naturally all the time. If I want to talk to you, Debbie, like I wait till you’re not talking to somebody else, and then I start talking and then I pause to see if you’ve understood that I’m talking to you. If I can’t get your attention by waiting, I tap you on the shoulder or I call out or something like that. And this type of use of attention in communication is very natural to us, but it’s also indicative that we’re appreciating that other people have their own minds and they’re engaged in their own things and that if we want to communicate, we have to engage them in their attention first. So dogs, were doing precisely the same thing.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written about how language marks the difference between human memory and dog memory. And I recently interviewed Temple Grandin who has done a lot of work in animal cognition and she’s posited that animals might think in pictures. And I was wondering what your thoughts might be on the ways in which dogs can think.

Alexandra Horowitz:

I think that’s perfectly possible. It’s interesting because it’s very hard for humans to imagine that animals are thinking if they’re not thinking in words or pictures. But I certainly want to imagine as well that they’re thinking in smells. What would that mean for us? It’s very hard for us to think about that, right? Because again, we kind of verbalize or we image it, but the fact that they know that something’s happened, they’re anticipating what’s going to happen next, that something is happening for them at that moment. To me, that’s not a question. Thinking is happening. So then the question is, well, what was the nature of that? It’s probably the nature of their perception generally. And most non-humans are actually pretty olfactory, not just dogs, but lots of non-humans. So maybe it’s also thinking in smells and sounds.

Debbie Millman:

Well, a nose of a beagle, for example, has 300 million receptor sites compared with the human being’s nose, which has only six million. So dogs smell fundamentally differently than humans. And from what I understand, I’ve learned through reading your books that a dog’s sniff is actually different than ours, as well as their exhale. So much so that their exhale actually enhances their sense of smell. How does that actually work?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Who knew that one could have a better or worse sniff, but it turns out our sniffs are pretty bad. Their whole anatomy is set up to enable olfactory information to get to the brain, and that includes all those receptor sites where odors connect to the cell and it causes the cell to fire and it sends a signal to the brain, but it’s also just anatomy. It’s the muscles of the nostrils that allow them to sniff up to seven times a second. Something that for us would be basically hyperventilation, but an analogy would be in the 60 frames per second that our eyes are able to see and our brains make into fluid motion. Since this is their picture of the world, they don’t want to be constantly releasing the picture every time they exhale. The way we get rid of a smell is we exhale through our in nostrils.

If you are in the New York City in the summer and it smells like garbage, you might just exhale through your nose and that literally displaces the odor molecules from the back of your nose so that you, at that moment, aren’t smelling the smell of garbage. But dogs don’t want to. That’s their scene of the world. So they instead have these side slits and that’s how they exhale. And then that does kind of create a little vortex. People who’ve study airflow have shown that helps hurry in the next snout full of air. So everything about them is designed to allow them to see the world through smell.

Debbie Millman:

They can also tell time through smell, I’ve learned through your work. I’m wondering if you can share how they do that.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Well, this is my positing based on something on the nature of smell. So an interesting thing about the vision is that light travels so quickly that when we open our eyes, the world just appears, and that seems straightforward to us. But if you look at any other medium, you see that that’s not at all straightforward. That’s not how other media work at all, right? If you’re in sound travels through air. And similarly, odors need to travel on the breeze. Odors that you smell in your nose are something called volatile organic compounds. That just means molecules that are light enough to go up your nose, so they have to be in the air to be smelled. Well, they get in the air on the breeze, and there isn’t a constant breeze. It’s not like opening your eyes and seeing the room. Air flow determines how you’re going to smell something, and similarly, odors will decay over time. That determines what you smell.

So there’s been this little bit of research on tracking dogs. These researchers asked if they could tell which way a missing person had gone, and the dog was able to tell just through sniffing five footsteps which way the person had gone. And that is because they could differentiate the odor concentration from the first to the fifth footstep. There was less odor in the first footstep and more in the fifth. Another way of thinking about that is the first footstep was older. It actually told the story of something in the past, the more distant past than the fifth footstep. The fifth footstep is newer.

So I very much see odors as inherently carrying time information in them. When a dog leaves their house and they stick their nose on the ground and smell whatever is on the sidewalk or the patch of grass, they’re basically collecting information about whoever has passed by. Nobody is there at that moment, but whatever dog or person or food or bird has been by, there’s some olfactory evidence of their presence. Similarly, if they stick their nose up into the breeze, they might catch the odor of someone who’s about to come around the corner, whose olfactory information is being carried ahead of them. So dogs, in that one moment to us, for us, which is just one visual moment, are experiencing a little bit of the past and a little bit of the future.

Debbie Millman:

That’s incredible. Alexandra, what is a dog’s sense of time and absence? I’m always worried then when I leave a dog alone, when in the past when I left Scruffy and Duff by themselves or now when I leave Max by himself, he might think that we’re never coming back. Do they remember that I’ve left or we’ve left before and always come back? Is there any sort of repetitive cognition that they can sort of hang their hats on, so to speak?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah. I think one of the most agreeable things about dogs living with us is that they’re really creatures of habit. So if we establish patterns, habitual patterns with them, they learn those really rapidly. And this is exactly how, for instance, your dog knows if you get up at the same time of day to feed them or go for a walk, right? They are sensitive to our behavior and they learn our habits by the same regard. If you left for work every day, were gone for six hours and came back. They get sensitive to that period of time and know approximately when you’re going to return.

Now, some people think, well, that’s not the case. I just go to my basement and I come back up and my dog is so delighted to see me. But there was actually research that looked at the intensity of the greeting that dogs give to their people when somebody’s been gone a half an hour or an hour or several hours, and it’s more intense the longer you’ve been gone, right? They’re sensitive to that feeling of the time that you’ve been missing, but they all also are very adaptable and will endure the same time again and again and again without over anxiety that this time you’re gone for good.

Debbie Millman:

In addition to all of your teaching in research, you also write books. Your first book, Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, came out in 2009, became a New York Times number one bestseller, spent 64 weeks on the bestseller list. I read an interview wherein someone asked you how you became a writer, and you stated, “I wrote a book and people started calling me a writer.” But you are such a beautiful writer, you have such a way with language. How did you get to be such a good writer?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Thank you. I mean, I think whatever writing skill I have is how every writer has her skill, which is through reading, through an interest in language, through an enjoyment of the playfulness of language. And here there’s an evocation of my dad again and his enjoyment in the sometimes silliness of language and how one can be playful even with a serious topic. So I was just like so many others, a profligate reader, and then whatever I create is simply a result of that plus time.

Debbie Millman:

Your most recent book, The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves, is part memoir, part book of science. The book is about your quest to understand the science of early dog development by studying the behavior of your own brand new puppy. And sort of reminded me, you mentioned Jean Piaget. Yeah, and this was psychologist before, and he used his own children as subjects in formulating his theories about developmental psychology. Was that intentional in getting your-

Alexandra Horowitz:

Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:

… puppy to figure it out?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yes, exactly. I couldn’t bear any dogs myself, but I thought I could do one better. I could just adopt a dog and subject them to the same type of scrutiny that really I subject all my subjects to, but not my child and live with them at the same time.

Debbie Millman:

Your new puppy entered your world in the spring of 2020 and your family at the time included what you’ve described as three reasonable humans, you, your husband and your son, two elderly dogs and one contented cat in a home that was replete with animal fur. The pandemic was just taking hold. What made you decide to get a puppy at that particular moment?

Alexandra Horowitz:

This was an accident. I was interested in following litters of dogs who had been fostered by shelters and individuals associated with those shelters, and then following all of the puppies during their early development. And I was looking for multiple litters to follow. I happened to be following one litter in upstate New York of 11 puppies when suddenly it was March 13th, our world shut down on itself. And I realized, “I’m probably not going to be led into people’s homes to watch their litters of puppies develop. I bet not only is this the last litter I’m going to watch for a while, but this is the litter from which we should get a puppy.” So I hadn’t been thinking that there would be a puppy in this litter. I wanted to collect a lot of information from a lot of exposures, but circumstances dictated it.

Debbie Millman:

Talk about how you chose your particular dog from that litter and why you named the dog Quiddity, which literally means the essence of something. Why that name?

Alexandra Horowitz:

And in fact, also is a title of a philosopher’s book, WV Quine, he called it Quiddities. So there was a philosophy connection, but that was unintentional. Once I realized we were going to adopt a puppy in this litter, I had a kind of panic, which was that as a scientist, even one who doesn’t proclaim to be a scientist of early dog development per se, I thought, “Well, I should be able to predict, I should be able to know which the perfect puppy is for our family.” Not the perfect puppy, they’re all perfect, but which one would suit our funny little family unit best. And I really couldn’t tell. All of them had these becoming characteristics. They were all becoming themselves. Their personalities were starting to diverge, their behavior was starting to be individuated. And I couldn’t tell happily the foster who was taking care of all these heroically taken care of all these puppies and the mother had met all the people who wanted to adopt puppies and kind of preassigned several puppies to each one as possible choices.

And in our group, she assigned one female to us and I was sort of interested in a little bit of female energy in our otherwise male environment of both dogs and my husband and son being male. So we chose the female, but it was a little bit out of my control. And I think that’s just as well actually. What we could control was her name. And I’m very keen on naming. I think naming a dog is a great part of entering them into your family. I’ve done a little study on names where of the several thousand people who contributed to this study, many of them would contribute part of each member of the family to the dog’s name.

And I think that’s just wonderful because it’s part of including them right away conspiratorially, kind of like you’re part of us already. And so our way of doing that was we just all chose names of the three humans in our family. We eliminated them in various rounds. And then my son kind of chose the final name, which was Quid. I don’t know if he knew what quid meant exactly, if he’d read it somewhere. I guess he was 10 at the time. But it sounded just delightful enough. And then with its lengthening as Quiddity as the essence of a thing, it seems like this puppy being the essence of dog, was going to really represent her for us.

Debbie Millman:

I was surprised to read that Quid’s mother, who had been extremely dotting since birth to all of her pups, began to find them irritating as they got older. Through reading the book, I began to understand that pups become much better at learning skills from other dogs or even humans, pretty much any dog other than their moms after a certain age. And even free-ranging dogs tend to drift away from their mothers and puppies form much longer-lasting bonds with their siblings. Is this an advantage from an evolutionary point because of how many puppies get separated from their mothers?

Alexandra Horowitz:

A number of interesting things have happened in the transition from wolves to dogs in wolf packs. Often the young wolves will stay with the pack. Wolf packs are really just family packs, multi-generational family packs. Maybe a male will go off and forge his own way, or female will go off and forge her way with another male. But with dogs, just think about it. They have to be flexible enough to live with another family and not just another family, but a human family, a family that’s not of their species. And the way that dogs have changed in order to accommodate this is kind of twofold. Dogs can give birth twice a year, so they go into heat approximately every six months. If that’s the case, then you have to imagine that your previous litter had better be pretty well on their way before that next litter comes along.

So kind of biology might start the process here. And then secondarily, while that mother dog is taking care of her litter, it’s a completely full-time job. I mean, this particular dog, Maze, had 11 puppies. They are born unable to do a thing they can’t see, they can’t smell. They can barely move. They could just about lift their head and suckle, they can’t maintain their own body temperature. They can’t excrete for themselves. Their mom has to prompt their excretions and then clean up after them. So it’s a full-time responsibility with these 11 puppies for several weeks of feeding, warming and cleaning them. And it’s appropriate that as they start to get bigger, more capable, a few weeks in, they can eat food other than milk that she starts to similarly distance herself from them and make things a little more challenging instead of lying down to let them nurse standing up and making them kind of reach for her belly if they want to nurse, for instance.

And then as they get more rambunctious, scolding them a little bit and telling them, you just can’t jump on me and bite me all the time, which is the type of thing a parent should do and tell their young ones. And so that’s when they start turning to their siblings more and learning more from their siblings. That actually does equip them pretty well to moving on to a different family, a different world. Hopefully in there too, there’s an exposure to people. And not in every free ranging population will there be, but ideally in any population of dogs that’s being bred or raised from a shelter, there will be humans in there from the very early weeks until they’re adopted out so that dogs just know to interact with them.

Debbie Millman:

How traumatic is it to separate a dog from their mother and siblings?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I don’t think it’s hugely traumatic. I mean, I think at its essence, the mom is ready to be done with the pups, is no longer looking to sleep with them, is no longer counting them. Sure, they are go toward each other, but I don’t think that they’re heavily bonded. Siblings too, similarly, they’re attached but not permanently bonded. What I think can be traumatic is that they’re going from this pile of dogs who they live on and around and follow everywhere and who follow them to often these very isolated situations in human families, I thought about it a lot with this puppy.

You never saw the dogs not on top of each other when they were sleeping and eating, climbing over each other in full body contact. But one of the first things that we tend to do in America, in 21st century America, with dogs is put them in a crate by themselves. And that’s very isolating, and I think that’s challenging. I think that itself is challenging, but if instead they get to be proximate to the other warm bodies in the house, it seems to me that the transition is actually often very smooth.

Debbie Millman:

You brought Quid home when she was about 10 weeks old and chartered her growth from “wee grub to boisterous sprite, from her birth to her first birthday.” And very surprisingly, you found that you didn’t quite take to Quid right away. I was so surprised by this. Why?

Alexandra Horowitz:

This is something that I hadn’t anticipated and I actually struggled with whether to put it in the book. And the book wound up being more of a memoir than I thought it would be because I included some of this reaction that I had. I just assumed because I loved visiting the puppies and I love puppies and I’m interested in dogs generally, I’d never meet dogs who I don’t like, right? Frankly, that never happens that I would adore this dog. But instead I was very conscious and with the way I was scrutinizing her behavior, hour by hour, day by day, of the ways that she was disrupting our family and all the relationships in the family between the dogs, with the dogs with the cat, us with the dogs, us with the cat, they were all disrupted by this little chaotic force.

Debbie Millman:

Yes, I’ve been there. Roxanne and I had our biggest fight the weekend we got the dog.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Absolutely. It’s three days later that everybody says, “I think I’ve made a great mistake.” And for me, it lasted longer, I think, because I was less willing to kind of suspend disbelief, and I think I didn’t give her the benefit of the doubt. I was almost too attentive. I think this is one place that maybe my kind of scientific gaze where I was looking at and assessing and analyzing everything led me to have more difficulty falling in love with her than, for instance, my husband and son who were immediately smitten and had no trouble.

And at the same time, also Finnegan, who was our older dog, who has been like, ugh, who’s one of these heart dogs, who I had a terrific relationship with. He’s in every of one of my books, and who was, at the time, 12 and a half, started to suffer from a degenerative disease and he was moving much less well. And I could see his vitality dim even as hers shown so brightly and it felt unfair. It felt like an unfair trade to me, and it was hard for me to release that and just take in the kind of joyousness of her presence purely.

Debbie Millman:

Quid is two and a half now. How has she changed and what is your relationship like with her now?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Well, I love her now. Now, she’s terrific. She’s a complete delight really. She’s her own dog. She’s not the dog I would have anticipated. She’s not the dog I would have chosen. She has energies that are inexplicable to me, could chase a ball until she’s exhausted and I don’t understand that. I don’t appreciate it. But I-

Debbie Millman:

She’s not a cerebral dog.

Alexandra Horowitz:

She’s not a thinker. I think it became easier for me actually to see her for herself after our older dogs passed, which they sadly did about a year ago.

Debbie Millman:

I know. I’m so sorry.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Thank you. I wrote an obituary for Finnegan.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. In the New York Times, which is absolutely stunning. Stunning.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Which I think there should be more of, frankly, because that’s a real relationship with a real individual whose death needs marking. And yet for the same reason, I was able to see her a little bit better and her grief actually and her feeling of loss of these siblings. She was quite close to both of them, even though I think that she kind of vexed them as well. After they died, I became closer with Quid.

Debbie Millman:

You write about how dogs are not born understanding the Byzantine rules of human social interaction and the rules of our houses and what we consider appropriate behavior. They don’t understand the pronouns we put on items. This is my bed, this is your bed. They don’t have a clue about the identities we give to objects. That’s a shoe, not a shoe, a chew toy. One of my favorite moments in The Year of the Puppy is actually near the end when you offer a list titled “What You Need to Be Prepared For Your Puppy.” And I’d like to share that list with our listeners now, if you don’t mind.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Sure, sure.

Debbie Millman:

Here’s Alexandra Horowitz’s complete list titled “What You Need To Be Prepared For Your Puppy.” Expect that your puppy will not be who you think nor act as you hope, and that is the complete list. Tell us why that is the list.

Alexandra Horowitz:

I mean, I’m playing with the fact that there are a lot of books which say, “Here’s the list of sort of items you need to buy or things you need to do to train your dog.” And then the whole thing is set, set and done, and you’ve got the good dog for life. And I think that while an attempt to at least superficially prepare people for the upheaval that is adding an individual quadruped wolf descendant to your life, it also is woefully inadequate really. And the thing that’s really happening is that you’re adding an individual person to your life who has their own beliefs and feelings and knowledge and awareness and is very young often and doesn’t know very much. And the best thing you can do is be patient with them. Give them a little benefit of the doubt and let them learn about your world. Help them learn about your world as you learn about them. That’s where the relationship that you want is going to come from, not in getting the equipment and doing the simple training. It starts with being open to a new individual.

Debbie Millman:

When I first, first, first got my dogs as an adult woman on my own, I didn’t know anything about what I was doing. My first dog, Scruffy, I decided to get him when I was going through depression and thought it might help, and bought, I don’t know, hundreds of books on dog training and had to be a good dog mom. And then over the years have been given a lot of dog books and have always been interested in sort of the inner lives of dogs. And I do have to say that there’s absolutely no comparison to the books that you write and every other book I’ve ever read on how to understand dogs.

And I only wish that I had gotten The Year of the Puppy before we got Max. It would’ve helped a great deal. I just have a few more questions for you and then I’ll let you go. Last week, the state of New York banned pet stores from selling dogs, cats, and rabbits. And the ban, which takes effect in December of 2024, is meant to prevent the sale of animals raised by commercial breeders accused of keeping them in inhumane conditions. And I agree with Martha Nussbaum who says that animals have intrinsic dignity. Aside from this ban, how can we help dogs have more dignified existences?

Alexandra Horowitz:

That’s such a great question. I think the answer is in letting them be themselves a little bit more, leaning into their dogness. And I think one of the difficult things about having a dog in contemporary society is that a lot is asked of them, which is kind of fundamentally antagonistic with who they are. They’re asked to stay by themselves for long periods of time, doing nothing, sort of waiting. They’re asked to be still when they’re young and little when they can’t still their bodies yet. They’re asked not to use their mouths when they use their mouths like we use our hands, right?

They’re asked not to sniff things when that’s their way of seeing the world. I think appreciating that the thing we enjoy about living with dogs is their otherness, is the things that are different about them rather than just trying to make them into little mini humans. I think that respects their dignity, and that would be the way, if I were king of the world and I could make us change how we deal with dogs, it would be allowing them to roll in that thing now and then and play with other dogs, splash in the puddles, sniff as long as they want to sniff, follow their impulses somewhat more and celebrate them for who they are, not just try to make them somebody they’re not.

Debbie Millman:

Alexandra, my last question for you is this. Can dogs smile?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yes, they’re smiling much of the time. It’s just not with their mouth. They’re smiling with their tail and body and ears and face, right? They certainly have muscles in their face which are expressions of a smile, but they, like the dolphin, sometimes look like they’re smiling because of their lips. We’re very convinced by that, but it’s more a full body smile, which is I think even more pleasurable.

Debbie Millman:

Alexandra Horowitz, thank you so much for doing so much work in the world that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Alexandra Horowitz:

A complete pleasure, Debbie. Thanks.

Debbie Millman:

Alexandra Horowitz’s latest book is The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. You can find out more about Alexandra Horowitz and her other marvelous books at alexandrahorowitz.com. You can listen to her podcast called Off Leash, which is wonderful wherever you love podcasts, and you can also see more about the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard dogcognition.weebly.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Alexandra Horowitz appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
A good title serves as an invitation, and Martha Wainwright knows not only how to craft that invitation, but how to deliver it in the most persuasive and penetrating manner. One of her most famous songs is titled “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole.” Now, who wouldn’t want to know who that song is about and what wrong they caused? Martha Wainwright’s second album was titled, I Know You’re Married, but I’ve Got Feelings, Too. That, too, was enigmatic. Even the title of her memoir published in 2022 is a bit of a cliffhanger, Stories I Might Regret Telling You. The book is about growing up in a family of rock and roll royalty and how she managed to find her own distinct musical voice. Martha joins me today from Montreal to talk about her life, her memoir, and her latest album with another irresistible title, Love Will Be Reborn. Martha Wainwright, welcome to Design Matters.

Martha Wainwright:
Hi.

Debbie Millman:
Martha, is it true you love the way New York City smells?

Martha Wainwright:
Yes, it is true. That’s something that I wrote in the memoir. I remember as a kid going down three, four times a year to visit my dad. I lived in Montreal, as I do now, when I was a kid. And I just felt that the smell, I think it was the pavement or whatever was happening, whatever was in the air really hit my olfactory sense in a way that excited me and made it unforgettable.

Debbie Millman:
Your memoir, Stories I Might Regret Telling You, came out last year, is now out in paperback. You start the book recounting how your father didn’t want your mother to have you and pressured her to have an abortion. She had you anyway. In his song, “That Hospital,” your dad sings about the experience and he writes, “The little girl that was born there, that escaped that scrape with fate, a few months ago in Montreal, I watched her graduate.” How did you find out you almost weren’t born?

Martha Wainwright:
Well, my dad told me. Which I don’t think was the greatest idea. The book opens up with that scene or it opens up with that truth that I had been told when I was 14 years old, about almost not being born. And it’s not a judgment on the decision to have an abortion or to not have an abortion or whether that was right or wrong or anything like that. It was more a comment on having heard that from a parent at 14, which is already sort of an uncertain age. It’s where I start the book in terms of someone who has always felt a little out of place or not sure of herself or not knowing where to go and how to be. And so it would seem to me to be an obvious springboard into the story. It is certainly a bit of an abrupt start.

He told me late one night and maybe out of remorse, out of sadness, or out of trying to connect. But one of the things also that I think I talked a little bit about in the book, or a realization that I made through writing the book and looking about the relationship with my dad, which has been a distanced one, a loving one, but with a lot of kilometers between us, is that when you don’t bring up your kids on a daily basis, where you’re not taking care of them daily and understanding that dynamic of parent and child and the responsibility of the parent to protect child more. Where it’s not a relationship that is only about honesty and openness and treating them as equals, but there’s a dynamic that is learnt in that daily care. I think when you don’t have that, it’s hard to know how to be with your kids. And that’s what I think maybe Loudon didn’t recognize and maybe it’s not his fault that he didn’t recognize that because he didn’t really know how to be a dad, if that makes sense.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, absolutely. You were born to rock and roll royalty. For our listeners, I just want to sort of paint the picture of your lineage. Your mother and her sister performed as the legendary folk duo Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Your father is the prolific Grammy Award-winning songwriter, Loudon Wainwright III. You describe your brother Rufus Wainwright as one of the most famous singers in the world. Your father’s sister Sloan and your half sister Lucy Wainwright Roche are also singers. Lucy’s actually been on Design Matters as well. Your family is as famous for what they write about in their music as the music itself, and as far as I can tell, there’s no other family in rock and roll history that has ever written more about each other and that includes the Jacksons, the Osmonds, the Staple Singers, even the Braxtons. Do you think that the stories you share about each other are unusual? Or do you think that you’re all just more honest than the other family groups?

Martha Wainwright:
Well, you said rock and roll. I was sort of thinking of it as that kind of folk dynasty more in the sense that it kind of came out of an older type of music. And also folk should be accessible to people usually through talking about humanity or politics or the music of the people. The temperature of what is occurring in the community at that time. And the songwriter tells a story of people behind the scenes and, much of it, behind the walls in the family life, the secrets or the relationships. And so I’ve always found that as songwriters in our family, I think that that’s been something that we all seem to have hooked into. And for better or for worse, we probably would be making more money if we were able to write simpler pop songs just in terms of getting a hook, getting a great line, or whatever.

But I also think, in the case of our family specifically, you talk about my parents, but even before that there was Loudon Wainwright II. Loudon’s dad who-

Debbie Millman:
Famous editor.

Martha Wainwright:
He’s written… Exactly, famous editor. And editorialist. He wrote “A View from Here,” which is a column that was in Life Magazine for 50 years. And he wrote often about his own family and the American family and the dynamic of the family and of course set in the era that he was in and in the story of the day. So that already had started a generation before. And there was a struggle between him and his son, my dad, Loudon Wainwright III. So already this sort of father son competition, which my dad has written about a lot in songs and contemplated that relationship with his dad and then, of course, with his son Rufus. Where they have a competitive element to it.

Less and less, but certainly at the beginning of Rufus’s career, Rufus’s career was very illustrious and impressive and exciting. And Loudon has been honest in his anxiety around it. But that kind of dynamic that we seem to see over and over and over again in literature and in people’s lives. And it’s this willingness to talk about it that is sort of surprising and not often done in the form of a song and over several generations and in response to a family member’s other song or whatever. I don’t know if it’s unprecedented, this thing of songwriting in response to one another with these intimate relationships. But the thing that I always find about it is that the more personal that we get, the more I think people see themselves and feel connected to the stories because they recognize them as something that is similar or has commonalities with their own lives.

Debbie Millman:
In many ways, they’re Shakespearean stories. You also write quite candidly about your relationship with your mother, sharing both the sublime and the difficult. And you revealed that since you were old enough to understand words, she told you how hardheaded you were, how you had a chip on your shoulder. She didn’t like these qualities in you, and you state that you didn’t like these qualities in you either. So I have two questions about this. Did you agree with her about those qualities? And how do you feel about those qualities now?

Martha Wainwright:
I was able to talk openly about my mother because she’s dead. I don’t know where our relationship was going and where it would’ve evolved to, but when she was diagnosed with cancer when she was 60, my relationship with her changed. The conflict and the anger that I had towards her, I wanted to really flip that around and have the remaining time that I had with her to be very loving and make up for some of the bad stuff that we had gone through. Maybe that would’ve happened over time naturally, but I really knew that our time was limited. So I really wanted to consider all those things that she told me and all those things that affected me, that made me sad or upset when I was younger, whether it was, as you say, being too hardheaded or being overly earnest and things that she felt were not great qualities.

And I think that they stung because I was afraid that she was right. And maybe that was why she was telling them to me, because she wanted me to face some of those facts about it. I certainly believed her because she was a very believable person and because I was, as I said, afraid that she might be right and I wanted to adjust. Looking back, I don’t think that she was right. And she was probably not right to say anything too negative about her kids because I don’t really know if much good can come out of it. But it did form me and it did propel me to write in a way that was in-your-face and was confrontational with a lot of emotion and with vulnerability and anger. And so that defined my artistry at a young age and I did push back.

She created an environment where I was then able to gain confidence through this songwriting style. And she was really impressed by the first set of songs that I wrote and quickly changed her tune. And as she watched me though, start my career, which was a very rocky start, and was filled with insecurity and insecurity that she had probably partially caused, and also excess and mistakes. And she also was worried about that and those behaviors in me and she would warn me. And I think, in that instance, she was correct. And she was a concerned mother. And so I don’t fault her for that at all. And when, at 30, I discovered that she was sick, or we discovered, I really wanted to turn things around to show her before she left this earth that I was going to be okay. And that was hard to do, but it was a good thing for me to do and she helped me do it, too.

Debbie Millman:
While you lived with your mom and brother in Montreal for most of the time, when you were 14, you went to live with your dad for a year when your mom and her sister went on the road. And you’ve written about how during that year you lived with Loudon, you became more like him as if the DNA in you that came from him started to wake up, almost like a switch got turned on. Was that when you first considered becoming a musician as well?

Martha Wainwright:
Well, that year, I was attending Friends Seminary in Manhattan and I had a math teacher who was very frustrated with my performance, with my homework and my work ethic, and she said, “What do you want to do all your life? Sing and dance?” Of course, the answer was yes. I didn’t say anything, I just sort of listened to her. But it was a great realization and helpful to me to think, “Okay, I don’t have to put this pressure on myself to say, what am I going to do? Am I going to become a mathematician? Am I going to become an accountant? Am I going to become a lawyer? Am I going to become…”

There was so many people around me that were quite high-achieving as well. You know, go to a school like Friends Seminary that has a lot of people who are very upwardly mobile. My mother was really high achieving. I’d been to some pretty good schools, so there was a pressure to succeed. And so when she said that, I thought, “Well, that’s probably not the worst route for me. That’s probably my best bet.” So that was a relief. And at first, when at 14, I was more interested in theater because I was appalled at the amount of songwriting that was going on around me. And Rufus was constantly on the piano banging away. So I thought, “Well, theater could be more for me.” And I wanted to do very serious plays and be a serious actress. And then of course I started writing songs a few years later and that seemed a lot easier than trying to do a Pinter play or something.

Debbie Millman:
I love the part of memoir where you audition for the National Theater School of Canada with a monologue from Antigone. Talk about a high bar. How did you learn how to write music? I know your dad gave you a Sigma guitar when you were 13. Did he teach you how to play? Did you teach yourself how to play? Did Rufus or Kate teach you how to play the piano?

Martha Wainwright:
Loudon wasn’t around. He gave me the guitar, but my mom showed me three chords. So I got the guitar when I was 12 and didn’t touch it much. I was taught an A chord, a D chord, and a G chord, and maybe an E chord. Three or four chords, which are all you need to write any masterpiece, really. Your muscles have to start to be able to play those things because it hurts. So I did not have any guitar lessons or anything like that. And my brother was always on the piano, so I didn’t play the piano. I did not have a guitar teacher. I played a little bit of violin, so I knew how to read music and my fingers could move a little bit on the fretboard. But it was really my mother who taught me those chords. And then she taught me a simple picking pattern. And very much by just doing it over and over and over again, you get faster and faster and faster and it’s easier and easier.

So a very simple rhythm guitar style. And I wasn’t obsessive about it, I wasn’t passionate about it, but once I could play a few chords, then I could accompany myself. And that’s where it got exciting for me. And so generally, I remember it started with learning some Elvis Presley songs, country songs. Things like that are really easy. So “That’s All Right Now, Mama” and things like that, where I could accompany myself and sing. That would’ve been at around, I don’t know, 15 or something like that. And I could perform that. I could play at a talent show or something. And that was exciting because that was a freedom where just me and this simple instrument that I don’t need to plug in can sort of create a sound that is independent. That was powerful. And then soon after, I tried writing songs and things came.

Debbie Millman:
You say this about your voice in the book, and I’d like to read it verbatim. “One person’s voice is handed to them like a gift. Another person has to create a voice literally in her gut, her heart, her throat. Some people seem to channel someone else’s voice, taking it on and welcoming it. Your body is your own, but sometimes it’s also a tool for someone else to come through. Sometimes singing feels like a skill and sometimes it feels like an art. Singing has saved my life. Sometimes I feel that if it weren’t for being able to sing, I would not be here. I would’ve died by misadventure or taken my own life, but that might be a load of cow shit. I can really sit in sadness, as you might have guessed, but I can get out of it pretty easily, too often by singing.”

Martha, over the years, how have you found your own voice? And when did you realize that you’re really a fine original singer?

Martha Wainwright:
Well, I think that my own voice was always there, but it wasn’t appreciated by others. Or if it was appreciated by others, going back to some personality traits that weren’t very useful to me, I either didn’t believe them or I didn’t want their opinion or recommendation. So there was a hardheadedness.

Recently, I found some recordings of me singing as a kid. My mother and Aunt Anna McGarrigle did some music for some kids’ movies in the eighties and nineties, and they had me sing a couple of songs for the credits and things like that. And I sound just like I sound today, I sound like I’m eight and I sound like I’ve been smoking for a bunch of years, but I’m a little pitchy, it’s a little off-key. I’m twanging. I’m bending the node. I’m not doing it probably how a director would’ve wanted me to do it.

It’s the kind of thing where I would’ve gotten to the callback but not gotten the part because I wasn’t willing to bend to what the director needed me to do. And it was a hardheadedness and a sort of unwillingness to change. But in a way then, what happened is that people had to come to me rather than me come to them, in some ways, artistically. And when I was writing songs and doing shows and trying to get a record label in my twenties, I was not fitting a mold that was suitable for record labels. And producers worked with me and they tried to adjust my songwriting and I was difficult to work with.
Not that I wasn’t nice, but I just sort of walked out of the situation or turned away from it or sabotaged it in some way. And I guess I just wanted them to like me for who I am and who I was. It took time for that to happen, but I think that it made it set when the first record came out and to the larger public, people remarked on its originality or something. Not that musically, it wasn’t super original. It wasn’t like crazy or anything musically. But I think that the singing voice and the songwriting was different than other people’s and it was remarked on. That was the way I had to get there.

Debbie Millman:
In an old interview I read in Believer Magazine, you stated that to create a rhythm, you play the guitar more violently than most women play the guitar. And then in various places throughout the memoir, you talk about being intimidated by guitar playing and that you wish that you were better at it. If you were better at it, do you think you would be less distinctive? You have a very distinctive style to your playing.

Martha Wainwright:
That’s interesting. That is true. I worked for a long time with a piano player who was classically trained, and it was early on, and he was always so surprised at my chord choices and some of the things I did musically because he found it to be quite sophisticated. But it wasn’t that I was sophisticated, it was actually just completely naive. And it was by not knowing what I was playing, that I sort of went to a different chord that people would normally go to or say, “Okay, well yeah, after this chord, you can go here, here, or here.” But because I had to try out many things, I was not as constrained, in a way. And he was really envious of that because for him, having music been drilled into him, he felt that he was not as creative as maybe he wished he could be in that way.

He’s creative in other ways and I’m envious of his ability to play. But I thought that that was an interesting positive thing about not being sure of what you’re doing. And yes, I think that because I don’t play licks on the guitar or play the melody a lot on the guitar, I play a more rhythm guitar style. So my left hand is kind of quite limited to what it’s doing, and I’m not playing lead guitar. What that means is that I have to accompany myself and there has to be quite a bit going on in the guitar. So it has to get loud, it has to get quiet, it has to be dug in, it has to have maybe an interesting open chord every once in a while. The guitar does have to do a lot with a little. The skills aren’t that huge there, so I think that I’m trying to use the skills that I do have to their fullest.

Debbie Millman:
Rufus is a few years older than you, so it’s not surprising that he signed a record deal before you did. He started touring the world and you, at that time, became his backup singer and joined fellow backup singer Joan Wasser, now known as Joan As Police Woman on the road. Joan has also been on the show and is a dear friend. What was that like for you to be a backup singer? And I think it seemed, from what I read, to be a very formative time for you.

Martha Wainwright:
It was really defining for me, musically. Before Rufus put out records, I was his backup singer in Montreal, and he would play weekly shows when he was 19, 20 and I was 17. I probably was 16 when we started and when he was first writing his first songs. And those first set of songs, not all of them, but quite a few of them had me on them singing sort of a duet. He would write everything. It wasn’t my making, he would tell me very specifically what to sing. But we practiced for hours and hours a day and performed them a lot, around Montreal in particular, sometimes in New York. And this was before he got a record deal. So it was about two or three years of that and just him showing me, asking me to sing things that were really not in my brain at all. Sing really high, sing low, follow his melody in harmony, sustained notes for a really long time, because he has a really impressive voice. Rufus really put me through my paces.

It was kind of quite acrobatic, his parts that he would write.. And maybe he was torturing me, maybe he was doing it on purpose and he would make us practice over and over and over again, and then I would just kind of get angry. I’d be like, “I’m out of here.” But that listening capacity that he created in me, and of course, my mother loved watching this. Obviously she had sung her whole life with her sister more as a duet, but just seeing her two kids sing together and blending and doing that sort of classic family sound thing that happens when families hang together and made her so happy. I think it, at first, she would’ve wanted us to do some type of a duet thing. And then, of course, it was really obvious that both of us were really also wanted to do our own thing and that wasn’t going to work, as we would end up killing each other. But it was such a huge thing.

And then when he did get his record deal and I came down and I recorded those songs and then we went on the road for his first record and then his second record. Just touring with him, he brought me to Japan, he brought me all over Europe, all over the United States. We were opening up for people like Roxy Music and big, big bands. Then he would have his shows. And then I became his opening act, oftentimes, and I had little EPs that I had pressed up myself with my own songs on them. And they weren’t available in stores, and so I would sell them in his shows and people were really impressed with me and intrigued and because they couldn’t buy the CD in the store, I would sometimes sell a hundred CDs a night.

And I’d have these wads of cash in my top drawer and I was able to make a living, because of Rufus, starting from the age of 20 years old. I was selling my CD at his shows, walking away with a grand a night and paying my rent. And it was really, as I say, formative and helpful. And then, it was time to move on. It was time to be like, “Okay, well now I want to do my own thing.” But I don’t know if I would’ve… He’s just a huge part of my story and my parents are, too. There’s just no way around it.

Debbie Millman:
You write about how you also had the opportunity to audition as a backup singer for Leonard Cohen. And this was something you had dreamed of since you were a little girl. You had met him when you were very little. In the end, you decided not to take the job. How come?

Martha Wainwright:
Well, I didn’t audition, so I can’t say that I think I would’ve gotten the job or I could have gotten the job. So I was a huge, and still am, Leonard fan as a young person, as a 14, 15-year-old. I got obsessed and went to go see him play in Montreal. And just the dynamic that he had with his backup singers always. They played such a huge role, which I think was why I felt so comfortable singing with Rufus and playing a big role because they are really present, his singers. So that was like, “Wow, what a great job. That’s what I want to do. That’s the job that I want.” And I knew a lot of the songs. And so when he was putting together the band for his comeback world takeover, which was so amazing, I was hanging out with his daughter because we were really close friends and she said, “Oh, well…”

And I had met Leonard a bunch of times. He had been to my shows, we knew each other. He was a really big fan. She’s like, “You got to go do the audition. You’re totally going to get the part. It’s perfect. We’ll be on the road together. It’s going to be really fun.” We were like, this is a good plan. But right at that time, I had already made I think two records, my career was taking off, and I realized that that’s not what I wanted to do, even though it’s a great job. But it’s not what I wanted to do.

Debbie Millman:
You state that you don’t really hear music in your head and you don’t go around jotting down bits of lyrics on scraps of paper. How do you go about writing a song?

Martha Wainwright:
God, I can’t remember. You’re making me nervous because it’s been a while. I’ve been working so hard. I’ve been touring a lot and promoting the book as well, and I have two kids, and so it’s been a busy time. I haven’t sat down to-

Debbie Millman:
We’ll talk about the magnificence of Love Will Be Reborn in a few moments and about the most recent songs.

Martha Wainwright:
Yes. So I haven’t had a chance in the last year and I have to start writing songs. But generally what happens, or what has happened in the past over the last almost 30 years, is I get so upset and riled up and kind of like buzzing almost because I haven’t been writing or whatever the reason is that life is stored up in me. And then I start, just with the guitar on the couch, start with some chords usually. And then maybe a line will come, or two lines, a phrase. Just things that are like a hook phrase that seem poetic, that seem like there’s a lot in them where you can go, and that are really a direct reflection of how I’m feeling or what’s going on.

And so usually I can identify pretty quickly, “Oh, okay, I’m saying this or I’m writing this because this is how I’m feeling because such and such thing happened last week.” And then that helps me to then compose the song. And when I can go deeper into that and use examples of daily life, usually, to illustrate it. Or people or relationships. A lot of the songs are about love and falling in love, falling out of love, being in love with people who aren’t in love with you. And then, of course, that gets transferred to children and to friendships.

Debbie Millman:
You state that you write maybe five songs in a good year. Do you write a song until you think it’s good or do you write a lot of rejected songs? What is the way in which the songs end up on an album?

Martha Wainwright:
Well, I think that most of them are kept. Sometimes I’ll combine, if I have some cool chords in a melody that I like and I’m working on two separate things, and then I realize that they’re not fully formed things, I’ll say, “Okay, well maybe I can use that as a section or something. Or maybe I can add to it.” Some songs are written quicker than others or easier, and other ones are toiled over for a long time and I write five songs a year or something like that.

But I also find that there seems to be three or four or five maybe different ways of doing it. There’s certain songs, and all songwriters are like this, I think, they have songs that are similar sounding. They have, that’s a set of songs that sound sort of a… And then they have another type of songwriting where those are kind of similar, and it’s not that they’re writing the same song over and over, but there is an element of that, too. I think that that’s also comforting to the listener. Someone turns on, whether it’s Bruce Springsteen or somebody who has a real sound, Neil Young or whatever, they want to hear that sound.

Debbie Millman:
You talk about how you’ve walked away from commercial opportunities because you’re hardheaded and want to do things your own way and go on to state that the truth is, for the last 25 years, you’ve made and played music and gotten good at it. The overall goal is to enjoy playing, but also to get to do it in front of millions of people. Most musicians want this, but the reality is more difficult and complicated. Recognition is essential for the ego, but you don’t need recognition to play music. After all, it’s a natural expression that has been commodified to produce a financial benefit. Martha, I’m wondering how hard is it to straddle the continuum of commodification versus poverty versus artistry?

Martha Wainwright:
In my case, the reasons for making music have changed over time, which is kind of great because it keeps it fresh. There’s always a love to make music, and obviously, it’s the only thing that I know how to do at this point. So I can’t have any other real skills for me to be able to have another profession. It would be really hard to start again at something. But certainly now, having two kids and being the sole money maker and the responsibility of that, working becomes really, truly a necessity, like it is for everybody. That’s not how I felt about it when I was in my twenties. I enjoyed making money and spending the money, but now the money has taken on another type of importance, which is to create something that I can leave behind for the kids, mainly. And also where I can work enough, I make enough money so that I don’t always have to work because then I can be with the kids and take care of them because they’re in school and they can’t go on the road and things like that.

So that for me, at this stage in my life is a really big, big part of it. That being said, I just got back from a tour yesterday. I was in Norway and Sweden for a week. The week before I was with my kids in Montreal. The week before that I was in Holland for a week. I do week on, week off. When I’m there, playing to however many people it is, whether it’s a hundred people or a thousand people, it is the same as it always was, in terms of hoping that people come, hoping that people like it, wanting to give them a great 90 minutes, wanting to sing as well as possible, trying to achieve on stage.

Also, some magic. Sometimes there’s magic, sometimes there isn’t magic. But if there is no magic that there has to be, it has to seem like there is. And that’s really important so that it’s always good. And sometimes you think, as a performer, you think either it’s magic and it’s not as magical as the night before when you thought it wasn’t magic. You’re not in control of the same thing. But I guess what I’m saying is that even though the motives have changed a little bit, there’s always been the same person there doing the same instinct in me to do it.

Debbie Millman:
Last year, you released a new album titled Love Will Be Reborn. Critics have declared this album to be the very best of your career to date, which is saying a lot. I read that you wrote the title track in a very dark time. But the positivity and luminosity of Love Will Be Reborn, in many ways, has predicted your future. Despite how long it might take you to write songs is true that you wrote, love will be Reborn in 10 minutes?

Martha Wainwright:
Pretty much. It was really quick. It just flew out of me. I’m really hoping that that happens again, because I hadn’t written the song in a while, either. And there was a lot going on that was really dark. I’d started divorce proceedings, which quickly got really scary. And I was really scared and I was out on the road without the kids and feeling like, “Oh, my God.”

I was promoting the last record, a record called Goodnight City, and just really afraid. And then as you said, it was so surprising that this thing just flew out of me that was very positive and I just really took it as almost like a prayer. I’m not religious, but it felt like something to hold onto, like “Well, maybe if I keep saying this and saying this good thing and sort of believing this thing that things will get better.”
And that did happen. And the song is not about a man, but it’s about love in general, with everybody.

But love did come back into my life with a man, which was really surprising. And then just wanting peace and hopefully achieving peace, obviously with the father of my children would be, really, the best possible outcome. So it came quickly and I was really happy to know that that meant that there’s things that we’re not even in control of that are just in there. That was a relief.

Debbie Millman:
You start the album with a really, really ferocious song, “Middle of the Lake,” which felt a bit like a departure for you and in an arrival in a new place, musically. Can you talk a little bit about the way in which you used howling and screaming to amplify that song? It’s such a great song.

Martha Wainwright:
Thank you so much. Well, that was definitely, I put that the song first because it’s different than a lot of the rest of the record. And it was the last song that I actually wrote for that record. And it does have a lot of sonic… I’m singing in these different ways and I’m singing high and low and yelling and whispering, and I’m singing the backup parts, so there’s a lot of me in there, but it’s kind of a different me.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, for the first time, I felt like, “Huh, Martha maybe was influenced a little bit by Kate Bush in this.”

Martha Wainwright:
Yeah. Well, of course I am influenced by Kate Bush, not so obviously by [inaudible 00:39:48]

Debbie Millman:
No, not at all.

Martha Wainwright:
And adored her music. I’m influenced by the McGarrigles, and I know that she was influenced by the McGarrigles, but letting the female voice really dance wildly in a way that’s just so powerful, which I think that is what the female voice has been doing forever. It’s like, totally… I don’t know if it’s witchy, I don’t really know what that word really means. But just allowing that kind of total, unbridled, uncontrolled female self be there. And it’s not coquettish or intentionally sexy or for the purpose of attracting men. It seems more on its own, more natural, and with nature as well.

Debbie Millman:
So interesting. I think it’s one of your sexiest songs, actually. In thinking about it. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, there’s a Kate Bush-ness to it. There’s a Bjork-ness to it. There’s a very much a Martha Wainwright-ness to it. It felt like listening to that song, especially, it’s the opening, that you had reached a whole new level of your artistry. And then you bring in “Report Card” after it. And I was like, “Okay, I need a day off.”

Martha Wainwright:
Yeah, no, that song I think is really intense, too. No, I’m going to agree with the critics and say that this is my best record, because like the first record, it came out of a long time in the making and a lot of things having happened and a lot of pivotal things happening. And the first record is really about… It’s like revving up. But this record, to me, seems about really understanding and taking control. Also rejecting some of the things through my past that have been not helpful and difficult and unnecessary. So a real rebirth and a better second half to life than first half, possibly. And I think that that’s the theme of the record and also the book.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, you state that at the end, that you’re about hopefully half only halfway through. Talk about “Report Card.” It’s a long song, for you. It’s quiet. It’s heartbreaking. I think it may be the saddest song you’ve ever written. What motivated it?

Martha Wainwright:
The saddest thing that I’ve ever dealt with, sadder than losing a boyfriend or losing my mother or anything that I had ever experienced, which was to not be able to see my kids and know where they are and be with them and to have access to them, which was to me the hardest part of my separation and divorce. And that just totally shook me. And it’s not that it’s unfair. Life is not fair. So it’s not unjust, but it seemed to have strike in me a lot of pain. And I think with Report Card, it was hard because I had always, as a songwriter, spoken very openly about my feelings and people and bloody mother-ing asshole and always open, open, open. But then when you have kids, you can’t do that. I can’t be like, “Your dad…”

A bunch of stuff is off-limits, which I learned through writing the book, too. You don’t really want to say everything. And especially not when it comes to people that the kids care about and it’s not worth it. That being said, I was in so much pain, I needed to say something. I needed to be able to express something. But I knew it was pointless to have it be angry or to have it be blaming. And I didn’t want to write another song about their dad and I just had to find a way to talk about what I was feeling, just being alone in the house and being without them, and how scary that was and how it really is my Achilles heel. It really got me, that thing. And it still does. So I had to say it. I had to give myself the right to say it. And I was so sad and I get so sad. And the song had to match the sadness.

Debbie Millman:
You write in your memoir, when you go back and listen to your older records, you regret that most people will never hear them or know anything about you and your work. As you’re back on the road now touring, sharing this new album, sharing your memoir, do you have the same worries?

Martha Wainwright:
No. I do feel like this last year or two years, now that the record is out, I’ve been able to reconnect with fans and people. And that is the flip side to also what I think a lot of women, in particular, do when they get divorced and they don’t necessarily have custody of their kids all the time, is they throw themselves into work. Because you’re like, “Well, if I can’t be taking care of my kids and I’m not with them, then I have to be doing something else and I have to…”

So that has afforded me the possibility to work, which has been great. And has reminded me of A, that I got to keep out there working because if I don’t go back to Oslo and go back to Amsterdam and go back to all these places, I will be forgotten. You have to. It’s a train, you got to keep it going, you got to keep feeding it, and I need to continue for as long as I can. There’s no pension in the music business. And also I have a healthy competition with other people in my field, including my family. My dad’s still working.

Debbie Millman:
I know.

Martha Wainwright:
For God’s sake, he’ll never stop working. When I get off the phone with him, I’m like, “God, he did six shows this week? He’s 76 years old.” I’m like, “I need to book more shows.”

Debbie Millman:
Martha, I have one last question for you today you conclude your memoir with the story of meeting a new love and the glorious process of falling in love. How has that changed you? How has that influenced your music?

Martha Wainwright:
On the record, we hear at least three, if not four songs about Nico. And there were quite positive and I think exciting and really good songs, too. So that was really inspiring for songwriting, certainly. And it was great that the whole record was not going to be about a difficult divorce and my sadness that all of a sudden, no, that’s not what’s happening here. What’s also happening here is a sort of new beginning that was really unexpected and really welcome.

And I think that also, when you read the book and listen to a lot of my music from the last 20 years, there is this kind of feeling of I’m not good enough, or wanting to be loved by men and wanting to be more beautiful and wanting to be more perfect and wanting men to like me, and this sort of insecurity there that, I have to say, for the first time, has been completely turned on its head. And being loved by a man in a way that is kind and loving and generous. And I’m really glad that that’s happened because it feels good.

Debbie Millman:
Martha Wainwright, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Martha Wainwright:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Martha Wainwright’s memoir is titled Stories I Might Regret Telling You, and it is out now in both hardcover and paperback. Her latest album is titled Love Will Be Reborn. You can find all her music and see lots more about Martha on her website, MarthaWainwright.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I want to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Martha Wainwright appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
When the celebrated record producer Rick Rubin decided to write about making great art, he created a book about how to be in the world. This is because he believes, as I do, that life itself is a creative act. Rick Rubin has won nine Grammy Awards, and over the years he has produced a who’s who of musical artists, from Adele to the Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash, and Jay-Z. His range is vast and his talents are many. They also include prose. This man can really write. Rick’s latest creation is a rich meditation and love letter of sorts to creativity, and it just debuted at the very top of the New York Times Best Seller list. It’s titled The Creative Act: A Way of Being. We’re going to talk all about it and more in our conversation today.

Rick Rubin, welcome to Design Matters.

Rick Rubin:
Hello, pleasure meeting you.

Debbie Millman:
Rick, you were born on Long Island in the 1960s. Your dad was a shoe salesman and your mother a stay-at-home mom. I understand your Aunt Carol was like a third parent to you. In what ways did she influence you as you were growing up?

Rick Rubin:
Both of my parents were the youngest in big families and were always the youngest and always childlike. My Aunt Carol was my mom’s oldest sister, and she functioned as my second mom. My Aunt Carol worked at Estee Lauder in Manhattan. She ran the creative services department at a time when many women didn’t have jobs like that. I would spend time with her both in her office at Estee Lauder and she would take me to the theater and she would take me to museums and to movies. She had a very different cosmopolitan life than my parents who had a more… We lived at the beach, it was more of a beach life. So I got to experience two very different upbringings because of my Aunt Carol. My parents would drop me off with my Aunt Carol on Friday night, and I would be with her until Monday morning. And then she would take the train back to Manhattan and go to work. So my parents got the weekend off, I got to have the benefit of a third parent. It was a really good deal all the way around.

Debbie Millman:
I believe you first fell in love with magic when you were nine years old. Why magic?

Rick Rubin:
Something sparked in me when the mystery of this something happening that didn’t seem possible. The impractical happening excited me. When you’re a kid, the difference between doing a card trick and speaking to a dead relative, let’s say, they’re closer. When you’re nine years old, it’s all the same. The things that you can’t explain, some of them are done through learning a technique, and some of them we just can never figure out. I was interested in all of those, in all of the things that couldn’t be explained or the things that were baffling, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure everything out.

Debbie Millman:
Shortly thereafter I understand that you began to have recurring problems with your neck, I believe you were around 14, and your doctor diagnosed this as stress-related and recommended that you undertake different types of meditation to help manage the stresses in your life. This must have been in the ’70s. It sounds pretty progressive for a doctor to recommend that at that time. What kinds of meditation were you doing back then?

Rick Rubin:
I learned TM at that time, transcendental meditation. I loved it, and it’s been a big part of my life ever since. Now, I’ve learned many forms of meditation since, and sometimes I use other forms for a particular purpose, but I tend to keep coming back to TM. I don’t know if that’s because it works the best for me or if it’s because of when I learned it and how many years that was, because it was my first practice, maybe that’s the reason that I stick with it. I also quite like guided meditations and yoga nidra, where I’ll lay down and be guided through a process. Instead of having to keep the attention myself, to check out and listen to instructions is very relaxing as well.

Debbie Millman:
I think another influence at that time was a teacher you had at Long Beach High School, Mr. Freeman. I believe it was he who first taught you how to play guitar.

Rick Rubin:
Yes. He ran the audiovisual department at school, and any possibility to not go to class and hang out in the AV department and play guitar and watch videos and just hang out with artistic… It was an artistic bunch of people who were into both artistic stuff, but also the technology of the arts because we all could run the projectors and we could all could deal with all the machinery of it.

Debbie Millman:
At that point in your life, what did you think you wanted to do professionally?

Rick Rubin:
I didn’t have any ideas on my own. I imagine maybe when I was 14 I was probably still interested in magic. My parents had in mind for me to be on a professional track, and their first choice would’ve been a doctor. I’m needle-phobic and pass out at the sight of blood, so they would settle for me being a lawyer. In their mind that was the track I was on. I guess in my mind I was a kid, I didn’t know anything. So there were things that I loved, that wasn’t one of them, but I assumed that would be the path I would go on.

Debbie Millman:
While in high school, you started a punk band you named the Pricks. Can you talk to us or tell us about the brawl that ensued at your debut gig at CBGBs?

Rick Rubin:
Yeah, it was a planned event, it wasn’t a real brawl. I also like pro wrestling quite a bit, so it was a theatrical event. My father played a policeman in the story. It was like a performance art piece. It’s funny that you ask about it, that it has taken on some sort of a mythology enough for you to ask about it when in reality there were probably 12 people in the room. Even as a performance art piece, it was not particularly successful.

Debbie Millman:
Was it performance art or was it more of a stunt?

Rick Rubin:
I don’t know where the line is. I think the line between those things is very close. The things that Andy Kaufman did, you could say they were stunts, and you could also categorize them as performance art. He did the concert at Carnegie Hall, and at the end of the concert he had everyone in theater go outside and get on buses and go to a junior high school cafeteria for cookies and milk.

Debbie Millman:
I know somebody that was there. It was really phenomenal. It was a phenomenal experience for them.

Rick Rubin:
Yes. It’s clearly a stunt, and it’s clearly performance art. It’s both.

Debbie Millman:
Without a doubt. Without a doubt. You founded your next punk band, Hose, in 1981, and I understand that at the time the band Flipper was a big influence. I have been a huge Flipper fan for as long as I can remember. I think they had one of the greatest rock and roll logos of all time. In what way were they an influence to you?

Rick Rubin:
Up until that point I understood punk rock to be fast music. Flipper was the first punk band that played slow music, almost like sludgy music, and it was very innovative to me and it inspired me to start a slow punk band. So I would say that was probably as close as it got to Flipper, but it’s pretty close because they were the only ones doing that. So it was definitely derivative of Flipper. I don’t think so many bands came in their wake doing what they did. But then Kurt Cobain says Flipper was his biggest influence as well, so interesting to see the tentacles of a band. Because it’s funny, everyone I knew, all the punk rockers I knew had the Flipper album. I knew the guys in the band and I met the people at the record company, and everyone I knew had this album and it sold 10,000 copies, which other albums sell 500,000 copies or a million copies at that time. Yet, here’s one that sold this many, and everyone I know has it.

Well, it messed up my sense of thinking I know what popular is, because I didn’t, and the idea of how much love and energy can be created with a small group of people with a niche audience, because for a period of time, Flipper was my very favorite band, whereas, maybe three years earlier, four years or five years earlier, maybe it would’ve been ACDC, who sold millions and millions of albums. So for me, their impact on me was the same, but their impact on the world was not.

Debbie Millman:
Which I find really upsetting. I think that their seven-minute song, “Brainwash,” from the compilation Sex Bomb Baby is one of the best pop-punk rock songs ever written.

Rick Rubin:
It’s so cool. Love Canal, so cool. “The Wheel,” they have a song called “The Wheel” that’s incredible.

Debbie Millman:
Your first 12-inch EP was titled Hose, and according to the liner notes, it was recorded on one Sunday in April, 1982 between the hours of 10:00 PM and 1:00 AM. I believe you designed the cover which was an homage to Composition II made by Mondrian.

Rick Rubin:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
The Hose album was the first time the Def Jam logo was placed on a cover, I believe. Def Jam was the record company you started in your dorm room at NYU. Your dorm room was literally the company’s headquarters, and the NYU mail room became Def Jam’s as well. Your dorm room address was on the album sleeves. How did you first come up with the name Def Jam?

Rick Rubin:
It was street slang for great music, great record. It was something you might hear somebody say who spoke the lingo of the street.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that the large D and J letter forms were as much for the role of the DJ in Def Jam as for the words themselves.

Rick Rubin:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Why so?

Rick Rubin:
One of the reasons I started recording rap music at all was the people who were making it were experienced music makers who had made music before. Hip-hop was a really revolutionary new genre, and the people who made music in other ways from before hip-hop didn’t really understand what it was. They made it more like the things that had come before. It was not unusual to hear on the earliest of rap records before the Def Jam records the musical track might sound the same as an R&B track that you might hear someone singing on if you went to a nightclub. The perception of the more experienced people at that time was, “Okay, we’ll make this R&B song, and instead of having someone sing the melody, we’ll get a rapper to rap on it.” That’s one aspect of hip-hop, but it’s not the whole picture of hip-hop.

I would go to hip hop clubs and what was exciting about it was the DJ really was the star of the show. It was all about montage. It was about taking old things and finding a way to reinterpret them. It’s so interesting because it wasn’t copying something. It was taking a tiny aspect and turning this tiny aspect into something new. And it was very exciting. And it was done through human DJing. It was done through dexterity, it wasn’t done through machines. So there was a performance aspect even in replaying someone else’s music, and that’s what hip hop really was. I would have these experiences of going to these clubs with this incredible music, besides the rapping, incredible music. I wanted to basically just document that because as a fan. If someone had already done it, I probably wouldn’t have done it. The only reason I did it was as a fan wanting to be serviced as a fan, and I wasn’t being serviced, so I made it because I wanted it to exist.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that when you were first involved in hip hop the idea that it would become what it became was not a possibility. You stated that nobody who was making hip-hop music thought this is going to be the biggest thing in the world. Most people didn’t even think it was music. It was that outside everything else that was going on. And at the time, Rick, I was working at HOT 97. I was working with Steve Smith and Judy Ellis, Rocco McRight, Tracy Cloherty, and we were trying to reposition HOT 97 from a dance music radio station, which is what it was, to the first hip-hop radio station in the world. Even people at the radio station thought we were nuts.

Rick Rubin:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
They were absolutely convinced that this was going to be a huge failure.

Rick Rubin:
Yes, I remember. I mean, it was incredible cause it was a new urban art form, and the stations that played the urban music refused to play it. The first stations to play hip-hop were rock stations and alternative stations and college stations because in some ways the R&B stations were the most resistant to it.

Debbie Millman:
Many of the artists you worked with at that time, including your Def Jam partner, Russell Simmons, used the word fearless to describe you, Rick. Was that a word you’d used to describe yourself then or now?

Rick Rubin:
I would say artistically I’m fearless. I’m not fearless outside of the world of art. The things that turn me on are the things that are radical. I like edgy things, I like extreme things, I like unusual things. I tend not to like the typical mainstream thing. My tastes run that way, and because I know that’s what moves me, I want to make things that move me as well. I know as someone who practices trying to make things to excite myself, there can’t be any rules, there can’t be any boundaries in art. Now, outside of art, it’s a whole different issue. I’m terrified on a regular basis, but when it comes to art, I know… It’s funny, it comes out of knowing it’s what’s best. I know this is what’s best for the art. I know the art has to be free. There’s a line in the book that the world is only as free as it allows its artists to be. It’s true.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve since gone on to be one of the most successful producers in music history. You sold your share of Def Jam to Russell Simmons and started your own labels. You were the co-president of Columbia Records and now own your own studio, Shangri-La Studios. As I mentioned in the intro, you’ve won nine Grammy Awards. You’ve been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, named the most successful producer in any genre by Rolling Stone, you’ve collaborated with many of the biggest artists in every genre of music. Now I want to spend the rest of the show today talking about your new book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. The first question that I want to ask you about is something I heard you say on my dear friend Tim Ferris’s podcast. Is it really true that he thought you writing this book was a bad idea?

Rick Rubin:
Everyone I spoke to about what I imagined the book could be before starting it, from publishers to friends, thought it was a terrible idea.

Debbie Millman:
Because you weren’t going to be talking about Jay-Z and Ye and Adele? I mean, why, why did they think-

Rick Rubin:
Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
… it was such a bad idea?

Rick Rubin:
The general consensus was the book that people want from me is a book about the stories that they know about that I was involved in. That’s what people want. The reason I was talking to people early on, I was like, “I don’t know what’s in this book. I don’t even know how to figure out what’s going to be in this book, but I have an idea that this is something I want to make happen. I don’t know how it’s going to work, but I’m willing to do the work for it to happen.” The general consensus was why do you want to write a book about something you don’t know about when you can write a book about something you do know about, and that’s the book that everybody wants?” I said, “It’s because it wasn’t interesting to me. I’m not interested in talking about myself at all.”

The whole purpose of me deciding to do a book was based on I get to work with very few artists. I get to work with a lot of artists for someone in my position, but compared to artists in the world, I work with a tiny amount of artists. So if I work with seven or eight artists in a year, that’s a lot. If that’s the whole reach of my creative impact is working with this small group of people, I want to be able to share this information with more people. I don’t know how to do it, but I want to be able to do that and I’m willing to figure it out. And that was an eight-year process to get there.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you wanted people reading this book to have a Dao-like experience. The Dao was written 3,000 years ago. What do you mean by a Dao-like experience?

Rick Rubin:
One of the things that’s so powerful about the Dao is that every time you go back to it, you have a new experience of it. It’s written in an open-ended enough way where the reader is involved in what the book is saying. The book is giving clues for us. It’s not telling us what to do. It’s giving us clues about how to think about things. I wanted the book to be a book that you could open randomly anywhere and get good information, which is what the Dao does, and I wanted a book where every time you read it, you’ll feel like you can learn something new from it. Again, it was a tall order in the beginning of the process.

Debbie Millman:
The book is beautifully designed, it’s very minimal, it’s very clean. There’s no pages and pages of acknowledgements or an intro or an epilogue. There’s a timelessness to the design. In looking through the book to try to find some evidence of who designed it, I saw that actually you designed it. You do give a shout out of thanks to Pentagram, and I know Paula Scher did your Republic Records logo. Did you work with Paula on this as well?

Rick Rubin:
I did. Paula was great and a great collaborator. I thought she would have the credit on the book and she said, “I think the credit is your credit with me,” so that’s how Paula wanted the credit. But I counted on her confidence in what was good when I was making decisions that go against a lot of… When I went to Book Soup to look at what all the new books look like, all the new releases, none of them looked like this book. None of them look remotely like this book.

Debbie Millman:
Which is nice. You can see it from on a table from a distance really easily.

Rick Rubin:
Yeah, it almost feels like it’s from another time, and I like that about it.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about the circle and the dot. That’s a recurring motif. It’s on the cover and then it’s used in each chapter underneath the chapter head.

Rick Rubin:
I like that it’s a symbol that’s open to interpretation. What do you see when you see the circle and the dot?

Debbie Millman:
I see the world, the globe, and the dot is the heart of the globe.

Rick Rubin:
Beautiful. I’ve asked other people, and one person who was an eye doctor said it’s an eye. And another person said it’s a target. I said, “Really? Why do you think it’s a target?” He’s like, “Because it’s a target. That’s clearly what it is.” It’s so funny how when whatever we see, we think that’s what it is, and I like the open poetic nature. I found the symbol a long time ago. It’s the alchemical symbol for the sun. I used it on my phone for a long time. It’s just a symbol that I like to look at. And that’s how it started. I liked that it had some history, some esoteric history to it, yet it doesn’t scream overtly mystical. It’s very open to interpretation.

Debbie Millman:
I mean, the one that I would push back against from your eye doctor was the I, because it feels like there’s not a lot of Is, capital letter I, in the book. It’s not a book that feels I or ego-driven, it feels very much a sort of gift or a love letter, as I mentioned earlier. The titles of the chapters in The Creative Act are just a few words each, most are one or two words, and you call them 78 areas of thought. In the chapter title “Tuning In,” you state, “Just as trees grow flowers and fruits, humanity creates works of art, the Golden Gate Bridge, the White Album, Guanica, Hagia Sophia, the Sphinx, the Space Shuttle, the Autobahn, Clair de Lune, the Coliseum in Rome, the Philips screwdriver, the iPad, Philadelphia cheese steak. The artist is on a cosmic timetable, just like all of nature.” Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by the artist being on a cosmic timetable?

Rick Rubin:
Yes. In the same way that the seasons change, who orchestrates that change? Who orchestrates the bee moving from flower to flower? It’s all instinctual. All these things happen on an instinctual basis. And if we’re in tune, we can be guided in the same way that a hummingbird is guided to build a nest. The same way, we can get back to our true connection if we get out of our own way. If we try to make it, this is the way I think it, that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s if you’re in tune with the planet and you’re playing your role in this giant orchestra that’s going on all the time, and that’s the culture moving forward, that’s everything we get to see is either natural or added to the nature by us.

I’m arguing that we are an extension of nature continuing to unfold. We’re part of it now. We can be part of it in a way that upsets nature, and nature wouldn’t do that. I remember I was in Hawaii years and years ago and I was listening to a public radio station there. There was a very old Hawaiian man being interviewed. He might have even been reading poetry, it was very beautiful. One of the things that he said was, “When I go on the boat and I look back at my island, I see all the things that man made on my island, and none of them make it more beautiful than it was before. None of them make it better.”

The book is arguing that if we are really in tune with what’s going on, we would be making things that make the world a better place. We can’t help but do it. And when I say a better place, maybe I say more in balance because so much of it is balance. Nature gives us terrible storms that wipe out communities. That’s all part of this balance. If we can tap into this energy that’s happening all around us at all times, it’s clear what our choices will be. It’s almost as if it happens for us if we really stay still, really tune.

In the early days of my career, I used to live very against the planet. I would stay up all night, which is not a natural thing to do. I lived in very controlled spaces that were manmade spaces where I didn’t have much connection to nature. I found since living in more outdoor spaces, spending much more time outside, I’m more in tune with the planet now because I’m living the way people lived thousands of years ago. I think that that helps me tune into this energy. I’m not suggesting that’s for everybody, there are degrees of all of this, but I think if we can tune in to what’s going on around us, it becomes clear what our part is.

Debbie Millman:
The whole notion of tuning in feels sort of cosmic and magical to some degree. You go on to state in the book, “If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker. This isn’t because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come.” I’m wondering if you think ideas come through the artist rather than from the artist?

Rick Rubin:
Yes, the ideas come through the artist, not from the artist. The artist may make connections between things, but the grand vision doesn’t come from us. I think the more artists you speak to, they would all tell you this. The ones who really have done it consistently over a period of time tend to get more mystical just through the reality of their experience. When you see something remarkable happen over and over again that you can’t explain, you start to realize, “Well, that’s how it is because it happens all the time.” And once you let your guard down because you see it happen all the time, you can welcome it. You can put yourself in a position to allow it to happen more often.

Debbie Millman:
This reminds me of something Elizabeth Gilbert said about the American poet Ruth Stone, and I wanted to read you verbatim what she said because I think it’s really a perfect example of tuning in and what happens when you do that. She stated that Ruth Stone, who’s now in her 90s, has been a poet her entire life, and described when she was growing up in rural Virginia she’d be out working in the fields, and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. She said, “It was like a thunderous train of air, and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, run like hell. And she would run like hell to the house, and she’d be getting chased by this poem. The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her she could collect it and grab it on the page.

“And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it. And she said it would continue on across the landscape looking, as she put it, for another poet. And then there were those moments where she would almost miss it. She’s running to the house and she’s looking for the paper and the poem passes through her and she grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her. And she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. In these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards from the last word to the first.”

Rick Rubin:
Wow. So cool, I love it. Beautiful.

Debbie Millman:
I was reading your book and I’m like, “Oh my God, Ruth Stone, that’s what happens.” And then I also read that Tom Waits would do that. He’d be driving in the car, and if he couldn’t get to where he was going fast enough, he’d be like, “Don’t you see I’m driving?”

Rick Rubin:
Beautiful. What’s interesting about both of those stories is not just the cosmic transmission aspect, it also tells us the commitment that the artist needs to make that when it’s happening, we have to be present for it. We must be present for it because it’s coming and it’s going. There’s a section of the book called “An Area of Thought 24/7,” and it’s about the commitment. It’s funny because we say it’s not really about us, yes, it’s not really about us, but if we’re not actively participating with all of ourselves at all times, it doesn’t happen. It takes a tremendous work ethic and commitment to wait for lightning to strike, to wait for it to happen.

And then there’s another part in the book where we talk about you can’t just wait for that, so you have to show up to work either way. And sometimes through that experimentation process, before the lightning strikes, we still have to show up, whether it’s our recording studio or our table to write, where we’re going to sculpt or our design table, whatever it is, we show up. And we show up on a regular enough basis that hopefully, hopefully the lightning will strike more often. And if it doesn’t, we’re going to be so much better at crafting that when it does strike we’re going to be able to make a much more beautiful thing using the information that comes through.

Debbie Millman:
You talk in the book about the playfulness and sense of relaxation that is evident in great work. I know that showing up every day, sitting down every day, doing it every day can be torturous. A lot of the time when I’m making something, I feel like I’m having a fight with whoever I’m making it with. I mean, I’m not talking about a person, I’m talking about a pen or when I’m making art tortured with the canvas, or if I’m writing something, I’m just being tortured by the words. And then it might take, I don’t know, however long, sometimes hours, sometimes weeks to get to that place where you feel like the work is coming through you as opposed to from you. And that’s the torture, that fight within myself. What kind of advice would you have for people listening that want to try to get more comfortable with the playfulness or get more in tune with the playfulness?

Rick Rubin:
Well, I want to say something about what you just said before I answer that question…

Debbie Millman:
Sure.

Rick Rubin:
… just because it happened to me this morning. I’m starting a new podcast because I’ve been doing Broken Record for five years where I’ve been talking to musicians, and I realized I like to talk to people who are not musicians. I like to talk to all kinds of people. So I’m starting a new podcast, which will be called Tetragrammaton, and I made a little welcome recording to start the process. I made a version of it with a friend talking to me, asking me questions and talking about the podcast. And it was fun and it worked well. And then I listened back and I thought, “I didn’t really like my choice of words. I feel like I could do better.” Also now that I’m written a book and I know the amount of time that went into picking every word in the book, writing and rewriting and trying to convey information in a way that it’s both accurate and hold some energy.

So I thought, “Okay, I’m going to rewrite my answers to be more together, more like in the book.” I rewrote it last night and then I rerecorded it. And then this morning I got back the edit with the new rewritten version, and it was terrible. I immediately was like, “Oh, I have to go with the first one. It’s imperfect. It’s casual. It’s fun, and it says what it needs to say.” Me working on it didn’t make it better. Me giving it better words didn’t make it better. And being open to, even though in my mind I can make it better, me doing the work to make it better, me putting the time in to make it better and then saying, “You know what? I’m going with the original that I thought wasn’t good enough. I’m going back to that because it has something that I can’t explain.”

So knowing that the amount of time or effort we put into a project gives no connection between the amount of work that goes in and how good it gets. Unless you do the work, you never know if it could be better. So when we’re working in the recording studio, often an artist is playing a song and it gets better and it gets better and it gets better and we keep playing it and we keep playing it until it gets worse and worse and worse because it still might get better, it still might get better. But once the momentum shifts and it gets worse a couple of times in a row, the chances in that moment of getting a better one, unlikely. We may come back to it at another time or rethink it at another time, but in the moment when it’s happening, there’s a momentum that’s generated where it’s getting better or hanging around the same area, and then there’s a time when it gets worse.

Debbie Millman:
How do you know when it’s getting worse?

Rick Rubin:
It’s a feeling. It’s a feeling. I’ll tell you, one of the things that’s hardest about it is if you’re listening to the same thing over and over again, you can definitely lose perspective. Sometimes I’ll say five hours into playing something, “I can’t really tell anymore, let’s listen to it tomorrow.” Or go out for a walk, go for a swim, or work on something different. If you really engage in a different project and you come back to the project you had tunnel vision on, the tunnel vision’s gone as soon as you really engage in something else.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk with you about the artist’s antenna. You state that we are all translators for messages the universe is broadcasting, and the best artists tend to be the ones with the most sensitive antenna to draw in the energy resonating at a particular moment. I think connects a bit to the tuning in aspect as well. How do you think that artists are able to pick up what is resonating through this antenna? Do you think it’s magic?

Rick Rubin:
Yeah, I think it starts through the love of the thing that you’re making. When you go into a creative pursuit, chances are you doing it because you love that form. I think that devotion plays a role. Through repeated viewing, repeated listening, repeated the study, the care that goes in as a fan, I think that opens the channel. Now, in terms of sensitivity, the same sensitivity that makes you a great artist makes you a sensitive person. There’s great beauty in being more sensitive, and there’s great pain in being more sensitive. So it’s not uncommon to see great artists have drug problems or not be able to handle their life in a way that’s sustainable. That same sensitivity is the thing that makes them the great artist. It makes the world too painful to be in, can make the world to be. It can also make the world an ecstatic place. The highs tend to be higher and the lows tend to be lower if you’re really sensitive. Where another person having the same input feels it as a three or a seven, and we might feel it as a zero or 11 based on the same input.

Debbie Millman:
You state that many great artists first develop their sensitive antennae not to create art but to protect themselves.

Rick Rubin:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And they have to protect themselves because everything hurts more and because they feel everything more deeply.

Rick Rubin:
An example of that would be it’s not unusual to hear stories of artists whose parents maybe were alcoholics, and when a parent would get home and they wouldn’t know which version of the parent it would be, “Is this the one that I can talk to, or is this the one if I try to talk to, I’m going to get hurt or threatened?” Even as children, to protect themselves, they’re learning to study the situation in very advanced ways, unrealistically advanced ways.

Debbie Millman:
I have spoken to psychologists about how that awareness is created to try to stay as safe as possible. And if you can be that attuned to what somebody might do to you, you can try to protect yourself from it. But that’s a tough exchange.

Rick Rubin:
Absolutely. The other beautiful part of it is through the self-expression, we can heal. There’s something about being able to say, “This is me as I am. This is how I see the world,” it’s really enlivening. And through the creation of art we can heal ourselves and we can heal the audience as well. We heal each other. It’s a beautiful form of connection and communication.

Debbie Millman:
Especially when great music speaks to the person individually but universally at the same time.

Rick Rubin:
Yes. When it’s speaking to different people, different people can like it for completely different reasons and have a completely different relationship to it. And none of that matters. Once we make a piece of art to our standard and put it out into the world, after that, the audience gets to… It gets to become theirs. And when I say theirs, each person who interacts with it gets to have their own story with it, and based on their life experiences, they’ll see it in a different way.

Debbie Millman:
Have you been able to work with artists to try to calibrate their antenna to use that sensitivity without being self-destructive?

Rick Rubin:
Absolutely. Myself. I tend to be depressive, and being a Pisces, I’m a person who historically-

Debbie Millman:
Water.

Rick Rubin:
… would be one who might fall prey to addiction. Luckily I’ve been able to avoid that as it relates to drugs or alcohol. I definitely had a food problem, and I was very overweight earlier in my life, and luckily found a way out of that.

Debbie Millman:
How would you define your own antenna?

Rick Rubin:
I would say I’m an open channel. When something interests me, it doesn’t matter where it’s coming from or why. I notice what’s interesting to me. I don’t feel like I have a thing that’s mine in terms of the way that I’m engaging as making creative things. Sometimes when I look at many of the things I’ve made, I can see themes that run through them, but it never happens intentionally that way. I get to realize I like things that have a believability about them. I like it to feel natural and in the moment, and I like things that are surprising.

Debbie Millman:
You have a chapter titled “Self-Doubt,” and you state that self-doubt lives in all of us. While we may wish it to be gone, it is there to serve us. I was surprised to hear that you have a depressive tendency because so much of your work seems so buoyed by light. How do you manage self-doubt? Do you still have self-doubt? I think I heard, actually, on 60 Minutes that you feel like you’re paid for your confidence and decision-making. Is there room for self-doubt in that?

Rick Rubin:
There’s definitely room for self-doubt. The purpose of it is to know what you’re doubting. When the work is in front of me and I have the reaction that I have, whatever that is, I think it’s beautiful, I think it’s challenging, I think it’s exciting, I think it’s not good enough. I trust that a million percent, and the reason is if I feel it, I’m not thinking past that. It’s like if I’m shown two pieces of clothing and asked which one I like better, it’s usually easy for me to say, “I think I like this one better than that one.” That’s all I’m doing. I never go past what that means or what are the commercial implications or what the companies are going to think. I never think past just, how does it make me feel? Would I wear that piece of clothing or do I think it needs to be a better piece of clothing? Do I want a different choice?

I’m making things as the audience. I’m always the audience for the things that I’m working on, and I never think past what I like. The self-doubt can come when you get past what you think. I would say in my work, I’ve never had self-doubt. All it is is a reflection of where I’m at. It’s like, “This is the best version of this that I can make at this time. I like it. I like it enough for you to hear it” Or “I’m collaborating with a person whose name’s on the front of the record and this is how they want it to be, and I support them in their vision. It’s theirs.” But beyond that, it’s out of our control. So self-doubt would come in different ways. In the book, we talk about doubting a work into greatness, and that’s the difference between doubting yourself and doubting a work.

Debbie Millman:
How do you deal with artists that are concerned or worried or doubting that they’re not going to ever be able to make something as good as they already did?

Rick Rubin:
I come in with the confidence of saying, “We’re going to make the best thing you’ve ever made.” The reason there is for us to work together to make the best thing you’ve ever made. Whether that’s possible or not, we’ll see, but that’s the intention. We go in with the intention it’s going to be the best it could ever be. I could remember when I said that to Johnny Cash, he looked at me like I was insane because he had reached such heights and so long ago. The last 20, 25 years before us working together, there were no glimpses that he would get to the place where he was before. But I definitely went in with that intention, that was my goal. Again, I don’t know if it’s possible, but that’s the intention and it’s a belief that it’s possible, because everything’s possible. We don’t know. We can’t know. I always start with the idea of, “I know I’m willing to do whatever I can do for it to be as good as it could be. We’re going to find out how good that is.”

Debbie Millman:
Do you believe that something needs to be believed as possible in order to make it possible?

Rick Rubin:
I think it helps because sometimes we surprise ourselves into the possibility of something existing that we don’t think is possible. We can be working on something and through a mistake discover, “Whoa, that thing I didn’t think was possible is possible.”

Debbie Millman:
I loved your book. The one part that actually made me cry, and I don’t cry at a lot of books, you wrote about fear. I am going to try to read this without actually tearing up. “Ultimately, your desire to create must be greater than your fear of it.” What would be your advice to anyone like me that might be having a war between fear and art?

Rick Rubin:
I would suggest lowering the stakes and know that the thing that you’re making is… Think of it more like a diary entry. You’re making a diary entry. Tomorrow you’re going to make a new diary entry. The work that you’re making doesn’t define you for the rest of your life. It’s a moment in time. If you like the thing that you make enough to show it to a friend, it’s ready to go to the world. Because if you’ll show it to your friend or someone with good taste, that’s all it is. It’s no more than that. Everything else is a story in our head. But if it’s good enough to show to your friend, it’s certainly good enough to show to a stranger.
The other thing that I would recommend is anything you can do to get on a roll of momentum of like a diary entry, make something small, release it into the world. No one has to see it. Just put it up.

Whatever your version of publishing is, publish it. Do another one, publish it, do another one, publish it, do another one, publish it. Get past the idea that this thing is going to define me forever and it has to be perfect. I don’t know if it could ever be finished. What’s today’s version? Put it out. What’s tomorrow’s version? Put it out. Through that process you build the musculature and the confidence to be able to do it.

Debbie Millman:
Where do you see the role of shame in making art?

Rick Rubin:
Any of the negative emotions that we have can be channeled into the thing that we’re making. Whatever our state is when we’re making things is somehow inhabited in the art, and that’s part of what makes the art great. The art isn’t great because of how perfect it is. It’s great because of how close of a reflection it is to our humanity, flaws and all. In terms of shame from the outside on work that you do, all I could say is to ignore it, because if someone doesn’t like something you make, that’s fine. That tells you more about them than it does about you. It’s funny, I’ve read a bunch of reviews about the book, they’ve been a bunch of great reviews. There are some reviews of people saying, “This is the worst book I’ve ever read.” No, it’s amazing to see, and the best work divides the audience, I talk about it in the book. If everybody likes it, you haven’t gone far enough.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s like the worst thing that could possibly happen. Then it’s just middle of the road.

Rick Rubin:
Yeah. So it’s okay if someone doesn’t like the work. Going from someone hating it to loving it is easier than having someone not care about it. Not care about it as a non-starter.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, actually reminds me of something that you said in the chapter on greatness, where you state that if you think, “I don’t like it, but someone else will,” you’re not making art for yourself. You’ve found yourself then in the business of commerce, which is fine, but it’s not art, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Seth Godin said something very similar in an interview that I did with him several years ago that also is a mantra in my mind. Would you say that any art that involves ego or vanity or self-glorification or need for approval is anti-art?

Rick Rubin:
Not necessarily. Honestly, not necessarily, because there aren’t any rules. There are some really great artists who are complete egomaniacs, and they find a way to make that work. There’s no blanket rule for any of these things. You can always find the exception.

Debbie Millman:
You have a chapter in The Creative Act called “The Abundant Mindset,” which reminded me of something that the late great Milton Glaser said in an interview I had with him. He stated, “If you perceived the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be.” Milton always thought there was enough to go around for everyone if we were willing to share. There are enough ideas in the universe and enough nourishment. Why do you think people get so protective of ideas? One of the things that I love about hip hop is the sharing and the sampling and the building from one art form to another. Yet, people are so litigious and contentious about it now.

Rick Rubin:
In the early days of hip-hop, the people who were doing it were purely doing it out of love. I think anything that turns into big business ends up becoming more contentious. It’s just a byproduct of success.

Debbie Millman:
I have one last question for you today. I have about 400 other questions I’d like to ask you, maybe even more, but I’m conscious of our time.

Rick Rubin:
We will do this again, for sure.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Thank you. You write in The Creative Act that it’s not uncommon to long for outward success, hopeful that it will fill a void inside ourselves, some imagine achievement as a remedy to fix or heal a sense of not being enough. For those of us struggling, so self-serving question is my last question, sorry about that, very obvious, for those of us struggling with filling that void with productivity or achievement or success, what would be the first thing you’d recommend people do to try and reset?

Rick Rubin:
I would say get some sort of help outside of art to work on yourself because they’re two separate things. The first album I produced that was a number one album was the Beastie Boys Licensed to Ill.

Debbie Millman:
License to Ill, yeah.

Rick Rubin:
I remember getting a call from the lawyer I worked with at that time who said, “You have the number one album in the country, how does that feel?” I remember saying, “I’ve never felt worse in my whole life,” in that moment. All I thought was, “All I ever want to do is make good music. I’m making something that I love that the world loves, and it did nothing for whatever was going on inside.” If it wasn’t for that phone call, I would think back think, “Oh, that must’ve been the greatest.” But I remember how surreal it was having this conversation. I’ve had great success over the course of my life, and I have a great life outwardly because of it. None of that healed whatever’s going on inside of me, and that was a whole other full-time job for as long as I’ve been doing this.

Debbie Millman:
How long does the feeling of pride or accomplishment stay with you after you make something you’re proud of?

Rick Rubin:
In the moment that it happens, I feel the excitement of like, “There it is.” As soon as I let it out into the world, I usually don’t think about it again. I’m doing things like reading the reviews of the book. This is the first time I’ve ever written a book. It’s the first time my name has been on the front of something. My name’s always on the back. In some ways, this is my first project, even though I’ve made hundreds of things over the course of my life. So I’m treating it in a different way than anything else I’ve done before. Really out of the curiosity of just like, “How does this work? What does this feel like? What’s going on?” and luckily, I’ve in a place where I can read someone say something really beautiful and I can see, “Oh, I understand what they see in it, and that’s beautiful.” And then I can read someone who hates it and I can laugh, it’s like, “Wow, they don’t get it at all. I feel bad for them.”

For me, it’s beautiful, and I know for some people it’s beautiful, so I feel bad if someone doesn’t feel it. But again, not everything’s for everybody. It’s one of the things I love so much about Seth Godin. Seth really instills this idea of finding your tribe, finding whatever size it is, the people who like what you do, that’s your audience. And if you cater to them… When I say cater to them, meaning you make the things you want to make that they like. Catering to them can be misinterpreted. It’s like you’re making what they want. No, no, no, you’re making what you want, and they are the right audience. They feel what you are doing, whatever size that is.

And then on occasion, out of that something transcends that small tribe and has a universal appeal. That’s all we could ever do. You can’t aim for any more than really yourself first, yourself and the one friend that you feel good enough about playing it for that tells you, “Okay, I’m ready for this to be seen by someone.” And then you know, “Okay, it’s time for this to be seen.” Or you can say, “I’m going to work on it a little more, see what happens.” Work on it a little more. If it gets better, great. If it gets worse, okay, there it is. Let’s start the next one. Let’s send this out into the world and start the next one.

I learned something recently about the musical artist Drake, very popular rapper, and I learned that over the course of the year, he put out 80 songs, 8-0. Now, he’s one of the biggest artists in the world. He doesn’t put out an album every year, but he put out 80 songs, many of which I’m thinking other than the hardcore Drake fans never heard. It’s not like the batting average is high. He’s taking a lot of swings all the time. I didn’t know that. I only know the ones that everybody knows. I thought it was fascinating. So even when you’d think you’re under the microscope because the whole world is watching because you’re at the top of your game, there’s 80 songs that argue otherwise.

Debbie Millman:
Rick Rubin, thank you so much for making this beautiful book that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Rick Rubin:
Thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:
Rick Rubin’s latest book, his first book, is The Creative Act: A Way of Being. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Rick Rubin appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
She’s an award-winning journalist, a New York Times bestselling author, several times over, a co-founder of one of the most significant magazines of the 20th century, and an activist whose work has impacted the place women and girls now have in the world. She’s also co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Women’s Action Alliance, and the Women’s Media Center. For over 60 years, she has been in the thick of American cultural and political life, where she has been instrumental in shaping our ideas about feminism, humanity, and equal rights for all people.

She is, of course, the legendary Gloria Steinem, and I have the great honor of interviewing her today in my studio at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Gloria Steinem, welcome to Design Matters.

Gloria Steinem:
Thank you so much. And now listening to your introduction, I’m only worried about living up to it.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, you already have. That’s the great thing. You’ve already done these things. Gloria, I understand that your older sister, Susanne, was actually the person in your family who named you. Is it true you were named after her favorite doll?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, I think so. My parents had had another child, a boy, who was stillborn, between us. And that meant that my sister was almost a decade older than I. So she was another mother in a way, and I looked up to her and followed her around much to her alarm. And yes, she did name me.

Debbie Millman:
I wonder what type of doll we could find now back in the fifties that is named Gloria. I think we’re going to have to do an eBay search to figure that out.

Gloria Steinem:
I think the dolls that I adored, and I did have a collection of dolls, were named after Sonja Henie, who was a great figure skater of the era. I don’t know. They came with names, not mine, but I was in love with dolls.

Debbie Millman:
You were born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio. Your father’s mother Pauline Perlmutter Steinem was a suffragist, and the first woman in the state of Ohio to be elected to the national board. This was before women had the right to vote nationally. How did she manage such a victory?

Gloria Steinem:
First of all, I’m so impressed with your research. Thank you for that, because I think Pauline deserves notice and attention. She had come from either Russia or a country close to Russia. We’re not sure, when she was a teenager, then lived in Vienna, I think. Not sure. And my grandfather went there to find a bride, in a very European traditional way.

So she arrived in her late teens as a bride, and she did become a suffragist. Also, she founded the first vocational high school. Otherwise, they were all learning Latin and Greek, whether that was going to be useful in their lives or not in Toledo. And she was greatly admired. I only remember her in a sensory way because I was too little. I remember her kitchen and food, but my mother was definitely in love with her mother-in-law law.

Debbie Millman:
Did her activism even subliminally influence you at all? Did you look back at what she was doing and feel like that was something you also wanted to do at that age?

Gloria Steinem:
I’m not sure. I certainly admired the fact that she had made it possible for women to vote by organizing them to vote in a group. Otherwise, they were harassed and scared away from the voting places by gangs of men and boys who were hostile to women voting. I knew that. I knew about the vocational high school. I knew she was very admired, but I’m not sure. Maybe it made me assume that I could go to college, which my older sister did too. That was possible in my family for women to be educated. But she seemed distant and so honorable, I couldn’t imagine imitating her.

Debbie Millman:
Your parents, Leo and Ruth Steinem, met at the University of Toledo in 1917 while they were working together on their college newspaper. After they graduated, they got married. And you’ve written how your mother married your father because of his refusal to worry. And then as a result, was left to worry alone, on her own. Why didn’t your father worry at all? He seemed to be such a carefree, risk-taking experimenter.

Gloria Steinem:
I can only imagine it had something to do with his family, which was well to do. And he was one of four boys, and he was a kind of devil may care kind of person. Whereas my mother came from a very working class family. Her father was a railroad engineer. So I think my father’s carefree attitude was charming to her, and his great argument for getting married was, “It’ll only take a minute.”

Debbie Millman:
I believe they were married twice. Right? Didn’t they get married privately in a very quick civil ceremony and then have another marriage?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. A private ceremony and then a public one, yes.

Debbie Millman:
Ultimately, I believe that because they were married twice, but only divorced once, I think your mother felt that they were still married for quite a long time.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, because she felt divorce was a shame. And so when pressed, she would say well really, they were still married.

Debbie Millman:
Your father was a man of many trades. He ran a dance pavilion and a summer resort. He was an antique salesman. He tried to write slogans for ad agencies. I loved some of the slogans that you’ve included in some of your writing. He dreamed up a living chess game, with costume teenagers moving across the squares of a dance floor. Very ahead of his time.

He was always looking for the next big deal, and he was often on the road. You were often with him, sometimes working alongside him as a little girl and still in single digits. Can you talk about how you assisted him in his efforts as an antique salesman?

Gloria Steinem:
He used to go to country auctions to buy jewelry, antiques, small antiques, things he could carry around in his car. And then he would sell them to roadside dealers. So this was his winter way of life, when the summer dance pavilion was not going. My job was to pack and unpack these little items of jewelry, or glassware, or China, or whatever, when he went into a roadside shop in order to try to sell them. So I was the packer and the unpacker, which I was in heaven about. I mean, kids love to be necessary, so I felt I was part of the grownup world.

Debbie Millman:
Didn’t he sometimes send you into some of the antique stores to work independently of him as a little girl?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, depending on how little I was, yes. Right? I mean, there was a downside to it, because I always felt a little bit as if we were the gypsies of the highway and looked down upon by whoever it was who owned the shop as we drove up in our dusty car.

Debbie Millman:
When your family was on the road, you never started out with enough money to reach a particular destination. Instead, your dad took a few boxes of China, silver, other small antiques he bought at country auctions, and then used them to sell, and buy, and barter your way through your travels. Did you know what he was doing? Did you feel okay about that? Did you ever feel insecure?

Gloria Steinem:
I knew that it worried my mother, who had grown up in a way less economically secure way, and therefore was more worried. But my father’s slogan was kind of, “If you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, it could be wonderful.” And that’s seductive too. I’m sure I’ve absorbed a lot of that, because I too have never had a proper job.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written how there were only a few months every year when your dad seemed content with a house dwelling life. Do you know what the motivation was behind his desire to be constantly moving? Did you ever ask him about it?

Gloria Steinem:
No, we never talked about it in those terms. I just accepted who he was, even though it did also cause my parents to separate eventually, because my mother wanted to live in a more secure place. And after my decade older sister was in college, it was possible for my mother and I to move into her old family house in Toledo.

But my father was always present. He never had a bank account, because I think he feared the IRS would attach it. But he used to send me money orders every once in a while,

Debbie Millman:
$50 money orders, which is a lot of money at that time.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, yes. He did his best to be attentive, and he was certainly fun to be with. I don’t remember ever feeling that my parents were not doing their best, whatever it was, either my mother or my father.

Debbie Millman:
From what I understand and what I’ve read, you’ve described yourself as a child who wanted too much to fit in, and have written about how you longed for a home. Much of the time, you were on the road before you were 10 years old. You weren’t going to school. Your sister enrolled in whatever high school was near whatever destination you were going to, but you were young enough to get away with your love of comic books, and horse stories, and Louisa May Alcott. You were essentially teaching yourself. Did you feel that it would’ve been preferable at that time to have one stable place that you lived?

Gloria Steinem:
What I remember emotionally is that as we were driving to Florida or California, we would pass through neighborhoods with conventional houses, with front yards and porches. And I would fantasize living there. I would think, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live there and to go to school like the other kids?” But I was always well-treated. It isn’t as if I wanted to escape. I just had a case of envy for the life I saw in movies.

Debbie Millman:
Every summer, you and your family stayed in a small house your dad had built across the road from a lake in rural Michigan. And there he ran a dance pavilion on a pier over the water. And though there was no ocean within hundreds of miles, he named it Ocean Beach Pier. I kind of love that about him.

On weekends, he booked the big dance bands of the time, and people came from all over to dance to live music, Guy Lombardo, Duke Ellington, the Andrew Sisters. And I understand that during this time, you also fell in love with dancing. And Ruby, the cigarette girl at the resort taught you how to tap dance. And is it true you could tap dance to the Minuet in G in a hoop skirt at six years old?

Gloria Steinem:
Actually, the Minuet was not tap dancing. I had a dance partner who was a girl a little taller than I dressed up as a boy, and we did an old-fashioned Minuet.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Gloria Steinem:
But we also tap danced, and I somehow thought I was going to tap dance my way into… I guess I wanted to be a Rockette. I thought that would be the peak of success. And also, there were Hollywood movies that were full of dance scenes, so that was my impractical to put it mildly, imagination of my future life.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I believe you also took ballet lessons. Did you have fantasies about being a professional dancer beyond even a Rockette?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I think I had sense enough to know that I had started ballet too late, and that I was not likely to be a real ballet dancer. But whenever a ballet company stopped in Toledo, I went and fantasized about how I could do it, in spite of the fact that the toe shoes that I wore on each weak ankle were not going to get me there.

But it was the only way I could imagine moving forward in life. My 10 years older sister had gone to college, so I guess I knew that was a possibility. But the only way of not following the script of getting married, and having children, and living in the suburbs, if you’re lucky, was show business for me. Not very practical obviously. I felt like a writer, but I didn’t know you could make a living that way.

Debbie Millman:
So even then, you felt like you wanted to have sort of unconventional life?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. Both because my parents were somewhat unconventional and because I didn’t see happiness much in the conventional neighborhoods around me. The most attractive people in my childhood were the band members for whom my mother cooked, because there were no restaurants in that part of Michigan. So there were often all these band men sitting around the table. And I was the only child, and they were very nice to me. Perhaps they were missing their own children. But everything that seemed attractive was not nine to five. It was some form of show business.

Debbie Millman:
One of my favorite stories about your dad was how he was unable to resist swearing, and your mother asked that he not swear around you and your sister. So he named the family dog Damnit.

Gloria Steinem:
True.

Debbie Millman:
When my brother was a little boy, he was also forbidden to say… For whatever reason, that word was his favorite word to say, “Damn it.” And my parents were like, “You can’t say that.” So he decided to reorganize the way he said that word. He said, Damo and navit. And I think that really tells you almost everything you need to know about him.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. No, that’s very inventive and poetic. And my father also invented a very satisfying, long epithet that was gosh darn cholera [inaudible 00:15:45] the younger the age of the middle age. I don’t know, it just went on and on, which he would rattle off at great speed.

Debbie Millman:
And he also, from what I understand, liked to say that that was dynamite?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, that was his business stationary actually, that showed you who he was. I have a letterhead that’s a big three-inch high red with dropped out, kind of exploding letters in my office framed. It’s dynamite, because it definitely tells you who he was.

Debbie Millman:
I got the sense from everything that you’ve written about him, that he was a happy man. He was a kind man and a happy man. Was there a time where you felt that your parents loved each other?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, I think so. I mean, I could imagine why my devil may care father from a well-to-do Jewish family would appeal to my very, very hardworking, not quite penniless, but that grandfather worked on the railroad. So I think also, they shared a sense of humor. And I could understand why they appealed to each other, even though their interests were so distant.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written how both your mother and your father paid a high price for lives that were out of balance, and how your father chose his own journey. And how though he never realized his dreams, ultimately, your mother was unable to even pursue hers. And you wrote this about her in your book My Life on the Road. “Long before I was born, she had been a rare and pioneering woman reporter, work that she loved and had done so well, that she was promoted from social reporting to Sunday editor for a major Toledo newspaper. She had stayed on this path for a decade after marrying my father and six years after giving birth to my sister. She was also supporting her husband’s impractical dreams and debts, suffering a miscarriage and then a stillbirth. She experienced so much self-blame and guilt, that she suffered what was then called a nervous breakdown. Once out of the sanatorium, she gave up her job, her friends, and everything she loved, to follow my father.”

And this is when you were born, Gloria. This was the only mother you knew as a little girl. How did you understand her at such a young age, prior to even becoming aware that she’d had this previous life?

Gloria Steinem:
There were always clues. I mean, she loved Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she would share that poetry and various essays. She taught me how to fold a paper in thirds so that it was like a reporter’s notebook, since at that point, there weren’t proper reporter’s notebook, but you could hold it in one hand and make notes on it with the other. So I realized the saddest words probably in the English language, what might’ve been, for her.

Debbie Millman:
Your mother suffered from depression, and addiction, and hallucinations, but you also describe her like your father, kind and loving with flashes of humor and talent, in everything from math to poetry. She had been so ambitious and so capable. How did she lose her confidence? Was that something that women were just expected to give up?

Gloria Steinem:
I’m not sure, because much of it happened before I was born. Because as I was saying, my sister was a decade older. And she was trying to be a mother, a wife to an irresponsible, charming man, and also a journalist all at the same time. Which I believe is why she, or the atmosphere anyway around her, when she had what was then called a nervous breakdown, which meant that she was too depressed to work, and she spent I’m not sure how long, at least a year in a sanitarium. When she emerged, she was also addicted to sodium pentothal, which was the tranquilizer of the era, and especially given to women because it was thought that women didn’t need to be that alert in order to function as homemakers.

Debbie Millman:
Really to keep them in line homemaking.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. I mean, that had happened before I was born. So I did recognize because of her reciting Omar Khayyam to me in the morning when I woke up, or because of her affection for short stories, I did recognize who she might have been. And I wonder how many of us, I hope many fewer of us now, women and some men too, are living out the unlived lives of their mothers. But I realized that I was too. I mean, I would wanted to be a writer anyway. It wasn’t as if I was doing something that I didn’t want to do, but I did understand it was the unlived life of my mother.

Debbie Millman:
As I was reading about your childhood, and your origin stories, and the essays that you’ve written about your mother, to Ruth, which is a gorgeous essay included in one of your earlier books, as well as stories about your dad. It struck me more than anyone I’ve ever read about or interviewed now over 18 years and 500 plus interviews, how the conditions of your origin story really did create the conditions for you to be the activist and the feminist that you are now, and have been for 50 years. It could have crushed someone the way you were grown up. You could have followed in your mother’s footsteps very, very easily.

What do you think it is about who you are that you were able to take the learnings of both your parents, the kindness, the lovingness that they were able to share and show you, to be able to break those patterns and become who you were and are?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I think your phrase, the kindness and the lovingness is the key to it. Because I did experience always kindness and respect for who I was as an individual, and I did always know that I was loved, which I’m not sure was as true for either of my parents. And yet, they somehow managed to create that for me.

So that, plus I lived in books. I mean, I loved Louisa May Alcott. I read everything she ever wrote, not only for young readers, but her much more depressed, older books for older readers. And my father used to sometimes buy a whole house library in order to get a couple of first editions, and then he would dump all the other books in the garage. So I would go out in the garage and end up reading some minute history of World War, I don’t know. I mean, things I had no business reading. If I was hooked on a book, I would just stay up all night until I finished it. I just entered it.

Debbie Millman:
I used to read books over and over. I also believe that books helped save me. I used to sneak copies of The Godfather that my parents had in their library into my room under the covers, and was just titillated by that sex scene at the beginning. I couldn’t believe that people did things like that.

I know at one point, you asked one of your mother’s doctors if her spirit had been broken, and he told you that that was as good a diagnosis as any. And he said it’s hard to mend anything that’s been broken for 20 years. And it reminded me of the mother in Michael Cunningham’s, The Hours, the difference being that your mother stayed. And I was also wondering if that was also part of what gave you the sense of meaning to keep going.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, clearly. I mean, I loved my mother, and I admired her in many ways. But I definitely didn’t want to become her. That was maybe I’m not sure, part of the reason why I didn’t get married, even though I was engaged at least once to a wonderful guy I still know. I mean-

Debbie Millman:
I want to ask you about that in a bit.

Gloria Steinem:
But I didn’t see in front of me besides my mother, many examples of women who had married, had children, and were happy, because there were not that many women in the paid labor force. It was mostly a time of very poor families or suburban families. It must’ve been present somewhere, but I didn’t see it.

Debbie Millman:
Your parents divorced when you were 10. You and your mom then moved to Clark Lake in Amherst in order to be close to your sister who was attending Smith College. You said that that year was the most conventional life you would ever lead. Was it everything you imagined it to be?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. We rented a house. It was in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is very close to Smith College where my sister was going. And we rented an already furnished house, literally the only proper house that I’d ever lived in. And I went to what I guess I think was the sixth grade, and I kind of pretended to be normal.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah, I know what that’s like. Did people believe you?

Gloria Steinem:
I’m not sure. I should go back and find them and see. But I did love having a house that I could invite friends home to.

Debbie Millman:
When your sister began her last year of college, you and your mom moved back to Toledo and into the house where your mom had grown up. There, you shared bunk beds and also lived with rats. I believe at one point you were bitten by a rat. Was that something that scared you, or was it just more adventure?

Gloria Steinem:
No, no, no. It definitely scared me, because I still remember it. And I was thinking, given the current rat crisis in New York City, I should write about it.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Gloria Steinem:
Because it was the summertime and I was sleeping… My hand must’ve been over the side of the bed. And I woke up not because the rat bit me, but just I woke up, and there was a whole pool of blood there. And my mother, even though she was not well, managed to get the two of us to a local emergency room so I could have a tetanus shot.

And memorably when I came back, the pool of blood on the floor had been licked up. Later on, after I had been one of the many writers who started New York Magazine… And I knew that rats were a feature of New York life, especially for poor families. I used to try to get Clay Felker the editor, to let me write about rats, and he would never do it. It was not the image of the magazine he had in mind.

Debbie Millman:
That’s so interesting, Gloria. Recently, New York Magazine won a national magazine award for their coverage of what’s happening right now with rats in Manhattan.

Gloria Steinem:
Really? I didn’t know that.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I was a judge for the cover design-

That’s fascinating. And the cover design won. And I believe the article did as well, but definitely the cover did.

Gloria Steinem:
Well, you see. If only they listened.

Debbie Millman:
Yep. Now, you had a number of different jobs as you were growing up. You worked as a sales girl in a women’s clothing store after school. And on Saturdays you read scripts. You played records at a local radio station. You worked as a magician’s assistant and also a lifeguard. Have you always had a strong work ethic?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I was just trying to make a little extra money. And I was looking for something. I was answering ads in the newspaper much of the time. For instance, the magician’s assistant.

Debbie Millman:
I sort of had this vision of you being on stage in a very sudden, Desperately Seeking Susan kind of environment.

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I did stand there while he threw knives at me. I mean, I was standing against a cork board, and the knives were not that sharp, thankfully. But it was a way of making money basically. And I used to also dance at supermarket openings, and the-

Debbie Millman:
Lions Club, I believe-

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, the Lions Club. It was a way of making 10 or $20 for a show, and it was also a way out of everyday life.

Debbie Millman:
When you were 17, your mom sold your Toledo house, so you would have money to pay for college, so that the house money paid for your college education. You went to live with your sister in Washington, DC where she was a jewelry buyer in a department store. And this gave you a carefree senior year of high school. You were elected vice president of the student council and the senior class. What was that experience like for you?

Gloria Steinem:
It was very bizarre for a lot of reasons. One thing was I couldn’t understand for a bit why the student body walking around the halls of that high school looked different. And it took me a while to understand they were all white, that this in the District of Columbia was still a time of racial segregation in public schools.

I was living with my sister because my mother was in a mental hospital. And people would treat me with sympathy saying, “It must be so hard to be away from your parents.” And I would say, “Oh yes,” even though it was the most carefree time I had ever lived in my life, but I didn’t want to betray them, I guess. So it was a time of happiness, but pretense.

Debbie Millman:
As you did visit your mom on the weekend, she started to get better. You slowly began to meet someone you described in your writing as someone you’d never known, and you’ve written that you discovered that you were alike in many ways, something you either hadn’t seen or couldn’t admit out of fear that you would share her fate. What similarities did you see?

Gloria Steinem:
A sense of humor, a love of reading and writing. Some character that was… I mean, it is true that I had some of my father’s adventurousness, but I’m not sure he ever sat down and read a book in his life. So that entire part of my mother’s life I really related to. And it made me sad, because I realized what she had missed.

Debbie Millman:
At the time, you had no inkling that you had become one of the great liberators of our time and how-

Gloria Steinem:
I’m still not so sure about that.

Debbie Millman:
You don’t have to be. Plenty of us are sure.

Gloria Steinem:
But there came to be a women’s movement, which helped us all.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, of course. But you were a big part in helping women all over the world take a stand for their own lives. Do you think that your grief over your mother’s inability to have a life she wanted to, impacted you to do that? I mean, I don’t even know that you realized it at the time, but do you think that ultimately, that fueled what you were doing?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, it was clear to me that I didn’t want to live what was still a conventional life. In the ’50s. Most of my classmates got engaged and or married in college or soon after college. I realized I didn’t want to do that, but I didn’t quite know what else I could do. So I ended up fleeing to India, because there was a one shot atypical fellowship available.

And I ended up living in India for two years, which made a huge difference, because that was close to the independence movement. Obviously Gandhi was a huge force. I was trying to write about Gandhi, so I was going around and interviewing people who had worked with him.

And I remember finally getting to a great woman leader named Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, who listened to me as she rocked on her porch and finally said, “Well, my dear, we taught him everything he knew.” It turned out that it had been the women’s movement that organized the March to the sea to get salt without taxes, and Gandhi had come from living in South Africa and became the external symbol for this internal movement that was mostly women.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about your time in India in a moment. I just want to talk about a few things that happened before you went to India. You graduated from high school in 1952. You attended Smith College like your sister. I understand you also applied to Cornell and Stanford, neither of which accepted you, and I hope that they regret that greatly now. But at the time, did you feel rejected? Did you wish that you had been accepted to either of those schools? Would you have gone?

Gloria Steinem:
I don’t know. I wasn’t surprised that I wasn’t accepted, because my background was not typical, and the high school I went to in Toledo, I may have been one of two or three people who went to college from my graduating class. Most everybody, the women got married. The men went to work in the factories. So I can understand why they were not so willing to take a chance, whereas Smith viewed me as a legacy because my sister had gone there.

Debbie Millman:
At Smith, you majored in government. What were you imagining you would do professionally at that point?

Gloria Steinem:
I’m not sure what kind of job I thought I could get, but it was an era in which Senator McCarthy was wrongly accusing people of being a communist. So I had some sense of how important government was and how unjust it could be. I don’t know that I imagined exactly the kind of job I wanted to have, but I thought it was the world I wanted to be active in.

Debbie Millman:
You also took courses at the University of Geneva and earned a scholarship to study at Oxford University in England for a summer. Did you have a sense at that point that you were beginning to take after your father by traveling so much?

Gloria Steinem:
That’s a good question. I don’t know. I mean, mainly I had been in Geneva at the university there. And in the summer, I just didn’t want to go home. So I managed to get to Oxford and take a summer course there.

Debbie Millman:
You returned to Smith College for your senior year, where you met Blair Chotzinoff, who you already mentioned. Was it love at first sight?

Gloria Steinem:
I think so. I mean, he was the friend of a man who was the fiance of a friend of mine in the same dormitory at Smith. And we went to the same country house for a weekend. There was a big storm and a flood, which meant that we couldn’t get out, so we ended up staying there.

Debbie Millman:
How Biblical.

Gloria Steinem:
Right, right. And he was very handsome, and funny, and unconventional. He looked sort of like a Kashmiri prince. He had a little bit dark skin and green eyes. And so, I mean, he was only Jewish, but he looked kind of amazing. He, of course, had never gone to college, and he was working as a so-called leg man for a Broadway columnist at the time.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, wow.

Gloria Steinem:
So he was welcome in all the nightclubs, and restaurants, and so on.

Debbie Millman:
I understand he took you for rides and he had a little plane. He would take you-

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. He loved to fly. And so when he came to visit me at Smith College, he would fly from New York, from a New York airport, to a tiny airport near North Hampton.

Debbie Millman:
Is it true that he once wrote your name Gloria in the Sky?

Gloria Steinem:
He may have. I don’t remember seeing it. Maybe he was trying to do that. I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:
I was trying to find a picture of that.

Gloria Steinem:
But I just remember that my house mother at that era at Smith… If you lived in a dormitory, there was a woman who was looking after you. And my house mother was kind of in love with him too.

Debbie Millman:
Sounds like he was pretty gorgeous.

Gloria Steinem:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
So he proposed. He proposed marriage. Initially, you said yes. Did you want to marry him?

Gloria Steinem:
I did and I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine not being with him. I was trying to get a job as a researcher. Women were then only hired as researchers with Time, or Newsweek, or the New York Times. I wanted to continue working, but I was not sure I could support myself. All my friends were getting married. It just seemed a kind of stop gap measure to get engaged, and he had given me the engagement ring that belonged to his mother.

Debbie Millman:
How hard was it to break off the engagement, and what made you decide to do that?

Gloria Steinem:
I felt if I got married, it was the last choice I would have. Life would be over, because I didn’t see people, women around me who were continuing to change after acquiring an identity through their husbands. Maybe that was wrong, but I just didn’t see it.

So it felt more like an end than a beginning. And since I had the opportunity to go to India on a very slender scholarship, I did that. And I did it in a not very kind way. I mean, I just left and left him a note.

Debbie Millman:
Just a don’t hate me.

Gloria Steinem:
Just trying to explain. Right.

Debbie Millman:
What gave you the courage to do something so unconventional in 1956, to go to India by yourself?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I’m not sure it was courage. I mean, it was desperation in the sense of not wanting to get married when I viewed marriage as not my first choice, but my last choice in leading someone else’s life.

I knew about India and cared about India, because both my mother and her mother-in-law, even though they came from very different families, had been theosophists. Which is literally God knowledge, but a form of philosophy that I think was very popular in those years, and leaned heavily towards the east. And was mostly populated by women, perhaps women who were striving to find some religion that was not as patriarchal, as the churches and temples around them.

Debbie Millman:
En route to India, you stopped in the UK and at the time discovered that you were pregnant. What was your reaction?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I had feared that I was pregnant, and hoped that I was not, and had all kinds of fantasies about riding horses in the park-

Debbie Millman:
You write about that.

Gloria Steinem:
Throwing myself downstairs and all the about that, all the impractical things. In the local phone directory, I had found a doctor who was near where I was staying with a college classmate and her husband in London. So he confirmed that I was pregnant, and said that he would send me to a woman gynecologist who would do an abortion. At that point, I think legally, you had to have the signatures of two physicians in order to have a legal abortion.

And he said, “I will do this, but you must promise me two things. One, you will never tell anyone my name. And two, you’ll do what you want to do with your life.” And later on, I dedicated a book to him, because that was so pivotal and so important.

Debbie Millman:
You didn’t tell anyone for many, many years. Not the person that you were living with, not the man who you had been with, until the women’s movement came along and women began to tell the truth about our lives. Did you feel ashamed or guilty?

Gloria Steinem:
I didn’t feel guilty. It wasn’t a decision I would ever have changed. But it was not a subject that was talked about in public. And it wasn’t until we started New York Magazine, and I had a column there, that I went to cover an early women’s liberation meeting in a church someplace downtown in the village, I think. And there, I heard women standing up and talking about the dangers of illegal abortion in public. I had never seen women telling the truth in public before. So I went home and wrote a column about it, and began to talk about it for the first time.

Debbie Millman:
I am 61 years old, and have had a lot of experiences in my life that I feel very ashamed of, and it’s taken me years to talk about them. One of the biggest being the sexual abuse that I was affected by as a child. And yet, I’ve been able to talk about that more easily than my abortion. In fact, I’ve never talked about it on the air ever. And I really thought about it a lot over the last couple of days reading about your experiences. Why is there so much shame, especially when people are admitting it on Twitter or on social media, just to be able to really communicate how prevalent this is and how necessary it is? And my life would never have been the same. Never, never, never, never, never had been the same, had I had a child when I was pregnant, yet I still feel guilt, and I still feel shame, which is why I was asking you about how you felt.

Gloria Steinem:
Well, do you think… I mean, you’re much younger than I am, but still, you may be in a generation that was still wrongly shamed for that, whereas younger women are not.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s very possible. I was 11 years old when the US Supreme Court gave women the right to reproductive freedom. And because I was an avid reader of the newspaper as I was growing up, that was one of the things that saved me, that suddenly allowed me to consider that if anything happened while I was being sexually abused by my stepfather, that I might not have to kill myself. That somehow, I might be able to get help.

Gloria Steinem:
But that so, to be in the same household with someone who is sexually abusing you, and to feel you’re not credible, you can’t be rescued. I mean, that’s way beyond anything I ever experienced, and that you survived and triumphed is huge.

Debbie Millman:
Well, thank you. I mean, that’s why I think I’m so fascinated by people’s origin stories. I look at what you went through, and somebody like Oprah Winfrey, what she’s gone through. And how women like you, like Oprah, have been able to change so much for so many.

Gloria Steinem:
And you.

Debbie Millman:
Well I mean, I’m not going to go there but-

Gloria Steinem:
No, but really, because it feels to me as if you went through something that was more of a trial than I did.

Debbie Millman:
Well, thank you, Gloria. That means a lot to me. What do you make of the makeup of the Supreme Court at the moment, and what are your thoughts on what we need to do to win back our reproductive freedom? I mean, what’s happening now is terrifying. It’s just terrifying.

And it’s especially terrifying when I think about young girls in my situation that I was in at 10, 11 years old, actually were thinking at one point that I might’ve been pregnant, and thinking I had no choice but to kill myself. What do we do for these young girls whose lives are at such risk?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, we have a pretty strong, not strong enough, but a pretty strong multiracial women’s movement. It is possible to get an abortion that’s legal and safe in many states. The problem is getting people from unfriendly states into supportive ones. So I think the dialogue has changed. Not enough, of course, but quite a lot.

There are still religions that are wrongly shaming women for making this choice, and families, and cultures. So it’s helpful to do what you just did, which is to talk about it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah. You’ve written about how you didn’t begin your life as an active feminist until you went to an abortion speak out in a church basement in the village in 1969. You were already in your mid-thirties, and you were there covering in. And you were sitting on the windowsill on the side, still being a reporter. What activated your activism?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I heard women standing up and telling the truth about their experience of needing and having an abortion. And I suddenly thought, “Okay, if so many millions of us have had this experience, why are we still silent about it?” And that’s when I went back and wrote a column. And also, because the women’s movement was beginning and I was getting invitations to speak, which was very scary to me… I mean, I became a writer so I didn’t have to talk in public. And I asked first Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and then Flo Kennedy, and friends to travel and lecture with me. So it was clear to me that we needed to break the silence, and that I needed to help do that.

Debbie Millman:
Working as a freelance writer required learning to live with a lot of financial insecurity. And you said you don’t know that you would’ve had the courage to become a freelance writer with no guaranteed source of income, if you hadn’t been brought up that way. Do you view it the same way now?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. It’s hard to think what if. But if I had grown up in a family with a father working for a salary, I might not have had the same… Not exactly courage, but sense that you could live another way. No, I feel lucky.

Debbie Millman:
As you were beginning to start writing with activism in mind, you found yourself wanting to report on a view of the world as if, in your words, everyone mattered. And this was still the 1960s, and even your most open-minded editor told you that if you published an article saying women were equal, he would have to publish one next to it saying women were not, in order to be objective. And I just find this astonishing, astonishing that this was the way people were thinking.

Gloria Steinem:
I don’t know how to express it, but it was. I mean, I think even when The Feminine Mystique and Betty Friedan’s work was first published, that there was a feeling that there needed to be an opposite view about how happy women were as housewives, which of course many were. But the whole point is diverse choice for everybody.

Debbie Millman:
In 1968, Clay Felker hired you to be a political columnist and features writer for the newly launched New York Magazine. Clay gave you a platform to write about equality, civil rights, women’s rights. What was that like for you at that time?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, it was wonderful to be in a group of… I mean, Milton Glaser and Clay Felker, who were inventing a city magazine, which didn’t exist, I don’t think any place in the rest of the country before that.

So it was great fun to be part of it. There weren’t equal numbers of women by any means, but they were open to other ideas. Jimmy Breslin is a great writer about the city of New York, which he deeply loved. Editorial meetings were great fun. No, it was the first time that I remember being excited about working in a group.

Debbie Millman:
What was it like to work with Milton Glaser?

Gloria Steinem:
Oh, gosh, how can I describe it? He was kind of a paterfamilias. He had a kind of gravitas, which I guess came from the fact that he listened and only suggested something that he had considered. I worried about his wife, Shirley, because she was a great artist. And I can’t speak for her, but I don’t know if she felt that her career was as important as Milton’s.

Debbie Millman:
Well, certainly not in the way Lee Krasner’s career became almost as important as Jackson Pollock’s. They did write a few books together, children’s books. But no, she never reached the level of notoriety, and fame, and respect that he did, although she’s been wonderfully generous in helping to create the Milton Glaser archives and the various exhibits that have occurred since he died.

Gloria Steinem:
I remember going to some event, some all day benefit in a church basement or something. I don’t know what it was. And Shirley and I were standing in line for a fortune teller. And he said whatever he did to her after looking at her palm. And when I came up, he said, “You must help the woman who just came before you. She’s a great artist and she doesn’t know it.”

Debbie Millman:
Oh, wow.

Gloria Steinem:
It was very touching.

Debbie Millman:
I’m going to have to speak to Steven Heller about this, because Steven Heller and Beth Kleber, the archivist here at SVA who’s managing Milton’s archives, we need to investigate this. Thank you for telling me that. Who came up with the idea for creating a magazine for women that wasn’t about beauty, and clothes, and makeup, and marriage, but it was about politics, and societal issues, and questioning norms and rules and laws?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, there were a number of us women writers who had worked for the existing women’s magazines. Glamour, the Ladies’ Home Journal, Mademoiselle. And within those pages, there would be one essay that was not about clothes, and makeup, and traditional subjects.

So there was a little bit of a place, but we did realize that there was not an entire magazine. Clay allowed us to introduce a section that was women’s magazine to come, Ms. Magazine. And I had no idea. I mean, Jane O’Reilly was part of it. Lots of other writers were part of it.

And then he sent me off to do publicity for it, just traveling all the way to California doing free radio shows and whatever. And when I got to California, someone called into the radio show, a woman, and said, “I can’t find it.” So I called Clay in a panic and said, “It never got here. It never got here.” And we discovered that it had sold out in just a week.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. The magazine, you founded it in 1971. It was originally included as a special section of New York Magazine. The issue came out at the very end of 1971, but you cover dated it Spring 1972, because you were afraid it was not going to sell and become an embarrassment to the movement.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. We feared that it would lie like a lox, as we said.

Debbie Millman:
It sold out in less than a week.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, yes.

Debbie Millman:
Before you settled on the name Ms. for the magazine, you considered the name Sojourner after Sojourner Truth. But in your research, you discovered people thought it was a travel magazine. Sisters was another, but then people thought it was about Catholic nuns, a definite need for a magazine. At the time, the word Ms., M-S., was only used in secretarial handbooks from the 1950s, where it was recommended as a way of dealing with the unfortunate situation in which you didn’t know the marital status of the woman you were writing to. How did you determine Ms. was the name to go with?

Gloria Steinem:
It was a mix really, of just what you said, because it was a way of saying that someone was a female without saying marital status. And it was used that way in some situations in England. And also, it was short, and a magazine logo is helpful if short, because then you have more space on the cover. So we called it Ms., much to the confusion of a lot of people who called it M-S or-

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I read that the New York Times took 15 years, 15 years to get the term Ms. Accepted in the newspaper. You wrote letters, you petitioned, demonstrated. They changed Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. They changed all the pronouns of transsexual. They changed everything before they changed Ms. They even referred to you as Ms. Steinem of Ms. Magazine for 15 years. What got them to finally change it?

Gloria Steinem:
I guess, I mean we picketed the newspaper, and we wrote to the editors, and we did everything we could. But actually the most frustrating thing was that after they finally changed and began to use Ms., we took roses to Abe Rosenthal, who actually had been a corresponded in India when I was in India. So I knew him, which nobody could believe because he didn’t seem conducive to-

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Gloria Steinem:
Right. So we took roses to him, and he said the most annoying thing, which was, Well if I’d known it mattered so much to you, I would’ve done it earlier.” You just wanted to kill him.

Debbie Millman:
Wow. Gloria, I wanted to share with you a story from my childhood. My mother was a seamstress growing up. She had her own business. She advertised in the Penny Saver to get seamstress business. She mostly made clothes for people that couldn’t find conventional clothes to fit them in department stores. And the name of her company as I was growing up was The Artistic Tailor, because she was an artist, but also a seamstress. So she was The Artistic Tailor. After Ms. Magazine came out, she changed the name of her business to Ms. Artistic Tailor.

Gloria Steinem:
Oh, that’s so touching.

Debbie Millman:
I wanted you to know that.

Gloria Steinem:
That’s great.

Debbie Millman:
Ms. just celebrated its 50th anniversary. It’s still a vibrant magazine. It’s still a paper magazine, in addition to a website, has a robust social media presence. How has the magazine been able to survive on the shoestring it’s had all this time? All this time.

Gloria Steinem:
Well, at a certain point in our life, even before, while we were still in our conventional form, we realized that we could not raise money as we needed to unless we were a foundation. So we did become a 501(c)(3).

Debbie Millman:

The Ms. Foundation for Women?

Gloria Steinem:
Yeah, instead of a for-profit incorporation. And therefore, we could run full page ads saying, “Buy a subscription for a friend you don’t know.” Especially women in prison, for instance. I mean, the reading materials in prisons are often very slender, to put it mildly. And we wanted to be able to send the magazine into women in prison, and so asked for contributions for that.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about how there are events that divide our lives into before and after. And despite all you’ve accomplished at this point point in your life, you described that moment back then as an event most people may never have heard of, the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. What happened there to create this line before and after for you?

Gloria Steinem:
First of all, that conference was the first and I guess last big National Women’s Conference that was financed… I mean in a slender way, but anyway, by federal funds that had come from a congressional resolution that was put forth by Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Patsy Mink, who were all members of Congress then. And that was purposefully representative.

We did our best in each state to see that it represented from a racial and economic point of view who lived there. It didn’t always work, but it mostly worked, so that it became in this huge hall in Houston, the single most representative meeting for women that has ever existed. And after that meeting, its chapters state by state, especially in Minnesota, and a lot, continued to represent that. But by now, there are all kinds of women’s groups gathered around different issues. But then, it made a huge difference to have a dedicated group city by city, state by state.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve stated that this is when you learn the difference between protesting other people’s rules and making one’s zone, between asking and doing. How did you learn that?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, we were kind of in charge of ourselves there in this massive meeting. And preparing for it, carrying it on, and so on. So trying to be as representative as we could. And there were caucuses. There was a Black women’s caucus, a Latina women’s… There were lots of different caucuses, and I was the messenger going from caucus to caucus, asking them what changes they wanted in the overall statement.

So it was just an incredibly moving experience. And I remember after it was over thousands of people in this massive hall, and there was empty chairs and empty amphitheater. And I was standing there thinking, “Who will remember this meeting, who will?” And three Native American women came up to me and gave me a red shawl, a Native American prayer shawl, and said, “Wear this when you need support and need help.”

And somehow they, Native Americans have gone through more deprivation, and injustice, and theft of their land, perhaps than any other group here, that they had that kind of kindness, and confidence, and sense of history. Gave me a sense of comfort in history.

Debbie Millman:
Didn’t they also give you a necklace that you wore until it fell apart?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, absolutely. I still have the beads in a bowl somewhere.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Gloria Steinem:
It is, right.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you a little bit about anger. In all of your activism, you discovered an endemic among women, an inability to show anger. And you discovered that anger is supposed to be unfeminine, so we suppress it until it overflows, and you now feel that harnessing anger for change is a good thing. And though it took you a long time to know what to say when people called you a bitch, you learned to simply say thank you. How did you get to that place?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, that’s not so hard to say thank you. It took me a while. But I don’t know. Anger, I think overflows in a way, and it heads into our fear of lack of control. The other thing is that I think for many women, that lack of control means that when we get angry, we cry.

And I remember talking to a woman who was an executive in a big office and had decision-making power over people, both men and women. And she said to me, she said, “I know that I cry when I get angry, so I just get angry and cry, and say to the group I’m angry with or talking to, ‘You may think I am sad because I am crying. No, I’m crying because I’m angry.'” I thought that’s genius.

Debbie Millman:
Genius, genius. I’ve gotten to a point now… Because I think that anger is really just a cover for sadness and grief. That if you allow yourself to cry, you actually are able to metabolize the feeling, and then use it for good.

Gloria Steinem:
No, I agree. We shouldn’t be shamed, and we shouldn’t shame ourselves, which we were often doing, I think. Because crying when we’re angry, maybe some men experience this too, but I think not as much.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I find it’s much easier to calibrate my emotions if I allow myself to cry, as opposed to flip out and get angry. How can we best harness our anger right now? Between the backtracking of so many of our rights, reproductive freedom, freedom of speech, the rampant book banning, how do we best face the future?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I don’t think there’s any one way, but I do think that anger is an energy cell that we can use. Because righteous anger, anger at injustice, unfairness, pain, cruelty, is an energy cell. And if we look at it that way, this is a gift. This is energy I can use. Then we can, I hope, begin to feel less at fault or less disempowered by being angry.

Debbie Millman:
What do you see in this generation of women that you haven’t seen in generations past?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, so much. I mean, obviously it depends where and who. But I think first of all, there’s just an assumption that marriage is supposed to be equal, that men can take care of babies as women take care of babies, that it’s not a punishment for men. On the contrary, that it’s a big reward. That if you are arriving at a place of work, whether it’s in a factory, or an office, or the government, or whatever it is, if the people there don’t look something like the country, there’s probably something undemocratic going on. So the burden of proof of caring has shifted in a big way, from what’s wrong with me, to what’s wrong with society, and how can I help to fix it?

Debbie Millman:
Is it possible to feel optimism looking at what we’re facing?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, no, absolutely. Because optimism is a form of planning. So if we don’t imagine something positive that is possible, it’s way less likely to happen. It may be difficult when looking at Trump in the White House, something I never thought could possibly happen. But he’s no longer there and-

Debbie Millman:
Let’s hope he stays out

Gloria Steinem:
I think just remembering that we have to imagine change in order to have an idea of what we want and be able to plan is very, very helpful.

Debbie Millman:
Gloria, the last thing I want to talk to you about is age. You’ve been very open about your age. I remember back when you turned 40, a reporter said, “Wow, you look great for 40.” And you said, “This is what 40 looks like.” And you said it again when you turned 80.

Gloria Steinem:
And I think I also said, “We’ve been lying so long. Who would know?”

Debbie Millman:
Exactly.

Gloria Steinem:
Right, right.

Debbie Millman:
You were very open again about it when you turned 80. Next year, you’re going to be 90. You’ve said that you seriously love aging, and have recently discovered yourself thinking things like, “I don’t want anything I don’t have.”

Gloria Steinem:
That’s true.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a pretty remarkable thing.

Gloria Steinem:
That’s true, except that I haven’t written enough. That’s the one thing that I regret and hope to still remedy, even if I have to… I researched to find the oldest woman in the world, and I found a woman in the Himalayas who’s 130.

Debbie Millman:
So there’s plenty of time.

Gloria Steinem:
Plenty of time. No, I know that’s not overwhelmingly practical.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I know you plan to live past 100. You’ve said that many times. What do you want most for this next decade?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, speaking for myself, I hope that I write more, because writers will do lots of things in order not to write. And I had so much activist temptation, that I’m afraid I overdid it. So I would like to do that. I’m content where I’m living in a house where I’ve been forever, or an apartment in a house. I am not so good at saying no. I could use a course in saying no, because I need to at least mark off days and say, “Okay. I’m saying no on this day.” I’m saying this now in the hope that I actually do it. But am surrounded by chosen family who are my friends, and I’m healthy enough. So I feel very, very lucky to have lived through what I have, and to see a possible future, which is a luxury in this world.

Debbie Millman:
Gloria, my last question is this one. I’ve read that when you turn 100, you want to have a diner, and you’ve described it like this. “A little diner with blue gingham curtains by the side of the road, because diners are the most democratic places. Everyone goes, truck drivers go, people from the neighborhood, people in their tuxes after parties go. and they’re cheerful and cozy, and you get just the kind of reward food that you want. They’re truly populist places. And in the back room, we could have a little revolutionary meeting from time to time, and you would serve brand muffins.” So I have a two part question. Is this still an ambition? Is the first part.

Gloria Steinem:
First of all, I love you for knowing that. I don’t know where you found that, but it’s quite true that I’ve always loved diners as the kind of ultimate democracy. But I recognize that it’s impractical for me to be running a diner. I still have a great feeling about them, but I think I’m content to be in my apartment with a guest room, where friends can stay, with a living room where we can have talking circles. I think I’m content to be there.

Debbie Millman:
Well, the second part of my question was if indeed you do ever do that, can I become a server there? But we’ll wait and see if it happens, and we’ll jump off that bridge when we get to it.

Gloria Steinem:
Okay. You and I can be serving bran muffins there-

Debbie Millman:
Let’s call it Steinamites. Gloria Steinem, thank you. Thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Thank you for being one of the people in the world that have made a difference in how we live in the world. It has been an honor and a thrill to have an opportunity to talk with you today.

Gloria Steinem:
And thank you for your incredible generosity and spending the time that you have to know everything. When I’m losing my memory, I’m calling you up.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely, anytime. Anytime. For more information about Gloria Steinem, all her work, her books, her writing, and her activism, you can go to her website at gloriasteinem.com.

This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Gloria Steinem appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Okay, so you have a few bad habits. Maybe you bite your nails, maybe you drink too much, too often. Oh and cheese. Is there too much cheese in your life? I know there is in mine. And don’t get me started on flossing. And yet, it’s hard. It’s really, really, really hard to break a bad habit. And it’s just as hard to get a good habit going. Or is it?

James Clear thinks it’s doable, and he wrote a blockbuster best selling book about it titled Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. James Clear is a writer, a speaker, and an entrepreneur. And he’s here to tell us about his life, his career, and how we maybe can stop sabotaging our efforts with insurmountable goals. James Clear, welcome to Design Matters.

James Clear:
Hey, good to talk to you. Thanks for having me. And I think cheese is only a good habit. I can’t categorize that as bad. That sounds great.

Debbie Millman:
Well, we’re starting out in a very good place. James, I understand that you tend to geek out about ultra light travel bags. Why?

James Clear:
Yeah, I don’t know. In my twenties I had this urge where I really wanted to see the world and get out. I had never been abroad until I was 23 I think. Eventually after I graduated college, I got a passport and started wanting to travel. And I was really into photography at the time, and so I was doing a lot of landscape photography or street photography in different places.
I can remember one trip in particular where I landed in Morocco and I was in Marrakesh, and I was taking some pictures and hanging out and doing some stuff, and. Then a few days later I went to Casablanca and I got off the train. It was 4:00 or something or 3:00, and for some reason I wasn’t able to get to my hotel quickly and the sun was setting soon, and that’s the hour when the light is best for photos. And so I wanted to take pictures for the next couple hours before the sun was gone, but I didn’t have time to drop my bags off. And I was so happy that I had figured out how to travel with just one bag because it would’ve been a ridiculous scene for me to be carting around wheeling all this luggage around trying to take photos for a couple hours. So that was probably the trip where I was like, “It’s definitely worth the effort to try to figure out how to travel with just one bag.”

Debbie Millman:
Let’s go back in time a little. You were born and raised in Hamilton, Ohio. Your mom is a nurse. Your dad played professional baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals in the minor leagues, and still live in the same house you grew up in. You used to live in Ohio as well. Why Ohio?

James Clear:
I mean, the main answer I think is family. The main answer is the people I love live here. But I like Ohio too. I have pride in being from here. My parents’ house, which they do still live in. It’s about five minutes away from my grandparents’ house, so I spent a large portion of my childhood running around on my grandparents’ farm. They both live maybe 45 minutes north of Cincinnati. It’s a little more built up now than when I was growing up. I grew up, it was much more rural. Being outdoors, and running around the fields, and feeding the cows, that was all part of how I grew up, and I loved being outside there. I have a cabin in the woods now too that I love to go out to, and I have dreams of taking my grandkids out there the way that I spent time on my grandparents’ farm. I don’t know, it occupies a warm place in my heart and I’m proud to be from Hamilton, and proud to be from Ohio. And all of the people I love are still here, so I spend a lot of time here.

Debbie Millman:
Well, having cows then makes sense regarding your love of cheese.

James Clear:
That’s right. I didn’t think about that, but it started early.

Debbie Millman:
Now I know that every Sunday, you and your family and all of your cousins and extended family would go over to your grandparents’ house, and your grandmother would make dinner every Sunday for 18 people.

James Clear:
I know. She was a saint.

Debbie Millman:
What kinds of things would she make for 18 people? That’s like a Thanksgiving dinner every week.

James Clear:
It was a lot of spaghetti, a lot of pasta a lot of the time. Lasagna and spaghetti are the two that I remember the most. Every Sunday we would go to church in the morning and then we’d go over to my grandparents for breakfast. So my grandma would cook us breakfast. That was just my immediate family and my grandparents. That’s seven or eight people. Then we’d go home for four hours, and then at 3:00 we would come back to their house and then she would cook dinner for 18 people.

Debbie Millman:
You’re right, she’s a saint.

James Clear:
Yeah. And I say that jokingly because of all the work and everything that she did for us. She actually passed away recently. She passed away within the last year. And some of our extended family, some cousins of hers and stuff came down from Columbus for the funeral. And one of them said that he looked at his coworkers before he drove down that day and he was like, ‘I’m telling you, she’s the sweetest lady I’ve ever met.” But I think we all have people in our lives that we love to say things like that about, but she actually is the one person I know that when you said things like that at her funeral, you weren’t just being nice about it and kind of glossing over the tougher parts of her life. I truly don’t know if I ever heard her criticize someone, which is just an insane thing to be able to say about somebody. She’s almost too nice about it. It was one of those things where it was like truly if I didn’t have something nice to say, I just didn’t say anything at all. She was a special lady, and I’m fortunate to have had her in my life.

Debbie Millman:
James, I understand that when you were four years old, you saw a cowboy on TV and decided right then and there you wanted to have lasso and swing it. So you took a screwdriver and tied it to a piece of string, and swung it around your head in the backyard. This resulted in your cutting your eyelid and getting your first stitches.
And fast forward as you’re growing up, you were playing sports and they had a significant role in your life. You swam, you played basketball and football. But because you were always getting hit in football, you switched to baseball. And I was wondering, especially as we’ll go into what happened in high school while you were playing sports. I’m wondering, are you accident prone?

James Clear:
Yeah, it’s funny. I don’t think of myself as being super reckless or anything, but I don’t know. I have a lot of experiences with stitches. Yeah, I don’t know. I just wanted to make a lasso and I thought, “I’ll tie a screwdriver on the string that’ll do the trick.” And my mom was in the kitchen and looked out the window and saw me just whirling this around my head. I was really lucky though, and actually that’s kind of a theme throughout many of the injuries that I had is that it was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. I cut my eyelid but not my eye, and I ended up getting stitches on my eyelid and kind of sewing that back together.
And then later, I’ve had stitches all over the place. I cut my knee open diving on a broken swing set, and then of course I had my injuries in high school. I had a set of blinds fall in my head one time. I ended up getting 20 staples across my head for that. So I don’t know. I really don’t identify as someone who’s accident prone, but that probably sounds ridiculous to anybody listening to me list all these off right now.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s interesting because all of your accidents really have something to do with being sports-minded or athletic. I am actually accident prone, but I’m the kind of person that trips over nothing, falls over a step, bangs into a wall or a door. I mean all of my stitches, and I have a bunch are all self-inflicted wounds that I encountered by being clumsy.

James Clear:
I think the way that I would describe it for me is I’m very hard on things. My wife is constantly complaining about that. I’m banging doors, plopping onto couches, cracking frames of things. I’m always very hard on things. I don’t buy nice cars for myself because I know that I’m just going to-

Debbie Millman:
Same. Exactly.

James Clear:
I need something that I can be rough with. I guess I am that way with my body occasionally too.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I am the same way. My wife has a gorgeous car. I will not even try to drive it. I insisted on getting a Jeep.

James Clear:
Yeah, there you go. That seems right.

Debbie Millman:
So let’s talk about what happened in high school, because I do think it is a really defining moment in how you became who you are. Like your dad, you wanted to play professional baseball on the last day of your sophomore year of high school while playing with your classmates. You were hit in the face right between the eyes with a flying baseball bat that slipped out of the hands of one of your team members and rotated through the air, sort of like a helicopter into your face.
The hit broke your nose and your ethmoid bone, which is the bone behind your nose, deep inside your skull. Shattered both your eye sockets. Cognitively. You didn’t know what year it was. You lost the ability to breathe, and you began to have seizures.
What happened next? I mean, and we’ll talk a lot about your book. You start your book with this chapter, which resulted in my sort of just not putting the book down till pretty much I finished. It is so riveting and so unexpected to start a book in this way.

James Clear:
Yeah, I guess that was a good call by my publisher. I don’t like writing about myself, so I pushed back multiple times and it’s like, “I just don’t think it needs to be about me.” I’d really prefer to just make it straightforward and about building better habits, but they ended up winning out and they were like, “This has to be in there.” So it seems like people found it interesting.
Yeah, it was a hard moment for me. I don’t know. It’s strange to think about in retrospect. It’s hard to fully parse the experience. I was obviously very out of it for a while. I ended up being put into a medically induced coma that night. I ended up waking back up the next day. And as you said, I had multiple facial fractures. I ended up back into surgery about a week later to get a lot of that fixed up, which interestingly that hurt more than the initial injury was the breaking of my nose, the resetting of a lot of the bones.
The big thing is the road to recovery was so long. I couldn’t drive a car for the next nine months. I was practicing basic motor patterns, like walking in a straight line at physical therapy. All I really wanted to do was just get back, and play some baseball, and be a normal teenage kid. But it took a long time.
And I did not have any language for describing what I was going through at the time. I never would’ve said like, “I was just trying to get 1% better. I was just trying to find a way to improve.” But that was a time in my life when I had to practice the art of small changes or the art of little improvements, because that’s all I could really handle. I just had to find something to be positive about or some small improvement to focus on, and then wake up the next day and try to do it again. And eventually I was able to make my way back. It’s funny, thinking back on it now, I don’t remember being really in a bad mood about it. I remember being I don’t know, fairly positive or happy. And I think to your point earlier about what’s special about Ohio or what’s special about being here, it was the people that helped me do that. I mean, my grandpa was a very positive person. My parents are very positive people. And I think their influence was really dramatic and important during that time. And even though my physical progress was slow, mentally, I had a good attitude and I felt pretty good throughout the process. And it was a long road back, but I don’t look back on it begrudgingly.

Debbie Millman:
The hospital that you were flown to was the same hospital your sister went to for her cancer treatment after she was diagnosed with leukemia 10 years prior. And your parents met with the same priest they had met with back then as well. Was there ever a moment where you were in danger of losing your life?

James Clear:
So there was a period of time where I started to lose the ability to do basic functions. Swallowing, breathing. I had a couple seizures as I mentioned. And then at one point, I lost the ability to breathe on my own. So I think that probably qualifies. They had to intubate me, and then they were pumping breaths into me by hand for a little bit because around that same time, I was being transferred to the helicopter. The helipad was across the street. So we were in this ridiculous situation where I obviously was told all this after the fact, I’m being wheeled across the street and we kind of are hitting bumps on the sidewalk. The intubation apparatus popped out, so they had to reattach that. And then were trying to get me on the helicopter at the same time. So I think the nurses and doctors did a great job managing the whole situation, but I was in a very unstable condition for a window of time there.

Debbie Millman:
You were placed in a coma as you mentioned. And when you woke up, you told one of the nurses that you had lost the ability to smell. She then recommended that you blow your nose. What happened after that?

James Clear:
Yeah. I mean it seems like a decent idea. I was just like, “I can’t smell anything.” And she was like, “Well, you have all kinds of gunk and blood, and all sorts of stuff in there, so let’s clear your nasal cavity a little bit. So see if you can blow that out.” Which it didn’t hurt that bad even though my nose was broken. But when I blew, I forced air through the cracks in my shattered eye socket, and so then my left eye bulged out of the socket. It was halfway out. So the situation just became more complicated. I ended up having double vision for weeks. The doctors all had to confer to try to figure out what to do. They decided not to operate. They said they were pretty sure that the air was going to seep back out of the eye socket and my eye would gradually recede. And that did happen. It took about a month for it to go back to the normal position, but it did slowly make its way back.

Debbie Millman:
Pretty sure is not very confidence inducing.

James Clear:
Right. At the time, that probably didn’t feel as good as I was hoping, but we made it back. We made our way out. It was a really ridiculous 24 hour stretch.

Debbie Millman:
You said that after the injury, you were trying to regain some control over your life. What did that look like for you?

James Clear:
I think it all started with focusing on what you can control. So I mentioned physically, it was physical therapy sessions or whatever. Whatever exercise I was being asked to do. Can I do this well, can I try to give a good effort and do this successfully and have a good day today? So it started with a lot of that stuff. I had always enjoyed school and always taken pride in getting good grades and being a good student. It’s funny, as an entrepreneur now, a lot of my entrepreneurial friends really are anti school, or are down on school, or didn’t have a good experience. I feel like the opposite. It was kind of a game to me and I enjoyed trying to figure out how to play the game well. So I didn’t know if I have every indication that my intelligence is the same, but is it? Let’s see. And so I felt good about being able to study in the same way, or get a good grade on a test, or just make my way back there. I do think that helped me gain some confidence and feel like, “You know what? Maybe I can’t move the way I want yet, or maybe I still have a little bit of double vision or I can’t drive a car yet. But it seems like everything’s going to be okay. I’m thinking clearly, and I’ll get there eventually.” So I think study habits played a role in it. And then eventually, once I was able to start playing baseball again about a year later, then I started to focus more on the physical and the athletic part of it. And I was never as good as my dad, so I didn’t end up playing professionally or anything like that. But looking back on my career, I feel like I was able to fulfill my potential. And that was a pretty long arc. It took me probably a solid five or six years of continuous improvement and just getting a little bit better each year. I barely got to play high school baseball. I was coming off the bench my first year in college. My sophomore year, I ended up being a starter. My junior year I was all conference, my senior year I was an all American. So I just gradually kept making these little progressions. And that was very confidence inspiring. I had a coach who told me one time, a basketball coach that confidence is just displayed ability. And I felt like each year that went on, I was displaying my ability a little bit more and more. And I was gaining confidence in myself and feeling like, “Yeah, I have ever a reason the world to work really hard this off season or to show up again because I have proof of it.”

Debbie Millman:
I sort of see confidence as the successful repetition of any endeavor.

James Clear:
I like that, the successful repetition of any endeavor. It’s like that coach that told me that, that confidence is displayed ability is kind of like, “Yeah, if you want to feel confident about making free throws, go out there and practice.” And once you knock down 10 in a row, you’re going to feel a lot better about it. Successful repetition of it is going to breed confidence.
It is kind of this interesting thing. I think a lot of the time in life, we talk ourselves out of attempting things. We decide that, “I’m not ready yet. I just don’t feel confident in it. I feel like I need to learn more. I feel like I need to develop my skills.” But the confidence comes after the fact, not before. And you need the willingness to try, and then the confidence arises after the fact.

Debbie Millman:
How do you manage being back on the baseball field? For me, it would’ve been, I don’t know what it was for you. But that first day back on the field holding your mid up to catch a ball, were you afraid of getting hit again?

James Clear:
That’s interesting. Actually looking back, that’s a great question. Looking back, I had a couple advantages that I didn’t really think about. So the first is I actually got hurt in gym class, not in a game. So we were playing baseball, but it wasn’t an actual game. And secondly, I got hit by a bat, but I was a pitcher. So I didn’t have to pick up a bat and get in the batters box that often. I was just standing on the mound pitching. And so when I was playing the game, I was not in the same situation as when I was injured, which is an interesting thing looking back on it. And so I didn’t really have that very much. I didn’t have this fear of playing baseball. If anything, I was just excited to get back out there and get back to it.
I’m not the kind of person that worries very much. Maybe to my detriment sometimes, but I’m not that kind of mindset. I just was able to chalk it up to, “Listen, this is a freak accent.” And sometimes you get unlucky in life and unlucky that day. Yeah. And then you just got to move on.

Debbie Millman:
You got a full scholarship to go to Denison University where you majored in biomechanics. Why biomechanics? What were you imagining you were going to do professionally back then?

James Clear:
Oh man, I wasn’t imagining anything. The only thing I wanted to do in college was play baseball, but I liked school and I was a good student. And looking back, I was able to kind of hack the system to my benefit.
So I don’t have any entrepreneurs in my family. I didn’t have anybody to look to. I wasn’t thinking I’ll be an entrepreneur someday. And at that time, I didn’t have any close friends who were entrepreneurial or whatever. But when I went to college, I looked at all the majors that were there, and I was interested in some stuff. I was a science guy, so I was interested in biology and physics. I took some chemistry classes. I was kind of playing in that sphere anyway. And then my sophomore year I heard, I don’t even remember where, that you could design your own major. And I was like, “I didn’t even know that was a thing.”
So I looked into it a little bit more. I just looked at the course catalog and I was like, “I like these physics classes, and I like these anatomy classes, and I like these biology classes. I’ve already taken a couple of these chemistry classes.” And then I just put it all out on the piece of paper and I was like, “What would my major like this be called?” And biomechanics was the closest thing that I could think of. And it applied pretty well. I pitched it to the Academic Affairs Council and they were like, “Yeah sure.”
So looking back, that’s a pretty entrepreneurial thing to do, to be like, “I don’t like any of the options that you have. I’ll make my own.” But I didn’t identify as an entrepreneur at that time. But it’s kind of cool to connect the dots looking backward and being like, “You were sort of always on this path. You like creating things, you like optimizing things. You like creating your own experience.”

Debbie Millman:
You then went on to Ohio State for your MBA. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of the St. Gallen Symposium when you were there?

James Clear:
Yeah, so to the point that I just made a few minutes ago where I said all I really wanted to do was play baseball, but I liked school and I was good at school. I hadn’t thought too much about what I was going to do after at Denison. And my default answer was always I’ll go to med school. I thought about doing that and then I looked at a PhD program. I applied for a Fulbright Grant that I didn’t get. So that was kind of sitting there and I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll go and get my MBA.” Not because I really knew anything about it. I had never had a real corporate job or anything. Just because everybody said, “Yeah, business knowledge. That’s important. You should know how that works. And then that’ll always be relevant.” I ended up getting a good scholarship, so it made the decision easy. But what I really needed was time to think. I needed two years to figure out what am I actually going to do next.
So I went there and I took the classes, and occasionally these opportunities would come across that they would email out to the class. And there was this one called the St. Gallen Symposium that was a conference that was in Switzerland. And as I had mentioned previously, I had never been abroad at that point. So I was like, “Man, this is an essay competition. And if you get selected, if your essay gets chosen, you get to go to Switzerland. Well, that sounds kind of cool.”
I did actually something that now I use this strategy all the time and or have used it all the time over the last 10 years building my business, which is basically looking at best practices and trying to figure out what parts of those transfer to your own skill set and experience. Or reverse engineering, I guess we could call it.
So the symposium had all the previous winners listed on the website and their essays. And so I downloaded all the essays from the previous 10 years and read them all. And I looked to see how many references did each one have, how long was each one. Was there any similarity in structure in the way that they made their argument? And I did actually end up finding some common themes that it appeared the selection committee liked.
And so when I wrote my article, I had that number of references, and I used that structure, and I wrote with that amount of length, and all of that. And anyway, long story short, the essay got selected. Ultimately, I actually ended up going two years. So the MBA program was a two year program. And I attended the first year. And then the second year, my essay ended up being selected as the winner. And the prize was $10,000. That was more money than I had ever made before. So I was getting ready to graduate, and suddenly I had $10,000 in the bank account. And I was like, “You know what? Maybe I’ll try to give it a go and try to make my own thing.” Maybe I’ll try to start a business. So that was the money that I lived off of for the first probably six to eight months while I was trying to figure things out and start my own thing. And I really don’t know… at this point I’m kind of like man, I’m so wired this way. I probably would’ve ended up

an entrepreneur somehow. But I don’t know how it would’ve happened without that essay. I probably would’ve had to go get a regular job for a while and then figure out some exit plan.

Debbie Millman:
So when you started your own business, what was the business?

James Clear:
Well, my first ideas, my first attempts were really sad attempts at a business. The very first thing I took some of that $10,000 that I got paid. I think I spent 1,500 bucks on getting an iPhone app built. And it let you put… this is pre Instagram. This is a while ago. It let you put captions on photos and filters on photos and stuff. It didn’t have any kind of social media component or anything, but it was just like a photo editing app. It was pretty bad looking back on it. It wasn’t very well executed.
And I put it on the app store because I was hearing all these stories about people launching apps and making all this money. And I just thought, “If you build it, they will come.” And I built it and nobody came. And that was a good lesson for me. It was an expensive one because I had just burned through 15% of my cash. But I needed to learn that you need to have an audience. You need to have an ability to market, an ability to launch a product. I had no way of getting the word out. I didn’t know how to get in front of people. And so that experience forced me to go back to the drawing board and learn how do you get an audience? How would I get this in front of people’s eyeballs?
And I started reading more and more about email lists, and building an email list, and starting a blog, and all that. And I started to go down that path. As I did over the next year or two, I started some other websites, some of which were other bad business ideas. I bought puppypresent.com at one point.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a good name.

James Clear:
The idea was that my girlfriend, now my wife, she loved puppies like many people. And I was like, “What if you could have breeders rent out time with their puppies and you could just buy it as a gift, maybe buy a puppy present?” And be like, “Hey, for your birthday, I got you two hours with these puppies. Let’s go play with them.” I thought it was a decent idea, but all the breeders I talked to hated it. They were like, “Wait, you just want to play with the dogs, but you don’t want to buy them?” And I was like, “Exactly.” So there were a lot of little hair brain things like that, that I tried that just never panned out. And it took about two years before I started to find my footing.
I was doing some web design gigs in the background to make money try. I had to pay the bills somehow while I was waiting to have a business that was actually spitting off some cash. Eventually, I found my way to writing what is now jamesclear.com. So I started in September of 2010 was when I did that iPhone app thing. And then November of 2012 was the first article on jamesclear.com.
That’s one of the biggest inflection points in my life was the choice to… you could look at it at different levels. The choice to become an entrepreneur, the choice to start jamesclear.com, the choice to start writing rather than, I don’t know, paying people to build iPhone apps. But setting out on the entrepreneurial path has been one of the biggest inflection points that I’ve had.
And it took a long time. It was a really slow burn. There was nothing sexy or glamorous about those first two years where I was struggling and didn’t even have a idea that was working well. And then there also wasn’t anything sexy about the first three years of jamesclear.com where it basically wasn’t making any money. But eventually I got a book deal and Atomic Habits came out, and now it’s great, but it took a long time. It was five years of struggle before anything really hit.

Debbie Millman:
And I remember when I first became aware of your writing and saw how hard you were working, I was very impressed with how dedicated you were and are. But especially before you were atomic, so to speak.

James Clear:
The habit that kind of launched my career was that I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday, and I did that for three years.

Debbie Millman:
And what gave you this sense? Before you go one, I’m sorry to interrupt because this is my million dollar question for you. What gave you the sense that you could make a business by writing twice a week?

James Clear:
Well, I had a couple people who were proofs of concept. I didn’t know them, but I had a couple people that I looked at. So I was in grad school 2008 to 2010, just kind of stewing on these entrepreneurial ideas. There were the A-list bloggers around that time, two of them. One was Leo Babauta at Zen Habits who Leo’s still writing now. And he was a huge site at the time. And I was interested in habits. I hadn’t written anything about it yet. I just thought, “Hey, this site’s kind of cool. This is interesting, this guy’s making a living.” I think he had six kids and I was like, “Somehow he’s figuring this out and he’s writing about habits.” I was like, “I don’t have any kids. It’s just me. I barely have a bedroom. I can probably figure out how to do one sixth of this.” So Leo was definitely an early inspiration.
And then Chris Guillebeau was also writing. Chris is still doing his thing now too. He was an early inspiration too because I mentioned I was really into travel and photography and stuff. And Chris had this whole travel thing that he was really all about. But also, Chris was the one who was writing every Monday and Thursday. That was just kind of his cadence. Leo I think wrote even more frequently than that. I think he wrote three or four times a week or something.
But I actually can remember one article that Chris wrote, I don’t even remember the title of it or whatever, but I remember reading it. And I was in grad school and I thought, “Man, I feel like I could do this. I feel like I could write something that’s as good as that.” And so then I decided to try one, and it was way worse than what Chris had written.
And I had to be honest with myself and I was like, “This is much harder than I thought it was.” It was a really interesting lesson where I was like, “If it looks easy, they’re probably putting in a lot more work than you think.” And the better somebody is at their job, the easier it often looks. Anyway, I had to a little bit of humble pie there and sit back and be like, “Okay, I need to start giving a better effort.”
But when I settled on that Monday Thursday schedule, I did it partially because it felt like this is a cadence that I can actually stick to. This is something I could actually… I can’t do five days a week. I might not even be able to do three days a week, but I think I could do two.

Debbie Millman:
I know. People like Maria Popova, astonish me that she can do it every single day. Yeah,

James Clear:
It’s absurd. Her output, I saw somewhere on her site, she said she’s published, it was something, it seemed impossible. It was like 60 million words or something. I was like, “How is that even doable?”

Debbie Millman:
She’s a very dear friend of mine and I know she writes every single one of those letters.

James Clear:
Yeah, it’s unbelievable. So I felt like I could stick to it, and I have a very high quality bar. And it was really hard for me to let myself be like, “I’ll just put it out even if I feel like it’s just okay.” I just couldn’t get myself to do it. So I thought, “Well, twice a week is enough that I could spend 20 hours on an article or even 30 hours on an article.” I often did that for the first year or two where I would say the average article was probably eight to 10 hours. And it was frequent that I would spend 15 to 20. The fastest I ever did one in was four or six hours, something like that. So it was consistent enough that I felt like it was going to add up and compound, but it was infrequent enough that I had the space to do what I felt like was good work.

Debbie Millman:
Do you ever suffer from writer’s block or not knowing what to write about?

James Clear:
So I had this moment where I was writing for a few years, and the site was growing, and I hit 100,000 subscribers. And for some reason that number kind of got in my head a little bit and I was like, “Okay, now a lot of people are paying attention. Now it has to be really good.” And so I went through this little phase where rather than just telling myself, “Hey, it’s going well. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Rather than doing that, I thought I need to be more perfect now. So I thought, “Okay, what I need to do is spend even more time writing. More time revising it, more time working it out, more trying time trying to craft a really great sentence.” Interestingly, the writing actually got worse, not better.
What I came to realize is that if I ever feel like I’m running low on ideas, what I need is not to write more. What I need is to read more. And it’s kind of like driving a car where you got to stop sometimes and fill the car up with gas. And the point of having a car is not to sit at the gas station all day, and just keep pumping gas into the tank, and never produce anything, or never go anywhere. But the point is also not to just drive until you run out of gas and then you’re stuck on the side of the road. And so you need this balance between the two. And reading is like filling up the tank for me, and writing is like going on an adventure. And they both feed each other, and I need both of them. And when I’m really on is usually when I’m reading something really great. It’s so good, I can barely make it through a page or two without taking a bazillion notes. And then I’m like, “I got to put this book down and just write about this right now.” And then the ideas take off on the page. So reading and writing are much more intertwined than I think I initially realized. And almost all of my good ideas are downstream from something great that I read.

Debbie Millman:
You said that everything you write about is mostly a reminder to yourself of what you should be doing. Was that how your specialty in understanding habits first came about?

James Clear:
Yeah, it’s funny to call it a specialty. I feel like my readers and I are peers, and I write about this stuff because I struggle with all the same things everybody else struggles with. It’s like, “Hey, have you procrastinated?” “Sure all the time.” “Do you start something and then you’re inconsistent?” “Yes, absolutely.” “Have you focused too much on the goal and not enough on the process?” “For sure.” I struggle with all that stuff like everybody else does. And so I wrote about it because it was relevant to my own life. I was interested in trying to figure it out a little bit more, and apply it, and I was just kind of curious about it. And so for that reason, because I was interested and because it excited me, I think the writing was better as a result.
Now, it’s probably worth noting that in those early years, that first year or so, I wrote about a lot of other stuff too. I wrote about how to have better squat form in the gym, and the medical system in America, and all kinds of stuff. And the readers didn’t seem to care about those as much. And so I kind of followed my nose a little bit and I was like, “You know what? Every time I write about habits, or strategy, or making better choices, or being creative or productive, those are the topics that the audience also likes and that I like.” There’s a lot of other stuff that I like that people are like, “Well that’s great, but you can kind of keep it to yourself.” And so for those things I just kind of like, “Well, maybe I’ll journal about that and not publish it.” So I gradually kind of found my footing in my area of expertise or specialty as you say. And it was mostly just trial and error. But all the time, whatever I was writing about, I tried to make it something that I was excited about or that I was interested in personally.

Debbie Millman:
I think that’s what makes it so interesting. I work with a woman that helps me with my research. Her name is Emily [inaudible 00:34:10]. And she didn’t know about you before I started working on the show. And initially, she was surprised because she knows that I’m not somebody that is particularly interested in the self-help genre, so to speak. But as soon as she started researching you, as soon as she started reading your book, as soon as we started talking about the way in which you approach what you share, she completely understood why I was so intrigued and excited about talking with you.

James Clear:
That’s cool.

Debbie Millman:
You have a very unique way of sharing information with people. That also happens to be something that could be helpful. I have never in my life recommended what would be considered a self-help book to my wife. But I am insisting that she read Atomic Habits because I think she will benefit from it so much and-

James Clear:
I take no responsibility how this ends up. I hope that she enjoys it

Debbie Millman:
Well, I’ve already started sneaking in some of the techniques. I’m Trojan horsing it in, because she so needs it.

James Clear:
That’s good. That’s good. I think it’s important to be a practitioner of the ideas, and not just a writer of them or a theorizer of them. And I do think that if you’re forced to practice the ideas, if they’re things you actually use in your daily life, there’s going to be a better quality to the writing. And then also, you come to appreciate how difficult it is to make any kind of progress in the world, or to create something new, or to put this idea into practice.
I think because I have struggled with all of these common habit pitfalls like everybody else has had, I think I am in a better position to say something compelling about it because it’s like, “Yeah, I know what this is like.” I’ve struggled through all this too. It also gives me more confidence in the ideas if I can be like, “Yes, I’ve actually used them.” And I’m not saying it’s going to be a perfect fit for everybody and I don’t think it’s going to work in all scenarios, but I know that it worked in this scenario. So I feel better about sharing it.
My kind of approach now is that there is no one way to build better habits. There’s no single strategy to follow. But there are a lot of tools that you can use. And my job is to lay all the tools out on the table and say, “Hey, here’s a wrench, and here’s a hammer, and here’s a screwdriver.” And your job is to say, “You know what? I think for my life or for my situation, the wrench feels like the right fit, or the hammer might be better for this particular experience or this particular situation.”
And I think if I can do that well, if I can lay all the tools out and give everybody a full toolkit to work with, we’re all in a better position to make some of these changes. Doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy all the time or even that it’s going to work all the time. But I feel like I have a better appreciation for having a big suite of tools because I’ve had to practice it.

Debbie Millman:
Well, a lot of people agree. In 2018, you brought your book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones into the world. In the years since the book was published, you have sold over 9 million copies worldwide. You’ve been on the New York Times Bestseller List, I looked it up this week, for 154 weeks. 154 weeks listeners. Your book has been translated into over 50 languages. Your newsletter is sent out every week to more than 2 million subscribers. And you also travel all over the world with your super sleek bags giving inspiring speeches. Congratulations James.

James Clear:
Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride. And I don’t think it’s reasonable for any author to expect those kind of outcomes. It just struck a chord, and I’ve been very fortunate. But yeah, I don’t really know what else to say other than I’m glad that people are finding it useful.
I think ultimately, the only way a book can grow that is if it’s word of mouth. It’s far outpaced my ability to sell it or to tell people about it. And what I tell myself when I go to sleep at night is people are finding this useful. It’s growing because people are telling other people about it. And the only reason they’re telling people about it is because they find it helpful themselves. And that certainly feels good. It feels gratifying. Habits have been written about for a long time. They’ve been around long before I was here, and people be writing about it long after I’m gone. And I am just adding a very small piece to the collective knowledge of humanity on the topic. I’m not really saying much that’s very new. My hope is just that maybe when you read it, you’re like, “I never quite heard it put that way before.” Or, “Maybe this gives me a little bit different line of attack than I had previously.” And perhaps that unlocks an opportunity for you that maybe wasn’t there before. And I’m really grateful to all the readers.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I’m only going to push back a little bit here James, because I do think what you’re writing about is new in that it’s your perspective. Which is doesn’t have any shame attached to it. There’s no berating. It’s just very straightforward, very relatable, and really, really helpful.
So let’s talk a little bit about habits. I have two fairly basic questions from my listeners that may have not read your book, maybe the two or three people out there in the world, or your website. So just two easy questions that I think will help frame the rest of my questions. First, what is a habit?

James Clear:
Well if you talk to an academic or a researcher, they’re going to say something like, “A habit is an automatic or mindless behavior that you do without even really thinking about it.” So brushing your teeth, or tying your shoes, or every time you pick up a pair of barbecue tongues, you tap them together twice. Stuff that you don’t even really think about that much.
I think there’s another definition, another way to describe a habit, which is it’s a behavior that’s tied to a particular context. So you can never have a human outside of an environment, where you’re going to live your whole life in some type of environment. And your behaviors are often linked to that environment. So your couch at 7:00 PM is linked to the habit of watching Netflix, for example. Or your kitchen table at 7:00 AM is linked to the habit of drinking tea and journaling.
And I think that reveals something important about habits, which is the environment plays a pretty big role in how they’re shaped, in how they’re triggered, and so on. I think the strict academic answer is it’s a pretty mindless automatic routine or behavior. That’s not how we usually talk about it in daily conversation. If I were to ask you, “What are some habits you want to build?” You might say, “Writing every day or going to the gym four days a week.” And writing is never going to be mindless the way that brushing your teeth might be, but I know what you mean when you say it. You mean I want it to be this regular practice, this ritual, and so on. So it kind of depends on how academic we want to get about the definition. But I think we could just say most of us know what we mean when we say a habit. We mean something I do regularly, something I do frequently, something I do consistently.

Debbie Millman:
So my second basic question is what do we get wrong about habits?

James Clear:
It’s a good question. I think different people get different things wrong. So I don’t know that there is one single answer. There are some common pitfalls that you see people fall into a lot. Like one common pitfall is biting off more than you can chew or starting too big. I mean, this happens to everybody. It’s happened to me a bazillion times. You get excited. Especially if you’re an ambitious person, you start thinking about the changes you want to make and then you’re like, “Let me find the perfect workout program, and it’s an hour long, and you’re going to do it five days a week.” And instead, it might be more useful just to develop the habit of going to the gym for five minutes, four days a week. Just become the kind of person who masters the artist showing up. But we often resist that type of small action because it feels like, “Well, this isn’t enough to get me the results that I want.” So that’s probably not even worth it.
But there are levels to this whole thing. And if you can master the art of showing up, then you’re in a position to optimize, to improve, to advance. So that’s kind of a big part of my philosophy is make it easy to show up.
The other common maybe pitfall or mistake, the things that people get wrong about it. I think one thing that we get wrong is we don’t look at our bad habits enough. We don’t think about what they can teach us for building good habits. So let me give you an example.
Most behaviors in life produce multiple outcomes across time. So broadly speaking, there’s an immediate outcome, and there’s an ultimate outcome. For bad habits, the immediate outcome is often pretty favorable. The immediate outcome of eating a donut is great. It’s sweet, it’s sugary, it’s tasty, it’s enjoyable. It’s only if you keep eating donuts for a year too, that you get unfavorable outcomes.
Or smoking is the classic bad habit example. Well, the immediate outcome of smoking might be that you get to socialize with friends outside the office or you reduce stress on the way home from work. So the immediate outcome might be favorable. It’s only the ultimate outcome five or 10 years later that’s unfavorable.
But, building bad habits is often pretty frictionless. It’s somewhat easy. The way that we all talk about building good habits where we’re like, “Oh man, I just need to get myself to go to the gym.” Nobody says that about eating donuts. Nobody says, “Oh man, if I could just get myself to eat more donuts.” We don’t talk about it that way. And I think there’s a lesson baked in there. Why is that? If we can start to look and maybe unravel our bad habits a little bit more, we notice they’re behaviors that are often really convenient. There are behaviors that are often immediately rewarding. There are behaviors that are often obvious and occupy space in our environments, in the rooms and buildings that we work in all the time. And you can copy and paste those lessons onto building good habits. You can try to find ways to make your good habits immediately rewarding. You can try to make them more visible in the environment. You can try to find ways to make those frictionless and convenient. And the more that you do those things, the more you’re kind of putting those same forces to work for you rather than against you.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I was really struck by was just in my own environment and online, and in advertisements, maybe you hear things like, “Be healthy for 30 days and then,” or, “Do this thing for 21 days and then.” And you said the honest answer to how long it takes to build a habit is forever. And I’m wondering why you think it’s forever.

James Clear:
Well, what I’m trying to get at there is a habit is not a finish line to be crossed. It’s this lifestyle to be lived. And it’s not like, “Hey, just do this for 30 days and then you’ll be a healthy person.” Or, “Just do this for 60 days and then you will be productive.” You don’t have to worry about it anymore. What I’m really getting at when I say the true amount of time it takes to build a habit is forever is you are looking for a sustainable change. A non-threatening change. You’re looking to integrate it into your new lifestyle, kind of build this new normal. And then once you’ve stuck to it for a long time and it becomes part of your natural cadence of your day, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just like, “This is just part of my daily routine. This is something I can stick to.”
And that’s how habits really last. This idea that let me start the day off by doing this 21 day sprint and then I’ll be the kind of person I want to be. I think once you unpack it that way, almost everybody realizes, “Well, that’s not how it actually works.” But that is what we’re sold a lot of the time. That is what everyone’s telling us. And so I’m just kind of pushing back on that a little bit and trying to be like, “You don’t really need to make these radical changes all the time. What you really need is can we just figure out a way to live a good day today? All you got to do is live one good day. And can we find a pattern that is sustainable, that’s non-threatening, that you can integrate into your daily routine?” And then it can start to become something that this is just normal for me. It’s not like I’m not reaching so much. I’m not trying to be a totally different person.

Debbie Millman:
The part that I found to be most fascinating about your book was this deep-seated notion that our habits are how we embody a particular identity. And you encourage people interested in doing this type of work to start by asking themselves who is the kind of person you want to become, and what is the type of identity that you want to build? And that’s very intentional.

James Clear:
Yes. Yes, it is intentional. We often talk about habits as mattering because of the external stuff they get us, All this stuff we’ve just been talking about, “Habits will help you get fit, or make more money, or be more productive, or reduce stress.” And it’s true habits can help you do those things, and that’s great. But the real reason that habits matter is that as you said, they help you embody a particular identity.
Every action that you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So no, writing one sentence does not finish the novel. But it does cast a vote for I’m a writer. And no, doing one pushup does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.
And this is why I say the real goal is not to do a silent meditation retreat. It’s to become a meditator. The real goal is not to run a half marathon, it’s to become a runner. Then these cases, I’m using labels. Reader, or runner, or meditator, or whatever. But it’s true for characteristics as well. “I’m the type of person who finishes what they start,” or, “I’m the type of person who shows up on time.”
And the more that you believe that aspect or that element of your story, the more you start to integrate that into your identity, the easier it becomes to stick to that behavior in the long run. I mean, in a sense, once it’s part of your story, once it’s like some aspect of yourself that you take pride in, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just acting in alignment with the type of person that you see yourself be.
I mean, if you take pride in the size of your biceps, you’ll never skip arm day at the gym. Or if you take pride in how your hair looks, you have this long hair care routine and you follow it every day. And the aspects of our identity that we take pride in or that we kind of say, “Yeah, this is part of who I am.” We don’t have to motivate ourselves to do those behaviors in the same way that somebody who’s maybe just getting started does. It’s kind of like, “No, this is just part of what I do. This is part of how I show up.” And I think that’s ultimately where we’re really trying to get to.
It is a long process. I like that voting metaphor because each time you do a little habit, it’s like casting a vote on the pile. And you kind of build up this body of evidence. And no individual instance changes your belief about yourself or changes the story that you’re telling, but over time, you start to tip the scales in favor of that story.
And this is a little bit different than what you often hear people say. You’ll often hear something like, “Fake it till you make it.”

Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah. No, no. I say make it till you make it. Just make it till you make it.

James Clear:
Make it till you make it?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

James Clear:
That’s such a good creator phrase. Just make the blog post until you make it. Make the piece of art until you make it. Just make the thing. Just keep creating until it’s there.

Debbie Millman:
Right.

James Clear:
Fake it till you make it asks you to believe something positive about yourself, right? So it’s not ultimately that terrible, but it asks you to believe something positive without having evidence for it. There’s a word for beliefs that don’t have evidence. We call it delusion. Your brain doesn’t like this mismatch between what you say you are and what you’re actually doing.
And behavior and beliefs are this two-way street. What you do, the actions you take each day, they influence what you think about yourself. And the mindset that you have, the beliefs that you carry, they influence the actions that you take. But my argument is to let the behavior lead the way, to make it till you make it as you say, to start with one small action. To start with a little bit of evidence that, “Hey, in this moment, I was that kind of person.” And eventually, you have every reason in the world to believe that aspect of your story. So yes, your habits are how you embody a particular identity. And even if they’re small, I think that makes them particularly powerful.

Debbie Millman:
But we can also look at the opposite. And what you say about yourself often as you mentioned, will begin to determine who you are or who you become. One of the things that I was struck by, you write about how people can walk through life in a cognitive slumber. And I’m going to quote you here. “Blindly following the norms attached to their identity by stating things like, ‘I’m terrible with directions. I’m not a morning person. I’m bad at remembering people’s names. I’m always late. I’m not good with technology. I’m horrible at math.'” James, almost every one of those, except the, “I’m always late,” are actually designations that I thought you were describing me, and how I state my identity. And I read that. Yeah. I’m like, “James is looking deep into my soul and he is telling me that I don’t have to say these things about myself anymore if I don’t want to be them.” That’s what was so personal about my experience reading your book.

James Clear:
That’s funny. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to target you like that.

Debbie Millman:
No it’s okay.

James Clear:
It’s interesting though, these stories that we carry around. I didn’t think something like I have a sweet tooth. Before I wrote the book, I wouldn’t have thought anything about that. I love chocolate, I love caramel. Sure. But now I look at it and I’m like, “Each time you tell yourself that, you’re kind of reinforcing that identity.” And it becomes a little bit easier to do that thing the next time.
And I am not an extreme sort of personality in the sense I don’t think that means, “Hey, you should never eat chocolate or you’re never going to forget somebody’s name again,” or whatever. All that stuff’s going to happen. This is just life.
But I do think that it’s worth asking yourself questions given the reality of the situation without ignoring the facts and without ignoring the reality of what needs to be done, what’s the most empowering version of a story that I could tell myself? What’s the most useful version of a story that I could tell myself? Because if you’re not ignoring reality, there’s no sense in telling yourself a less useful version. There’s no sense in telling yourself the least empowering version. But we often do that.
I heard about this interesting exercise one time where I said take two sheets of paper. On the first sheet, you’re going to write the story of your last year or pick whatever timeframe you want your last 10 years. And the only rule for this little game is that you are not allowed to say anything that isn’t true. So it has to be factually true. But the first page, you’re going to write the story of your last 10 years. And you’re only going to write it in the least favorable way possible. And then the second page, you’re going to write the story of your last 10 years, and you’re going to write it in the most favorable way possible.
It’s interesting because you’re going to sit there with these two pieces of paper, and there are no lies on either page. Yet which version of these stories are we telling ourselves each day? If you’re not going to ignore reality, if you’re still going to say, “Hey listen, I’m still going to wrestle with the truth and I’ll still make sure that I do what I need to do.” I just can’t see any sense in telling yourself the story that’s on the first page. It doesn’t make any sense to do anything other than what’s going to make you feel useful, empowered, joyful, happy, fun, excited. Let’s tell the version of that story and still do the things we need to do. And sometimes life is hard and you still got to deal with it. But we don’t always do that. And I think we would probably be in a better place if we tried to do that each day.

Debbie Millman:
So I think a really important way of thinking about this then is that habits matter, not because they can get you better results, which they can do, but also because they can change your beliefs about who you are.

James Clear:
Yeah. I don’t think this is unique necessarily to habits. I’m not saying other experiences in life don’t matter or that a one-off event or something doesn’t make a difference. Those things do matter. It’s just that over time, your habits are the experiences that get repeated. So the weight of the story starts to shift in favor that just because of the frequency of them. And everything else starts to be like, “That just happened one time, this was a blip on the radar,” or whatever. And so I think they are unique in their long-term ability to shape identity. Because day after day, week after week, you’re getting these little bits of proof that, “Hey, this is part of my story.”

Debbie Millman:
One of the most viral aspects of your book is about how important it is to focus on building a system rather than trying to achieve a specific goal or an outcome. And you state that you don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. I’m wondering if we can just deconstruct that a little bit for my listeners. What do you mean by a system?

James Clear:
So your goal is your desired outcome. What is your system? Your system is the collection of habits that you follow. And if there is ever a gap between your goal and your system, if there’s ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, your daily habits will always win. Almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. In many ways, our results in life are kind of like a lagging measure. Or at least to a large degree, they’re a lagging measure of the habits that preceded them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Even silly stuff like the amount of clutter in your living room is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. We also badly want better results in life. But the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. It’s like fix the inputs, and the outputs will fix themselves.

And there are many things in life that influence outcomes. I’m not saying habits are the only thing that matters. You’ve got luck and randomness, you have misfortune. All sorts of things can befall you. But by definition, luck and randomness are not under your control, and your habits are. And the only reasonable, rational approach in life is to focus on the elements of the situation that are within your control. So I think for all of those reasons, I encourage people to focus on building a system rather than worrying too much about a goal.

And I totally get why this is hard. Some of it I think is just a byproduct of the way that both major media and social media works. You’re only going to hear about something once it’s a result. You’re never going to see a story that’s like, “Lady eats chicken and salad for lunch today.” It’s only a story once, “Lady loses 100 pounds.” Or you’re never going to see people talking about on the news, “James Clear writes 500 words today.” It’s only a story once it’s like, “Atomic Habits is the best seller.” The outcomes of success are highly visible and widely discussed, and the process of success is often invisible and hidden from view. And I think that leads us to overvaluing results and maybe undervaluing the process of the system.

So all I’m trying to get at with this is a little bit of an encouragement to say, “Hey, goals are great and success is awesome. But let’s maybe put that on the shelf for a minute and spend most of our days focused on what collection of habits am I following? What system am I running?” And kind of adjust the gears of that machine a little bit, and start running a better system. And that’ll carry me to a different destination naturally.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about the brain and habits. You write that the primary reason the brain remembers the past is to better predict what will work in the future. And this happens in everything. I remember years ago, I rearranged the furniture in my bedroom. And I had been very used to habitually walking into my bedroom in a certain way and going to my night table to find something. And suddenly in the days after rearranging the furniture, I found myself blindly walking in the wrong direction because my night table was no longer there. And it struck me how dependent we get on these habits that are unconscious, and how much that impacts the way we live our days. So how is our brain impacted by our reliance on our habits?

James Clear:
Well, it depends on how broad you want to get with this answer or how deep you want to go. Ultimately, every organism needs energy to survive. And anything that you can do to conserve energy or to be more efficient or effective is going to help in the survival of that species. And so your brain is looking to automate things. It’s looking to figure out solutions to future problems that it won’t have to think as much about. And if it doesn’t have to think about that. It can shift its attention and energy to something else. And so habits save you time. They save you effort, they save you energy. And at that very basic biological level, they help you survive. Now of course the environment our ancestors grew up in, it was very different than what we have today. So now we have this kind of paleolithic hardware, we’ve got this biology that is primed to build habits. But we live in a modern society where there’s all sorts of different ways to apply that brain and that kind of thinking. And so now we’re building habits on social media, and we’re building habits in corporate workplaces, and we’re building habits and saving for retirement. And our ancestors didn’t care about any of that stuff. But the machinery works just as well in those situations as it did before.

So ultimately, I think habits are, from a biological level, they’re like an energy saving process. But then in a more practical, modern way of thinking about it, they’re a time saving process. And they help you become more effective and efficient in that way because you don’t have to spend time thinking about what to do.

Debbie Millman:
Well, what’s so interesting about this notion of the brain trying to hack these systems for us, a lot of it is done subconsciously. And when that happened in my bedroom with the night table, I began to wonder how many unconscious habits do I just obey? Because this is the way I’ve taught myself to view the world. And that’s why the shift in identity was so intriguing to me in using these hacks to begin to start to rework certain neural pathways in my brain that I might not even be aware is sabotaging my efforts.

James Clear:
That’s a fascinating question. And I think a lot of the habits that are unconscious, you wouldn’t want to have to spend any time thinking about. If you get up in the middle of the night and you just need to walk over to the bathroom,

well you don’t want to have to be thinking carefully about how do I turn to get out of bed, and how do I put one foot in front of the other? And where is the coffee table, and how do I walk around it? Am I going to stub my toe on the side of the bed? All of those non-conscious patterns that we have, they just help you operate through the world. And if you had to actually think about every little thing you were going to do throughout the day, you would never be able to do anything. It’d be hard to move even across the room.

But, there also are all these unconscious thought patterns that we have, these little identities that we carry around with us, these stories that we keep repeating, that maybe we don’t even know we’re telling ourselves or realize. And this is another thing that I say in the book, which is the process of behavior change almost always starts with self-awareness. Because it’s really hard to change that story if you don’t realize you’re telling yourself it every time. And there are different strategies you can use for that. There’s some things in the book that are actual tactics like the habits scorecard or something like that where you write all your habits out and analyze them a little bit. That stuff can help.

I think also just a process of reflection and review. Whatever cadence makes sense for you, whatever that exact process looks like can be unique to you. But making time to think about how you’re spending your time and reflecting on whether that represents the values or the identity that you want to build. It’s really hard to self-assess stuff without giving yourself time to think. If you’re so busy that you don’t have any time to sit, and relax, and maybe stew on it a little bit, it’s hard to be self-aware of all those little subtle stories that we’re telling ourselves.

In my case, I have a period of reflection review at the end of each week. I do a really short one each Friday. That one’s mostly business related. It’s mostly looking at what did I produce, how much traffic, how many email subscribers, revenue expenses. It’s just a spot check for the business for the most part. But then I also have one at the end of each year where I do an annual review, and that’s much broader. That’s like how many nights did I stay away from home this year while traveling? Was that the right amount? Should that be up or down? Do I need more family time or less? How many workouts did I do this year? How many on average each month? What were my best lifts throughout the year? How many articles did I write? How many words did I produce this year? Is that what I want to do next year?

So you can get the idea. It’s customized to you and what you’re interested in. But just having those moments of reflection review, I think help make you more self-aware. And boy, it’s really hard to change behavior if you’re not aware of it. So that process is really important for shaping the habits that you want.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I love that you share those annual reviews with your readers. They’re not just for you. You share the good, the bad, and the changeable every year. And they’re really fun to read. And it’s been fun to see the trajectory since 2018 especially, when the book was published. Looking back on this last 10 year period, what is the biggest thing that you’ve changed about yourself after learning all you have about habits?

James Clear:
I’ll give you two. So I’ll give you what I think is something big that I have changed for myself, which I don’t know if it’s the biggest, but it’s something big. And then I’ll also give you one that hasn’t changed, which I think is also interesting.

So the thing that hasn’t changed is working out has been one of the core habits that my life has been built around for the last 10 years. And I genuinely mean this. I don’t know that I would be an entrepreneur if I didn’t have that one habit. I’m not necessarily saying everybody needs to work out a bodybuilder or anything like that. You can decide what it is for you. But I do think we need some habit that we feel like grounds us, that we feel like is time for us that you can get away from everything. When I’m in the gym, that is the only hour of the day where I’m not always thinking about the business in the background, or thinking about what I need to do, or responsibilities or whatever. That’s the only time that I have where it’s truly just me.

There have been so many days over the last 10 years where I felt like, “Man, I really blew that day. Or we just didn’t get anything effective done. I haven’t made any progress. The book is still a mess.” But, at least I got a good workout in. So that one has kind of been an anchor point for me.

And then I do think something that I’ve grown with is caring less about what other people think and focusing more on, I guess we could just call it trusting myself more or trusting my instincts more. Some of this is going to be natural. You’re not going to have much to trust yourself on early in your creative career, because you haven’t produced much yet. And now I’ve produced a lot more. So I kind of have a better taste for what works and what doesn’t, or what’s good and what isn’t.

But I do look back and think. It’s kind of interesting. For the first two years that I published articles on jamesclear.com, I never shared any of them on Facebook because I didn’t want anybody who knew me to see it. I didn’t want it to color their thoughts about me. I was like, “Well what if they saw my stupid little blog and thought, ‘I’m surprised he’s doing that. I thought he was going to be doing something more impressive.'” Or, “I’m surprised he’s spending time on that. I wonder if he has a day job. Is this actually the thing that he’s doing is just writing here?”

I definitely was worried about the collective they and what they thought. And looking back now, I’m like it’s kind of silly because if you were to ask me any individual person, “You worried about what Sarah thinks?” I’d be like, “Well no, she probably isn’t judging me like that?” Or, “Are you worried about what Tony is going to say.” No, probably not. He would probably be cool about it. But collectively, I had this image of they will not be impressed by it, or they will not think it’s good enough. I don’t feel that way as much anymore. I’m sure I still fall into that pitfall, but I look back on it now and I hope that I’ve grown a little bit since then.

I think the one thing that helped me get through it, and it didn’t become an enormous roadblock, was that I let that fear or that worry, that concern be the gas pedal and not the brake for my work. So because I was worried about what people were going to think, what I told myself was not, “I shouldn’t do this,” or, “I’m not good enough,” or, “

I should just quit.” What I told myself was, “Now you really got to make sure it’s good.” Now it’s like, “Get to it. Let’s start working.” And I think that made me put a better effort in. And so the result ended up being great.

But I can just as easily imagine a scenario where I tell myself, “I don’t know what people would think. I’m going to look pretty foolish here. I’m going to feel kind of stupid.” So I’m just not going to attempt it. I really try to live this way in my life. I don’t think I always do it, but I try to not be my own roadblock. I try to let the world tell me no before I actually tell myself no.

And there’s not 1,000 ways to do anything in life, but there’s almost always more than one way. And it’s actually very rare that you run into a true hard roadblock where you’re like, “Hey, the world just says, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing else you can do. You can’t be persistent anymore. There’s no other way to try this. You have to give up.'” It’s actually very rare to get a full stop like that. There’s almost always something else you can do, some other line of attack to try, if you just have the courage to do it. And I think that’s something that’s changed for me is maybe hopefully, I have a little bit more of that creative courage now than I did before. But I’m glad that it didn’t stop me early on because I could easily imagine a scenario where that would be true.

Debbie Millman:
I think a lot of people are glad that didn’t stop you. My last question James. I read that you might be starting a podcast. Is that true?

James Clear:
The rumors cannot be confirmed or denied. I think it’d be cool. We have lots of episodes that we’re working on, and trying to feel out, and figure out. I don’t have a launch date for it. And as I am sure you can appreciate, as I said earlier in this conversation, when it looks easy for people, it is probably much more work than you were thinking. So I am learning that right now. It is much, much harder to produce something that you’re proud of than maybe you would think on the surface just listening. So I have a lot to learn, but I’m definitely thinking about it and we’re slowly working on it.

Debbie Millman:
Excellent. Can’t wait to hear it. Thank you so much James, for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

James Clear:
Of course. I appreciate the opportunity, and love any chance to talk to you. Thanks, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. James Clear’s book is titled Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. You can find out more about James Clear and sign up for his weekly newsletter at jamesclear.com or atomichabits.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: James Clear appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
She’s an award-winning journalist, a New York Times bestselling author, several times over, a co-founder of one of the most significant magazines of the 20th century, and an activist whose work has impacted the place women and girls now have in the world. She’s also co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Women’s Action Alliance, and the Women’s Media Center. For over 60 years, she has been in the thick of American cultural and political life, where she has been instrumental in shaping our ideas about feminism, humanity, and equal rights for all people.

She is, of course, the legendary Gloria Steinem, and I have the great honor of interviewing her today in my studio at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Gloria Steinem, welcome to Design Matters.

Gloria Steinem:
Thank you so much. And now listening to your introduction, I’m only worried about living up to it.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, you already have. That’s the great thing. You’ve already done these things. Gloria, I understand that your older sister, Susanne, was actually the person in your family who named you. Is it true you were named after her favorite doll?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, I think so. My parents had had another child, a boy, who was stillborn, between us. And that meant that my sister was almost a decade older than I. So she was another mother in a way, and I looked up to her and followed her around much to her alarm. And yes, she did name me.

Debbie Millman:
I wonder what type of doll we could find now back in the fifties that is named Gloria. I think we’re going to have to do an eBay search to figure that out.

Gloria Steinem:
I think the dolls that I adored, and I did have a collection of dolls, were named after Sonja Henie, who was a great figure skater of the era. I don’t know. They came with names, not mine, but I was in love with dolls.

Debbie Millman:
You were born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio. Your father’s mother Pauline Perlmutter Steinem was a suffragist, and the first woman in the state of Ohio to be elected to the national board. This was before women had the right to vote nationally. How did she manage such a victory?

Gloria Steinem:
First of all, I’m so impressed with your research. Thank you for that, because I think Pauline deserves notice and attention. She had come from either Russia or a country close to Russia. We’re not sure, when she was a teenager, then lived in Vienna, I think. Not sure. And my grandfather went there to find a bride, in a very European traditional way.

So she arrived in her late teens as a bride, and she did become a suffragist. Also, she founded the first vocational high school. Otherwise, they were all learning Latin and Greek, whether that was going to be useful in their lives or not in Toledo. And she was greatly admired. I only remember her in a sensory way because I was too little. I remember her kitchen and food, but my mother was definitely in love with her mother-in-law law.

Debbie Millman:
Did her activism even subliminally influence you at all? Did you look back at what she was doing and feel like that was something you also wanted to do at that age?

Gloria Steinem:
I’m not sure. I certainly admired the fact that she had made it possible for women to vote by organizing them to vote in a group. Otherwise, they were harassed and scared away from the voting places by gangs of men and boys who were hostile to women voting. I knew that. I knew about the vocational high school. I knew she was very admired, but I’m not sure. Maybe it made me assume that I could go to college, which my older sister did too. That was possible in my family for women to be educated. But she seemed distant and so honorable, I couldn’t imagine imitating her.

Debbie Millman:
Your parents, Leo and Ruth Steinem, met at the University of Toledo in 1917 while they were working together on their college newspaper. After they graduated, they got married. And you’ve written how your mother married your father because of his refusal to worry. And then as a result, was left to worry alone, on her own. Why didn’t your father worry at all? He seemed to be such a carefree, risk-taking experimenter.

Gloria Steinem:
I can only imagine it had something to do with his family, which was well to do. And he was one of four boys, and he was a kind of devil may care kind of person. Whereas my mother came from a very working class family. Her father was a railroad engineer. So I think my father’s carefree attitude was charming to her, and his great argument for getting married was, “It’ll only take a minute.”

Debbie Millman:
I believe they were married twice. Right? Didn’t they get married privately in a very quick civil ceremony and then have another marriage?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. A private ceremony and then a public one, yes.

Debbie Millman:
Ultimately, I believe that because they were married twice, but only divorced once, I think your mother felt that they were still married for quite a long time.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, because she felt divorce was a shame. And so when pressed, she would say well really, they were still married.

Debbie Millman:
Your father was a man of many trades. He ran a dance pavilion and a summer resort. He was an antique salesman. He tried to write slogans for ad agencies. I loved some of the slogans that you’ve included in some of your writing. He dreamed up a living chess game, with costume teenagers moving across the squares of a dance floor. Very ahead of his time.

He was always looking for the next big deal, and he was often on the road. You were often with him, sometimes working alongside him as a little girl and still in single digits. Can you talk about how you assisted him in his efforts as an antique salesman?

Gloria Steinem:
He used to go to country auctions to buy jewelry, antiques, small antiques, things he could carry around in his car. And then he would sell them to roadside dealers. So this was his winter way of life, when the summer dance pavilion was not going. My job was to pack and unpack these little items of jewelry, or glassware, or China, or whatever, when he went into a roadside shop in order to try to sell them. So I was the packer and the unpacker, which I was in heaven about. I mean, kids love to be necessary, so I felt I was part of the grownup world.

Debbie Millman:
Didn’t he sometimes send you into some of the antique stores to work independently of him as a little girl?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, depending on how little I was, yes. Right? I mean, there was a downside to it, because I always felt a little bit as if we were the gypsies of the highway and looked down upon by whoever it was who owned the shop as we drove up in our dusty car.

Debbie Millman:
When your family was on the road, you never started out with enough money to reach a particular destination. Instead, your dad took a few boxes of China, silver, other small antiques he bought at country auctions, and then used them to sell, and buy, and barter your way through your travels. Did you know what he was doing? Did you feel okay about that? Did you ever feel insecure?

Gloria Steinem:
I knew that it worried my mother, who had grown up in a way less economically secure way, and therefore was more worried. But my father’s slogan was kind of, “If you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, it could be wonderful.” And that’s seductive too. I’m sure I’ve absorbed a lot of that, because I too have never had a proper job.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written how there were only a few months every year when your dad seemed content with a house dwelling life. Do you know what the motivation was behind his desire to be constantly moving? Did you ever ask him about it?

Gloria Steinem:
No, we never talked about it in those terms. I just accepted who he was, even though it did also cause my parents to separate eventually, because my mother wanted to live in a more secure place. And after my decade older sister was in college, it was possible for my mother and I to move into her old family house in Toledo.

But my father was always present. He never had a bank account, because I think he feared the IRS would attach it. But he used to send me money orders every once in a while,

Debbie Millman:
$50 money orders, which is a lot of money at that time.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, yes. He did his best to be attentive, and he was certainly fun to be with. I don’t remember ever feeling that my parents were not doing their best, whatever it was, either my mother or my father.

Debbie Millman:
From what I understand and what I’ve read, you’ve described yourself as a child who wanted too much to fit in, and have written about how you longed for a home. Much of the time, you were on the road before you were 10 years old. You weren’t going to school. Your sister enrolled in whatever high school was near whatever destination you were going to, but you were young enough to get away with your love of comic books, and horse stories, and Louisa May Alcott. You were essentially teaching yourself. Did you feel that it would’ve been preferable at that time to have one stable place that you lived?

Gloria Steinem:
What I remember emotionally is that as we were driving to Florida or California, we would pass through neighborhoods with conventional houses, with front yards and porches. And I would fantasize living there. I would think, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live there and to go to school like the other kids?” But I was always well-treated. It isn’t as if I wanted to escape. I just had a case of envy for the life I saw in movies.

Debbie Millman:
Every summer, you and your family stayed in a small house your dad had built across the road from a lake in rural Michigan. And there he ran a dance pavilion on a pier over the water. And though there was no ocean within hundreds of miles, he named it Ocean Beach Pier. I kind of love that about him.

On weekends, he booked the big dance bands of the time, and people came from all over to dance to live music, Guy Lombardo, Duke Ellington, the Andrew Sisters. And I understand that during this time, you also fell in love with dancing. And Ruby, the cigarette girl at the resort taught you how to tap dance. And is it true you could tap dance to the Minuet in G in a hoop skirt at six years old?

Gloria Steinem:
Actually, the Minuet was not tap dancing. I had a dance partner who was a girl a little taller than I dressed up as a boy, and we did an old-fashioned Minuet.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Gloria Steinem:
But we also tap danced, and I somehow thought I was going to tap dance my way into… I guess I wanted to be a Rockette. I thought that would be the peak of success. And also, there were Hollywood movies that were full of dance scenes, so that was my impractical to put it mildly, imagination of my future life.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I believe you also took ballet lessons. Did you have fantasies about being a professional dancer beyond even a Rockette?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I think I had sense enough to know that I had started ballet too late, and that I was not likely to be a real ballet dancer. But whenever a ballet company stopped in Toledo, I went and fantasized about how I could do it, in spite of the fact that the toe shoes that I wore on each weak ankle were not going to get me there.

But it was the only way I could imagine moving forward in life. My 10 years older sister had gone to college, so I guess I knew that was a possibility. But the only way of not following the script of getting married, and having children, and living in the suburbs, if you’re lucky, was show business for me. Not very practical obviously. I felt like a writer, but I didn’t know you could make a living that way.

Debbie Millman:
So even then, you felt like you wanted to have sort of unconventional life?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. Both because my parents were somewhat unconventional and because I didn’t see happiness much in the conventional neighborhoods around me. The most attractive people in my childhood were the band members for whom my mother cooked, because there were no restaurants in that part of Michigan. So there were often all these band men sitting around the table. And I was the only child, and they were very nice to me. Perhaps they were missing their own children. But everything that seemed attractive was not nine to five. It was some form of show business.

Debbie Millman:
One of my favorite stories about your dad was how he was unable to resist swearing, and your mother asked that he not swear around you and your sister. So he named the family dog Damnit.

Gloria Steinem:
True.

Debbie Millman:
When my brother was a little boy, he was also forbidden to say… For whatever reason, that word was his favorite word to say, “Damn it.” And my parents were like, “You can’t say that.” So he decided to reorganize the way he said that word. He said, Damo and navit. And I think that really tells you almost everything you need to know about him.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. No, that’s very inventive and poetic. And my father also invented a very satisfying, long epithet that was gosh darn cholera [inaudible 00:15:45] the younger the age of the middle age. I don’t know, it just went on and on, which he would rattle off at great speed.

Debbie Millman:
And he also, from what I understand, liked to say that that was dynamite?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, that was his business stationary actually, that showed you who he was. I have a letterhead that’s a big three-inch high red with dropped out, kind of exploding letters in my office framed. It’s dynamite, because it definitely tells you who he was.

Debbie Millman:
I got the sense from everything that you’ve written about him, that he was a happy man. He was a kind man and a happy man. Was there a time where you felt that your parents loved each other?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, I think so. I mean, I could imagine why my devil may care father from a well-to-do Jewish family would appeal to my very, very hardworking, not quite penniless, but that grandfather worked on the railroad. So I think also, they shared a sense of humor. And I could understand why they appealed to each other, even though their interests were so distant.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written how both your mother and your father paid a high price for lives that were out of balance, and how your father chose his own journey. And how though he never realized his dreams, ultimately, your mother was unable to even pursue hers. And you wrote this about her in your book My Life on the Road. “Long before I was born, she had been a rare and pioneering woman reporter, work that she loved and had done so well, that she was promoted from social reporting to Sunday editor for a major Toledo newspaper. She had stayed on this path for a decade after marrying my father and six years after giving birth to my sister. She was also supporting her husband’s impractical dreams and debts, suffering a miscarriage and then a stillbirth. She experienced so much self-blame and guilt, that she suffered what was then called a nervous breakdown. Once out of the sanatorium, she gave up her job, her friends, and everything she loved, to follow my father.”

And this is when you were born, Gloria. This was the only mother you knew as a little girl. How did you understand her at such a young age, prior to even becoming aware that she’d had this previous life?

Gloria Steinem:
There were always clues. I mean, she loved Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she would share that poetry and various essays. She taught me how to fold a paper in thirds so that it was like a reporter’s notebook, since at that point, there weren’t proper reporter’s notebook, but you could hold it in one hand and make notes on it with the other. So I realized the saddest words probably in the English language, what might’ve been, for her.

Debbie Millman:
Your mother suffered from depression, and addiction, and hallucinations, but you also describe her like your father, kind and loving with flashes of humor and talent, in everything from math to poetry. She had been so ambitious and so capable. How did she lose her confidence? Was that something that women were just expected to give up?

Gloria Steinem:
I’m not sure, because much of it happened before I was born. Because as I was saying, my sister was a decade older. And she was trying to be a mother, a wife to an irresponsible, charming man, and also a journalist all at the same time. Which I believe is why she, or the atmosphere anyway around her, when she had what was then called a nervous breakdown, which meant that she was too depressed to work, and she spent I’m not sure how long, at least a year in a sanitarium. When she emerged, she was also addicted to sodium pentothal, which was the tranquilizer of the era, and especially given to women because it was thought that women didn’t need to be that alert in order to function as homemakers.

Debbie Millman:
Really to keep them in line homemaking.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. I mean, that had happened before I was born. So I did recognize because of her reciting Omar Khayyam to me in the morning when I woke up, or because of her affection for short stories, I did recognize who she might have been. And I wonder how many of us, I hope many fewer of us now, women and some men too, are living out the unlived lives of their mothers. But I realized that I was too. I mean, I would wanted to be a writer anyway. It wasn’t as if I was doing something that I didn’t want to do, but I did understand it was the unlived life of my mother.

Debbie Millman:
As I was reading about your childhood, and your origin stories, and the essays that you’ve written about your mother, to Ruth, which is a gorgeous essay included in one of your earlier books, as well as stories about your dad. It struck me more than anyone I’ve ever read about or interviewed now over 18 years and 500 plus interviews, how the conditions of your origin story really did create the conditions for you to be the activist and the feminist that you are now, and have been for 50 years. It could have crushed someone the way you were grown up. You could have followed in your mother’s footsteps very, very easily.

What do you think it is about who you are that you were able to take the learnings of both your parents, the kindness, the lovingness that they were able to share and show you, to be able to break those patterns and become who you were and are?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I think your phrase, the kindness and the lovingness is the key to it. Because I did experience always kindness and respect for who I was as an individual, and I did always know that I was loved, which I’m not sure was as true for either of my parents. And yet, they somehow managed to create that for me.

So that, plus I lived in books. I mean, I loved Louisa May Alcott. I read everything she ever wrote, not only for young readers, but her much more depressed, older books for older readers. And my father used to sometimes buy a whole house library in order to get a couple of first editions, and then he would dump all the other books in the garage. So I would go out in the garage and end up reading some minute history of World War, I don’t know. I mean, things I had no business reading. If I was hooked on a book, I would just stay up all night until I finished it. I just entered it.

Debbie Millman:
I used to read books over and over. I also believe that books helped save me. I used to sneak copies of The Godfather that my parents had in their library into my room under the covers, and was just titillated by that sex scene at the beginning. I couldn’t believe that people did things like that.

I know at one point, you asked one of your mother’s doctors if her spirit had been broken, and he told you that that was as good a diagnosis as any. And he said it’s hard to mend anything that’s been broken for 20 years. And it reminded me of the mother in Michael Cunningham’s, The Hours, the difference being that your mother stayed. And I was also wondering if that was also part of what gave you the sense of meaning to keep going.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, clearly. I mean, I loved my mother, and I admired her in many ways. But I definitely didn’t want to become her. That was maybe I’m not sure, part of the reason why I didn’t get married, even though I was engaged at least once to a wonderful guy I still know. I mean-

Debbie Millman:
I want to ask you about that in a bit.

Gloria Steinem:
But I didn’t see in front of me besides my mother, many examples of women who had married, had children, and were happy, because there were not that many women in the paid labor force. It was mostly a time of very poor families or suburban families. It must’ve been present somewhere, but I didn’t see it.

Debbie Millman:
Your parents divorced when you were 10. You and your mom then moved to Clark Lake in Amherst in order to be close to your sister who was attending Smith College. You said that that year was the most conventional life you would ever lead. Was it everything you imagined it to be?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. We rented a house. It was in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is very close to Smith College where my sister was going. And we rented an already furnished house, literally the only proper house that I’d ever lived in. And I went to what I guess I think was the sixth grade, and I kind of pretended to be normal.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah, I know what that’s like. Did people believe you?

Gloria Steinem:
I’m not sure. I should go back and find them and see. But I did love having a house that I could invite friends home to.

Debbie Millman:
When your sister began her last year of college, you and your mom moved back to Toledo and into the house where your mom had grown up. There, you shared bunk beds and also lived with rats. I believe at one point you were bitten by a rat. Was that something that scared you, or was it just more adventure?

Gloria Steinem:
No, no, no. It definitely scared me, because I still remember it. And I was thinking, given the current rat crisis in New York City, I should write about it.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Gloria Steinem:
Because it was the summertime and I was sleeping… My hand must’ve been over the side of the bed. And I woke up not because the rat bit me, but just I woke up, and there was a whole pool of blood there. And my mother, even though she was not well, managed to get the two of us to a local emergency room so I could have a tetanus shot.

And memorably when I came back, the pool of blood on the floor had been licked up. Later on, after I had been one of the many writers who started New York Magazine… And I knew that rats were a feature of New York life, especially for poor families. I used to try to get Clay Felker the editor, to let me write about rats, and he would never do it. It was not the image of the magazine he had in mind.

Debbie Millman:
That’s so interesting, Gloria. Recently, New York Magazine won a national magazine award for their coverage of what’s happening right now with rats in Manhattan.

Gloria Steinem:
Really? I didn’t know that.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I was a judge for the cover design-That’s fascinating. And the cover design won. And I believe the article did as well, but definitely the cover did.

Gloria Steinem:
Well, you see. If only they listened.

Debbie Millman:
Yep. Now, you had a number of different jobs as you were growing up. You worked as a sales girl in a women’s clothing store after school. And on Saturdays you read scripts. You played records at a local radio station. You worked as a magician’s assistant and also a lifeguard. Have you always had a strong work ethic?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I was just trying to make a little extra money. And I was looking for something. I was answering ads in the newspaper much of the time. For instance, the magician’s assistant.

Debbie Millman:
I sort of had this vision of you being on stage in a very sudden, Desperately Seeking Susan kind of environment.

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I did stand there while he threw knives at me. I mean, I was standing against a cork board, and the knives were not that sharp, thankfully. But it was a way of making money basically. And I used to also dance at supermarket openings, and the-

Debbie Millman:
Lions Club, I believe-

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, the Lions Club. It was a way of making 10 or $20 for a show, and it was also a way out of everyday life.

Debbie Millman:
When you were 17, your mom sold your Toledo house, so you would have money to pay for college, so that the house money paid for your college education. You went to live with your sister in Washington, DC where she was a jewelry buyer in a department store. And this gave you a carefree senior year of high school. You were elected vice president of the student council and the senior class. What was that experience like for you?

Gloria Steinem:
It was very bizarre for a lot of reasons. One thing was I couldn’t understand for a bit why the student body walking around the halls of that high school looked different. And it took me a while to understand they were all white, that this in the District of Columbia was still a time of racial segregation in public schools.

I was living with my sister because my mother was in a mental hospital. And people would treat me with sympathy saying, “It must be so hard to be away from your parents.” And I would say, “Oh yes,” even though it was the most carefree time I had ever lived in my life, but I didn’t want to betray them, I guess. So it was a time of happiness, but pretense.

Debbie Millman:
As you did visit your mom on the weekend, she started to get better. You slowly began to meet someone you described in your writing as someone you’d never known, and you’ve written that you discovered that you were alike in many ways, something you either hadn’t seen or couldn’t admit out of fear that you would share her fate. What similarities did you see?

Gloria Steinem:
A sense of humor, a love of reading and writing. Some character that was… I mean, it is true that I had some of my father’s adventurousness, but I’m not sure he ever sat down and read a book in his life. So that entire part of my mother’s life I really related to. And it made me sad, because I realized what she had missed.

Debbie Millman:
At the time, you had no inkling that you had become one of the great liberators of our time and how-

Gloria Steinem:
I’m still not so sure about that.

Debbie Millman:
You don’t have to be. Plenty of us are sure.

Gloria Steinem:
But there came to be a women’s movement, which helped us all.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, of course. But you were a big part in helping women all over the world take a stand for their own lives. Do you think that your grief over your mother’s inability to have a life she wanted to, impacted you to do that? I mean, I don’t even know that you realized it at the time, but do you think that ultimately, that fueled what you were doing?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, it was clear to me that I didn’t want to live what was still a conventional life. In the ’50s. Most of my classmates got engaged and or married in college or soon after college. I realized I didn’t want to do that, but I didn’t quite know what else I could do. So I ended up fleeing to India, because there was a one shot atypical fellowship available.

And I ended up living in India for two years, which made a huge difference, because that was close to the independence movement. Obviously Gandhi was a huge force. I was trying to write about Gandhi, so I was going around and interviewing people who had worked with him.

And I remember finally getting to a great woman leader named Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, who listened to me as she rocked on her porch and finally said, “Well, my dear, we taught him everything he knew.” It turned out that it had been the women’s movement that organized the March to the sea to get salt without taxes, and Gandhi had come from living in South Africa and became the external symbol for this internal movement that was mostly women.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about your time in India in a moment. I just want to talk about a few things that happened before you went to India. You graduated from high school in 1952. You attended Smith College like your sister. I understand you also applied to Cornell and Stanford, neither of which accepted you, and I hope that they regret that greatly now. But at the time, did you feel rejected? Did you wish that you had been accepted to either of those schools? Would you have gone?

Gloria Steinem:
I don’t know. I wasn’t surprised that I wasn’t accepted, because my background was not typical, and the high school I went to in Toledo, I may have been one of two or three people who went to college from my graduating class. Most everybody, the women got married. The men went to work in the factories. So I can understand why they were not so willing to take a chance, whereas Smith viewed me as a legacy because my sister had gone there.

Debbie Millman:
At Smith, you majored in government. What were you imagining you would do professionally at that point?

Gloria Steinem:
I’m not sure what kind of job I thought I could get, but it was an era in which Senator McCarthy was wrongly accusing people of being a communist. So I had some sense of how important government was and how unjust it could be. I don’t know that I imagined exactly the kind of job I wanted to have, but I thought it was the world I wanted to be active in.

Debbie Millman:
You also took courses at the University of Geneva and earned a scholarship to study at Oxford University in England for a summer. Did you have a sense at that point that you were beginning to take after your father by traveling so much?

Gloria Steinem:
That’s a good question. I don’t know. I mean, mainly I had been in Geneva at the university there. And in the summer, I just didn’t want to go home. So I managed to get to Oxford and take a summer course there.

Debbie Millman:
You returned to Smith College for your senior year, where you met Blair Chotzinoff, who you already mentioned. Was it love at first sight?

Gloria Steinem:
I think so. I mean, he was the friend of a man who was the fiance of a friend of mine in the same dormitory at Smith. And we went to the same country house for a weekend. There was a big storm and a flood, which meant that we couldn’t get out, so we ended up staying there.

Debbie Millman:
How Biblical.

Gloria Steinem:
Right, right. And he was very handsome, and funny, and unconventional. He looked sort of like a Kashmiri prince. He had a little bit dark skin and green eyes. And so, I mean, he was only Jewish, but he looked kind of amazing. He, of course, had never gone to college, and he was working as a so-called leg man for a Broadway columnist at the time.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, wow.

Gloria Steinem:
So he was welcome in all the nightclubs, and restaurants, and so on.

Debbie Millman:
I understand he took you for rides and he had a little plane. He would take you-

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. He loved to fly. And so when he came to visit me at Smith College, he would fly from New York, from a New York airport, to a tiny airport near North Hampton.

Debbie Millman:
Is it true that he once wrote your name Gloria in the Sky?

Gloria Steinem:
He may have. I don’t remember seeing it. Maybe he was trying to do that. I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:
I was trying to find a picture of that.

Gloria Steinem:
But I just remember that my house mother at that era at Smith… If you lived in a dormitory, there was a woman who was looking after you. And my house mother was kind of in love with him too.

Debbie Millman:
Sounds like he was pretty gorgeous.

Gloria Steinem:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
So he proposed. He proposed marriage. Initially, you said yes. Did you want to marry him?

Gloria Steinem:
I didn’t and I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine not being with him. I was trying to get a job as a researcher. Women were then only hired as researchers with Time, or Newsweek, or the New York Times. I wanted to continue working, but I was not sure I could support myself. All my friends were getting married. It just seemed a kind of stop gap measure to get engaged, and he had given me the engagement ring that belonged to his mother.

Debbie Millman:
How hard was it to break off the engagement, and what made you decide to do that?

Gloria Steinem:
I felt if I got married, it was the last choice I would have. Life would be over, because I didn’t see people, women around me who were continuing to change after acquiring an identity through their husbands. Maybe that was wrong, but I just didn’t see it.

So it felt more like an end than a beginning. And since I had the opportunity to go to India on a very slender scholarship, I did that. And I did it in a not very kind way. I mean, I just left and left him a note.

Debbie Millman:
Just a don’t hate me.

Gloria Steinem:
Just trying to explain. Right.

Debbie Millman:
What gave you the courage to do something so unconventional in 1956, to go to India by yourself?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I’m not sure it was courage. I mean, it was desperation in the sense of not wanting to get married when I viewed marriage as not my first choice, but my last choice in leading someone else’s life.
I knew about India and cared about India, because both my mother and her mother-in-law, even though they came from very different families, had been theosophists. Which is literally God knowledge, but a form of philosophy that I think was very popular in those years, and leaned heavily towards the east. And was mostly populated by women, perhaps women who were striving to find some religion that was not as patriarchal, as the churches and temples around them.

Debbie Millman:
En route to India, you stopped in the UK and at the time discovered that you were pregnant. What was your reaction?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I had feared that I was pregnant, and hoped that I was not, and had all kinds of fantasies about riding horses in the park-

Debbie Millman:
You write about that.

Gloria Steinem:
Throwing myself downstairs and all the about that, all the impractical things. In the local phone directory, I had found a doctor who was near where I was staying with a college classmate and her husband in London. So he confirmed that I was pregnant, and said that he would send me to a woman gynecologist who would do an abortion. At that point, I think legally, you had to have the signatures of two physicians in order to have a legal abortion.

And he said, “I will do this, but you must promise me two things. One, you will never tell anyone my name. And two, you’ll do what you want to do with your life.” And later on, I dedicated a book to him, because that was so pivotal and so important.

Debbie Millman:
You didn’t tell anyone for many, many years. Not the person that you were living with, not the man who you had been with, until the women’s movement came along and women began to tell the truth about our lives. Did you feel ashamed or guilty?

Gloria Steinem:
I didn’t feel guilty. It wasn’t a decision I would ever have changed. But it was not a subject that was talked about in public. And it wasn’t until we started New York Magazine, and I had a column there, that I went to cover an early women’s liberation meeting in a church someplace downtown in the village, I think. And there, I heard women standing up and talking about the dangers of illegal abortion in public. I had never seen women telling the truth in public before. So I went home and wrote a column about it, and began to talk about it for the first time.

Debbie Millman:
I am 61 years old, and have had a lot of experiences in my life that I feel very ashamed of, and it’s taken me years to talk about them. One of the biggest being the sexual abuse that I was affected by as a child. And yet, I’ve been able to talk about that more easily than my abortion. In fact, I’ve never talked about it on the air ever. And I really thought about it a lot over the last couple of days reading about your experiences. Why is there so much shame, especially when people are admitting it on Twitter or on social media, just to be able to really communicate how prevalent this is and how necessary it is? And my life would never have been the same. Never, never, never, never, never had been the same, had I had a child when I was pregnant, yet I still feel guilt, and I still feel shame, which is why I was asking you about how you felt.

Gloria Steinem:
Well, do you think… I mean, you’re much younger than I am, but still, you may be in a generation that was still wrongly shamed for that, whereas younger women are not.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s very possible. I was 11 years old when the US Supreme Court gave women the right to reproductive freedom. And because I was an avid reader of the newspaper as I was growing up, that was one of the things that saved me, that suddenly allowed me to consider that if anything happened while I was being sexually abused by my stepfather, that I might not have to kill myself. That somehow, I might be able to get help.

Gloria Steinem:
But that so, to be in the same household with someone who is sexually abusing you, and to feel you’re not credible, you can’t be rescued. I mean, that’s way beyond anything I ever experienced, and that you survived and triumphed is huge.

Debbie Millman:
Well, thank you. I mean, that’s why I think I’m so fascinated by people’s origin stories. I look at what you went through, and somebody like Oprah Winfrey, what she’s gone through. And how women like you, like Oprah, have been able to change so much for so many.

Gloria Steinem:
And you.

Debbie Millman:
Well I mean, I’m not going to go there but-

Gloria Steinem:
No, but really, because it feels to me as if you went through something that was more of a trial than I did.

Debbie Millman:
Well, thank you, Gloria. That means a lot to me. What do you make of the makeup of the Supreme Court at the moment, and what are your thoughts on what we need to do to win back our reproductive freedom? I mean, what’s happening now is terrifying. It’s just terrifying.

And it’s especially terrifying when I think about young girls in my situation that I was in at 10, 11 years old, actually were thinking at one point that I might’ve been pregnant, and thinking I had no choice but to kill myself. What do we do for these young girls whose lives are at such risk?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, we have a pretty strong, not strong enough, but a pretty strong multiracial women’s movement. It is possible to get an abortion that’s legal and safe in many states. The problem is getting people from unfriendly states into supportive ones. So I think the dialogue has changed. Not enough, of course, but quite a lot.

There are still religions that are wrongly shaming women for making this choice, and families, and cultures. So it’s helpful to do what you just did, which is to talk about it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah. You’ve written about how you didn’t begin your life as an active feminist until you went to an abortion speak out in a church basement in the village in 1969. You were already in your mid-thirties, and you were there covering in. And you were sitting on the windowsill on the side, still being a reporter. What activated your activism?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I heard women standing up and telling the truth about their experience of needing and having an abortion. And I suddenly thought, “Okay, if so many millions of us have had this experience, why are we still silent about it?” And that’s when I went back and wrote a column. And also, because the women’s movement was beginning and I was getting invitations to speak, which was very scary to me… I mean, I became a writer so I didn’t have to talk in public. And I asked first Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and then Flo Kennedy, and friends to travel and lecture with me. So it was clear to me that we needed to break the silence, and that I needed to help do that.

Debbie Millman:
Working as a freelance writer required learning to live with a lot of financial insecurity. And you said you don’t know that you would’ve had the courage to become a freelance writer with no guaranteed source of income, if you hadn’t been brought up that way. Do you view it the same way now?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. It’s hard to think what if. But if I had grown up in a family with a father working for a salary, I might not have had the same… Not exactly courage, but sense that you could live another way. No, I feel lucky.

Debbie Millman:
As you were beginning to start writing with activism in mind, you found yourself wanting to report on a view of the world as if, in your words, everyone mattered. And this was still the 1960s, and even your most open-minded editor told you that if you published an article saying women were equal, he would have to publish one next to it saying women were not, in order to be objective. And I just find this astonishing, astonishing that this was the way people were thinking.

Gloria Steinem:
I don’t know how to express it, but it was. I mean, I think even when The Feminine Mystique and Betty Friedan’s work was first published, that there was a feeling that there needed to be an opposite view about how happy women were as housewives, which of course many were. But the whole point is diverse choice for everybody.

Debbie Millman:
In 1968, Clay Felker hired you to be a political columnist and features writer for the newly launched New York Magazine. Clay gave you a platform to write about equality, civil rights, women’s rights. What was that like for you at that time?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, it was wonderful to be in a group of… I mean, Milton Glaser and Clay Felker, who were inventing a city magazine, which didn’t exist, I don’t think any place in the rest of the country before that.
So it was great fun to be part of it. There weren’t equal numbers of women by any means, but they were open to other ideas. Jimmy Breslin is a great writer about the city of New York, which he deeply loved. Editorial meetings were great fun. No, it was the first time that I remember being excited about working in a group.

Debbie Millman:
What was it like to work with Milton Glaser?

Gloria Steinem:
Oh, gosh, how can I describe it? He was kind of a paterfamilias. He had a kind of gravitas, which I guess came from the fact that he listened and only suggested something that he had considered. I worried about his wife, Shirley, because she was a great artist. And I can’t speak for her, but I don’t know if she felt that her career was as important as Milton’s.

Debbie Millman:
Well, certainly not in the way Lee Krasner’s career became almost as important as Jackson Pollock’s. They did write a few books together, children’s books. But no, she never reached the level of notoriety, and fame, and respect that he did, although she’s been wonderfully generous in helping to create the Milton Glaser archives and the various exhibits that have occurred since he died.

Gloria Steinem:
I remember going to some event, some all day benefit in a church basement or something. I don’t know what it was. And Shirley and I were standing in line for a fortune teller. And he said whatever he did to her after looking at her palm. And when I came up, he said, “You must help the woman who just came before you. She’s a great artist and she doesn’t know it.”

Debbie Millman:
Oh, wow.

Gloria Steinem:
It was very touching.

Debbie Millman:
I’m going to have to speak to Steven Heller about this, because Steven Heller and Beth Kleber, the archivist here at SVA who’s managing Milton’s archives, we need to investigate this. Thank you for telling me that. Who came up with the idea for creating a magazine for women that wasn’t about beauty, and clothes, and makeup, and marriage, but it was about politics, and societal issues, and questioning norms and rules and laws?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, there were a number of us women writers who had worked for the existing women’s magazines. Glamour, the Ladies’ Home Journal, Mademoiselle. And within those pages, there would be one essay that was not about clothes, and makeup, and traditional subjects.
So there was a little bit of a place, but we did realize that there was not an entire magazine. Clay allowed us to introduce a section that was women’s magazine to come, Ms. Magazine. And I had no idea. I mean, Jane O’Reilly was part of it. Lots of other writers were part of it.
And then he sent me off to do publicity for it, just traveling all the way to California doing free radio shows and whatever. And when I got to California, someone called into the radio show, a woman, and said, “I can’t find it.” So I called Clay in a panic and said, “It never got here. It never got here.” And we discovered that it had sold out in just a week.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. The magazine, you founded it in 1971. It was originally included as a special section of New York Magazine. The issue came out at the very end of 1971, but you cover dated it Spring 1972, because you were afraid it was not going to sell and become an embarrassment to the movement.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes. We feared that it would lie like a lox, as we said.

Debbie Millman:
It sold out in less than a week.

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, yes.

Debbie Millman:
Before you settled on the name Ms. for the magazine, you considered the name Sojourner after Sojourner Truth. But in your research, you discovered people thought it was a travel magazine. Sisters was another, but then people thought it was about Catholic nuns, a definite need for a magazine. At the time, the word Ms., M-S., was only used in secretarial handbooks from the 1950s, where it was recommended as a way of dealing with the unfortunate situation in which you didn’t know the marital status of the woman you were writing to. How did you determine Ms. was the name to go with?

Gloria Steinem:
It was a mix really, of just what you said, because it was a way of saying that someone was a female without saying marital status. And it was used that way in some situations in England. And also, it was short, and a magazine logo is helpful if short, because then you have more space on the cover. So we called it Ms., much to the confusion of a lot of people who called it M-S or-

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I read that the New York Times took 15 years, 15 years to get the term Ms. Accepted in the newspaper. You wrote letters, you petitioned, demonstrated. They changed Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. They changed all the pronouns of transsexual. They changed everything before they changed Ms. They even referred to you as Ms. Steinem of Ms. Magazine for 15 years. What got them to finally change it?

Gloria Steinem:
I guess, I mean we picketed the newspaper, and we wrote to the editors, and we did everything we could. But actually the most frustrating thing was that after they finally changed and began to use Ms., we took roses to Abe Rosenthal, who actually had been a corresponded in India when I was in India. So I knew him, which nobody could believe because he didn’t seem conducive to-

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Gloria Steinem:
Right. So we took roses to him, and he said the most annoying thing, which was, Well if I’d known it mattered so much to you, I would’ve done it earlier.” You just wanted to kill him.

Debbie Millman:
Wow. Gloria, I wanted to share with you a story from my childhood. My mother was a seamstress growing up. She had her own business. She advertised in the Penny Saver to get seamstress business. She mostly made clothes for people that couldn’t find conventional clothes to fit them in department stores. And the name of her company as I was growing up was The Artistic Tailor, because she was an artist, but also a seamstress. So she was The Artistic Tailor. After Ms. Magazine came out, she changed the name of her business to Ms. Artistic Tailor.

Gloria Steinem:
Oh, that’s so touching.

Debbie Millman:
I wanted you to know that.

Gloria Steinem:
That’s great.

Debbie Millman:
Ms. just celebrated its 50th anniversary. It’s still a vibrant magazine. It’s still a paper magazine, in addition to a website, has a robust social media presence. How has the magazine been able to survive on the shoestring it’s had all this time? All this time.

Gloria Steinem:
Well, at a certain point in our life, even before, while we were still in our conventional form, we realized that we could not raise money as we needed to unless we were a foundation. So we did become a 501(c)(3).

Debbie Millman:
The Ms. Foundation for Women?

Gloria Steinem:
Yeah, instead of a for-profit incorporation. And therefore, we could run full page ads saying, “Buy a subscription for a friend you don’t know.” Especially women in prison, for instance. I mean, the reading materials in prisons are often very slender, to put it mildly. And we wanted to be able to send the magazine into women in prison, and so asked for contributions for that.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about how there are events that divide our lives into before and after. And despite all you’ve accomplished at this point point in your life, you described that moment back then as an event most people may never have heard of, the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. What happened there to create this line before and after for you?

Gloria Steinem:
First of all, that conference was the first and I guess last big National Women’s Conference that was financed… I mean in a slender way, but anyway, by federal funds that had come from a congressional resolution that was put forth by Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Patsy Mink, who were all members of Congress then. And that was purposefully representative.
We did our best in each state to see that it represented from a racial and economic point of view who lived there. It didn’t always work, but it mostly worked, so that it became in this huge hall in Houston, the single most representative meeting for women that has ever existed. And after that meeting, its chapters state by state, especially in Minnesota, and a lot, continued to represent that. But by now, there are all kinds of women’s groups gathered around different issues. But then, it made a huge difference to have a dedicated group city by city, state by state.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve stated that this is when you learn the difference between protesting other people’s rules and making one’s zone, between asking and doing. How did you learn that?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, we were kind of in charge of ourselves there in this massive meeting. And preparing for it, carrying it on, and so on. So trying to be as representative as we could. And there were caucuses. There was a Black women’s caucus, a Latina women’s… There were lots of different caucuses, and I was the messenger going from caucus to caucus, asking them what changes they wanted in the overall statement.
So it was just an incredibly moving experience. And I remember after it was over thousands of people in this massive hall, and there was empty chairs and empty amphitheater. And I was standing there thinking, “Who will remember this meeting, who will?” And three Native American women came up to me and gave me a red shawl, a Native American prayer shawl, and said, “Wear this when you need support and need help.”
And somehow they, Native Americans have gone through more deprivation, and injustice, and theft of their land, perhaps than any other group here, that they had that kind of kindness, and confidence, and sense of history. Gave me a sense of comfort in history.

Debbie Millman:
Didn’t they also give you a necklace that you wore until it fell apart?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, absolutely. I still have the beads in a bowl somewhere.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Gloria Steinem:
It is, right.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you a little bit about anger. In all of your activism, you discovered an endemic among women, an inability to show anger. And you discovered that anger is supposed to be unfeminine, so we suppress it until it overflows, and you now feel that harnessing anger for change is a good thing. And though it took you a long time to know what to say when people called you a bitch, you learned to simply say thank you. How did you get to that place?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, that’s not so hard to say thank you. It took me a while. But I don’t know. Anger, I think overflows in a way, and it heads into our fear of lack of control. The other thing is that I think for many women, that lack of control means that when we get angry, we cry.
And I remember talking to a woman who was an executive in a big office and had decision-making power over people, both men and women. And she said to me, she said, “I know that I cry when I get angry, so I just get angry and cry, and say to the group I’m angry with or talking to, ‘You may think I am sad because I am crying. No, I’m crying because I’m angry.'” I thought that’s genius.

Debbie Millman:
Genius, genius. I’ve gotten to a point now… Because I think that anger is really just a cover for sadness and grief. That if you allow yourself to cry, you actually are able to metabolize the feeling, and then use it for good.

Gloria Steinem:
No, I agree. We shouldn’t be shamed, and we shouldn’t shame ourselves, which we were often doing, I think. Because crying when we’re angry, maybe some men experience this too, but I think not as much.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I find it’s much easier to calibrate my emotions if I allow myself to cry, as opposed to flip out and get angry. How can we best harness our anger right now? Between the backtracking of so many of our rights, reproductive freedom, freedom of speech, the rampant book banning, how do we best face the future?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, I don’t think there’s any one way, but I do think that anger is an energy cell that we can use. Because righteous anger, anger at injustice, unfairness, pain, cruelty, is an energy cell. And if we look at it that way, this is a gift. This is energy I can use. Then we can, I hope, begin to feel less at fault or less disempowered by being angry.

Debbie Millman:
What do you see in this generation of women that you haven’t seen in generations past?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, so much. I mean, obviously it depends where and who. But I think first of all, there’s just an assumption that marriage is supposed to be equal, that men can take care of babies as women take care of babies, that it’s not a punishment for men. On the contrary, that it’s a big reward. That if you are arriving at a place of work, whether it’s in a factory, or an office, or the government, or whatever it is, if the people there don’t look something like the country, there’s probably something undemocratic going on. So the burden of proof of caring has shifted in a big way, from what’s wrong with me, to what’s wrong with society, and how can I help to fix it?

Debbie Millman:
Is it possible to feel optimism looking at what we’re facing?

Gloria Steinem:
Yes, no, absolutely. Because optimism is a form of planning. So if we don’t imagine something positive that is possible, it’s way less likely to happen. It may be difficult when looking at Trump in the White House, something I never thought could possibly happen. But he’s no longer there and-

Debbie Millman:
Let’s hope he stays out

Gloria Steinem:
I think just remembering that we have to imagine change in order to have an idea of what we want and be able to plan is very, very helpful.

Debbie Millman:
Gloria, the last thing I want to talk to you about is age. You’ve been very open about your age. I remember back when you turned 40, a reporter said, “Wow, you look great for 40.” And you said, “This is what 40 looks like.” And you said it again when you turned 80.

Gloria Steinem:
And I think I also said, “We’ve been lying so long. Who would know?”

Debbie Millman:
Exactly.

Gloria Steinem:
Right, right.

Debbie Millman:
You were very open again about it when you turned 80. Next year, you’re going to be 90. You’ve said that you seriously love aging, and have recently discovered yourself thinking things like, “I don’t want anything I don’t have.”

Gloria Steinem:
That’s true.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a pretty remarkable thing.

Gloria Steinem:
That’s true, except that I haven’t written enough. That’s the one thing that I regret and hope to still remedy, even if I have to… I researched to find the oldest woman in the world, and I found a woman in the Himalayas who’s 130.

Debbie Millman:
So there’s plenty of time.

Gloria Steinem:
Plenty of time. No, I know that’s not overwhelmingly practical.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I know you plan to live past 100. You’ve said that many times. What do you want most for this next decade?

Gloria Steinem:
Well, speaking for myself, I hope that I write more, because writers will do lots of things in order not to write. And I had so much activist temptation, that I’m afraid I overdid it. So I would like to do that. I’m content where I’m living in a house where I’ve been forever, or an apartment in a house. I am not so good at saying no. I could use a course in saying no, because I need to at least mark off days and say, “Okay. I’m saying no on this day.” I’m saying this now in the hope that I actually do it. But am surrounded by chosen family who are my friends, and I’m healthy enough. So I feel very, very lucky to have lived through what I have, and to see a possible future, which is a luxury in this world.

Debbie Millman:
Gloria, my last question is this one. I’ve read that when you turn 100, you want to have a diner, and you’ve described it like this. “A little diner with blue gingham curtains by the side of the road, because diners are the most democratic places. Everyone goes, truck drivers go, people from the neighborhood, people in their tuxes after parties go. and they’re cheerful and cozy, and you get just the kind of reward food that you want. They’re truly populist places. And in the back room, we could have a little revolutionary meeting from time to time, and you would serve brand muffins.” So I have a two part question. Is this still an ambition? Is the first part.

Gloria Steinem:
First of all, I love you for knowing that. I don’t know where you found that, but it’s quite true that I’ve always loved diners as the kind of ultimate democracy. But I recognize that it’s impractical for me to be running a diner. I still have a great feeling about them, but I think I’m content to be in my apartment with a guest room, where friends can stay, with a living room where we can have talking circles. I think I’m content to be there.

Debbie Millman:
Well, the second part of my question was if indeed you do ever do that, can I become a server there? But we’ll wait and see if it happens, and we’ll jump off that bridge when we get to it.

Gloria Steinem:
Okay. You and I can be serving bran muffins there-

Debbie Millman:
Let’s call it Steinamites. Gloria Steinem, thank you. Thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Thank you for being one of the people in the world that have made a difference in how we live in the world. It has been an honor and a thrill to have an opportunity to talk with you today.

Gloria Steinem:
And thank you for your incredible generosity and spending the time that you have to know everything. When I’m losing my memory, I’m calling you up.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely, anytime. Anytime. For more information about Gloria Steinem, all her work, her books, her writing, and her activism, you can go to her website at gloriasteinem.com.

This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Gloria Steinem appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

True or false? Steven Heller came of age in the 1960s and has never done drugs, not even marijuana. Steven Heller stopped drinking alcohol as a young man when he found himself running through Greenwich Village in February with his pants off and decided he couldn’t handle it anymore. Steven Heller worked for the New York Review of Sex and Screw Magazine before becoming an art director at the very serious New York Times where he worked for decades. Steven Heller has written more than 200 books. Last one, true or false? Steven Heller has appeared on Design Matters more often than any other guest. Listeners, true, true, true and true and much of it is recounted in Steve’s new book Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York. Steven Heller, welcome back. It is always an absolute delight to see you back in our little recording booth.

Steven Heller:

I feel very unclaustrophobic in here.

Debbie Millman:

Good, I’m glad. Steve, let’s get right into the book. You start Growing Up Underground stating the following. This book is about, you guessed it, me. However, it is not a trek through the hills and valleys of my autobiographical topology, I focus instead on how blind luck put me in intriguing places with curious people from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. These first three sentences on their own lead me to my first three questions. Ready?

Steven Heller:

I’m ready.

Debbie Millman:

First question, I know you’ve been writing, rewriting, cutting and pasting snippets of your autobiography on and off for almost 20 years. The turning point to actually doing it came after reading designer Paul Sahre’s book, Two-Dimensional Man: A Graphic Memoir. How did that influence you?

Steven Heller:

It just made me competitive. It was unusual for a designer to write what was officially technically a memoir or autobiography. There are lots of monographs and there are lots of me, me, mes in the monographs, but Paul actually covered his life and I reviewed it for Eye Magazine and I said, “I’ve been sitting around with little bits and pieces of this for a long time, so I’d like to do one too before my coil unravels.”

Debbie Millman:

My second question about that intro was why the specific timeframe, that 10-year timeframe from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s?

Steven Heller:

Well, I was a big fan of John Reed who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. I wanted to do something that was 10 years that shook my world.

Debbie Millman:

Then last question, do you really truly feel as if it were blind luck that put you in these intriguing places with these specific and intriguing people? What about the specific choices that you made to get to those places? I just have such a big issue with the idea of luck.

Steven Heller:

Well, I have an issue with luck and fate, but I think there was some divine intervention and that’s the reason why I never did drugs.

Debbie Millman:

Why is that, Steve?

Steven Heller:

Because in my superstitious semi-religious way, I said to myself, if I ever do a drug, something terrible will land on my head, the old piano falling out of the window.

Debbie Millman:

Roxane Gay, my wife, also feels that way. I think she’s done drugs one time and she’s written an essay about how that one time she smoked marijuana, she was so paranoid she was laying on the bed. She was so paranoid she was going to fall off the bed. She actually thought about tying herself to the bed and ended up in the hospital, but that’s a whole other podcast on a whole other day.

Steven Heller:

We’re funny people.

Debbie Millman:

You go on to state in the introduction that this is not a comprehensive life story. Rather, you’ve assembled a sampler of essays that revolve around two facets of your life. First, the personal, which includes a psychological rationale for being a typically rebellious teenager and the professional, which reveals how becoming rebellious led you into a career as a graphic designer and art director first with the underground newspapers and hippie pornography that we’re going to talk about, and how that ultimately led to a 33-year career at the straight and narrow New York Times. What made you decide to structure the book in this way?

Steven Heller:

Well, I didn’t think my total existence on the planet would make for good stories. I structured it in this way so that I would have less to write. I did a biography, as you know, of Paul Rand who lived to be 86, and then I did a few years after that, a biography of Alvin Lustig who lived to be 45. I always joke that I chose Alvin Lustig because he had less years, which meant less work. I figured 10 years was a good book-ended journey.

Debbie Millman:

Because anybody that knows you knows what a slacker you are in terms of shirking away from hard work.

Steven Heller:

Well, I have a ambivalence about work.

Debbie Millman:

You are what you refer to in the book as an appointment baby. Talk about that.

Steven Heller:

I think the appointment baby issue is really what triggered the final manuscript. I found out one strange day that my mother had made an appointment with her doctor to induce labor and have me, and I had never heard that story before and she seemed to be very proud of it. I realized that it fit her narcissistic way of living that she wanted to go on a trip, which my parents did often, all over the world. She wanted it on a certain date, which meant I had to be born prior to her leaving on her cruise, which meant that her figure had to return and she had to look as good as she could on said cruise. I became an appointment baby and I never heard the term before. I’ve heard about induced pregnancies, I’ve heard about cesareans, but the appointment baby thing seemed so 1950s.

Debbie Millman:

Did she get her figure back in time?

Steven Heller:

She said she did. In fact, when she was showing this video that she had made from an eight-millimeter film, my father was dutifully photographing her on B deck and he was on A deck and I wasn’t around anywhere. My wife, Louise Fili, she was showing the video too said, “Where was Baby Steve?” My mom said, “He’s at home with the housekeeper.”

Debbie Millman:

Shortly after you were born, she just left you, handed you off to the housekeeper and took a cruise with your dad?

Steven Heller:

Yeah, her figure was back.

Debbie Millman:

It’s sort of crazy to think about what women did back in those days in the ’60s. My mother proudly told me that she decided when she was pregnant with me that she was going to go on a diet and the first, this is what she told me proudly, the first thing she did after she had me was weigh herself.

Steven Heller:

Well.

Debbie Millman:

How is this something you think is good?

Steven Heller:

I think people worry about a lot of personal things that are perhaps triggered by the chemicals in the brain that happen when you’re in that kind of physical state.

Debbie Millman:

That’s generous of you.

Steven Heller:

I’ve become a little less cynical about the whole affair having written about it and having cut out a lot of the anger part.

Debbie Millman:

How did you get past that? What gave you the sense that that wasn’t something that would necessarily be helpful to the memoir?

Steven Heller:

Well, I didn’t want to write a revenge book because there was nobody I wanted to take revenge against. I mean, I’d do it all over again the way it happened because the way it happened is what’s turned out and I’m relatively happy within my constant depression. The paradox is that for 10 years before my mom passed away at 93, she was writing a memoir and she was doing it all in long hand on sheets of paper of different sizes and colors.

She had this huge file and that every time I would come to their house for dinner, which wasn’t often, but every time I did, she would pull the file out and say, “Can you please help me edit this?” It became an absurd part of my life. I just wanted to avoid it in such a visceral way that I would just say, “Nope,” cut her off and she’d continue. She was very persistent and tenacious. It was all about her travels around the world. I presume there was some interesting things in there because they had met a lot of interesting people, but I wasn’t about to spend a large chunk of my life and time rehashing her life.

Debbie Millman:

Do you still have those files and that writing?

Steven Heller:

I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:

That’d be an interesting read.

Steven Heller:

I have the eight-millimeter films my father took, but they’re films and we haven’t transferred them to digital.

Debbie Millman:

Early on in the book, you tell us your full legal name isn’t Steven Heller. Can you share what that name is, what your full legal name is and why you don’t use it?

Steven Heller:

No, because then people won’t buy the book.

Debbie Millman:

You’re going to want to make people? Spoiler alert.

Steven Heller:

No, I can tell you.

Debbie Millman:

Oh good.

Steven Heller:

It’s Harmon, H-A-R-M-O-N. It was the name of a baseball player who played second base and I think outfield as well for the Washington Senators and Minnesota Twins or some team like that. His name was Harmon Killebrew. Even though I wasn’t named after him as a kid, camp counselors and so-called friends would call me Killerbrew or Killer, but I thought the name being rather odd to find a person that I didn’t want to be. The names that people have now are so exotic and eccentric. I could easily have been called Moon or Moon Walker and live nicely with it in the ’60s, but that name wasn’t going to get me very far.

Debbie Millman:

Now, is it true that Louise Fili, your wife, the legendary designer, Louis Fili, told you that she probably would not have wanted to go out with you if she knew your legal name was Harmon Heller?

Steven Heller:

That’s what she said.

Debbie Millman:

Why? It seems uncharacteristically shallow.

Steven Heller:

It is uncharacteristically shallow of her, but at the same time, I wouldn’t want to have to yell, “Harmon.”

Debbie Millman:

When did you tell her about your name?

Steven Heller:

I told her a year after we met. I didn’t tell my son until he was about five or six years old.

Debbie Millman:

Now, from what I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong here with my research and the material from your book, when you were 15, your parents went on a month-long sight seeing trip to Russia and they sent you to live with a family friend in Stockholm, Sweden. The Swiss were the first folks who refused to call you Harmon. They felt Steve was easier to say. And so, you became Steven Heller at that time. Is that true?

Steven Heller:

Sweden changed my life.

Debbie Millman:

How so?

Steven Heller:

Forever and ever. Well, it changed my life in terms of the name. I realized I didn’t have to live with that albatross around my neck, but it also changed in terms of political consciousness and social consciousness. The people I lived with were very enlightened about world events. Vietnam was just beginning. There were many Europeans who were against our involvement and I lived with one family that was definitely communist. I was, let’s say, indoctrinated between courses of smoked fish and other things.

Debbie Millman:

Now, while you were there, in addition to your political awakening, you also grew your hair and in your book, you write about how at the time, strangers went out of their way to physically and verbally attack you when you came back because your wavy black hair was down to your shoulder and your hair then became a lightning rod for really rude comments and unwanted physical contact that culminated in an experience at the all boys prep school you attended. Can you talk a little bit about what happened at that point?

Steven Heller:

Well, in Sweden, they were far ahead socially of the US just as they were in England. What seemed like freak show, hippies called themselves freaks, was perfectly normal in Sweden, but I felt that hair had always defined me. It was the thing that was a lightning rod for my mother. She was always very particular about dress and appearance and grooming, and it was the easiest way to defy her by changing the norm.

I grew the hair long and I had no real sense that it would be offensive to anybody. I knew it would be different. I was self-conscious about doing it, but I did it anyway. But it really did cause people to be upset, they questioned what their lives were about. It triggered some sort of deep mass psychosis so that Greenwich Village was the only safe place I could be unless I disguised myself, which I essentially did and took strange circuitous roots through dangerous parts of the Lower East Side to get to MacDougal Street.

Debbie Millman:

They made you cut your hair when you went to school.

Steven Heller:

I went to a boys prep school and I went there because my parents had me tested at NYU a thematic apperception test, which to this day I despise. It was actually a fun test because they show you these drawings that had some things purposely going on. They’d have different objects. It was the opposite of a Rorschach test and it was intended to let your emotions dictate how you saw the narrative of the picture. There was one that just cracked me up, and I don’t explain why it cracked me up in the book because there’s a certain amount of embarrassment, but it was prurient to say the least. The graduate student who is giving me the test just made copious notes as I’m unable to speak, I’m laughing so hard, but it turned out that that test was the measuring stick that was used to determine whether I would have a normal co-ed life or become a regimented businessman to be.

Debbie Millman:

Why did they make you cut your hair? Why were they so brutal about your hair in that school?

Steven Heller:

Well, you got to remember that in those days, everybody was kind of organization man, except on a younger level. There was a lot of conformity and prep schools were conformist by their very nature. This particular school, which doesn’t exist anymore, thank heavens, had what was called a dean of discipline and his name was Demi. I used to think he was a demigod, but he would stand at the top of the stairway as we answered the bell for the first period, and he would literally measure the amount of fringe that went over your shirt collar. If there was too much, well he would tell you to have it cut by the next day or if there was too much, as in my case, he had other means.

Debbie Millman:

Which was rather devastating.

Steven Heller:

Which was very traumatic. I mean, the school was adjacent to the YMCA and there was a barber in the YMCA and he and Demi must have worked out a strategic tortured plan, kind of the equivalent of water boarding. It sent me into a tailspin. That combined with my mother’s obsession with it and being proper and all, I just started slowly or quickly going down the slope.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I mean, it’s really, from what I understand, what motivated you to start drawing pictures of your feelings and those drawings became a big part of who you were and they became a topic of your twice weekly therapy sessions and really, I think in many ways it seems like those drawings saved your life.

Steven Heller:

Being able to draw was a release after the haircut, which was basically taking a nice head of black hair and making it into what I look like now. I just went home and I stayed home and I had to only go to school, but I went out and bought myself some Dr. Martin’s dyes and some India ink and sketchbooks and started drawing. I had a particular apocalyptic view that I talk about in the book.

Debbie Millman:

I understand that your therapist was so enamored by your work that it helped you develop confidence about your drawing.

Steven Heller:

She helped develop confidence in everything. She was the one that told my parents what they were doing wrong and you needed some intervention like that. She told them the things that could trigger me and whether it’s a snowflake kind of thing or whether it’s a really good intervention, I opt for the ladder, but she also did like the drawings a lot, and so, I thought there might be something here and I should continue. I did continue until it was suggested that I try to sell them to The New Yorker of all places.

Debbie Millman:

Start of the time.

Steven Heller:

New Yorker didn’t have any use for them. I remember at 15 or thereabouts visiting the art director of Evergreen Review who was an illustrator named Dick Hess, and I noticed when I went to pick up my portfolio the following day, it hadn’t been touched and that sent me into a tailspin for about 6 to 12 months.

Debbie Millman:

Your dad orchestrated a transfer. In the middle of your junior year, you transferred to Walden where Neil Shevlin, your art teacher, liked your work. I understand that his encouragement gave you the courage to begin to show your portfolio to several underground newspaper art editors. You’ve got a very different response from those editors and art directors. How did you even know about these underground newspapers?

Steven Heller:

Well, when I was 15 or so, I saw on the newsstand a cover of the East Village Other, and I show it in a slideshow of mine. It’s not in the book, and it was a collage of General William Westmoreland, the commander in the field of Vietnam. Coming out of his fatigue uniform was a serpent and I just loved that. Then there was another cover that I saw and I bought the issue and it was of Cardinal Spellman who was the vicar of the US Army, and he was the cardinal in charge of the New York Archdiocese and he had died. The headline read, Congratulations on your promotion.

It was just the kind of humor that I needed. I had grown up with an uncle who was a terrific man, professor at Columbia. His daughter, my cousin, is now Vice Dean of Law at Columbia. My other cousin, his daughter, is a cellist in Paris. He was the one who saved my butt. He told my parents to send me to the shrink or I would fall into the pit and never come out. He was the one that told me about the birds and the bees, told me about contraceptives, was frank with me just about everything and introduced me to the great comics of the era, Mort Sahl, Nichols and May, Jules Feiffer, who was my hero and who I later worked with. I fortunately had that support. I didn’t have it 24 hours a day, but I remember the phone call on a Saturday morning where he called to tell my parents that I should be allowed to drop out of school.

Debbie Millman:

High school?

Steven Heller:

No, college. By that point, there was something else going on at NYU that led to my release, but he convinced them that I didn’t need college. He, of course, was a PhD and his field was among other things, academic freedom.

Debbie Millman:

Well, you started working after you graduated high school that’s why I was like, “Wait, I thought you graduated high school.” You were offered a job at the free press doing old school paste-up by the art director JC Suares, and he left the paper three weeks after he hired you. You became the defacto art director at 16 years old-

Steven Heller:

At 16.

Debbie Millman:

… of The New York Free Press. What was that like for you?

Steven Heller:

It was kind of unreal, but it was a job. I mean, I had been working since I was 12. I worked actually in the art department of Bergdorf Goodman. I worked for an advertising agency when I was 12 or 13. Didn’t last long at either place and screwed things up royally in both places, but working was not unusual or aberrant for me. When I was brought on, it just felt like, okay, this is the way life is. I was taught how to do something, not very well, but I fit the bill that they needed, but it was that stuff that got me interested in design, particularly design and illustration.

Debbie Millman:

You also decided at that time or around that time to create your own magazine with gift money that you saved from your bar mitzvah. How much money did you save and what made you decide at that point to start your own publication?

Steven Heller:

Well, I know exactly how much I made because my father was an accountant for the Air Force and he kept meticulous records. It was to be put away for college. College was not expensive then. NYU was probably $500 a semester and School of Visual Arts was even cheaper. But after experiences in both NYU and SVA where I was either thrown out or left depending on how you read the records, I had some of that money available to me.

Debbie Millman:

Well, just as an aside, you now have two honorary doctorates. Well done, Dr. Heller.

Steven Heller:

Denada.

Debbie Millman:

You titled the magazine Borrowed Time. Why that particular name?

Steven Heller:

Because I felt we all lived on borrowed time. I was reading a lot of Sarte and Camus at the time. The thing that kept me sane while I was in high school was reading Russian literature.

Debbie Millman:

That was my minor in college, by the way. I don’t know if you know that about me.

Steven Heller:

I didn’t know that. Well, Russian literature is not a lot of laughs.

Debbie Millman:

No, that’s why I love it.

Steven Heller:

But I would find myself alone during certain periods of time and I would go into the bathroom of our Stuyvesant Town apartment and there was a riser, a heat riser, steam riser, and you could hear into other people’s apartments through the riser. I would sit and listen to other people’s conversations and read my Russian literature. I didn’t feel alone, and at the same time, I felt kind of morose. I enjoyed feeling morose. I figured the Russians enjoyed feeling morose. I remember reading Lermontov and how depressing hero of our time was and how good I felt.

Debbie Millman:

Yep. I completely understand about Russian literature. People often ask me, “Oh see, that means you speak Russian?” I’m like, “No, no, no. I read it in English translation.” It was the content that I was so desperate to read and related to.

Steven Heller:

Well, at Walden, there was actually the woman who much later became the headmaster taught a Russian literature course. It was like you’d go in there all jolly and you’d come out with clouds over your head

Debbie Millman:

Weeping. Your friend Timothy Jackson was going to be the art director of Borrowed Time, but after Brad Holland answered an ad you placed for illustrators, he took over the role. I think that it’s safe to say that Brad Holland is one of the very big influences in your life and in the direction your life took at that point. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Steven Heller:

Well, I devoted a whole chapter to Brad as my mentor. For those who don’t know who he is, he’s one of the greatest illustrators in the United States and really helped change the course of illustration from being a profession of visual mimics to creating content, creating ideas that would supplement or compliment texts. He had come off the boat, so to speak, from the Midwest. He had worked at Hallmark cards at the rabbit division is what he called it. He answered an ad for contributors.

Most of the contributors who answered the ad were just local hippies who I would see around periodically around Washington Square. Brad was the first serious artist that I met other than Neil Shevlin, who was my art teacher, who I learned later committed suicide. Brad just wanted to be able to place his drawings somewhere. He had just gotten hired by Playboy to do a monthly column. He had done something for Avant Garde. He had done all these little books for Hallmark. He was a true professional and he taught me what a typeface was. He taught me what a paste-up was. He taught me that you line things up, that there’s a grid that you follow. He gave me in a month’s time a full graduate program.

Debbie Millman:

You wrote this about what Brad taught you, and I want to read it because I think it’s so special. You write, Brad became my teacher, not in the ways of illustration, but in publication design in general and visual thinking specifically. I learned aspects of type use I hadn’t appreciated before. Notably, I learned to achieve expression through letters and their accents, voices and pitches. This is the expression that different faces bring to text and headlines. I admired Brad’s passion and listened spellbound as he told me about his duals with editors and art directors over his principle to never render anyone else’s ideas. I understood that Brad was not only fighting the conventional wisdom that an illustrator was merely the extension of an art director’s, or worse, an editor’s hands. He was also trying to radically alter, if not expunge, the conventions of slavishly sentimental illustration and create a more intimate personal art.

You and Brad joined forces with underground cartoonist Yossarian and created a plan to conquer the alternative art and cartoon world by offering subscriptions. You made a few hundred of the first and only issue of Borrowed Time and sent it to every underground newspaper that you could. Then you waited for the landslide of return subscription cards to arrive in the mail. What happened next?

Steven Heller:

Well, it was slightly different. We actually went out in front of the Fillmore East and sold them to people waiting online to see Big Brother in the holding company or whoever else was playing Johnny Winter’s brother. I remember Edgar Winter was in line for some reason.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Steven Heller:

He kept calling me gentleman. What we did was we started a syndication service called the Asylum Press. Brad did the logo. Well, we made a bunch of silkscreen posters of it. I have one framed in my office still. We thought we’d send this work to underground papers around the world and get some nominal fee for doing so. It didn’t really amount too much of anything except we did the one piece… Brad’s work was being picked up in any case. I mean, my stuff never really went that far. I got picked up I think by the Underground Press service, picked up by one of the Columbia University radical papers during the uprising there, but mostly, it was running in the New York Free Press where I had a weekly spot.

Debbie Millman:

Why did you decide to stop drawing?

Steven Heller:

I decided to stop because I wasn’t that good at it.

Debbie Millman:

According to who?

Steven Heller:

According to Brad, in a way, in a tacit way. He never said, “Hey, good work.” I assumed if you don’t say, “Good work,” that means you don’t think it’s good work. I wanted some sort of accolade, which I wasn’t getting. Also, I couldn’t draw realistically to save my life. I could draw expressionistically. There are a few of the images in the book and there was another reason, a silly reason in retrospect, but it was a reason nonetheless. My mother actually liked the drawings.

Debbie Millman:

Didn’t she collage with them?

Steven Heller:

She made a collage on a table. My mother would’ve been an artist had it been another time of life. She created children’s clothing lines. Some of it was about design. Most of it was about sourcing, but some of it was designy. She liked the drawings and wanted to show them to her friends. I say in the book, she used them like her travel photographs. I let her do it, but it really upset me that it was being exploited and co-opted. One reason for ending was my frustration with that. It was self-indulgent.

Debbie Millman:

Your drawing was self-indulgent or her behavior?

Steven Heller:

No, my drawing was self-indulgent to be sure, but to quit was self-indulgent. I was doing it for spite.

Debbie Millman:

I wish you hadn’t. In any case, by the time you were 17, ripe old age of 17, you became the first art director of Screw Magazine, which was the pioneering underground sex review that really helped trigger the 1960 sexual revolution. It was founded by Al Goldstein. How did you first meet Al and what gave him the sense you could art direct what was ostensibly a national magazine at 17 years old?

Steven Heller:

Well, first of all, it wasn’t a national magazine at the time.

Debbie Millman:

But it became one.

Steven Heller:

It became one, but we grew into it.

Debbie Millman:

But you grew into it with your talent, so it still counts.

Steven Heller:

Well, there was no talent involved. I mean, the pictures in the book will show that to anybody. I was working at the Free Press, our typesetter and managing editor was a guy named Jim Buckley, who was, I always thought very straight and narrow. When Al Goldstein came into our office unannounced one day, he came to sell a story. The story was about being an industrial spy for the Bendix Corporation. Goldstein had a lot of strange sub-careers.

He was a very neurotic, mixed up guy, but he could write his way out of a paper bag, as they say. He offered the story to our editor who thought it was worthy of publication. Not only that, it was worthy of going on the cover as the cover story. Unbeknownst to me, they came up with this idea to start a sex paper. Goldstein was writing these blood and gut stories, lover kills intruder with ice pick up the nose kind of thing for these tabloids that were run by a guy named Myron Fass.

The tabloids were national inquirer type things, except worse. They wouldn’t run anything related to sex. They thought sex was dirty, but ice pick murders were a-okay. Goldstein wanted to break that tradition of hypocrisy. Since he was also interested in getting laid a lot, he figured the best thing to do was start a sex paper.

Debbie Millman:

Ah, the ’60s.

Steven Heller:

I happened to be sitting in an office adjacent to the typesetting machine, and somebody must have asked, “Who’s going to paste this up?” They looked at me and I looked at them and I did. It looks like I just chopped things out of books and threw them on a page. It was very easy in those days because you could use wax, which also felt very soothing on the hand.

Debbie Millman:

How did you get Milton Glaser to design the Screw logo?

Steven Heller:

Well, that came many years later. I worked for Screw for first six issues and then Goldstein and I got into a big fight about the change of the logo. I didn’t know how to draw letters or do typography or lettering, but I knew that what we had was terrible. I knew that what he wanted to use, which some friend of his made was just as bad, if not worse. He called me one night to say, “We’re using it.” I said, “I’m not going to use it.” He was often not the most pleasant person, although I really loved him dearly, but he made me cry. The next day, I quit and started my own sex paper.

Debbie Millman:

What was that like?

Steven Heller:

That was just like normal. Why not start a sex paper? I had an idea with my co-publishers that we would do something different from what Screw did. Screw was kind of the funny, but raunchy. We were going to be more serious and artistic. We managed to get Grove Press to finance the first issue. We got full color printing on a heavier news print. I got type faces from these $1 a word places and I was actually able to design something that was not as embarrassing as Screw, but I was also called the only person in New York that could make a sex paper fail.

Debbie Millman:

Why?

Steven Heller:

Because we couldn’t sell. The first few issues sold. It was called The New York Review of Sex. Then, we called it the New York Review of Sex & Politics.

Debbie Millman:

Politics, yes.

Steven Heller:

Ultimately, the New York Review of Sex & Aerospace and then it was gone.

Debbie Millman:

While you were working on the fourth issue of the New York Review of Sex & Politics, you received a telephone call from the New York District Attorney’s Office. What did they tell you?

Steven Heller:

They said, “Don’t leave. We’re coming over. You’re under arrest.”

Debbie Millman:

And you obeyed, you did not leave.

Steven Heller:

No, I had no place to go. I was cowed by authority anyway. My partners who were much older than I-

Debbie Millman:

You were still a minor.

Steven Heller:

I was a minor and my partners weren’t around. One of the cops who came, I call him the heavy set one. He had come to our office a few weeks before and bought a bunch of papers saying he ran an adult bookstore. That was the evidence they needed.

Debbie Millman:

It was a sting operation.

Steven Heller:

It was a sting. The younger cop, the thinner cop, Toody and Muldoon from Car 54, he was an idealist. He was interested in disrupting the mob and Screw, the New York Review of Sex, all the other underground sex papers were distributed by mob families. That’s a whole other story and a whole other book. But he said, we’re not looking to shut you guys down, but we are interested in disrupting organized crime.

Debbie Millman:

But they were rounding up all of the Blue Magazines.

Steven Heller:

There was a lot of vice policing in New York City. Gay clubs were being raided all the time. It was the era of the massage parlor. At a certain point, it calmed down. But apparently, all you needed was one or two people or organizations to complain to the District Attorney about something and he’d go after, unless, of course, there was some legal reason he shouldn’t. We I think were able to prove in state supreme court that it was prior restraint, and legally, they had no right to take our publications off the newsstand. In those days, you had to be a veteran to run a newsstand. There were a lot of blind newsstand dealers, so they didn’t even know what they were selling, but they would have their papers taken from them and sometimes be arrested. It was a crazy time legally.

Debbie Millman:

In the period between that arrest and the trial, you were arrested again in another roundup. Somehow during the blitz of briefs and testimony, it was determined that the DA did not adhere to the law and you were exonerated on all charges before going to trial. At that point, your newsstand distributor gave you an ultimatum, either you include more hardcore sex, so first it was being taken off the newsstands because it was too lewd, now the distributors wanted you to have more hardcore sex to interest a viable readership or he fooled you. I believe that’s when you went back to Screw.

Steven Heller:

No, that’s when I went to a magazine called Rock. I went from sex to rock and roll.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, the Rock Magazine, not… I have so much sex on the brain that I was like, “That’s right. Rock Magazine, the magazine for men with rocks.”

Steven Heller:

No, I remember it was Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll.

Debbie Millman:

I have a dirty mind, I’m sorry.

Steven Heller:

I didn’t work for High Times, although I knew a bunch of the editors there.

Debbie Millman:

But you were in jail for a bit, right? You were held?

Steven Heller:

I was held in a detention pen twice. The first time it was with the prostitutes because I was underage and I had a long ponytail at the time and they were all playing with it. It all seemed very cute and they were making jokes. It wasn’t the most pleasant place to be in the tombs in New York City. I’m sure it still isn’t. But the second time I was arrested, I had turned 18. I was no longer with the goyles. I was with hardened vagrants and drunks and other people that were put in the tank for night court.

Debbie Millman:

You have a rap sheet?

Steven Heller:

No, I was able to expunge the rap sheet. I thought it would help me expunge other things, but it never did.

Debbie Millman:

While you were at Rock, now it’s all coming back to me, that’s where you met Patti Smith.

Steven Heller:

I met Patti Smith there.

Debbie Millman:

She was an editor, right? An editor and a writer.

Steven Heller:

Well, she was a writer, reporter. I mean, anybody who was a writer was kind of an editor. She was an interesting character who often talked about her ambitions to be a rock and roll star and mentioned a few names in passing a lot that were of interest to me like Sam Shepard, the playwright. I loved his work, particularly Operation Sidewinder. She never mentioned Robert Mapplethorpe. She mentioned Todd Rundgren a lot and I was not a fan of Todd Rundgren.

Debbie Millman:

For shade.

Steven Heller:

But we hung out a little bit. At that time, Rock Magazine was producing rock and roll shows at the New York Academy of Music, which became the Palladium. I would do programs and posters and things for the shows. Most of the shows were oldies shows, 1950s doo-wop groups, really great ones too. But one show we had was Van Morrison, Linda Ronstadt, and Tim Buckley. She and I went to the show and that’s where we kind of disappeared. She went one way. I went the other.

I had heard that she was fired from the paper because the publisher wanted more reportage and she was writing more lyrical stuff. But she met her lifelong music partner there, Lenny Kaye, who was a writer for us, who I always liked. I’m still in touch periodically with him. It just became this one little blip in her life and in my life, it meant something years later when she became a punk icon.

I ran into her one day because her kids went to the same school that my son went to. I said, “You don’t remember me, I’m sure, but we used to hang out.” She looked at me and she kind of in a daze said, “Oh yeah, I remember that. What are you doing now?” I said, “Well, I’m art director of The New York Times Book Review.” She said, “Oh, they just gave me a bad review for a book of poems.” That was the end of it.

Debbie Millman:

You then went back to Screw and that’s when you worked with Milton. Talk about that experience.

Steven Heller:

Well, when I went back to Screw, I wasn’t sure I was going back to Screw. I had finished what I could do with Rock. I was going to do an interim gig at Screw because I met the woman who became my first wife there. The magazine just looked like shit. I had learned to discern good from bad or at least good for mediocre. I suggested that they get a redesign. Since I figured I wasn’t going to be working there very long, let somebody else redesign it and I’ll pick up the pieces.

I had heard about Push Pin for the longest time and I convinced Al and Jim to contact Push Pin and see whether they’d be interested. Seymour Chwast, co-founder with Milton who is my best friend now, admitted to me that there was no question that they would do it because they did anything that would pay money. Goldstein was willing to pay a fairly sizable amount at that time. They took it on as a serious job. Milton did some logos and Seymour did some logos. Seymour’s, as I remember, more decorative. Milton did one that was just so corporate, it seemed a total anomaly. He did a Helvetica logo, all caps, and he took the middle part of the E and extended it like a hard-on into the W.

Debbie Millman:

One of the great logos of the 20th century, Steve.

Steven Heller:

Probably.

Debbie Millman:

It really is. Really so witty and-

Steven Heller:

It sure beats out I love New York.

Debbie Millman:

Well, definitely on par.

Steven Heller:

But I didn’t appreciate it.

Debbie Millman:

Really?

Steven Heller:

I really didn’t. I didn’t appreciate the Helvetica and the pages inside were stripped of any kind of decorative elements. He redesigned the Peter Meter, which was Al Goldstein’s measuring stick for-

Debbie Millman:

Device.

Steven Heller:

… films. He redesigned the shit list, which was also one of Goldstein’s favorite tools. But they used Helvetica, Lightline Gothic, straight columns. There was no ragging or anything like that. The photographs were basically straight black and white pictures on a full page, no bleed because it was a tabloid. When they gave us the pages to work with, they had tissues over them. I put it my own tissue over their tissues. I made copious notes about why this is bad. Goldstein sent it back to Milton and had me surreptitiously listen on the other extension. Milton was rather annoyed by it. I lost my battle and the Glaser issue came out and we continued to follow his lead for about six months. Then a year later, I had somebody come in with an airbrush and balloon up the Helvetica so that it could be run as a duotone and give a sense of marqueeness.

Debbie Millman:

In 1973, Brad Holland had a party wherein you met the great Ruth Ansel, then our director of The New York Times Magazine. There, you talked about the magazine business. You asked if you could show her your portfolio. She agreed. The meeting went better than you could have ever expected. What happened next?

Steven Heller:

Well, we had lunch and we seemed to get along. I was looking for another job. I wanted to be a designer. I wanted to be an art director. Herb Lubalin was always a hero. There were other designers who were doing things that were of interest to me like Lester Beall, Frank Zachary, who was the art director of Holiday Magazine. I related to him. I didn’t know what he did, but his name was on the masthead as art director so I thought he must be great. We later became good friends.

Ruth and I talked magazines and she looked at the portfolio, which had stuff in there that was from Screw and stuff that was from other places and other things that I did at Screw. We did other publications, some that weren’t sexual. She seemed to like what I did with type or she wasn’t wearing her glasses. She offered to me a temporary position designing pages for the magazine. Said she had to show her boss, Lou Silverstein, who was the great newspaper designer and assistant managing editor of The Times. I got a call a few weeks later saying Lou wanted to see me about another job.

By this time, most of my friends who were illustrators were working for the op-ed page. It was like that was the creme de la creme-

Debbie Millman:

Holy grail, absolutely.

Steven Heller:

… of illustration and of alternative journalism at the time. Lou said, “I’d like you to help out with the op-ed page.” I kind of pressed him, “Do you mean art director?” He went, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Art director.” He offered me less than I was making at Screw. There were less benefits. Screw gave incredible benefits and I figured this would be a good career move. I took the offer.

About two weeks after I started, I had two offices. I had an office in the art department, long desk in this crazy old 1930s art department, and I had an office up on the editorial floor around the library and in that area where all the editorial writers. Here were the kings and queens of editorial journalism and I was one of the members of the group.

I got a call from the guards downstairs and they said, “There’s some guys down here with very long hair that want to see you.” I figured the guards were just being guardy. People with long hair were still suspect. He said, “And you have to come down and we can’t let them in until you come down.” I came down and the first thing I saw when I turned the corner from the elevator bank were three apes, three people dressed in ape suits. They took me into a limousine and brought me to the market diner where the owner came out with a big bucket of bananas. That was just one of three different times Al Goldstein did his best to embarrass me at The New York Times.

Debbie Millman:

But it didn’t work. You ended up not only working for the op-ed page, you also ended up becoming the art director of The New York Times Book Review, this section that is one of the most read sections of any newspaper in the world. You did that for 33 years.

Steven Heller:

I did that for a long time.

Debbie Millman:

You worked for six different editors while you were at The New York Times Book Review and you write about how this job became the foundation of your professional life as an art director and all that followed, but you conclude the book stating that that is another story.

Steven Heller:

That is another story. I had grown up. It’s called Growing Up Underground. I had come out of the caverns of New York. I knew Hilly Kristal who started CBGBs. When I saw CBGBs for the first time before he opened it, I thought, this is disgusting and I had no desire to be part of that group. Certain friends of mine were already making their way out of the underground. The op-ed page was this transitionary point. I did it for two and a half or three years, whatever it was. I did the Book Review simultaneously for six months or more. I didn’t get along with the op-ed editor

Debbie Millman:

Charlotte Curtis.

Steven Heller:

Charlotte Curtis, who Gay Talese warned me to watch out for when I got the job at the time as he was working on his book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife. He spent a lot of time at Screw and I just figured that was a good place to end because if I started on the Book Review, everything else falls into place after that and I didn’t know how to make it into the same kind of story.

Debbie Millman:

Will there be a sequel to this memoir to tell those stories? Seems like there’s so much more to still be told.

Steven Heller:

Well, I’m not sure. I liked the idea of writing something that was very personal. I’ve written a lot of objective essays, journalism reportage. This was, as you said upfront, about me. I don’t see myself as a fiction writer, but I do see something that happened during those 30 years that could make a possible roman a clef. (romanaclef?)

Debbie Millman:

I’ve known you a long time. I’m very fortunate you had your lunch with Ruth Ansel. I had my lunch with you, the lunch that changed my life, that helped me write my first book, which you essentially handed to me on a silver platter, invited me to co-found the masters in branding program where we’re speaking in my little podcast studio.

It is a glorious, glorious book. I’ve read it several times. I have spent the last hour plus talking with you about just a sliver of some of the remarkable stories that you recount in this book, time working at Interview Magazine, working with so many of some of the world’s greatest art directors and illustrators. For listeners that might want to hear more about Steve’s many experiences at The Times or his role as co-chair at the School of Visual Arts, MFA Designer as entrepreneur, or his 40 years at the helm of Print Magazine or the other 199 books he has written, we have 14 episodes with Steve in the Design Matters archive that you could listen to in anticipation of the sequel to this remarkable memoir.

Steve, I just want to thank you so much for everything that you do in the world, for your writing, for your reportage, for your generosity, and for your friendship. Thank you for joining me today to talk about this remarkable new book of yours. Thank you so much for making so much work that matters.

Steven Heller:

Well, I must thank you. You’re the first person to interview me on this book.

Debbie Millman:

It’s good.

Steven Heller:

I have looked forward to it for a long time. Our friendship is very important to me and dear to me, and it’s been a great ride.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. Thank you. Steven Heller’s latest book, his memoir is titled, Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York. You can read more about Steve and read about all of his other wonderful books he’s written at hellerbooks.com and you can read his daily Heller column on printmag.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Steven Heller appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

A good title serves as an invitation, and Martha Wainwright knows not only how to craft that invitation, but how to deliver it in the most persuasive and penetrating manner. One of her most famous songs is titled Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole. Now, who wouldn’t want to know who that song is about and what wrong they caused? Martha Wainwright’s second album was titled, I Know You’re Married, but I’ve Got Feelings, Too. That Too was enigmatic. Even the title of her memoir published in 2022 is a bit of a cliffhanger, stories I Might Regret Telling You. The book is about growing up in a family of rock and roll royalty and how she managed to find her own distinct musical voice. Martha joins me today from Montreal to talk about her life, her memoir, and her latest album with another irresistible title, Love Will Be Reborn. Martha Wainwright, welcome to Design Matters.

Martha Wainwright:

Hi.

Debbie Millman:

Martha, is it true you love the way New York City smells?

Martha Wainwright:

Yes, it is true. That’s something that I wrote in the memoir. I remember as a kid going down three, four times a year to visit my dad. I lived in Montreal, as I do now, when I was a kid. And I just felt that the smell, I think it was the pavement or whatever was happening, whatever was in the air really hit my olfactory sense in a way that excited me and made it unforgettable.

Debbie Millman:

Your memoir, Stories I Might Regret Telling You, came out last year, is now out in paperback. You start the book recounting how your father didn’t want your mother to have you and pressured her to have an abortion. She had you anyway. In his song, That Hospital, your dad sings about the experience and he writes, “The little girl that was born there, that escaped that scrape with fate, a few months ago in Montreal, I watched her graduate.” How did you find out you almost weren’t born?

Martha Wainwright:

Well, my dad told me. Which I don’t think was the greatest idea. The book opens up with that scene or it opens up with that truth that I had been told when I was 14 years old, about almost not being born. And it’s not a judgment on the decision to have an abortion or to not have an abortion or whether that was right or wrong or anything like that. It was more a comment on having heard that from a parent at 14, which is already sort of an uncertain age. It’s where I start the book in terms of someone who has always felt a little out of place or not sure of herself or not knowing where to go and how to be. And so it would seem to me to be an obvious springboard into the story. It is certainly a bit of a abrupt start.

He told me late one night and maybe out of remorse, out of sadness, or out of trying to connect. But one of the things also that I think I talked a little bit about in the book, or a realization that I made through writing the book and looking about the relationship with my dad, which has been a distanced one, a loving one, but with a lot of kilometers between us, is that when you don’t bring up your kids on a daily basis, where you’re not taking care of them daily and understanding that dynamic of parent and child and the responsibility of the parent to protect child more. Where it’s not a relationship that is only about honesty and openness and treating them as equals, but there’s a dynamic that is learnt in that daily care. I think when you don’t have that, it’s hard to know how to be with your kids. And that’s what I think maybe Loudon didn’t recognize and maybe it’s not his fault that he didn’t recognize that because he didn’t really know how to be a dad, if that makes sense.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, absolutely. You were born to rock and roll royalty. For our listeners, I just want to sort of paint the picture of your lineage. Your mother and her sister performed as the legendary folk duo Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Your father is the prolific Grammy Award-winning songwriter, Loudon Wainwright III. You describe your brother Rufus Wainwright as one of the most famous singers in the world. Your father’s sister Sloan and your half sister Lucy Wainwright Roche are also singers. Lucy’s actually been on Design Matters as well. Your family is as famous for what they write about in their music as the music itself, and as far as I can tell, there’s no other family in rock and roll history that has ever written more about each other and that includes the Jacksons, the Osmonds, the Staple Singers, even the Braxtons. Do you think that the stories you share about each other are unusual? Or do you think that you’re all just more honest than the other family groups?

Martha Wainwright:

Well, you said rock and roll. I was sort of thinking of it as that kind of folk dynasty more in the sense that it kind of came out of an older type of music. And also folk should be accessible to people usually through talking about humanity or politics or the music of the people. The temperature of what is occurring in the community at that time. And the songwriter tells a story of people behind the scenes and, much of it, behind the walls in the family life, the secrets or the relationships. And so I’ve always found that as songwriters in our family, I think that that’s been something that we all seem to have hooked into. And for better or for worse, we probably would be making more money if we were able to write simpler pop songs just in terms of getting a hook, getting a great line, or whatever.

But I also think, in the case of our family specifically, you talk about my parents, but even before that there was Loudon Wainwright II. Loudon’s dad who-

Debbie Millman:

Famous editor.

Martha Wainwright:

He’s written… Exactly, famous editor. And editorialist. He wrote A View from Here, which is a column that was in Life Magazine for 50 years. And he wrote often about his own family and the American family and the dynamic of the family and of course set in the era that he was in and in the story of the day. So that already had started a generation before. And there was a struggle between him and his son, my dad, Loudon Wainwright III. So already this sort of father son competition, which my dad has written about a lot in songs and contemplated that relationship with his dad and then, of course, with his son Rufus. Where they have a competitive element to it.

Less and less, but certainly at the beginning of Rufus’s career, Rufus’s career was very illustrious and impressive and exciting. And Loudon has been honest in his anxiety around it. But that kind of dynamic that we seem to see over and over and over again in literature and in people’s lives. And it’s this willingness to talk about it that is sort of surprising and not often done in the form of a song and over several generations and in response to a family member’s other song or whatever. I don’t know if it’s unprecedented, this thing of songwriting in response to one another with these intimate relationships. But the thing that I always find about it is that the more personal that we get, the more I think people see themselves and feel connected to the stories because they recognize them as something that is similar or has commonalities with their own lives.

Debbie Millman:

In many ways, they’re Shakespearean stories. You also write quite candidly about your relationship with your mother, sharing both the sublime and the difficult. And you revealed that since you were old enough to understand words, she told you how hardheaded you were, how you had a chip on your shoulder. She didn’t like these qualities in you, and you state that you didn’t like these qualities in you either. So I have two questions about this. Did you agree with her about those qualities? And how do you feel about those qualities now?

Martha Wainwright:

I was able to talk openly about my mother because she’s dead. I don’t know where our relationship was going and where it would’ve evolved to, but when she was diagnosed with cancer when she was 60, my relationship with her changed. The conflict and the anger that I had towards her, I wanted to really flip that around and have the remaining time that I had with her to be very loving and make up for some of the bad stuff that we had gone through. Maybe that would’ve happened over time naturally, but I really knew that our time was limited. So I really wanted to consider all those things that she told me and all those things that affected me, that made me sad or upset when I was younger, whether it was, as you say, being too hardheaded or being overly earnest and things that she felt were not great qualities.

And I think that they stung because I was afraid that she was right. And maybe that was why she was telling them to me, because she wanted me to face some of those facts about it. I certainly believed her because she was a very believable person and because I was, as I said, afraid that she might be right and I wanted to adjust. Looking back, I don’t think that she was right. And she was probably not right to say anything too negative about her kids because I don’t really know if much good can come out of it. But it did form me and it did propel me to write in a way that was in-your-face and was confrontational with a lot of emotion and with vulnerability and anger. And so that defined my artistry at a young age and I did push back.

She created an environment where I was then able to gain confidence through this songwriting style. And she was really impressed by the first set of songs that I wrote and quickly changed her tune. And as she watched me though, start my career, which was a very rocky start, and was filled with insecurity and insecurity that she had probably partially caused, and also excess and mistakes. And she also was worried about that and those behaviors in me and she would warn me. And I think, in that instance, she was correct. And she was a concerned mother. And so I don’t fault her for that at all. And when, at 30, I discovered that she was sick, or we discovered, I really wanted to turn things around to show her before she left this earth that I was going to be okay. And that was hard to do, but it was a good thing for me to do and she helped me do it, too.

Debbie Millman:

While you lived with your mom and brother in Montreal for most of the time, when you were 14, you went to live with your dad for a year when your mom and her sister went on the road. And you’ve written about how during that year you lived with Loudon, you became more like him as if the DNA in you that came from him started to wake up, almost like a switch got turned on. Was that when you first considered becoming a musician as well?

Martha Wainwright:

Well, that year, I was a attending Friends Seminary in Manhattan and I had a math teacher who was very frustrated with my performance, with my homework and my work ethic, and she said, “What do you want to do all your life? Sing and dance?” Of course, the answer was yes. I didn’t say anything, I just sort of listened to her. But it was a great realization and helpful to me to think, “Okay, I don’t have to put this pressure on myself to say, what am I going to do? Am I going to become a mathematician? Am I going to become an accountant? Am I going to become a lawyer? Am I going to become…”

There was so many people around me that were quite high-achieving as well. You know, go to a school like Friends Seminary that has a lot of people who are very upwardly mobile. My mother was really high achieving. I’d been to some pretty good schools, so there was a pressure to succeed. And so when she said that, I thought, “Well, that’s probably not the worst route for me. That’s probably my best bet.” So that was a relief. And at first, when at 14, I was more interested in theater because I was appalled at the amount of songwriting that was going on around me. And Rufus was constantly on the piano banging away. So I thought, “Well, theater could be more for me.” And I wanted to do very serious plays and be a serious actress. And then of course I started writing songs a few years later and that seemed a lot easier than trying to do a Pinter play or something.

Debbie Millman:

I love the part of memoir where you audition for the National Theater School of Canada with a monologue from Antigone. Talk about high bar. How did you learn how to write music? I know your dad gave you a Sigma guitar when you were 13. Did he teach you how to play? Did you teach yourself how to play? Did Rufus or Kate teach you how to play the piano?

Martha Wainwright:

Loudon wasn’t around. He gave me the guitar, but my mom showed me three chords. So I got the guitar when I was 12 and didn’t touch it much. I was taught an A chord, a D chord, and a G chord, and maybe an E chord. Three or four chords, which are all you need to write any masterpiece, really. Your muscles have to start to be able to play those things because it hurts. So I did not have any guitar lessons or anything like that. And my brother was always on the piano, so I didn’t play the piano. I did not have a guitar teacher. I played a little bit of violin, so I knew how to read music and my fingers could move a little bit on the fretboard. But it was really my mother who taught me those chords. And then she taught me a simple picking pattern. And very much by just doing it over and over and over again, you get faster and faster and faster and it’s easier and easier.

So a very simple rhythm guitar style. And I wasn’t obsessive about it, I wasn’t passionate about it, but once I could play a few chords, then I could accompany myself. And that’s where it got exciting for me. And so generally, I remember it started with learning some Elvis Presley songs, country songs. Things like that are really easy. So That’s All Right Now, Mama and things like that, where I could accompany myself and sing. That would’ve been at around, I don’t know, 15 or something like that. And I could perform that. I could play at a talent show or something. And that was exciting because that was a freedom where just me and this simple instrument that I don’t need to plug in can sort of create a sound that is independent. That was powerful. And then soon after, I tried writing songs and things came.

Debbie Millman:

You say this about your voice in the book, and I’d like to read it verbatim. “One person’s voice is handed to them like a gift. Another person has to create a voice literally in her gut, her heart, her throat. Some people seem to channel someone else’s voice, taking it on and welcoming it. Your body is your own, but sometimes it’s also a tool for someone else to come through. Sometimes singing feels like a skill and sometimes it feels like an art. Singing has saved my life. Sometimes I feel that if it weren’t for being able to sing, I would not be here. I would’ve died by misadventure or taken my own life, but that might be a load of cow shit. I can really sit in sadness, as you might have guessed, but I can get out of it pretty easily, too often by singing.”

Martha, over the years, how have you found your own voice? And when did you realize that you’re really a fine original singer?

Martha Wainwright:

Well, I think that my own voice was always there, but it wasn’t appreciated by others. Or if it was appreciated by others, going back to some personality traits that weren’t very useful to me, I either didn’t believe them or I didn’t want their opinion or recommendation. So there was a hardheadedness. Recently, I found some recordings of me singing as a kid. My mother and Aunt Anna McGarrigle did some music for some kids’ movies in the eighties and nineties, and they had me sing a couple of songs for the credits and things like that. And I sound just like I sound today, I sound like I’m eight and I sound like I’ve been smoking for a bunch of years, but I’m a little pitchy, it’s a little off-key. I’m twanging. I’m bending the node. I’m not doing it probably how a director would’ve wanted me to do it.

It’s the kind of thing where I would’ve gotten to the callback but not gotten the part because I wasn’t willing to bend to what the director needed me to do. And it was a hardheadedness and a sort of unwillingness to change. But in a way then, what happened is that people had to come to me rather than me come to them, in some ways, artistically. And when I was writing songs and doing shows and trying to get a record label in my twenties, I was not fitting a mold that was suitable for record labels. And producers worked with me and they tried to adjust my songwriting and I was difficult to work with.

Not that I wasn’t nice, but I just sort of walked out of the situation or turned away from it or sabotaged it in some way. And I guess I just wanted them to like me for who I am and who I was. It took time for that to happen, but I think that it made it set when the first record came out and to the larger public, people remarked on its originality or something. Not that musically, it wasn’t super original. It wasn’t like crazy or anything musically. But I think that the singing voice and the songwriting was different than other people’s and it was remarked on. That was the way I had to get there.

Debbie Millman:

In an old interview I read in Believer Magazine, you stated that to create a rhythm, you play the guitar more violently than most women play the guitar. And then in various places throughout the memoir, you talk about being intimidated by guitar playing and that you wish that you were better at it. If you were better at it, do you think you would be less distinctive? You have a very distinctive style to your playing.

Martha Wainwright:

That’s interesting. That is true. I worked for a long time with a piano player who was classically trained, and it was early on, and he was always so surprised at my chord choices and some of the things I did musically because he found it to be quite sophisticated. But it wasn’t that I was sophisticated, it was actually just completely naive. And it was by not knowing what I was playing, that I sort of went to a different chord that people would normally go to or say, “Okay, well yeah, after this chord, you can go here, here, or here.” But because I had to try out many things, I was not as constrained, in a way. And he was really envious of that because for him, having music been drilled into him, he felt that he was not as creative as maybe he wished he could be in that way.

He’s creative in other ways and I’m envious of his ability to play. But I thought that that was an interesting positive thing about not being sure of what you’re doing. And yes, I think that because I don’t play licks on the guitar or play the melody a lot on the guitar, I play a more rhythm guitar style. So my left hand is kind of quite limited to what it’s doing, and I’m not playing lead guitar. What that means is that I have to accompany myself and there has to be quite a bit going on in the guitar. So it has to get loud, it has to get quiet, it has to be dug in, it has to have maybe an interesting open chord every once in a while. The guitar does have to do a lot with a little. The skills aren’t that huge there, so I think that I’m trying to use the skills that I do have to their fullest.

Debbie Millman:

Rufus is a few years older than you, so it’s not surprising that he signed a record deal before you did. He started touring the world and you, at that time, became his backup singer and joined fellow backup singer Joan Wasser, now known as Joan As Police Woman on the road. Joan has also been on the show and is a dear friend. What was that like for you to be a backup singer? And I think it seemed, from what I read, to be a very formative time for you.

Martha Wainwright:

It was really defining for me, musically. Before Rufus put out records, I was his backup singer in Montreal, and he would play weekly shows when he was 19, 20 and I was 17. I probably was 16 when we started and when he was first writing his first songs. And those first set of songs, not all of them, but quite a few of them had me on them singing sort of a duet. He would write everything. It wasn’t my making, he would tell me very specifically what to sing. But we practiced for hours and hours a day and performed them a lot, around Montreal in particular, sometimes in New York. And this was before he got a record deal. So it was about two or three years of that and just him showing me, asking me to sing things that were really not in my brain at all. Sing really high, sing low, follow his melody in harmony, sustained notes for a really long time, because he has a really impressive voice. Rufus really put me through my paces.

It was kind of quite acrobatic, his parts that he would write.. And maybe he was torturing me, maybe he was doing it on purpose and he would make us practice over and over and over again, and then I would just kind of get angry. I’d be like, “I’m out of here.” But that listening capacity that he created in me, and of course, my mother loved watching this. Obviously she had sung her whole life with her sister more as a duet, but just seeing her two kids sing together and blending and doing that sort of classic family sound thing that happens when families hang together and made her so happy. I think it, at first, she would’ve wanted us to do some type of a duet thing. And then, of course, it was really obvious that both of us were really also wanted to do our own thing and that wasn’t going to work, as we would end up killing each other. But it was such a huge thing.

And then when he did get his record deal and I came down and I recorded those songs and then we went on the road for his first record and then his second record. Just touring with him, he brought me to Japan, he brought me all over Europe, all over the United States. We were opening up for people like Roxy Music and big, big bands. Then he would have his shows. And then I became his opening act, oftentimes, and I had little EPs that I had pressed up myself with my own songs on them. And they weren’t available in stores, and so I would sell them in his shows and people were really impressed with me and intrigued and because they couldn’t buy the CD in the store, I would sometimes sell a hundred CDs a night.

And I’d have these wads of cash in my top drawer and I was able to make a living, because of Rufus, starting from the age of 20 years old. I was selling my CD at his shows, walking away with a grand a night and paying my rent. And it was really, as I say, formative and helpful. And then, it was time to move on. It was time to be like, “Okay, well now I want to do my own thing.” But I don’t know if I would’ve… He’s just a huge part of my story and my parents are, too. There’s just no way around it.

Debbie Millman:

You write about how you also had the opportunity to audition as a backup singer for Leonard Cohen. And this was something you had dreamed of since you were a little girl. You had met him when you were very little. In the end, you decided not to take the job. How come?

Martha Wainwright:

Well, I didn’t audition, so I can’t say that I think I would’ve gotten the job or I could have gotten the job. So I was a huge, and still am, Leonard fan as a young person, as a 14, 15-year-old. I got obsessed and went to go see him play in Montreal. And just the dynamic that he had with his backup singers always. They played such a huge role, which I think was why I felt so comfortable singing with Rufus and playing a big role because they are really present, his singers. So that was like, “Wow, what a great job. That’s what I want to do. That’s the job that I want.” And I knew a lot of the songs. And so when he was putting together the band for his comeback world takeover, which was so amazing, I was hanging out with his daughter because we were really close friends and she said, “Oh, well…”

And I had met Leonard a bunch of times. He had been to my shows, we knew each other. He was a really big fan. She’s like, “You got to go do the audition. You’re totally going to get the part. It’s perfect. We’ll be on the road together. It’s going to be really fun.” We were like, this is a good plan. But right at that time, I had already made I think two records, my career was taking off, and I realized that that’s not what I wanted to do, even though it’s a great job. But it’s not what I wanted to do.

Debbie Millman:

You state that you don’t really hear music in your head and you don’t go around jotting down bits of lyrics on scraps of paper. How do you go about writing a song?

Martha Wainwright:

God, I can’t remember. You’re making me nervous because it’s been a while. I’ve been working so hard. I’ve been touring a lot and promoting the book as well, and I have two kids, and so it’s been a busy time. I haven’t sat down to-

Debbie Millman:

We’ll talk about the magnificence of Love Will Be Reborn in a few moments and about the most recent songs.

Martha Wainwright:

Yes. So I haven’t had a chance in the last year and I have to start writing songs. But generally what happens, or what has happened in the past over the last almost 30 years, is I get so upset and riled up and kind of like buzzing almost because I haven’t been writing or whatever the reason is that life is stored up in me. And then I start, just with the guitar on the couch, start with some chords usually. And then maybe a line will come, or two lines, a phrase. Just things that are like a hook phrase that seem poetic, that seem like there’s a lot in them where you can go, and that are really a direct reflection of how I’m feeling or what’s going on.

And so usually I can identify pretty quickly, “Oh, okay, I’m saying this or I’m writing this because this is how I’m feeling because such and such thing happened last week.” And then that helps me to then compose the song. And when I can go deeper into that and use examples of daily life, usually, to illustrate it. Or people or relationships. A lot of the songs are about love and falling in love, falling out of love, being in love with people who aren’t in love with you. And then, of course, that gets transferred to children and to friendships.

Debbie Millman:

You state that you write maybe five songs in a good year. Do you write a song until you think it’s good or do you write a lot of rejected songs? What is the way in which the songs end up on an album?

Martha Wainwright:

Well, I think that most of them are kept. Sometimes I’ll combine, if I have some cool chords in a melody that I like and I’m working on two separate things, and then I realize that they’re not fully formed things, I’ll say, “Okay, well maybe I can use that as a section or something. Or maybe I can add to it.” Some songs are written quicker than others or easier, and other ones are toiled over for a long time and I write five songs a year or something like that.

But I also find that there seems to be three or four or five maybe different ways of doing it. There’s certain songs, and all songwriters are like this, I think, they have songs that are similar sounding. They have, that’s a set of songs that sound sort of a… And then they have another type of songwriting where those are kind of similar, and it’s not that they’re writing the same song over and over, but there is an element of that, too. I think that that’s also comforting to the listener. Someone turns on, whether it’s Bruce Springsteen or somebody who has a real sound, Neil Young or whatever, they want to hear that sound.

Debbie Millman:

You talk about how you’ve walked away from commercial opportunities because you’re hardheaded and want to do things your own way and go on to state that the truth is, for the last 25 years, you’ve made and played music and gotten good at it. The overall goal is to enjoy playing, but also to get to do it in front of millions of people. Most musicians want this, but the reality is more difficult and complicated. Recognition is essential for the ego, but you don’t need recognition to play music. After all, it’s a natural expression that has been commodified to produce a financial benefit. Martha, I’m wondering how hard is it to straddle the continuum of commodification versus poverty versus artistry?

Martha Wainwright:

In my case, the reasons for making music have changed over time, which is kind of great because it keeps it fresh. There’s always a love to make music, and obviously, it’s the only thing that I know how to do at this point. So I can’t have any other real skills for me to be able to have another profession. It would be really hard to start again at something. But certainly now, having two kids and being the sole money maker and the responsibility of that, working becomes really, truly a necessity, like it is for everybody. That’s not how I felt about it when I was in my twenties. I enjoyed making money and spending the money, but now the money has taken on another type of importance, which is to create something that I can leave behind for the kids, mainly. And also where I can work enough, I make enough money so that I don’t always have to work because then I can be with the kids and take care of them because they’re in school and they can’t go on the road and things like that.

So that for me, at this stage in my life is a really big, big part of it. That being said, I just got back from a tour yesterday. I was in Norway and Sweden for a week. The week before I was with my kids in Montreal. The week before that I was in Holland for a week. I do week on, week off. When I’m there, playing to however many people it is, whether it’s a hundred people or a thousand people, it is the same as it always was, in terms of hoping that people come, hoping that people like it, wanting to give them a great 90 minutes, wanting to sing as well as possible, trying to achieve on stage.

Also, some magic. Sometimes there’s magic, sometimes there isn’t magic. But if there is no magic that there has to be, it has to seem like there is. And that’s really important so that it’s always good. And sometimes you think, as a performer, you think either it’s magic and it’s not as magical as the night before when you thought it wasn’t magic. You’re not in control of the same thing. But I guess what I’m saying is that even though the motives have changed a little bit, there’s always been the same person there doing the same instinct in me to do it.

Debbie Millman:

Last year, you released a new album titled Love Will Be Reborn. Critics have declared this album to be the very best of your career to date, which is saying a lot. I read that you wrote the title track in a very dark time. But the positivity and luminosity of Love Will Be Reborn, in many ways, has predicted your future. Despite how long it might take you to write songs is true that you wrote, love will be Reborn in 10 minutes?

Martha Wainwright:

Pretty much. It was really quick. It just flew out of me. I’m really hoping that that happens again, because I hadn’t written the song in a while, either. And there was a lot going on that was really dark. I’d started divorce proceedings, which quickly got really scary. And I was really scared and I was out on the road without the kids and feeling like, “Oh, my God.”

I was promoting the last record, a record called Goodnight City, and just really afraid. And then as you said, it was so surprising that this thing just flew out of me that was very positive and I just really took it as almost like a prayer. I’m not religious, but it felt like something to hold onto, like “Well, maybe if I keep saying this and saying this good thing and sort of believing this thing that things will get better.”

And that did happen. And the song is not about a man, but it’s about love in general, with everybody. But loved did come back into my life with a man, which was really surprising. And then just wanting peace and hopefully achieving peace, obviously with the father of my children would be, really, the best possible outcome. So it came quickly and I was really happy to know that that meant that there’s things that we’re not even in control of that are just in there. That was a relief.

Debbie Millman:

You start the album with a really, really ferocious song, Middle of the Lake, which felt a bit like a departure for you and in an arrival in a new place, musically. Can you talk a little bit about the way in which you used howling and screaming to amplify that song? It’s such a great song.

Martha Wainwright:

Thank you so much. Well, that was definitely, I put that the song first because it’s different than a lot of the rest of the record. And it was the last song that I actually wrote for that record. And it does have a lot of sonic… I’m singing in these different ways and I’m singing high and low and yelling and Whispering, and I’m singing the backup parts, so there’s a lot of me in there, but it’s kind of a different me.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, for the first time, I felt like, “Huh, Martha maybe was influenced a little bit by Kate Bush in this.”

Martha Wainwright:

Yeah. Well, of course I am influenced by Kate Bush, not so obviously by [inaudible 00:39:48]

Debbie Millman:

No, not at all.

Martha Wainwright:

And adored her music. I’m influenced by the McGarrigles, and I know that she was influenced by the McGarrigles, but letting the female voice really dance wildly in a way that’s just so powerful, which I think that is what the female voice has been doing forever. It’s like, totally… I don’t know if it’s witchy, I don’t really know what that word really means. But just allowing that kind of total, unbridled, uncontrolled female self be there. And it’s not coquettish or intentionally sexy or for the purpose of attracting men. It seems more on its own, more natural, and with nature as well.

Debbie Millman:

So interesting. I think it’s one of your sexiest songs, actually. In thinking about it. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, there’s a Kate Bush-ness to it. There’s a Bjork-ness to it. There’s a very much a Martha Wainwright-ness to it. It felt like listening to that song, especially, it’s the opening, that you had reached a whole new level of your artistry. And then you bring in Report Card after it. And I was like, “Okay, I need a day off.”

Martha Wainwright:

Yeah, no, that song I think is really intense, too. No, I’m going to agree with the critics and say that this is my best record, because like the first record, it came out of a long time in the making and a lot of things having happened and a lot of pivotal things happening. And the first record is really about… It’s like revving up. But this record, to me, seems about really understanding and taking control. Also rejecting some of the things through my past that have been not helpful and difficult and unnecessary. So a real rebirth and a better second half to life than first half, possibly. And I think that that’s the theme of the record and also the book.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, you state that at the end, that you’re about hopefully half only halfway through. Talk about Report Card. It’s a long song, for you. It’s quiet. It’s heartbreaking. I think it may be the saddest song you’ve ever written. What motivated it?

Martha Wainwright:

The saddest thing that I’ve ever dealt with, sadder than losing a boyfriend or losing my mother or anything that I had ever experienced, which was to not be able to see my kids and know where they are and be with them and to have access to them, which was to me the hardest part of my separation and divorce. And that just totally shook me. And it’s not that it’s unfair. Life is not fair. So it’s not unjust, but it seemed to have strike in me a lot of pain. And I think with Report Card, it was hard because I had always, as a songwriter, spoken very openly about my feelings and people and bloody mother-ing asshole and always open, open, open. But then when you have kids, you can’t do that. I can’t be like, “Your dad…”

A bunch of stuff is off-limits, which I learned through writing the book, too. You don’t really want to say everything. And especially not when it comes to people that the kids care about and it’s not worth it. That being said, I was in so much pain, I needed to say something. I needed to be able to express something. But I knew it was pointless to have it be angry or to have it be blaming. And I didn’t want to write another song about their dad and I just had to find a way to talk about what I was feeling, just being alone in the house and being without them, and how scary that was and how it really is my Achilles heel. It really got me, that thing. And it still does. So I had to say it. I had to give myself the right to say it. And I was so sad and I get so sad. And the song had to match the sadness.

Debbie Millman:

You write in your memoir, when you go back and listen to your older records, you regret that most people will never hear them or know anything about you and your work. As you’re back on the road now touring, sharing this new album, sharing your memoir, do you have the same worries?

Martha Wainwright:

No. I do feel like this last year or two years, now that the record is out, I’ve been able to reconnect with fans and people. And that is the flip side to also what I think a lot of women, in particular, do when they get divorced and they don’t necessarily have custody of their kids all the time, is they throw themselves into work. Because you’re like, “Well, if I can’t be taking care of my kids and I’m not with them, then I have to be doing something else and I have to…”

So that has afforded me the possibility to work, which has been great. And has reminded me of A, that I got to keep out there working because if I don’t go back to Oslo and go back to Amsterdam and go back to all these places, I will be forgotten. You have to. It’s a train, you got to keep it going, you got to keep feeding it, and I need to continue for as long as I can. There’s no pension in the music business. And also I have a healthy competition with other people in my field, including my family. My dad’s still working.

Debbie Millman:

I know.

Martha Wainwright:

For God’s sake, he’ll never stop working. When I get off the phone with him, I’m like, “God, he did six shows this week? He’s 76 years old.” I’m like, “I need to book more shows.”

Debbie Millman:

Martha, I have one last question for you today you conclude your memoir with the story of meeting a new love and the glorious process of falling in love. How has that changed you? How has that influenced your music?

Martha Wainwright:

On the record, we hear at least three, if not four songs about Nico. And there were quite positive and I think exciting and really good songs, too. So that was really inspiring for songwriting, certainly. And it was great that the whole record was not going to be about a difficult divorce and my sadness that all of a sudden, no, that’s not what’s happening here. What’s also happening here is a sort of new beginning that was really unexpected and really welcome.

And I think that also, when you read the book and listen to a lot of my music from the last 20 years, there is this kind of feeling of I’m not good enough, or wanting to be loved by men and wanting to be more beautiful and wanting to be more perfect and wanting men to like me, and this sort of insecurity there that, I have to say, for the first time, has been completely turned on its head. And being loved by a man in a way that is kind and loving and generous. And I’m really glad that that’s happened because it feels good.

Debbie Millman:

Martha Wainwright, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Martha Wainwright:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Martha Wainwright’s memoir is titled Stories I Might Regret Telling You, and it is out now in both hard cover and paperback. Her latest album is titled Love Will Be Reborn. You can find all her music and see lots more about Martha on her website, MarthaWainwright.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I want to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Martha Wainwright appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

We humans are a species that live on a tiny planet in a vast universe full of countless, billions of stars. I wouldn’t be able to say that if it weren’t for science. The rigorous process of observing, asking questions and seeking answers through verifiable experimentation has opened our minds to marvels. Yet a lot of people are still suspicious of science and don’t understand how it works. Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent much of his life explaining to the public what science is. Neil is an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. He’s worked for the President of the United States several times and led the reboot of Carl Sagan’s legendary show, Cosmos. He’s the host of the popular podcast, Star Talk, and the author of more than a dozen bestselling books. His latest is titled Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. And it is a full-throated, poetic invocation of the power of science and the beauty of the world it has revealed. Neil deGrasse Tyson, welcome to Design Matters.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Well, you sound like my mother talking about my life and my books. Thank you for-

Debbie Millman:

I’m not entirely sure how to take that, but I’ll take it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Well, moms always say nice things regardless. So that’s all. That’s all I’m saying.

Debbie Millman:

Okay. Okay.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah. Well, thank you for that very warm introduction.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, my absolute pleasure. Neil, is it true that Saturn is the only planet in our solar system with an average density less than water?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah. But that doesn’t do justice to some of the other big bulbous planets. So if you look at Jupiter, which is by far the most massive planet in the solar system. In fact, if you cobble together all the other planets, they will not equal the massive Jupiter. Jupiter is big and bulbous the way Saturn is, and it has an average density just slightly more than water. All right. And so Saturn is slightly less than water. So I don’t want to single out Saturn as the guilty party here. Is that guilty if you’re less dense than water? I don’t know. I don’t want to single out Saturn when all of the gas giants are big and bulbous and low density, they’re like beach balls. But yes, Saturn happens to have a density less than water, which means if you scoop out an average part of it, it’ll float. And that’s kind of weird. So I don’t know if you knew this, but as a child, I knew this fact as a child.

Debbie Millman:

Well, that’s why I’m asking. And I’m asking you this question because it takes us all the way back to when you were asked the question.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Oh.

Debbie Millman:

Crafty, right?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah. I see what you did there.

Debbie Millman:

You asked that question in 1973, and I’m wondering if you could share with our listeners when you were first asked that question.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Well, I knew it before others had asked me. All right. I just thought it was an intriguing fact. Who doesn’t love intriguing facts about everything? It’s like saying, did you know that [inaudible 00:03:28]. And no matter what it is, if it begins with a did you know, it’s usually because someone sifted through random information and found something that was particularly interesting. I just remember, as a child, seeing people playing with rubber duckies in the bathtub and other little floating devices. Of course, ducks float on purpose. That’s how they can just hang out on the water surface. And I thought to myself, if Saturn’s average density is less than water, they should make rubber Saturns.

The people who are thinking not just birds floating. And so it would not be until I was director of the Hayden Planetarium, and I made this fact public about my early life, and somebody sent me a rubber Saturn. So in my office, I have a tiny little rubber… I haven’t yet taken it into a bathtub, but I trust that it’s going to float. And I thought that was a very thoughtful gift.

Debbie Millman:

I think there needs to be a whole merchandising section in the Hayden planetarium of inflatable Saturn pool toys. Why haven’t you not done that yet?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

No, because I’m not that exploitive of the universe. Let’s put it that way.

Debbie Millman:

Fair enough, fair enough.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Commercially exploitive. No.

Debbie Millman:

Your fascination with the stars began way before that question was asked of you. And from what I understand, your fascination really was inspired by your first trip to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. You were nine years old and stated that visit made an indelible impression on you. And I had a somewhat similar experience at the same age. When I visited my first planetarium, I was in Miami with family, and we went to the planetarium. And it’s a palpable, visceral memory I often think about. You’ve said that that’s actually not unusual for many people. Their first planetarium visits are remembered for a lifetime. Why do you think that is?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah, I don’t, I wish I could say it was because the universe is so amazing, but no. Yes, that’s true, but I don’t think that’s the reason. I think the reason, after a lot of thinking about this, especially when we rebuilt the original Hayden Planetarium into what is today, the Rose Center for Earth and Space, containing the new Hayden Planetarium. What we learned as we visited many museums across the country, and in fact around the world, in trying to plan and design the new facility, what we learned is that you are much more likely to remember an immersive experience, no matter what that immersive experience is. So at the time, there was a prevailing scholarship among museum educators that exhibits had to be hands-on. And that meant you’d walk up to an exhibit box, let’s say, and they’d be buttons and levers and sounds. And then they test to see what you learned, what principle of science, science museums were talking about of course.

What you learned in this. And I thought to myself, maybe they learned something, maybe they didn’t. But how much time did they spend in front of it? Minutes? No one is spending a half hour in front of a museum exhibition box, especially kids. Then I thought they spent years in school learning and minutes in front of an exhibit. You can’t expect the exhibit to teach them testable things, a curriculum, a syllabus. It occurred to me that the goal of a museum, given these facts, is to inspire you to want to learn more. Not to teach you in the moment, it’s to flick switches that you might have that had never been turned on, or to fan the embers that had once been raging with curiosity and for whatever reason had gone dormant. That’s what needs to happen. And an immersive exhibit, it’s value to you, it’s advantage over other exhibits is you are consumed by it.

Typically all of your senses, maybe not smell, but maybe that too, you see it, you feel it, you hear it, you look all around you, you are consumed by it. And that’s what happens in a planetarium. And I tested this. I tested this. By the way, and to be immersive means the exhibit is bigger than you are. It has to be, otherwise you can’t immerse yourself in it. So let’s just take a couple of examples. I don’t have to have ever met you, but if you grew up in Philadelphia and went to the Franklin Institute, which is there obviously named after Ben Franklin, which is their science museum, I know what exhibit you remember the most. I know upfront. You know what it is?

Debbie Millman:

What?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

It’s the living heart. Why? Because you walked through it and you were in it and you felt the beat of the heart because the sound gave it to you. And you said, “Oh my gosh, I’m in the aorta, I’m in the left ventricle.” And everybody remembers that. Even when they don’t remember any other exhibit. In the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, I know what exhibits you’re going to remember. It’s the coal mine. Why? Because you got into this bucket or whatever and then you lowered into this coal mine. It’s an immersive experience. Everybody remembers that. So yeah, a planetarium is an immersive experience that happens to also bring you the universe. And it affected me and it affect many people. It happened to become my career I think because the universe chose me more than I chose it. But this might be a lesson to educators about how to influence the passions and the ambitions of people who they touch.

Debbie Millman:

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve wondered what that show was that I actually saw in the planetarium. So it was in Coral Gables, Miami, Florida, 1970. If you happen to know what show I saw, I would be eternally grateful.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Well, what was common in the day was planetarium shows were live. They would have a live presenter. And typically you would get the sky tonight. All right? And so that you’d know what to look for when you went out. 1970, we are actively going to the moon.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, this was a history of the world, the cosmos as we knew it then. And I was enchanted.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

And we went to the moon from 1968 through 1972. So you were right there in the moment. So again, you didn’t have to remember what you saw, but you remembered feeling it. And I think that’s maybe there’s not enough things that we feel anymore in this world.

Debbie Millman:

I want to talk to you about your latest book. It is a really interesting, quite different book than so many of your others. But before we talk about Starry Messenger, I want to ask you one question about The Sky is Not the Limit. In your memoir, The Sky is Not the Limit, you have a chapter titled Dark Matters wherein you discussed the challenges that you faced because of the color of your skin. And in fact, when you graduated with your PhD from Columbia and astrophysics, you stated that there were now seven black astrophysicists in the world. And I’m wondering since that time, has it gotten any better?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

So I would later be corrected on that number. There were 12. I was way off.

Debbie Millman:

I stand corrected.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

So let me first stand publicly corrected. That number was all I could figure out at the time, but there were a couple of others. That was 12 out of many thousands at the time. So you wouldn’t ever speak of the percent of black astrophysicists because it was so low, it’s not a meaningful fraction to hear. You want to hear the number. Oh, that number’s way larger now. It’s at least in the hundreds. So I’m delighted to report that fact. And my field has done very well relative to other STEM fields. But yeah, there’s still room to go. Oh, my point is I saw the forces operating against me coming up and I needed a lot of restoring forces within me to overcome, to stay with it. I can’t tell you how many people said you should leave astrophysics. You’ll never be any good at this.

I feel like the person receiving their first academy award, oh, the people who believed in me and F you to all those who didn’t. That’s not an uncommon fact that there’s so many people who believe they know more about you and what you’ll accomplish than you do. And they’ll tell you. And I’m thinking, well, what are you gaining by that? Where’s that coming from? And so then I asked myself how many other people would have succeeded, but for lack of how large their fuel tank was to get through all of this. That’s why I can say that the numbers can still be improved. And it’s not simply that we have a field that is free from sexism or racism. I won’t say that. I will say there’s room for improvement, but we’ve come farther than others. That’s all.

Debbie Millman:

Race and color are just two of the topics that you explore in Starry Messenger.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

In one chapter.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. But there are ways in which you bring it up in other chapters that aren’t as specific. But you’ve said that the inspiration for the book came from a lifetime of observing how scientists view the world differently from everyone else. But suggest that you don’t have to be a scientist to be science literate. And I’m wondering if you can talk about what it means to be science literate.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

It sounds like you actually read the book.

Debbie Millman:

I did. I loved it. I loved it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

I don’t ever require that interviewers read the book, but thank you for digging into these subtle, and for me, important points. So the book is what the world looks like if you’re scientifically literate. And as you correctly recounted, you don’t have to be a scientist to be scientifically literate. Science literacy is about how do you receive information and then act on it. And what is your preparation in advance of having received that information. So for just as an example, as best as I can judge, our brains are not wired for thinking statistically about the world. Or probabilistically. And so we make all manner of decisions that we think are rational and sensible, but are simply not when analyzed with simple basic statistics that could be taught in middle school but is not. And so here’s someone maybe at the casino betting on the number seven in a roulette table, and they keep betting on it.

I say, “Why do you keep betting on seven?” “Well, it’s due!” I said, “What do you mean due?” “Well, look at the list of numbers, because they’ll show you the previous rolls, the last 10 rolls. It’s due!” And then I can tell them, “No, it’s not. It’s not due. Every roll has exactly the same probability of hitting on a seven as every other role.” And they will not believe it because they feel like it’s not true. Do I need a PhD in astrophysics to know the statistics of that? No. Once again, you can learn that in middle school. And so that’s why I say the world looks different when you are scientifically literate. And this statistics and probability, by the way, I think, like I said, because I don’t think our brain is wired to think natively that way, you have to be constantly taught it and all the nuances of it.

I was in school for 20 years, K through 12, and then four years of college and then six years of graduate school, 22 years. Oh my gosh. I would say for some part of half of all those years I was learning some new aspect of probability and statistics. So that now I feel the probability rather than feeling the emotion of my desired outcome. And so that helps me immediately go there. But like I said, you can learn it at a much earlier stage. But my people, the American Physical Society, was once invited to stay at the MGM Grand or it was the MGM Marina at the time, in Las Vegas because there was a hotel snafu in San Diego and they couldn’t hold the conference in San Diego, the annual conference, 4,000 physicists. So they say, fine. Thank you, MGM. So they all go to Vegas and a week later there’s a headline.

Debbie Millman:

I love this story.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Physicists in town, lowest casino take ever. And it’s not like they were playing this machines and outwitted them. No, you’re knocking out with a casino by design, because casinos were invented to exploit this weakness of our thinking. That’s a very clear and clean and present example. But the book is full of examples such as that. And you noted it was different from my other books because this was long in the making. I remembered when I was 14, it was a new comet that had been discovered in the sky, Comet Kohoutek. And there’s high anticipation for it because it was discovered very far away from the sun. That meant it should get brighter and brighter and brighter as it got closer. It didn’t live up to that expectations. But regardless, we had discovered it with our telescopes.

It was headline news. And what am I in eighth grade, barely ninth grade? And I go out in the street and there’s a full grown adult holding a placard saying the comet is coming, the end of the world is near. And I’m thinking, no, it’s not. And you’re a grownup. You’re a full grown man, and I’m a kid. And you’re thinking this way. Oh my gosh. And that was my window to the fact that there are people, maybe not in his case, but there might be other grownups who are in charge of things. Who control resources, and money, and opportunities, and laws in legislation that could be susceptible to thinking in ways that are not informed by science literacy. So this book, is it a celebration or is it a lament? Maybe it’s both of the things in society that we fall victim to because we’ve either never knew or lost the capacity to think rationally about it.

Debbie Millman:

You write in detail about the notion of truth in Starry Messenger. And in a day and age wherein fake news is part of our daily vernacular, you provided definition of scientific truths that I’d like to share for our listeners. And you state this. Objective truths of science aren’t founded in belief systems. Objective truth is applied to all people, places and things as well as all animals, vegetables and minerals. Some of these truths apply across all of space and time. They are true even when you don’t believe in them. They’re not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion, nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truth, this is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled. Neil, do you worry about how successful the scientifically illiterate are at communicating their belief systems?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah, so what you just asked me, I could take as an insult as though you said, “Neil, you’re failing at your job.”

But I won’t take it as an insult. I will take it with a positive outlook and say, with all of my efforts and the efforts of many others on the landscape, it may be, without all of us, it would’ve been much worse. Okay? So that’s my positive spin on what we all see going on in this world. It might have been worse. So I think like the song To Dream the Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha. It’s based on, of course, Don Quixote, the phrase tilting at windmills may actually come from that story where he’s a knight and he is got this jousting stick and he wants to fight a windmill. And that’s a weird concept. But no, you’re not going to win against a windmill. That’s not going to happen. But why does he do it? And so that song, if you read the lines of that song, the they’re very beautiful, they’re poetic and they’re inspirational.

Just because there’s an immovable object doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to move it. And there’s another line, I want to march into hell with a heavenly cause. There’s these beautiful phrases in there that celebrate the fight. How impossible was the fight for Martin Luther King in the 1960s, with water cannons and police, nightsticks and attack dogs when they’re protesting? By the way, last I checked, peaceful protest is in the First Amendment. Not the Tenth Amendment or the Twelfth or the Twentieth or the Fifth. No, the First Amendment, the right to peaceably protest. That’s why they were all holding the American flags with them.

And the American flag wasn’t held upside down, which would be a international distress call. It was, no, we know what the founding principles are of this country and we want to push that back on you. They at the time, surely felt like an immovable object and irresistible force, yet they kept fighting. And so yes, I have all of these thoughts and principles within me to continue this because without it, there is no civilization. There’s no society as we know it. We might as well all just move back into the cave and pretend like whatever we want to be true is what will become true. Yeah, I’ve seen that in our history books and I don’t want to relive that.

Debbie Millman:

One of the topics you returned to several times in the book is the notion of how humans might appear to space aliens who arrive on Earth with no preconceived notions of who we are and what we are or how we should be.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Love me some space aliens. Yep.

Debbie Millman:

And as somebody who’s endlessly fascinated by the possibilities of intelligent life in the universe outside of us, if we consider ourselves or if we would even be considered intelligent, what motivated the perspective to look at who we are from a completely objective perspective?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Well, there are many forces operating on that. The alien is the clear and present one, typically other than the film ET by Steven Spielberg, we imagine aliens as evil conquerors. And of course that’s not based on any actual data on the behavior of aliens. However, when you pause and think about it, these are beings with higher technology than us, encountering us and they want to enslave us, kill us, harrow us, whatever. So if you pause and think about that line of storytelling, then you realize it’s what we suppose the aliens would behave, but it’s really based on how we know we have behaved with one another. The history of colonization, the history of conquering, the history of all of this, is the retold story of one culture civilization with higher technology exploiting another culture or civilization that has lesser technology than they do. And in some cases completely slaughtering them. The greater the imbalance, the greater the injustice that has been lobbed upon our own species by ourselves.

But getting back to your question, there was a recurring character in the 1990s in Saturday Night Live, I think it was played by Phil Hartman. And it was called Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. And I was like, “What?” So it was some caveman who the glacier retreated and he comes out, and he came from 30,000 years ago. But they teach him English and he gets a law degree and he’s in the courtroom and he wins every case. How does he win every case? Because somebody says, “Oh, the person called me up and they said they were going to do bad things and he did the thing, but he didn’t.” And whatever is the case, it doesn’t matter. He’ll come in and say, “I see your devices and your gadgets, and they mystify me. And I don’t know that they might have forces on us that we don’t really understand because I don’t understand them. And so maybe my client is not guilty because he was a victim of these mysterious [inaudible 00:25:53].” And I thought to myself, this is an alien view. The aliens will come and say, “What are you doing? Why? What? How? What?”

So the value of a complete stranger to your culture can reveal so many things about you. And by the way, it’s also a trope. It’s a storytelling trope in film. It’s the fish out of water trope. So the film Crocodile Dundee, you get this guy from the Outback coming to New York City. And you just watch that play out. And it reveals to you things about urban living that you might not have noticed for having been born within it. So yeah, practically every chapter an alien comes along and I bring the alien along and wonder what the alien will think.

Debbie Millman:

Well, it becomes this impartial observer revealing our inconsistencies and some of our hypocrisies and some of our idiocies. And you asked this question in Starry Messenger on a landscape of endless political strife, if a peace-loving space alien landed on Earth and walked up to you and requested, “Take me to your leader.” would you escort it to the White House or to the National Academy of Sciences? And I love that question. And when I read it, I thought of something that Michio Kaku is famous for saying. He states imagine walking down a country road and meeting an anthill. Do we go down to the ants and say, “I bring you trinkets, I bring you beads. I give you nuclear energy and biotechnology. Take me to your leader.” Or do we have the urge to step on a few of them? And I’m wondering if a space alien came to visit us here on Earth, would they just think we were a bunch of ants?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah. Well, it depends on how much smarter than us they were. It wouldn’t take much for smarts to land there. And I can give a very clear and clean example. The closest species to humans is of course the chimp.

Debbie Millman:

Chimpanzee.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah, it’s got 99%, something like that, identical DNA. Yet what’s the smartest thing a chimp does? It can stack boxes and reach a banana suspended from the ceiling perhaps. Or we can teach it some rudimentary sign language. Yet we have philosophy and culture and the arts and the James Webb telescope. And so typically religious people might say, “Well, what a difference that 1% makes. We’re special on this.” But that’s very close-minded, that’s very ego driven because why not ask the next obvious question, what would we look like to a species that was 1% beyond us on this intelligence vector that we’ve set up for this example. If the smartest chimp can do what our toddlers can do, then the smartest human would do what their toddlers can do.

And I joke about this. I say they’ll bring Stephen Hawking forward and say, “This is the smartest human we could find because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head, like little alien Mary over here and Timmy, just come from preschool. Oh, you just derived the principles of calculus. That’s so cute.” And they put it with a magnet on their refrigerator door. That would be 1% different. Imagine 5%. 10%. The audacity of us to say, “Let’s find other intelligent lifeforms like us.” Oh my gosh. That is not invoking a cosmic perspective on what is possible. Consider that we define, just one other little fact here, I think this point was first made by Carl Sagan.

We measure the intelligence of other animals by their capacity to communicate with our tools, like the chimp using sign language, but we don’t measure our intelligence by our capacity to communicate with them. Because clearly they’re communicating. The ants on an anthill know what they’re doing. And so to get a bigger hill, you get the termites, the termite mounds. They know what they’re doing, they’re communicating. And it reminds me, was it a New Yorker comic? Must have been two dolphins are swimming together. And one says to the other, referencing the dolphin trainer on the deck, “Those trainers, they face each other and make noises, but it’s not clear they’re actually communicating with each other.”

Debbie Millman:

Yep. We are unable to communicate with other species, and yet we wonder or try to consider how we would communicate with aliens that came to visit us.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah. So the proper way to say that is we cannot meaningfully communicate with other species that even has very close DNA to us. So what confidence do we have that a smarter species will be able to communicate with us?

Debbie Millman:

Especially if they’re not DNA based?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Well, yeah. It may be that their simplest thoughts transcend the most brilliant humans who have ever lived. Just sleep on that for a bit.

Debbie Millman:

Neil, in your chapter on gender and identity, you write that skin pigments arose as a marvelously adaptive feature of human evolution that can in fact be achieved through several different genomic pathways. And yet people persist in willfully sorting our species into just a handful of colors and assign hierarchies to those colors. Yet when we think about color from a scientific perspective, there are no sharp boundaries in color. Can you talk about why our color categories as we create these hierarchies are actually lazy? That’s the word you use, lazy.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah. I don’t mind people sorting people. I don’t have no problems with that. But as you noted, if you sort people and then rank them, and usually the person doing the sorting, if they rank you whatever category there, and they put themselves at the top. That’s a very typical behavior of ego-driven sorters. So in the chapter’s gender and identity and color and race, I invest a fair number of paragraphs. I’m trying to get people to realize how lazy it is to categorize something that in fact exists on a spectrum. Taking the literal spectrum as an example, we say, oh, how many colors are in the spectrum? Well, there’s seven. Well, we say seven because Newton, there’s really six obvious colors. Newton threw in a seventh one. Had a mystical fascination with the number seven. That’s where we get indigo in the spectrum.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Get rid of indigo. All right, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Clean, I get that. But do you realize these are not discreet colors on the spectrum. There’s an unlimited variation as you go from red to violet. Unlimited. But what we do is we say, well, all right, let’s call it seven colors. Well, any interior designer knows there’s way more than seven colors out there. It’s not just how many colors there are. There are different shades of colors. There’s more than 100 shades of white, listed in the Benjamin Moore catalog, more than 50 shades of black. And what I mean by that, these are colors, shades, where the word black or the word white is in the name. And then there’s an adjective in front of it. And so autumn white or-

Debbie Millman:

Pearly.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Exactly. Cold black or whatever. So wait a minute, okay, interior designers, they’re still classifying. But the more categories you have, the closer you are to a continuum. You’re more prepared to admit that colors are on a continuum. And what happens if a crime is committed and the police officer asks you, “Can you describe the perpetrator?” After you give the height and what they’re wearing and maybe their weight, they say, “Were they Black or White or Brown or Asian?” Four categories. Four. Four. And so you must say, “Oh, there’s a Black person who did it.” And that means every person who’s been bend into the category of Black now gets looked at by the police, which may account for why the dozen times I’ve been stopped by the police minding my own business because someone said a Black person did something to them.

Now I don’t know it. Let’s say it was true that a “Black” person with a darker skinned than I am, and lighter skinned, this nuance is lost. So the example I give in the book is I know we have the ability to give more nuance than this. Want evidence for it? Not only Benjamin Moore’s catalog of paints, but something you’ve encountered weekly. Go into any pharmacy, go to the hair color aisle. There’s an entire aisle of women’s hair color. There’s 20 shades of blonde with different models on the cover modeling the hair color. So why is it that we have more precision in our labeling of hair color than we do in our ability to identify a perpetrator? There’s something wrong there. So for me, this would call for the police should come around with these charts that has maybe 50, 100 maybe too much. 50.

You say point to the shade of color that comes closest to the person’s skin if you’re trying to get an eyewitness account. Don’t just say Black or White. No. All right. And by White people, there are people who are more ruddy in their colors if they have some Irish influence or whatever. So pick that out. And that would help, I think. I would be picked up many fewer times by the police. All right? Because my skin color would not precisely match whatever the person saw. Plus eyewitness testimony is itself a problem that’s in the law and order chapter. Is [inaudible 00:36:33] law and order? Is that what I called it?

Debbie Millman:

Yes. You called it law and order.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Law and disorder. Eyewitness testimony is so revered in the court of law. I need a witness. And in science, nobody says that. Because a witness means the actual objective truth filtered through your brain. And anytime that happens, that’s bad. And we knew that since second grade. No, we knew that since kindergarten when we all played telephone. And you just watch information go through your brain. And it’s not because it messed up because they were kids. It messed up because our human brain was involved. And what happened with adults as well.

Debbie Millman:

One thing that I think is so interesting, going back to the notion of hair coloring as opposed to hair color, is you make the point that if an alien came to this planet and saw how much we all do to change the way we look, they would think we are a planet of a species that loathe themselves.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah. I don’t think we think enough about people with straight hair might make it curly, people with light hair will make it darker people. People with dark hair make it lighter. People with facial hair will remove it. People with their bodies are a little male, thin and wimpy, they’ll go to the gym to boost it. How many breast augmentation surgeries there are per year in the United States?

Debbie Millman:

In the hundreds of thousands.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

It’s hundreds of per year. And by the way, a lot of that is not just simply to change our view. A lot of that is to reinforce a gender that would otherwise be less… The binarity of gender is stoked and enhanced by the beauty industrial complex.

So if you have hair growing between your eyebrows, and you’re female and you want to reinforce that you’re a female, you’re going to remove that hair. You’re going to remove the hair above your lip. You’re going to grow your hair longer because that’s what girls are supposed to do. You’re going to enhance your breast, if not by surgery, then by broad design. And we know there’s a whole industry of broad designs just to do that. If you’re not tall enough, you’re going to wear heels. And the man, like I said, if they’re thin, they’ll get muscles. And you just go to the gym, get a gym membership, you’ll get muscles. All of this? You know what that does? It cloaks, the holding aside that we are hopelessly unsatisfied with our natural appearance. What it also does is cloak the full spectrum from being pure female to being pure male about how people naturally look.

And beyond that, how people want to look. Okay, so if today I feel female, and I’ll dawn some clothes that the beauty industrial complex says is more typically female. And I just feel that, do that. Okay. Or if you’re female and you wear some “male clothes” or you don’t shave above your lip or whatever, people say, “Whoa, what about the chromosomes?” Sure, you can look biologically at chromosomes, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the free expression of who you are to yourself. And somewhere I read, somewhere I read was it, that in the United States, we have the pursuit of happiness. I think that was a quote somewhere, yeah. The pursuit of happiness. And seems to me that ought include what I feel like dressing today. And for you to say I can’t or pass a law that prevents it to me is a violation of the founding principles of this country.

It’s none of your business if I want to wear dress or pants. It isn’t. And so the problem is, the more you realize that not only do people have the urge, it’s not everyone but enough of us to express ourselves on a gender spectrum. Those who don’t express themselves on a gender spectrum are otherwise reinforcing a gender that isn’t natively there in your body’s expression, that the binarity of it all, is hiding a deep reality within civilization. This is a point I make in the gender and identity chapter. And the science I’m bringing to it is in my field, we invest huge energy trying to understand all the things that vary on an entire spectrum. There’s not just big stars, small stars, there’s a whole range of stars.

There’s not just hot stars, cold stars, there’s a whole range of temperature. There’s not just near stars or far stars, there’s a whole range of differences. We have entire vocabulary birthed and developed to communicate about the variation of objects on a spectrum. And human beings on this earth have rejected, resisted or are blind to the actual variation that exists within us as a species. And when you have power over laws of legislation that then prevent it, I need a stronger word than mean-spirited. It is a violation of what we would hope and expect would prevail in a country that declares itself to be an exemplar of freedom.

Debbie Millman:

What would the aliens say?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Ah, what would the aliens say? Yeah. So aliens, they come up to Earth and they’re looking in the tourist catalog. I’ve heard about Earth, got water and continents and let’s take a look. And they go down and visit and this Earth with oceans and land and clouds as nature, as the universe would see us. And then they go look in our classrooms, and there are these color coded globes, and they realize what? “These humans have divided up the land masses? And now you need papers to cross the land mass. Or they’ll fight wars if you’re born on one side of a… By the way, they’re all human.” “All right? And well, look. They have different skin color.” “Skin color? What you’re really distinguishing that? But no, you’re all humans.”

Debbie Millman:

They all look the same. By the way, oak trees would say all humans are identical to each other. They would not notice your hair or your skin. We all have just this big bulbous thing coming out between our shoulders. Two limbs, two legs. When you look at a robin flying, are you saying, oh, this one is slightly different because ornithologists know they’re variations within species, but we know it’s just a robin. When you see a snake, do you know if it’s male or female? No. From a distance or up close? No. The snakes know. All right. They know completely. And snake experts will know, but you typically don’t. In the same way, the alien wouldn’t know any of these things that we’ve used to divide us. And they see us fighting wars, killing one another. They would rush back home and declare there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Absolutely. Over an unprovable idea about how we were created. It’s insane to think about it in that way.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

I know that we have just a couple of minutes left. Yesterday, granter reported that a group of astronomers pouring over data from the James Webb Space Telescope may have glimpsed light from ionized helium in a distant galaxy, which would indicate the presence of the universe’s very first generation of stars looking all the way back in time.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yeah. So first, that is an amazing fact. However, the telescope was designed for exactly that purpose. And ionized helium would mean there’s high energy light. When you ionize an atom, the energy to do that, it has to be high enough to make that happen. And if you ionize helium very early, it means somebody is giving you light to do that. And this would be the end of what we call the dark ages in the universe where the universe had the matter, but the matter hadn’t coalesced to make stars yet. And so we playfully call that the dark ages because it was the literal dark ages. So yeah, I expect discoveries to continue coming from our James Webb space telescope. It’s a remarkable feat of engineering and science.

Debbie Millman:

I want to close our interview today with a quote from Starry Messenger. And I know a lot of what we’ve talked about today point out some of the hypocrisies of the human species. But there’s many things that are quite wonderful. And you state this, the total number of people who have ever been born is about 100 billion. Yet the genetic code that generates viable versions of us is capable of at least 10 to the 30 variations. That astronomically huge number is a one followed by 30 zeros providing a million trillion trillion possible souls. So far, our branch of the tree of life has produced no more than 0.0000000000000001% at 16 zeros of all possible humans forcing the conclusion that most people who could ever exist will never even be conceived. So that means that each of us, for all practical purposes, is unique in the universe now and forever. It’s one of the most magical thoughts I think I’ve ever been encountered.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Yo, thank you for noticing that. And it also means you’re the lucky one to even be alive.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. We all are. And now in this moment in time when we can actually have data from the James Webb Space Telescope that can reveal that early light, how remarkable for all of us.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

And Richard Dawkins is also famous for saying, we’re lucky because we get to die. And I said, “What? What do you mean by that?” Well, following that same reasoning, most people won’t get to die because most people will never even exist. Most people who could exist will never exist. And so for that reason, I think to myself, you won the lottery. And why not use this occasion to make the world better today than it was yesterday? And to bring joy to the world. Life is precious. The very fact of being alive.

And all that’s in the chapter Life and Death. And I end that chapter with a quote from Horace Mann, which I want on my tombstone basically. My sister knows this in case no one else has it. It’s, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Excuse me. He gave that as part of his speech and it’s for early 1800s. So it has a little more flourish in it. So let me give the full quote because he is giving us a graduation speech. He was an academic educator and it was just one of his final speeches. He’s said, I beseech you. That’s a word I think we should bring back, beseech.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, that’s a good one.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Not enough of it today. “I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts, these, my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

Debbie Millman:

Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Delighted. Thanks for having me.

Debbie Millman:

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s latest book is Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. You can read more about all things Neil up on his website, neildegrassetyson.com and see all his work up close and personal at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I beseech you to do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

In the world of design, advertising, and photography, Peter Arnell is a pioneer. His work with high profile clients, including Donna Karen, Samsung, Home Depot, and PepsiCo, have put him at the center of some of the most successful and sometimes controversial campaigns of recent decades. His energy is legendary, and it spills over into collaborations with artists, architects, and performers, including Frank Gehry, David Hockney, Michael Jackson, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Tina Turner. A new two volume monograph brings together the extraordinary diversity of his work. It’s called Peter Arnell: Projects 1980-2020, and we’re going to talk all about the book and his storied career today. Peter Arnell, welcome to Design Matters.

Peter Arnell:

Oh, thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Peter, you’ve written about how the earliest memory you have is still painfully clear, and you’ve described it as, “A snippet of a lost and forgotten eight millimeter film jerking all over the screen in front of an old Super 8 projector.” Can you share a little bit more about the memory and how it has impacted you since?

Peter Arnell:

I think that memory, which I think affected my work and my life, was seeing the riderless horse at the Kennedy funeral. And I didn’t know a lot of things that I know now years later, about the boots of a soldier in backwards, and what a riderless horse was, et cetera, et cetera. But what was fascinating was just during the news reels, it was quite amazing to see tens of thousands of people in crowds everywhere staring at this horse without any rider on it. And it must have affected me dramatically because I think I spent the rest of my life looking for what’s not there.

And I think when you are in the creative business, it depends on what era and what decade we’re talking about, but I think in the early days, I was always trying to do things differently by staring not at what’s there, hence the competition, but looking at new ideas or points of differentiation by seeing what’s not there. And it also, of course, creates a tremendous amount of curiosity. So when you start to look at both the process of developing an idea, as well as actually expressing an idea, a way to articulate in a very simple fashion the right question to the audience, the way you do it is by, I think, removing the very obvious, or the very expected that the customer, or the viewer, would expect in a piece of communication, and add a billboard, et cetera.

And I think that that impact of that riderless horse probably stuck in my memory somewhere, what are all these people looking at? What are they staring at? What is this celebration or sadness all about? And so as I went on in my career, I think we’ve been known here for launching campaigns and products and services without ever even showing the product in them, because we believe strongly that if you could create a conversation that touches people’s feelings or emotions, they will go much farther and deeper to a potential customer who, in the end, we are really asking to join our brand, not really buy the brand. That kind of long-term thinking, I believe, and that approach came from those early visuals of that funeral of Jack Kennedy.

Debbie Millman:

Your parents split up when you were very young. From what I understand, your father disappeared. Your mom wasn’t able to raise both you and your sister, and you went to live with your maternal grandparents. What is your relationship with your parents like now?

Peter Arnell:

Well, unfortunately it’s been quite a while since we put Nathan and Ada to rest. But I think the dramatic effects of all of these breaks or cracks in one’s life, I do think affect ultimately how you operate or think in life. I don’t know how they affect the psyche, I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’m sure all those things had tremendous effects on the way I operate, the idea of collecting how I try to keep everything, maybe the fear of loss, I’m sure they’re connected up somewhere.

Debbie Millman:

You collect quite a few different things, these are just a few things that I’ve read about, dried leaves and twigs from a memorable autumn trip, bottle openers from places you love, matchbooks, paper napkins, photos, postcards, and all sorts of mementos that help you remember a place, a time, and a feeling. And you’ve said that your purpose for collecting is for saving your life, literally and figuratively. And Peter, has somebody that has also over the years done quite a lot of collecting, including repurchasing my childhood library and all the toys I played with, I really fully understand the desire to do that. What was the first thing you started to collect?

Peter Arnell:

At 65 years old, I’m not exactly sure of what the first thing was, but I think it was matchbox cars. I still have a couple of them, I have a BP, British Petroleum, lime green and blue tow truck from that, and I have a British Leyland, a white ambulance. But the collecting I do helps me in building a library of thoughts and ideas that touch me at some point that I believe are applicable at some point later in my life, and that’s really what I do, all the things that I collect have a direct relationship to some event or some experience that I had in my life, as you mentioned. But it’s quite random, and it tends to be a lot of objects that relate to my journey.

I have these bags that are called, they’re in files called PPT, people, places, and things, and I bag and tag everything. I mean, if I showed you my desk right now, to your point, I just picked up a incredible collection of new leaves on my trip to Paris a couple weeks ago. And I don’t stop there, many times, I then work on displaying them and figuring out how they can actually be presented so that they can be shared with friends and family. So the house is filled with thousands and thousands of very odd things from all over the world.

I think that when I was an adult, I think probably in my early 20s, I started to study Eames, and I was fascinated, I was, by the incredible collections that they had, and how-

Debbie Millman:

You’re talking about Charles and Ray Eames, right?

Peter Arnell:

Yes, yes, and how they affected their designs. They were living with childhood memories and books and scrap art, and things they collected from all over the world, and masks, and it goes on and on and on. So I guess in a way that legitimized what I was doing. It does get quite complicated because then you have to find space for all of it, and space in New York City is not so available, so you have to find systems. I have a big storage facility out in Long Island, way out in Smithtown, that’s around 9,000 square feet, where everything from as far as I started collecting lives there. And it’s not just objects, it’s also how many magazines of how many ads that I ran an ad in, or it’s a swatch of some material that we developed, or it’s a prototype and a model, it’s everything and anything, I don’t throw anything away. In fact, we have no garbage cans in my office.

Debbie Millman:

Really?

Peter Arnell:

Yeah, we have one in the kitchen, which is, of course, needed, but I don’t know where that came from, it certainly makes things a bit complicated at times for everybody in the studio. But I just think that everything has beauty. Everything in life has beauty, if you seek it you’ll find it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a crumbled piece of paper, and those days that I worked with Frank Gehry, watching him create the most extraordinary architecture from simple ideas or notions of building things on his desk, to broken things to artifacts, they all have value and they all have beauty, and there will be a time in everyone’s life where those things can and should be applied. So by keeping all of that, and keeping it well and preserving it and cataloging the fashion that you can access it, I found that to be a very calming situation for myself.

Debbie Millman:

Your grandparents lived between Brighton Beach and Coney Island on Shore Boulevard at the end of Sheepshead Bay. You’re a native New Yorker, I am too. We’re also in the same exact generation, you’re just a year or so older than I am, so I remember how all of those wonderful neighborhoods felt back then. At the time, I read that you thought of yourself as a New York street rat. Why?

Peter Arnell:

Well, maybe I need to explain first what a New York street rat was for me.

Debbie Millman:

Okay, because I know what they’re like.

Peter Arnell:

I come from very humble beginnings. My grandfather was a fishmonger in the Fulton Fish Market. If we wanted to do something, if we needed money, we had to find a job. I folded newspapers at Shelley’s Luncheonette on the corner of Neptune and Shaw Boulevard, I pumped gas at the Mobile station, I worked at Juniors cleaning dishes in lower Brooklyn. You had to hustle all the time in order to keep things going, or keep up with things that maybe, at that time although small, were dreams.

I think the streets also, in the late 50s, early 60s, were a place of community, in neighborhoods like Sheepsheads Bay, and especially around that area, by Manhattan Beach and Brighton Beach, there was a great sense of community, and people lived, weather permitting, on their stoops and in front of their homes, and that was the gathering place. People followed and watched people’s patterns, and when they came and when they went, and the policeman was on the horse and the horse was parked by the little building that was there on the island, temple-like building where the police officers used to sit watching the neighborhood. People entertained themselves by going to schoolyards and playing basketball and stick ball.

So when I say street rat, I refer to myself as someone who got savvy quickly, learned a lot about life and experienced things on the street. The home apartment, 3D, was a little tiny apartment. It looked bigger then than it really was in my mind as a child, but it was a small apartment, and the bed was right by the kitchen in the little pantry area. So being out with friends and by the bay, and the activity and the community and the Mister Softee, and all this stuff that was going on back then, it got me really comfortable with the streets in the sense of that’s where one would learn, one would grow, one would have experiences. So I refer to myself as a street rat just because most of my knowledge and experience on how to approach things, or how to move things through a timeline, come from those days on the street, watching, observing how things moved and how people were, et cetera.

Debbie Millman:

You mentioned your grandfather being a fishmonger. He was a Jewish immigrant from Russia, and he became a fresh water fishmonger in the Fulton Fish Market, and I understand you often accompanied him to his work, helping him pack trays of fish with ice. You’ve written something really beautiful about the experience and I wanted to share it with our listeners. You state, “We woke up before midnight to pile into my grandfather’s cream and butterscotch colored Buick Skylark for the ride to the Fulton Fish Market at the South Street Seaport. It was a thrill at that age, heading toward the gleaming skyline of Manhattan, though the ride often lulled me back to sleep before we rolled over the Brooklyn Bridge.

“We pulled off at the first exit in Manhattan and parked in grandpa’s regular spot under the bridge. My grandfather would yank open the driver’s side door of the Buick, that always woke me up. A boy of 14 or 15 or 16, still half asleep, I looked up at the Wall Street skyline, and at the span of the bridge stretching back towards Brooklyn, murky and mysterious and majestic, shrouded in mist. It was the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen, and it’s burned, engraved, into my imagination.” And you went on to write that the bridge like was a gateway to a fantasy land, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how the bridge became that gateway to the fantasy land. What kind of fantasy land?

Peter Arnell:

If you lived in the outer boroughs, making a trip to Manhattan was like going into the big city. I mean, everything scale-wise seemed extraordinary. To this date every time I cross the Brooklyn Bridge I get a rush. I think that Roebling had an extraordinary vision. When you cross a body of water, the act itself on a bridge, especially back then, I believe was quite violent, because the East River, as it opens up the Atlantic Ocean, et cetera, it’s just this very calm, beautiful, elegant stream that is incredibly turbulent, but at the same time, from a visual point of view, quite beautiful and harmonic. And then you see this massive piece of architecture in a funny way divided, and it’s the most bizarre set of architectural elements of Gothic, it’s Renaissance, and he’s got everything going on there, along with modern technology to span this river.

And I think I understand it all, and I felt it all from an early age. And so I think it became this arrival into the big world, into adult world every time I crossed it, and this lingering to really be on the other side from Brooklyn, which some people might not call the suburbs, but they were back then, into the big city. And Lower Manhattan, with all Wall Street, and the movement, and the energy down at the fish market, and the boats and the harbor, it was breathtaking. It did offer me, in the end, an incredible contribution to my entire career.

My grandfather parked his car a bit away from the fish market, because the people who really couldn’t afford parked under the bridge. And of course the reason why people didn’t like to park their car there was there was pigeons and they did nasty things on your car all day, so if you parked your car under the areas where the pigeons were, the car was ugly and smelly by the time you went to pick it up. But that’s where he parked it, and he parked it very close to the, it must have been about 10 degrees off of the angle of the bridge, and that view, which I’ve seen so many times in so many different lighting conditions and weather conditions, it still remains to me one of the most beautiful images of discovery, of design, power, presence, of anything in the city.

And I remember one night I had the good fortune of meeting Donna Karen and her, at the time, head of marketing, and there were just two employees, I think, at the time. She had just began, it was days into her new career after leaving Anne Klein. And she went on and on and on about New York and all the things that I loved. I got along with her very well. It was late in the afternoon, and I thought to myself, my God, she’s talking about designing clothes for people who live in that place of which I understand and know very well, and the way she described it, and the way she described her dream and her ambitions, kept on leading my mind back to that spot with grandpa in the Skylark, looking up at the bridge.

So that night with a little Ricoh Instamatic camera, when the moon’s up high, 400 black and white Tri-X film, with the light bouncing on the river, it picks up the light quite beautifully. And I wanted so badly, I was being offered an opportunity to pitch for her business. And Kalman, I believe, is the other from M & Company.

Debbie Millman:

Tibor.

Peter Arnell:

Yeah, Tibor, who is one of the most brilliant people we know in our industry, God rest his soul. And it was him and I pitching, and I guess it was a very anxious Peter that night. And I went out, I went back to there. I also have been known to go there, there are benches there now, and speak to grandpa. Still to this day. But I went out, I shot a picture of the bridge at night, in black and white, in a period in the early 80s where color and fashion and red lips and big hats, and all this vivid stuff, imagine the antithesis of that was a photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge at about 10:30 at night, and I just was convinced that she would get it. I was convinced that she would understand that I knew how to launch her company. And I ran to Ja Brunell, he was a man who made Veloxes. I don’t know if you remember back when he did these Veloxes.

Debbie Millman:

Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah.

Peter Arnell:

And with Optima type put New York under Donna Karen. She had been talking about, in the meeting, about Maud Frizon shoe boxes, and how they said Maud Frizon Paris. So I put all that together and I took this picture, and then I ran to her the next day. I showed it to her, and she started crying. She had the same emotional, incredible reaction to just this stupid black and white photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge, which I’m sure even that angle exists in postcards and tourist sites and everything forever. But it was the fact that we were displacing that to represent a hot new fashion company, of which the product wasn’t even designed yet, in a world that was all color, in black and white, no models, no clothing, and I guess in that conversation I just said, “This is it.” And she said, more importantly, “This is what I really believe is my image.”

And I’m not sure if I knew, or she knew, or anyone knew what we were up to at that point. I think we get too much credit for seeing and thinking things through with such depth, I think a bit of history and memory and informed intuition, and there’s a whole bunch of things operating, and then you’ve got to have the chutzpah to push it forward. So I went up there, God knows what she would’ve said, and then that began really my career in communications advertising. She gave me my first real chance.

I think that night, through Donna’s dream, and something that happened in the room between the two of us, the street rat was alive and well. The street rat was trying so hard to knock on the door of opportunity to say, I don’t know anything about fashion, and I know less about clothes and models and shootings and advertising, I don’t know that world. I was writing books at the time on architecture, and doing graphic design at Bergdorf Goodman for 300 little line ads to make money.

And at that point, it didn’t matter if I knew fashion, nor, in a way, did Donna care about that. It was just this other world we stepped in around ideas and thoughts, and if you always are holding on to the things that are so meaningful in your entire life, they will come back, not to haunt you, but to support you in a very, very powerful way. Especially in the arts and in communication arts, because the world turned into an entire visual economy with Instagram and social media, and everything, but back then, there was a process involved. There were croppers and layouts, and we’d have computers, and we had to use scissors, and all this other good stuff.

Debbie Millman:

Wax machines.

Peter Arnell:

Wax machines and T-square, everything. So the hand was involved, it was a craft, how you print a picture. So I think she felt that night that there was some connection, some bizarre connection between me and that bridge, my history, which I never talked about that night, nor with her for a long time. And being the grandson of an immigrant, and her being the granddaughter of an immigrant, it’s the whole thing. And her family growing up in the sewing, the garmento business, and mine, it’s all that stuff, and it began a journey of 40 years of extraordinary opportunity and luck to be invited into other people’s great work and collaborations, and so forth.

Debbie Millman:

You started working with Donna Karen in 1984. I graduated college in 1983. And I am a native New Yorker, I was born in Brooklyn as well, I lived in Queens, I lived on Staten Island, and I went to school in Albany. When I graduated I knew, the only thing I really knew for sure was that I wanted to live in Manhattan, and came and lived in a hovel, in a tenement building in Manhattan, and struggled to find my first jobs doing layout and paste-up in magazines, and was a magazine rat, for sure. My dream at the time was to work at Vanity Fair. But I have to tell you, I remember, I actually remember the first time I saw that Brooklyn Bridge ad, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you.

I was sitting at my desk at my little rinky-dink office, doing my little rinky-dink layouts with X-Acto blades and wax and whatnot, and I turned the page and there was this bridge, this almost hazy black and white Donna Karen New York, and I was hypnotized by it. I was hypnotized by it. And it became this aspirational little world I wanted to embody and live in. And went to Bergdorf Goodman, and it was so out of my reach, and so beautiful. That’s how powerful that ad was for me, for millions of women, especially the young working women of New York at the time that were really being seen as this generation of young women in the workforce for the first time.

You ultimately created an identity and a world for Donna Karen that created one of the most successful fashion brands of all time. You went on to create Donna Karen New York, which was another huge blockbuster success, and a career was ignited. What did you imagine when you were a kid that you wanted to do when you grew up? Because kids like us didn’t think about design, we didn’t even know about design.

Peter Arnell:

First of all, thank you for, it’s very beautiful what you said, and it touched me. People who purchased magazines back then, they just couldn’t wait until they come out, many couldn’t afford them. The September issue was always too big to carry, and it was the fights with the publishers about where you position that, and all this stuff, and what sections were good. And it’s so funny because of all the things I ever did in my life, that was the one project that I did where there was no cropping, there was no meetings about approvals, there was no discussions of where it’s going in the magazine. I think I was just so overwhelmed and proud that someone would actually print something that I had, in my own little way, contributed to this massive, incredible force called Donna Karen. She was, without exception, a leader of a generation, not just in fashion, but in spearheading the aspirations and drives for tens of thousands of women in university and Parsons and FIT, and she was really the guts of 7th Avenue for 20 years.

So when you speak about it, I have to say, I think I was acting much more as a documentarian that day than I was as an advertising person. I was acting as a New Yorker, respecting and demonstrating the values of our great city, but as it was slightly displaced over into fashion and into an ad, it exploded. And if you really think about what you’re saying, she started a business with, I want to say we had $14,000 budget that year, and she had less than a million dollars to start the whole business, so it was incredible, if you think about it, that such a powerful idea came to be known as a brand that then became this very highly regarded and very effective tool that’s taught in schools for those things that I did back then.

But they didn’t come along with a plan, they came along just with maybe, at the time, a fear that I would lose the opportunity to do something great and get an account. They came with relying on my childhood, and going back, not forward, to something that I really did believe was a gateway, and in the end it was, to my entire career. I mean, that bridge ends up becoming the reason why I go on for 40 years of getting all these chances to do interesting things. And I don’t believe that as a child I could have seen or put that together. I think that my father, my biological father, Alvin Arnell, did a book called Standard Graphical Symbols. It was when I was one year old, or something. But he designed what we now know as emojis for electrical, structural, and mechanical engineering, and he did a book, it was like a AIA standard graphical symbols for the engineering world.

So I have to say I did grow up with, there was something there in my genes or DNA, or in the environment or something, there was something there, even if it was for a short period of time. Of course later on I studied him. But I don’t think I ever had any thought about what I wanted to do when I was a child. And I would argue I don’t even know what I want to do today. At some point, I realized this incredible life of making and creating things permits me entree into so many worlds all over the globe of so many different industries and so many different challenges and solutions, whether they be Special Olympics, or whether they be Chrysler, wherever I work or have worked, that I’m able to roll my sleeves up and learn. And I think I ended up putting myself in a perpetual school. I’m always in school learning.

I’m not sure how much I know, but somehow I was able to aggregate friendships and associations, experiences, and they kept on building and building, and then at some point people believe in you, and they go from, “What do you do?” To, “I like what you do,” to, “I’d like you to do what you do for me.” If I had to do it all over again I would probably do some things over differently, because as you grow and expand at that young age, you just don’t have the capacity or experience or knowledge to know how to manage much of it. Now older, looking back 45 years, you see things so differently, you see things so differently.

Debbie Millman:

What are some of the bigger things you would’ve done differently?

Peter Arnell:

When you have nothing and you’re fighting, and you’re in a world, Madison Avenue, just nobody, it was a small little tiny company fighting against BBDO, and all these big giants, and my God, you just go. You just go, and you just are blind. Any opportunity was an opportunity, and you’re just banging down walls, and you’re ranting and raging, you’re just trying to get stuff done, and so on. And all of that, in the end, just a waste of time. One services one’s own growth and fuels it much better by looking in the mirror and reflecting on certain realities, and trying to understand and have gratitude for yourself before anything else, as a human being.

And I missed a lot of that stuff because I was going so fast, and building so fast. I mean, imagine 22 years old and you did that Donna Karen thing, and then years later, shortly thereafter, I was credited for coming up with DKNY, which was a massive shift in the fashion industry, because prior to DKNY, second lines were built as a cheaper fabrication of the first line, Anne Klein, Anne Klein 2, on and on. This idea of the other side of the same woman, that a woman who likes caviar also likes pizza, that women are spending a few thousand dollars for an outfit, could also enjoy putting on jeans and running barefoot, whatever. So that idea of extending the brand, and then taking Donna Karen New York, taking those letters out, it changed again. And I was young, and I was just on fire. We went on to work on second lines, and A line, and we were like B for beanpoles, it was almost like a comedy.

And then in the middle of it we were running to Paris, we were hired by Mr. Arno to work with Mr. Lacroix to start a couture house. And I was in Paris all of a sudden, and we were on fire. And when you’re on fire and when you’re growing and when you’re going that fast, you’re really blind to so much, especially when you’re young and don’t have experience, I think you tend to step over, or step around, things that are important in life as building blocks to character and knowledge, and so forth. So I would have gone through it differently by slowing down and enjoying more of it, less of a street rat and more of a well-mannered citizen of society, so to speak. And then we kept on growing. I mean, it didn’t stop, it went on forever. We were just lucky. And most people in our space, who was talking about brand in the early 80s?

Debbie Millman:

No one. Oh, well, if they were, they were accusing you of being a sellout and doing the devil’s work.

Peter Arnell:

Right, right.

Debbie Millman:

As I was accused. Do you think that if you knew what you know now about the speed in which you grew, the work that you would do well, the work that would be criticized, would you have done anything different, or do you feel that that has all led you to this moment? I once asked Seth Godin what he would tell his 30-year-old self, and he’s like, “Nothing, because if I did anything any different I wouldn’t be right here right now.”

Peter Arnell:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

He wasn’t talking about talking to me, he was talking about where he is in his life.

Peter Arnell:

Sure. I mean, there’s a certain, they always say 30% of my OCD triggers 70% of all else I do, you know what I mean? So if I wasn’t the same person, of course. But yeah, I was fearful of too many of the wrong things.

Debbie Millman:

Like what? Don’t go over that too quickly.

Peter Arnell:

I should have had more confidence in what I believed in in regard to my work than worrying about outside criticism or competition because the work. However, I was lucky enough to arrive at this ongoing month after month, year after year, successes around being associated with the early days of Nespresso capsule, and Listerine pocket packs, I mean, it goes on and on and on, The Gap with Mickey, Banana Republic, and the naming and launching of Allure for Mr. Wertheimer, Chanel.

Debbie Millman:

I mean, some of the greatest work of the latter half of the 20th century, without a doubt. Martha Stewart Everyday, Michael Jackson’s Invincible, Hanes Hosiery with Tina Turner, the list goes on and on and on.

Peter Arnell:

Yeah, so I think that I would’ve probably found more opportunity. I always think that the more time you have, and the more reflection you have, the better the work’s going to be, and I think the first thing is that I’m almost sure that almost, without exception, everything I’ve ever done could have been better. I see now many of the opportunities to have gone all the way, but I think there was a few there that I had reached a certain point that worked, so I was okay, and everyone was happy, and the client was content, et cetera. This idea of pushing yourself and working hard to just always try to seek the truth in a solution, there is an essence and a truth in every message and in every company’s culture that if you hold a mirror up correctly to, and you angle it to the audience, you will see there’s a spot there, a sweet spot.

Steven Spielberg said to me once that you really need to believe that sharks don’t have soundtracks, and that always stuck in my head about Jaws, that do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, I think without that soundtrack the shark wouldn’t have been very threatening. So I think there’s always this kind of expectation in the marketplace where people find the mix between familiar and the unexpected, the sweet spot, to be magical. And I think that, I wish almost 100%, that I would’ve spent more time in front of the camera, I would’ve tried to play with the leading on a piece of type for more hours, it goes on and on and on. So you only saw, and even if those things were whatever one would consider successful, were successful solutions for clients I had, I would think at the end the real hero in all that was the client who allowed those things to get to the marketplace, because many of them were so unbearably difficult to believe in or to follow.

There were many, many times where the art of the sale is as important as the art of the idea, which is as important as seeing the vision of what’s not there, and then putting all that together and solving a marketplace problem for a client, which then has to compete, and on and on and on, it’s very complex. And then when you put the billboard up, it doesn’t have your phone number, you can’t explain anything to anybody, it either works or it doesn’t work, in a split second, in a business where communication has to just get it, like Think Different, or Just Do It, just in a split second you get it, you have a community or you don’t. They do take time to build, but in the beginning if you entrench a brand in the right lane, right from the beginning, I think they are forever propositions, they don’t really need to change.

And so I think I could have done better many, many times, schedules, budgets, time, clients, relationships, all affect the result that ends up in the marketplace. It’s not just the idea. The other thing is that sometimes, I think as I got into my 40s, I don’t know if it was just psychological or age, but I felt like I was listening less and hearing myself more, and I think that tends to lead to problems, because you start out with Donna, who’s banging her chest about New York City, and then you do a picture, it’s so clean, simple, elegant. I came out of this background of editing and writing books on architecture, James Sterling, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Aldo Rossi, all these books that I wrote and edited and laid out, that’s how we started our career in the studio.

And so I’m very academic. The academic side of me uses up, many times, too much time, versus the intuitive creative side, the artist side. And then when they bang heads the academic side always wins because it knows too much. And so I would do a lot less of the academic and a lot more of, again, I would not be fearful of making sure all my boxes were checked off, and everything was so picture perfect in both presentation as well as execution, and more time on the values that I would’ve built in, or the ideas, how to mask them. And I was very much also at that time into the win versus the journey with a client.

Debbie Millman:

Oh yeah, yeah.

Peter Arnell:

It was the 80s, it was Wall Street, it was the pitch, and then I would lose interest after a certain period of time. So I did hold onto, and worked for years with Samsung and Donna, and I had very long relationships, but they were few, and most of what I do and did were assignment based. So if you design the Pepsi logo, you do it once, then you finish, and that’s it.

So a combination of living in that world of either fixing or finding identity or expression, communication, idea, solution, strategy, marketing, whatever, and the pace of it all, and the hungry Peter, who was always looking for the next, and the world changing dramatically from the East Coast, to Silicon Valley and technology, all this was going on for… I mean, think about my life, was 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, each decade is just filled with major shifts in societal, crazy bell curves of amazing introductions, innovations, and movements that I was a witness to. So I was wanting to move and always keep up, and always stay in shape, and practice exercising the brain. But you get in your own world at a certain point, you closed down, because that’s your mission, is to survive, grow, contribute, win, be the best, and you lose sight sometimes of, not sometimes, but many times of the other parts of life that are truly valuable and also feed that.

Balance was never my thing. Someone said to me, “How do you vacation?” I said, “I tried that once, it didn’t work for me,” and it really is the case. I usually go to bed around 11:00, 12:00, 1:00, and I usually get up about 3:30, and I’ve done that most of my life. I’m known for not sleeping, I like to do two days in one, I like to win, I think that’s important. I don’t drink, I don’t go to nightclubs or bars, or things like that. So I work, and I still think I’m the grandson of an immigrant scared to not be able to pay his bills. I think it’s the same person who is just there always if you follow, it just never changes

Debbie Millman:

Your life now, and the work that you’re doing now, is very different than the work and the life that you had in the early part of the 2000s. You sold your business to, I believe it was Draft, and then bought it back, and then sold it to Omnicom. I also sold my business to Omnicom, so I understand what that was like, and then left. You had a breakup with Omnicom. And this all was around the time you redesigned Pepsi and then Tropicana. What happened with Tropicana?

Peter Arnell:

This might end up becoming the most famous podcast ever in the history of marketing if I answer this, not only truthfully, but accurately.

Debbie Millman:

Well, if you change your mind and you want to take it out, we certainly can, but I’d love to-

Peter Arnell:

No, no, no.

Debbie Millman:

I should tell you, Peter, I should tell you, I don’t know if you know this, so full disclosure, I really should have told your people before, but I worked on the design that you redesigned that Tropicana went back to, so there’s this incredible symmetry to this right now. But I don’t do that kind of work anymore either.

Peter Arnell:

So I’m going to try to give you a very simple narrative. So the chairman at the time, the chairperson and the president were enamored by our studio and the work that I was doing, and we got a lot of work from Pepsi. In fact, we got every brand, Mountain Dew, and I think the only thing we didn’t do was SoBe. Gatorade, excuse me. And Indro was, at the time, super excited about design. That was her thing, she went out to speak to Steve Jobs, she had a meeting with him, and she was really on the right track for many reasons. Indro came to her office one day and showed me a champagne glass. She wanted everything modern and clean and cleaned up, and so forth. And I tell many people this, but can you imagine, how does a designer get accused of having authority to change all the factory lines throughout the entire world? It doesn’t go down that way, it really doesn’t.

Actually, the way it goes down is you’re given an assignment and direction on a brief, and you follow it. And if the client is tough on that brief, you follow it by just illustrating with your talent the values or the objectives that are in that brief, which is what we did. And if you don’t want to pay to change the factories in the line to get a pet product, see through plastic, because it costs too much money, it’s a big investment, tooling and this and that, then somebody raises their hand and says, “Just put the juice up there. Put it in a champagne glass, it’ll look rich and valuable.”

So that instruction came from the company, that is the truth. And then we went ahead and we did thousands of images and pictures and layouts of moving all that thing around, we moved that around a lot, and they loved it. Not only did they love it, but how does in a big corporation, something get registered and trademarked and printed, manufactured and distributed, because an art director, no. So we were an easy fall, the lesson I learned was you need to do what’s right, that idea that was presented was never right. The idea that was presented was to redesign the packaging, which we did, which came out with Trop50, there was a clear pitcher-like bottle that I designed that came out years later, the half the sugar Trop50 version of that.

Debbie Millman:

Which still isn’t on shelves.

Peter Arnell:

Yes, yes, yes. But it all exploded, and then there was an article in the Newsweek with Danny Lyons that was hysterical, accusing me as public enemy number one in the design world. It just went on and on and on. And then the New York Times had this editorial with a straw coming out of my head saying idiot. So they got, what I understand, six or eight letters, and the gentleman who was running the company in Chicago, who was appointed by the chairman of Pepsi, he wanted to do what he wanted to do, and he really probably believed that it was a mistake to change the packaging. So within weeks there’s a famous Stu Elliott article that comes out talking about the campaign, and it was all about squeeze and love, and all this beautiful black and white photography, and the whole thing. And then weeks, days, I don’t remember, a week and a half later there was an article that Pepsi’s pulling the whole thing.

It was probably not necessary in the end. However, I think the lesson I took away from it all, back to my point about believing in myself, and fear and all this, was I should have just raised my hand early on. Although you’re in these contracts with clients, you can’t say anything. But I just should have kept my mouth shut and just simply say, “Things happen, mistakes happen in life, and people make the wrong choices.” Instead I said something like, publicly, “They paid me a ton of money, if they don’t know what to do with the work, that’s their problem.” I don’t think that went over big.

Debbie Millman:

Yikes, yeah.

Peter Arnell:

But certainly I got a lot of notoriety for being the biggest asshole ever. But I said what was on my mind. So I think at the end, the reason why it might have never been a success is because the strategy behind it was, in a way, a facade, because when you don’t have a shelf stable product, the colors change during the season, which is very hard for the consumer, and is it good, not good, et cetera, and then you end up with a lot of confusion. So if I had thought about it, I probably would’ve raised my hand and said to the management of Pepsi, “I don’t think that’s a good idea and I’m not going to participate in it,” but the pay was good.

Debbie Millman:

Having spent most of my career in fast moving consumer goods, I know exactly how hard it is to push back with a client that’s on a deadline, and you have a lot of people to pay, and you have a lot of sure deadlines that you have. And it’s funny, Peter, because at the time, of course, I was very dismayed that the package that my company had worked on was going away, and when I saw the packaging and I read the strategy I was like, this is not a bad strategy. Rather than show an actual orange, why not show what’s in the orange, the actual juice? And I remember talking to Paula Scher about it, one of the partners at Pentagram, and she was like, “Don’t gloat, Debbie, because this is not good for design. Because if we give in to people that are trying to keep change from happening, what kind of innovation will ever be allowed?”

And it’s always stayed with me, she’s one of my dearest friends, and for her to say at the time, and she was right, she was absolutely right, because as we see now, there’s almost no brand identity that’s launched these days that isn’t on some level picked apart and accused of being genitalia, people talk about it being female genitalia or male genitalia, and it’s the same logo, or looking like a swastika. So this happens, I think that people have become so terrified of anything that’s uncertain, that when they see something at shelf, nobody goes and says, “Oh my God, could you look at that? M&M’s redesigned, I’m going to try them now.” They go to the shelf, they see something’s changed and they think, why is that different? Am I getting less M&M’s for more money? Look what happened with the recent brouhaha about M&M’s.

Peter Arnell:

Right.

Debbie Millman:

But in any case, everyone has an opinion about everything, the very same identities that people ring their hands over, a year later when they are redesigned, the very same people ring their hands over it again.

Peter Arnell:

But it’s interesting because Paula’s right, we’re professionals. We work hard, we really care about our craft and how things really are put together. And we’re in an industry where everybody has an opinion about everything. I don’t know at what point someone felt maybe in our lifetimes we should have had more Paul Rand’s, because he knew early on he needed to be a tough one to get things through, and he was a tough one, as you know, he was a monster at both the pitch, as well as the control of the product. And everyone’s a designer, everyone’s a photographer now, everyone, everyone, but there are differences in the end, aren’t there? And when someone raises their hand and says no, in a way they don’t have a right to say no.

However, the world today has changed, and in a way they do have a right to say no, because their voice matters. In a way the industry and its value has been so demeaned because the authority, professionalism, quality, the power of the talent that’s out there, you talked about Pentagram, and the extraordinary artists, graphic artists, communication experts, video editors, brilliant talent, real talent, they have been undercut by someone shooting something on an iPhone, and other things, that I guess, in a funny way, I guess the sign of our times, but in a way the industry has let itself do that.

I always believe that what I do has incredible long-lasting value and it’s an investment, and I’ve always believed that, and I’ll always believe it. Not because I think my work is good or bad, there’s many, many others who do much more extraordinary work than I, in my entire career there’s always been giants around me, from powerful art directors to brilliant people. However, I’ve been always able to explain to people that what we do here is IP, and it has value, and it becomes the absolute flag, the banner, the lead of one’s organization in so many ways if you could actually integrate that into every touchpoint of a company and its dealings with consumers.

But there aren’t a lot, if any of me, ever, and still today, who actually go to the mat on the point that what we do might not be the best, or even close. But its competency is very high, its approach is very smart, and ultimately its results work. So it has value, it has the same value as an investment one would make into a corporation if it’s done right. So we maintain the industry’s original thinking that design is good business, as Paul said, and you think about all the corporations, CBS and Dorfman, and Seagram and Meise, and all these incredible iconic designers in all architects, that built these corporations, images, Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright, and they all had the same thing in mind which is go to a visionaire, or somebody who sees how to capture, either by mirroring or contributing newness, or freshness, or evolution, or reimagining something, and let them build it, let them expose it, let them have the time to develop it.

I think that’s why Bilbao became the building, and will always be the building of the century, because it permitted a world to understand that good design, and the power of supporting good design, can change a country, can change a city, can change the meaning of art. It has so much ramifications. Those movements, whether they be deco, Bauhaus, [foreign language 00:56:43], whether they be Cassandre doing a poster for a boat or shoes in Paris, or Dubonnet, whatever, those legendary moments don’t have a place today in our world. Those iconic moments, you go to the Museum of Modern Art, just 15 years ago, you would’ve seen design celebrated completely different.

And it’s not a sign of our times at all, it’s a sign of somehow technology, or Andy’s 15 minutes of fame mindset, somehow has taken over the craft and art of industrial graphic brand and packaging and corporate, the things that create the language, the visual and verbal language development for corporations, for products that have always been on the forefront of leading and growing companies, have somehow become secondary, or not even important in the way that a print shop isn’t important anymore, or Gar Lelard at Lab 57, printing black and white photo, it’s all gone. Most of it is gone.

And so that’s okay, you have to move all your times, but talent that exists, and great talent that exists, and professionals who have talent in the industry of corporate identity and branding and communications, the world and the industry needs to celebrate them more, and for the right reasons, because they move the economy, they grow businesses, they create extraordinary progress for enterprises. And we learned that from Steve Jobs, didn’t we? We learned that from Steve Jobs, that design was important. We’ve learned that from Braun, we’ve learned that from Knoll, from Florence Knoll, we’ve learned that from so many incredible giants of design industry, Jony Ive, God knows what this man has done to contribute to the landscape of design.

But somehow in most places it lost its value, and I will never let go of the relationship between the business of that business and the business of design, and those things to me connect strongly. And so I think the other and most important thing to say is that the economics around the industry need to come back in a very strong way, and people have to really start to generate the delta between the common and the unique, the highly available and the very, very exclusive talents that exist there to allow these superstars in the world of design to flourish in their own right and be successful and progress as they have toward others, and customers, and so forth. And I see that went away, but for the industry, like in architecture, architect’s roles, contractors took over and they became less the authority on their destiny in the built environment.

So I don’t know how we got off on all this subject, but it’s probably only to say that on the third point, regarding what would I have done different, I probably would’ve just said, “This thing isn’t for me.” Because at the end, if you really look at what we did with Tropicana, it wasn’t a great design. There was nothing magical or innovative about any of it.

Debbie Millman:

Well, the cap, the cap was.

Peter Arnell:

Well, I haven’t gotten to the cap yet.

Debbie Millman:

Okay, okay.

Peter Arnell:

But God bless you for raising it. But the graphic arts of it was just a glass with juice in it with, the world said, poorly placed type. But the cap was a great idea, the cap could have been their Snap, Crackle and Pop, it could have been the Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz, it could have and should have, and still could be. That idea of the hours and weeks and months of working with the packaging container companies to master the click of that cap and the squeeze to always touch the orange, and then I became like a buffoon explaining it to everyone. I was rattled, I came to a meeting late and went on a video, I was like, “And you touch the cap.” It wasn’t done the way I would do it today.

Debbie Millman:

For our listeners that might not be aware, the cap, because this was quite some time ago, I guess about 15 years ago, the cap was actually half an orange, and it was a dome, and it looked like an orange, and it was ingenious. It seems like you’ve learned a lot since that time. I was really intrigued by your inclusion of all the work that you’ve put in to your book, it’s been 40 years. First time ever you’ve published this monograph of your vast body of work. It’s a two volume hardcover book with a beautiful slip case. It’s 848 pages, it contains over 2,600 photographs and illustrations of hundreds of clients and collaborations. And it’s not just the greatest hits, it’s the work, it’s the life, it’s the evidence of a life in design and advertising and branding, with hundreds of projects, including projects for Unilever and Con Edison and Reebok and PepsiCo and Chrysler, and Commissions from Martha Stewart and Gwyneth Paltrow and Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Tom Brady. Did you leave any work out?

Peter Arnell:

I did.

Debbie Millman:

You did?

Peter Arnell:

Yeah, 25 to 30% of the projects didn’t get in.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Peter Arnell:

Because it was just growing and growing and growing.

Debbie Millman:

Also, you had to get their permissions, right? Didn’t you have to get permissions from everyone?

Peter Arnell:

Yeah, I don’t know if you realize, most of the photography in the book is my own.

Debbie Millman:

Right, I was thinking about that, because I did a book where I had to get permission from Coca-Cola for some of the images, and it took a year.

Peter Arnell:

Yeah, no, it took a while to get everything, all of the homework in order. But the photography stuff is always complicated, and we’ve always been very good at making sure that I have the rights to publish the work. But I think the big mission in that whole book is, because at the end of the day you like the work, you don’t like the work, isn’t really the point, and I’m not sure if I ever did anything important or relevant enough to be in a book like that, and that’s the truth. But it just seems like I tried my best every time, and I think the book just represents a journey of trying my best. That’s the most you can ask for from anybody.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely.

Peter Arnell:

And I think that when I wanted to take pictures they said, “Put the camera down, you’re not a photographer, you’re not a designer, you’re not a car designer, how could you be at Chrysler designing cars?” It’s just that world. But I don’t know, it’s been a big life, I probably have another 20, 30 years to go. So I’m not going to stop, I’m working on Fontainebleau now in Las Vegas.

Debbie Millman:

Well, they’re a repeat client as well, right? Didn’t you work with them 10 years ago?

Peter Arnell:

Yeah, I’ve done many things from Mr. Soffer at Fontainebleau. I think we started our relationship over 20 years ago. There was the Miami, and then there was the original Vegas, and then Vegas one stopped for a while because of financial turmoil, and then now it’s back and we’re reopening at the end of this year. But I’ve always done really simple things in the end, because in such a complexity of problems and people in the world, and competition, how do you take complexity and convert it into simplicity? Is a really very, very difficult job, consistently.

And I’ve been happy to be with my same photo assistant, Rune Stokmo, for coming up 36 years, and Dan, who’s the president here, who’s been with me for 22 years, and Yuko, who’s been here for 32 years. We’re still with a lot of the, what I call the old timers, the founders of the business. So we’re lucky to be here, and next step is the opening of Fontainebleau, that’s the next moment in my career here. I’m sure that’ll be met with an interesting public opinion, to open up a first casino and resort after. There will be a lot of stuff that’s interesting.

Debbie Millman:

Peter Arnell, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Peter Arnell:

Yeah, thank you so much for today, it was just such a pleasure to talk to you.

Debbie Millman:

Peter Arnell’s latest book is a two volume monograph called Peter Arnell: Projects 1980-2020. You can learn more about Peter, his work, and his book on his website, peterarnell.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening, and remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Peter Arnell appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

They are rare, but there are voices in pop music that are just irresistible, and Susanna Hoffs has one of them. In the 1980s, she co-founded the All-Girl Group, The Bangles, whose hits included Walk Like An Egyptian, the Prince-penned Manic Monday and Eternal Flame. She’s also had a long and illustrious solo career and a prolific collaboration with the singer-songwriter Matthew Sweet. And now, Susanna Hoffs has written a book, not a memoir, as you might expect from a musician in the limelight for nearly four decades, but a novel titled This Bird Has Flown. The book is about a female rockstar who falls on hard times and then falls for a charismatic literature professor she meets on a plane. Susanna Hoffs, welcome to Design Matters.

Susanna Hoffs:

It’s such a pleasure to be here,

Debbie Millman:

Susanna, is it true that you were bat mitzvahed at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem?

Susanna Hoffs:

Yes. My older brother who’s only a year older than me, had his bar mitzvah at the Whaling Wall, very quick, just reading one little stanza, and then we had a luncheon afterwards at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and I did a little [foreign language 00:01:14] prayer over the bread and that was it. Boom boom.

Debbie Millman:

Nice.

Susanna Hoffs:

Bat mitzvah. Bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah, all in the same day.

Debbie Millman:

You grew up in Los Angeles and your mother, Tamar Simon, was initially a painter then a filmmaker, and your dad was a psychoanalyst. What was it like to grow up with a live-in therapist?

Susanna Hoffs:

It was fantastic. I love this question. I really feel like my journey as an artist has been very much informed by my upbringing, and in particular, the fact that I had a psychoanalyst father also having an artist mother. I think that it informed the fact that I chose to make my life’s work in art, in many forms of it. And obviously, as a musician, but also now having written a novel, but also going to UC Berkeley, where I was an art major, having started as a drama dance major, I pivoted to art because in a way, art encompassed everything that I was interested in.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written about how you grew up with a tantalizing library of paperback novels.

Susanna Hoffs:

Oh yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And included books by John Updike to Gustave Flaubert, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, Erica Jung. Now, is it true that you now have all of those dogeared paperbacks you read in your own library now?

Susanna Hoffs:

I do. My mother was an and is an avid reader, and I have all of these sort of tattered paperbacks, and they’re so precious to me, and I read a lot of these. There was an open vibe in the household, so some of these books I read as a teen and ended up with the paperbacks in my library, but they still funnily resonate in the stuff that I’m making now. It’s fun to have made it this far. I’m 64 this year, and for some reason, maybe because of the Beatles’ song When I’m 64, I’m more aware. I’m reflecting a lot on the journey from then till now because both of my brothers are living nearby me now, after not living close by. We’re all sharing our LA stories and our childhood, so a lot of this stuff is resonating in a particular way.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I totally understand the reflection mode. I’m going to be 62 this year, so I’m always thinking about what’s left. One of the questions that I know that you asked yourself as you were thinking about writing your book, if not now, when? That’s on repeat in my brain every single day.

Susanna Hoffs:

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You said that you fell in love with music as a child. As a baby, your mom was always playing the radio, and she loved the Beatles and Burt Bacharach. And I believe your uncle put a guitar in your hands when you were six or seven. Were you even big enough to hold it?

Susanna Hoffs:

There’s a picture of me from, I think when I was just seven, or I’d just turned eight, where there’s this big guitar in my lap and I’m wearing a dress with a little Peter Pan collar and I’m sitting on the porch outside. The guitars were all gigantic. Now, they’ve made smaller guitars, but back then, I think my uncle just… He had so many instruments lying around that he just gave me one that he didn’t need to keep for himself.

But I learned, I think with the same, this is also an old story that I’m reflecting on now, that I just learned by doing. I feel embarrassed to say that I don’t read music. I can’t read a musical chart. I can look at it and see when a note’s higher and note’s lower, but I’m not schooled in it, and I never really took a writing course either. But for me, it’s all about just throwing myself in, fueled by a passion, and it just crosses all genres. But being self-taught, at this point, I just accept that I am that. I don’t know if I can learn new tricks, and I never really thought I’d get to this moment, although in some way I did. But it’s just been a really fascinating journey to get to this precise moment with the novel.

Debbie Millman:

I read that you wrote your first song at eight years old, and it was titled The Rock Island Line. You described it as vintage-y folk style. And I was wondering if this was influenced by your love of the band, the Kingston Trio, which was also a band that I loved at the same time.

Susanna Hoffs:

That’s so cool. It was very much influenced by the Kingston Trio. Yeah. I love that sound. It’s just the organic sound of acoustic guitars and voices.

Debbie Millman:

You were also involved in musical theater and plays all through middle and high school, and you said that theater was almost like your major in high school. At that point, were you thinking that you wanted to be a professional actress?

Susanna Hoffs:

I considered it growing up in a household where movies were king and that it was a big part of the family dynamic to go see movies and Westwood and I saw so many movies like Shampoo when it came out, the Exorcist when it came out, we would take the bus, my brothers and I too, or we would go with our parents, but it was always hard for me to get cast in the juicier roles in high school because I was very small. I was petite, and people always thought that I was younger than I was, which was horrifying in adolescence. It was practically a tragedy that I know when really… I felt like outside the cool people group. I didn’t think anyone would ever cast me any in anything.

So early on, I decided to just keep exploring the arts and see what happened and when I was in college and the Patty Smith Group played the Winterland Ballroom and the Sex Pistols played there too, and I was at both of those shows, it was an epiphany for me that starting a band in that zeitgeist of the band as the Art project and really having a graphic sensibility, a musical sensibility, a very clear mission statement, if you will, I started to think about that. Around that time I was dating David Roback, who ended up going on to form the band Mazzy Star, but some of what we were doing, and we were living together at a certain period during the four years I was at college, to really create a sound that when I did advertise myself upon graduation, coming home to LA, and it was a circuitous path.

I was leaving flyers that I drew and designed myself in record stores and at the Whisky a Go Go when the Go-Go’s were playing there, that led me also to put an ad in the recycler, a throwaway paper where you could buy a car or a rug or a old sofa. And it led me to the sisters, Vicki and Debbi Peterson that we met on a night, and I want to say January of ’81 in the garage where I was living, because people live in a garage. Kids who come back from college and haven’t quite figured out how to afford an apartment, we just lived in the garage and renovated it. So the Petersons came over. We played the song White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane, which they taught me, and I learned it. It was only two chords. It sounded so much more sophisticated than two chords, but that’s what it was.

And my mom was listening in from the house. We had a house guest from New York, and they were like, “You guys sound like a band,” and were. That’s the night we met. We never looked back. We were a band from this blind date that we had with each other in the garage.

Debbie Millman:

I love the fact that you handmade a flyer, and Susanna, I came upon one in my research. It’s a glorious flyer. It’s blue, eight and a half by 11. Kind of looks a little bit like a punk ransom note. I want to try to describe it for our listeners. It had the headline Girls in what looks like a very handwritten, original font. Very sharp, and it states-

Susanna Hoffs:

Yep. It was handwritten. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

It’s states you were forming a boss all-girls group to play rockabilly, psychedelic, and surf music with a mercy beat, and you stated your influences were Love, The Go-Go’s, The Last, Beau Brummels, The Birds, Blue Caps, and then handwritten under those bands that were in a sort of font, it was The Modern Lovers. You also wrote underneath that, “Must be nice,” in all caps and asked people to call you weekdays after 5:30 and weekends. And you put your first stack of flyers, I believe in a Go-go’s show in the bathroom, as you mentioned, at the Whisky a Go Go.

Susanna Hoffs:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

So I just have some questions about the flyer. Actually, before the show listeners, Susanna and I were talking about whether or not we were going to talk about design, and I didn’t think we would very much, but now I’m actually going to ask a couple of questions about the design of this flyer. So what made you decide to… It’s so interesting, this combination of handwritten type, of type set information and then the add-on of The Modern Lovers. Talk about even the whole notion of making a flyer to put in the bathrooms at a nightclub.

Susanna Hoffs:

I know. It was this DIY spirit. I loved graphic design, I loved music, I loved art, and I was the flyer maker of all the early Bangles concerts. I have other ones that I haven’t shared yet, but in some, I took a cutout. There were mostly collage because I don’t know how to use a computer. There were no computers anyway.

Debbie Millman:

Right, right.

Susanna Hoffs:

So I would just tape and glue and I would cut out things from magazines and hand write stuff. Yeah. This is an slightly off-topic story, but a friend forwarded me a letter that I had typed to a guy who had a band in the South Bay Area, just me saying, “This is my number. I’ve left a bottle of whiskey at your doorstep.” I had tracked down this guy’s home address where we’re all living with our parents. We were kids, and he had saved this letter for 40 years, and just stumbled upon it because my brother somehow got roped into this group online, and I thought, “You know what? That was a brazen thing to do to track down this musician who I admired,” but that’s just how I approached everything. I didn’t really think that hard about it. I was like this scrappy 17 year old who was just determined.

So the same thing. I have other flyers, and now I feel like I should put them up on my Instagram.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely.

Susanna Hoffs:

They were all collages. I was just making art. My mother was always doing that, and my grandmother before her. It was like a family tradition. I didn’t even think twice about it, but it makes me so happy that you were charmed by that.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. So why an all-girls band? What made you decide at that point that that was the sound you wanted and that was the way you wanted to introduce your music?

Susanna Hoffs:

It was a combination of things. One, that I had worked with David Roback in our Pre Mazzy Star template of what we were doing. When that relationship became fraught, I came back to LA. I was still very close with David because he was like a member of our family having grown up in the neighborhood and being my brother’s best friend all through childhood. But I thought maybe it would be less complex to work with other women in some way. I just got frustrated and I was so determined to make something happen, to meet people in LA that I could commune with, and we had similar tastes.

And so I think that I just started to advertise myself in all those ways, the flyers, the Recycler magazine. Yeah, and it was the right move because somehow it wasn’t even… Vicki wasn’t meant to answer the phone. I was calling the girl who had placed an ad I had in the Recycler, but the minute we played together, it was clear. Why look any further? It was like a blind date where you go, “Okay, this works.” So that’s how it was.

Debbie Millman:

I actually, what you said, which I loved. You said as soon as you met, it was weirdly instantaneously platonic love at first sight, as if you ran off to Vegas and got married in an Elvis wedding chapel.

Susanna Hoffs:

Exactly. That’s exact quote. That’s exactly sums it up.

Debbie Millman:

And that was 1981. You decided, at the time, to call yourself The Bangs. Why The Bangs?

Susanna Hoffs:

There had been an Esquire magazine in part that my mom had a subscription, and there was a famous cover with Ed Sullivan and Ed Sullivan was so in our, for the Petersons in me, very important because of that first Beatles. That’s how we all found out about the Beatles, and it was Ed Sullivan wearing a Beatle wig. And within the pages of that Esquire magazine were a bunch of really interesting hairstyles, and one was more of a bouffant kind of thing like this, and it said, the haircut or the hairdo was called The Supersonic Bang, or The Supersonic Bangs maybe, or Bang. The idea of The Bangs, both for our affection for that very ’60s look with the bangs like Barry Julie Christie in the movie, Darling. It was just so popular, and it was the beginning of the ’80s, but Vicki, Debbi and I were just obsessed with the fashion of the ’60s and the look and feel of movies and everything and the sounds.

But then we soon thought, “Ah, supersonic Bangs is a bit clumsy and long,” and so we just shortened it. But then there was a New Jersey band, right when we were about to put out our first EP on a small indie label, we discovered that there was a band in New Jersey who was claiming to sue us. So we had 48 hours to change the name of the band, and it just became The Bangles.

Debbie Millman:

You all, Vicki and Debbi Peterson and Michael Steele, you quickly became part of the Paisley underground scene. And unlike most of the girl bands, then or now, you wrote much of your own material. You actually all played your own instruments. You made your own decisions about how to present yourself. I read that you didn’t have anybody helping you. Everything you all wore was either from thrift stores or cobbled together from your own closets. And you described your style as a retro beatnik Bohemian steeped in an obsession with ’60s music and fashion.

Susanna Hoffs:

That’s pretty accurate. That is accurate, I think. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And I was wondering how you would describe your style now.

Susanna Hoffs:

Oh gosh. It’s much different. I’m wearing what I now call… I got this on sale during the thing, what I call my David Burn sweater. I don’t know if you can see this.

Debbie Millman:

Stop making sense.

Susanna Hoffs:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Yes, it’s that big.

Susanna Hoffs:

And I’m relieved that I don’t have to try to be her, the girl from 1980. I think there was a period of time where I thought, “Oh, I’ve got to present her,” this alter ego, even though it’s all part and parcel of who I am, but I don’t feel the need to traipse around… I can’t bear wearing high heels. I don’t believe in stilettos. No offense to people who love them, but how can your toes get squashed like that for so long? I don’t understand. That’s torture to your feet, and I think it looks really sexy and hot, but really? Can you really walk around in those all day? I’m just having a epiphany that at this phase of my life, I like to be comfortable. I find myself wearing pants at home. Of course, it’s sweatpants, but my fashion sensibility has shifted a bit.

Debbie Millman:

I understand that when Peter Philbin first came to see you play, he asked, and this was before you were signed, he asked one of the artists he was working with to join him, and that was Bruce Springsteen who came to see you at Magic Mountain in Valencia, California. And apparently, he asked Bruce to weigh in, “Should we or shouldn’t we sign them?” And Bruce gave you a thumbs up, and you got signed to Columbia Records in March of ’83. Looking back on it now, do you feel like this happened really fast for the band? There were some bands that it happens right, not right away, but fairly soon, and others that take quite a long time, wondering how you feel about the kismet serendipity of it?

Susanna Hoffs:

Yeah. I love that question. The kismet of it was just incredible, but to be honest, it didn’t feel fast. The fact was that Columbia was the only record label, an amazing record label. Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan, Springsteen, and way going back for generations. It was a major label. So because we were do-it-yourself, because we are scrappy local band in LA, yes, part of this very cool Paisley underground scene that was so fun to be a part of. And we had been on Faulty Products, which was Miles Copeland’s smaller imprint, then we were on IRS with the EP that Craig Leon produced. But we really didn’t have any major label interest. So it was a huge deal When we met Peter Philbin, who had brought Bruce Springsteen to our show, schlepped him out to Magic Mountain from wherever he was living. It was quite momentous.

Debbie Millman:

Prince happened to come upon a video of the band singing Hero Takes a Fall, which is on your first album from Columbia, one of the tunes from All Over The Place, and he reached out to you. And at that point, another serendipity, you had first heard When Doves Cry. And so at one of your Hollywood shows, you were told Prince had come to see you. What was that first meeting like?

Susanna Hoffs:

Oh, gosh. I can recall that we were in the dressing room at the Palace on Vine Street near Capital Records. That was the venue, if I have the info remembered correctly. And we were in the dressing room and somebody in the crew mentioned it, and then we started to play our set. And he really did love this song Hero Takes a Fall, but the record wasn’t like on the charts exactly. We were still quite underground. And I’m standing on the stage and I could still see, came in from the wings, already shredding on the guitar, and he was playing this really beautiful guitar. And I never, before or since, witnessed the kind of genius, everything about him. It was a supernatural event occurring on the stage. Him just playing this solo that was channeling something says the Gods of some sort.

Well, anyone who’s seen his solo in While My Guitar Gently Weeps from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance with Tom Petty and many others on the stage, there will never be anyone like that ever again. And then to get the gift of Manic Monday, that changed so much for The Bangles. That was our first real AM FM radio hit.

Debbie Millman:

And apparently, he gave you that… He started performing Hero Takes A Fall at his shows and ultimately, gave you a mixed tape of songs that he’d written, which he thought would be perfect for the band.

Susanna Hoffs:

Well, really, the one. There was two-

Debbie Millman:

Jealous Girl, right? Jealous Girl.

Susanna Hoffs:

There were two. There were two. Yeah. We hovered around the cassette player. This was the ’80s. Wasn’t digital really yet, and the minute I heard that song, the minute I heard that riff, I was like Baroque pop. It’s like what I loved growing up as a child, the sounds of the ’60s, but modern. And also the first time I stood in front of that mic and I looked over and the red light was on recording and I sang it, I was like, “Oh, yes.” You just know sometimes. There’s songs that I’ve wanted to sing in my life, and I think this will be so a perfect fit. And then you try them on and they’re not, and you just have to accept that. But everything about Manic Monday was like putting my foot in the glass slipper. I just went, “Oh my God.” And I could tell David Kahne, our producer, was feeling the same feels in that moment.

Debbie Millman:

Prince asked for the pseudonym Christopher to be used on the album credits. Why Christopher and why a pseudonym?

Susanna Hoffs:

I don’t know. My feeling about it was knowing him. He championed artists. He championed all kinds of artists, including many, many female artists. And I think he wanted it to be about The Bangles. If he had had put Prince on there, the initial story would be different. He wanted us to claim it, I think, and make it obviously, make it our own. He offered to send us the backing tracks, but we as Bangles, it was our feeling that we wanted to Bangle-fy it, to start from track it ourselves and add all the guitars and do our own spin on it. But I just thought it was a generous act. That’s how I think of it.

Debbie Millman:

Well, the album Different Light, was one of the biggest hits of the 1980s. It spawned several more hits, including the song Walk Like An Egyptian, which was actually ranked Billboard’s number one song of 1987. But I understand that the band was divided about whether it would be a failure or a success.

Susanna Hoffs:

Oh, Walk Like An Egyptian?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Susanna Hoffs:

Oh yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Why?

Susanna Hoffs:

Yeah. I was sitting in David Kahne’s office at Columbia Records, just talking to him about songs and what might or might not go on the album because he and I had a quite close relationship. And he played me this demo tape of it, a wonderful singer named Marty Jones. It was her version that I heard, and it had this groovy bossa nova feel to it, the Marty Jones version. And I love bossa nova because it, again, it’s that ’60s thing. It’s very swinging ’60s. The bossa nova was really popular then. And even the Look of Love, which is a Burt Bacharach song, it has a feeling like that. So yeah. Even though it’s nothing like Walk Like An Egyptian, which was obviously a quirky song, but I got to know Liam Sternberg who wrote it. He was very close with Chrissy Hein and came from Akron as well. And we had been on a ferry or something in Europe, and everyone was on the boat going as it was going through this rocky surf. And somehow, that spawned the lyrics to that song.

But it was an afterthought to release Walk Like An Egyptian as the third single. And who would’ve thunk that the kids would call their local radio stations? And boom, as you said, we couldn’t believe that it was number one and ended up being the biggest song that year.

Debbie Millman:

This also happened with the song you wrote for the band’s third album, Everything, Eternal Flame, which is now arguably one of your biggest and most enduring songs. It was initially voted off the album. Why? How did people not recognize that it was what it was?

Susanna Hoffs:

I don’t know. For some reason, I was so proud of it. And speaking of Bruce Springsteen walking around with the cassette of Nebraska, his Nebraska album, at least that’s the lore, I walked around. I never left my house without the cassette of the demo that I made with Billy and Tom of Eternal Flame, because the minute we wrote that bridge part, the sun shines through the rain part. I was like, “Oh my God, I love…” I was so excited about this song, and I was playing it for my or The Bangles attorney and anybody that would listen. But when it came time to actually do the band meeting, which was always a little bit tense, obviously, because everybody was like, “Here’s [inaudible 00:27:08] song.”

At that point, we were all writing mostly with others because we were just thrown together for near a decade at that point. It was many years in a van. We needed a little bit autonomy from each other. I guess that’s why we all split off and wrote with other friends, but I don’t know why we just had this… Everybody got equal amount of songs on the record, and it had become oppressive, honestly. There was a little bit of a road weary. It’s hard to make art by committee. It just is. So that’s why bands generally last for a discreet amount of time, because they’re so amazing when it’s happening and all the energy’s there, but it can become wearying after a while.

So anyway, I thought it was a shoo-in, but the other girls didn’t pick it. But then Davitt Sigerson, who was so great to work with, such a wonderful creative producer and such a big-hearted guy, and I’m friends with both David Kahne and Davitt to this day, partway through the recording of the record, he’s like, “Sue, I keep thinking about Eternal Flame. I have this idea for it.” He knew I was obsessed with Patsy Klein. Maybe Sweet Dreams came out around that time, the Jessica Lang biopic of it.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, yeah.

Susanna Hoffs:

But-

Debbie Millman:

Probably a little bit, yeah, right around that time.

Susanna Hoffs:

It might have, yeah. And so he said, “I’m picturing this little music box,” which it was a little music box thing, and I have this idea. And so we went out to the valley to work with Phil Chanel, who was a keyboard player because there wasn’t really a keyboard player in The Bangles. It was two guitars, base and drums was the setup. And we crafted a little arrangement for it, and that’s what it became.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve said that bands are like marriages, but it’s not just two people in the marriage. It’s all the people in the band in a marriage. And some of the best music has been created with that tension. I’m thinking of Fleetwood Mac or The Beatles or The Birds or The Beach Boys. How important was a certain amount of friction or debate to the band? Or was that tension what ultimately caused the band to break up that first time?

Susanna Hoffs:

I think tension is inevitable, just like it is within families when they squabble about small things, but also bigger things. Yeah, I think that we were pretty good at working through our differences. We were extremely respectful of one another, and I’m so grateful for that. My partners in the band were and are fantastic human beings who I admire. But I think the tensions of being on the road, I think there were little factions that evolved. I think we grew weary. I think there were pressures in the band. I think Eternal Flame, which may not have been favored by the other members. And I’m not even saying that’s true or not, but I think that song took off unexpectedly, and perhaps they feared that it would cement the idea that I was the lead singer of the band, even though it was a band like Fleetwood Mac where there’s multiple singers. Yeah. I think it’s just a difficult marriage to sustain over a very long period of time.

Debbie Millman:

10 years after you broke up, the band got back together, and you’ve released three albums since. As a solo artist, you’ve recorded five albums, two EPs. You performed as a duo with Matthew Sweet recording three stunning albums Under The Covers moniker. You also starred in all the Austin Powers movies as a singer in the band Ming Tea. You’ve also raised a family, and as we’ve hinted at, talked just a little bit about, written your first novel.

But before we talk about the book, I want to just ask you a few questions about your solo career and about your collaborations with Matthew Sweet.

Susanna Hoffs:

Sure.

Debbie Millman:

Your first solo album was released in 1991 and was titled When You’re a Boy, which is a lyric from the David Bowie song, Boys Keep Swinging from the 1979 album, Lodger. Why that title for your album?

Susanna Hoffs:

I can’t remember the exact impetus for it. I was reflecting on that recently because that was recorded a very long time ago. And I was thinking that when you’re a boy, you can do anything. And I was thinking that a lot about the experience of being a woman in this world and how complicated it is, and how we still have to fight for things that I would have thought by now would not be the case. And how the experience in life and my own personal journey to get to where I am now, at 64 as a woman, the challenges and all the glorious things about it. So I think that it was just a little bit like food for thought to put out an album with that title. And obviously, I love David Bowie, so it was fun to honor his song.

Debbie Millman:

Susanna, let’s talk about your brand new book, the novel This Bird has Flown. Writing is such a solitary act, but I read that you found an unexpected sense of freedom sitting alone in your room, writing for hours at a time. Given how much you’ve collaborated musically, was it hard to adjust to working entirely by yourself?

Susanna Hoffs:

I thought it would be. It was unexpectedly not an issue at all. And I don’t know why writing a novel would be that different from writing a song, although there’s a lot of things that songs typically have rhyming schemes and certain meters, and then it’s the melody part of it too. For me, I always gravitated to the melodies, and weirdly, now that I’ve written thousands of words on a page, I feel like maybe This Bird Has Flown will be an opportunity to be less fearful about the lyric part of it, because I found that in the writing, I would do inner rhymes and I would use alliteration, and there was a lyric quality to what I was doing from time to time. And I’d be like, “Okay, I’m doing that thing, but okay, I’m going to go with that as the style of the pros.” And it was so fun to do that. So I think now finally, I could tackle the solo writing venture, and or I could, again, hook up with my beloved writing compadres and see what we come up with.

Debbie Millman:

You were able to create a lot of suspense in telling this story, and you do it really well. I started reading it in evening and ended up staying up way past my bedtime because I was so engaged in the story and wanted to know what was going to happen. I was almost tempted to read the end before I was even halfway through, because I was like, “How does this turn out? I have to know.” Did you take classes or lessons to learn how to build suspense in that way?

Susanna Hoffs:

I didn’t. I didn’t.

Debbie Millman:

No?

Susanna Hoffs:

I’ve just self-taught again. Every night, I watch something as either an old movie on the Criterion Collection, I rewatch movies and I just read a lot. And I’m married to a filmmaker who’s a great storyteller. There was a few times where he hasn’t even read this draft. It’s been a while since he looked the book over. But every once in a while I’d say, “I want to work on Jane’s Predicament. I want to keep people guessing,” and I’d have a conversation with him. I also, once Little Brown bought the book, the draft and then I went on to have an editor.

I have wonderful readers. Let me put it this way. I had wonderful readers along the way. My agent, Sarah Burns, who edited the book, The Lovely Bones, came from editing, had good ideas. My best friend Margaret Stole, who’s the one who encouraged me to stop hiding my draft, this behemoth draft. And she actually said, “Send it to Sarah Burns,” because Sarah’s her literary agent. And she was right because Sarah read it over the weekend and said, “Let’s meet.” And so I flew to New York and met with her.

Debbie Millman:

And you wore a suit for that meeting, I believe.

Susanna Hoffs:

I did. I did.

Debbie Millman:

Why? You’re a rock and roller.

Susanna Hoffs:

Well, I was channeling the idea of being in New York City, being a novelist, I guess, and I just wanted to feel presentable. And it was like you can walk through the streets of Manhattan and you can see why they can film movies that are set in the ’50s if you find the right block to walk on. And I knew I had to walk from Midtown to the Upper East Side, not too far up in the Upper East Side, but I had to cross from the west side to the east side, and I was teary-eyed. It was a freezing day. I didn’t want to show up in jeans and a T-shirt. I don’t know. It was very. It was very meaningful to me, and it felt like the literary world was not the scrappy world of Hollywood rehearsal studios where you show up in whatever.

I wanted to dress for the occasion because to me, if for no one else, it was so momentous. It was ultra momentous. It was like, “I’m here. I did this thing. A literary agent read it and wants to talk to me.” I don’t know. It was so emotional. It was one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever had in my whole life.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Susanna Hoffs:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

So you wrote the entire book without even knowing if you were going to get a book deal?

Susanna Hoffs:

Yeah. If I could give myself one gift in my 50s, it was taking the plunge and doing this lifelong dream and just teaching myself how to do it by reading and having been a lifelong reader and studying films and stories, again, in all formats. It was so unexpectedly fun. It is such hard work. It is hours and hours and hours of work, but I never tire of it.

Debbie Millman:

And your son, I understand, kept urging you to write this by telling you, “If not now, when?”

Susanna Hoffs:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And I love that. I say that all the time to myself now.

Susanna Hoffs:

Good.

Debbie Millman:

Little Brown has described your book as one for lovers of Daisy Jones and the Six and inspired by favorites like Jane Eyre and Bridget Jones’ diary. That’s quite a range, and I was wondering if you agree with that description.

Susanna Hoffs:

I think it’s actually a marvelous description. I became friends with Helen Fielding several years back, and I had read all her books beyond the Bridget series. At one point, maybe I had access to ones that I didn’t know about when our friendship blossomed. And I just had lunch with Taylor Jenkins Reed, which was so thrilling. Talk about a great work ethic. She’s written so many books. This is a passion. But I love, again, the subgenre of books. Well, I love female protagonists. So Helen is so masterful with books, even when they were not the Bridget series, but other female protagonists. And Jane Eyre was a seminal work that I’ve revisited starting from adolescence, I would say, through my 60s. There’s something about the fierceness of that character. She doesn’t come from wealth. She’s basically like an orphan. I don’t know. There’s just something in the fierceness of her convictions and also her integrity as a character. I just find her endlessly inspiring and relatable, even if we’ve live in different time periods. And it’s just such a marvelous book.

Debbie Millman:

I feel the same way about that book. I still remember being 12 or 13 years old and picking it up in a doctor’s office of all things and just being completely and utterly riveted. Just riveted. And seeing her and Mr. Rochester speak over the ocean. It’s just, yeah. Is Jane your character in the book, Jane Start, named after Jane Eyre?

Susanna Hoffs:

I did grab the Jane from Jane Eyre. I like how it’s such a simple name. It sounds so beautiful to say Jane. That’s the weird thing. I didn’t have a page with 10 names written on it. There was this just instinctive firing different pistons and just different synapses all reacting. It just kept happening. It was like playful in my mind.

Debbie Millman:

There’s quite a lot of flirtatious literary banter in the book, which as an old English major, I quite liked. The other main character, Tom Hardy, is not named after the actor. He’s actually named after the author of what I believe is your favorite novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Yeah, [inaudible 00:41:22]-

Susanna Hoffs:

One of my favorites.

Debbie Millman:

One of your favorites. The man who wrote that was named Thomas Hardy.

Susanna Hoffs:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve said that you were drawn to several themes that informed this story. They include these questions. Will the ghosts of relationships pass threaten our chances of finding true love and happiness? And will our own personal demons do us from succeeding in our work? And I’m wondering, Susanna, why those particular questions?

Susanna Hoffs:

In my life, it took many relationships to realize when I met Jay that that was the right partner for me. But if you’ve ever experienced a relationship that’s gone south or didn’t work in a kind of way that eroded your sense of who you are-

Debbie Millman:

Oh yes, many times.

Susanna Hoffs:

And so you start to lose your confidence. You think, “Will I ever connect with another human being?” The wounds that are left behind, they may scab over, but they’re visible. They stay there for a long time. And also to just be among my friend group, to hear other people’s stories and how to watch them suffer through bad breakups and wonder, “Will I ever find somebody who understands me and I understand them? And I can feel confident that they will not hurt me?”

Debbie Millman:

I understand that the book has already been optioned for a movie.

Susanna Hoffs:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Congratulations. Thank you. Will you be in it at all?

Susanna Hoffs:

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a cameo. That’s the first. I’ve never thought about that yet. Perhaps a cameo. That’s the [inaudible 00:43:13].

Debbie Millman:

And anyone you hope will play Jane Start?

Susanna Hoffs:

I don’t know yet. That will be so fun to see down the line.

Debbie Millman:

And then my last question, have you started working on a second book or a sequel? I’d love to know how the relationship between our main characters evolves.

Susanna Hoffs:

Well, I’m right there with you. I have been collecting ideas, and I have a whole file of them on my computer and to be continued, and I would love to talk to you about it as I get closer to figuring the answers to those questions.

Debbie Millman:

Wonderful. Susanna Hoffs, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Susanna Hoffs:

Ah, it was such a pleasure.

Debbie Millman:

Susanna Hoff’s novel is called This Bird Has Flown, and her latest album is titled Deep End. You can read a lot more about all of her work on her website, susannahoffs.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Susanna Hoffs appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

When the celebrated record producer Rick Rubin decided to write about making great art, he created a book about how to be in the world. This is because he believes, as I do, that life itself is a creative act. Rick Rubin has won nine Grammy Awards, and over the years he has produced a who’s who of musical artists, from Adele to the Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash, and Jay-Z. His range is vast and his talents are many. They also include prose. This man can really write. Rick’s latest creation is a rich meditation and love letter of sorts to creativity, and it just debuted at the very top of the New York Times Best Seller list. It’s titled The Creative Act: A Way of Being. We’re going to talk all about it and more in our conversation today.

Rick Rubin, welcome to Design Matters.

Rick Rubin:

Hello, pleasure meeting you.

Debbie Millman:

Rick, you were born on Long Island in the 1960s. Your dad was a shoe salesman and your mother a stay-at-home mom. I understand your Aunt Carol was like a third parent to you. In what ways did she influence you as you were growing up?

Rick Rubin:

Both of my parents were the youngest in big families and were always the youngest and always childlike. My Aunt Carol was my mom’s oldest sister, and she functioned as my second mom. My Aunt Carol worked at Estee Lauder in Manhattan. She ran the creative services department at a time when many women didn’t have jobs like that. I would spend time with her both in her office at Estee Lauder and she would take me to the theater and she would take me to museums and to movies. She had a very different cosmopolitan life than my parents who had a more… We lived at the beach, it was more of a beach life. So I got to experience two very different upbringings because of my Aunt Carol. My parents would drop me off with my Aunt Carol on Friday night, and I would be with her until Monday morning. And then she would take the train back to Manhattan and go to work. So my parents got the weekend off, I got to have the benefit of a third parent. It was a really good deal all the way around.

Debbie Millman:

I believe you first fell in love with magic when you were nine years old. Why magic?

Rick Rubin:

Something sparked in me when the mystery of this something happening that didn’t seem possible. The impractical happening excited me. When you’re a kid, the difference between doing a card trick and speaking to a dead relative, let’s say, they’re closer. When you’re nine years old, it’s all the same. The things that you can’t explain, some of them are done through learning a technique, and some of them we just can never figure out. I was interested in all of those, in all of the things that couldn’t be explained or the things that were baffling, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure everything out.

Debbie Millman:

Shortly thereafter I understand that you began to have recurring problems with your neck, I believe you were around 14, and your doctor diagnosed this as stress related and recommended that you undertake different types of meditation to help manage the stresses in your life. This must have been in the ’70s. It sounds pretty progressive for a doctor to recommend that at that time. What kinds of meditation were you doing back then?

Rick Rubin:

I learned TM at that time, transcendental meditation. I loved it, and it’s been a big part of my life ever since. Now, I’ve learned many forms of meditation since, and sometimes I use other forms for a particular purpose, but I tend to keep coming back to TM. I don’t know if that’s because it works the best for me or if it’s because of when I learned it and how many years that was, because it was my first practice, maybe that’s the reason that I stick with it. I also quite like guided meditations and yoga nidra, where I’ll lay down and be guided through a process. Instead of having to keep the attention myself, to check out and listen to instructions is very relaxing as well.

Debbie Millman:

I think another influence at that time was a teacher you had at Long Beach High School, Mr. Freeman. I believe it was he who first taught you how to play guitar.

Rick Rubin:

Yes. He ran the audio visual department at school, and any possibility to not go to class and hang out in the AV department and play guitar and watch videos and just hang out with artistic… It was an artistic bunch of people who were into both artistic stuff, but also the technology of the arts because we all could run the projectors and we could all could deal with all the machinery of it.

Debbie Millman:

At that point in your life, what did you think you wanted to do professionally?

Rick Rubin:

I didn’t have any ideas on my own. I imagine maybe when I was 14 I was probably still interested in magic. My parents had in mind for me to be on a professional track, and their first choice would’ve been a doctor. I’m needle phobic and pass out at the sight of blood, so they would settle for me being a lawyer. In their mind that was the track I was on. I guess in my mind I was a kid, I didn’t know anything. So there were things that I loved, that wasn’t one of them, but I assumed that would be the path I would go on.

Debbie Millman:

While in high school, you started a punk band you named the Pricks. Can you talk to us or tell us about the brawl that ensued at your debut gig at CBGBs?

Rick Rubin:

Yeah, it was a planned event, it wasn’t a real brawl. I also like pro wrestling quite a bit, so it was a theatrical event. My father played a policeman in the story. It was like a performance art piece. It’s funny that you ask about it, that it has taken on some sort of a mythology enough for you to ask about it when in reality there were probably 12 people in the room. Even as a performance art piece, it was not particularly successful.

Debbie Millman:

Was it performance art or was it more of a stunt?

Rick Rubin:

I don’t know where the line is. I think the line between those things is very close. The things that Andy Kaufman did, you could say they were stunts, and you could also categorize them as performance art. He did the concert at Carnegie Hall, and at the end of the concert he had everyone in theater go outside and get on buses and go to a junior high school cafeteria for cookies and milk.

Debbie Millman:

I know somebody that was there. It was really phenomenal. It was a phenomenal experience for them.

Rick Rubin:

Yes. It’s clearly a stunt, and it’s clearly performance art. It’s both.

Debbie Millman:

Without a doubt. Without a doubt. You founded your next punk band, Hose, in 1981, and I understand that at the time the band Flipper was a big influence. I have been a huge Flipper fan for as long as I can remember. I think they had one of the greatest rock and roll logos of all time. In what way were they an influence to you?

Rick Rubin:

Up until that point I understood punk rock to be fast music. Flipper was the first punk band that played slow music, almost like sludgy music, and it was very innovative to me and it inspired me to start a slow punk band. So I would say that was probably as close as it got to Flipper, but it’s pretty close because they were the only ones doing that. So it was definitely derivative of Flipper. I don’t think so many bands came in their wake doing what they did. But then Kurt Cobain says Flipper was his biggest influence as well, so interesting to see the tentacles of a band. Because it’s funny, everyone I knew, all the punk rockers I knew had the Flipper album. I knew the guys in the band and I met the people at the record company, and everyone I knew had this album and it sold 10,000 copies, which other albums sell 500,000 copies or a million copies at that time. Yet, here’s one that sold this many, and everyone I know has it.

Well, it messed up my sense of thinking I know what popular is, because I didn’t, and the idea of how much love and energy can be created with a small group of people with a niche audience, because for a period of time, Flipper was my very favorite band, whereas, maybe three years earlier, four years or five years earlier, maybe it would’ve been ACDC, who sold millions and millions of albums. So for me, their impact on me was the same, but their impact on the world was not.

Debbie Millman:

Which I find really upsetting. I think that their seven-minute song, Brainwash, from the compilation Sex Bomb Baby is one of the best pop punk rock songs ever written.

Rick Rubin:

It’s so cool. Love Canal, so cool. The Wheel, they have a song called The Wheel that’s incredible.

Debbie Millman:

Your first 12-inch EP was titled Hose, and according to the liner notes, it was recorded on one Sunday in April, 1982 between the hours of 10:00 PM and 1:00 AM. I believe you designed the cover which was an homage to Composition II made by Mondrian.

Rick Rubin:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

The Hose album was the first time the Def Jam logo was placed on a cover, I believe. Def Jam was the record company you started in your dorm room at NYU. Your dorm room was literally the company’s headquarters, and the NYU mail room became Def Jam’s as well. Your dorm room address was on the album sleeves. How did you first come up with the name Def Jam?

Rick Rubin:

It was street slang for great music, great record. It was something you might hear somebody say who spoke the lingo of the street.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve said that the large D and J letter forms were as much for the role of the DJ in Def Jam as for the words themselves.

Rick Rubin:

Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:

Why so?

Rick Rubin:

One of the reasons I started recording rap music at all was the people who were making it were experienced music makers who had made music before. Hip hop was a really revolutionary new genre, and the people who made music in other ways from before hip hop didn’t really understand what it was. They made it more like the things that had come before. It was not unusual to hear on the earliest of rap records before the Def Jam records the musical track might sound the same as an R&B track that you might hear someone singing on if you went to a nightclub. The perception of the more experienced people at that time was, “Okay, we’ll make this R&B song, and instead of having someone sing the melody, we’ll get a rapper to rap on it.” That’s one aspect of hip hop, but it’s not the whole picture of hip hop.

I would go to hip hop clubs and what was exciting about it was the DJ really was the star of the show. It was all about montage. It was about taking old things and finding a way to reinterpret them. It’s so interesting because it wasn’t copying something. It was taking a tiny aspect and turning this tiny aspect into something new. And it was very exciting. And it was done through human DJing. It was done through dexterity, it wasn’t done through machines. So there was a performance aspect even in replaying someone else’s music, and that’s what hip hop really was. I would have these experiences of going to these clubs with this incredible music, beside the rapping, incredible music. I wanted to basically just document that because as a fan. If someone had already done it, I probably wouldn’t have done it. The only reason I did it was as a fan wanting to be serviced as a fan, and I wasn’t being serviced, so I made it because I wanted it to exist.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve said that when you were first involved in hip hop the idea that it would become what it became was not a possibility. You stated that nobody who was making hip hop music thought this is going to be the biggest thing in the world. Most people didn’t even think it was music. It was that outside everything else that was going on. And at the time, Rick, I was working at HOT 97. I was working with Steve Smith and Judy Ellis, Rocco McRight, Tracy Cloherty, and we were trying to reposition HOT 97 from a dance music radio station, which is what it was, to the first hip hop radio station in the world. Even people at the radio station thought we were nuts.

Rick Rubin:

Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:

They were absolutely convinced that this was going to be a huge failure.

Rick Rubin:

Yes, I remember. I mean, it was incredible cause it was a new urban art form, and the stations that played the urban music refused to play it. The first stations to play hip hop were rock stations and alternative stations and college stations because in some ways the R&B stations were the most resistant to it.

Debbie Millman:

Many of the artists you worked with at that time, including your Def Jam partner, Russell Simmons, used the word fearless to describe you, Rick. Was that a word you’d used to describe yourself then or now?

Rick Rubin:

I would say artistically I’m fearless. I’m not fearless outside of the world of art. The things that turn me on are the things that are radical. I like edgy things, I like extreme things, I like unusual things. I tend not to like the typical mainstream thing. My tastes run that way, and because I know that’s what moves me, I want to make things that move me as well. I know as someone who practices trying to make things to excite myself, there can’t be any rules, there can’t be any boundaries in art. Now, outside of art, it’s a whole different issue. I’m terrified on a regular basis, but when it comes to art, I know… It’s funny, it comes out of knowing it’s what’s best. I know this is what’s best for the art. I know the art has to be free. There’s a line in the book that the world is only as free as it allows its artists to be. It’s true.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve since gone on to be one of the most successful producers in music history. You sold your share of Def Jam to Russell Simmons and started your own labels. You were the co-president of Columbia Records and now own your own studio, Shangri-La Studios. As I mentioned in the intro, you’ve won nine Grammy Awards. You’ve been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, named the most successful producer in any genre by Rolling Stone, you’ve collaborated with many of the biggest artists in every genre of music. Now I want to spend the rest of the show today talking about your new book, the Creative Act: A Way of Being. The first question that I want to ask you about is something I heard you say on my dear friend Tim Ferris’s podcast. Is it really true that he thought you writing this book was a bad idea?

Rick Rubin:

Everyone I spoke to about what I imagined the book could be before starting it, from publishers to friends, thought it was a terrible idea.

Debbie Millman:

Because you weren’t going to be talking about Jay-Z and Ye and Adele? I mean, why, why did they think-

Rick Rubin:

Exactly.

Debbie Millman:

… it was such a bad idea?

Rick Rubin:

The general consensus was the book that people want from me is a book about the stories that they know about that I was involved in. That’s what people want. The reason I was talking to people early on, I was like, “I don’t know what’s in this book. I don’t even know how to figure out what’s going to be in this book, but I have an idea that this is something I want to make happen. I don’t know how it’s going to work, but I’m willing to do the work for it to happen.” The general consensus was why do you want to write a book about something you don’t know about when you can write a book about something you do know about, and that’s the book that everybody wants?” I said, “It’s because it wasn’t interesting to me. I’m not interested in talking about myself at all.”

The whole purpose of me deciding to do a book was based on I get to work with very few artists. I get to work with a lot of artists for someone in my position, but compared to artists in the world, I work with a tiny amount of artists. So if I work with seven or eight artists in a year, that’s a lot. If that’s the whole reach of my creative impact is working with this small group of people, I want to be able to share this information with more people. I don’t know how to do it, but I want to be able to do that and I’m willing to figure it out. And that was a eight-year process to get there.

Debbie Millman:

You said that you wanted people reading this book to have a Dao-like experience. The Dao was written 3,000 years ago. What do you mean by a Dao-like experience?

Rick Rubin:

One of the things that’s so powerful about the Dao is that every time you go back to it, you have a new experience of it. It’s written in an open-ended enough way where the reader is involved in what the book is saying. The book is giving clues for us. It’s not telling us what to do. It’s giving us clues about how to think about things. I wanted the book to be a book that you could open randomly anywhere and get good information, which is what the Dao does, and I wanted a book where every time you read it, you’ll feel like you can learn something new from it. Again, it was a tall order in the beginning of the process.

Debbie Millman:

The book is beautifully designed, it’s very minimal, it’s very clean. There’s no pages and pages of acknowledgements or an intro or an epilogue. There’s a timelessness to the design. In looking through the book to try to find some evidence of who designed it, I saw that actually you designed it. You do give a shout out of thanks to Pentagram, and I know Paula Scher did your Republic Records logo. Did you work with Paula on this as well?

Rick Rubin:

I did. Paula was great and a great collaborator. I thought she would have the credit on the book and she said, “I think the credit is your credit with me,” so that’s how Paula wanted the credit. But I counted on her confidence in what was good when I was making decisions that go against a lot of… When I went to Book Soup to look at what all the new books look like, all the new releases, none of them looked like this book. None of them look remotely like this book.

Debbie Millman:

Which is nice. You can see it from on a table from a distance really easily.

Rick Rubin:

Yeah, it almost feels like it’s from another time, and I like that about it.

Debbie Millman:

Talk about the circle and the dot. That’s a recurring motif. It’s on the cover and then it’s used in each chapter underneath the chapter head.

Rick Rubin:

I like that it’s a symbol that’s open to interpretation. What do you see when you see the circle and the dot?

Debbie Millman:

I see the world, the globe, and the dot is the heart of the globe.

Rick Rubin:

Beautiful. I’ve asked other people, and one person who was an eye doctor said it’s an eye. And another person said it’s a target. I said, “Really? Why do you think it’s a target?” He’s like, “Because it’s a target. That’s clearly what it is.” It’s so funny how when whatever we see, we think that’s what it is, and I like the open poetic nature. I found the symbol a long time ago. It’s the alchemical symbol for the sun. I used it on my phone for a long time. It’s just a symbol that I like to look at. And that’s how it started. I liked that it had some history, some esoteric history to it, yet it doesn’t scream overtly mystical. It’s very open to interpretation.

Debbie Millman:

I mean, the one that I would push back against from your eye doctor was the I, because it feels like there’s not a lot of Is, capital letter I, in the book. It’s not a book that feels I or ego-driven, it feels very much a sort of gift or a love letter, as I mentioned earlier. The titles of the chapters in the Creative Act are just a few words each, most are one or two words, and you call them 78 areas of thought. In the chapter title Tuning In you state, “Just as trees grow flowers and fruits, humanity creates works of art, the Golden Gate Bridge, the White Album, Guanica, Hagia Sophia, the Sphinx, the Space Shuttle, the Autobahn, Clair de Lune, the Coliseum in Rome, the Philips screwdriver, the iPad, Philadelphia cheese steak. The artist is on a cosmic timetable, just like all of nature.” Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by the artist being on a cosmic timetable?

Rick Rubin:

Yes. In the same way that the seasons change, who orchestrates that change? Who orchestrates the bee moving from flower to flower? It’s all instinctual. All these things happen on an instinctual basis. And if we’re in tune, we can be guided in the same way that a hummingbird is guided to build a nest. The same way, we can get back to our true connection if we get out of our own way. If we try to make it, this is the way I think it, that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s if you’re in tune with the planet and you’re playing your role in this giant orchestra that’s going on all the time, and that’s the culture moving forward, that’s everything we get to see is either natural or added to the nature by us.

I’m arguing that we are an extension of nature continuing to unfold. We’re part of it now. We can be part of it in a way that upsets nature, and nature wouldn’t do that. I remember I was in Hawaii years and years ago and I was listening to a public radio station there. There was a very old Hawaiian man being interviewed. He might have even been reading poetry, it was very beautiful. One of the things that he said was, “When I go on the boat and I look back at my island, I see all the things that man made on my island, and none of them make it more beautiful than it was before. None of them make it better.”

The book is arguing that if we are really in tune with what’s going on, we would be making things that make the world a better place. We can’t help but do it. And when I say a better place, maybe I say more in balance because so much of it is balance. Nature gives us terrible storms that wipe out communities. That’s all part of this balance. If we can tap into this energy that’s happening all around us at all times, it’s clear what our choices will be. It’s almost as if it happens for us if we really stay still, really tune.

In the early days of my career, I used to live very against the planet. I would stay up all night, which is not a natural thing to do. I lived in very controlled spaces that were manmade spaces where I didn’t have much connection to nature. I found since living in more outdoor spaces, spending much more time outside, I’m more in tune with the planet now because I’m living the way people lived thousands of years ago. I think that that helps me tune into this energy. I’m not suggesting that’s for everybody, there are degrees of all of this, but I think if we can tune in to what’s going on around us, it becomes clear what our part is.

Debbie Millman:

The whole notion of tuning in feels sort of cosmic and magical to some degree. You go on to state in the book, “If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker. This isn’t because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come.” I’m wondering if you think ideas come through the artist rather than from the artist?

Rick Rubin:

Yes, the ideas come through the artist, not from the artist. The artist may make connections between things, but the grand vision doesn’t come from us. I think the more artists you speak to, they would all tell you this. The ones who really have done it consistently over a period of time tend to get more mystical just through the reality of their experience. When you see something remarkable happen over and over again that you can’t explain, you start to realize, “Well, that’s how it is because it happens all the time.” And once you let your guard down because you see it happen all the time, you can welcome it. You can put yourself in a position to allow it to happen more often.

Debbie Millman:

This reminds me of something Elizabeth Gilbert said about the American poet Ruth Stone, and I wanted to read you verbatim what she said because I think it’s really a perfect example of tuning in and what happens when you do that. She stated that Ruth Stone, who’s now in her 90s, has been a poet her entire life, and described when she was growing up in rural Virginia she’d be out working in the fields, and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. She said, “It was like a thunderous train of air, and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, run like hell. And she would run like hell to the house, and she’d be getting chased by this poem. The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her she could collect it and grab it on the page.

“And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it. And she said it would continue on across the landscape looking, as she put it, for another poet. And then there were those moments where she would almost miss it. She’s running to the house and she’s looking for the paper and the poem passes through her and she grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her. And she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. In these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards from the last word to the first.”

Rick Rubin:

Wow. So cool, I love it. Beautiful.

Debbie Millman:

I was reading your book and I’m like, “Oh my God, Ruth Stone, that’s what happens.” And then I also read that Tom Waits would do that. He’d be driving in the car, and if he couldn’t get to where he was going fast enough, he’d be like, “Don’t you see I’m driving?”

Rick Rubin:

Beautiful. What’s interesting about both of those stories is not just the cosmic transmission aspect, it also tells us the commitment that the artist needs to make that when it’s happening, we have to be present for it. We must be present for it because it’s coming and it’s going. There’s a section of the book called An Area of Thought 24/7, and it’s about the commitment. It’s funny because we say it’s not really about us, yes, it’s not really about us, but if we’re not actively participating with all of ourselves at all times, it doesn’t happen. It takes a tremendous work ethic and commitment to wait for lightning to strike, to wait for it to happen.

And then there’s another part in the book where we talk about you can’t just wait for that, so you have to show up to work either way. And sometimes through that experimentation process, before the lightning strikes, we still have to show up, whether it’s our recording studio or our table to write, where we’re going to sculpt or our design table, whatever it is, we show up. And we show up on a regular enough basis that hopefully, hopefully the lightning will strike more often. And if it doesn’t, we’re going to be so much better at crafting that when it does strike we’re going to be able to make a much more beautiful thing using the information that comes through.

Debbie Millman:

You talk in the book about the playfulness and sense of relaxation that is evident in great work. I know that showing up every day, sitting down every day, doing it every day can be torturous. A lot of the time when I’m making something, I feel like I’m having a fight with whoever I’m making it with. I mean, I’m not talking about a person, I’m talking about a pen or when I’m making art tortured with the canvas, or if I’m writing something, I’m just being tortured by the words. And then it might take, I don’t know, however long, sometimes hours, sometimes weeks to get to that place where you feel like the work is coming through you as opposed to from you. And that’s the torture, that fight within myself. What kind of advice would you have for people listening that want to try to get more comfortable with the playfulness or get more in tune with the playfulness?

Rick Rubin:

Well, I want to say something about what you just said before I answer that question…

Debbie Millman:

Sure.

Rick Rubin:

… just because it happened to me this morning. I’m starting a new podcast because I’ve been doing Broken Record for five years where I’ve been talking to musicians, and I realized I like to talk to people who are not musicians. I like to talk to all kinds of people. So I’m starting a new podcast, which will be called Tetragrammaton, and I made a little welcome recording to start the process. I made a version of it with a friend talking to me, asking me questions and talking about the podcast. And it was fun and it worked well. And then I listened back and I thought, “I didn’t really like my choice of words. I feel like I could do better.” Also now that I’m written a book and I know the amount of time that went into picking every word in the book, writing and rewriting and trying to convey information in a way that it’s both accurate and hold some energy.

So I thought, “Okay, I’m going to rewrite my answers to be more together, more like in the book.” I rewrote it last night and then I rerecorded it. And then this morning I got back the edit with the new rewritten version, and it was terrible. I immediately was like, “Oh, I have to go with the first one. It’s imperfect. It’s casual. It’s fun, and it says what it needs to say.” Me working on it didn’t make it better. Me giving it better words didn’t make it better. And being open to, even though in my mind I can make it better, me doing the work to make it better, me putting the time in to make it better and then saying, “You know what? I’m going with the original that I thought wasn’t good enough. I’m going back to that because it has something that I can’t explain.”

So knowing that the amount of time or effort we put into a project gives no connection between the amount of work that goes in and how good it gets. Unless you do the work, you never know if it could be better. So when we’re working in the recording studio, often an artist is playing a song and it gets better and it gets better and it gets better and we keep playing it and we keep playing it until it gets worse and worse and worse because it still might get better, it still might get better. But once the momentum shifts and it gets worse a couple of times in a row, the chances in that moment of getting a better one, unlikely. We may come back to it at another time or rethink it at another time, but in the moment when it’s happening, there’s a momentum that’s generated where it’s getting better or hanging around the same area, and then there’s a time when it gets worse.

Debbie Millman:

How do you know when it’s getting worse?

Rick Rubin:

It’s a feeling. It’s a feeling. I’ll tell you, one of the things that’s hardest about it is if you’re listening to the same thing over and over again, you can definitely lose perspective. Sometimes I’ll say five hours into playing something, “I can’t really tell anymore, let’s listen to it tomorrow.” Or go out for a walk, go for a swim, or work on something different. If you really engage in a different project and you come back to the project you had tunnel vision on, the tunnel vision’s gone as soon as you really engage in something else.

Debbie Millman:

I want to talk with you about the artist’s antenna. You state that we are all translators for messages the universe is broadcasting, and the best artists tend to be the ones with the most sensitive antenna to draw in the energy resonating at a particular moment. I think connects a bit to the tuning in aspect as well. How do you think that artists are able to pick up what is resonating through this antenna? Do you think it’s magic?

Rick Rubin:

Yeah, I think it starts through the love of the thing that you’re making. When you go into a creative pursuit, chances are you doing it because you love that form. I think that devotion plays a role. Through repeated viewing, repeated listening, repeated the study, the care that goes in as a fan, I think that opens the channel. Now, in terms of sensitivity, the same sensitivity that makes you a great artist makes you a sensitive person. There’s great beauty in being more sensitive, and there’s great pain in being more sensitive. So it’s not uncommon to see great artists have drug problems or not be able to handle their life in a way that’s sustainable. That same sensitivity is the thing that makes them the great artist. It makes the world too painful to be in, can make the world to be. It can also make the world an ecstatic place. The highs tend to be higher and the lows tend to be lower if you’re really sensitive. Where another person having the same input feels it as a three or a seven, and we might feel it as a zero or 11 based on the same input.

Debbie Millman:

You state that many great artists first develop their sensitive antenna not to create art but to protect themselves.

Rick Rubin:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

And they have to protect themselves because everything hurts more and because they feel everything more deeply.

Rick Rubin:

An example of that would be it’s not unusual to hear stories of artists whose parents maybe were alcoholics, and when a parent would get home and they wouldn’t know which version of the parent it would be, “Is this the one that I can talk to, or is this the one if I try to talk to, I’m going to get hurt or threatened?” Even as children, to protect themselves, they’re learning to study the situation in very advanced ways, unrealistically advanced ways.

Debbie Millman:

I have spoken to psychologists about how that awareness is created to try to stay as safe as possible. And if you can be that attuned to what somebody might do to you, you can try to protect yourself from it. But that’s a tough exchange.

Rick Rubin:

Absolutely. The other beautiful part of it is through the self-expression, we can heal. There’s something about being able to say, “This is me as I am. This is how I see the world,” it’s really enlivening. And through the creation of art we can heal ourselves and we can heal the audience as well. We heal each other. It’s a beautiful form of connection and communication.

Debbie Millman:

Especially when great music speaks to the person individually but universally at the same time.

Rick Rubin:

Yes. When it’s speaking to different people, different people can like it for completely different reasons and have a completely different relationship to it. And none of that matters. Once we make a piece of art to our standard and put it out into the world, after that, the audience gets to… It gets to become theirs. And when I say theirs, each person who interacts with it gets to have their own story with it, and based on their life experiences, they’ll see it in a different way.

Debbie Millman:

Have you been able to work with artists to try to calibrate their antenna to use that sensitivity without being self-destructive?

Rick Rubin:

Absolutely. Myself. I tend to be depressive, and being a Pisces, I’m a person who historically-

Debbie Millman:

Water.

Rick Rubin:

… would be one who might fall prey to addiction. Luckily I’ve been able to avoid that as it relates to drugs or alcohol. I definitely had a food problem, and I was very overweight earlier in my life, and luckily found a way out of that.

Debbie Millman:

How would you define your own antenna?

Rick Rubin:

I would say I’m an open channel. When something interests me, it doesn’t matter where it’s coming from or why. I notice what’s interesting to me. I don’t feel like I have a thing that’s mine in terms of the way that I’m engaging as making creative things. Sometimes when I look at many of the things I’ve made, I can see themes that run through them, but it never happens intentionally that way. I get to realize I like things that have a believability about them. I like it to feel natural and in the moment, and I like things that are surprising.

Debbie Millman:

You have a chapter titled Self-Doubt, and you state that self-doubt lives in all of us. While we may wish it to be gone, it is there to serve us. I was surprised to hear that you have a depressive tendency because so much of your work seems so buoyed by light. How do you manage self-doubt? Do you still have self-doubt? I think I heard, actually, on 60 Minutes that you feel like you’re paid for your confidence and decision making. Is there room for self-doubt in that?

Rick Rubin:

There’s definitely room for self-doubt. The purpose of it is to know what you’re doubting. When the work is in front of me and I have the reaction that I have, whatever that is, I think it’s beautiful, I think it’s challenging, I think it’s exciting, I think it’s not good enough. I trust that a million percent, and the reason is if I feel it, I’m not thinking past that. It’s like if I’m shown two pieces of clothing and asked which one I like better, it’s usually easy for me to say, “I think I like this one better than that one.” That’s all I’m doing. I never go past what that means or what are the commercial implications or what the companies are going to think. I never think past just, how does it make me feel? Would I wear that piece of clothing or do I think it needs to be a better piece of clothing? Do I want a different choice?

I’m making things as the audience. I’m always the audience for the things that I’m working on, and I never think past what I like. The self-doubt can come when you get past what you think. I would say in my work, I’ve never had self-doubt. All it is is a reflection of where I’m at. It’s like, “This is the best version of this that I can make at this time. I like it. I like it enough for you to hear it” Or “I’m collaborating with a person whose name’s on the front of the record and this is how they want it to be, and I support them in their vision. It’s theirs.” But beyond that, it’s out of our control. So self-doubt would come in different ways. In the book, we talk about doubting a work into greatness, and that’s the difference between doubting yourself and doubting a work.

Debbie Millman:

How do you deal with artists that are concerned or worried or doubting that they’re not going to ever be able to make something as good as they already did?

Rick Rubin:

I come in with the confidence of saying, “We’re going to make the best thing you’ve ever made.” The reason there is for us to work together to make the best thing you’ve ever made. Whether that’s possible or not, we’ll see, but that’s the intention. We go in with the intention it’s going to be the best it could ever be. I could remember when I said that to Johnny Cash, he looked at me like I was insane because he had reached such heights and so long ago. The last 20, 25 years before us working together, there were no glimpses that he would get to the place where he was before. But I definitely went in with that intention, that was my goal. Again, I don’t know if it’s possible, but that’s the intention and it’s a belief that it’s possible, because everything’s possible. We don’t know. We can’t know. I always start with the idea of, “I know I’m willing to do whatever I can do for it to be as good as it could be. We’re going to find out how good that is.”

Debbie Millman:

Do you believe that something needs to be believed as possible in order to make it possible?

Rick Rubin:

I think it helps because sometimes we surprise ourselves into the possibility of something existing that we don’t think is possible. We can be working on something and through a mistake discover, “Whoa, that thing I didn’t think was possible is possible.”

Debbie Millman:

I loved your book. The one part that actually made me cry, and I don’t cry at a lot of books, you wrote about fear. I am going to try to read this without actually tearing up. “Ultimately, your desire to create must be greater than your fear of it.” What would be your advice to anyone like me that might be having a war between fear and art?

Rick Rubin:

I would suggest lowering the stakes and know that the thing that you’re making is… Think of it more like a diary entry. You’re making a diary entry. Tomorrow you’re going to make a new diary entry. The work that you’re making doesn’t define you for the rest of your life. It’s a moment in time. If you like the thing that you make enough to show it to a friend, it’s ready to go to the world. Because if you’ll show it to your friend or someone with good taste, that’s all it is. It’s no more than that. Everything else is a story in our head. But if it’s good enough to show to your friend, it’s certainly good enough to show to a stranger.

The other thing that I would recommend is anything you can do to get on a roll of momentum of like a diary entry, make something small, release it into the world. No one has to see it. Just put it up. Whatever your version of publishing is, publish it. Do another one, publish it, do another one, publish it, do another one, publish it. Get past the idea that this thing is going to define me forever and it has to be perfect. I don’t know if it could ever be finished. What’s today’s version? Put it out. What’s tomorrow’s version? Put it out. Through that process you build the musculature and the confidence to be able to do it.

Debbie Millman:

Where do you see the role of shame in making art?

Rick Rubin:

Any of the negative emotions that we have can be channeled into the thing that we’re making. Whatever our state is when we’re making things is somehow inhabited in the art, and that’s part of what makes the art great. The art isn’t great because of how perfect it is. It’s great because of how close of a reflection it is to our humanity, flaws and all. In terms of shame from the outside on work that you do, all I could say is to ignore it, because if someone doesn’t like something you make, that’s fine. That tells you more about them than it does about you. It’s funny, I’ve read a bunch of reviews about the book, they’ve been a bunch of great reviews. There are some reviews of people saying, “This is the worst book I’ve ever read.” No, it’s amazing to see, and the best work divides the audience, I talk about it in the book. If everybody likes it, you haven’t gone far enough.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, that’s like the worst thing that could possibly happen. Then it’s just middle of the road.

Rick Rubin:

Yeah. So it’s okay if someone doesn’t like the work. Going from someone hating it to loving it is easier than having someone not care about it. Not care about it as a non-starter.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, actually reminds me of something that you said in the chapter on greatness, where you state that if you think, “I don’t like it, but someone else will,” you’re not making art for yourself. You’ve found yourself then in the business of commerce, which is fine, but it’s not art, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Seth Godin said something very similar in an interview that I did with him several years ago that also is a mantra in my mind. Would you say that any art that involves ego or vanity or self-glorification or need for approval is anti-art?

Rick Rubin:

Not necessarily. Honestly, not necessarily, because there aren’t any rules. There are some really great artists who are complete egomaniacs, and they find a way to make that work. There’s no blanket rule for any of these things. You can always find the exception.

Debbie Millman:

You have a chapter in The Creative Act called The Abundant Mindset, which reminded me of something that the late great Milton Glaser said in an interview I had with him. He stated, “If you perceived the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be.” Milton always thought there was enough to go around for everyone if we were willing to share. There are enough ideas in the universe and enough nourishment. Why do you think people get so protective of ideas? One of the things that I love about hip hop is the sharing and the sampling and the building from one art form to another. Yet, people are so litigious and contentious about it now.

Rick Rubin:

In the early days of hip hop, the people who were doing it were purely doing it out of love. I think anything that turns into big business ends up becoming more contentious. It’s just a byproduct of success.

Debbie Millman:

I have one last question for you today. I have about 400 other questions I’d like to ask you, maybe even more, but I’m conscious of our time.

Rick Rubin:

We will do this again, for sure.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. Thank you. You write in The Creative Act that it’s not uncommon to long for outward success, hopeful that it will fill a void inside ourselves, some imagine achievement as a remedy to fix or heal a sense of not being enough. For those of us struggling, so self-serving question is my last question, sorry about that, very obvious, for those of us struggling with filling that void with productivity or achievement or success, what would be the first thing you’d recommend people do to try and reset?

Rick Rubin:

I would say get some sort of help outside of art to work on yourself because they’re two separate things. The first album I produced that was a number one album was the Beastie Boys Licensed to Ill.

Debbie Millman:

License to Ill, yeah.

Rick Rubin:

I remember getting a call from the lawyer I worked with at that time who said, “You have the number one album in the country, how does that feel?” I remember saying, “I’ve never felt worse in my whole life,” in that moment. All I thought was, “All I ever want to do is make good music. I’m making something that I love that the world loves, and it did nothing for whatever was going on inside.” If it wasn’t for that phone call, I would think back think, “Oh, that must’ve been the greatest.” But I remember how surreal it was having this conversation. I’ve had great success over the course of my life, and I have a great life outwardly because of it. None of that healed whatever’s going on inside of me, and that was a whole other full-time job for as long as I’ve been doing this.

Debbie Millman:

How long does the feeling of pride or accomplishment stay with you after you make something you’re proud of?

Rick Rubin:

In the moment that it happens, I feel the excitement of like, “There it is.” As soon as I let it out into the world, I usually don’t think about it again. I’m doing things like reading the reviews of the book. This is the first time I’ve ever written a book. It’s the first time my name has been on the front of something. My name’s always on the back. In some ways, this is my first project, even though I’ve made hundreds of things over the course of my life. So I’m treating it in a different way than anything else I’ve done before. Really out of the curiosity of just like, “How does this work? What does this feel like? What’s going on?” and luckily, I’ve in a place where I can read someone say something really beautiful and I can see, “Oh, I understand what they see in it, and that’s beautiful.” And then I can read someone who hates it and I can laugh, it’s like, “Wow, they don’t get it at all. I feel bad for them.”

For me, it’s beautiful, and I know for some people it’s beautiful, so I feel bad if someone doesn’t feel it. But again, not everything’s for everybody. It’s one of the things I love so much about Seth Godin. Seth really instills this idea of finding your tribe, finding whatever size it is, the people who like what you do, that’s your audience. And if you cater to them… When I say cater to them, meaning you make the things you want to make that they like. Catering to them can be misinterpreted. It’s like you’re making what they want. No, no, no, you’re making what you want, and they are the right audience. They feel what you are doing, whatever size that is.

And then on occasion, out of that something transcends that small tribe and has a universal appeal. That’s all we could ever do. You can’t aim for any more than really yourself first, yourself and the one friend that you feel good enough about playing it for that tells you, “Okay, I’m ready for this to be seen by someone.” And then you know, “Okay, it’s time for this to be seen.” Or you can say, “I’m going to work on it a little more, see what happens.” Work on it a little more. If it gets better, great. If it gets worse, okay, there it is. Let’s start the next one. Let’s send this out into the world and start the next one.

I learned something recently about the musical artist Drake, very popular rapper, and I learned that over the course of the year, he put out 80 songs, 8-0. Now, he’s one of the biggest artists in the world. He doesn’t put out an album every year, but he put out 80 songs, many of which I’m thinking other than the hardcore Drake fans never heard. It’s not like the batting average is high. He’s taking a lot of swings all the time. I didn’t know that. I only know the ones that everybody knows. I thought it was fascinating. So even when you’d think you’re under the microscope because the whole world is watching because you’re at the top of your game, there’s 80 songs that argue otherwise.

Debbie Millman:

Rick Rubin, thank you so much for making this beautiful book that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Rick Rubin:

Thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:

Rick Rubin’s latest book, his first book, is The Creative Act: A Way of Being. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Rick Rubin appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

Okay, so you have a few bad habits. Maybe you bite your nails, maybe you drink too much, too often. Oh and cheese. Is there too much cheese in your life? I know there is in mine. And don’t get me started on flossing. And yet, it’s hard. It’s really, really, really hard to break a bad habit. And it’s just as hard to get a good habit going. Or is it?

James Clear thinks it’s doable, and he wrote a blockbuster best selling book about it titled Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. James Clear is a writer, a speaker, and an entrepreneur. And he’s here to tell us about his life, his career, and how we maybe can stop sabotaging our efforts with insurmountable goals. James Clear, welcome to Design Matters.

James Clear:

Hey, good to talk to you. Thanks for having me. And I think cheese is only a good habit. I can’t categorize that as bad. That sounds great.

Debbie Millman:

Well, we’re starting out in a very good place. James, I understand that you tend to geek out about ultra light travel bags. Why?

James Clear:

Yeah, I don’t know. In my twenties I had this urge where I really wanted to see the world and get out. I had never been abroad until I was 23 I think. Eventually after I graduated college, I got a passport and started wanting to travel. And I was really into photography at the time, and so I was doing a lot of landscape photography or street photography in different places.

I can remember one trip in particular where I landed in Morocco and I was in Marrakesh, and I was taking some pictures and hanging out and doing some stuff, and. Then a few days later I went to Casablanca and I got off the train. It was 4:00 or something or 3:00, and for some reason I wasn’t able to get to my hotel quickly and the sun was setting soon, and that’s the hour when the light is best for photos. And so I wanted to take pictures for the next couple hours before the sun was gone, but I didn’t have time to drop my bags off. And I was so happy that I had figured out how to travel with just one bag because it would’ve been a ridiculous scene for me to be carting around wheeling all this luggage around trying to take photos for a couple hours. So that was probably the trip where I was like, “It’s definitely worth the effort to try to figure out how to travel with just one bag.”

Debbie Millman:

Let’s go back in time a little. You were born and raised in Hamilton, Ohio. Your mom is a nurse. Your dad played professional baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals in the minor leagues, and still live in the same house you grew up in. You used to live in Ohio as well. Why Ohio?

James Clear:

I mean, the main answer I think is family. The main answer is the people I love live here. But I like Ohio too. I have pride in being from here. My parents’ house, which they do still live in. It’s about five minutes away from my grandparents’ house, so I spent a large portion of my childhood running around on my grandparents’ farm. They both live maybe 45 minutes north of Cincinnati. It’s a little more built up now than when I was growing up. I grew up, it was much more rural. Being outdoors, and running around the fields, and feeding the cows, that was all part of how I grew up, and I loved being outside there. I have a cabin in the woods now too that I love to go out to, and I have dreams of taking my grandkids out there the way that I spent time on my grandparents’ farm. I don’t know, it occupies a warm place in my heart and I’m proud to be from Hamilton, and proud to be from Ohio. And all of the people I love are still here, so I spend a lot of time here.

Debbie Millman:

Well, having cows then makes sense regarding your love of cheese.

James Clear:

That’s right. I didn’t think about that, but it started early.

Debbie Millman:

Now I know that every Sunday, you and your family and all of your cousins and extended family would go over to your grandparents’ house, and your grandmother would make dinner every Sunday for 18 people.

James Clear:

I know. She was a saint.

Debbie Millman:

What kinds of things would she make for 18 people? That’s like a Thanksgiving dinner every week.

James Clear:

It was a lot of spaghetti, a lot of pasta a lot of the time. Lasagna and spaghetti are the two that I remember the most. Every Sunday we would go to church in the morning and then we’d go over to my grandparents for breakfast. So my grandma would cook us breakfast. That was just my immediate family and my grandparents. That’s seven or eight people. Then we’d go home for four hours, and then at 3:00 we would come back to their house and then she would cook dinner for 18 people.

Debbie Millman:

You’re right, she’s a saint.

James Clear:

Yeah. And I say that jokingly because of all the work and everything that she did for us. She actually passed away recently. She passed away within the last year. And some of our extended family, some cousins of hers and stuff came down from Columbus for the funeral. And one of them said that he looked at his coworkers before he drove down that day and he was like, ‘I’m telling you, she’s the sweetest lady I’ve ever met.” But I think we all have people in our lives that we love to say things like that about, but she actually is the one person I know that when you said things like that at her funeral, you weren’t just being nice about it and kind of glossing over the tougher parts of her life. I truly don’t know if I ever heard her criticize someone, which is just an insane thing to be able to say about somebody. She’s almost too nice about it. It was one of those things where it was like truly if I didn’t have something nice to say, I just didn’t say anything at all. She was a special lady, and I’m fortunate to have had her in my life.

Debbie Millman:

James, I understand that when you were four years old, you saw a cowboy on TV and decided right then and there you wanted to have lasso and swing it. So you took a screwdriver and tied it to a piece of string, and swung it around your head in the backyard. This resulted in your cutting your eyelid and getting your first stitches.

And fast forward as you’re growing up, you were playing sports and they had a significant role in your life. You swam, you played basketball and football. But because you were always getting hit in football, you switched to baseball. And I was wondering, especially as we’ll go into what happened in high school while you were playing sports. I’m wondering, are you accident prone?

James Clear:

Yeah, it’s funny. I don’t think of myself as being super reckless or anything, but I don’t know. I have a lot of experiences with stitches. Yeah, I don’t know. I just wanted to make a lasso and I thought, “I’ll tie a screwdriver on the string that’ll do the trick.” And my mom was in the kitchen and looked out the window and saw me just whirling this around my head. I was really lucky though, and actually that’s kind of a theme throughout many of the injuries that I had is that it was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. I cut my eyelid but not my eye, and I ended up getting stitches on my eyelid and kind of sewing that back together.

And then later, I’ve had stitches all over the place. I cut my knee open diving on a broken swing set, and then of course I had my injuries in high school. I had a set of blinds fall in my head one time. I ended up getting 20 staples across my head for that. So I don’t know. I really don’t identify as someone who’s accident prone, but that probably sounds ridiculous to anybody listening to me list all these off right now.

Debbie Millman:

Well, it’s interesting because all of your accidents really have something to do with being sports-minded or athletic. I am actually accident prone, but I’m the kind of person that trips over nothing, falls over a step, bangs into a wall or a door. I mean all of my stitches, and I have a bunch are all self-inflicted wounds that I encountered by being clumsy.

James Clear:

I think the way that I would describe it for me is I’m very hard on things. My wife is constantly complaining about that. I’m banging doors, plopping onto couches, cracking frames of things. I’m always very hard on things. I don’t buy nice cars for myself because I know that I’m just going to-

Debbie Millman:

Same. Exactly.

James Clear:

I need something that I can be rough with. I guess I am that way with my body occasionally too.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I am the same way. My wife has a gorgeous car. I will not even try to drive it. I insisted on getting a Jeep.

James Clear:

Yeah, there you go. That seems right.

Debbie Millman:

So let’s talk about what happened in high school, because I do think it is a really defining moment in how you became who you are. Like your dad, you wanted to play professional baseball on the last day of your sophomore year of high school while playing with your classmates. You were hit in the face right between the eyes with a flying baseball bat that slipped out of the hands of one of your team members and rotated through the air, sort of like a helicopter into your face.

The hit broke your nose and your ethmoid bone, which is the bone behind your nose, deep inside your skull. Shattered both your eye sockets. Cognitively. You didn’t know what year it was. You lost the ability to breathe, and you began to have seizures.

What happened next? I mean, and we’ll talk a lot about your book. You start your book with this chapter, which resulted in my sort of just not putting the book down till pretty much I finished. It is so riveting and so unexpected to start a book in this way.

James Clear:

Yeah, I guess that was a good call by my publisher. I don’t like writing about myself, so I pushed back multiple times and it’s like, “I just don’t think it needs to be about me.” I’d really prefer to just make it straightforward and about building better habits, but they ended up winning out and they were like, “This has to be in there.” So it seems like people found it interesting.

Yeah, it was a hard moment for me. I don’t know. It’s strange to think about in retrospect. It’s hard to fully parse the experience. I was obviously very out of it for a while. I ended up being put into a medically induced coma that night. I ended up waking back up the next day. And as you said, I had multiple facial fractures. I ended up back into surgery about a week later to get a lot of that fixed up, which interestingly that hurt more than the initial injury was the breaking of my nose, the resetting of a lot of the bones.

The big thing is the road to recovery was so long. I couldn’t drive a car for the next nine months. I was practicing basic motor patterns, like walking in a straight line at physical therapy. All I really wanted to do was just get back, and play some baseball, and be a normal teenage kid. But it took a long time.

And I did not have any language for describing what I was going through at the time. I never would’ve said like, “I was just trying to get 1% better. I was just trying to find a way to improve.” But that was a time in my life when I had to practice the art of small changes or the art of little improvements, because that’s all I could really handle. I just had to find something to be positive about or some small improvement to focus on, and then wake up the next day and try to do it again. And eventually I was able to make my way back.

It’s funny, thinking back on it now, I don’t remember being really in a bad mood about it. I remember being I don’t know, fairly positive or happy. And I think to your point earlier about what’s special about Ohio or what’s special about being here, it was the people that helped me do that. I mean, my grandpa was a very positive person. My parents are very positive people. And I think their influence was really dramatic and important during that time. And even though my physical progress was slow, mentally, I had a good attitude and I felt pretty good throughout the process. And it was a long road back, but I don’t look back on it begrudgingly.

Debbie Millman:

The hospital that you were flown to was the same hospital your sister went to for her cancer treatment after she was diagnosed with leukemia 10 years prior. And your parents met with the same priest they had met with back then as well. Was there ever a moment where you were in danger of losing your life?

James Clear:

So there was a period of time where I started to lose the ability to do basic functions. Swallowing, breathing. I had a couple seizures as I mentioned. And then at one point, I lost the ability to breathe on my own. So I think that probably qualifies. They had to intubate me, and then they were pumping breaths into me by hand for a little bit because around that same time, I was being transferred to the helicopter. The helipad was across the street. So we were in this ridiculous situation where I obviously was told all this after the fact, I’m being wheeled across the street and we kind of are hitting bumps on the sidewalk. The intubation apparatus popped out, so they had to reattach that. And then were trying to get me on the helicopter at the same time. So I think the nurses and doctors did a great job managing the whole situation, but I was in a very unstable condition for a window of time there.

Debbie Millman:

You were placed in a coma as you mentioned. And when you woke up, you told one of the nurses that you had lost the ability to smell. She then recommended that you blow your nose. What happened after that?

James Clear:

Yeah. I mean it seems like a decent idea. I was just like, “I can’t smell anything.” And she was like, “Well, you have all kinds of gunk and blood, and all sorts of stuff in there, so let’s clear your nasal cavity a little bit. So see if you can blow that out.” Which it didn’t hurt that bad even though my nose was broken. But when I blew, I forced air through the cracks in my shattered eye socket, and so then my left eye bulged out of the socket. It was halfway out. So the situation just became more complicated.

I ended up having double vision for weeks. The doctors all had to confer to try to figure out what to do. They decided not to operate. They said they were pretty sure that the air was going to seep back out of the eye socket and my eye would gradually recede. And that did happen. It took about a month for it to go back to the normal position, but it did slowly make its way back.

Debbie Millman:

Pretty sure is not very confidence inducing.

James Clear:

Right. At the time, that probably didn’t feel as good as I was hoping, but we made it back. We made our way out. It was a really ridiculous 24 hour stretch.

Debbie Millman:

You said that after the injury, you were trying to regain some control over your life. What did that look like for you?

James Clear:

I think it all started with focusing on what you can control. So I mentioned physically, it was physical therapy sessions or whatever. Whatever exercise I was being asked to do. Can I do this well, can I try to give a good effort and do this successfully and have a good day today? So it started with a lot of that stuff.

I had always enjoyed school and always taken pride in getting good grades and being a good student. It’s funny, as an entrepreneur now, a lot of my entrepreneurial friends really are anti school, or are down on school, or didn’t have a good experience. I feel like the opposite. It was kind of a game to me and I enjoyed trying to figure out how to play the game well. So I didn’t know if I have every indication that my intelligence is the same, but is it? Let’s see.

And so I felt good about being able to study in the same way, or get a good grade on a test, or just make my way back there. I do think that helped me gain some confidence and feel like, “You know what? Maybe I can’t move the way I want yet, or maybe I still have a little bit of double vision or I can’t drive a car yet. But it seems like everything’s going to be okay. I’m thinking clearly, and I’ll get there eventually.” So I think study habits played a role in it.

And then eventually, once I was able to start playing baseball again about a year later, then I started to focus more on the physical and the athletic part of it. And I was never as good as my dad, so I didn’t end up playing professionally or anything like that. But looking back on my career, I feel like I was able to fulfill my potential. And that was a pretty long arc. It took me probably a solid five or six years of continuous improvement and just getting a little bit better each year. I barely got to play high school baseball. I was coming off the bench my first year in college. My sophomore year, I ended up being a starter. My junior year I was all conference, my senior year I was an all American. So I just gradually kept making these little progressions.

And that was very confidence inspiring. I had a coach who told me one time, a basketball coach that confidence is just displayed ability. And I felt like each year that went on, I was displaying my ability a little bit more and more. And I was gaining confidence in myself and feeling like, “Yeah, I have ever a reason the world to work really hard this off season or to show up again because I have proof of it.”

Debbie Millman:

I sort of see confidence as the successful repetition of any endeavor.

James Clear:

I like that, the successful repetition of any endeavor. It’s like that coach that told me that, that confidence is displayed ability is kind of like, “Yeah, if you want to feel confident about making free throws, go out there and practice.” And once you knock down 10 in a row, you’re going to feel a lot better about it. Successful repetition of it is going to breed confidence.

It is kind of this interesting thing. I think a lot of the time in life, we talk ourselves out of attempting things. We decide that, “I’m not ready yet. I just don’t feel confident in it. I feel like I need to learn more. I feel like I need to develop my skills.” But the confidence comes after the fact, not before. And you need the willingness to try, and then the confidence arises after the fact.

Debbie Millman:

How do you manage being back on the baseball field? For me, it would’ve been, I don’t know what it was for you. But that first day back on the field holding your mid up to catch a ball, were you afraid of getting hit again?

James Clear:

That’s interesting. Actually looking back, that’s a great question. Looking back, I had a couple advantages that I didn’t really think about. So the first is I actually got hurt in gym class, not in a game. So we were playing baseball, but it wasn’t an actual game. And secondly, I got hit by a bat, but I was a pitcher. So I didn’t have to pick up a bat and get in the batters box that often. I was just standing on the mound pitching. And so when I was playing the game, I was not in the same situation as when I was injured, which is an interesting thing looking back on it. And so I didn’t really have that very much. I didn’t have this fear of playing baseball. If anything, I was just excited to get back out there and get back to it.

I’m not the kind of person that worries very much. Maybe to my detriment sometimes, but I’m not that kind of mindset. I just was able to chalk it up to, “Listen, this is a freak accent.” And sometimes you get unlucky in life and unlucky that day. Yeah. And then you just got to move on.

Debbie Millman:

You got a full scholarship to go to Denison University where you majored in biomechanics. Why biomechanics? What were you imagining you were going to do professionally back then?

James Clear:

Oh man, I wasn’t imagining anything. The only thing I wanted to do in college was play baseball, but I liked school and I was a good student. And looking back, I was able to kind of hack the system to my benefit.

So I don’t have any entrepreneurs in my family. I didn’t have anybody to look to. I wasn’t thinking I’ll be an entrepreneur someday. And at that time, I didn’t have any close friends who were entrepreneurial or whatever. But when I went to college, I looked at all the majors that were there, and I was interested in some stuff. I was a science guy, so I was interested in biology and physics. I took some chemistry classes. I was kind of playing in that sphere anyway. And then my sophomore year I heard, I don’t even remember where, that you could design your own major. And I was like, “I didn’t even know that was a thing.”

So I looked into it a little bit more. I just looked at the course catalog and I was like, “I like these physics classes, and I like these anatomy classes, and I like these biology classes. I’ve already taken a couple of these chemistry classes.” And then I just put it all out on the piece of paper and I was like, “What would my major like this be called?” And biomechanics was the closest thing that I could think of. And it applied pretty well. I pitched it to the Academic Affairs Council and they were like, “Yeah sure.”

So looking back, that’s a pretty entrepreneurial thing to do, to be like, “I don’t like any of the options that you have. I’ll make my own.” But I didn’t identify as an entrepreneur at that time. But it’s kind of cool to connect the dots looking backward and being like, “You were sort of always on this path. You like creating things, you like optimizing things. You like creating your own experience.”

Debbie Millman:

You then went on to Ohio State for your MBA. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of the St. Gallen Symposium when you were there?

James Clear:

Yeah, so to the point that I just made a few minutes ago where I said all I really wanted to do was play baseball, but I liked school and I was good at school. I hadn’t thought too much about what I was going to do after at Denison. And my default answer was always I’ll go to med school. I thought about doing that and then I looked at a PhD program. I applied for a Fulbright Grant that I didn’t get. So that was kind of sitting there and I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll go and get my MBA.” Not because I really knew anything about it. I had never had a real corporate job or anything. Just because everybody said, “Yeah, business knowledge. That’s important. You should know how that works. And then that’ll always be relevant.” I ended up getting a good scholarship, so it made the decision easy. But what I really needed was time to think. I needed two years to figure out what am I actually going to do next.

So I went there and I took the classes, and occasionally these opportunities would come across that they would email out to the class. And there was this one called the St. Gallen Symposium that was a conference that was in Switzerland. And as I had mentioned previously, I had never been abroad at that point. So I was like, “Man, this is an essay competition. And if you get selected, if your essay gets chosen, you get to go to Switzerland. Well, that sounds kind of cool.”

I did actually something that now I use this strategy all the time and or have used it all the time over the last 10 years building my business, which is basically looking at best practices and trying to figure out what parts of those transfer to your own skill set and experience. Or reverse engineering, I guess we could call it.

So the symposium had all the previous winners listed on the website and their essays. And so I downloaded all the essays from the previous 10 years and read them all. And I looked to see how many references did each one have, how long was each one. Was there any similarity in structure in the way that they made their argument? And I did actually end up finding some common themes that it appeared the selection committee liked.

And so when I wrote my article, I had that number of references, and I used that structure, and I wrote with that amount of length, and all of that. And anyway, long story short, the essay got selected. Ultimately, I actually ended up going two years. So the MBA program was a two year program. And I attended the first year. And then the second year, my essay ended up being selected as the winner. And the prize was $10,000. That was more money than I had ever made before. So I was getting ready to graduate, and suddenly I had $10,000 in the bank account. And I was like, “You know what? Maybe I’ll try to give it a go and try to make my own thing.” Maybe I’ll try to start a business. So that was the money that I lived off of for the first probably six to eight months while I was trying to figure things out and start my own thing. And I really don’t know… at this point I’m kind of like man, I’m so wired this way. I probably would’ve ended up an entrepreneur somehow. But I don’t know how it would’ve happened without that essay. I probably would’ve had to go get a regular job for a while and then figure out some exit plan.

Debbie Millman:

So when you started your own business, what was the business?

James Clear:

Well, my first ideas, my first attempts were really sad attempts at a business. The very first thing I took some of that $10,000 that I got paid. I think I spent 1,500 bucks on getting an iPhone app built. And it let you put… this is pretty Instagram. This is a while ago. It let you put captions on photos and filters on photos and stuff. It didn’t have any kind of social media component or anything, but it was just like a photo editing app. It was pretty bad looking back on it. It wasn’t very well executed.

And I put it on the app store because I was hearing all these stories about people launching apps and making all this money. And I just thought, “If you build it, they will come.” And I built it and nobody came. And that was a good lesson for me. It was an expensive one because I had just burned through 15% of my cash. But I needed to learn that you need to have an audience. You need to have an ability to market, an ability to launch a product. I had no way of getting the word out. I didn’t know how to get in front of people. And so that experience forced me to go back to the drawing board and learn how do you get an audience? How would I get this in front of people’s eyeballs?

And I started reading more and more about email lists, and building an email list, and starting a blog, and all that. And I started to go down that path. As I did over the next year or two, I started some other websites, some of which were other bad business ideas. I bought puppypresent.com at one point.

Debbie Millman:

That’s a good name.

James Clear:

The idea was that my girlfriend, now my wife, she loved puppies like many people. And I was like, “What if you could have breeders rent out time with their puppies and you could just buy it as a gift, maybe buy a puppy present?” And be like, “Hey, for your birthday, I got you two hours with these puppies. Let’s go play with them.” I thought it was a decent idea, but all the breeders I talked to hated it. They were like, “Wait, you just want to play with the dogs, but you don’t want to buy them?” And I was like, “Exactly.” So there were a lot of little hair brain things like that, that I tried that just never panned out. And it took about two years before I started to find my footing.

I was doing some web design gigs in the background to make money try. I had to pay the bills somehow while I was waiting to have a business that was actually spitting off some cash. Eventually, I found my way to writing what is now jamesclear.com. So I started in September of 2010 was when I did that iPhone app thing. And then November of 2012 was the first article on jamesclear.com.

That’s one of the biggest inflection points in my life was the choice to… you could look at it at different levels. The choice to become an entrepreneur, the choice to start jamesclear.com, the choice to start writing rather than, I don’t know, paying people to build iPhone apps. But setting out on the entrepreneurial path has been one of the biggest inflection points that I’ve had.

And it took a long time. It was a really slow burn. There was nothing sexy or glamorous about those first two years where I was struggling and didn’t even have a idea that was working well. And then there also wasn’t anything sexy about the first three years of jamesclear.com where it basically wasn’t making any money. But eventually I got a book deal and Atomic Habits came out, and now it’s great, but it took a long time. It was five years of struggle before anything really hit.

Debbie Millman:

And I remember when I first became aware of your writing and saw how hard you were working, I was very impressed with how dedicated you were and are. But especially before you were atomic, so to speak.

James Clear:

The habit that kind of launched my career was that I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday, and I did that for three years.

Debbie Millman:

And what gave you this sense? Before you go one, I’m sorry to interrupt because this is my million dollar question for you. What gave you the sense that you could make a business by writing twice a week?

James Clear:

Well, I had a couple people who were proofs of concept. I didn’t know them, but I had a couple people that I looked at. So I was in grad school 2008 to 2010, just kind of stewing on these entrepreneurial ideas. There were the A-list bloggers around that time, two of them. One was Leo Babauta at Zen Habits who Leo’s still writing now. And he was a huge site at the time. And I was interested in habits. I hadn’t written anything about it yet. I just thought, “Hey, this site’s kind of cool. This is interesting, this guy’s making a living.” I think he had six kids and I was like, “Somehow he’s figuring this out and he’s writing about habits.” I was like, “I don’t have any kids. It’s just me. I barely have a bedroom. I can probably figure out how to do one sixth of this.” So Leo was definitely an early inspiration.

And then Chris Guillebeau was also writing. Chris is still doing his thing now too. He was an early inspiration too because I mentioned I was really into travel and photography and stuff. And Chris had this whole travel thing that he was really all about. But also, Chris was the one who was writing every Monday and Thursday. That was just kind of his cadence. Leo I think wrote even more frequently than that. I think he wrote three or four times a week or something.

But I actually can remember one article that Chris wrote, I don’t even remember the title of it or whatever, but I remember reading it. And I was in grad school and I thought, “Man, I feel like I could do this. I feel like I could write something that’s as good as that.” And so then I decided to try one, and it was way worse than what Chris had written.

And I had to be honest with myself and I was like, “This is much harder than I thought it was.” It was a really interesting lesson where I was like, “If it looks easy, they’re probably putting in a lot more work than you think.” And the better somebody is at their job, the easier it often looks. Anyway, I had to a little bit of humble pie there and sit back and be like, “Okay, I need to start giving a better effort.”

But when I settled on that Monday Thursday schedule, I did it partially because it felt like this is a cadence that I can actually stick to. This is something I could actually… I can’t do five days a week. I might not even be able to do three days a week, but I think I could do two.

Debbie Millman:

I know. People like Maria Popova, astonish me that she can do it every single day. Yeah,

James Clear:

It’s absurd. Her output, I saw somewhere on her site, she said she’s published, it was something, it seemed impossible. It was like 60 million words or something. I was like, “How is that even doable?”

Debbie Millman:

She’s a very dear friend of mine and I know she writes every single one of those letters.

James Clear:

Yeah, it’s unbelievable. So I felt like I could stick to it, and I have a very high quality bar. And it was really hard for me to let myself be like, “I’ll just put it out even if I feel like it’s just okay.” I just couldn’t get myself to do it. So I thought, “Well, twice a week is enough that I could spend 20 hours on an article or even 30 hours on an article.” I often did that for the first year or two where I would say the average article was probably eight to 10 hours. And it was frequent that I would spend 15 to 20. The fastest I ever did one in was four or six hours, something like that. So it was consistent enough that I felt like it was going to add up and compound, but it was infrequent enough that I had the space to do what I felt like was good work.

Debbie Millman:

Do you ever suffer from writer’s block or not knowing what to write about?

James Clear:

So I had this moment where I was writing for a few years, and the site was growing, and I hit 100,000 subscribers. And for some reason that number kind of got in my head a little bit and I was like, “Okay, now a lot of people are paying attention. Now it has to be really good.” And so I went through this little phase where rather than just telling myself, “Hey, it’s going well. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Rather than doing that, I thought I need to be more perfect now. So I thought, “Okay, what I need to do is spend even more time writing. More time revising it, more time working it out, more trying time trying to craft a really great sentence.” Interestingly, the writing actually got worse, not better.

What I came to realize is that if I ever feel like I’m running low on ideas, what I need is not to write more. What I need is to read more. And it’s kind of like driving a car where you got to stop sometimes and fill the car up with gas. And the point of having a car is not to sit at the gas station all day, and just keep pumping gas into the tank, and never produce anything, or never go anywhere. But the point is also not to just drive until you run out of gas and then you’re stuck on the side of the road. And so you need this balance between the two. And reading is like filling up the tank for me, and writing is like going on an adventure. And they both feed each other, and I need both of them. And when I’m really on is usually when I’m reading something really great. It’s so good, I can barely make it through a page or two without taking a bazillion notes. And then I’m like, “I got to put this book down and just write about this right now.” And then the ideas take off on the page. So reading and writing are much more intertwined than I think I initially realized. And almost all of my good ideas are downstream from something great that I read.

Debbie Millman:

You said that everything you write about is mostly a reminder to yourself of what you should be doing. Was that how your specialty in understanding habits first came about?

James Clear:

Yeah, it’s funny to call it a specialty. I feel like my readers and I are peers, and I write about this stuff because I struggle with all the same things everybody else struggles with. It’s like, “Hey, have you procrastinated?” “Sure all the time.” “Do you start something and then you’re inconsistent?” “Yes, absolutely.” “Have you focused too much on the goal and not enough on the process?” “For sure.” I struggle with all that stuff like everybody else does. And so I wrote about it because it was relevant to my own life. I was interested in trying to figure it out a little bit more, and apply it, and I was just kind of curious about it. And so for that reason, because I was interested and because it excited me, I think the writing was better as a result.

Now, it’s probably worth noting that in those early years, that first year or so, I wrote about a lot of other stuff too. I wrote about how to have better squat form in the gym, and the medical system in America, and all kinds of stuff. And the readers didn’t seem to care about those as much. And so I kind of followed my nose a little bit and I was like, “You know what? Every time I write about habits, or strategy, or making better choices, or being creative or productive, those are the topics that the audience also likes and that I like.” There’s a lot of other stuff that I like that people are like, “Well that’s great, but you can kind of keep it to yourself.” And so for those things I just kind of like, “Well, maybe I’ll journal about that and not publish it.” So I gradually kind of found my footing in my area of expertise or specialty as you say. And it was mostly just trial and error. But all the time, whatever I was writing about, I tried to make it something that I was excited about or that I was interested in personally.

Debbie Millman:

I think that’s what makes it so interesting. I work with a woman that helps me with my research. Her name is Emily [inaudible 00:34:10]. And she didn’t know about you before I started working on the show. And initially, she was surprised because she knows that I’m not somebody that is particularly interested in the self-help genre, so to speak. But as soon as she started researching you, as soon as she started reading your book, as soon as we started talking about the way in which you approach what you share, she completely understood why I was so intrigued and excited about talking with you.

James Clear:

That’s cool.

Debbie Millman:

You have a very unique way of sharing information with people. That also happens to be something that could be helpful. I have never in my life recommended what would be considered a self-help book to my wife. But I am insisting that she read Atomic Habits because I think she will benefit from it so much and-

James Clear:

I take no responsibility how this ends up. I hope that she enjoys it

Debbie Millman:

Well, I’ve already started sneaking in some of the techniques. I’m Trojan horsing it in, because she so needs it.

James Clear:

That’s good. That’s good. I think it’s important to be a practitioner of the ideas, and not just a writer of them or a theorizer of them. And I do think that if you’re forced to practice the ideas, if they’re things you actually use in your daily life, there’s going to be a better quality to the writing. And then also, you come to appreciate how difficult it is to make any kind of progress in the world, or to create something new, or to put this idea into practice.

I think because I have struggled with all of these common habit pitfalls like everybody else has had, I think I am in a better position to say something compelling about it because it’s like, “Yeah, I know what this is like.” I’ve struggled through all this too. It also gives me more confidence in the ideas if I can be like, “Yes, I’ve actually used them.” And I’m not saying it’s going to be a perfect fit for everybody and I don’t think it’s going to work in all scenarios, but I know that it worked in this scenario. So I feel better about sharing it.

My kind of approach now is that there is no one way to build better habits. There’s no single strategy to follow. But there are a lot of tools that you can use. And my job is to lay all the tools out on the table and say, “Hey, here’s a wrench, and here’s a hammer, and here’s a screwdriver.” And your job is to say, “You know what? I think for my life or for my situation, the wrench feels like the right fit, or the hammer might be better for this particular experience or this particular situation.”

And I think if I can do that well, if I can lay all the tools out and give everybody a full toolkit to work with, we’re all in a better position to make some of these changes. Doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy all the time or even that it’s going to work all the time. But I feel like I have a better appreciation for having a big suite of tools because I’ve had to practice it.

Debbie Millman:

Well, a lot of people agree. In 2018, you brought your book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones into the world. In the years since the book was published, you have sold over 9 million copies worldwide. You’ve been on the New York Times Bestseller List, I looked it up this week, for 154 weeks. 154 weeks listeners. Your book has been translated into over 50 languages. Your newsletter is sent out every week to more than 2 million subscribers. And you also travel all over the world with your super sleek bags giving inspiring speeches. Congratulations James.

James Clear:

Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride. And I don’t think it’s reasonable for any author to expect those kind of outcomes. It just struck a chord, and I’ve been very fortunate. But yeah, I don’t really know what else to say other than I’m glad that people are finding it useful.

I think ultimately, the only way a book can grow that is if it’s word of mouth. It’s far outpaced my ability to sell it or to tell people about it. And what I tell myself when I go to sleep at night is people are finding this useful. It’s growing because people are telling other people about it. And the only reason they’re telling people about it is because they find it helpful themselves. And that certainly feels good. It feels gratifying. Habits have been written about for a long time. They’ve been around long before I was here, and people be writing about it long after I’m gone. And I am just adding a very small piece to the collective knowledge of humanity on the topic. I’m not really saying much that’s very new. My hope is just that maybe when you read it, you’re like, “I never quite heard it put that way before.” Or, “Maybe this gives me a little bit different line of attack than I had previously.” And perhaps that unlocks an opportunity for you that maybe wasn’t there before. And I’m really grateful to all the readers.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I’m only going to push back a little bit here James, because I do think what you’re writing about is new in that it’s your perspective. Which is doesn’t have any shame attached to it. There’s no berating. It’s just very straightforward, very relatable, and really, really helpful.

So let’s talk a little bit about habits. I have two fairly basic questions from my listeners that may have not read your book, maybe the two or three people out there in the world, or your website. So just two easy questions that I think will help frame the rest of my questions. First, what is a habit?

James Clear:

Well if you talk to an academic or a researcher, they’re going to say something like, “A habit is an automatic or mindless behavior that you do without even really thinking about it.” So brushing your teeth, or tying your shoes, or every time you pick up a pair of barbecue tongues, you tap them together twice. Stuff that you don’t even really think about that much.

I think there’s another definition, another way to describe a habit, which is it’s a behavior that’s tied to a particular context. So you can never have a human outside of an environment, where you’re going to live your whole life in some type of environment. And your behaviors are often linked to that environment. So your couch at 7:00 PM is linked to the habit of watching Netflix, for example. Or your kitchen table at 7:00 AM is linked to the habit of drinking tea and journaling.

And I think that reveals something important about habits, which is the environment plays a pretty big role in how they’re shaped, in how they’re triggered, and so on. I think the strict academic answer is it’s a pretty mindless automatic routine or behavior. That’s not how we usually talk about it in daily conversation. If I were to ask you, “What are some habits you want to build?” You might say, “Writing every day or going to the gym four days a week.” And writing is never going to be mindless the way that brushing your teeth might be, but I know what you mean when you say it. You mean I want it to be this regular practice, this ritual, and so on. So it kind of depends on how academic we want to get about the definition. But I think we could just say most of us know what we mean when we say a habit. We mean something I do regularly, something I do frequently, something I do consistently.

Debbie Millman:

So my second basic question is what do we get wrong about habits?

James Clear:

It’s a good question. I think different people get different things wrong. So I don’t know that there is one single answer. There are some common pitfalls that you see people fall into a lot. Like one common pitfall is biting off more than you can chew or starting too big. I mean, this happens to everybody. It’s happened to me a bazillion times. You get excited. Especially if you’re an ambitious person, you start thinking about the changes you want to make and then you’re like, “Let me find the perfect workout program, and it’s an hour long, and you’re going to do it five days a week.” And instead, it might be more useful just to develop the habit of going to the gym for five minutes, four days a week. Just become the kind of person who masters the artist showing up. But we often resist that type of small action because it feels like, “Well, this isn’t enough to get me the results that I want.” So that’s probably not even worth it.

But there are levels to this whole thing. And if you can master the art of showing up, then you’re in a position to optimize, to improve, to advance. So that’s kind of a big part of my philosophy is make it easy to show up.

The other common maybe pitfall or mistake, the things that people get wrong about it. I think one thing that we get wrong is we don’t look at our bad habits enough. We don’t think about what they can teach us for building good habits. So let me give you an example.

Most behaviors in life produce multiple outcomes across time. So broadly speaking, there’s an immediate outcome, and there’s an ultimate outcome. For bad habits, the immediate outcome is often pretty favorable. The immediate outcome of eating a donut is great. It’s sweet, it’s sugary, it’s tasty, it’s enjoyable. It’s only if you keep eating donuts for a year too, that you get unfavorable outcomes.

Or smoking is the classic bad habit example. Well, the immediate outcome of smoking might be that you get to socialize with friends outside the office or you reduce stress on the way home from work. So the immediate outcome might be favorable. It’s only the ultimate outcome five or 10 years later that’s unfavorable.

But, building bad habits is often pretty frictionless. It’s somewhat easy. The way that we all talk about building good habits where we’re like, “Oh man, I just need to get myself to go to the gym.” Nobody says that about eating donuts. Nobody says, “Oh man, if I could just get myself to eat more donuts.” We don’t talk about it that way. And I think there’s a lesson baked in there. Why is that? If we can start to look and maybe unravel our bad habits a little bit more, we notice they’re behaviors that are often really convenient. There are behaviors that are often immediately rewarding. There are behaviors that are often obvious and occupy space in our environments, in the rooms and buildings that we work in all the time. And you can copy and paste those lessons onto building good habits. You can try to find ways to make your good habits immediately rewarding. You can try to make them more visible in the environment. You can try to find ways to make those frictionless and convenient. And the more that you do those things, the more you’re kind of putting those same forces to work for you rather than against you.

Debbie Millman:

One of the things that I was really struck by was just in my own environment and online, and in advertisements, maybe you hear things like, “Be healthy for 30 days and then,” or, “Do this thing for 21 days and then.” And you said the honest answer to how long it takes to build a habit is forever. And I’m wondering why you think it’s forever.

James Clear:

Well, what I’m trying to get at there is a habit is not a finish line to be crossed. It’s this lifestyle to be lived. And it’s not like, “Hey, just do this for 30 days and then you’ll be a healthy person.” Or, “Just do this for 60 days and then you will be productive.” You don’t have to worry about it anymore. What I’m really getting at when I say the true amount of time it takes to build a habit is forever is you are looking for a sustainable change. A non-threatening change. You’re looking to integrate it into your new lifestyle, kind of build this new normal. And then once you’ve stuck to it for a long time and it becomes part of your natural cadence of your day, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just like, “This is just part of my daily routine. This is something I can stick to.”

And that’s how habits really last. This idea that let me start the day off by doing this 21 day sprint and then I’ll be the kind of person I want to be. I think once you unpack it that way, almost everybody realizes, “Well, that’s not how it actually works.” But that is what we’re sold a lot of the time. That is what everyone’s telling us. And so I’m just kind of pushing back on that a little bit and trying to be like, “You don’t really need to make these radical changes all the time. What you really need is can we just figure out a way to live a good day today? All you got to do is live one good day. And can we find a pattern that is sustainable, that’s non-threatening, that you can integrate into your daily routine?” And then it can start to become something that this is just normal for me. It’s not like I’m not reaching so much. I’m not trying to be a totally different person.

Debbie Millman:

The part that I found to be most fascinating about your book was this deep-seated notion that our habits are how we embody a particular identity. And you encourage people interested in doing this type of work to start by asking themselves who is the kind of person you want to become, and what is the type of identity that you want to build? And that’s very intentional.

James Clear:

Yes. Yes, it is intentional. We often talk about habits as mattering because of the external stuff they get us, All this stuff we’ve just been talking about, “Habits will help you get fit, or make more money, or be more productive, or reduce stress.” And it’s true habits can help you do those things, and that’s great. But the real reason that habits matter is that as you said, they help you embody a particular identity.

Every action that you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So no, writing one sentence does not finish the novel. But it does cast a vote for I’m a writer. And no, doing one pushup does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.

And this is why I say the real goal is not to do a silent meditation retreat. It’s to become a meditator. The real goal is not to run a half marathon, it’s to become a runner. Then these cases, I’m using labels. Reader, or runner, or meditator, or whatever. But it’s true for characteristics as well. “I’m the type of person who finishes what they start,” or, “I’m the type of person who shows up on time.”

And the more that you believe that aspect or that element of your story, the more you start to integrate that into your identity, the easier it becomes to stick to that behavior in the long run. I mean, in a sense, once it’s part of your story, once it’s like some aspect of yourself that you take pride in, you’re not even really pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just acting in alignment with the type of person that you see yourself be.

I mean, if you take pride in the size of your biceps, you’ll never skip arm day at the gym. Or if you take pride in how your hair looks, you have this long hair care routine and you follow it every day. And the aspects of our identity that we take pride in or that we kind of say, “Yeah, this is part of who I am.” We don’t have to motivate ourselves to do those behaviors in the same way that somebody who’s maybe just getting started does. It’s kind of like, “No, this is just part of what I do. This is part of how I show up.” And I think that’s ultimately where we’re really trying to get to.

It is a long process. I like that voting metaphor because each time you do a little habit, it’s like casting a vote on the pile. And you kind of build up this body of evidence. And no individual instance changes your belief about yourself or changes the story that you’re telling, but over time, you start to tip the scales in favor of that story.

And this is a little bit different than what you often hear people say. You’ll often hear something like, “Fake it till you make it.”

Debbie Millman:

Oh yeah. No, no. I say make it till you make it. Just make it till you make it.

James Clear:

Make it till you make it?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

James Clear:

That’s such a good creator phrase. Just make the blog post until you make it. Make the piece of art until you make it. Just make the thing. Just keep creating until it’s there.

Debbie Millman:

Right.

James Clear:

Fake it till you make it asks you to believe something positive about yourself, right? So it’s not ultimately that terrible, but it asks you to believe something positive without having evidence for it. There’s a word for beliefs that don’t have evidence. We call it delusion. Your brain doesn’t like this mismatch between what you say you are and what you’re actually doing.

And behavior and beliefs are this two-way street. What you do, the actions you take each day, they influence what you think about yourself. And the mindset that you have, the beliefs that you carry, they influence the actions that you take. But my argument is to let the behavior lead the way, to make it till you make it as you say, to start with one small action. To start with a little bit of evidence that, “Hey, in this moment, I was that kind of person.” And eventually, you have every reason in the world to believe that aspect of your story. So yes, your habits are how you embody a particular identity. And even if they’re small, I think that makes them particularly powerful.

Debbie Millman:

But we can also look at the opposite. And what you say about yourself often as you mentioned, will begin to determine who you are or who you become. One of the things that I was struck by, you write about how people can walk through life in a cognitive slumber. And I’m going to quote you here. “Blindly following the norms attached to their identity by stating things like, ‘I’m terrible with directions. I’m not a morning person. I’m bad at remembering people’s names. I’m always late. I’m not good with technology. I’m horrible at math.'” James, almost every one of those, except the, “I’m always late,” are actually designations that I thought you were describing mean, and how I state my identity. And I read that. Yeah. I’m like, “James is looking deep into my soul and he is telling me that I don’t have to say these things about myself anymore if I don’t want to be them.” That’s what was so personal about my experience reading your book.

James Clear:

That’s funny. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to target you like that.

Debbie Millman:

No it’s okay.

James Clear:

It’s interesting though, these stories that we carry around. I didn’t think something like I have a sweet tooth. Before I wrote the book, I wouldn’t have thought anything about that. I love chocolate, I love caramel. Sure. But now I look at it and I’m like, “Each time you tell yourself that, you’re kind of reinforcing that identity.” And it becomes a little bit easier to do that thing the next time.

And I am not an extreme sort of personality in the sense I don’t think that means, “Hey, you should never eat chocolate or you’re never going to forget somebody’s name again,” or whatever. All that stuff’s going to happen. This is just life.

But I do think that it’s worth asking yourself questions given the reality of the situation without ignoring the facts and without ignoring the reality of what needs to be done, what’s the most empowering version of a story that I could tell myself? What’s the most useful version of a story that I could tell myself? Because if you’re not ignoring reality, there’s no sense in telling yourself a less useful version. There’s no sense in telling yourself the least empowering version. But we often do that.

I heard about this interesting exercise one time where I said take two sheets of paper. On the first sheet, you’re going to write the story of your last year or pick whatever timeframe you want your last 10 years. And the only rule for this little game is that you are not allowed to say anything that isn’t true. So it has to be factually true. But the first page, you’re going to write the story of your last 10 years. And you’re only going to write it in the least favorable way possible. And then the second page, you’re going to write the story of your last 10 years, and you’re going to write it in the most favorable way possible.

It’s interesting because you’re going to sit there with these two pieces of paper, and there are no lies on either page. Yet which version of these stories are we telling ourselves each day? If you’re not going to ignore reality, if you’re still going to say, “Hey listen, I’m still going to wrestle with the truth and I’ll still make sure that I do what I need to do.” I just can’t see any sense in telling yourself the story that’s on the first page. It doesn’t make any sense to do anything other than what’s going to make you feel useful, empowered, joyful, happy, fun, excited. Let’s tell the version of that story and still do the things we need to do. And sometimes life is hard and you still got to deal with it. But we don’t always do that. And I think we would probably be in a better place if we tried to do that each day.

Debbie Millman:

So I think a really important way of thinking about this than is that habits matter, not because they can get you better results, which they can do, but also because they can change your beliefs about who you are.

James Clear:

Yeah. I don’t think this is unique necessarily to habits. I’m not saying other experiences in life don’t matter or that a one off event or something doesn’t make a difference. Those things do matter. It’s just that over time, your habits are the experiences that get repeated. So the weight of the story starts to shift in favor that just because of the frequency of them. And everything else starts to be like, “That just happened one time, this was a blip on the radar,” or whatever. And so I think they are unique in their long term ability to shape identity. Because day after day, week after week, you’re getting these little bits of proof that, “Hey, this is part of my story.”

Debbie Millman:

One of the most viral aspects of your book is about how important it is to focus on building a system rather than trying to achieve a specific goal or an outcome. And you state that you don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. I’m wondering if we can just deconstruct that a little bit for my listeners. What do you mean by a system?

James Clear:

So your goal is your desired outcome. What is your system? Your system is the collection of habits that you follow. And if there is ever a gap between your goal and your system, if there’s ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, your daily habits will always win. Almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. So whatever system you’ve been running for the last six months, or year, or two years, it’s carried you almost inevitably to the outcomes that you have right now.

In many ways, our results in life are kind of like a lagging measure. Or at least to a large degree, they’re a lagging measure of the habits that preceded them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Even silly stuff like the amount of clutter in your living room is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. We also badly want better results in life. But the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. It’s like fix the inputs, and the outputs will fix themselves.

And there are many things in life that influence outcomes. I’m not saying habits are the only thing that matters. You’ve got luck and randomness, you have misfortune. All sorts of things can befall you. But by definition, luck and randomness are not under your control, and your habits are. And the only reasonable, rational approach in life is to focus on the elements of the situation that are within your control. So I think for all of those reasons, I encourage people to focus on building a system rather than worrying too much about a goal.

And I totally get why this is hard. Some of it I think is just a byproduct of the way that both major media and social media works. You’re only going to hear about something once it’s a result. You’re never going to see a story that’s like, “Lady eats chicken and salad for lunch today.” It’s only a story once, “Lady loses 100 pounds.” Or you’re never going to see people talking about on the news, “James Clear writes 500 words today.” It’s only a story once it’s like, “Atomic Habits is the best seller.” The outcomes of success are highly visible and widely discussed, and the process of success is often invisible and hidden from view. And I think that leads us to overvaluing results and maybe undervaluing the process of the system.

So all I’m trying to get at with this is a little bit of an encouragement to say, “Hey, goals are great and success is awesome. But let’s maybe put that on the shelf for a minute and spend most of our days focused on what collection of habits am I following? What system am I running?” And kind of adjust the gears of that machine a little bit, and start running a better system. And that’ll carry me to a different destination naturally.

Debbie Millman:

I want to talk about the brain and habits. You write that the primary reason the brain remembers the past is to better predict what will work in the future. And this happens in everything. I remember years ago, I rearranged the furniture in my bedroom. And I had been very used to habitually walking into my bedroom in a certain way and going to my night table to find something. And suddenly in the days after rearranging the furniture, I found myself blindly walking in the wrong direction because my night table was no longer there. And it struck me how dependent we get on these habits that are unconscious, and how much that impacts the way we live our days. So how is our brain impacted by our reliance on our habits?

James Clear:

Well, it depends on how broad you want to get with this answer or how deep you want to go. Ultimately, every organism needs energy to survive. And anything that you can do to conserve energy or to be more efficient or effective is going to help in the survival of that species. And so your brain is looking to automate things. It’s looking to figure out solutions to future problems that it won’t have to think as much about. And if it doesn’t have to think about that. It can shift its attention and energy to something else. And so habits save you time. They save you effort, they save you energy. And at that very basic biological level, they help you survive. Now of course the environment our ancestors grew up in, it was very different than what we have today. So now we have this kind of paleolithic hardware, we’ve got this biology that is primed to build habits. But we live in a modern society where there’s all sorts of different ways to apply that brain and that kind of thinking. And so now we’re building habits on social media, and we’re building habits in corporate workplaces, and we’re building habits and saving for retirement. And our ancestors didn’t care about any of that stuff. But the machinery works just as well in those situations as it did before.

So ultimately, I think habits are, from a biological level, they’re like an energy saving process. But then in a more practical, modern way of thinking about it, they’re a time saving process. And they help you become more effective and efficient in that way because you don’t have to spend time thinking about what to do.

Debbie Millman:

Well, what’s so interesting about this notion of the brain trying to hack these systems for us, a lot of it is done subconsciously. And when that happened in my bedroom with the night table, I began to wonder how many unconscious habits do I just obey? Because this is the way I’ve taught myself to view the world. And that’s why the shift in identity was so intriguing to me in using these hacks to begin to start to rework certain neural pathways in my brain that I might not even be aware is sabotaging my efforts.

James Clear:

That’s a fascinating question. And I think a lot of the habits that are unconscious, you wouldn’t want to have to spend any time thinking about. If you get up in the middle of the night and you just need to walk over to the bathroom, well you don’t want to have to be thinking carefully about how do I turn to get out of bed, and how do I put one foot in front of the other? And where is the coffee table, and how do I walk around it? Am I going to stub my toe on the side of the bed? All of those non-conscious patterns that we have, they just help you operate through the world. And if you had to actually think about every little thing you were going to do throughout the day, you would never be able to do anything. It’d be hard to move even across the room.

But, there also are all these unconscious thought patterns that we have, these little identities that we care around with us, these stories that we keep repeating, that maybe we don’t even know we’re telling ourselves or realize. And this is another thing that I say in the book, which is the process of behavior change almost always starts with self-awareness. Because it’s really hard to change that story if you don’t realize you’re telling yourself at every time. And there are different strategies you can use for that. There’s some things in the book that are actual tactics like the habits scorecard or something like that where you write all your habits out and analyze them a little bit. That stuff can help.

I think also just a process of reflection and review. Whatever cadence makes sense for you, whatever that exact process looks like can be unique to you. But making time to think about how you’re spending your time and reflecting on whether that represents the values or the identity that you want to build. It’s really hard to self-assess stuff without giving yourself time to think. If you’re so busy that you don’t have any time to sit, and relax, and maybe stew on it a little bit, it’s hard to be self-aware of all those little subtle stories that we’re telling ourselves.

In my case, I have a period of reflection review at the end of each week. I do a really short one each Friday. That one’s mostly business related. It’s mostly looking at what did I produce, how much traffic, how many email subscribers, revenue expenses. It’s just a spot check for the business for the most part. But then I also have one at the end of each year where I do an annual review, and that’s much broader. That’s like how many nights did I stay away from home this year while traveling? Was that the right amount? Should that be up or down? Do I need more family time or less? How many workouts did I do this year? How many on average each month? What were my best lifts throughout the year? How many articles did I write? How many words did I produce this year? Is that what I want to do next year?

So you can get the idea. It’s customized to you and what you’re interested in. But just having those moments of reflection review, I think help make you more self-aware. And boy, it’s really hard to change behavior if you’re not aware of it. So that that process is really important for shaping the habits that you want.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I love that you share those annual reviews with your readers. They’re not just for you. You share the good, the bad, and the changeable every year. And they’re really fun to read. And it’s been fun to see the trajectory since 2018 especially, when the book was published. Looking back on this last 10 year period, what is the biggest thing that you’ve changed about yourself after learning all you have about habits?

James Clear:

I’ll give you two. So I’ll give you what I think is something big that I have changed for myself, which I don’t know if it’s the biggest, but it’s something big. And then I’ll also give you one that hasn’t changed, which I think is also interesting.

So the thing that hasn’t changed is working out has been one of the core habits that my life has been built around for the last 10 years. And I genuinely mean this. I don’t know that I would be an entrepreneur if I didn’t have that one habit. I’m not necessarily saying everybody needs to work out a bodybuilder or anything like that. You can decide what it is for you. But I do think we need some habit that we feel like grounds us, that we feel like is time for us that you can get away from everything. When I’m in the gym, that is the only hour of the day where I’m not always thinking about the business in the background, or thinking about what I need to do, or responsibilities or whatever. That’s the only time that I have where it’s truly just me.

There have been so many days over the last 10 years where I felt like, “Man, I really blew that day. Or we just didn’t get anything effective done. I haven’t made any progress. The book is still a mess.” But, at least I got a good workout in. So that one has kind of been an anchor point for me.

And then I do think something that I’ve grown with is caring less about what other people think and focusing more on, I guess we could just call it trusting myself more or trusting my instincts more. Some of this is going to be natural. You’re not going to have much to trust yourself on early in your creative career, because you haven’t produced much yet. And now I’ve produced a lot more. So I kind of have a better taste for what works and what doesn’t, or what’s good and what isn’t.

But I do look back and think. It’s kind of interesting. For the first two years that I published articles on jamesclear.com, I never shared any of them on Facebook because I didn’t want anybody who knew me to see it. I didn’t want it to color their thoughts about me. I was like, “Well, what if they saw my stupid little blog and thought, ‘I’m surprised he’s doing that. I thought he was going to be doing something more impressive.'” Or, “I’m surprised he’s spending time on that. I wonder if he has a day job. Is this actually the thing that he’s doing is just writing here?”

I definitely was worried about the collective they and what they thought. And looking back now, I’m like it’s kind of silly because if you were to ask me any individual person, “You worried about what Sarah thinks?” I’d be like, “Well no, she probably isn’t judging me like that?” Or, “Are you worried about what Tony is going to say.” No, probably not. He would probably be cool about it. But collectively, I had this image of they will not be impressed by it, or they will not think it’s good enough. I don’t feel that way as much anymore. I’m sure I still fall into that pitfall, but I look back on it now and I hope that I’ve grown a little bit since then.

I think the one thing that helped me get through it, and it didn’t become an enormous roadblock, was that I let that fear or that worry, that concern be the gas pedal and not the break for my work. So because I was worried about what people were going to think, what I told myself was not, “I shouldn’t do this,” or, “I’m not good enough,” or, “I should just quit.” What I told myself was, “Now you really got to make sure it’s good.” Now it’s like, “Get to it. Let’s start working.” And I think that made me put a better effort in. And so the result ended up being great.

But I can just as easily imagine a scenario where I tell myself, “I don’t know what people would think. I’m going to look pretty foolish here. I’m going to feel kind of stupid.” So I’m just not going to attempt it. I really try to live this way in my life. I don’t think I always do it, but I try to not be my own roadblock. I try to let the world tell me no before I actually tell myself no.

And there’s not 1,000 ways to do anything in life, but there’s almost always more than one way. And it’s actually very rare that you run into a true hard roadblock where you’re like, “Hey, the world just says, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing else you can do. You can’t be persistent anymore. There’s no other way to try this. You have to give up.'” It’s actually very rare to get a full stop like that. There’s almost always something else you can do, some other line of attack to try, if you just have the courage to do it. And I think that’s something that’s changed for me is maybe hopefully, I have a little bit more of that creative courage now than I did before. But I’m glad that it didn’t stop me early on because I could easily imagine a scenario where that would be true.

Debbie Millman:

I think a lot of people are glad that didn’t stop you. My last question James. I read that you might be starting a podcast. Is that true?

James Clear:

The rumors cannot be confirmed or denied. I think it’d be cool. We have lots of episodes that we’re working on, and trying to feel out, and figure out. I don’t have a launch date for it. And as I am sure you can appreciate, as I said earlier in this conversation, when it looks easy for people, it is probably much more work than you were thinking. So I am learning that right now. It is much, much harder to produce something that you’re proud of than maybe you would think on the surface just listening. So I have a lot to learn, but I’m definitely thinking about it and we’re slowly working on it.

Debbie Millman:

Excellent. Can’t wait to hear it. Thank you so much James, for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

James Clear:

Of course. I appreciate the opportunity, and love any chance to talk to you. Thanks, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. James Clear’s book is titled Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. You can find out more about James Clear and sign up for his weekly newsletter at jamesclear.com or atomichabits.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: James Clear appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

Rickie Lee Jones spent her early life drifting to and fro, landing wherever good luck and intuition seemed to guide her. In the mid 1970s, that place was Los Angeles. It was there that she would write the hit single Chuck E’s In Love. In 1979, her debut album sold over two million copies and she went on in her career to win two GRAMMYs, and to claim her spot as one of the greatest singer/songwriters in American popular music. She joins me now to discuss her journey, her career, and her newly released memoir. Rickie Lee Jones, welcome to Design Matters.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Hi, good to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Hi. Rickie, congratulations on your memoir. I agree with music critic Bob Lefsetz who said it’s absolutely the best book about being an artist in the rock world that he’s ever read. Congratulations.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Your book is titled Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. Fans of yours know that the name Last Chance Texaco is taken from the title of one of your songs from your 1979 debut album. What made you decide to use that song title as the title of your book?

Rickie Lee Jones:

I think it’s evocative of a journey telling the story of a life on the road. When I think about it, actually, my dad wrote this story called The Road Runner when I was little. We traveled around so much, me in the back of that car, my life has been on the road. The other reason is the song is one of the most powerful and unique songs I’ve written, but I think mostly because it seemed to be the true signpost of my life.

Debbie Millman:

You write in the introduction that Last Chance Texaco remains a kind of living spirit to you, a whisper of belief and impossibilities. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit more about your belief in impossibilities.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It’s so intrinsic to my nature that it’s almost hard to separate it and talk about it. But I’ve always had and have still this feeling of being in a frame of being a story that’s watched by something that I interact with and talk to, that I talk to and interact with. That is to say that it manifests almost at will, but it manifests before me in proofs, which would suggest doubts, but people have doubts because they can’t see the invisible world, but we have a connection to things we can’t see. We find it out in science, “Oh, there are atoms, there are molecules.” So anyway, that’s what it is. There’s a unfettered connection to the invisible world that is both noun and verb. It is both a place and a feeling of personality that interacts with, because we don’t quite have words here to describe it. I don’t try, but I know it is and it is with me always.

Debbie Millman:

You go on to state that after all these decades, life remains stubbornly mysterious, which I loved. I want to ask, how does it remain stubbornly mysterious?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, I guess because you can’t ever figure out how things operate, but also in a more innocent way when I take a walk outside and look up at the birds, and there’s a connection between the bird and some other thing that’s going to happen later in the day. If you’re watching, you’ll see it all, and it’s stubbornly mysterious because it refuses to reveal itself. Yet probably it’s revealing itself all the time. It’s us that refuses to see, but there’s a little prose going on in the book too.

Debbie Millman:

I want to go back in time a bit and talk about not only where you came from, but who you came from. Your paternal grandfather, Frank Peg Leg Jones, and your grandmother, Myrtle Lee, were vaudevillians based in Chicago where you were born. Frank was a really big star singer and dancer on the vaudeville circuit. He was once build above Milton Burrow. Though he lost a limb in a childhood train accident, he was quite a good dancer. You’ve written that you were in awe of your grandfather. Do you have memories of seeing him perform when you were a child?

Rickie Lee Jones:

He died in 1940. He died before my parents met each other. I’ll just tell you a little side story. I joined ancestry.com, and in that, a distant cousin contacted me and I found out all these things because he’s done a whole family history that includes my side. He separates from me around 1800, but he told me all about my family. That’s when I just found out when Frank died. I’m hoping in some piece of film that they find in a studio that Peg Leg Jones will be there in an audition tape, but I’ve never got to see him. We had two whole scrapbooks of his notices, which I can no longer find. I’m hoping they’re in storage. But I remember the one about Milton Burrow because Milton Burrow was famous. And the one which I quoted in the book, “This mono-ped puts most two-legged men to shame.” I love the language they used back then. They’re very succinct [inaudible 00:06:05] mono-ped.

Debbie Millman:

A mono-ped. Yes.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So Frank, yeah. We were kind of [inaudible 00:06:11] at people who tumbled from town to town. Frank Peg Leg Jones is the one who started that by joining vaudeville, because all of the other Jones still lived in Beaufort County, North Carolina. We are the only ones that went tumbling west like a tumbleweed. My family line goes back to the very first settlers of North Carolina. Indeed, we are the first families of North Carolina. So I’m going to get a little plaque that … And that is an incredible thing. I wish that I could have passed that on to the Jones before they passed away because wouldn’t they have been how happy. I don’t know, maybe they would have poo-pooed it, but wouldn’t they have been happy to see that, all that rambling comes from the very first Welshman who rambled over to America in 1720.

Debbie Millman:

That’s incredible. I’ve done ancestry on both sides of my family. I can go all the way back to the early 1800s on my father’s side of the family. But on my mom’s side of the family, we only go back to my great grandmother, and that is because no one can remember her maiden name, which is just completely heartbreaking to me, the idea that no one can remember.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, mine was adopted. Not only did we not have her last name, but we had no idea, but this fellow found her last name. I think some people just have a propensity for this kind of thing.

Debbie Millman:

Your mother was raised in orphanages around Mansfield, Ohio, and her parents were unable to take care of her. The courts ruled your mom’s mom an unfit mother, and all four of her children were permanently separated from her. You write in your book that all four children, along with a million other orphans of the great depression, were left to fend for themselves among the religious fanatics and pedophiles and sadists that seemed to gravitate towards children’s homes. Rickie, how did she finally get away? It’s a really remarkable story in your book.

Rickie Lee Jones:

You mean about old One Ball?

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So One Ball was named One Ball because she wore her hair in one bun on top of her head. But the children had called her One Ball to indicate the one testicle they thought was hanging under the skirt. My mother, every time she told that story, she’d laugh. I think from all those, which at that time, I guess wasn’t that many years, 30 years separated, it was safe to laugh at this inhumane woman that was the matron. She’d sneak up on the children, that was her thing, to be in the shadows, catch them and terrify them before she hurt them. She was sneaking up and back at my mother who was brushing her hair in the mirror and she saw her coming up from behind.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It was a great moment of redemption because she turned and caught her just before she got there and held her hair brush up and said, “If you ever come after me again, I’m going to ran this hairbrush up your butt.” She probably said ass, because that was more like my mother, but I wrote butt because I didn’t want to portray my mother worse than the matron dream because she swore, but that’s what she did. She stood up to the sadist and frightened her. I guess my mother left soon after and the woman never bothered her again. At least that’s how the story was told to me.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. You write that childhood traumas leave their dirty footprints in the fresh white snow-

Rickie Lee Jones:

Of our happy-ever-afters.

Debbie Millman:

… of our happy-ever-afters. It’s a beautiful line. You go on to state that no matter what your mom did, she found traces of her past obstructing the future. How did that affect you?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, we never escape it. It gets passed on to all of us. Trauma is generational, I have learned. So if your grandmother was raped, you’re going to live with it. If they tell, it doesn’t dissipate. I think even if they don’t tell, their behavior will be so bizarre in particular ways. So even talking about it, it’s as if it happened to me. My mind begins to dissipate and swirl. It’s hard to stay centered on the subject. There’s so much trauma in my mother’s past. These stories I tell are the only ones she told, but sometimes hinted to something worse. She would say of the religious fanatics who populate that area, the revivalist, the [inaudible 00:11:23]. She would say, “Goddamn hypocrites.” But the look on her face said much, much more than those words, as if something had happened to her specifically by religious people. And she’s just never going to tell her children about it. So I think it always gets passed on. How do you heal from it? I don’t know. We’ll find out. We’ll keep living and we’ll find out how.

Debbie Millman:

You were three years old when you made your debut as a performer, you were a snowflake in a ballet recital of Bambi. Rickie, is it true you were so intoxicated by the applause of the audience your dance teacher how to escort you off the stage?

Rickie Lee Jones:

It is totally true. So I remember, and we saved that little uniform for so long, I remember it had spangles on it. In fact, now that I say this out loud, I think every costume I put on somehow evokes that very first snowflake outfit. But as I bowed and didn’t know I’d been out there longer, and all the kids had left the stage and I was still bowing, and the people were applauding and laughing, I just stayed, “Thank you very much,” and they liked to tell that story as I grew up. There’s always one of us out there.

Debbie Millman:

So safe to say you realized very early on you liked being on stage?

Rickie Lee Jones:

I liked it. I felt no fear and liked everybody’s happy smiling faces. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

One of the things that I really related to a great deal was how you grew up creating invisible friends. In your book, you describe how you would daydream about an invisible horse galloping down the street in a storm of wild fury, only to find you waiting and fearless. Then a trembling velvet muzzle would press against your hand, which was the horse’s gesture of acceptance and trust. Only you understood and contained its wild heart. You’d then holler out to your invisible horse, to the consternation of your siblings who watched you in bewilderment. What did your family make of your invisible world?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, I only became aware of them watching me when my mother told my dad to tell my invisible friend goodbye, that she didn’t want me talking to things that weren’t there anymore. But she didn’t seem to understand that that was as real to me as the physical world. There was no possibility that I could tell my invisible friend goodbye. That’d be like telling her goodbye. They just thought and did slightly treat me as if I was a little bit different than most people, which since that’s how they always treated me, it was normal, but it didn’t feel good. So maybe my mom thought if I stopped doing these things, that I would start to find my way toward real people and make real friends. Little did she know the reason I had invisible friends was because the real people didn’t want to play with me. I was also very bossy in my invisible world. I could control everything. With real people, they had ideas that were definitely inferior to mine.

Debbie Millman:

Did you name your invisible friends?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Sure.

Debbie Millman:

I had an invisible friend named Goonie, for some reason, and I made my mother set the table with a place setting for her every night.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Excellent. My friend was named Bashla. That’s a Slavic name, I don’t know where that came, Bashla. Then when my parents quizzed me about my invisible friends, I began to make up others. I took the cue of the question to mean you should have more friends. So I made up SlowBeeSlow, but none was as real as Bashla.

Debbie Millman:

As you were growing up, your father’s anger and depression grew and he often left for months at a time. Your mother’s mood swings were unpredictable, and one day you came home from school to find that she had all of her teeth pulled out because they were hurting her. How were you able to make sense of this behavior and keep any semblance of your center?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, that event that my mother did, that was after the accident with my brother. So I think she was having a long, long fall. Why she decided to hurt herself, I don’t know if that was a conversation with my father. I said that thing about trauma having an impact forever, who knows where that came from. But for myself as an 11-year-old girl, who’d already seen the accident and all the trouble, for my mother to do this thing without warning, and I come home from school and she doesn’t have any teeth, was maybe like the very last door to our lives than it had been to the new, bizarre horror that was coming. “You just can’t do stuff like that, mom, and you got to keep your children informed. Tell your daughter. I’m thinking of getting Paul’s teeth, say something so that I don’t come home and meet a mother without any teeth.”

Debbie Millman:

There’s a thread of magic that runs through Last Chance Texaco, where you talk about sensing things or knowing things in a way that’s very mysterious, we talked a little bit about that earlier. This happens quite vividly with the premonition you have about your older brother’s accident. I don’t know if you’re okay to talk about it at all, but can you describe the premonition and then what subsequently happened to him, and how he is now?

Rickie Lee Jones:

There have been a few times where I’ve had this place come upon me, and it is a place. I was in a lot of stressors in the lunchroom. It was just a few weeks into my sixth grade year, I think. I was still 10 years old, and the kids were drawing [inaudible 00:17:54] lines around their trays and I had to get out of the lunchroom, and to do that, I had to go by the table of older kids who were very mean. So on my way out, I stopped to look at some pictures, class pictures, that were on the right side of the auditorium stage. That’s where we ate, in the auditorium. As I looked at my brother’s graduation picture, the light in the room went away just like in a movie and centered around his picture. But it’s more than that.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It’s kind of scary because when I talk about it, it’s here, but I don’t talk about it much. It’s possible I could have had a life of premonitions if I would have let it happen anymore. But at any rate, I saw the picture and the message came. The message was really clear. It said, “Something is going to happen to Danny and nothing will ever be the same.” As if a gentle angel was saying, “So we’re letting you know, and there’s nothing you can do.” I don’t know. As years went by, I thought, when we used to make records, we worked with tape, and when you hit the Cymbal really loud or the guitar really loud, the sound actually echoed over in part of the tape. So you’d hear a echo of a sound just before it came when you’re listening back.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It’s quite amazing, and as years have gone by, I thought, “Maybe time is kind of like that,” because we live in a spiral universe. Maybe some events are so loud they echo into the future, just like the … But at any rate, he did have this terrible accident 48 hours later. The man hit his motorcycle and knocked him off, dragging him along the road, because his foot was caught on the fender, cut his leg open so bad. They severed his leg, but his head hitting the ground also caused traumatic brain injury.

Rickie Lee Jones:

You ask how he is now. Well, he didn’t have a great life, but he had an okay life. He ran a pool tournament for a while. He had his own pool hall, but probably nothing like the life he was hoping to have. When people are infirmed or handicapped, or when people live a life that way, the only thing that they don’t want is to be measured as less than. “This is the life that is now, this is what I am. I’m not less than I was. I’m just Dan.” He’s still alive and he’s funny. The thing that he had when he was a little kid, he never lost, which was just a kind of lighthearted way of going through the world. Isn’t that something?

Debbie Millman:

Thank you for sharing that, Rickie. It seems that you were able to find solace and comfort in music, and you write about how you felt rescued by The Beatles.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yeah. They had some kind of a magic in their sound. It changed the world. Elvis was powerful, right? An American symbol, a sex symbol, but there was something about The Beatles that did more than rock and roll. I just never understood how to express it. But when I hear the harmonica, the room that the reverb creates and the guitar, and there’s a place, I am transported back to that place in time. Like so many of us are with music, the way we felt when we first heard it. So, I guess it’s the music.

Debbie Millman:

One of the things I loved reading about was how you loved The Beatles so much you had a Beatle haircut, Beatle boots, Ringo rings, you collected Beatles trading cards that came with sheets of bubble gum. You felt that if you could not have Paul, you would be Paul, and your love of The Beatles seemed to really help you undergo a social and spiritual metamorphosis and rock music at that point became your Bible. But one thing that I loved was that you didn’t want to be a girl singer or The Beatles girlfriend. You wanted to be a Beatle, and there’s a big distinction there.

Rickie Lee Jones:

That’s the key, isn’t it?

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely.

Rickie Lee Jones:

And maybe that’s the calling. I just don’t know, but I could never have settled for any of the roles that were offered to the girls. It was just automatic that I would be them.

Debbie Millman:

Over the course of your early life in sort of preparation for your career, you had a number of incidents that you turned down, which took a lot of bravery and courage. And the first was when you started singing, your dad was so impressed with your ability, he took you to an audition for the Lew King show, which was a local television talent show, and you won. But then a decision had to be made that really did impact one direction that your life could have taken. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Sure. The Lew King Rangers show was, like you said, a talent show for kids. Who is the famous guy in Vegas, (singing), what was his … He was a star on that show. I auditioned and I was a good singer as a kid, but they told my parents that they would have to buy an insurance policy if I was going to be on the show, an insurance policy was just gangsterism. It would’ve cost a lot of money, from what my parents earned. When we were driving home, I was in the backseat, and I remember this so well, lots of talking, lots of talking about it. Then finally they put it back in my hands and said, “If you really want to do this, we’ll find a way to do it.” And I said, “No, I don’t want to do it. It’s wrong what they’re doing,” and I turned down what I lusted for, which was not only to be on television, but to sing in front of people.

Debbie Millman:

You write that the Lew King show and that decision was your first lesson in the dark quarters of the music business, where favors are exchanged and sins offered up as collateral. You go on to state of the many exercises and integrity you have achieved or endured or failed. This was your greatest. Why is that?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Because I was a little kid and didn’t have the years that come as you get older, the years of reason. And I instinctually knew it was unethical, but a little kid wants what they want. So I think it’s a harder decision for a little kid to make, maybe not.

Debbie Millman:

You describe how that decision really gave you a compass of sorts, which is the one that comes to children who sacrifice their dreams for family, and all around you, your childhood was slipping away. But you write, to your north, you had a dream, and only one direction you could call your own. Was that when you knew you wanted to be a professional musician?

Rickie Lee Jones:

I knew that I wanted to entertain. I wanted to act, I had been in tap and ballet. I was also swimming, hoping to go to the Olympics. So whatever I was going to be, it was going to be a self-made thing, not a thing I went to school to learn to be, it would be on my shoulders.

Debbie Millman:

Yet when you tried out for the school choir, you were turned down.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Not only were you turned down, but the music teacher singled you out in front of your friends and stated that your voice was too unusual and would not fit into his chorus. How do teachers like that even exist?

Rickie Lee Jones:

He kind of looked like a Marine. They’re just kind of people that are about everything being the same. Why they’re in the arts, I think there were a lot more of them in the arts. He was teaching everybody that if they wanted to be in music as a profession, they’d have to sound like this and sing like this, and maybe they’d get a job in this choir. You remember in the mid to late ’60s, choirs were very popular. They all sang in unison. So that was the job you could get, and I was, “That is not the job I’m going to get,” but that hurt really badly.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yet, he was right. My voice was different. There was something about me that seemed to piss teachers off, and they very unceremoniously sent me on my way. Maybe even at 12 or 13, I had a personality that was singular and meant to be a star on stage. I was not ever going to be in the choir, one of. I always liked that little girl who did the long bow. I would always separate myself somehow, but they could have been so much gentler with me. It’s a long shot.

Rickie Lee Jones:

The people who become famous are long shots. They’re the people that teachers and most people around them go, “This guy’s never going to amount to anything,” because we are finding our way to a different plateau entirely. In that realm, we would be a bum, we’re not meant to be there. We’re meant to be up there. Since so few people make it, I guess, are able to define themselves and sell themselves as a singular new and different, come to the new and different, because so many people want the same, same, same. So they treat you so badly. It’s a miracle that anybody who’s a little bit different ever achieves anything that they’re meant to achieve, I think. Yeah, that guy was a bad guy. He really hurt my feelings. He meant to hurt my feelings.

Debbie Millman:

And that’s the part that makes it cruel.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Your childhood was abruptly and forever altered by your brother’s injury. At that point you described your family life as something like a nuclear submarine waiting for the signal to destroy all known life. But music became an even stronger solace view, and you write how Jefferson Airplane was on your turntable every day, Buffalo Springfield, Jimi Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, and The Mothers of Invention were frequently played. You also love show tunes, particularly from West Side Story. You go on to describe how Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow seemed to be at the eye of a storm you long to be part of. What storm was that?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, outside of my house, the hippies were growing. They’d been growing since ’65 and ’66. There’s an article in LOOK or LIFE Magazine about them in LSD, and little slices of them out there, and their long hair, and Indian headbands. So first it’s a look that invites a child, but what they’re talking about, peace, protest, that’s way lower on the list. I want to be part of all that love and attention. They would have love-ins. There was a love-in or something in in Encanto Park. I wanted to be there so bad. Well, all it was was people standing around. It wasn’t anything like what the title … I thought something magical would be happening in there. But nevertheless, I was drawn out of the family circle and all that trouble and drama to a larger picture that maybe I could find a place in.

Debbie Millman:

The last song on site A of Surrealistic Pillow, Comin’ Back to Me was my favorite. You taught yourself how to play the guitar, sounding out each note one phrase at a time by ear. How did you feel when you realized you could play it?

Rickie Lee Jones:

It took so long, so many weeks of practice, and memory, and getting … The fingers would hurt so badly pressing on those little steel razors. Then finally I could make that beautiful motion walking down from the C to the A minor. And when you’re making music, it’s like you’re weaving reality. You’re weaving places. You’re bringing the … It’s magic, and bringing these feelings into existence out here before you. Oh my God. I had longed to do it and I was doing it. That’s all I can say about that. It was pretty wonderful.

Debbie Millman:

I don’t want to skip too far ahead in time, but what was it like to record that song for your album Pop Pop?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, I wasn’t sure I should do it because it has always been that first song I learned and it’s attached to so many feelings that have their root when I was 11, or 10, or 12 years old. I go right back to that bedroom when I start thinking of that song. So, I didn’t want to put it out before me where it could be measured, and maybe people wouldn’t like it or would like it, but it wouldn’t be my private … But that didn’t happen at all. Actually, it’s remained my own private place. I was more concerned on a technical level with the key, because my voice is much lower now, but at the time it was pretty low in my register, and I was working hard to sing there. Marty Balin and I have a similar range that we can sing in. So I was just thinking about it technically, was I pulling it off, because I knew how I felt singing it, but was I conveying it to the listener. That’s all I was thinking about.

Debbie Millman:

Is it different for you to perform songs that were written by other people rather than songs written by yourself?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

One song that I think is remarkable that you do is a cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil, which takes the song and makes it a completely different song. It’s a completely different song. I was playing it for my wife and I’m like, “Do you recognize this song?” And I played the first couple of bars that you sang and she’s like, “No.” And then I played the Rolling Stones’ version and she was like, “Holy shit.” I’m like, “Yeah. yeah.”

Rickie Lee Jones:

Excellent.

Debbie Millman:

It’s amazing. Amazing.

Rickie Lee Jones:

That’s exactly what I would wish happened. So, yes, I have a very different relationship. When I hear a song, I can mold it in any direction I want. But when I write it, it’s almost like taking dictation, “This is the way I have to play it.” If I play it another way, that will be what it looks like. It’s like you’re making a baby in here, but you get to decide what it’s … So I have to stick to the creation of the song rather than the interpretation of the song when it’s mine.

Debbie Millman:

I think you were 14, you heard from a friend that her boyfriend was starting a band, and you auditioned and became the lead singer of the California Blues Band.

Rickie Lee Jones:

California Blues Band.

Debbie Millman:

Your mother gave you money to buy a Paisley empire waisted one piece satin lounge pajama outfit that you saw at Lerners department store. I remember Lerners department store, by the way. What did it feel like to finally sort of be the lead singer in a band?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, I wore that pajama out of Lerners that day. So I was walking through Christown Mall with it on, and I felt like … So they’re looking at me, and I like that. Partly I think that they might not like me, but I don’t care. I’m kind of walking on air and I’m part of the hippies. That costume was an invitation to anywhere I wanted to go. I’m grown up, I’m part of the hippies, I’m a rockstar. We didn’t say rockstar back then, but I’m the lead singer of a band. I’m in a band. So it felt like, I guess, uniforms are supposed to make you feel. When you put on a uniform, you’re a part of us, and you do this. Maybe uniforms help you do your job better. But I felt like I had put on the uniform of my future.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It was also defiance, because the lounge pajama, it was a pajama, which I didn’t know. I didn’t know people wore lounge pajamas. I never heard of that. So it was defiance against my parents who would let, my mother would let me, but she wouldn’t like it, and all the people that were looking at me, and that defiance made me feel good. That’s the key in me, I guess, I need a little defiance.

Debbie Millman:

Actually, the defiance reminds me of an experience you had in high school where you were expelled because you refused to take off your hat.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yeah. Defiance with clothes. When you take off the hat, you get no education.

Debbie Millman:

I believe that that teacher also was very cruel to you and told you that you were an undesirable element at the school.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, not the teacher, but the vice principal. The teacher was a woman, the home ed teacher, but the vice principal said I was an undesirable element, because I said, “No, no, wait, you just expelled me. You suspended me for three days for this. I just got back.” He said, “I don’t care. You’re an undesirable element at this school.” So she didn’t seem to know that I’d already been absent-

Debbie Millman:

Punished for it.

Rickie Lee Jones:

… for three days and sent the note in again. So it just seemed so unfair, but he made it clear, he didn’t care if it was fair, he was taking this opportunity to get me out of the school. Shame on him.

Debbie Millman:

Shame on him, indeed. Did he ever apologize to you when he realized what you did with your life?

Rickie Lee Jones:

It’s not just me. He kicked out 11 other hippies that year. He got rid of all the heads. Some of those kids were just long-haired kids. They didn’t smoke pot. They were really good students. No, he didn’t apologize to anybody.

Debbie Millman:

All of that ultimately motivated you to run away.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yes, again.

Debbie Millman:

You ran away several times as a teenager. On the road, you had skirmishes with gangsters, would-be abductors. You snuck into a concert venue to see Jimi Hendrix. You witnessed an abusive man beating up his wife. You even met a pimp, who was actually rather nice. When you settled in Los Angeles, you lived in a cave for a while. You hitch-hiked on a dark highway to get to Canada. Though I know in real life you end up alive, obviously we’re talking, there were moments while reading your book where I was genuinely terrified that you might not make it. How scared were you during these experiences in your early life?

Rickie Lee Jones:

I think I was scared a lot. When I made the decision to leave my dad in 1968, he had become abusive and was drinking too much. Not that I hadn’t kind of been used to that a little bit, but when he beat me, that hadn’t happened before, and I went, “I’m out of here.” There’d been a festival I wanted to go to, so I took that opportunity to run away. I had an ability, it turned out, to take care of myself with strangers, but it was always terrifying. I hitch-hiked, and you never know who’s going to pick you up. You have to be so aware of every tiny detail of the person, if you’re going to survive. I had that skill and I also got a lot of luck.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So it was thrilling, but I was also a little baby. I was just 14 years old, and I looked older because I had big boobs. That’s all. If I’d been flat-chested, I don’t think anybody would have mistaken me for a 17 … I said I was 17 because I didn’t act like an 18-year-old because I didn’t know enough. So if I did 17, that would get me through.

Rickie Lee Jones:

I went in a car with somebody bringing pot back from Mexico. So that was so dang dangerous. And to me it was just kind of thrilling. Lots of people were bringing pot over. So I could do that too and see what that felt like to be nefarious. Well, from the time that guy got over there, I got worried about the people who brought the drugs. I was in danger. I didn’t know that guy. I mean, it was a friend of a friend of a friend, but who knows who he was. Yet, escorted there to Hot Springs and back home again. So it does sometimes feel like I had a very divine escort, which my intellect, my instincts, but no, it feels like something brighter than just me. So I was scared a lot.

Debbie Millman:

When you settled in Los Angeles, you were able to collect unemployment from a job you’d been fired from. You were set to get $85 a month for six months, which at the time was just enough to pay rent.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Just enough. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

So you gave yourself that six months to either have a career in music or you would have to go home. I believe that one of the first songs you wrote at that time was one that ended up on your first album, a song that I’ve probably played several thousand times in my life. It’s a song called Company. You talk about writing it in the book, I don’t remember the exact word that you used, but it sounded like, or it felt like it was an excruciating process at the time to write that song. Can you talk a little bit about how you wrote that song? I mean, that’s a crazy good song to be the first song you’ve ever really written. It’s a masterpiece.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yeah. I had written the lyric. I worked for this gangster named Rocky, and luckily he was probably doing who knows, when he was really shipping, but I’d have to sit at a desk and wait for a consolidated shipping form to fill out, and I have many hours to do nothing. So I started writing lyrics on the typewriter. The typewriter made me feel like a real writer, and I wrote the lyrics to Young Blood, some parts of The Real End, which becomes a line in Coolsville, and Company. Pretty much almost as it ends up, “I’ll remember you too clearly, but I’ll survive another day. Conversations to share, no one there. I’ll imagine what you’d say. Two for the movie show, three in the back row. Hold on tight.” So I’m playing with synchronized rhythmic ideas in the lyrics, right? Can you see the connection? So that’s what I’m sitting there doing.

Rickie Lee Jones:

But when I reach across the galaxy, and I think that was the line, that was not too many universes and galaxies, a few, but not too many in lyrics, “When I reach across the galaxy, I’ll miss your company.” In the old [inaudible 00:44:02] way, just two verses, not even a bridge. So I met this guy out on the beach, Alfred Johnson, he was playing piano, and he was good, and he knew Laura Nyro songs, and he was playing the old stuff that I liked, Up On The Roof, and whatever.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So I agreed to go over to his house, which was a little bit of a risky thing to do. At that age, sort of like 22 or so, I was not as risky as I had been as a teenager, but I went ahead over him and his friend, and when I walked in, and it was an apartment in the very back overlooking the garage, when I walked in, there were dismembered dolls everywhere, hanging from things and stuck on the lamps and stuff. So I had to use that … I was still at the door, I know, but I had to use that instinct of, “Is this a message or is this art? What am I looking at here?” And I could see them looking at me and I just went, “Cool.” And I don’t even know if I commented on it, which made them respect me even more. I was pretty sure I wasn’t in danger.

Rickie Lee Jones:

I asked myself, “Why does the world have to be so dangerous that if you go over to somebody’s house, you don’t know if they’re going to kill you.” It’s so dangerous for women every day, and we live with that tension every day. Men can’t know, and they dismiss it. They go, “What are you always worried about?” Well, because there’s a lot to worry about, and you can’t know unless you become one of us, and how many ways we have to watch all the time.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So anyway, I got there and quite the opposite of danger happened, which is he sat behind his keyboard and he had so much equipment. He loved all this equipment. Alfred is a black man from far away, like Riverside or something. I assumed his language would be black music, but it wasn’t. It was Buffalo Springfield and Little Feat. It was that generation of music, while mine actually was Marvin Gaye. And don’t get me wrong, I think Buffalo Springfield was a very important band, where many, many things connect. But so we had a common language that we didn’t know when we first met. As we began to play, he took ahold of the lyrics and he did something nobody does … I can only describe it as a physical thing where he took ahold of them and cut a little hole out and put his heart in them. He made them his own.

Rickie Lee Jones:

We did it in the old way of … Like I would imagine the old timing songwriters would’ve done. So I’m standing by the keyboard, he’s there, and we’re singing every single thing. “So how are we going to write this Company?” “Company,” I said, “I was hoping that Frank Sinatra might sing this.” Okay. So I’ve given us some kind of a language to use to start. (singing) I could see Frank doing that. So there’s our first line. Then I think I do that, and then Alfred says (singing). So, as we got deeper in, almost syllables for were exchanged. (singing) Maybe that was one person. (singing) And that much took an hour and a half. So by 12 hours later, we’d finished it. (singing) Can’t sing it with the earphones in. (singing) “What cords are we going to put under there?” “So that second time we do it, when we suspend that cord and resolve it.” “Well, remember it, do it next time. Don’t forget. That was really good.”

Rickie Lee Jones:

So by the time it was done, we had lived a lifetime together, and we were done. We did write more. We wrote the bridge to Weasel And The White Boys, and he wants to write more, and I would like to write more with him. But I have to see him in another life because that was a whole lifetime spent with Alfred writing Company. I tell it with words, but I’d like to go back and feel what it was to have all life before you, before me, and know that every single thing I did mattered, and was forming all the roads that would be on the map to come.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It’s hard to have that at 66. But if you don’t, if you don’t say, “I have a life before me, and there are still many roads to carve out of everything I make it,” it’s a question of timing also, but you have to keep seeing your life as before you, not after you. That power will go into the work that you make. I think one of the things about Company, besides that I was a forlorn, love lost lyricist, was all life was before us. And we had a lot at stake.

Debbie Millman:

But yet the song feels like an old soul wrote it. It’s hard to believe that you were just coming out of your teenage years when you wrote that song. You also wrote a song titled Easy Money that the producer, Bud Dain, liked.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Bud Dain.

Debbie Millman:

And then he offered you a job, wherein you would write a certain number of songs per month for $800 a month. And back in 1977, that was like winning the lottery. You were all set to sign it. And then similar to your decision with Lew King, you didn’t.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Similar with my brother, the voice that spoke about my brother’s accident. It wasn’t bad, but it was also almost like a juxtaposition of time, because understand, I have the pen in my hand. I’ve come up the elevator to the office to sign. And I have the pen in my hand and something very loudly says, “Don’t sign. If he wants you, someone else will too,” which is an invitation to the future. It’s saying, “You are just beginning. This is not where you’re supposed to go. Don’t stop here.” Isn’t that funny how destiny calls you, but you can get waylaid like the Odyssey. You can get waylaid. So, it was a powerful moment. I still am in awe that some part of me knew that I would go to better places. This would not be my only chance. When we’re down at the bottom, we do feel like anything is where we’re supposed to be.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. You write that it took ball to pass up that opportunity and opt for poverty on the belief that something greater was meant for you. And it was, it was. At this point in your life, you were doing gigs around various small, somewhat CD venues through Los Angeles. What would you consider to be your big breakthrough? What was that moment?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Troubadour. The Troubadour was the third show. Nick Mathe, my old next door neighbor, had become my manager, and he had actually done a pretty good job, I think. And we had decided we’d have three showcases, which showcases was like, you didn’t get paid. I guess it’s how it always is now, but you didn’t get paid and you did a 20 or 30-minute show. And then people could come and get a taste for who you are. So we did three of them. The last one would be at the Troubadour, and that one had a … It was like a snowball. The first one, there were three famous people, that is three A&R guys, or three … This was full of them. We got it attached to Wendy Waldman’s show because we couldn’t get in anywhere.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So they put us in at the very beginning of her show, God bless her for that. We had people from three record companies, Warner Brothers, Portrait, Horizon, and I think portrait or horizon was a subsidiary of Columbia, A&M, Tommy LiPuma. So there were a whole bunch of important folks at that show. I did five songs, and I invited my friends from the street, that is four or five guys I knew who hung out on the street on Santa Monica Boulevard, came in and sang harmony on an acapella thing. My friend from The Great American Food & Beverage Company came in and played piano on [inaudible 00:54:16], and I played the other … Because I wanted to show them as much as I could how big the room was, what I liked, the old timey stuff, acapella stuff, because I didn’t know if the songs I wrote showed you where I wanted to go. So anyway, that was my big plan, and I think it worked.

Debbie Millman:

You wrote about a drive with the producer Lowell George as the official beginning of your new life, the one that you live today, and you write, “That ride seemed so right and normal as if I had always been destined to ride in that range Rover. Although I was giddy inside, I was cool. And if I may say beautiful. I knew who I was, the songwriter, the girl on the beret. I belonged sipping Moet with Lowell George. I belonged.” What did you envision your future would be like at that point?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, I think at that time I was really living in the here and now. So I had Lowell and the possibility of his world. I knew Tom and Chuck and their world. So this is me on unemployment, possibly becoming part of worlds that I’ve lived with all my life. So here sitting in the couch is David Crosby, and over there is Graham Nash. So that’s what I was doing. I don’t think I was doing anything else but navigating my feelings and the real world before me.

Debbie Millman:

You knew from the beginning of your career that you wanted to have staying power. And before you even made a record, you were aware of the danger of being what you referred to as being used up too fast. Were you worried that that might happen?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Sure, but the illusion was a year into my career, and I was so very famous. All the doors opened, all the backstage doors opened, and I seemed to have so much money it would never go away. The illusion was that it would always be that way. It could never go away. That’s been the challenge, is learning that balloon of attention and fame will be expelled. And how will you be here in 30 years if this is where you want to be? The only way for me was to write work that was so iconic and so powerful that, like Frank Sinatra, who was my hero, that people would always come back to be a part of it. So that was what I set out to do. So, it’s been a life experience, not a career experience. It’s been learning how to navigate life.

Rickie Lee Jones:

The thing I feel now is that music and this career, there’s no difference between my life and my career, and my career and my life. They’re all mixed up together. That’s why it was okay to write the book and tell you about my history, because if you’re meant to be here, it’ll only do good. Also, I wanted to, I thought, “There really aren’t very many stories of women’s whole lives. We have memoirs, but this is a story of a life, and a time, and a family, and at an extraordinary event, that is my career, but the book is the story of a life.”

Debbie Millman:

What’s really interesting is as, I guess I would be considered a super fan, reading your book illuminated so much of your music in a completely different way, because you have been so private so much of what you wrote about, I didn’t know. I was sort of astounded by the history that you bring to your music, and it sort of helps augment the music in a completely different way. Re-listening to your entire catalog in preparation for the interview, I was like, “Oh, okay. That’s the story in Coolsville.” You kind of get the music in a completely different way. Your second album Pirates is considered one of the greatest albums ever made. And I’m not saying that because I’m a fan, I’m saying that because it’s been written about as one of the greatest albums ever made.

Debbie Millman:

And it was written at the end of your addiction to heroin, when you and musician, Sal Bernardi, lived on 9th Street in Manhattan. And you write that, “This is where Sal and I lost our way together. We stayed up all night and slept until 4:00 PM and rose half dead to get high and feel half alive again. We wrote music and read Edgar Allan Poe,” who shows up in some of the lyrics. “We lived the strange Twilight, the slow motion fluid that fed our memories. We were junkies.” You’ve said that heroin was like a carnival ride you couldn’t exit until the ride was over. And one day you knew it was time to get off the ride. How did you kick the habit? Because you didn’t go to rehab. How did you manage to get over this?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, it took a lot of false starts. It’s hard to describe to anybody how overpowering heroin is to the spirit and the psyche. And I guess I’m many, many, many years away, so it’s say for me to look, but it’s also kind of like, what’s that … You know that book, The Hobbit, and there’s that one eye in the tower? It’s kind of like that. If you turn and look at it, it’ll look at you too. But I guess it’s talking to the part of the brain that doesn’t feel safe and doesn’t feel pleasure, and it fills that up with safety and pleasure in a half sleep state where you can write anything and be walking in a dream and talking. So, well, that’s nice. But in a month, or two, or six, this place begins to recede.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So when you stop taking the drug, this place isn’t quite the same anymore. So when you’ve been on that drug for a few years, you don’t have anything here to root into. It has gone away and become part of the dream place. The strength of will it takes to abandon that safe, wonderful dream place for this stark bright, hard, frightening world is incredible. When I was a drug addict, about two or three years, I began to want to be well. And that helps that language to say, “I’m sick and I want to be well.” It was very hard. I had a therapist, I tried, I failed, I tried, I failed. I identified triggers, and it took a year or a year and a half of saying, “No more,” and then relapsing.

Rickie Lee Jones:

But after finally three months or four months, the test, I survived that test. I didn’t get high and a year later, the year test. So, I never went to AA or anything, but it really was one day at a time, one step at a time. We made it here, we made it there, and resolving never to go back. Now, what I just wanted to do right now was to try to describe what addiction is so that people who don’t have addictive personalities could get a sense that it’s not a choice. It’s like an altering of the brain that takes place, and it takes the will to go, “I know that place exists, even though I can’t see it anymore, and I’m going back. I’m going over the mountains and through the deserts, and I’m finding my way back to reality.”

Debbie Millman:

You’ve been sober for decades now and write, “How months go by now when you forget you were an addict. The dark is gone. The shadow’s faded. You are recovered and whole.” One thing that I shook my head over as I was reading your book was the notion that male rockers like Keith Richards, you sort of admired for his longevity and drug use. But women in rock and roll are shamed for the same behavior that men are often held for. How do you make sense of that, if you can?

Rickie Lee Jones:

I think we do it with women in all things. We assign a moral code to them that we don’t hold men to. And it’s sad because that dubiousness is creating careers. It’s very hard now to have a career if you won’t sell yourself sexually. We worked so hard to not have to do that. So that’s a little discouraging.

Debbie Millman:

Well, one other thing that you can’t help but notice if you look at the lyric and the liner notes of your albums, all the songs are music and lyrics by Rickie Lee Jones, for the most part. You look at some of the popular music today and you see, and I’m really not joking, 30 or 40 names. I don’t even know how that is possible.

Rickie Lee Jones:

I guess everybody in the room gets their name on.

Debbie Millman:

It seems like there was a moment in time where music was a very personal sort of soul-revealing experience. And over time, that’s sort of changed to really become entertainment.

Rickie Lee Jones:

The relationship was the art. It was the person’s relationship with art. Now, it’s a person’s relationship with show business and fame. What they’re seeking is success. What we sought was a great song. We hoped it sold, but our emphasis was the great song. It’s not anymore. Nobody’s trying to write a great song. They’re trying to write a hit song. That’s what shows. That’s too bad. But I really think we’re cyclical. People get tired of that. That’ll fall away. Something else will take its place. Hopefully songs, hopefully not just sounds, but who knows what’s coming?

Debbie Millman:

Finally, my last question is one that my wife, who is a writer, suggested that I ask you. The question is, how would the liner notes of your life read?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Of my life? Woo. That’s a long and creative thing, which I don’t know if I can do on the fly. It’s kind of like a tombstone too, right? That’s a kind of good idea. Instead of a tombstone, we’ll put some liner notes. I guess I would say she was a woman of her time who transcended her time, but that’s too easy. That’s more like a tombstone. I guess she was a woman who transcended, who found a place to fit in. You could go either way with that. But I think the jury’s out, and liner notes are always written by somebody else, their view of who you are. You can try to plant eggs and get them to go in that direction, but I was never sure how other people saw me. There’s a nice thing that’s happened this year, where I finally don’t feel misunderstood. That’s really all I could ask for, things seem to be right now. So maybe there won’t be any liner notes, or just put it out and let people guess.

Debbie Millman:

Rickie Lee Jones, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express to you how much your music has meant to me in my life. I own everything you’ve ever published and really just want to thank you for doing the work that you do. Thank you for enriching my life with your music and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Rickie Lee Jones:

You’re welcome. Thank you so much for doing this too. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Rickie Lee Jones’ new memoir is titled Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. You could read more about her remarkable career on her website, rickieleejones.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Rickie Lee Jones appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

If we think more positively about being an introvert today than we did 10 years ago, Susan Cain is the reason why. Her 2012 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, made the case that our culture gets introverts all wrong and often undervalues them. In 2016, she followed up with the book Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts. Now, she’s investigating another underappreciated aspect of the human experience. Her latest book is titled Bittersweet: How Longing and Sorrow Make Us Whole. He or she argues that a bittersweet melancholic outlook makes emotional room for beauty, creativity, and love. And we’re going to talk all about that today. Susan Cain, welcome to Design Matters.

Susan Cain:

Thank you so much, Debbie. I am your fan, and it is so great to be here with you.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. Thank you. Susan, I want to know if it’s true that there’s never been a day in your adult life that you haven’t had some dark chocolate.

Susan Cain:

It’s so true. And I would even modify it to say that there’s never been a day when I haven’t had too much dark chocolate.

Debbie Millman:

Good for you. Now, why dark chocolate versus milk or white?

Susan Cain:

I just always really… Long before I ever knew I was going to write a book called Bittersweet, from the time I was a kid, my favorite chocolate was bittersweet chocolate. And now that I’m adult, I also know that it’s better for you. So if I’m going to have this chocolate addiction, it might as well be the kind that’s good for you.

Debbie Millman:

And I understand you’re not too picky about the kind of dark chocolate. In fact, you prefer the little semi-sweet chocolate chips that you can put in yogurt.

Susan Cain:

Well, I do do that. Yeah, but I mean, I like it all. I definitely notice if it’s specially good chocolate. I just don’t pay that much attention. It’s more like the chocolate fix. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You grew up in Lawrence on Long Island, the youngest of three children, and your grandfather was a rabbi who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn. And you’ve said, that was your favorite place in the world. How come?

Susan Cain:

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it really was my favorite place. And he was one of my favorite people in the world. I mean, the apartment itself was like the proverbial place, like you step across the doorway and you’re suddenly in another realm. You know?

Debbie Millman:

Mm-hmm.

Susan Cain:

If it were the site of a children’s movie, it would’ve been the place from which the adventures began, but they were adventures of the mind. It was this place where every surface was filled with stacks of books, the walls were lined with books. His life was in books. He would spend all his time sitting on the sofa and reading and then crafting these sermons that were based on it. He just had this very magical, gentle, loving, wise presence. And the whole place was imbued with that. We used to go and visit. My mother and I would go and visit him there all the time. They would be talking their adult talk, and I would just comb through the bookshelves. It wasn’t even the books themselves; it was like some essence that I was absorbing. It was like what love looked like for me or one aspect of it. And also what ambition looked like in a way because I wanted to grow up and be part of that world of books in which he lived and which he revered so much.

Debbie Millman:

Did he live in Borough Park?

Susan Cain:

Yes, he did. He did.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. My grandparents lived there as well. I come from a very Orthodox Jewish family, and my grandmother and grandfather lived there. That’s where we went to synagogue and spent a lot of time.

Susan Cain:

Oh, you’re kidding.

Debbie Millman:

No, I’m not.

Susan Cain:

Which synagogue was it? I wonder if it was the same one.

Debbie Millman:

Actually, I don’t know. My father passed away many years ago, and he sort of broke away from the religion as a young adult. We ended up going to a more reform synagogue in Howard Beach, Queens where we ended up moving after Brooklyn.

Susan Cain:

Mm-hmm. Right.

Debbie Millman:

So I was only about two or three years old when we lived in Brooklyn and then moved to Howard Beach, Queens.

Susan Cain:

Well, I bet you your grandparents went to my grandfather’s synagogue.

Debbie Millman:

I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t.

Susan Cain:

I would bet a dollar on it.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I bet. I remember going with my grandmother, sitting in a separate place from the men, wearing plastic shoes on Yom Kippur, the whole thing.

Susan Cain:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Okay, so now I’ll go back to my official questions.

Susan Cain:

Okay.

Debbie Millman:

Susan, I read that you went to the library every Friday and came home with a teetering stack of books. What were your favorites at that time?

Susan Cain:

Oh gosh, so many different books. I guess there were two genres especially that I loved. One was the fantasy genre, so like E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and all those writers. But also, my family went every summer. My father was a huge anglophile and bibliophile. So we went every summer to London and we would go with his empty suitcase, which we would then-

Debbie Millman:

Fill.

Susan Cain:

… fill with books. Yeah, because there was no Amazon in those days.

Debbie Millman:

Right.

Susan Cain:

And England just had all these great books that you couldn’t get in the US, especially for kids. So there are all these boarding school stories of the kind in which Harry Potter was kind of modeled.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Susan Cain:

So I grew up reading all those stories.

Debbie Millman:

As you were growing up, I understand you spent countless afternoons writing stories. You called the area under your family’s card table, your workshop, and curled up there producing magazines, comprised of loose leaf papers stapled together. And is it true that you sold subscriptions to your family members to the magazines?

Susan Cain:

Yeah, it is true.

Debbie Millman:

I love that.

Susan Cain:

There were two magazines. One was called Rags and one was called Rabbit. I don’t know why, but yeah, I had a lot of willing buyers among the extended family.

Debbie Millman:

It’s so interesting. I had a best friend, her name was Debbie also. We made a magazine also that we wrote and drew ourselves. And I still think that this is one of my best names ever. We called our magazine Debutante [inaudible 00:06:30] our names.

Susan Cain:

Oh, that’s so clever.

Debbie Millman:

Unfortunately, neither of us have that copy. We reconnected on Facebook years and years and years ago. But the first thing we tried to figure out was who got the magazine, and neither one of us did.

Susan Cain:

You’re reminding me that I had a friend named Michelle in fourth grade. I used to go to Michelle’s house and we would sit at this little table in her room and write plays. We weren’t writing them together. We were more like writing them side by side, but those are some of my happiest memories.

Debbie Millman:

Actually, when I was doing my research, I read that you guys would sit side by side and then read aloud to each other, read the plays out loud to each other.

Susan Cain:

Oh, wow. First of all, I can’t even imagine what this research is that you did. I’m so impressed because I don’t remember that I’ve ever even talked about that, about writing those plays with Michelle.

Debbie Millman:

Were you envisioning at that point? Was that when you first thought you might want to be a writer?

Susan Cain:

Oh, I wanted to be a writer from the time I was four years old. I was in love with books from the very beginning. My siblings were much older, and my whole family, they’re all readers. So I was like the little kid growing up in a family of much older people where everybody’s thing was books. So I grew up with that ambition. So yeah, I was writing those little stapled together stories from the time I was very, very small.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve talked about how much your mother encouraged your creativity at that time in your life and have said that she never told you that you should be outside more or do more regular kid stuff or daydream less or socialize more. You’ve stated that she understood that you had plenty of friends to play with, but recognized that one of your best friends was your very own self. And I was wondering, did you prefer to play on your own or was it something that you just like to do both of?

Susan Cain:

It was really both. I don’t know. Maybe if I had always been off on my own, maybe she wouldn’t have been quite as supportive. She might have been more worried about it or something like that. But no, I always had a lot of friends and always loved playing with my friends. It was very devoted. My close friends, there’s nothing like, I think, girlhood friendships. They’re just the best and the most fun and the most intense. Yeah, I had all of that, but also loved to spend all this time reading and daydreaming. And that aspect of life was just very familiar to her because she had grown up with this father who was so immersed both in his community but also in this life of the mind. So I guess that juxtaposition was just natural to the way she had always lived.

Debbie Millman:

One thing that I was really compelled by as I was doing my research was how you’ve written about how on both your mother’s side of the family and your father’s side of the family, you lost most of your relatives in the Holocaust, and it gave you the sense as you were growing up that something like this could happen at any moment. This motivated your subsequent research into what’s referred to as inherited grief, which I was really, really fascinated by. Can you talk a little bit about what inherited grief is and some of the research and some of the things that you discovered doing that research?

Susan Cain:

Yeah. I mean, inherited grief is the idea that the grief or the trauma that occurs to generation A can be inherited by the descendants of generation A. It can be inherited in generations B, C, D, E, F and all the way down. I think people have always had a sense that that might be true, but would assume that that would’ve happened primarily or solely through family traditions, cultural traditions, whatever. But what’s really fascinating is this whole new line of research that started actually with Holocaust survivors, but has since branched out beyond that. That has found that there seem to be epigenetic changes that occur when a profound life event happens that change the very makeup of our DNA in such a way that it can be passed to the descendants, whether or not those descendants have ever known the actual people who withstood those events. And it’s very interesting, if you look among Jews in general, there does seem to be this predisposition to anxiety. Where does that come from? Does that come from… Just that we-

Debbie Millman:

We are not alone.

Susan Cain:

Yeah. Is it like we teach it to each other, something bad could happen at any moment? Maybe it’s that, but it also may be something that really is encoded in us.

Debbie Millman:

I just think it’s so interesting that trauma actually has the ability to then impact our evolution if it’s changing our DNA.

Susan Cain:

I know. It’s kind of a remarkable finding. I mean, I should say, these studies are still pretty young and they’re somewhat controversial, but there’s enough of them that are starting to accumulate now that I would say the field is less controversial than it was when it first emerged. But yeah, there is a woman named Rachel Yehuda at Columbia who pioneered this work and continues to do more and more of it. And it’s really fascinating.

Debbie Millman:

You write about Rachel specifically in your book, and I ended up going into a rabbit hole of her research as well, which is just incredibly fascinating in terms of understanding how important it is to get help after trauma and how trauma not only then impacts you, but really whoever you’re around and whoever you’re with and potentially whoever you bring into the world.

Susan Cain:

Yeah. No, there’s something very empowering about knowing that. And I actually discovered this… Well, I mean, I guess I always knew about this aspect of my life, but I did have a moment… When I was researching the book, I went to this conference for bereavement counselors. I’m not a bereavement counselor myself. I was just there as part of my book research. But the workshop was led by this incredible guy named Dr. Simcha Raphael, and he led us through an exercise where at first we just had to tell the group about a loss that we had gone through in our lives. And I talked about a particular loss and I found myself in floods of tears, which I hadn’t expected.

As we began the exercise, I was feeling actually quite kind of detached in a matter of fact. And so it really took me by surprise that as I started to talk, these tears came, and the tears were not unfamiliar to me. It was like, I had known them before, I had experienced these tears before. And it was actually Simcha who said to me that there was something about the nature of the tears that they seem to be not only my own tears. They seem to be other people’s tears too-

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Susan Cain:

… that they seem to be like tears of parents or ancestors that I was carrying with me. And that was, on the one hand, maybe a kind of woo-woo thing to say, but on the other hand, there was something about it that really resonated. And I was reminded of all my life from the time I was very young. Like when I was in sleep-away camp, for example, and I had kind of liked camp and kind of really didn’t, I was pretty ambivalent about it, and yet on the last day of camp, when I was a little kid, I was in floods of tears about leaving camp. There was always something about endings and goodbyes that I took much harder than the situation seemed to warrant. And it felt like there was some ancient grief that I was locking into. That whole experience got me down this pathway of investigating this idea of inherited grief.

Debbie Millman:

I know you went to Princeton University.

Susan Cain:

Mm-hmm.

Debbie Millman:

You graduated with a degree in English. I also graduated with a degree in English, but from SUNY Albany. And you graduated after completing a 91-page long senior thesis titled A Study of T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. And I’m wondering why you chose those writers and artists.

Susan Cain:

Oh my, first of all, can I just exclaim over the level of research you do for your podcasts? It’s amazing. I haven’t thought about that senior thesis in 30 years, and certainly no one has asked me about it.

Debbie Millman:

Really?

Susan Cain:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, my God. I love T.S. Eliot. I was so excited to ask you about it.

Susan Cain:

Wow. Okay. So I wrote that… As I say, I haven’t thought about it in decades, but I’m pretty sure the subtitle of that thesis was a study of anti-democratic literature between the world wars. So it’s really actually a follow-on of everything we were just talking about, I think, because I emerged from this family where so much of our destiny was shaped by those wars. I was just always really fascinated by what could have possibly caused all of that to happen. So yeah, I was really interested in the literature of that period during that lull between the wars when there was even that time during the ’20s where it seemed like everything was happy and good and then turned very dark. So I’ve always been trying to figure that out.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, that’s so interesting because in terms of that happy and dark, you also talked about effortless perfection and how everybody at Princeton appeared extremely shiny and in control and seemed they were supposed to be in life and as if they had already arrived sort of fully formed.

Susan Cain:

Yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And you described this as effortless perfection. I’m wondering, if that was going on at Princeton then, it seems that the entirety of social media is experiencing that now. There’s the pressure that people seem to have to be effortlessly adept is extraordinary. And it’s a complete mismatch to what we truly feel and experience, but we can’t reveal that. How are you seeing what you were experiencing at Princeton then to what’s happening in this sort of larger context of what’s happening, I guess, mostly online now?

Susan Cain:

Well, I mean that term of effortless perfection didn’t actually exist back when I was at Princeton. I just was living it, I think. And what happened is, I went back 30 years later with a writer’s notebook, which is the most amazing gift because it allows you to just enter into conversations with total strangers really and talk about the real stuff. And so I just started asking these students what their lives were really like. And they were the ones who told me about this term effortless perfection, which is apparently a term at Princeton, at many other college campuses, because this generation has felt the need to invent this term to describe what it is they’re experiencing. It basically means this pressure to be perfectly thin, perfectly beautiful, perfectly athletic, perfectly academic, perfectly ambitious, perfectly social, and to do it all and to appear to be doing all of that effortlessly.

I do think social media has enhanced all of these pressures, but they’re, in certain ways, not so different from what I had experienced all those years ago. I think this has been something that’s been deep in our culture for a long time. Social media, just because it’s so performative by its nature, just enhances, but it enhances what had already been there.

Debbie Millman:

I want to share a really, really bittersweet story with you about something that I did. I think I was in ninth grade. I just remembered this for the first time.

Susan Cain:

Ah.

Debbie Millman:

I have crush on a boy named Robert, and Robert had a crush on a girl named Lorraine. And I wanted Robert to think that I was perfect. I got a t-shirt, my favorite t-shirt, and I got those press-on letters.

Susan Cain:

Oh yeah, those iron-ons.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Those iron-on letters, and I measured really carefully, and I ironed on the word perfect-

Susan Cain:

Oh, my gosh.

Debbie Millman:

… on a t-shirt and went to school with it on. And people were looking at me rather bizarrely, I remember that, like, “Whoa.” But what I didn’t realize as I measured, to make sure it was perfectly placed, was that the P and the T ended up under my arms and got all crinkled by my perspiration over the course of the day. And so all you saw was erfec with the P and the T sort of bunched up in my armpits essentially. I just remember that, I’m like, “Oh my God, this attempt to have seemed perfect which showed how imperfect I really, really was.”

Susan Cain:

I can’t get over that story. It’s like, if you had invented that story for a children’s book, it would feel like too neat to be true. But I do think you should write that one up.

Debbie Millman:

I probably will now that it’s come flooded back to me. Oh, my God. In any case, from Princeton, you went to Harvard and you went to Harvard Law. You have your JD. You were a practicing lawyer for a long time. Was that effortless perfection, even though we didn’t know the term at that point, do you think that that was sort of fueling your decision to pursue this sort of very respectable, very prestigious type of career?

Susan Cain:

No, I actually really don’t. There were two things that happened. One is that I took a bunch of classes at Princeton in creative writing, but they were all in fiction. And I didn’t understand at the time really that there was a thing of creative nonfiction. I just didn’t know even though I realized in retrospect there was a class there in that, but somehow that escaped me.

So anyway, I was doing these fiction classes and it just really wasn’t my thing. And so I thought, “Oh, well, all those youthful dreams that I always had about being a writer, those were just like kid dreams. They weren’t real. That’s not what I’m going to do.” And at the same time, my father pulled me aside and said, “All those writer dreams that you’ve had, that’s really great when you’re young. But when you can’t support yourself when you’re 30 and you can’t pay the rent, it’s not really so romantic then. So you should do something where you can support yourself.” Although I resisted that advice at the time he gave it to me, it also sunk in and I did want to be able to be able to take care of myself. So it was just this practical decision that I made. That’s really what it was.

But then, I got to law school. And because most of the people who were at law school were people who had majored in politics or government or whatever, because I was so not meant for that place in the first place, I actually liked it more than most people did. Most people really gritted their teeth through it. I found it fascinating because it just felt to me like it was like being in another country, I’ve said before. And I just found it all fascinating. So for a while, I quite enjoyed the whole thing.

Debbie Millman:

Were you still keeping your diaries at that point? I know that you had started writing diaries from a very, very early age. It was part of what created a bit of a rift between you and your mom.

Susan Cain:

Yeah. I kept these very intense diaries all the way through high school and college. And I kept them in this red backpack with a little combination lock on them. And I would carry that backpack with me from dorm room to dorm room, to apartment building, to wherever I was living. And I do remember being in law school and carrying that backpack with me on my summer job things. But at some point I lost the backpack. Strange, like it’s floating around somewhere in the world.

Debbie Millman:

Somewhere in the world. I’ve read about this, and when I was reading about it, I literally gasped. It’s one thing to have a parent read your diaries as your mom did when you were younger, but quite another to know that it’s somewhere out in the world.

Susan Cain:

I know.

Debbie Millman:

I feel like every time you talk about it, I’m hoping that somewhere, somehow, someone will hear this and see a red backpack at a flea market and buy it and send it back to you. That is my hope.

Susan Cain:

That would be so awesome. I have to say, my best friend from college heard me… We were talking about some college stuff. She really wants me to write a memoir from those years. And I’m like, “I can’t do it unless I find the diaries,” because I don’t think I remember enough for a whole memoir, but I have books and books in there, somewhere floating around the world. But it is a curious thing. I lost those diaries twice because in one of those summer dorm room things, I left the diaries behind and then got a phone call from whom I had been subletting. And she said, “You’ve left this backpack full of diaries.” And so I came and got them, and then I lost them again a year later. So I don’t know, I am an extremely forgetful person by nature. I just am. I don’t know if it’s that or if it’s some subconscious thing of having wanted to lose them. Who can say?

Debbie Millman:

After you graduated from Harvard, you went to work at a firm called Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.

Susan Cain:

Steen & Hamilton. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Steen & Hamilton. Steen & Hamilton, which is described as an international white-shoe law firm, has over 1,200 lawyers worldwide. You’ve since said that you were not a very natural lawyer in a million different ways, but you were on the partner track and very committed to that track. How did you envision your life at that point?

Susan Cain:

Well, I mean, this was before I had kids, which made it easier. I really loved it at the beginning. The firm I was at, Cleary… All the firms have a slightly different personality to them, and Cleary had a kind of intellectual vibe and an international vibe. And I just liked it. I enjoyed it. I really liked my colleagues. I thought it was kind of interesting. I couldn’t quite believe that I was able to manage in this world of high finance, which was so foreign to me. I didn’t grow up in that kind of family. I didn’t know the difference between a stock and a bond when I first started practicing. It was all so bizarre to me really. So I got a huge kick out of it at the beginning.

But then, it’s actually a very interesting lesson. Because this was a 24/7 type of existence, so when you’re absorbed into a social world 24/7, it really does become a kind of hermetically sealed container. And it’s very hard to imagine what your life could be like outside of that. Even though as the years went on I was starting to feel like completely overworked and this wasn’t really the right fit for me, I still was within that container and envisioning a life of being a partner with these colleagues who I really liked. And I had a dream, I wrote about this in the book. I had this dream of being able to move into a red brick townhouse in West Village, in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, which is this lovely neighborhood.

Debbie Millman:

Best neighborhood in the world.

Susan Cain:

It is the best neighborhood in the world. It really is. And I did end up moving there. I just couldn’t afford the townhouse, but I did end up getting an apartment there after leaving the law.

Debbie Millman:

When one of your senior partners let you know that you are not going to make partner, you burst into tears and immediately took a leave of absence from the firm. One thing I wasn’t clear about, did you know if he meant you weren’t going to make partner at that specific time or that you were never going to make partner?

Susan Cain:

I had no idea. I wasn’t clear either. I’m still not clear to this day, but I do know that I had simultaneously the sense of like, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened and this is the best thing that’s ever happened. And while I was crying, I was in the mode of, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened. But I left, two hours later, I was bicycle riding around Central Park, just in a loop around the park going nowhere. But just the fact that it could be two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon or whatever day it was and I was free to just wander around the city like that was the most amazing thing. Yeah. And then literally that very night, I started writing again. And it was the first time I had done that in so many years.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I read that one week later, you signed up for a creative non-fiction class at NYU. And at that moment, you said you had a complete feeling of certainty that this was what you were going to be doing and had zero expectation that you would make a living out of it.

Susan Cain:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

But you were then committed. That was when you just decided to accept that this was what you wanted to do.

Susan Cain:

Yeah. It wasn’t even accepting it. It was like, there was no choice. It was so clear. It was like, “This is it. This is what I’ve always wanted. This is what I…” And especially because now I had found this genre of nonfiction. Because as I said, when I had been in college, I had been experimenting with fiction and that didn’t work. But it was like, now I’d found nonfiction and I realized, “Oh, this was the thing I needed all along.” It wasn’t only that I didn’t expect to make a living at it, I told myself that the goal was to try to publish something by the time I was 75, because I didn’t know what was involved in getting published, I didn’t know if it such a thing could be possible. I had just grown up with this idea of, to publish a book, it was like scaling Mount Olympus.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Susan Cain:

So do you know if you’ll actually be able to scale Mount Olympus before you’re 75? No, you do not. So that’s how it was to me. But I knew that I wanted to center my life around that.

Debbie Millman:

Shortly after you left your job, you also ended a seven-year relationship that you also had felt always was sort of wrong.

Susan Cain:

Mm-hmm.

Debbie Millman:

As you’ve put it, so there you were in your early 30s, you had no career, no love, no place to live, and your next move, I love this because I so relate, your next move was to immediately fall into a relationship with a handsome musician who despite you stating was the wrong guy for a variety of reasons, your feelings for him developed into a crazy obsession, the likes of which you have never experienced before or since. No matter what you did, you couldn’t seem to escape it. Been there, done that, know it. So glad that’s behind me. Do you have a sense of why this happened at the time?

Susan Cain:

Oh yeah, very much so. I mean I had basically spent the prior 10 years in the wrong relationship and in the wrong career. And now I was suddenly in this state that I called free fall, but it wasn’t an accident that this was the particular person who I fell in love with. What actually happened is, I had this very indulgent friend, Naomi, who would listen to me tell stories about this guy on endless repeat. And Naomi one day said to me, “If you are this obsessed with him, it’s because he represents something. He represents something that you’re longing for. And so what is it that you’re longing for?”

The minute she said it, the moment she said it, it was so clear to me that he represented this beautiful world of art and literature that I had wanted to be part of from the very beginning and had not thought I could belong to somehow or not allowed myself access to or something like that. As soon as I understood that, the obsession with him completely melted away and I was just able to focus on the writing itself, which was the thing. I mean, he was a lovely person. He had all kinds of qualities to justify loving him, but the obsession part, that was all gone. Whenever you’re feeling an emotion that’s beyond all reason, there’s a reason.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Susan, that’s my favorite line in the book. You are this hooked because he represents something you’re longing for. And how often do we sort of transfer and project these longings on someone as opposed to something that we should be doing or want to be feeling or need to be feeling that we just can’t seem to get ourselves to feel. And it’s really the moment I was so looking forward to talking to you about because I know I’ve been through it, I know so many people have been through these experiences where this sort of obsession takes over our psyche. And we don’t really know why because we know it’s not the person. I’ve had that experience with siblings. I’ve had this experience with significant others where the anger, the sadness or the sorrows somehow seem so much bigger than it is because it’s really not about that at all.

Susan Cain:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I know. And when you’re in the throes of it, it’s very hard to see that. It’s actually, I think, probably less common to have a kind of epiphany moment the way I did, that all she had to do was ask that one question and I was like, “Oh, okay. The skies have parted and now I see.” More often, we probably come to it more gradually or in retrospect.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I think that’s something that’s actually going to help people in reading Bittersweet because I had an experience recently where I was just weeping over something that had happened with my brother. I was literally all day long weeping, weeping on the street, weeping in the house, weeping in the studio. And all of a sudden, because I had just read that, I thought, “This isn’t about that at all. This is something much, much deeper.” And then I was able to really look at it in a way that I hadn’t before.

Susan Cain:

Oh wow.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I want to talk about longing and bittersweet in a moment, but I just feel like it’s really important to at least acknowledge what happened right before Bittersweet or in the years before Bittersweet, which is when that obsession fell away and you started writing for real, which really ultimately led you to writing Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, which is an idea you had in the beginning of the 2000s and then ultimately published in 2012.

At the time you were writing Quiet, you thought that you were working on a highly idiosyncratic project and you’d be lucky to get a book deal and sell a few copies, but that’s not what happened at all. Your agent approached several publishers that was on auction, a bidding war. Penguin Random House emerged the winner. It took you seven years to write Quiet. I want to make sure I have this right. Is it true that your editor read the first draft, told you it was terrible, rejected it outright, and then told you to start over from scratch?

Susan Cain:

Yeah, it is true. I mean, she said it more nicely than maybe that summary makes it sound like.

Debbie Millman:

Okay.

Susan Cain:

She was nice about it.

Debbie Millman:

But she still said the word like, “No.”

Susan Cain:

Yeah. I remember going to her office and sitting at her desk and she said, “Yeah, I want you to start over. Just start over, start from scratch, and we’re going to give you all the time that you need to do this.”

Debbie Millman:

Wow, that’s incredible. I have to tell you that I told my editor that I needed more time and she was like, “No.”

Susan Cain:

I know. Well, it’s funny that you say that because I was actually so elated when she did that because I knew I needed so much more time. I totally knew it. I had never published a word in my life. I had no idea how to write a book, and I knew I couldn’t do it in the short amount of time that publishing contracts usually give you. So I was just thrilled that I had all that free rein.

Debbie Millman:

Well, it was worth it, worth the wait. Quiet was finally released in 2012. It became a pretty instant success. It’s now sold over four million copies worldwide. It’s been translated into more than 40 languages. It spent more than seven years on The New York Times Best Seller list. Your TED Talk on the power of introverts has been viewed over 40 million times. And as importantly as all of those markers of success, I think that it’s really clear in our culture today that Quiet inspired a cultural reconsideration about what it means to be an introvert. Did you have any sense or intuition at all that that groundswell was going to occur and that way in which we think about quieter people was going to be so profound and meaningful to so many people?

Susan Cain:

I guess the glimmerings of it started to happen from the time that I first sold the book and there was that bidding war that you talked about. At that bidding war, that consisted of me going around to meet with all the different publishers who were bidding. So I was basically going from one meeting to the next. Each one filled with people saying, “Oh, this book is about me. I’ve never said this out loud before, but this is about me.” So I started to hear things like that over and over and over again. So you start to kind of get a glimmer, but I think you never believe something like that until it actually happens.

Also, if I showed to you, it wasn’t only that one time when my editor pulled me in and said start from scratch, but there was another editor who was involved and he wrote me a two-page, single-space letter talking about all the different things that I needed to do and conceptualize in order to have the book fulfill its promise. If you were the person reading that letter, not knowing the future, you would have no way of knowing that you would actually be able to pull it off.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Because it sort of seems like these big successful books just come out fully formed, and they don’t.

Susan Cain:

Yeah, yeah. Or even the question of which topic. Before I was working on Quiet, I worked on so many other different writing projects, and it wasn’t clear that this was the one I was going to focus on, but somehow I just did .

Debbie Millman:

Well, that’s interesting. You’ve said that you feel like the only point of writing is telling the truth of what it’s like to be alive.

Susan Cain:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And telling those truths that people don’t really talk about in everyday life.

Susan Cain:

Yeah, I do feel that way.

Debbie Millman:

Bittersweet, your most recent book, the title of which is really Bittersweet: How Longing and Sorrow Make Us Whole, has just been released. It debuted number one on The New York Times Bestseller list. Congratulations.

Susan Cain:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

That is absolutely magical and incredible. You start Bittersweet by recounting how when you were 22 years old and still in law school, a group of friends visited your dorm room to pick you up on their way to class. And you’ve been listening to what you described as bittersweet music, which is something you’d been doing all your life. And your friends asked why you were listening to funeral tunes. You laughed and you all went off to class, and then you thought about your friend’s comment for the next 25 years.

Susan Cain:

Yeah, I did.

Debbie Millman:

Why?

Susan Cain:

Why did keep thinking about it that way?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Yeah.

Susan Cain:

I kept thinking about it because I have always felt this deep intuition that there’s something in that music and in the bittersweet sensations that it is straining to evoke. There’s something in that music that is connected to transcendence and spiritual longing. And I say this as a deeply agnostic person. I’ve never been a believer in conventional terms. And yet, I guess when I hear music like that, I’m experiencing, I think, what other people mean when they talk about God.

Debbie Millman:

Mm-hmm.

Susan Cain:

That’s how profound it is to me. And I now know not just to me, to many, many other people. But then as I continued this whole exploration, I realized it wasn’t really just about music itself. It’s more like about just this deep state of mind in which you are connected to the fact that joy and sorrow are forever paired and you’re connected to the sense of a longing for the world to be more perfect and more beautiful than it is. And that there’s something in that longing that is actually what carries you closer to that, which we long for. I don’t really know any state of mind more profound than that one.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. There’s something really powerful in the word longing because there’s a sense of it being both something you’re striving for and reaching toward, but also don’t have yet. And so there’s that sense of both having and not having or sorrow and potential.

Susan Cain:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Debbie Millman:

I actually learned from reading Bittersweet that people play happy songs on their playlists about 175 times on average, but they play sad songs 800 times.

Susan Cain:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

I thought that that was one of the most profound bits of data in the book about the human experience.

Susan Cain:

I know. It’s so fascinating. There’s this YouTube video, I talked about it in the book, with this two-year-old boy who’s attending his sister’s piano recital. Off stage, you can hear there’s someone at the recital plunking out Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. And you see the boy sitting on his father’s lap, listening to Moonlight Sonata for the first time, which is just the quintessential beautiful melancholic music. And the boy has these tears streaming down his face, but they’re not tears of like, “Ah, my truck broke.” It’s not like that. It’s like just these profound tears. And this video went viral with everybody trying to figure out what that was. In one of the comments, someone said something like, he is experiencing the mix of joy and sorrow that is one of the greatest states that humans can experience.

Debbie Millman:

That’s transcendence.

Susan Cain:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

That is transcendence. I mean, I’ve always suspected that certain kinds of music somehow impact me on a sort of molecular level.

Susan Cain:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

And I don’t know if it’s sort of social conditioning or if it’s the key or if it’s neurological or all of those things, but there’s definitely comfort in music, I think, more than any other art form.

Susan Cain:

I agree. I do believe that music is the highest of all the art forms because it just goes straight to the heart of the thing.

Debbie Millman:

Mm-hmm.

Susan Cain:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You write about how Aristotle wondered why the great poets and philosophers and artists and musicians often had melancholic personalities. And that’s a word that shows up quite a lot in Bittersweet. And I’m wondering if you could define what having a melancholic personality means.

Susan Cain:

It’s a kind of tendency to states of poignancy and sorrow and longing. It’s an intense awareness of the way in which joy and sorrow are forever paired. It’s an intense awareness of the way in which everyone and everything we love most will not be here forever. And it’s with all of that, an intense vibration with the incredible beauty of the world. There’s something about the apprehension of the impermanence and of the universality or inevitability of sorrow. There’s something that comes with that, that’s intensely connected to beauty and creativity and to communion, this deep communion of the fact that all souls have to pass this way, that none of us are going to get to the Garden of Eden. Each of us is going to occasionally glimpse it, and those glimpses are going to be some of the most magical things ever to happen to us, but we’re never actually going to arrive home. We’re never going to arrive there.

There’s something about the fact of us all being together in that state of exile that is the deepest bonding agent we have. This is why I find it so mystifying to live in a culture that’s so insistent only on smiles, only on upbeat, only on optimism because I feel like, “Oh my gosh, don’t you see? Don’t you see this incredible power that we have? Don’t you see that all our art comes from this wellspring of the fact that the Garden of Eden is over there and not here? And don’t you see this is what bonds us together?”

Debbie Millman:

Yes. And that’s the whole sort of bewilderment I have around this notion of effortless perfection because I think people are much more interested in sort of the rigor and the process and the messiness and how… I mean, part of what I feel so compelled to do in my own interviews is talk about the struggle, talk about the obstacles, talk about how you overcame those things. I’m not really as interested in… I mean, if that ends up resulting in success, that’s amazing, and people then can see a potential path that they might be able to learn from. But I’m just not interested in the shiny, happy stuff.

Susan Cain:

Yeah, no, I know. I’m sure you feel this way. I’m sure you love being happy. I’m sure you prefer being happy to being sad. I know I do. I think probably every human does. So it’s not that there’s something wrong with happiness, it’s just a big pretense.

Debbie Millman:

Right. It’s projection of how you want people to see you. And that’s the part that’s so concerning because Generation Z is now… I’ve been reading how they’re being called Generation D. D for depression.

Susan Cain:

Oh, wow.

Debbie Millman:

Because of this comparative survival of the most effortlessly perfect.

Susan Cain:

Right, right, right.

Debbie Millman:

And because of the comparisons. They take down pictures if they don’t get enough likes or if they don’t get enough feedback, and that breaks my heart.

Susan Cain:

Yeah. No, it must be so incredibly difficult to be growing up in that kind of an environment. I think what people really want, I think people want to feel inspired and connected by stories of the world as it actually is as opposed to the world the way we’re pretending it to be. So that’s just what I wanted to kind of open up more space for us to talk about.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I know that when you were writing Quiet, I read that you were worried that people would think you were really talking about sort of being a misanthrope.

Susan Cain:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And equating introversion with not liking people. And that was not your intention or your message. And now with Bittersweet, you’ve written that you think there’s a danger of people thinking it’s a book advocating for a depressive state.

Susan Cain:

Yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And that’s absolutely not what you’re talking about at all. It seems like, psychologically, our culture doesn’t distinguish between melancholy or even sorrow and depression, although they’re completely different and distinct states. And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit because I know that that’s a really important part of the book.

Susan Cain:

It is really important. It’s not just our culture, it’s the whole field of psychology. I mean, one of the first things I did was, I started typing the word melancholy into PubMed, which is the database where you define clinical articles, and there is no distinction made. You type in melancholy, and what you get is a bunch of articles about depression. And I started asking around with esteemed psychologists and they were like, “Yeah, there is a difference. Here’s what the difference is.” But you can’t find it written down anywhere in the field. Only now there is beginning to emerge kind of a 2.0 in the field of positive psychology that’s saying, positive psychology shouldn’t be only about looking at states of utmost cheer and optimism. It should be about a deeper understanding of what human flourishing actually is. And that humans flourish by existing with these two poles of light and dark and joy and sorrow. That’s what humanity must do. That’s what it always has done.

I feel like we’re at the glimmers of starting to get there, but yes, I have the same fear of being misunderstood that I had with Quiet in that way. I gave a TED Talk about bittersweetness in 2019. It was the summer before the pandemic. So people were not of a mind at that point to be thinking about these kinds of things. And I came off the stage and some people I knew in the audience were like, “Oh, I never knew you were depressive.” And I was like, “No, no, no, that’s not what I was saying.” And you know what, I probably am somewhere on that spectrum or something, but I think these are differences of degree, and that the differences of degree are so meaningful as to effectively be differences of kind, by which I mean-

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely.

Susan Cain:

Yeah. If you’re in a state of depression, as I understand it, it’s like an emotional black hole and you feel numb and you feel despair and worthless and hopeless and all these things. Whereas the state of bittersweetness, you’re not feeling any of that. You’re feeling a sorrow for the trials that humanity has to face and the evils that come into it and all of that. But you’re also feeling this incredible love and amazement at how beautiful everything also is. And it’s like, the more you feel one, the more you’re then feeling the other. They go together.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. I’ve experienced three episodes of depression in my life. And I can tell you that there’s a very, very different emotional experience between depression and sadness.

Susan Cain:

Mm-hmm.

Debbie Millman:

I try not to say things like I’m feeling depressed because I know what feeling depressed is. So I don’t want to say I’m feeling depressed the way I think people just say I’m feeling depressed because I know what real depression feels like. I try to sort of position it or describe it as I feel blue. And that feels more accurate. I’m not in a depressive hole where I can’t get out of bed, where I can’t think about the future with any hope. I’m just catatonic and very, very sad. Blue is more melancholic. And I think that’s why Joni Mitchell called the album Blue aside from the song.

Susan Cain:

Right.

Debbie Millman:

That’s sort of the perfect… And I know you have the same feeling about Leonard Cohen’s music. I think I have about Joni Mitchell’s. It’s the most sort of beautiful, sad, joyful sorrowful, light, and dark music on the planet.

Susan Cain:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

And that’s how you just sort of define bittersweetness in the book. It’s a state in which you can truly inhabit the idea that life is always simultaneously joy and sorrow, light and dark. I’m wondering where longing comes in in that because the longing part is still that part that I’m so invested in in Bittersweet.

Susan Cain:

Me too. It’s probably the heart of it all to me. I believe that this sense of longing that we have, this sense of existential longing for that, which is most perfect, beautiful, true love, the pure essence of love, that longing is, it’s the core part of the human soul.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Susan Cain:

And we don’t have a language for talking about that I think because we have understood this longing only within the realm of religion. Religion is probably the best medium that we found for giving expression to this longing. So we long for Eden. We long for Mecca. We long for Zion.

Debbie Millman:

Love.

Susan Cain:

Yeah. I mean, the way the sophists put it, they call it the longing for the beloved of the soul. To me, that says it all. But because we have religion over here and we have secular life over there, we don’t have as much of a way of talking about this kind of existential longing and everyday life. And yet our art expresses it for us, and that’s why you have Dorothy longing for somewhere over the rainbow.

Debbie Millman:

Mm-hmm, yes. Home sweet home.

Susan Cain:

Yeah, home sweet home. We’re longing for home. As the religious have always said, “I’m a poor wayfaring stranger. I want to go home.” Harry Potter, like all these different protagonists of children’s fiction, they enter the story at the moment that they become orphans. It’s not an accident. It’s not an accident. He enters the story at the moment he is now going to spend the rest of his life longing for these parents who he’ll never remember. There’s something about that, that that is who we are at our very essence and it’s the best part of our nature because the fact that we’re so beset by this longing, first of all, it has a sweetness to it. But second, the more we lean into that longing, the closer paradoxically we get to the thing we’re longing for.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Susan Cain:

And that’s what the mystical traditions all teach. They all teach the same thing. They tell you, “Be thirsty, be thirsty,” because the idea is, the thirstier you are, the closer you get to its quench.

Debbie Millman:

You write about how the Ancient Greeks use the word pothos, which is different than pathos. So it’s P-O-T-H-O-S, which means longing for what is beautiful and unattainable. And reading Bittersweet, I learned that a young Alexander the Great described himself as seized by pothos as he sat on a riverbank and gazed into the distance, and that it was pothos that set Homer’s Odyssey in motion. With the ship wrecked, Odyssey is longing for home. The poem literally starts with him homesick, weeping on a beach.

Susan Cain:

Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And I wanted to share one of my favorite literary quotes about homesickness that I’ve been quoting for feels like my entire adult life. It’s from a letter Robert Frost wrote to the poet Louis Untermeyer. And I don’t know if you know this, it was in 1916. Talking about what a poem actually is, and he states, “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”

Susan Cain:

Oh, my gosh.

Debbie Millman:

I know. Goosebumps, right?

Susan Cain:

Oh, my gosh. Yes, total goosebumps. I can’t believe you found that. It’s like, that sizes all up.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I’ve been quoting this for years. I don’t if you know this, well, if you haven’t heard that, John F. Kennedy used that quote in the last speech he ever gave in October 1963, when he was visiting Amherst College.

Susan Cain:

Ha, did not know that.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. You write at length about a psychologist, Dr. Dacher Keltner. Did I say it right?

Susan Cain:

Yes, Dacher Keltner.

Debbie Millman:

Dacher Keltner, who has conducted really pioneering work on what he refers to as the compassionate instinct. He also believes that when we think of human nature, we tend to think about survival of the fittest. But Dr. Keltner says, we should also really be talking about survival of the kindest because as humans, the only way that we survive is by being able to respond to the cries of our infants. And what has radiated outward from there in your writing is that humans not only respond to our own infant’s cries, we react to the cries of other people’s infants. And then we react to other human beings’ in distress in general. Did I get that right?

Susan Cain:

Yeah, you did. You did. Dacher’s work is really incredible and it’s rooted in Darwin’s work. And the thing to know about Darwin, the layperson’s view is survival of the fittest. So I don’t know what comes to mind when your typical person thinks of Darwin, but I’m assuming, they’re thinking in very competitive terms like that. But Darwin was actually a very gentle melancholic type of person. He adored his wife. He adored his, I think he had 10 children.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, my God.

Susan Cain:

Yeah. And he loved them. And most of all, he loved his daughter Annie, who really both parents were incredibly close with. And then Annie died of Scarlet fever when she was 10. And he and his wife were absolutely heartbroken. He was a very sensitive soul. His father had wanted him to be a doctor, but he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. I guess in those days people had surgery without anesthesia. So the whole thing horrified him. He was way too sensitive for that. And he went and he studied his beetles and his birds and stuff.

It was really Darwin who had first noticed this compassionate instinct. He noticed in animals that there was this impulse to react to the suffering of other animals. And he noted that it happened so instantaneously and in such a preconscious way that he felt it had to be an incredibly deep-seated instinct. And then enter Dacher Keltner 150 years later, and he’s making all these discoveries, like we have the vagus nerve, which is the biggest bundle of nerves in our bodies. It’s so fundamental to who we are that it regulates our breathing, our digestion. And also, our vagus nerve, if we see another being in distress, becomes activated. It’s at the same level, it’s as basic to us as our need to breathe and our need to digest food, is our preconscious response to other being suffering.

So it’s not like it’s just a Sunday school teaching that’s imposed on us from up on high. It’s like, this is who we are, and who we are is also competitive and sometimes cruel. These two things sit side by side in human nature, but this compassionate aspect, it is real. And its foundation, you could say, is sadness in a way. It’s like, part of the reason parents bond with infants is because we are designed to respond to those infants’ cries. So this is-

Debbie Millman:

To have to recognize it as something that sort of needs to be attended to.

Susan Cain:

Exactly.

Debbie Millman:

What’s so interesting to me is that all of those other things, digestion, breathing, those are all involuntary.

Susan Cain:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

We can’t control those things.

Susan Cain:

Exactly.

Debbie Millman:

And so this comes from the same place where we can’t control this need to take care of another being that is close to us in pain or sorrow.

Susan Cain:

Yeah, exactly. That’s why I say it’s not like a Sunday school teaching like, “Now I will remember to be kind to somebody.” It’s like, you don’t have a choice. This is what Darwin noticed. You don’t feel good when you see someone else who’s in trouble. You yourself then feel like you’re in trouble. It’s vicarious and it’s preconscious. So this is why I think there’s that same impulse that we find in the sad music and everything else. This is why those stimuli trigger in us feelings of love because this is part of how our love mechanics work.

Debbie Millman:

Another major learning for me in reading Bittersweet was the idea that showing sorrow is more powerful than actually showing anger. And I’ve realized over time that basically, almost without fault, every feeling of anger that I have has an underlying foundation of sadness. That really it’s about sadness first and I can either choose to express that through sorrow or through anger, and anger tends to be easier. And I think that’s why so many people don’t even recognize their own sorrow because they’re really operating first out of anger.

Susan Cain:

I think that’s right. And the sorrow gets socialized out of us. That’s especially true in the workplace.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Susan Cain:

There’s one study I talked about in the book where they interviewed people about different things that had happened to them at their work, and people would describe situations that were just clearly sad and painful, but they would never use words like that to describe them. They would only use words like frustrated and angry because those are the only words people feel like they have permission to say.

Debbie Millman:

Isn’t that interesting? We can’t bring our full selves to that workplace. Before I let you go, I want to go back to something we discussed earlier, the distinction between depression and longing. You write about Columbia University psychiatry professor Philip Muskin, in Bittersweet, who stated, “Creative people are not creative when they’re depressed.” And you suggest that it may be more useful to view creativity through the lens of bittersweetness of grappling simultaneously with darkness and light, and go on to state that it’s not pain that equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye and to decide to turn it into something better. And I’m wondering, because this is really a show so much about the origins of creativity, do you think that this is something that people can do consciously?

Susan Cain:

Yes, I do. I do. I mean, for some people, I think it happens automatically. But yeah, I think absolutely there’s a choice we can make when we find ourselves at those moments of pain or processing past ones where you can kind of leave it unattended and it’s going to have its way of taking itself out on you or on the people around you, or you can make the conscious choice to turn it into something else. I’m always mindful about saying that because I feel like the last thing someone in pain needs is like, “Now another thing on my to-do list. Not only am I having pain, but now I have to turn around and turn it into something different.” But there is something incredibly liberating about trying to do that and about just understanding during those moments that there is a special experience you’re having at that moment that you probably won’t be having again. I lost my father and my brother to COVID.

Debbie Millman:

I know. I’m so sorry.

Susan Cain:

Oh, thank you. And I do remember, especially raw moments, you feel in the immediate shock and aftermath after a loved one, dies. I mean, from a writer’s point of view, there was a kind of intensity during those moments. I didn’t always feel like writing, but I remember feeling like if I don’t capture this now, it will be gone because there’s something really intense happening at this very moment. I happen to be a writer, but there’s a thousand different ways of expressing and transforming pain into something else.

Debbie Millman:

Well, it also doesn’t have to happen at the same time.

Susan Cain:

That’s true. That’s a really good point.

Debbie Millman:

There are moments where I’m feeling really sad and feeling sorry for myself. People often ask me what I do when that happens, and I say, I just wallow. I mean, I’m old enough now to know that I can’t just push it away. Let me feel it, let me metabolize it. I know it eventually will pass or change, and so just experience it when you’re feeling it. And then maybe feel like you’re connected to other people that might be feeling that too in a way that you couldn’t feel otherwise.

Susan Cain:

Yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And then when you are feeling better, you can try to transform it into something else that includes understanding the world in a different way maybe.

Susan Cain:

Yeah. It doesn’t have to be like a painting that’s going to hang on a gallery wall or something. It could be baking a cake or it could be, as you said, understanding the world differently. I’m always struck that in the wake of 9/11, suddenly there were all these people signing up to become firefighters and teachers. And then in the wake of the pandemic, we have people signing up for medical school and nursing school. So I think there’s something in the human spirit that looks at pain and tries to turn it into something of meaning. It’s just what we do naturally. You might say that the opposite things should be happening, right? A lot of firemen die in a burning building, so now there’s more people signing up to be firefighters. That just doesn’t make sense, you might say.

Debbie Millman:

Right.

Susan Cain:

Or people are dying in a pandemic. Why would everyone be signing up to become doctors and nurses now? But there’s something in the human spirit that does that.

Debbie Millman:

That calls us to it.

Susan Cain:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Speaking of baking a cake, I have one last question for you.

Susan Cain:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

I read that a few times a year, you try to like cooking.

Susan Cain:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

I was wondering how that was going for you.

Susan Cain:

Oh, my gosh. I think I have one of those times coming on, actually. I haven’t had one for a while. But yeah, I’m not a natural cook, and I always wish that I were. I always admire people who are domestic geniuses who whip things up, and it’s all, as we said, effortless for them. It is not for me, but I love the idea of it.

Debbie Millman:

Me too. I’m eternally grateful now that my wife likes to do it way more than I do or can.

Susan Cain:

Oh, you are so lucky. That is awesome.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Yeah. Susan, for me, the idea at the heart of Bittersweet is how people can transform pain into creativity, transcend, and love. It is an exquisitely beautiful book. And I want to thank you for sharing it with the world and for joining me today on Design Matters.

Susan Cain:

Well, thank you so much, Debbie, for having me and for the work that you do. It was such a treat to get to know you. I feel like we have to get together in person after this.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. So many other things I want to tell you and share with you. Susan Cain’s remarkable new book is titled Bittersweet: How Longing and Sorrow Make Us Whole. You can find out more about Susan Cain and read lots more about her work at susancain.net. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Susan Cain appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie:

We’re more connected than ever, but it doesn’t really feel that way. We talk on the phone less than we use to, but we spend more hours in front of screens or plugged into earbuds. We’re constantly interacting, but not always communicating on a meaningful level. We’re busy, but we’re not often getting a lot done. Priya Parker aims to change that. In her new book, “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.” Parker sets out to make our lives more productive and our interactions more meaningful. With life’s distractions, Parker reminds us that human contact is what really matters. Trained as a conflict resolution mediator, Priya has worked all over the world with NGOs, companies, and universities. She’s the founder of Thrive Labs, where she helps organizations embrace and cultivate their sense of purpose.

Debbie:

Today, we’re going to talk about her new book and her passion for purpose. Priya Parker, welcome to Design Matters.

Priya:

Thank you for having me.

Debbie:

Priya, you’ve described yourself as the daughter of a mother who hails from Indian cow worshipers in the ancient city of Varanasi, while your father’s family is from American cow slaughters in South Dakota. That’s a lot of cows in your lineage.

Priya:

It sure is. It’s funny. It’s no wonder that I ended up in the field of conflict resolution. My mother comes from India. She comes from a family that is Hindu and theosophist, which is not Hinduism, and they’re vegetarian, and they have traveled all around India, because of my grandfather’s job, but basically come from a tradition where in Hinduism, the cow is a sacred animal. If my family was listening, they would make sure to correct me that they’re not technically cow worshipers, it is a sacred animal, because it is the vehicle for one of the gods. My father comes from South Dakota by way of Iowa. To this day, my grandmother who’s no longer living to [Aida Millers 00:02:11], are farmers in Wagner, South Dakota.

Debbie:

Your parents met in Iowa. They fell in love, married, had you in Zimbabwe, and worked in fishing villages across Africa and Asia. What was it like growing up in such an international setting?

Priya:

I think when you grow up in any type of context, you don’t realize that it’s special, because it’s just what you know. It wasn’t really anything different for me until we actually moved to the United States. I remember being at a summer camp and kids started making fun of me and saying that I spoke English with an accent. It never occurred to me that I had an accent. I ran home and cried, not because I was upset that I had an accent, but because it was clearly a bad thing to have based on how they were treating me. My father looked at me and he said, “Priya, everybody has an accent.”

Debbie:

That’s wonderful. You don’t have an accent though.

Priya:

When we moved here, I had come from Indonesia and then The Hague for six months. My accent at least as I was told was a jumble of a lot of different things. I think like anything that you do over time, I came young enough where it got stemmed out of me and I now speak as an American. My father is American born and raised and so it’s also the lilts that I heard at home, but I came at a young enough age where because I stayed through college, it became an Americanized twang.

Debbie:

Your dad got a doctorate in philosophy with a major in watershed management from the University of Arizona with a 296-page thesis without whopping name, which I’m going to try to share. It’s toiled-

Priya:

I don’t even know this.

Debbie:

It’s toiled the effective spatial variability on output from the water erosion prediction project, soil erosion computer model.

Priya:

He is not a brander.

Debbie:

He also worked for the Peace Corps and the United Nations World Health. Your mother is an advisor and writer with decades of experience at the World Bank, the UN, and other organizations. How did your incredibly prolific parents influence you?

Priya:

They influence me very deeply, most specifically my mother influence me in the way that she gathered. My father describes himself as a hydrologist and my mother described herself as a cultural anthropologist. The reason they lived in fishing villages was because it was the Venn diagram of poverty and water. My father studied and built sanitation systems. My mother basically began to work in villages to understand and help them grow in the ways that they wanted to. What’s now called participatory development and even human centered design didn’t have a language back then, and she would work in villages to develop very simple games and techniques that would bring villagers together often when a large amount of aid was likely to come in or they’re experiencing great change, and trying to figure out how do you actually “do development.”

Priya:

I say that in quotes, in a way that puts the people affected by that development at the center of the conversation. From a very early age, the conversations around my dinner table were almost always about how do you gather in a way that puts the people involved at the center of their decisions.

Debbie:

Your parents eventually divorced in Virginia and both remarried, and with joint custody, you pinged between their households, which you’ve described as toggling back and forth between a vegetarian incense field, Buddhist, Hindu, new age universe, and a meat eating conservative, twice a week church going Evangelical Christian realm. What was that like for you?

Priya:

A little bit schizophrenic. My parents divorced and very quickly they remarried. I guess in the course of my life very quickly between two or three years. I toggled back and forth every Friday afternoon, I would pack up my stuff at one house. When I was younger, the other parent would pick me up and we’d drive just a mile to the other house, but it was another universe. I was fully part of both families. I’m an only child, and so I didn’t have any siblings to co-witness the experience with me. There is no one who was part of both worlds with me. I became a bit of a chameleon.

Priya:

Years later, my husband would joke that when I’m with my mother’s family and somebody sneezes I would say, “Bless you.” When I’m with my father’s family and someone sneezes I would say, “God bless you.”

Debbie:

Interesting.

Priya:

These were things I didn’t even realize until I had a common witness in my life to point it out. For most of my teenage years, I’ve tried to figure out how I could fit in to both places.

Debbie:

As you were going back and forth between households, you’ve written about how you remember learning about republicans and democrats at school, and you asked your father which one your family was. He said, “We are so glad you asked, we are republicans. We believe in the values of this country.” When you asked your mother the same question, she and your stepfather said, “We’re democrats.” You’ve since said, “That is the story of the essence of how you grew up.” They lived a mile apart, but they lived a world apart.

Debbie:

You mentioned it before, but do you think this is what set you on an early path toward conflict, mediation, and seeing all sides of a story or an argument, or a debate?

Priya:

Absolutely. I remember the republican/democrat comment, I remember it because both of them, even more than what they said, they were relieved that I was asking and relieved that they could almost, and this wasn’t explicitly said, but protect me from the other side. When my mother said, “Oh, we’re democrats,” I remember thinking, “I think my dad said the other one.”

Debbie:

How old were you when you did this?

Priya:

I was probably 12 or 13. I remember thinking, “Here are two different people who both feel very passionate about this specific identity as well as passionate about not being the other one. Both are my parents.” From that day on, I realized that I needed to figure out why they felt so passionately about things that they believe that the other side was frankly completely wrong about. I remember, one week I’d be reading Thich Nhat Hanh with my mother. He’s a Vietnamese monk about presence and mindfulness. Then next week, I would literally be reading Ann Coulter, because that was the book my stepmother would give me.

Debbie:

Wow, that is schizophrenic, but that’s amazing to have that kind of range. You did not grow up in an echo chamber that’s for sure.

Priya:

I did not grow up in an echo chamber. I think for, before college in particular, my modus operandi was to survive to blend in, and survive is a strong word, but I’m using it that way, and to figure out how I could belong to both places. The way I could belong broadly was to listen and to speak up when I felt that it was hearable, and also to often not say anything. It was really when I was in college and I had some time away I think like so many of us that I began to ask the question not just what is my inheritance and where do I belong, but who do I want to be?

Debbie:

It was first at UVA where you went to college where you started being asked, “Where you from?”

Priya:

Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Debbie:

That was something that you had never really heard a lot before.

Priya:

They actually would ask, “What are you?”

Debbie:

What are you?

Priya:

Yeah.

Debbie:

As if you’re not a person?

Priya:

That’s how it sounds, but it was at least then, this is 2000, 2001, it wasn’t as offensive as it sounds today I think in part, because of the way our language has changed and political correctness, but basically people would want to know what race I was. I didn’t understand the question at first. I thought they were asking what year am I or at UVA you say, “First year, are you first year?” I quickly realized that they were asking, “No, what is my racial and ethnic background,” and that it mattered because it helped them place me.

Priya:

I remember speaking of gatherings, freshman orientation at UVA, one of the first things that happens at least then is a massive pool party. I walked in into the pool, limbic sized pool. At the front of the pool on the right side was broadly white students, and at the back of the pool was basically black students. I walked in and I realized that I had to physically choose a side. Otherwise, I’d fall into the water. For me, particularly growing up all over the world, it was a very stark visual, that I don’t even know if other people realized as explicitly.

Priya:

I learned very quickly that the correct answer to that question was I’m biracial, I’m half white, half Indian, and even that was a complicated answer, because people would say, “Are you American? Are you Indian?” I’d say, “I’m Indian. My mother’s half Indian and so I’m half Indian. My father’s white from Iowa and so I’m white American. Very quickly, I realized that to have a conversation about race, you had to have the right language before we could even understand each other, because we are using different phrases and language, we’re offending each other.

Debbie:

This led you to founding the Sustained Dialog Program at UVA, and then after in New Delhi India, where you conducted sustained dialogs in the country on behalf of the Dalai Lama Foundation. Can you tell us a little bit about what sustained dialog is for our listeners and what motivated you to do that at that point in your life?

Priya:

Yeah, absolutely. Just one correction, it is the Dalai Lama’s Peace Foundation, but it’s technically called, “The Foundation For Universal Responsibility.” Sustained dialog is a group process. You could even call it a communication technology that helps people who are on different sides of some conflicts come together and see if they can transform their underlying relationships. It was a process that was designed by a diplomat, a man named Harold Saunders. He goes by Hal Saunders. He actually passed away last year at the ripe old age of 85.

Priya:

He was assistant secretary to Kissinger, to Henry Kissinger. He was part of the team that drafted the Camp David Accords. One of the things that he found after serving in government for multiple administrations was that while there are certain things that governments can do like forge peace or make peace treaties, that if you don’t actually change hearts and minds on the ground, nothing actually changes between the perception of the citizens. He left government and started to run some of the longest running backroom dialogs between citizens of influence during the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Priya:

These groups of 20 influential citizens that had the ear of the government, but were free to speak their own mind would gather often three days at a time, three times a year over 13 years, to see if they could fundamentally change their relationship as soviets and Americans. As they did and built trust, began to see if that could have ripple effects through each of their administrations. He basically realized that when a group is committed to coming together for a specific purpose over time, you can begin to transform the underlying relationships, which has a potential to transform the conflict.

Priya:

In 2001, he was a trustee at Princeton and Princeton had its own race problems, which have been well-documented. Two students at Princeton David Tukey and Teddy Nemeroff were interested in starting sustained dialog at Princeton and they did that. As a freshman at University of Virginia, I learned about Hal Saunders work and they agreed to basically train us to figure out how do we actually launch sustained dialog at UVA. We actually launched it, we sent the letter to the students and administrators to launch the same dialog on September 10th 2001.

Debbie:

Oh my goodness.

Priya:

Yeah, so September 11th happened obviously the next day. While it was just the letter, part of the power I believe of an invitation is that it creates a container in people’s minds. When September 11th happened, and there was this deep desire to gather sustained dialog became one vehicle to do that with.

Debbie:

Does UVA still have that program in place?

Priya:

It still has that program in place, 15 years later.

Debbie:

It’s incredible.

Priya:

It’s amazing. It’s amazing, and it’s spread now to more than a dozen schools across, college campuses across the country as well as in Zimbabwe and South Africa. One of the things that really connected with me at the time was that it made me realize that conversation and group conversation was something that you can get better at, that conversation and that the way you gather is not just something that is inherited, or happens, or you trust the chemistry in the room, but that there are actual specific things you can do to create a gathering that’s transformative for people.

Debbie:

You went on to get a dual master’s of business administration and a master’s of public administration at Harvard Kennedy School and MIT Sloan. At that point in your lie, what were you hoping to do professionally?

Priya:

It’s a good question. Like most things in my life, I’m almost all split identity, so to choose one program one of event to end that trend, but I spoke with a mentor at the time, and she said, I was debating between actually getting a PhD in P studies in conflict resolution, or going to public policy school. She said to me, she’s actually in the book, [Rhonda Slame 00:16:22]. She said, “Go to public policy school, because you’ve already done many of the things you’ve spent your, the last eight years learning what you would learn in peace building. What you need to understand in these rooms is how power works and how systems work,” and to be in the room where it happens.

Priya:

That is going to happen much more at a public policy school so that you understand how governments think and how decisions are made. I actually first just went to the Kennedy School and then the financial crisis happened. At the time the financial crisis happened, you could say it was a failure of policy and regulation, but all of the panels in the financial crisis happened on the other side of the river, at the business school. Kennedy students who study policy for a living were literally go walking across the river that’s in Cambridge to go understand why are we in the biggest crisis of our generation. I applied to business school impart, because I understood that in this day and age you need to understand how business works.

Debbie:

You mentioned that you wanted to understand how power works. Is there an easy answer to the question, “How does power work?”

Priya:

No.

Debbie:

Okay, I figured. I figured we’ll get to that in the conversation today, but just in case there was an easy answer, I wanted to ask it.

Priya:

I will say one thing that I learned is that power is not a bad thing. It’s something that happens anytime too when more people come together. One of the best definitions I’ve heard of power in a group context is from the Christian Theologian Paul Tillich, and he describes power as an individual’s ability to self-actualize. It’s a controversial definition, because Hitler was practicing power. It can be evil, but he talks about the two twin forces and all group dynamics, and all group life as being power and love. He defines power as the ability to self-actualize, and love as the desire for the separated to become whole.

Priya:

He says that, “Power without love is abusive, but love without power is anemic.” In all group life, whether a marriage or a friendship, or a group of friends, or a nation, you need to actually have both of these things in balance.

Debbie:

It sounds like that’s also something that requires empathy to know the difference.

Priya:

Deeply.

Debbie:

Your thesis, when you were finishing school, your thesis was titled, “The souls of 1% to report on the emerging leaders of the millennial generation,” in which you discuss the phenomenon known as “FoMo” fear of missing out. Around that time, you predicted that FoMo would ripple through out culture, which indeed it has. Attaining such visibility in the cultural lexicon that it was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Priya:

Really?

Debbie:

Yeah, in 2016. How are you so ahead of the curve on that kind of cultural conversation?

Priya:

I saw it around me and I experienced it myself. I realized that in my specific dual degree program. So these were people who are both obtaining a business degree and a policy degree, who came into this program, wanting to learn the tools of business and policy to go back out and create social movements and cultural movements. Over the course of three years, a majority of them ended up going into banking and consulting. I almost fell into that trap myself. I started interviewing with McKinsey’s and the BCG’s. The more skills I got in these programs, frankly, the more insecure I became.

Debbie:

Why?

Priya:

Because you enter this subculture that is telling you that you need to keep learning, and that and this is part of the success of the companies, that the way to keep learning is to go into consulting, because you are exposed to all of these different fields and learn how to think and learn how to solve problems, and that this degree is not enough. It becomes a recruiting mechanism that we all start to believe. The second thing I saw was when I was, you know, this is around dinner table conversations with my friends, with my peers, and we were all debating what to do. A huge reason a number of us were going into, we’re going consulting or banking was because it was the choice that would be safe while preventing us from making a true choice.

Priya:

It would keep doors open for longer. It would keep us from making potentially the wrong decision of going into healthcare or going into farming, or agriculture, or something specific that we may then want to back out later from. I saw this as FoMo. Another term that someone told me in one of the interviews, FoBo, the fear of better opportunities. The fear of better options.

Debbie:

Oh, God.

Priya:

This thing that we’d learn in our accounting classes or our financing classes, which is the best option is to always preserve options begin to infiltrate our moral choices.

Debbie:

How did you decide at that point what you wanted to do next? You do so much work today advising people on how to find their purpose. How did you then find your own?

Priya:

I fainted on the plane.

Debbie:

Really?

Priya:

Yeah. I was just coming back from a summer internship, where I was pretty miserable. I was going back to graduate school for my third year, and I collapsed on a plane, and I had to be taken off in a stretcher. My heart rate fell, and my fiance at the time now husband got off the plane with me. We went to the hospital. When I finally came back to school, and got checked up on my doctor, he said, “There’s nothing wrong with you. Your vitamin D levels are a little low, but just get a little sun.” He said, “Can I say something?” I said, “Yeah.” He said something like, it’s at least my memory of it, he said, “You’ve been running through your 20s and you’ve been on war footing. Your army has simply run out of supplies. I strongly suggest that you take some time off.”

Priya:

As I talked to him and shared some of my experiences, I said, “I was doing conflict resolution and facilitation for my early years and through my 20s and I loved it, and I’ve now over the last two or three years become extremely stressed out forcing myself into these business models.” He said, “Take some time off.” I did, and I was very fortunate I was able to, but I took a semester off, and cleared everything for my life. I also felt very physically weak. I needed physical rest.

Priya:

During that time, I began to be able to clear away a lot of the noise. I worked with coaches and with therapists, but also just very, very simply cleared out a lot of the cultural norms and voices, and realized that the thing that I most love to do is facilitate. I remember making an agreement to myself with some help with some advisors that I would facilitate a hundred visioning labs in my living room before the end of the year. I began to impart, because I was going through this. I just started with one on one with my friends. I would do these three-hour sessions with friends on two pillows in a living room, where I’d guide them through a series of different practices.

Priya:

Some of them I learned from sustained dialogs, some of them I learned through my own creative process to help them get clear on their purpose, because I was suffering so deeply with getting clear on mine. As I started to do this, I would literally do three-hour sessions three days a week from 3:00 to 6:00 in my living room every day for free. It would build my craft. One of the things that the 10,000 hour rule through creating these experiences with my friends and seeing them, at least telling me they were having breakthroughs, they’d start sharing with their friends. Many people in those programs ran start-ups. So they’d bring me into their start-ups and start facilitating conversations with their start-ups.

Priya:

I started realizing that this is what I love to do and it’s my gift. If I actually honored that gift, and didn’t think that it wasn’t enough or embarrassed by it, that this could actually be a very powerful tool.

Debbie:

You started Thrive Labs.

Priya:

So I started Thrive Labs.

Debbie:

Before we get to that …

Priya:

It was awesome. It was heady. It was the jazz years, if you will. It was the summer, I believe in 2009, and I was interning in the office of Social Innovation, which was a new office so every president has a tradition that started with Johnson I believe where they create a new office. This one was the office of social innovation and civic participation. I was actually part of the office launch. It was an exciting moment, because we were able to have a coming out party. There was a lot of conversation about what should this coming out party look like. They invited us at the White House can with convening power, a hundred leaders in the field of social innovation, and so the heads of foundations and the heads of NGOs, Teach for America, and Meetup, and all sorts of different Wikipedia.

Priya:

I was thinking, “My goodness, what an amazing opportunity to have these people together in a room and not just witness and mark a moment, but what could we do with them?” I’m a facilitator, so I designed something dynamic, and I suggested doing a goldfish bowl where President Obama could be in the center, and we’d bring in 12 leaders at a time with the other hundred sitting in a big circle around and having a live dynamic conversation about the future of the field. I was getting very excited and everybody around just looked more and more nervous.

Priya:

They just said, “We have to have something scripted. We don’t know what might happen if it’s unscripted.” It was an incredible moment, because of the fact that the White House was honoring and acknowledging that this matters. From the structure of the gathering, to me, it was a missed opportunity.

Debbie:

You talk about this in your new book. It’s a wonderful story, a little bit heartbreaking, but a really vivid story. Your new book is called, “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.” What made you decide to write this particular book?

Priya:

I wrote this book after going to gathering after gathering. Sometimes my own included, but dinner parties, conferences, birthday parties, anytime people would come together. I almost always have wonderful people in the room, and leaving feeling like frankly it was a missed opportunity that there was not the level or depth of connection that could have been given who was actually there. One of the reasons I believe this happens is because so much of our gathering wisdom particularly in the US has somehow been associated with the realm of etiquette, and flowers, and even if you look at Instagram, impart because it’s a visual medium, so much of gathering, the gathering industrial complex is around literally what does a table look like.

Priya:

We’ve centered gathering around things rather than people. I wanted to write a book that’s centered gatherings around people. We have not thought about what actually creates magic between live, breathing people in a room. I set out to change that.

Debbie:

What does create magic in a live breathing room?

Priya:

Purpose. Gatherings that work for the most part, in my mind, tend to have some specific purpose. They know why they’re gathering. Everything falls from there. For example, a very simple example is a wedding. I’ve been to dozens of weddings, I imagine, you have as well. Even when you think about a wedding, there’s very few that stick out. Many of them blend into the rest, and the ones that stick out are the ones where the couple made a specific disputable decision that perhaps upset some people about what this gathering was for, what this wedding was for, and who it was for.

Priya:

What I mean by that is in a wedding often, you laugh at how many fights they can cause and the lead up to the wedding and planning, but one thing is often there’s a question about size like how big should this wedding be, and should we invite my mother’s colleague or my year old college buddy. This argument is actually a proxy war as to what is this wedding actually for. Is it to honor the parents or is this to celebrate the coming together of new communities and to build a tribe? Those are two very different weddings.

Debbie:

That’s a conflict resolution you have to manage.

Priya:

It is. I would say by managing it, to have the conversation ahead of time first within the couple and then usually within among the parents of what is this wedding for? One of the examples and this is an Indian example in the context of a wedding is even when you think about the ritual or the rights in a wedding, in a Christian context it’s the bride walking down the aisle with her father. The father literally gives her over to the husband in a heterosexual marriage. In India and in Hindu weddings, there’s a tradition of walking around a fire, it’s called, the Pheras.

Priya:

If you actually read the script in the Pheras, many of them basically have assumptions where the woman’s role is to take care of their child and there’s very specific assumed roles that many modern couples in India don’t actually want, but yet the ritual of the wedding that their parents, and their grandparents, and their great grandparents all took a part of has meaning in it. That image, walking around the fire is often image that is the photograph plastered on walls for generations at a time.

Priya:

Part of thinking about a purposeful wedding is to think about how do you create a ritual that both honors your past, but also reflects your values? It’s a very complicated question.

Debbie:

How do you get at what the intrinsic purpose of an event or a gathering is?

Priya:

You start by just asking, why do I want to have this gathering? Many gatherings suffer from a purpose confusion, because we assume that a category is a purpose. A birthday party is to celebrate my birthday or a wedding is to get married, or a team offsite is to bond the team. The first thing I always say and I try to do this myself is to actually pause and say, “Why do you want to have a birthday party? What is it that you need in your life right now? How might a gathering serve that?” One of the things that happens when we skip a purpose is that we assume a specific form for a gathering without thinking about what we actually need.

Priya:

To start if you’re for example wanting to do a pool party or neighborhood potluck, I would say, “Why do you want to have a pool party?” Someone might say, “Well, because it’s the beginning of summer.” I’ll say, “Why do you want to invite your neighbors?” They may say, “It’s nice to get together.” So keep asking why. Why is it nice to get together? We don’t see each other that often. Why does it matter for you to still see each other? Kind of get to knowing that, you really keep asking why. Then someone might say, “Because I want my children to be in a community where they know their neighbors and where they believe that strangers aren’t scary.” Then you have an animating purpose.

Debbie:

That then helps determine the energy of the gathering.

Priya:

The energy of the gathering and even more so who should be there. If I say, I want to have a neighborhood where strangers aren’t scary, all of a sudden, it may make sense to invite neighbors that I never met before of my pool party versus the ones that I’ve known for a decade.

Debbie:

Both?

Priya:

Both. Part of the reason purpose helps is because I joke in the book that you should use purpose as your bouncer, that purpose should be this animating force that helps you decide who should be there. One of the thing and another element of powerful transformative gatherings are those that are willing to exclude well.

Debbie:

What does that mean?

Priya:

One of the things that gatherings I think sometimes suffer from ironically is over inclusion, and it comes from a spirit of generosity. Now again, I do this myself. Sometimes it’s embarrassing or awkward to not invite so and so, because they’ll know about it. One of the things that gives gatherings animating life is when people are there, because they serve the purpose of the gathering. One of the examples that I recently heard from a friend, that he was invited by his 80-year old grandmother to come for her birthday party. All of his adult cousins realized that they got this invitation, but there was one catch, which was the adult spouses and the children were not invited.

Priya:

This caused mild uproar among the cousins. They’re all spread across geographically. They don’t all see each other. The spouses were like, “Why aren’t we invited?” It was great so we’re now on babysitting duty, whether they’re the male spouse or the female spouse, but it was their grandmother and she’s getting old, so she had some clout and they went. I spoke with my friend when he came back, and he was thrilled with this gathering. He was so moved by it. He said, “My grandmother and her wisdom gave us a gift. That was the ability to spend time with my cousins as an adult for the first time without playing the role also of spouse, without also playing the role of parent, with just being able to play the role of a cousin to say, what does this look like to have an adult relationship? Because the last time we did this was as children.”

Priya:

It was the most beautiful experience, because there is a specific purpose and there was space given to it.

Debbie:

I have two questions about this. The first, I can already see the questions in the social etiquette column in the New York Times on Sunday. I just read Priya Parker’s book and I’d like to have a party and I only want to invite so and so. What do I tell the other people that aren’t invited so that their feelings aren’t hurt?

Priya:

Yeah, you tell them the purpose of the party. In some cases, that might be a difficult conversation. So if the purpose of your party is to have a party where the people who bring out the best in you are there, you don’t always have to make your purpose explicit by the way. This is just for yourself as a design principle. I can give us the example of my own life that my parents and my in-laws were going to meet for tea and an aunt was visiting. It happened to be that she happen to be in town that weekend. It was also her birthday, and she was visiting for the very complicated situation.

Priya:

She had just assumed that she would join this tea. My fiance and I at the time love the aunt, but didn’t want her there, because this was this very unique opportunity for these two families to meet and spend time together. A part of being a generous host is if people are on the room, you pay attention to them. If people are in the room, you pull in the person who least belongs. Part of the problem of having an aunt there is that not that she’s going to be quiet and not take up space, but if you’re gathering, well, you’re including her intimately in the conversation.

Priya:

Frankly, it became a conflict, because it actually meant her staying at home or not. We had to say the purpose of this very unusual time together, we don’t live in the same cities for our parents to get together and you’re not a parent. That wasn’t apparent. I think part of gathering with intention means having difficult conversations. I got an email the other day from a friend who has read the book. She was hosting a gathering in her context of work. Some people knew about it and asked if they could come. She had this moment and she read the book, and she took a deep breath. She wrote back and said to the person why they were having a gathering and why that person wasn’t invited. She talked about the purpose.

Priya:

She did it with care, and she did it with transparency. One of the things that happened was that next time that she has a gathering and that person’s invited, they actually then know if we’re gathering over time that the invitation is purposeful, intentional, and you want them to be there.

Debbie:

With all the conflict resolution that you’ve done both internationally as well as between individuals, are there any universal elements that tend to be at the core of all conflicts? Is there a common solution, if so?

Priya:

It’s a million dollar question. You know, many conflicts come down to a disagreement or a threat around needs, values, interests, and identity. The conflict that I’m most interested in and have always been attracted to are conflicts over identity. I’m running these experiences called, “masterclasses in the art of gathering,” where I gather together 50, or 100, or 250 people who are all part of some community and create this live experience where for an hour, I build community among them. Then for an hour I reverse engineer the process. I did this a couple of days ago at a company in New York.

Priya:

One woman share this example that in college, she was part of a feminist group. There were republicans and democrats in this feminist group. At some point, the women democrats decided and basically said, “You can’t be a republican and a feminist. It’s a paradox. It’s an anomaly.” There is this huge conflict. The group basically eventually fell apart. The republican women left, and it was a core conflict about identity, which is what does it mean to be a feminist and what are your core values?

Priya:

You see this at the macro level as well in the American conversation. Last year, when we had the women’s march, one of the core I remember, organizer is writing about and parts that they were nervous about was whether or not there’d be conflict between pro life women and the marchers. Even now, there’s a roaring debate about whether or not you can be pro life and a feminist. These are the conversations to me that are juicy, and fascinating, and in so much depth, because it’s extremely complicated. It comes down to a core difference of values.

Debbie:

How do you bridge those differences without people necessarily feeling that they have to change their mind about the way they think?

Priya:

Yeah. I think one thing is you start building ways of being together that unite people across other types of identity. What I mean by that is they may disagree on this specific issue, but they may bond as hockey players, or they may bond as parents, or they may bond as … Sometimes it’s the more unique identities that they wouldn’t think they would have. That have some vulnerability in them. They may bond as people who have experienced estrangement in their life. They may bond as people who have had a near death experience. To me, one of the most powerful elements of transformative gatherings are when you can have conversations that get people out of their fixed identities.

Priya:

One of the things that Hal Saunders, my mentor, spoke about in terms of transforming relationships is he identified identity as all of the experiences over the course of your life up until this very moment that shapes who you are. What I loved about that definition was that there are yes some, perhaps, fixed elements over your identity, but even those are changing. Gender, or race, and some of the most interesting conversations today around what is fixed identity.

Priya:

Within the definition that he had, there’s also a lot of space that says, “There’s a possibility that in this moment, I’m willing to expand, or change, or question, or reimagine some element of my identity.” To me, gathering has become profound when you can start getting to that point in the conversation.

Debbie:

How do you encourage people in those situations to be more vulnerable to open their hearts a little bit?

Priya:

First of all, you have to want to. Whenever I do any type of gathering, particularly professional and I’m invited in to a company, or to an organization, or to a political movement, first of all I always go when I’m invited. I’d never force myself in, because you can’t force people to be vulnerable. It’s actually close to abusive to force people to be vulnerable. When people have gotten to a point where they realize that the way they’re doing things aren’t working, and they’re curious about another way, that’s when you can have a crack.

Priya:

For example, one of the things I always say before a meeting where people are coming together to talk about a topic that may be difficult or taboo or contentious is to have a dinner the night before. That has nothing to do with the topic. One of the things that I do is this dinner format that I write about 15 toasts.

Debbie:

I was going to ask you about that. It’s magnificent.

Priya:

It’s a fun model that a colleague and I, a friend of mine, Tim Leberecht and I designed and on the fly with input from my husband, where we were at the world economic forum meetings. This is the Global Agenda Council Meetings in Abu Dhabi, and realized that during the day, when people actually meet, there’s a lot of meeting but not a lot of connections, sort of what you said at the beginning of our conversation. We thought, “What if we can design a dinner the night before that would prime people to show up differently the next day?”

Priya:

We invited 15 people from all of these different councils. The age spread was I think 21 to somebody in their 80s, half men, half women, people from all over the world. We had a theme that we wanted to ask people was what did they believe a good life is? The night before I got very nervous. The night before the dinner I got very nervous, because I thought, “How are we going to actually have a conversation with 15 people about this topic? Are they going to talk? Is it going to be interesting or strange?” I realized I needed some structure. I needed to design for meaning.

Priya:

My husband and I were actually sitting in a dimly lit mall having lunch and started riffing a bit, and came up with this idea that was we’d ask everybody in the room at some point in the night to stand up, old school style, ding their glass, and give a toast to the theme. The only catch was that the final person has to sing their toast. That allows people to realize that it’s less scary to give a toast than to sing their toast. It moves the night along.

Priya:

It was an experiment. We did it and what was so beautiful about the night was that when people start sharing other parts of their life and bond around identities that are surprising and unexpected, they think about you differently the next day when you’re getting to the “meat of things” and it completely primes them to show up differently the next day.

Debbie:

You have a number of really extraordinary exercises in the Art of Gathering. I also was wondering if you would talk about the exercise, “I am here.”

Priya:

Yes. When my husband and I first moved to New York, we didn’t really know anybody here and we didn’t know the city. We started this experiment. We didn’t even really think of it as a gathering at the beginning, but we just said, one day a weekend we’ll go to some neighborhood, we’ll turn off our phones and we’ll walk around and explore it. We told a friend about this and she said, “Okay, I’m going to come.” The first time we did it, she invited a friend, and we chose Harlem as a neighborhood, and first went to church. Abyssinian Church and started to basically roam around Harlem and the upper side of New York and talked, and talked, and talked.

Priya:

At the end of the day, 7:00 PM, we all left and we felt completely exhausted and completely rejuvenated, and had a conversation, the four of us that was pretty spectacular. We just started doing it again and again and the idea started spreading. We’ve done it over 20 times and all types of different neighborhoods and themes.

Debbie:

You do this how often?

Priya:

We would do them usually, it ended up being about once a month. Actually, we have not done them since I’ve had children.

Debbie:

That makes sense, especially since you have a 16-week old.

Priya:

Yes. We are saying that we want to start them again, yeah.

Debbie:

One notion that I loved in the book is something you picked up at a Japanese tea ceremony in Kyoto, the phrase, and I hope I get this right, “Ichigo ichie.” It roughly translates to one meaning, one moment in your life that will never happen again. How has that influenced the way that you create gatherings?

Priya:

To me, when I heard this phrase, it gave me goosebumps. It was so beautiful. The tea master who I was speaking with that was a woman, she said, “One of the things that I’ve learned from my masters is that even though the Japanese tea ceremony is a very structured ceremony. There’s an order, it’s a ritual, there’s a way to do it. One of the things that the master believed is this is one of the founders of the ceremony a hundreds of years ago was that even when you have the same identical form of a ritual or of a structure, it will never be the same two different times, because the people who are in it are different.”

Priya:

If you have a tea ceremony on Tuesday at 10:00 AM and then you have the same people involved in the tea ceremony the next week at 10:00 AM, they are different people because of the last week of their life. What happens or how they’re moved, or what they think, or how they believe may have changed, and the dynamic between those people have changed. By the way, it may have also changed, because they now have a memory of having a tea ceremony the week before.

Priya:

The meaning and the depth of the tea ceremony changes, because they now have a relational memory to it. Similarly, with gatherings the reason this inspires me so much is because I think one of the reasons that our gatherings suffer is they seem boring. A birthday party has candles and a cake, or a board meeting has a square table and a whiteboard behind it that we start attributing forum. One of the things that this “ichigo ichie” phrase reminded me of and always reminds me of is that you have this unique crazy moment and time where people are coming together and you can create the future of this group live in realtime based on what happens between these people.

Debbie:

It’s incredible. You said that routine is the great enemy of a meaningful gathering, and I love that idea that to constantly be trying to abandon norms that we expect.

Priya:

Absolutely. One of the core ingredients is surprise and unexpectedness. It can even be a small tweak. It can be the way you start a meeting differently, or it can be the idea that you would have your birthday party and have everybody meet at a fishing docket 5:00 AM to watch the fisherman come in, and that that could be a birthday party. The idea that you can do something different is really the core of the book.

Debbie:

You talk about hosting in the book and recount the amazing way in which Ronald Heifetz starts his adaptive leadership class at the Harvard Kennedy School. I’m wondering if you could share a little bit about what that is like.

Priya:

Sure. This was a class shopping day the Kennedy School, where you can actually go and sit in classes for 20 minutes at a time or 45 minutes at a time, so just test the class. It’s not even the actual class. It’s pretty high risk to hold a bold experiment with people who are trying to forget if they want to take your class. Class starts, the bell rings, and most teachers stand up and explain what the class would be. The more innovative ones give a lecture and actually model a class rather than talking about a class, but Ron Heifetz blows the whole thing out of the water.

Priya:

He sits on a chair, at least when I was there. He sat on a chair in front of the class, and there’s 90 students in a room staring at him, and he doesn’t say anything. You sit there and watch him, and he’s just staring at a space. A few seconds go by, and everyone just sits there and continues to stare at him. You’re trying to figure out what’s going on.

Debbie:

It sounds like a John Cage composition.

Priya:

Yeah, exactly. People start mumbling and this nervous laughter. The teacher basically is not playing his role. All of a sudden, this entire group is on edge and not really sure what they should do. This popcorn like conversation starts. As far as I remember, people say things like, “Is this the class? Is he going to say something? Maybe this is what we’re supposed to do. Are we supposed to talk to each other? Ssh. Don’t ssh me. He’s about to talk. How do you know he’s about to talk?”

Priya:

Basically, this group of strangers starts trying to navigate what the hell are they supposed to do if there isn’t a guardrail and the person whose supposed to be an authority, the host, the teacher is abdicating his role. I love this example and three or four minutes into it, thank God. Everyone’s deeply relieved when Professor Heifetz finally steps up and he says, “Welcome to adaptive leadership.”

Priya:

I didn’t take the class. I just dropped the class, but what he does as I understand it over the course of the year is he creates all of these different dynamics and experiences where all of the scripts that we tend to follow, he pauses. He makes the implicit explicit, which is that in so many group context, we tend to follow scripts, whether or not we want to. The reason I started the chapter with this anecdote is because it’s a beautiful extreme example that shows how much we just assume and go into autopilot in our gatherings, because we assume that there’s a way to be. When you actually pause and invite people to be another way, conflict can happen, but the most beautiful things can happen as well.

Debbie:

You’ve said that all of the people who are taking risks is what inspires you in life. Why do you find that inspiring? I do too, but I think for different reasons than you do, mostly because I have a real hard time with risk.

Priya:

I am deeply inspired whenever I see people taking risks period, whether it’s taking a job that “makes no sense” to anybody else, or whether it’s speaking up in a room when your voice is shaking and continue to speak anyway. I feel very moved when I see people demonstrate encourage. To me, I love it when I go to a gathering. I actually much prefer being a participant than a host, much, much prefer it.

Debbie:

Why is that?

Priya:

In part, because you actually have a lot of power as a guest, but is unexpected power. I think one of the things that I implicit in this book, I don’t say it explicitly is the art of gathering is not just for host. It also how to be a better guest. So often, there’s gatherings that in the moment can actually be improved much improved not by the host, but by the guest offering something. Some of my favorite dinners are when at conferences when a group of people get together and everyone’s chitchatting and then somebody just says, “Hey, we don’t really know each other. Would you guys be up for answering a question? What if we all ask a question that would take us to different level?

Priya:

I love those moments, because you’re putting your neck out on the line. When anybody in a group or in a room tries to take a risk that helps people meaningfully connect despite the awkwardness, I’m always very moved and very grateful.

Debbie:

Priya, I have one last question for you. You dedicated the Art of Gathering to your husband, the writer, and commentator, and resident genius Anand Giridharadas. He dedicated his book, “The True American” to you and wrote on Facebook, “This won’t be the last book I dedicate to Priya Parker, but it is the first. A book is a lot of wild rambling before it is actually a book. From the earliest days, Priya selflessly put aside whatever she was doing to listen to every word of this book out loud as I was writing it. Finish a page or two, read it to Priya. That was the ritual. It’s impossible to imagine writing without her.” I talked to your husband about this as well. What is the dynamic like when you’re the one writing the book?

Priya:

One of the things that’s been so beautiful writing this book is that I don’t consider myself as a professional writer. I think of myself as a professional facilitator that is trying to get my thoughts down. When I wrote this book, Anand was with me every step of the way, and continued to basically say, “Write how you talk. Don’t write how you think you should write.” He helped me structure the book, he has edited the book many times. To me, marriage is, we joke that our marriage is a lifelong dialog that is this one long conversation.

Priya:

This period of writing this book to me was very humbling, because of how much he gave of himself, because it is his craft and it is his genius of how to string words together, and to deeply learn what it actually takes to be interesting on a page. You can judge for yourself whether I accomplished that. It was a very beautiful process to be witnessed and to be helped by him. The other thing that was fun was he was also writing a book during this time. He also had two children during this time. One of our daily rituals when we were both writing was to write on a library in our neighborhood and then meet for lunch, and eat, and read or talk about what we were writing about, refill, and then dive back into the books.

Priya:

It was really beautiful to actually have a similar rhythm at a time where life has been very intense.

Debbie:

That beauty is reflected in every page of your book. It’s a book not just about the art of gathering, but the art of living fully about purpose, about meaning, and about love.

Priya:

Thank you.

Debbie:

Priya, thank you so much for such an enlightening conversation. Thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Priya:

Thank you for having me. It’s such a pleasure.

Debbie:

Priya Parker’s new book is “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.” You can see more of her work at priyaparker.com. This is the 14th year I’ve been doing Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Priya Parker appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Amy Koppelman has published three novels. Two have been made into movies. I Smile Back, her second novel, was made into a devastating film starring Sarah Silverman. Coming out this fall is her second film, based on her first novel. Both the book and the movie are titled A Mouthful of Air, and Amy Koppelman both wrote and directed this movie. If there’s one thing all of her work has in common, books and films, it’s their emotional intensity and a willingness to take on difficult subjects like trauma, depression and aloneness. Also, she really knows how to tell a really good story. Amy Koppelman, welcome to Design Matters.

Amy Koppelman:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Amy, is it true that after graduate school, you found out where Joan Didion lived in Manhattan and, uninvited, dropped of a book manuscript on her doorstep?

Amy Koppelman:
Yes. I read that there was some problem Cindy Crawford was having in her building, and Joan Didion was on Page Six, and Joan Didion was the president of the board or on the board, and somehow they mentioned the building. So I knew. I mean, I don’t know how much time had passed between when I saw that and when I dropped it off, but I had been getting so many rejections from agents. It’s this weird thing because on one hand, I’m this terribly shy and insecure person, yet no matter how many rejections I got, I just kept sending out envelopes. I still don’t understand that, because there must be some part of me that deep down is like, “You’re the bomb. What you have to say matters,” even though at a table or all the time, I’m sure nothing I have to say matters all the time.

But anyway, there was this moment where I was like, “there is a fine line between delusion of grandeur and actually maybe you’re just not good, and maybe you could ask her: Should you keep doing this?” And so I dropped off what was my thesis, which was mostly this manuscript, but it was called Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight then. I just was like, “Am I a real writer? Can you tell me? Because if I’m not and I shouldn’t be doing this, I want to know.” Because I never started writing thinking about writing books. I really just started writing as, I guess, a place to get better, and then somehow that mutated into telling stories, so I didn’t know. Then she wrote me back and she said, “You are a real writer.”

Debbie Millman:
You asked her. You wrote and asked if you’re a real writer or not a real writer, and she told you you were.

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. She said, “Yes, Amy. You are a real writer.”

Debbie Millman:
Amy, you recently stated that if you had a happy childhood, home represents safety. A tumultuous childhood, and home becomes associated with danger. Can you talk a little bit about how you grew up and what home came to represent for you at that time?

Amy Koppelman:
Well, I don’t think until I had a home when I got older with my husband that I realized how scared I was in my own home. I loved my parents more than anything. I never thought of home as being a dangerous place, but when I look back now, I can see ways in which I was very vulnerable. I had been a very bulimic person, and when I moved in with my husband, he left for work one day and I went to do that in a garbage bag. It was the first time I was there, and I said, “I can’t do this to him. He loves me and I love him and I can’t do this to him.” I didn’t do it, and I never threw up again. The problem with that was, there was … and I was an extraordinarily high-functioning bulimic, then as soon as I stopped doing that, I fell into a very, very bad massive depression. I understand now, well, that’s because you didn’t have a place to put those feelings.

But from that moment living with him and in our first apartment, which very similar to Julie in the book, I wanted to make it like a dollhouse and I wanted there to be so much color, and I had strawberry wallpaper. And the reason that I wanted to meet you so badly was because I thought that you more than basically anybody in the world would understand and maybe even be able to explain to me why both Julie and my own insistence on color was so important. I mean, I think now, looking back, it’s like, well, if you have a lot of color and your eyes don’t have any space to land on the walls in your house, then you don’t have to go inward because you can keep looking at all the color.

But that’s kind of the negative way to look at it, because I also think that there was an insistence on this idea of a happy home, and a happy home looks like a dollhouse in my mind. And in a dollhouse, there’s wallpaper on the ceiling and there’s wallpaper on the walls. A dollhouse is the way we envision home when we’re little, right?

Debbie Millman:
Right, yeah. One thing I think is super interesting about your question about color is that I always refer to those first sort of two decades of my life as the black years. I think that color is representative of energy, and color is a stimulant, and color really entertains the eyes in a lot of ways, so I don’t think it’s an accident that you chose to bring color to counter what you might have been feeling inside, the darkness. We talk about depression as a darkness, and it makes a lot of sense to me, as somebody that’s spent a lot of time analyzing color.

You started writing at a very young age. I understand that you won a writing contest held by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Amy Koppelman:
Oh my God. No, I didn’t win it, but I don’t even know how you knew that I did that. But yes, I did. I had wanted to be a writer when I was a little girl and I entered a Daughters of the American Revolution contest and I didn’t have any idea that Amy Lynn Levine from New Jersey was definitely not going to win the Daughters of the American Revolution writing contest.

Debbie Millman:
But you got a certificate.

Amy Koppelman:
But I got a certificate, and that’s all that matters.

Debbie Millman:
OK, that’s winning. That’s winning.

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. I kept that on my wall for years and years.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that really struck me about reading that about you was that you walked back to your seat smiling and feeling proud.

Amy Koppelman:
So proud.

Debbie Millman:
Was that the first moment you had of feeling proud of yourself?

Amy Koppelman:
Probably, because it’s very hard for me to feel proud of myself. But I feel proud of my family. And yesterday for like a split second when they released the trailer for a movie, my daughter was like, “Wow, Mom,” and my son was like, “Wow,” and I was like, “OK, I’m going to let myself feel proud for like two seconds and not worry that if I feel proud, God’s going to punish me.”

Debbie Millman:
I hear you. I remember the first time I felt proud. I was in camp. It was between second and third grade. It was the year before or the half-year before the black years really kicked in and I remember walking to the lake and thinking, “I’m going into third grade. I am so proud of myself.” And I remember that feeling like it was palpable, like I could feel the feeling in my hands right now of what that carried in me.

Amy Koppelman:
Third grade is … things got murky for me around third grade.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, you wrote that it was around this time that you began suffering from depression and stated that it was, “As if a gauze came down” around you “like sluggish sadness.” Do you have a sense of why it began at that particular time?

Amy Koppelman:
Yes, in retrospect I do.

Debbie Millman:
How did you cope? How did you cope with your depression at that time? Did your parents realize something was wrong and try to get you help?

Amy Koppelman:
I didn’t ever realize that that was … it was only when I finally began taking antidepressant medication when my son was around a year and a half, and everything did go … it was all those cliches, from black and white to technicolor. And then I started realizing, oh, things used to look like this. I remember in second grade, things looking like this. Just now even in my left eye, I could see the color green on trees, looking out of Ms. Page’s window. And then something just changed and I didn’t know that it changed until I could see again. If you need the medication, it just basically gives you a trampoline so when you’re in freefall, you know that you’re not going to crash. What that does is it gives you the ability to feel. It gives you the ability to hear a song and cry, and it gives you the ability to see something beautiful and not be completely crushed by it.

People will be like, “Well, you won’t get anything creative done if you take an antidepressant and you’ll lose your libido.” And I was just like, “I don’t know anybody …” When I was at my most depressed, I wasn’t getting anything done. And the last thing I was really into, it was like, “Hey, let’s—”

Debbie Millman:
Kink around.

Amy Koppelman:
I don’t know how to say that. But the way I was able to understand what happened was only when I got color back again. Then when I went off of medication when I was pregnant with my daughter and everything went that dark that quickly, knowing the difference, that next to each other, that was very hard, because I knew that this wasn’t right. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this, because I didn’t have to go from third grade to then. I had to go from like three weeks before til that moment.

In the book and in the movie, the moment where I really break with that character is that when I gave birth to my daughter, after nine months of praying to the Zoloft container, when I was going … I took it to the fucking hospital with my shit. Then I held her in my arms and she was such a good little breastfeeder and I just thought, “No, I’ve done this for so long. I did this for these nine months and I did this for these however countless years. Why should she have to pay a price for my weakness?” Because it’s still a weakness, strength thing. And so for like five days or seven days, I didn’t take the medication. I mean, I didn’t exactly lie about it because no one would have thought that I didn’t take the medication because all I wanted to do was take the medication, and I would just secretly breastfeed her. Because I felt like, “OK, well, if I can give her six weeks”—I think that’s what it was—“six weeks, just make it through six more weeks, she’ll have all the nutrients that she needs.”

But then around five days in, I realized, “Oh, I’m about to hit a wall.” That’s when I then called Brian and I said, “When you come home, I have to take this medicine and you have to check under my tongue.” Because I was like, there is this moment where I was not sure if I could trust myself to actually really swallow it, because so strong was this idea of being weak versus being strong and being a good mom versus being a bad mom. I was sure that if I didn’t breastfeed her, I was a bad mom. And it took me a really long time not to feel guilty about that.

Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting hearing these real-life experiences that you’ve had, having read so much of your work, and now sort of realizing that I Smile Back and A Mouthful of Air are almost as if you had made different decisions and what the consequences of those decisions would be. I definitely want to talk to you about that.

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. I realized when I finished Hesitation Wounds, which is my most hopeful book … my son was graduating high school. It was right around that week. Your subconscious is so fucking strong. And the protagonist in that book, she treats treatment-resistant depression, and her brother had killed himself and she realizes in the course of the book that she had never really allowed herself to fully engage because of this. She was protecting herself. And at the end, the whole entire book balances on this moment of her daughter, which she adopted, saying to her to stick out her tongue to taste the snow. Her daughter’s a little girl from Cambodia and has never seen snow before, and the moment of the mother saying, “Should I stick out my …” the hesitation in that, in, do you stick out your tongue and engage in life and feel the snow against your tongue and the joy of that? It took me like seven years or eight years until I realized you can’t balance an entire book on a split second like that.

But it also took me that time to realize, “Oh, you’re writing a book about finally allowing yourself permission to be OK and to be happy. And so that’s when I realized, looking back, “Oh, A Mouthful of Air, you were writing through the fear of if you didn’t get the help you needed.” But I had no idea. I thought I was just writing about this character. And in I Smile Back, I was writing through the fear, I guess, of like, “I worked so hard to build this little family that I love, but inside of me I’m a very bad person and I’m like my father and I destroy the people that I love.” And that has nothing to do with even anything sexual. Just some people just destroy the people that they love, almost as a preemptive strike, like, “If I can hurt you before you hurt me …”

Then I wrote Hesitation Wounds, and now my son is 25, almost 26, and my daughter is 21, and I was with them yesterday and I thought, “Look at that. You didn’t ruin them.” I’m always surprised still that somehow they’re so beautiful.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I think that has a lot to do with you, actually. The opposite is they’re the product of good parenting.

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. And it was very important to me to have a steady home for them. I always wanted to have a kitchen table where they could do their homework. It sounds so silly, but where they could come home and have a snack and do their homework, and I was always so grateful that they could have that, that they weren’t distracted by chaos and craziness.

Debbie Millman:
I want to go back in time a little bit to right before you began writing professionally. I’ve been researching various childhood responses to trauma in an effort to understand how there seems to be really almost polar opposite directions people tend to go when they’re depressed, traumatized, abused. Some people work to overachieve in an effort to prove to themselves that they’re not as worthless as they feel, and other people just give up because they know they have no hope. They feel no hope. You’re really the former rather than the latter, despite your troubles at the time. You were accepted to an Ivy League college. You got your undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, very, very competitive school. What did you major in at the time? What did you think you wanted to do professionally at that point?

Amy Koppelman:
I actually wanted to be a sociology major, but my mother said, “You should be a political science major because it’d be better for your prospects in getting married.” She really didn’t know better and really believed that the most important thing was for me to get married. And luckily, I got married young and, luckily, I married the right person, but it was really good fortune or some survival mechanism in me that just knew that Brian was the right person.

Debbie Millman:
How did you meet Brian? I’ve done a lot of research. I can’t find the origin story.

Amy Koppelman:
Oh, I met Brian through his sister, who I had met … the girl who grew up across the street from me, Melissa Jacobson, said, “You’re going on a teen tour,” which my mother sent me on because you would send your kids on this music or teen tour to meet their husbands. I mean, I’m 15. But anyway, so I go on this teen tour—

Debbie Millman:
Very Jewish.

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah, and I meet Brian’s sister and she invites me over and I remember meeting him for the first time at the kitchen table. Then that night, we went to sleep. He went out. He was 19. I guess I was 15 or something. I remember I couldn’t fall asleep, but I remember thinking he was cute and she said, “Oh, well, if you can’t fall asleep, you could go into my brother’s room. He has lots of books.” So I went into his room and I started reading The Fountainhead and I fell asleep on his bed. Then that night, he came into the room when he came home from wherever he was and he was like, “My first girlfriend …”—this sounds so ridiculous—“Was named Amy. My best friend,” who’s still his partner, “Is named Levine.” My name was Amy Levine. And he told me that night, “One day, I’m going to marry you.” We had been talking and I was just like, “OK. Not if you knew me.” That was my exact response.

And then we were very, very close friends, but I liked a guy … I mean, I was crazy about a guy who was mean, and I liked him more. Then there’d be moments where Brian and I were almost together and then we weren’t, and I had this terrible fear of if he really knew me and knew what I was inside underneath the skin. I mean, imagine what that would be if then he actually did kiss me and was like, “Whoa, this is a terrible poisonous snake in here.”

Debbie Millman:
You still suffer from that a little bit.

Amy Koppelman:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And you’ve been married for over almost 30 years, right?

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Well, for those that are listening that might be wondering who we’re talking about, Amy’s husband is Brian Koppelman, who created with David Levine the massive TV show Billions. Brian’s actually been on Design Matters, so you can go and listen to that as well. I believe in that episode, he does talk about how much he loves his wife, Amy Koppelman.

Amy Koppelman:
Oh, I don’t listen to his podcasts because I get enough of him in the kitchen.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Again, going back in time a little bit, just because I find your history so incredibly compelling, you talked a little bit about this earlier on, suffering from bulimia. All through high school and college you suffered, and you’ve written how good at it you were. No one knew you weren’t satisfied until you threw up blood. I actually heard you say that on Brian’s podcast when he interviewed you, and I read that more recently in an interview that you conducted. But when I first heard it, it just broke my heart. My mother suffered from bulimia and I used to hear her throwing up, and it’s just a heart-wrenching experience to witness. Do you know what first triggered your bulimia?

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. I was in the mall with my mom and … there was some after-school special that showed what that was. Then I was in the mall with my mom and this girl who lived down the street from me … I had gained 10 or 15 pounds or something, and she goes, “Oh, Amy, I didn’t even recognize you.” And my mom was like, “It doesn’t matter …” I feel bad because I love my mom, but this is what she said: “It doesn’t matter how smart you are.” She just believed you had to be pretty and thin. And I remember going into some fucking restaurant and just throwing up and that moment, going down the escalator at the mall, and I knew how to do it because of this after-school special that I had seen.

And then it just starts to take over your life. But the biggest fear that I had was that anybody would know, because it was the way that I was able to not disappoint anybody and to be a perfect daughter and everything else. All was reliant on being able to have this release.

Debbie Millman:
It’s not surprising that when you decided to stop … cold turkey, by the way, and I don’t know anybody that’s ever been able to do that … that you went into a major depression. I mean, of course. That was what was keeping you from not feeling the feelings.

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. And it first manifested that I was very scared to go out. Brian would leave for work. Somehow I got away with not working and he would leave and I would get into bed and be in bed all day. Then he’d come home and I would smile, and it was when Kurt Cobain killed himself and I remember thinking, “I’m doing way too many things the same as him. I’m in bed. I have really bad stomach pain and I’m just lying here praying that somehow I could die.” That’s all I wanted to do was die, but I knew that he loved me and if I did that, if I killed myself in all the myriad fantastic ways that it could be done, I would destroy him, and I couldn’t do that. I would rather be alive in this, unable to function than to hurt him like that.

When I saw that with Kurt Cobain, that’s when I realized, “Oh, I don’t want to die,” and then I started getting help. “I don’t want to be like Kurt Cobain.” There was nothing and is nothing romantic about suicide. I’m somebody who just always wants to be happy, and I’m a very grateful person. If I’m going to say anything good about myself, I would say I’m a very appreciative person. So it does take that much to make me happy, which is also why being sad, it doesn’t make sense. And that’s how you know, this is not something that you are necessarily in control of, depression. Just like nobody wants to not be able to breathe, and so you get an inhaler.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I love how you talk about having an illness that happens to be mental versus physical, and that if we have diabetes, we take diabetes medication. If we have heart disease, we take statins. We do all sorts of things to prolong our lives and to ensure that our bodies don’t overtake us. Why wouldn’t we do the same with our minds?

Amy Koppelman:
Because even now, in the same conversation, I could say to you that it’s real and I could say to you that I’m a liar and that maybe it’s not real and maybe it is that I’m weak. I mean, the nature of depression, it only reinforces the feelings of the symptoms of, like, “You’re a bad person. There’s no reason to try,” whatever your inner dialogue is of why the world is better off without you in it. Julie Davis in the movie, especially, I really wanted to write about a mother who really believes that the greatest thing she could do for her family is to not be there, because if she’s out of the way, then she won’t hurt them, then she can’t hurt them. Because as if your mother kills herself, you’re not going to be fucked up from that. But in my—

Debbie Millman:
Right, but they don’t think that. I had an experience in my life recently where somebody that I cared about very, very, very much took his own life. In an effort to try and understand it, I’ve done a lot of reading, a lot of research and I think what it comes down to is the pain is so great for the person that they truly have convinced themselves that the world and that everybody that they love would be better off without them, would be happier without them, and they just have lost complete touch with the idea that they could be loved.

Amy Koppelman:
Right. Or they might even know that they’re loved, but then it’s that they’re not worthy of that. And so the person that they think they’re loving is actually not the person that they’re loving, because the person that they are is a terrible person. And actually, COVID came and so we didn’t really have many screenings, but there were a couple times where people were like, “Oh, you’re glamorizing suicide.”

Debbie Millman:
What?

Amy Koppelman:
And I was like, “What?” And they’re like, “Because she looks so happy at the end. She looks so happy.” And I was like, I think that that’s something people don’t understand. I do think for some people, and for Julie specifically, there’s a moment of true relief. She’s doing a good thing and she believes that. So then they said, “But, I mean, that doesn’t make any sense.” And I’m like, “Well, of course it fucking doesn’t make any sense. She’s not well.” Of course it doesn’t make any sense. The logic isn’t … I work a lot with people who try to help people who have depression and suicide and the one thing they haven’t gotten better at … they can predict a lot of things. They still can’t figure out who kills themselves and why. There’s still no real way to figure out who actually does it and who doesn’t. They haven’t been able to figure out, what is the thing that makes a person actually do it?

Sometimes it’s just as simple as somebody knocked on the door at the right time. The problem with that is that that’s what then makes it so painful for the family that they leave behind, because they go, “What if? What if? What if?” And I really wanted to, in the movie, show that the collateral damage of suicide is so profound for every generation. And also, the husband … lots of people, like, “Oh, the husband didn’t do enough.” If you love somebody who’s that depressed, if you love somebody who had tried to kill themselves … I mean, I never even actually tried to kill myself, but if you have, you’re in jail. You can’t act toward that person like you would a normal person because you’re scared that, like, “Wait, am I going to be the person who said the thing that is the thing that …” And so it works both ways. “If I had called, I could have saved them. If I had just been a tiny bit nicer or a tiny bit softer, they wouldn’t have done it.”

And to you, there’s no way if you’re a loving person and you love your family member or your friend that killed themselves that you can actually really fully ever return to the person you were before, because you can’t forgive yourself even if you know intellectually it wasn’t your fault and there was nothing you could do. So my hope for the movie is that it will help get women to talk more about how scary it is to be a mom, all women, how scary … you have no idea. All of a sudden, you’re responsible for this little life that can’t protect itself. Two, getting people to talk about suicide and the collateral damage it does. I’m very angry at people who kill themselves, especially now, for some reason.

Debbie Millman:
The thing about A Mouthful of Air … when the book first came out, it was compared to some really seminal feminist works, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. And just for my listeners that might not be as familiar with the book as they will be now that they hear this podcast, is the story of Julie Davis, who you’ve mentioned. She’s a young wife and mother battling an inner war between the love she feels for her family and the voice in her head that insists that they’d be better off if she were not alive. We first meet Julie several weeks after a suicide attempt and she’s trying to remake her life with her husband and her 1-year-old son, whose birthday happens to be the day that we meet her. And while A Mouthful of Air is about a mother suffering from acute postpartum depression, what I found really interesting, Amy, is that aside from the afterword, the term “postpartum depression” only appears once in the book. I did a search.

Amy Koppelman:
Does it appear even in the book at all?

Debbie Millman:
Just once.

Amy Koppelman:
Oh wow.

Debbie Millman:
Just once, as the doctor is talking about some of what she might be suffering from. You wrote about how in 1997, you went to a postpartum depression conference and there were 20 people there. So despite the fact that we know now that one out of every five new mothers suffers from postpartum depression, it seemed that very few people were talking about this topic back then, and a lot of people got angry about the ending of your book.

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah, well, I don’t think anybody sets out to write this book. I certainly didn’t set out to write this book. If you knew that this was what you were writing, you would never write it. I remember being in a room with my kids writing that last scene and I was happy with them. They were playing and I remember my fingers jumped off the keyboard because it was just terrible. Because in the book, different than the movie, there’s infanticide, and I remember thinking, “I don’t even know if that’s humanly capable. Can a mother kill her child?”

Debbie Millman:
And now we know, sure, that they can.

Amy Koppelman:
But I remember going to Ask Jeeves because it was before Google and one very rudimentary picture came up, and it was the first time I saw the words “postpartum depression.” It was like this butterfly that was waving and this woman wrote a thing to her daughter who had killed herself. And I remember when going to different agents with the book … and that’s when I saw the word “postpartum depression.” I was like, “Oh.” And I remember when trying to get an agent, this one agent said to me, “This is the reason I got into publishing. This is what I wanted to do,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, “but I’m sorry, I can’t. It’s too dark. No one’s going to read this. It doesn’t sell.” And I kept saying, “But it’s a real thing. But it’s a real thing.” And she kept saying, “It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to sell.”

I remember when Andrea Yates, who was really the first person that we talked about, killed her children and was on the cover of Time, I thought, “Oh, now people are going to finally understand this is a real thing.” I remember calling that same woman and saying, “Now do you see? It’s a real thing, see? It’s on the cover of Time. This is a real thing.” And she goes, “Oh, now you will never get this book published. This is so horrible.” And that’s when we really started talking about postpartum depression and people didn’t understand, like, “Well, afterwards, how come Andrea Yates said … how come she was able to, when she was interviewed, understand what she did? She must have known what she was doing.” And they didn’t understand what it was to have a psychotic break.

I mean, I remember when the book came out, at some point this woman who said she was something with Julia Roberts called and said, “We’d really like to do this.” And I remember leaning against a brick wall on West End Avenue and I was like, “Julia Roberts?” This was, “Julia would love to do this, and it’s amazing because at the end when she calls 9-1-1 …” And I was like, “What?” The woman read the ending of the book, but it was so painful to her that she just read it differently, and I was like …

Debbie Millman:
I was going to say, “Wait, did I miss that?”

Amy Koppelman:
… “But she doesn’t call 9-1-1.” And she’s like, “What do you mean?” And she goes, “I mean, can she?” And I was like, “Yes, if she wasn’t having a psychotic break.” Now, most people with postpartum depression don’t have psychotic breaks. Most people with postpartum depression don’t kill their children. But it’s a cautionary tale, because the mind is very strong. It protects you, but it also hurts you.

Debbie Millman:
Nearly 20 years after A Mouthful of Air was published, it has been adapted into a film, which you also wrote and directed, and it will be released in October. Congratulations, Amy.

Amy Koppelman:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You must be so excited.

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. I’m nervous, but I’m excited. It’s a pretty film.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a beautiful movie. I’ve seen it and I loved it. It’s a painful movie, but it’s a necessary movie, and it is a necessary subject that people talk about. The movie stars Mank Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried, American Horror Story’s Finn Witrock, Amy Irving, Billions’ Paul Giamatti, Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter, and more. Did you have a hand in the casting? It’s such a star-studded lineup.

Amy Koppelman:
I mean, I still don’t have an agent and I was able to get to Amanda because her husband Tommy was in I Smile Back. She had the big change where she said, “You have to give her a career,” and so I made her a children’s book illustrator. I did it really quickly on the spot because I had had this Pinky Tinkerbink character that I had made for my daughter, and so I knew I had drawings of this character. I was like, “What about if I make her a children’s book illustrator?” And the character Pinky Tinkerbink—my daughter was profoundly bullied … another thing I feel very guilty about … and she had very bad crossed eyes, and she was very dyslexic, like me. She’s even more dyslexic than me, which is hard to imagine. I made this character who had this very bad, ugly-looking finger, and the idea was that this character’s ugly-looking finger that the kids teased her about was really a key, and she could solve all the answers and everything she needed to know with this key.

We would always talk about Pinky Tinkerbink, so I told Amanda about the character, and then we made this story about Pinky Tinkerbink. And so for Julie, she’s able to help … I mean, it sounds so cheesy when I say it like this, but she’s able to help everyone else unlock their fears. It opens with a book that she wrote called Unlock Your Happy, but she can’t unlock her own fears. I think that that’s true with so many people. We’re always much more capable of helping other people than helping ourselves. Somebody said to me the other day, “If you listened to your own advice, you would never let that person talk to you that way,” about me, and I was like, “That’s true.”

Debbie Millman:
We make exceptions for ourselves in the worst possible ways. So, Julie Davis, the character in the movie, is not just an illustrator. She’s also a writer, so she writes and illustrates her own children’s books. The books are beautiful. Do you have any plans to publish a Pinky book?

Amy Koppelman:
The Pinky book that you see in the movie, I have it and it’s like 58 pages, and I sent it to all these different publishers, and they all rejected it across the board. Even when I was like, “It’s coming out on a movie with …” Nothing. But I’ve never been good at that. The reason I was able to make I Smile Back was basically a miracle. I got the book to Sarah and she opened it. I had heard her on Howard Stern talking and I was like, “She’s going to understand this book.” And see, if you’re me and you come out on little presses, you know you’re not going to have a lot of readers and you just want to try to find the people that will understand. And I knew she would understand, and when I went and met with her, I was like, “If I adapted this, would you be in it?” I think she said yes, just figuring, “I don’t want to hurt her feelings.” Like, everyone says they’re going to adapt something, and—

Debbie Millman:
No, but she also said something else. We’re talking about Sarah Silverman. She said, “Yes, as long as it doesn’t suck.”

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah, “Yes, as long as it doesn’t suck.” And she said, “I mean, I just never actually thought you were going to show up with the fucking script for me to do.” And that movie was hard to make. We made that for like $400,000 because weirdly, people didn’t think she could act in that movie.

Debbie Millman:
She should have gotten an Academy Award nomination for that role.

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. And I was like, “What?” It’s just like, “Look at her. What do you think she is?” She’s all tentacles. I think she’s all an open … she feels way too much, so of course … with Amanda, this was before Mank, and there was resistance to her being a rom com person, like she’s too pretty and fluffy and … I remember thinking, “Look at her eyes. What do you think’s going on in there in those eyes? How do you not see that?” And I was really lucky though, because John Sloss, who is the same person who was able to sell I Smile Back, he helped raise the money and so we were able to make this money with Maven Pictures and we got a $2.3 million budget.

Debbie Millman:
Nice.

Amy Koppelman:
Which was much more than $400,000. But it’s funny, I think no matter how big a budget they give you, you think, “Uh oh. Shit. I need more money,” but we figured it out.

Debbie Millman:
What was it like for you as a director?

Amy Koppelman:
We worked on this movie for a year. Amanda and I, we went through every scene together and we kept trying to get the money, we kept trying to get the money, and then we were down to like … she had to do something and we knew we had like three-and-a-half weeks left or something, and we got the money and we had three-and-a-half weeks of prep. All the planning … I had everything laid out, but three-and-a-half weeks of prep and I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, I can barely work my cell phone. I remember just going, “You’ll just do it. You’ll just figure it out, and even though you don’t understand, if you can see the feelings …” If you look at her … I didn’t ever really look behind the monitor. If you look at her and you can feel it when you’re looking at her, then the screen will capture it.

But then two nights before we were about to begin filming, when everything was a mess and nothing was ready, I do remember coming home and Brian answering the door and me going, “Oh my God. What did I get myself into? I have no idea what I’m doing.” And then I stay in a room alone all day long, and then there were all these people that were looking to me to have the answers, so it was a learning curve. But I thought, “OK, you have this chance, so take advantage of it.” Just know in my head, I heard myself say, “But you lived, so this is going to be nothing compared to that.”

Debbie Millman:
Exactly. You already got through the hard stuff. Amy, over the years, you’ve stated that writing has become a healthier receptacle for your sadness.

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. It’s better than a garbage bag.

Debbie Millman:
And that it is also the purest part of who you are, because it’s the only time where you’re not worrying about whether or not other people are OK. I’m wondering if you have any tips to evolve to this state if you’re not a writer. How do you get to a place where you stop worrying, you stop people-pleasing, you stop sort of pretzeling yourself into what other people want and need from you?

Amy Koppelman:
Well, the idea of, well, if you’re a writer … I actually really think everybody is a writer. If you can go to the coffee shop with your friend and you tell your friend a story, you’ve written something. It’s just the connection of letting yourself do it with your hands versus your mouth, which is why voice memo is great. I, of course, the past two months have gotten almost nothing written, so it’s something I struggle with all the time, how to write. I still have that inner voice in my head all the time telling me it’s self-indulgent, it’s stupid, it’s shallow, “The story’s shallow. You’re shallow,” all the things that you hear.

But if I don’t do it, then I’m not as good of mother or friend or wife. So even if I have two months of getting nothing written, I have nothing to show for it, it’s just like you sit down … it’s like [inaudible] practice book and you just keep doing it, because eventually, you’ll have that moment of understanding. For me, I never know what I’m setting out to write. I just write and write and write, and then I get to a scene and I realize … I know the feeling. I knew in A Mouthful of Air, I was writing about shame. I knew that word, “shame,” and I knew that’s what I was writing about. Then I got to a scene and I was like, “Oh, that’s what this book’s about,” and then I went back and saw that the subconscious is so strong, it’s all there. My books are always very short, but I’ll have hundreds of thousands of words to end up with barely what’s defined as a novel.

Debbie Millman:
I read that Brian said that you won’t be satisfied until you have a page with just a dot on it.

Amy Koppelman:
Yes, no, I know, it’s true. My new book I’ve been working on for so long and it just keeps … I keep hearing it in these little stanzas or something and I’m like, “Why are you hearing it like this? It’s impossible to understand. Can’t you just write long sentences?”

Debbie Millman:
But I can’t imagine how somebody can get to sort of the perfect number of words in a sentence without writing thousands of words and then editing it down. I don’t think it just comes out that way. I think it takes enormous effort. You and I were talking about this before we started the show, the idea that you have to sort of fight to get to the simple and that you have to go through all of that muck to really come out with something elegant and …

Amy Koppelman:
I do think the difference between what makes somebody a writer writer … because I think everybody’s a writer … is the rewriting, is the you really are trying to get the words right. For me, I’m always just like, “Am I being honest here?” And even if it’s ugly and even if somebody who doesn’t understand might think badly of what I’ve written or confuse me and the character … After I Smile Back came out, I had this one meeting with this one producer and people had been asking me this again and again. He goes, “So, how did you do the research for this novel?” And finally I looked at him and I just go, “I just fucked a million guys.”

Debbie Millman:
That’s what they’re wondering.

Amy Koppelman:
It’s like, “Fuck you.” Yeah. But for me, it’s like the people who understand will understand, and I just have to keep doing what I’m doing. And even if nobody reads my books … even Hesitation Wounds was rejected by over 50-something places. I Smile Back was—

Debbie Millman:
80.

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah, 81 I think was—

Debbie Millman:
81?

Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. I guess I’ve been so saved by fiction that my respect for that form and for all that it’s given me, I think if I’m honest, then it’ll find the person out there, and that person will know maybe in some small way that they’re not bad, that they should continue to live. I guess that is the thing with all the books. I guess that’s what I’m always saying, is that yeah, just hold on for one more breath.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Amy, your books are so important. A Mouthful of Air was so ahead of its time. I’m sort of mad that you feel that because they’re on small presses, not enough people will read them or not a lot of people will read them, because I think everybody should read them because they are some of the truest, honest books about the human psyche that I’ve ever read.

There’s a paragraph in A Mouthful of Air wherein you describe how Julie is feeling, and I want to read this because I think it’s just so perfect. You write this: “Julie is not sure if this is funny or sad, but it’s the truth, so she tries at least to understand it, and what she’s slowly beginning to acknowledge is that her depression … God, does she hate that word … her sadness, her melancholy, this wish of hers to shut her eyes in the hope of everything fading to black is not something that’s ever going to go away. There will be times that it will subside, a happy Sunday, a few happy Sundays, but be assured it will come back at her again.”

Amy, I know that this is not the case for you. You’ve written this about your own experience of depression: “It’s been 21 years now and I’ve been mostly good. I’ve had a couple of little blips, times when I’ve needed my medication adjusted, even fairly recently, although for the most part, I’ve been holding steady. This doesn’t mean that I’m not scared that it will come back. The crippling sadness will return. It’s physiological. But what I know now that I didn’t know 21 years ago is that with the love of my little family and proper medical care, I’ll get through it, as most of us do. Movies, books, art and time heal if you hold on long enough.”

I think that those two sort of bookend comments, those bookend pieces of your writing, really reflect everything that you’re trying to do with your work. And I was wondering, sort of as we get ready to close the show, if there’s anything else that you might want to share with our listeners about living with or understanding profound depression.

Amy Koppelman:
Just two days ago … I hadn’t been with my whole family together … we hadn’t all been together in the same spot and we went and we visited my daughter at college, and we were all laughing or whatever. I was walking down the street … it’s funny that you said that. I said to myself, “I don’t want everything to cut to black right now.” I mean, I just said … I mean, it was just like two days ago. That would have been one of the kind of moments where I would have been like, “OK, if everything just went to black now …” The idea of how painful the goodbye is, that still crushes me on a daily basis, this idea that we’re all born, at whatever age it is, you realize that everyone you love is going to be taken away from you. And the idea that you’re still supposed to love in spite of that, you’re still supposed to continue in spite of that, knowing that you’re going to hit this amount of pain that is inconceivable … and if you’re lucky, it’ll be in the right order. God forbid your children don’t die before you, your parents die before. Hopefully you’ll be spared the real tragedies of the wrong order, right?

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Amy Koppelman:
It’s still something I work on all the time. It’s also that I’m always looking over my shoulder, and so because I know both those things, I just try to have … people always overuse the word “gratitude,” but I try to have that for every moment that I’m OK, no different than somebody who’s had cancer and their cancer is in remission. That is still how I feel, just grateful for every day to be alive, that I got to see all the things that I saw, even the terrible things that I’ve seen in the past couple years and see on the streets just walking here. But that I survived, that I’m OK, that I’m here, I’m always grateful for that. And I guess the thing that bothers me the most about Julie’s life or the movie is that she missed so much. She missed her entire family grow up. She missed every ballet recital, every, “Oh no, should I break up with my boyfriend?” Every skinned knee …

Debbie Millman:
Baseball game, yeah.

Amy Koppelman:
… baseball game. She missed all of it. Fear of COVID, she missed all of it. I just don’t want people to give up because you just miss so much. And if you can just make it through and somehow ask for help and not feel ashamed … Be your own phone call. The phone call that didn’t come, the knock on the door that didn’t come …

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, the knock on the door.

Amy Koppelman:
If somehow, in some tiny, teeny, teeny, tiny way, Amanda and I through this movie can just make people understand you’re really not nearly as bad as you think you are and you really didn’t do anything wrong—that’s my hope.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you, Amy. Thank you. Amy Koppelman, thank you so much for bringing so much candid, honest, important work into the world, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Amy Koppelman’s latest film is titled A Mouthful of Air and it will be released to the world in October. You can see more about Amy’s three novels, her writing, her films at amykoppelman.com.

This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Amy Koppelman appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Rickie Lee Jones spent her early life drifting to and fro, landing wherever good luck and intuition seemed to guide her. In the mid 1970s, that place was Los Angeles. It was there that she would write the hit single “Chuck E’s In Love.” In 1979, her debut album sold over 2 million copies and she went on in her career to win two Grammys, and to claim her spot as one of the greatest singer/songwriters in American popular music. She joins me now to discuss her journey, her career and her newly released memoir. Rickie Lee Jones, welcome to Design Matters.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Hi, good to be here.

Debbie Millman:
Hi. Rickie, congratulations on your memoir. I agree with music critic Bob Lefsetz, who said it’s absolutely the best book about being an artist in the rock world that he’s ever read. Congratulations.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Your book is titled Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. Fans of yours know that the name Last Chance Texaco is taken from the title of one of your songs from your 1979 debut album. What made you decide to use that song title as the title of your book?

Rickie Lee Jones:
I think it’s evocative of a journey telling the story of a life on the road. When I think about it, actually, my dad wrote this story called “The Road Runner” when I was little. We traveled around so much, me in the back of that car, my life has been on the road. The other reason is the song is one of the most powerful and unique songs I’ve written, but I think mostly because it seemed to be the true signpost of my life.

Debbie Millman:
You write in the introduction that “Last Chance Texaco” remains a kind of living spirit to you, a whisper of belief and impossibilities. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit more about your belief in impossibilities.

Rickie Lee Jones:
It’s so intrinsic to my nature that it’s almost hard to separate it and talk about it. But I’ve always had and have still this feeling of being in a frame of being a story that’s watched by something that I interact with and talk to, that I talk to and interact with. That is to say that it manifests almost at will, but it manifests before me in proofs, which would suggest doubts, but people have doubts because they can’t see the invisible world. But we have a connection to things we can’t see. We find it out in science—“Oh, there are atoms, there are molecules.” So anyway, that’s what it is. There’s an unfettered connection to the invisible world that is both noun and verb. It is both a place and a feeling of personality that interacts with, because we don’t quite have words here to describe it. I don’t try, but I know it is with me always.

Debbie Millman:
You go on to state that after all these decades, life remains stubbornly mysterious, which I loved. I want to ask, how does it remain stubbornly mysterious?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I guess because you can’t ever figure out how things operate, but also in a more innocent way, when I take a walk outside and look up at the birds, and there’s a connection between the bird and some other thing that’s going to happen later in the day. If you’re watching, you’ll see it all, and it’s stubbornly mysterious because it refuses to reveal itself. Yet probably it’s revealing itself all the time. It’s us that refuses to see, but there’s a little prose going on in the book too.

Debbie Millman:
I want to go back in time a bit and talk about not only where you came from, but who you came from. Your paternal grandfather, Frank Peg Leg Jones, and your grandmother, Myrtle Lee, were vaudevillians based in Chicago, where you were born. Frank was a really big star singer and dancer on the vaudeville circuit. He was once billed above Milton Burrow. Though he lost a limb in a childhood train accident, he was quite a good dancer. You’ve written that you were in awe of your grandfather. Do you have memories of seeing him perform when you were a child?

Rickie Lee Jones:
He died in 1940. He died before my parents met each other. I’ll just tell you a little side story. I joined Ancestry.com, and in that, a distant cousin contacted me and I found out all these things because he’s done a whole family history that includes my side. He separates from me around 1800, but he told me all about my family. That’s when I just found out when Frank died. I’m hoping in some piece of film that they find in a studio that Peg Leg Jones will be there in an audition tape, but I’ve never got to see him. We had two whole scrapbooks of his notices, which I can no longer find. I’m hoping they’re in storage. But I remember the one about Milton Burrow because Milton Burrow was famous. And the one which I quoted in the book, “This mono-ped puts most two-legged men to shame.” I love the language they used back then. They’re very succinct—“mono-ped.”

Debbie Millman:
A mono-ped. Yes.

Rickie Lee Jones:
So Frank, yeah. We were kind of [inaudible] at people who tumbled from town to town. Frank Peg Leg Jones is the one who started that by joining vaudeville, because all of the other Joneses still lived in Beaufort County, NC. We are the only ones that went tumbling West like a tumbleweed. My family line goes back to the very first settlers of North Carolina. Indeed, we are the first families of North Carolina. So I’m going to get a little plaque that … and that is an incredible thing. I wish that I could have passed that on to the Joneses before they passed away because wouldn’t they have been how happy. I don’t know, maybe they would have poo-pooed it, but wouldn’t they have been happy to see that all that rambling comes from the very first Welshman who rambled over to America in 1720.

Debbie Millman:
That’s incredible. I’ve done Ancestry on both sides of my family. I can go all the way back to the early 1800s on my father’s side of the family. But on my mom’s side of the family, we only go back to my great grandmother, and that is because no one can remember her maiden name, which is just completely heartbreaking to me, the idea that no one can remember.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, mine was adopted. Not only did we not have her last name, but we had no idea, but this fellow found her last name. I think some people just have a propensity for this kind of thing.

Debbie Millman:
Your mother was raised in orphanages around Mansfield, Ohio, and her parents were unable to take care of her. The courts ruled your mom’s mom an unfit mother, and all four of her children were permanently separated from her. You write in your book that all four children, along with a million other orphans of the great depression, were left to fend for themselves among the religious fanatics and pedophiles and sadists that seemed to gravitate towards children’s homes. Rickie, how did she finally get away? It’s a really remarkable story in your book.

Rickie Lee Jones:
You mean about old One Ball?

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Rickie Lee Jones:
So One Ball was named One Ball because she wore her hair in one bun on top of her head. But the children had called her One Ball to indicate the one testicle they thought was hanging under the skirt. My mother, every time she told that story, she’d laugh. I think from all those, which at that time, I guess wasn’t that many years, 30 years separated, it was safe to laugh at this inhumane woman that was the matron. She’d sneak up on the children, that was her thing, to be in the shadows, catch them and terrify them before she hurt them. She was sneaking up and back at my mother who was brushing her hair in the mirror and she saw her coming up from behind.

It was a great moment of redemption because she turned and caught her just before she got there and held her hair brush up and said, “If you ever come after me again, I’m going to ram this hairbrush up your butt.” She probably said “ass,” because that was more like my mother, but I wrote “butt” because I didn’t want to portray my mother worse than the matron because she swore, but that’s what she did. She stood up to the sadist and frightened her. I guess my mother left soon after and the woman never bothered her again. At least that’s how the story was told to me.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. You write that childhood traumas leave their dirty footprints in the fresh white snow—

Rickie Lee Jones:
Of our happy-ever-afters.

Debbie Millman:
… of our happy-ever-afters. It’s a beautiful line. You go on to state that no matter what your mom did, she found traces of her past obstructing the future. How did that affect you?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, we never escape it. It gets passed on to all of us. Trauma is generational, I have learned. So if your grandmother was raped, you’re going to live with it. If they tell, it doesn’t dissipate. I think even if they don’t tell, their behavior will be so bizarre in particular ways. So even talking about it, it’s as if it happened to me. My mind begins to dissipate and swirl. It’s hard to stay centered on the subject. There’s so much trauma in my mother’s past. These stories I tell are the only ones she told, but sometimes hinted to something worse. She would say of the religious fanatics who populate that area, the [inaudible], she would say, “Goddamn hypocrites.” But the look on her face said much, much more than those words, as if something had happened to her specifically by religious people. And she’s just never going to tell her children about it. So I think it always gets passed on. How do you heal from it? I don’t know. We’ll find out. We’ll keep living and we’ll find out how.

Debbie Millman:
You were 3 years old when you made your debut as a performer. You were a snowflake in a ballet recital of Bambi. Rickie, is it true you were so intoxicated by the applause of the audience, your dance teacher how to escort you off the stage?

Rickie Lee Jones:
It is totally true. So I remember—and we saved that little uniform for so long—I remember it had spangles on it. In fact, now that I say this out loud, I think every costume I put on somehow evokes that very first snowflake outfit. But as I bowed and didn’t know I’d been out there longer, and all the kids had left the stage and I was still bowing, and the people were applauding and laughing, I just stayed—“Thank you very much.” And they liked to tell that story as I grew up. There’s always one of us out there.

Debbie Millman:
So, safe to say you realized very early on you liked being on stage?

Rickie Lee Jones:
I liked it. I felt no fear and liked everybody’s happy smiling faces. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I really related to a great deal was how you grew up creating invisible friends. In your book, you describe how you would daydream about an invisible horse galloping down the street in a storm of wild fury, only to find you waiting and fearless. Then a trembling velvet muzzle would press against your hand, which was the horse’s gesture of acceptance and trust. Only you understood and contained its wild heart. You’d then holler out to your invisible horse, to the consternation of your siblings, who watched you in bewilderment. What did your family make of your invisible world?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I only became aware of them watching me when my mother told my dad to tell my invisible friend goodbye, that she didn’t want me talking to things that weren’t there anymore. But she didn’t seem to understand that that was as real to me as the physical world. There was no possibility that I could tell my invisible friend goodbye. That’d be like telling her goodbye. They just thought and did slightly treat me as if I was a little bit different than most people, which since that’s how they always treated me, it was normal, but it didn’t feel good. So maybe my mom thought if I stopped doing these things, that I would start to find my way toward real people and make real friends. Little did she know the reason I had invisible friends was because the real people didn’t want to play with me. I was also very bossy in my invisible world. I could control everything. With real people, they had ideas that were definitely inferior to mine.

Debbie Millman:
Did you name your invisible friends?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Sure.

Debbie Millman:
I had an invisible friend named Goonie, for some reason, and I made my mother set the table with a place setting for her every night.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Excellent. My friend was named Bashla. That’s a Slavic name, I don’t know where that came from, Bashla. Then when my parents quizzed me about my invisible friends, I began to make up others. I took the cue of the question to mean you should have more friends. So I made up SlowBeeSlow, but none was as real as Bashla.

Debbie Millman:
As you were growing up, your father’s anger and depression grew and he often left for months at a time. Your mother’s mood swings were unpredictable, and one day you came home from school to find that she had all of her teeth pulled out because they were hurting her. How were you able to make sense of this behavior and keep any semblance of your center?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, that event that my mother did, that was after the accident with my brother. So I think she was having a long, long fall. Why she decided to hurt herself, I don’t know if that was a conversation with my father. I said that thing about trauma having an impact forever, who knows where that came from. But for myself as an 11-year-old girl who’d already seen the accident and all the trouble, for my mother to do this thing without warning, and I come home from school and she doesn’t have any teeth, was maybe like the very last door to our lives than it had been to the new, bizarre horror that was coming. “You just can’t do stuff like that, mom, and you got to keep your children informed. Tell your daughter, ‘I’m thinking of getting Paul’s teeth.’ Say something so that I don’t come home and meet a mother without any teeth.”

Debbie Millman:
There’s a thread of magic that runs through Last Chance Texaco, where you talk about sensing things or knowing things in a way that’s very mysterious. We talked a little bit about that earlier. This happens quite vividly with the premonition you have about your older brother’s accident. I don’t know if you’re OK to talk about it at all, but can you describe the premonition and then what subsequently happened to him, and how he is now?

Rickie Lee Jones:
There have been a few times where I’ve had this place come upon me, and it is a place. I was in a lot of stressors in the lunchroom. It was just a few weeks into my sixth grade year, I think. I was still 10 years old, and the kids were drawing [inaudible] lines around their trays and I had to get out of the lunchroom, and to do that, I had to go by the table of older kids who were very mean. So on my way out, I stopped to look at some pictures, class pictures, that were on the right side of the auditorium stage. That’s where we ate, in the auditorium. As I looked at my brother’s graduation picture, the light in the room went away just like in a movie and centered around his picture. But it’s more than that.

It’s kind of scary because when I talk about it, it’s here, but I don’t talk about it much. It’s possible I could have had a life of premonitions if I would have let it happen anymore. But at any rate, I saw the picture and the message came. The message was really clear. It said, “Something is going to happen to Danny and nothing will ever be the same.” As if a gentle angel was saying, “So we’re letting you know, and there’s nothing you can do.” I don’t know. As years went by, I thought, when we used to make records, we worked with tape, and when you hit the cymbal really loud or the guitar really loud, the sound actually echoed over in part of the tape. So you’d hear an echo of a sound just before it came when you’re listening back.

It’s quite amazing, and as years have gone by, I thought, Maybe time is kind of like that, because we live in a spiral universe. Maybe some events are so loud they echo into the future, just like the … but at any rate, he did have this terrible accident 48 hours later. The man hit his motorcycle and knocked him off, dragging him along the road, because his foot was caught on the fender. Cut his leg open so bad. They severed his leg, but his head hitting the ground also caused traumatic brain injury.

You ask how he is now. Well, he didn’t have a great life, but he had an OK life. He ran a pool tournament for a while. He had his own pool hall, but probably nothing like the life he was hoping to have. When people are infirm or handicapped, or when people live a life that way, the only thing that they don’t want is to be measured as less than. “This is the life that is now, this is what I am. I’m not less than I was. I’m just Dan.” He’s still alive and he’s funny. The thing that he had when he was a little kid, he never lost, which was just a kind of lighthearted way of going through the world. Isn’t that something?

Debbie Millman:
Thank you for sharing that, Rickie. It seems that you were able to find solace and comfort in music, and you write about how you felt rescued by The Beatles.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah. They had some kind of a magic in their sound. It changed the world. Elvis was powerful, right? An American symbol, a sex symbol, but there was something about The Beatles that did more than rock and roll. I just never understood how to express it. But when I hear the harmonica, the room that the reverb creates and the guitar, and there’s a place, I am transported back to that place in time. Like so many of us are with music, the way we felt when we first heard it. So, I guess it’s the music.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things I loved reading about was how you loved The Beatles so much you had a Beatle haircut, Beatle boots, Ringo rings, you collected Beatles trading cards that came with sheets of bubble gum. You felt that if you could not have Paul, you would be Paul, and your love of The Beatles seemed to really help you undergo a social and spiritual metamorphosis, and rock music at that point became your Bible. But one thing that I loved was that you didn’t want to be a girl singer or The Beatles’ girlfriend. You wanted to be a Beatle, and there’s a big distinction there.

Rickie Lee Jones:
That’s the key, isn’t it?

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Rickie Lee Jones:
And maybe that’s the calling. I just don’t know, but I could never have settled for any of the roles that were offered to the girls. It was just automatic that I would be them.

Debbie Millman:
Over the course of your early life, in sort of preparation for your career, you had a number of incidents that you turned down, which took a lot of bravery and courage. And the first was when you started singing, your dad was so impressed with your ability, he took you to an audition for the Lew King show, which was a local television talent show, and you won. But then a decision had to be made that really did impact one direction that your life could have taken. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Sure. The Lew King Rangers show was, like you said, a talent show for kids. Who is the famous guy in Vegas, [singing], what was his … he was a star on that show. I auditioned and I was a good singer as a kid, but they told my parents that they would have to buy an insurance policy if I was going to be on the show. An insurance policy was just gangsterism. It would’ve cost a lot of money, from what my parents earned. When we were driving home, I was in the backseat, and I remember this so well, lots of talking, lots of talking about it. Then finally they put it back in my hands and said, “If you really want to do this, we’ll find a way to do it.” And I said, “No, I don’t want to do it—it’s wrong what they’re doing,” and I turned down what I lusted for, which was not only to be on television, but to sing in front of people.

Debbie Millman:
You write that the Lew King show and that decision was your first lesson in the dark corners of the music business, where favors are exchanged and sins offered up as collateral. You go on to state, of the many exercises and integrity you have achieved or endured or failed, this was your greatest. Why is that?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Because I was a little kid and didn’t have the years that come as you get older, the years of reason. And I instinctually knew it was unethical, but a little kid wants what they want. So I think it’s a harder decision for a little kid to make, maybe not.

Debbie Millman:
You describe how that decision really gave you a compass of sorts, which is the one that comes to children who sacrifice their dreams for family, and all around you, your childhood was slipping away. But you write, to your North, you had a dream and only one direction you could call your own. Was that when you knew you wanted to be a professional musician?

Rickie Lee Jones:
I knew that I wanted to entertain. I wanted to act, I had been in tap and ballet. I was also swimming, hoping to go to the Olympics. So whatever I was going to be, it was going to be a self-made thing, not a thing I went to school to learn to be. It would be on my shoulders.

Debbie Millman:
Yet when you tried out for the school choir, you were turned down.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Not only were you turned down, but the music teacher singled you out in front of your friends and stated that your voice was too unusual and would not fit into his chorus. How do teachers like that even exist?

Rickie Lee Jones:
He kind of looked like a Marine. They’re just kind of people that are about everything being the same. Why they’re in the arts … I think there were a lot more of them in the arts. He was teaching everybody that if they wanted to be in music as a profession, they’d have to sound like this and sing like this, and maybe they’d get a job in this choir. You remember in the mid to late ’60s, choirs were very popular. They all sang in unison. So that was the job you could get, and I was like, “That is not the job I’m going to get.” But that hurt really badly.

Yet, he was right. My voice was different. There was something about me that seemed to piss teachers off, and they very unceremoniously sent me on my way. Maybe even at 12 or 13, I had a personality that was singular and meant to be a star on stage. I was not ever going to be in the choir. I always liked that little girl who did the long bow. I would always separate myself somehow, but they could have been so much gentler with me. It’s a longshot.

The people who become famous are longshots. They’re the people that teachers and most people around them go, “This guy’s never going to amount to anything,” because we are finding our way to a different plateau entirely. In that realm, we would be a bum; we’re not meant to be there. We’re meant to be up there. Since so few people make it, I guess, are able to define themselves and sell themselves as a singular new and different, because so many people want the same, same, same. So they treat you so badly. It’s a miracle that anybody who’s a little bit different ever achieves anything that they’re meant to achieve, I think. Yeah, that guy was a bad guy. He really hurt my feelings. He meant to hurt my feelings.

Debbie Millman:
And that’s the part that makes it cruel.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Your childhood was abruptly and forever altered by your brother’s injury. At that point you described your family life as something like a nuclear submarine waiting for the signal to destroy all known life. But music became an even stronger solace for you, and you write how Jefferson Airplane was on your turntable every day. Buffalo Springfield, Jimi Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, and The Mothers of Invention were frequently played. You also love show tunes, particularly from West Side Story. You go on to describe how Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow seemed to be at the eye of a storm you longed to be part of. What storm was that?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, outside of my house, the hippies were growing. They’d been growing since ’65 and ’66. There’s an article in LOOK or LIFE Magazine about them on LSD, and little slices of them out there, and their long hair and Indian headbands. So first it’s a look that invites a child, but what they’re talking about, peace, protest, that’s way lower on the list. I wanted to be part of all that love and attention. They would have love-ins. There was a love-in or something in Encanto Park. I wanted to be there so bad. Well, all it was was people standing around. It wasn’t anything like what the title … I thought something magical would be happening in there. But nevertheless, I was drawn out of the family circle and all that trouble and drama to a larger picture that maybe I could find a place in.

Debbie Millman:
The last song on Side A of Surrealistic Pillow, “Comin’ Back to Me,” was my favorite. You taught yourself how to play the guitar, sounding out each note one phrase at a time by ear. How did you feel when you realized you could play it?

Rickie Lee Jones:
It took so long, so many weeks of practice, and memory, and getting … the fingers would hurt so badly pressing on those little steel razors. Then finally I could make that beautiful motion walking down from the C to the A minor. And when you’re making music, it’s like you’re weaving reality. You’re weaving places. You’re bringing the … it’s magic, and bringing these feelings into existence out here before you. Oh my God. I had longed to do it and I was doing it. That’s all I can say about that. It was pretty wonderful.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t want to skip too far ahead in time, but what was it like to record that song for your album Pop Pop?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I wasn’t sure I should do it because it has always been that first song I learned and it’s attached to so many feelings that have their root when I was 11, or 10, or 12 years old. I go right back to that bedroom when I start thinking of that song. So, I didn’t want to put it out before me where it could be measured, and maybe people wouldn’t like it or would like it, but it wouldn’t be my private … but that didn’t happen at all. Actually, it’s remained my own private place. I was more concerned on a technical level with the key, because my voice is much lower now, but at the time it was pretty low in my register, and I was working hard to sing there. Marty Balin and I have a similar range that we can sing in. So I was just thinking about it technically—was I pulling it off?—because I knew how I felt singing it, but was I conveying it to the listener? That’s all I was thinking about.

Debbie Millman:
Is it different for you to perform songs that were written by other people rather than songs written by yourself?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
One song that I think is remarkable that you do is a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For The Devil,” which takes the song and makes it a completely different song. It’s a completely different song. I was playing it for my wife and I’m like, “Do you recognize this song?” And I played the first couple of bars that you sang and she’s like, “No.” And then I played the Rolling Stones’ version and she was like, “Holy shit.” I’m like, “Yeah. yeah.”

Rickie Lee Jones:
Excellent.

Debbie Millman:
It’s amazing. Amazing.

Rickie Lee Jones:
That’s exactly what I would wish happened. So, yes, I have a very different relationship. When I hear a song, I can mold it in any direction I want. But when I write it, it’s almost like taking dictation—“This is the way I have to play it.” If I play it another way, that will be what it looks like. It’s like you’re making a baby in here, but you get to decide what it’s … so I have to stick to the creation of the song rather than the interpretation of the song when it’s mine.

Debbie Millman:
I think you were 14—you heard from a friend that her boyfriend was starting a band, and you auditioned and became the lead singer of the California Blues Band.

Rickie Lee Jones:
California Blues Band.

Debbie Millman:
Your mother gave you money to buy a paisley empire-waisted one-piece satin lounge pajama outfit that you saw at Lerners department store. I remember Lerners department store, by the way. What did it feel like to finally sort of be the lead singer in a band?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I wore that pajama out of Lerners that day. So I was walking through Christown Mall with it on, and I felt like … so they’re looking at me, and I like that. Partly I think that they might not like me, but I don’t care. I’m kind of walking on air and I’m part of the hippies. That costume was an invitation to anywhere I wanted to go. I’m grown up, I’m part of the hippies, I’m a rockstar. We didn’t say rockstar back then, but I’m the lead singer of a band. I’m in a band. So it felt like, I guess, uniforms are supposed to make you feel. When you put on a uniform, you’re a part of us, and you do this. Maybe uniforms help you do your job better. But I felt like I had put on the uniform of my future.

It was also defiance, because the lounge pajama, it was a pajama, which I didn’t know. I didn’t know people wore lounge pajamas. I never heard of that. So it was defiance against my parents who would let, my mother would let me, but she wouldn’t like it, and all the people that were looking at me, and that defiance made me feel good. That’s the key in me, I guess, I need a little defiance.

Debbie Millman:
Actually, the defiance reminds me of an experience you had in high school where you were expelled because you refused to take off your hat.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah. Defiance with clothes. When you take off the hat, you get no education.

Debbie Millman:
I believe that that teacher also was very cruel to you and told you that you were an undesirable element at the school.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, not the teacher, but the vice principal. The teacher was a woman, the home ed teacher, but the vice principal said I was an undesirable element because I said, “No, no, wait, you just expelled me. You suspended me for three days for this. I just got back.” He said, “I don’t care. You’re an undesirable element at this school.” So she didn’t seem to know that I’d already been absent—

Debbie Millman:
Punished for it.

Rickie Lee Jones:
… for three days, and sent the note in again. So it just seemed so unfair, but he made it clear, he didn’t care if it was fair, he was taking this opportunity to get me out of the school. Shame on him.

Debbie Millman:
Shame on him, indeed. Did he ever apologize to you when he realized what you did with your life?

Rickie Lee Jones:
It’s not just me. He kicked out 11 other hippies that year. He got rid of all the heads. Some of those kids were just long-haired kids. They didn’t smoke pot. They were really good students. No, he didn’t apologize to anybody.

Debbie Millman:
All of that ultimately motivated you to run away.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yes, again.

Debbie Millman:
You ran away several times as a teenager. On the road, you had skirmishes with gangsters, would-be abductors. You snuck into a concert venue to see Jimi Hendrix. You witnessed an abusive man beating up his wife. You even met a pimp, who was actually rather nice. When you settled in Los Angeles, you lived in a cave for a while. You hitchhiked on a dark highway to get to Canada. Though I know in real life you end up alive—obviously, we’re talking—there were moments while reading your book where I was genuinely terrified that you might not make it. How scared were you during these experiences in your early life?

Rickie Lee Jones:
I think I was scared a lot. When I made the decision to leave my dad in 1968, he had become abusive and was drinking too much. Not that I hadn’t kind of been used to that a little bit, but when he beat me, that hadn’t happened before, and I went, “I’m out of here.” There’d been a festival I wanted to go to, so I took that opportunity to run away. I had an ability, it turned out, to take care of myself with strangers, but it was always terrifying. I hitchhiked, and you never know who’s going to pick you up. You have to be so aware of every tiny detail of the person if you’re going to survive. I had that skill and I also got a lot of luck.

So it was thrilling, but I was also a little baby. I was just 14 years old, and I looked older because I had big boobs. That’s all. If I’d been flat-chested, I don’t think anybody would have mistaken me for a 17 … I said I was 17 because I didn’t act like an 18-year-old because I didn’t know enough. So if I did 17, that would get me through.

I went in a car with somebody bringing pot back from Mexico. So that was so dang dangerous. And to me it was just kind of thrilling. Lots of people were bringing pot over. So I could do that too and see what that felt like to be nefarious. Well, from the time that guy got over there, I got worried about the people who brought the drugs. I was in danger. I didn’t know that guy. I mean, it was a friend of a friend of a friend, but who knows who he was. Yet, escorted there to Hot Springs and back home again. So it does sometimes feel like I had a very divine escort, which my intellect, my instincts, but no, it feels like something brighter than just me. So I was scared a lot.

Debbie Millman:
When you settled in Los Angeles, you were able to collect unemployment from a job you’d been fired from. You were set to get $85 a month for six months, which at the time was just enough to pay rent.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Just enough. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So you gave yourself that six months to either have a career in music or you would have to go home. I believe that one of the first songs you wrote at that time was one that ended up on your first album, a song that I’ve probably played several thousand times in my life. It’s a song called “Company.” You talk about writing it in the book; I don’t remember the exact word that you used, but it sounded like, or it felt like it was an excruciating process at the time to write that song. Can you talk a little bit about how you wrote that song? I mean, that’s a crazy good song to be the first song you’ve ever really written. It’s a masterpiece.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah. I had written the lyric. I worked for this gangster named Rocky, and luckily he was probably doing who knows when he was really shipping, but I’d have to sit at a desk and wait for a consolidated shipping form to fill out, and I have many hours to do nothing. So I started writing lyrics on the typewriter. The typewriter made me feel like a real writer, and I wrote the lyrics to “Young Blood,” some parts of “The Real End,” which becomes a line in “Coolsville,” and “Company.” Pretty much almost as it ends up, “I’ll remember you too clearly, but I’ll survive another day. Conversations to share, no one there. I’ll imagine what you’d say. Two for the movie show, three in the back row. Hold on tight.” So I’m playing with synchronized rhythmic ideas in the lyrics, right? Can you see the connection? So that’s what I’m sitting there doing.

But when I reach across the galaxy, and I think that was the line, that was not too many universes and galaxies, a few, but not too many in lyrics. “When I reach across the galaxy, I’ll miss your company.” In the old [inaudible] way, just two verses, not even a bridge. So I met this guy out on the beach, Alfred Johnson. He was playing piano, and he was good, and he knew Laura Nyro songs, and he was playing the old stuff that I liked, “Up on the Roof,” and whatever.

So I agreed to go over to his house, which was a little bit of a risky thing to do. At that age, sort of like 22 or so, I was not as risky as I had been as a teenager, but I went ahead over him and his friend, and when I walked in—and it was an apartment in the very back overlooking the garage—when I walked in, there were dismembered dolls everywhere, hanging from things and stuck on the lamps and stuff. So I had to use that … I was still at the door, I know, but I had to use that instinct of, “Is this a message or is this art? What am I looking at here?” And I could see them looking at me and I just went, “cool.” And I don’t even know if I commented on it, which made them respect me even more. I was pretty sure I wasn’t in danger.

I asked myself, “Why does the world have to be so dangerous that if you go over to somebody’s house, you don’t know if they’re going to kill you.” It’s so dangerous for women every day, and we live with that tension every day. Men can’t know, and they dismiss it. They go, “What are you always worried about?” Well, because there’s a lot to worry about, and you can’t know unless you become one of us, and how many ways we have to watch all the time.

So anyway, I got there and quite the opposite of danger happened, which is he sat behind his keyboard, and he had so much equipment. He loved all this equipment. Alfred is a Black man from far away, like Riverside or something. I assumed his language would be Black music, but it wasn’t. It was Buffalo Springfield and Little Feat. It was that generation of music, while mine actually was Marvin Gaye. And don’t get me wrong, I think Buffalo Springfield was a very important band, where many, many things connect. But so we had a common language that we didn’t know when we first met. As we began to play, he took ahold of the lyrics and he did something nobody does … I can only describe it as a physical thing where he took ahold of them and cut a little hole out and put his heart in them. He made them his own.

We did it in the old way of … like I would imagine the old timey songwriters would’ve done. So I’m standing by the keyboard, he’s there, and we’re singing every single thing. “So how are we going to write this, ‘Company’?” “’Company,’” I said, “I was hoping that Frank Sinatra might sing this.” OK. So I’ve given us some kind of a language to use to start. [singing] I could see Frank doing that. So there’s our first line. Then I think I do that, and then Alfred says [singing]. So, as we got deeper in, almost syllables were exchanged. [singing] Maybe that was one person. [singing] And that much took an hour and a half. So by 12 hours later, we’d finished it. [singing] Can’t sing it with the earphones in. [singing] “What cords are we going to put under there?” “So that second time we do it, when we suspend that cord and resolve it.” “Well, remember it, do it next time. Don’t forget. That was really good.”

So by the time it was done, we had lived a lifetime together, and we were done. We did write more. We wrote the bridge to “Weasel and the White Boys,” and he wants to write more, and I would like to write more with him. But I have to see him in another life because that was a whole lifetime spent with Alfred writing “Company.” I tell it with words, but I’d like to go back and feel what it was to have all life before you, before me, and know that every single thing I did mattered, and was forming all the roads that would be on the map to come.

It’s hard to have that at 66. But if you don’t, if you don’t say, “I have a life before me, and there are still many roads to carve out of everything I make,” it’s a question of timing also, but you have to keep seeing your life as before you, not after you. That power will go into the work that you make. I think one of the things about ‘Company,’ besides that I was a forlorn, love-lost lyricist, was all life was before us. And we had a lot at stake.

Debbie Millman:
But yet the song feels like an old soul wrote it. It’s hard to believe that you were just coming out of your teenage years when you wrote that song. You also wrote a song titled “Easy Money” that the producer, Bud Dain, liked.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Bud Dain.

Debbie Millman:
And then he offered you a job, wherein you would write a certain number of songs per month for $800 a month. And back in 1977, that was like winning the lottery. You were all set to sign it. And then similar to your decision with Lew King, you didn’t.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Similar with my brother, the voice that spoke about my brother’s accident. It wasn’t bad, but it was also almost like a juxtaposition of time, because understand, I have the pen in my hand. I’ve come up the elevator to the office to sign. And I have the pen in my hand and something very loudly says, “Don’t sign. If he wants you, someone else will too,” which is an invitation to the future. It’s saying, “You are just beginning. This is not where you’re supposed to go. Don’t stop here.” Isn’t that funny how destiny calls you, but you can get waylaid like the Odyssey. You can get waylaid. So, it was a powerful moment. I still am in awe that some part of me knew that I would go to better places. This would not be my only chance. When we’re down at the bottom, we do feel like anything is where we’re supposed to be.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You write that it took balls to pass up that opportunity and opt for poverty on the belief that something greater was meant for you. And it was, it was. At this point in your life, you were doing gigs around various small, somewhat seedy venues through Los Angeles. What would you consider to be your big breakthrough? What was that moment?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Troubadour. The Troubadour was the third show. Nick Mathe, my old next door neighbor, had become my manager, and he had actually done a pretty good job, I think. And we had decided we’d have three showcases, which showcases was like, you didn’t get paid. I guess it’s how it always is now, but you didn’t get paid and you did a 20- or 30-minute show. And then people could come and get a taste for who you are. So we did three of them. The last one would be at the Troubadour, and that one had a … it was like a snowball. The first one, there were three famous people, that is three A&R guys, or three … this was full of them. We got it attached to Wendy Waldman’s show because we couldn’t get in anywhere.

So they put us in at the very beginning of her show, God bless her for that. We had people from three record companies, Warner Brothers, Portrait, Horizon, and I think Portrait or Horizon was a subsidiary of Columbia, A&M, Tommy LiPuma. So there were a whole bunch of important folks at that show. I did five songs, and I invited my friends from the street, that is four or five guys I knew who hung out on the street on Santa Monica Boulevard, came in and sang harmony on an a capella thing. My friend from The Great American Food & Beverage Company came in and played piano on [inaudible], and I played the other … because I wanted to show them as much as I could how big the room was, what I liked, the old-timey stuff, a capella stuff, because I didn’t know if the songs I wrote showed you where I wanted to go. So anyway, that was my big plan, and I think it worked.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote about a drive with the producer Lowell George as the official beginning of your new life, the one that you live today, and you write, “That ride seemed so right and normal as if I had always been destined to ride in that Range Rover. Although I was giddy inside, I was cool. And if I may say, beautiful. I knew who I was, the songwriter, the girl in the beret. I belonged sipping Moet with Lowell George. I belonged.” What did you envision your future would be like at that point?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I think at that time I was really living in the here and now. So I had Lowell and the possibility of his world. I knew Tom and Chuck and their world. So this is me on unemployment, possibly becoming part of worlds that I’ve lived with all my life. So here sitting in the couch is David Crosby, and over there is Graham Nash. So that’s what I was doing. I don’t think I was doing anything else but navigating my feelings and the real world before me.

Debbie Millman:
You knew from the beginning of your career that you wanted to have staying power. And before you even made a record, you were aware of the danger of being what you referred to as being used up too fast. Were you worried that that might happen?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Sure, but the illusion was a year into my career, and I was so very famous. All the doors opened, all the backstage doors opened, and I seemed to have so much money it would never go away. The illusion was that it would always be that way. It could never go away. That’s been the challenge, is learning that balloon of attention and fame will be expelled. And how will you be here in 30 years if this is where you want to be? The only way for me was to write work that was so iconic and so powerful that, like Frank Sinatra, who was my hero, that people would always come back to be a part of it. So that was what I set out to do. So, it’s been a life experience, not a career experience. It’s been learning how to navigate life.

The thing I feel now is that music and this career, there’s no difference between my life and my career, and my career and my life. They’re all mixed up together. That’s why it was OK to write the book and tell you about my history, because if you’re meant to be here, it’ll only do good. Also, I wanted to … I thought, There really aren’t very many stories of women’s whole lives. We have memoirs, but this is a story of a life, and a time, and a family, and at an extraordinary event, that is my career, but the book is the story of a life.

Debbie Millman:
What’s really interesting is as, I guess I would be considered a super fan, reading your book illuminated so much of your music in a completely different way, because you have been so private. I was sort of astounded by the history that you bring to your music, and it sort of helps augment the music in a completely different way. Relistening to your entire catalog in preparation for the interview, I was like, “Oh, OK. That’s the story in ‘Coolsville.’” You kind of get the music in a completely different way. Your second album, Pirates, is considered one of the greatest albums ever made. And I’m not saying that because I’m a fan, I’m saying that because it’s been written about as one of the greatest albums ever made.

And it was written at the end of your addiction to heroin, when you and musician Sal Bernardi lived on 9th Street in Manhattan. And you write that, “This is where Sal and I lost our way together. We stayed up all night and slept until 4 p.m. and rose half-dead to get high and feel half-alive again. We wrote music and read Edgar Allan Poe,” who shows up in some of the lyrics. “We lived the strange twilight, the slow-motion fluid that fed our memories. We were junkies.” You’ve said that heroin was like a carnival ride you couldn’t exit until the ride was over. And one day you knew it was time to get off the ride. How did you kick the habit? Because you didn’t go to rehab. How did you manage to get over this?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, it took a lot of false starts. It’s hard to describe to anybody how overpowering heroin is to the spirit and the psyche. And I guess I’m many, many, many years away, so it’s safe for me to look, but it’s also kind of like, what’s that … you know that book, The Hobbit, and there’s that one eye in the tower? It’s kind of like that. If you turn and look at it, it’ll look at you too. But I guess it’s talking to the part of the brain that doesn’t feel safe and doesn’t feel pleasure, and it fills that up with safety and pleasure in a half-sleep state where you can write anything and be walking in a dream and talking. So, well, that’s nice. But in a month, or two, or six, this place begins to recede.

So when you stop taking the drug, this place isn’t quite the same anymore. So when you’ve been on that drug for a few years, you don’t have anything here to root into. It has gone away and become part of the dream place. The strength of will it takes to abandon that safe, wonderful dream place for this stark bright, hard, frightening world is incredible. When I was a drug addict, about two or three years, I began to want to be well. And that helps that language to say, “I’m sick and I want to be well.” It was very hard. I had a therapist, I tried, I failed, I tried, I failed. I identified triggers, and it took a year or a year and a half of saying “no more,” and then relapsing.

But after finally three months or four months, the test, I survived that test. I didn’t get high, and a year later, the year test. So, I never went to AA or anything, but it really was one day at a time, one step at a time. We made it here, we made it there, and resolving never to go back. Now, what I just wanted to do right now was to try to describe what addiction is so that people who don’t have addictive personalities could get a sense that it’s not a choice. It’s like an altering of the brain that takes place, and it takes the will to go, “I know that place exists, even though I can’t see it anymore, and I’m going back. I’m going over the mountains and through the deserts, and I’m finding my way back to reality.”

Debbie Millman:
You’ve been sober for decades now, and write, “How months go by now when you forget you were an addict. The dark is gone. The shadow’s faded. You are recovered and whole.” One thing that I shook my head over as I was reading your book was the notion that male rockers like Keith Richards, you sort of admired for his longevity and drug use. But women in rock and roll are shamed for the same behavior that men are often held for. How do you make sense of that, if you can?

Rickie Lee Jones:
I think we do it with women in all things. We assign a moral code to them that we don’t hold men to. And it’s sad because that dubiousness is creating careers. It’s very hard now to have a career if you won’t sell yourself sexually. We worked so hard to not have to do that. So that’s a little discouraging.

Debbie Millman:
Well, one other thing that you can’t help but notice if you look at the lyric and the liner notes of your albums, all the songs are “music and lyrics by Rickie Lee Jones,” for the most part. You look at some of the popular music today and you see, and I’m really not joking, 30 or 40 names. I don’t even know how that is possible.

Rickie Lee Jones:
I guess everybody in the room gets their name on.

Debbie Millman:
It seems like there was a moment in time where music was a very personal sort of soul-revealing experience. And over time, that’s sort of changed to really become entertainment.

Rickie Lee Jones:
The relationship was the art. It was the person’s relationship with art. Now, it’s a person’s relationship with show business and fame. What they’re seeking is success. What we sought was a great song. We hoped it sold, but our emphasis was the great song. It’s not anymore. Nobody’s trying to write a great song. They’re trying to write a hit song. That’s what shows. That’s too bad. But I really think we’re cyclical. People get tired of that. That’ll fall away. Something else will take its place. Hopefully songs, hopefully not just sounds, but who knows what’s coming?

Debbie Millman:
Finally, my last question is one that my wife, who is a writer, suggested that I ask you. The question is, how would the liner notes of your life read?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Of my life? Woo. That’s a long and creative thing, which I don’t know if I can do on the fly. It’s kind of like a tombstone too, right? That’s a kind of good idea. Instead of a tombstone, we’ll put some liner notes. I guess I would say she was a woman of her time who transcended her time, but that’s too easy. That’s more like a tombstone. I guess she was a woman who transcended, who found a place to fit in. You could go either way with that. But I think the jury’s out, and liner notes are always written by somebody else, their view of who you are. You can try to plant eggs and get them to go in that direction, but I was never sure how other people saw me. There’s a nice thing that’s happened this year, where I finally don’t feel misunderstood. That’s really all I could ask for. Things seem to be right now. So maybe there won’t be any liner notes, or just put it out and let people guess.

Debbie Millman:
Rickie Lee Jones, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express to you how much your music has meant to me in my life. I own everything you’ve ever published and really just want to thank you for doing the work that you do. Thank you for enriching my life with your music and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Rickie Lee Jones:
You’re welcome. Thank you so much for doing this, too. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Rickie Lee Jones’ new memoir is titled Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. You could read more about her remarkable career on her website, rickieleejones.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Rickie Lee Jones appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
If the pandemic has done anything positive, it’s allowed some people to rethink their work lives and ask, “What do we really want to be doing? What truly brings us a sense of pleasure and accomplishment?” For those of us on that journey, Jonathan Fields has a way to help us think about these questions. It’s outlined in his new book, Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work That Makes You Come Alive. Jonathan Fields is the author of several books about professional and personal growth. And he’s the founder of The Good Life Project, which is also the name of his podcast. Jonathan Fields, welcome back to Design Matters.

Jonathan Fields:
It is so good to be back here with you in conversation, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. Last time we did this, we were together in the studio I’m sitting in right now. And unfortunately, we’re a little bit further apart.

Jonathan Fields:
Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
So, our interview today is actually, as I’m mentioning, the second time that you’ve been on Design Matters. So I actually want to start today’s interview by asking you about something I seem to have missed completely in our first interview, which I’ve subsequently regretted ever since. So now nine years later, I get to ask you about the great 12-day Cool Whip experiment. Can you please tell our listeners what that was, and what on earth provoked you to do it?

Jonathan Fields:
Oh, wow. So when our daughter was a little, little kid, we were talking to her about food and different types of food, and natural food and food that was created in laboratories and how you can tell the difference. And she loves whipped cream, or loved whipped cream back when. She was probably 5 or 6 years old back then. And we thought it’d be fun to do this experiment one day. So we took two little glass ramekins, and we made fresh whipped cream in one and we put it in it. And then we got, I think, Cool Whip, and we scooped out an equal amount of Cool Whip on the other. And we just left them out, side by side, for 12 days. And it was this visual test of what would happen, nature versus science or laboratory.

Within a matter of about a half an hour, the actual whipped cream had just dissolved into a puddle. Twelve days later, the Cool Whip looked identical to the moment that we put it into the bowl, and we hadn’t touched it at all. On that day I was looking at it, and I took the little ramekin in my hand. I turned it upside down. Nothing happened. It stayed in it. And then I touched it, and it was rock solid.

So we got a pen and drew a little smiley face on it, and that was one of the first-ever blog posts that I put up, and it was just like a fun experiment. My recollection is that that post, probably much to the unhappiness of the people who created Cool Whip, ranked on the first page of search for Cool Whip for years.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I did have to go back to the Wayback Machine to find it. But I’m sure that our listeners can dig it up pretty easily. The pictures are quite extraordinary. And when I was looking at it, I thought, Well, there’s the origins of the visual proof of Jonathan’s Sparketype, and we’re going to talk about that, but I really did think that that Maker and Scientist combo was very appropriate in terms of how you’ve now designated the various parts of your personality. So, our interview today is going to be a little bit different from my usual interviews, in that we don’t really need to go back and do the deep dive into your origin story. But I’d still like to review a little bit of the highlights for our listeners that might not have heard that first episode from nearly a decade ago. Are you OK with that?

Jonathan Fields:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, good. So you grew up in a suburb of New York in a town called Port Washington. And this is also something new that I learned in researching you for this episode. Your town was known as the East Egg from The Great Gatsby, which is a beautiful little water town, and your mom was a serious craftsperson and a potter. She, I think, gave you a little old wooden set of paints, which was your grandfather’s, or maybe you found it in your attic. And that’s when you first fell in love with painting. So, talk a little bit about the kinds of things you were painting back then as a little boy in East Egg, Long Island.

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah. So, it’s funny because the mansion that the legend is there was one mansion at the top of the egg that was the shape of our town, that The Great Gatsby was based on also, which is this stunning, stunning estate on the water. But yeah, I grew up in a family where the home was just very bohemian artisan. My mom lived that life. She embodied it with everything in her and brought me into just the creative Jones, the creative impulse really, really early in life, and recognized it in me at the same time and said, “that’s something, let’s feed it in some way.” So, the painting side of it probably came a little bit later.

My recollection is my grandpa passed, and in cleaning out all of his stuff … and he was a very successful trial lawyer. He was a litigator. He was the type of person where every hair was quaffed perfectly. He had his nails manicured with clear nail polish, always a beautiful suit. And in looking at all of his old stuff, we come upon this old wooden box with a latch on the front of it. Pop open the latch, and inside is this paint set. It’s oil paints and acrylic paints and brushes and wood pallets, and I was like, “Did anyone know he was a painter?” And, raised eyebrows—nobody really knew.

So my mom gave that to me, part of my inheritance, and her pottery studio was in the basement of our house. And it was this magical world of of kilns and giant wheels, and jars and jars and jars of chemicals that she would make glazes out of. But in the corner, there was a little space, and I took a bunch of clay boxes—50-pound boxes of clay. And I then took an old door and threw them on top of it. I got an old swing-arm lamp that we had and bolted it on, and taught myself how to paint, and that was … I just, I lost time doing that. I mean, you know that feeling.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Jonathan Fields:
Almost everybody, I’m sure, listening to this knows that feeling. And for me, this was back in the day where some of the best art on the planet was album covers. It was amazing stuff. I mean, I remember trying to get as close as humanly possible to the actual album cover knowing absolutely nothing about paint, yet teaching myself, and I threw out so many canvases because I was a bit of a perfectionist. And if I was off by one line, I felt like it was just a disaster, and I would junk it and start over. But eventually I got pretty good. So I started making album covers on jean jackets, and that earned me my walking-around money in high school. My favorite of all time was Molly Hatchet, Flirtin’ with Disaster. I think it was Frazetta who did this just wild, wild intensely vivid. It looked like it was bursting off of the cover. It probably took me a couple of months to do that one. But I was so proud of it. I often wonder what happened to all those jean jackets, and I wish I had saved one.

Debbie Millman:
I wish you had, too. I was sure you were going to say your favorite was the Boston album cover?

Jonathan Fields:
That was pretty amazing, too, actually. It was probably between the two of them. The classic upside-down spaceship was pretty awesome.

Debbie Millman:
I kind of wish you had it so we can show it to Paula Scher.

Jonathan Fields:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you’ve been an entrepreneur then pretty much your entire life. In addition to selling jean jackets, you also were a self-described “lemonade stand kid.” You worked as a DJ through college but not only as a DJ, you worked building a DJ company. So, here’s the big disconnect for me, and something that I know we touched on in our first interview, but I want to go a little bit deeper. What made you decide to go to law school and become a big-time attorney for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with this kind of arts and crafts, nearly hippie-esque upbringing?

Jonathan Fields:
Short answer, money, and not the right reason in any way, shape or form. It was those who knew me at the time I made that decision really looked at me and said, “Wait, what? This is what you’re doing?” But it was a little bit more than that, actually. I basically never went to class in undergrad. I was building this DJ and mobile lighting and music company the whole time there. So I was out Thursday to Saturday night to 4 a.m. DJing and moving stacks and speakers and equipment, and developing the art because it’s a real artform, which I love to this day. And I barely ever attended class. And when I graduated with a horrible grade point average, by the way, I was kicking around a couple of different jobs outside sales jobs.

I remember driving my car to a building, taking the elevator to the top floor and knocking on doors of small businesses where my required role was, “hi, I’m here to see the president to talk about your long-distance telephone service.” When I finally made the decision to go to law school a couple years after that, it was in no small part because I got really curious about what I was really capable of intellectually. I knew I had a Jones for building businesses and being a maker. But I also knew that I really slacked off in terms of really pushing myself in college, and I was really curious, and I was looking for a way to test that and see what I could do.

And then at the same time, develop skills that I knew would equip me to do anything in life. So, I figured if I went, it would make me a better analyzer of ideas and arguments, it would teach me how to write, and it would teach me how to speak. It definitely helped with the first, and I love the fact that I don’t have to write in any way resembling what I was taught to write as a lawyer now for the rest of my life. But it also taught me how to speak and understand arguments. And I knew at the end of the day, also, I was a kid who, money mattered to me. It was a symbol of status, a symbol of prestige, a symbol of accomplishment.

So, I got to law school, and I worked ridiculously hard. I was very fortunate, graduated pretty close to the top of my class, and then had an opportunity presented to me that started me out at the SEC, big federal government agency, and then landed me in one of the biggest firms in the world working in New York, relentless hours, and ending up in a place where my body effectively shut down. But it was a strange decision for me. But I think also, having grown up in a family where it was fairly bohemian … my dad had one job his whole life. He’s a research professor. And we grew up in a town that was actually, there was a lot of money in the town. And I never felt overtly that we were the poor family in town because we weren’t. We were sort of like middle class. But I was always surrounded by people who had more and could do more because of that. And it did something to me that it took me probably decades into life to really unwind.

Debbie Millman:
After working at the U.S. Securities Commission, you then went on to become a private equity lawyer where you raised and launched more than $1 billion in private equity funds. And you’ve said that you were fascinated with the psychology of how markets move. Has that influenced you the way you think about marketing now?

Jonathan Fields:
Oh, 100%. One of the things you learn really quickly in the world of finance and the markets of financial markets is markets don’t move based on the fact, they move based on people’s perception of fact, which is marketing, right? It’s all about human psychology. It’s you in the world of branding. This is what you’ve lived for so much. There’s the product, there’s the thing itself, and then there’s what wraps around the thing itself that creates the perception of the thing. So I’ve been fascinated by that. And I think my interest in the markets early on was really it was a bit of a red herring. My real fascination was human behavior. Why do we do the weird things that we do? And how do we craft experiences and language that might somehow move people to go a little bit here or go a little bit there? It’s a big part of why I’ve loved entrepreneurship, because it’s not just figuring out the problem of business. It’s figuring out the much more wicked problem of people.

Debbie Millman:
You said that when you’re surrounded by that much money all the time, and the stakes are so high, you get a really warped sensibility about the value of money and the value of life. Did they become intertwined for you at that point?

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, there’s a … I probably lost myself in that for a short window. It was a pretty short window because my body effectively jettisoned me from the career pretty quickly. It’s very easy to get caught up in that swirl. I mean, I literally remember we were closing a deal, and there was an investor who had said that they were committing $25 million to this raise, and we were closing that evening. We found out that this person was about to get on a plane out at the airport, and we had to make a decision whether just to send me in a car over to the airport to go get his signature on a piece of paper that would lock in another $25 million. And somebody in the room was kind of like, “It’s really not worth it for that.” And you’re like, “Wait, wait, what?”

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Jonathan Fields:
It’s just you really do. When you live in that world, I think it’s—at least for me, maybe other people find it much more easy to tether themselves to truth and reality—the fact that this is not the world, but only this one bizarre representation of a world. It’s very easy to lose sight. And I think for a short window, I probably did.

Debbie Millman:
And then your body gave up on you. And then you gave up on this career, you quit. You went from making billions of dollars and raising billions of dollars in private equity funds to making $12 an hour as a personal trainer. So, tell us about that trajectory.

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, that was a bigger hit to my ego than anything else.

Debbie Millman:
But it seems like that’s what you sought out doing. It’s not like that was the last thing you could do. You went and actively looked for a job as a personal trainer.

Jonathan Fields:
100% true. And at the same time, I knew that even in the short time that I was in law, which is about five years or so, I had built a big chunk of my identity around being that person. So, when I go from that being able to show a particular business card and wear a particular thing, and there are certain assumptions that are made, to then exiting not just that job, but the entire industry, deciding I want to go back into entrepreneurship and the world of fitness and wellbeing. And I want to start at the ground up to really understand what was the dynamic from the most basic point of service.

I talked my way into a job as a personal trainer making 12 bucks an hour. And on the one hand, I was thrilled I was getting paid anything to learn an entirely new industry. This was a reeducation for me. And on the other hand, there was still something in me that that was struggling to let go of the fact that, “Dear God, what if one of my old clients walks by me and sees me stretching out a client in Central Park wearing my tights and running shoes and a ratty old T-shirt? What are they going to think?” Oh, the guy couldn’t hack it. Look what he’s had to do now. And it took a while for me to just really unwind that grasping at a certain identity and set of assumptions and say, “No, actually, it’s OK. I’m really good with this next journey that I’m going on.” But it wasn’t an instant thing.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a really hard one. I ended up quitting a job that I had right when I first started working out of college and had gone from working at a magazine, which I loved, to going to work at a real estate marketing company for twice the money and a car. And I hated every single day of it. Every single day, I cried every day, and knew that I had made this decision based on money. And when I quit, I ended up getting a job at Integral Yoga Health Food Store as a cashier, and I remember always being somewhat terrified that somebody was going to walk in and say, “Hey, are you that girl from the marketing agency? Why are you behind the cash register in a health food store?” No one ever did, so all that worry for nothing.

Jonathan Fields:
Don’t you wonder sometimes how many people have not risked stepping out and trying something entirely different just because of that fear of being socially judged by people who they want to be seen a certain way in their eyes?

Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. I mean, I still worry about that. I mean, that’s part of why I didn’t come out until I was 50. Just the fear and my own inner homophobia, how would I be judged? What would people think? I mean, I’ve spent most of my life primarily worried about that, but working on it, still working on it. This is about you, not me, so I want to continue talking about you. You ran a yoga studio for a while. And then very typical Jonathan Fields style, you sold it. You are just at heart an entrepreneur. And you sold it to pursue your own business, which is now called The Good Life Project, where you create media, you create tools, programs, experiences, podcasts, that help people live better lives. And so this is a super basic question, but I’m really curious about the answer. What does living a better life mean to you?

Jonathan Fields:
So, I’ve been asking that question to a lot of people for about a decade now. And I’ve probably been trying to figure it out for two to three decades. And while every person’s answer has been different, there are for sure some common patterns. But what I’ve distilled it down to, for me, is three buckets. Think of your life as three buckets. One is contribution, meaningful work. One is connection, the depth and quality of your relationships. And one is vitality, how you optimize your mind and your body. And to me a good life is really, it’s the ability to first recognize that those three things exist. Two, become aware of how helpful or empty any one of those domains are at any given window in time. And three, make the decision to allocate energy to try and top them all off and keep them topped off for as much as possible.

But that’s sort of like the big-picture model. There’s a mantra that tends to run in my head that I use to make decisions, that I feel like at the end of the day when I lay my head on the pillow will just result in a good life without having a long-term focus. And that is, when I’m looking at an opportunity, or the chance to invest myself in something, I’ll ask myself, “will this give me the opportunity to absorb myself in activities that fill me up while surrounding myself with people I cannot get enough of, and in some way, shape or form, making a difference to people who have no idea this thing is even happening?” If I hold true to that, then at this point I believe the good life side of it is just going to work its way out.

Debbie Millman:
One thing that I read that you’ve written that’s really stayed with me is the notion that a good life is not a place at which you arrive. It’s a lens through which you see and create your world. It reminded me a little bit of something that Seth Godin writes about in regards to happiness and pleasure, that pleasure is something that you always want more of, you can never seem to get enough of. But real happiness is being content with what you currently have. I love that in the context of thinking about what it means to live a good life. And that’s that sort of contentment with what you have. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you see that lens of a good life. So, if it’s a lens through which you see and create your world, how do you sharpen that lens?

Jonathan Fields:
Well, part of it is how do you sharpen the lens? But also part of is where do you focus the lens? To me, a lot of emphasis has been on focusing the lens on happiness, and on what people would call capital ‘S’ Success—money, status, power, prestige. And on the former, like you said, happiness is a snapshot. It’s not the movie. It is something that we love to experience, but it’s also not a sustainable state. And research shows now that probably about 50 or so percent of anybody’s happiness is based on a genetic set point at a certain level. And that can be giddy, all day, every day. That can also be like a little bit melancholy.

Now, you can do things in your life to move that. But if the metric that we hold ourselves to is we focus our lens on happiness, and the goal is to be 100% happy all the time, it’s just not possible. And for many of us, the closest we come is when we’re no longer melancholy all the time. And we feel pretty good about that until somebody says that’s actually not good enough. You’re not doing OK, and you can’t stop there. And then all of a sudden we start to judge and shame ourselves, and then we drop back into a bad place. So, happiness, I think, is not necessarily the best place to focus that lens. Nor is money, power, status. I think they’re proxies for agency, and that is the thing that I think is worthy of exploring.

But at the end of the day, I really focus a lot on meaning. I want to shift the lens in the direction of meaning because meaning is the thing that sustains no matter whether you’re happy, whether you’re miserable. No matter whether you have power or control or you don’t. Meaning is the thing that can be derived from pretty much any and every experience, and the experience of meaningfulness is profoundly transformative to your ability to move through each day and say, “You know what, I matter, this mattered. It may not have gone the way I wanted, but because I can derive a sense of meaning I’m going to wake up and do it again the next day and feel OK about the way things are.” Victor Frankl’s classic work on logotherapy. It’s really, to me, that’s where we focus the lens.

In terms of how to sharpen the lens, the thing that comes immediately to me are Eastern practices on developing, cultivating self-awareness. So, I’ve had a mindfulness practice for over a decade now. It’s the thing I do first thing in the morning when I open my eyes. I started it initially because I was pretty much brought to my knees struggling with a health issue. And I needed to try and figure out how to find, how to touchstone until I figured out my way through it. And it’s blossomed out into this thing where a sitting daily practice then starts to grow out and its tentacles reach into just a persistent or semi-persistent state as you move through the day. And you gain the ability to zoom the lens out, and look down on yourself almost and say, “Huh, what am I actually thinking about? Where am I focusing?” And you can zoom the lens into yourself and say, “What’s happening in my inner world right now? What’s happening in the circumstances around me?” And then be intentional about whether you want to keep the lens focus there or not. So the sharpening side to me is about self-awareness.

Debbie Millman:
A lot of your understanding of what it means to live a good life is articulated in your two previous books, your two bestselling books, How To Live a Good Life, and your second book, Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance, which we talked about at length in our last interview. So today, I really wanted to focus on your brand-new book. It’s titled Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work That Makes You Come Alive. Firstly, I want to say congratulations. I know you’ve been working on this book for a really long time, and congratulations on bringing it out into the world.

Jonathan Fields:
Thank you. I’m super excited. Yeah, I’m just … so, I’ll share something that’s interesting, and it’ll land in an interesting way with you. This is the first book of four books that I’ve written where I’m actually excited about the physical object of the book itself.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it is a beautiful book.

Jonathan Fields:
Thank you. And I was reflecting on why that’s true. And I went immediately back to a conversation that I had on the podcast many years ago with somebody who you had the opportunity to sit down with and become friends with—Milton Glaser. I remembered him saying to me, “The impulse to make and the impulse to create beauty are related but separate impulses.” I had been so focused just on the impulse to make and never really honored the fact that the impulse towards beauty actually really mattered to me as much. I didn’t want to just make stuff. I didn’t want to put things into the world. I want to put things into the world that evoke something both for me and for other people.

As I started to realize that matters, when it came to this book, for the first time I said, “You know what, it needs to be something different. The actual physical object of the book needs to be beautiful in a way that I’ve never paid attention to before.” So we put a lot more energy into doing that, and it all goes back to that moment with Milton where that light bulb went on, and it took me years to actually act on that.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I’m looking at the book now and I see a really pretty spot varnish, beautiful endpapers. You accomplished your goal. Congratulations.

Jonathan Fields:
Thank you. A little secret, I actually designed the cover for the book.

Debbie Millman:
I was wondering about that. Well done. Who knew you had all these secret talents?

Jonathan Fields:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
We’re going to have to start talking about design a little bit more in our next interview.

Jonathan Fields:
Maybe.

Debbie Millman:
Jonathan, you start your book with this statement: “Type ‘what should I do’ into Google, and there’s a decent chance it’ll finish your sentence ‘with my life.’” Why are so many people so unsatisfied by what they do?

Jonathan Fields:
That is the question. With so many ideas, so many books, so many offerings, so many solutions, so many potential ways to solve the problem. There are so many people who are still in a state of anywhere from genuine suffering to just what Adam Grant is now calling “languishing.” It’s like, not so bad, not so good. But is that the state that you want to bring through the rest of your life? I think a lot of it has to do with two things. One, the circumstances around you, and that includes circumstances that you may be born into that are incredibly helpful to your ability to thrive and also really layer on a whole lot of constraints and societal limitations that you grapple with. We don’t all step into the planet in equal position.

But the other thing is our inner world. I think it gets back to that notion of self-awareness. I think we try and line up the thing that we want to do in the world with expectations and with values, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the expectation and values are helpful to us. But we very rarely do the deeper work and say, “What actually nourishes me? How do I exert myself? How do I wake up in the morning? How do I invest myself? How do I invest my energy in a way that gives me the feeling of meaningfulness, that gives me the feeling of energy and excitement, that gives me the feeling of expressed potential and purpose that lets me lose myself in flow?” We don’t do that work.

There aren’t many classes in universities or colleges or high schools or grad schools that say, “Can we just stop for a second and take some time exploring who you actually are? What matters to you? What fills you up, and what empties you out?” So, how could we ever make decisions about what to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to, especially in the context of work, and have that actually let us show up and have all those feelings we still want to feel if we have no idea what the work is that gives us those feelings in the first place? I think some of us just randomly stumble into it. And then we’re like, “Wow, this is amazing. This is incredible.” And then they have the run at it. And then five years later, yeah, it ends, and they can’t replicate it because they never understood why they felt that way underneath it.

Debbie Millman:
I mean, I think that this book is also helpful for people that suffer from the opposite syndrome, which is to not feel spark or passion about any particular option, and feel stuck and not know which way to go and just feel trapped by that feeling, which is a real dilemma to be in. I’ve been there.

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve all been there. I think at different moments in our lives we feel trapped sometimes for different reasons. And some of us may hold a very deep value of financial security. Maybe we came up in a home that was very unstable, or for whatever reason, we enter adulthood, and that becomes this thing where it becomes the solitary driver of effort. And it may actually make you incredibly successful in the field that you’re pursuing and rise up to the top and then you get there. And you look around, you’re like, “Why don’t I feel the way that I wanted to feel?” Not that honoring that value doesn’t matter, but it’s not everything.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I know. I mean, certainly it matters. But if it becomes your lead gene, it infiltrates everything. And because that type of lead gene is heavily metabolized very quickly. It’s never enough, never ever enough. And you just keep spinning and spinning and spinning on that hamster wheel trying to accumulate more and metabolizing at nearly the same speed. Your book is fueled by the work you’ve been doing at your company. And the most recent is Spark Endeavors, where you are the chief architect and driving force behind the Sparketypes that you’ve developed. But I believe, and I might be wrong about this, so correct me, please. But I believe the foundation of this work really began in your first book, where you identified your first five primary sparks, which have transitioned and evolved since. But it seems like you’ve been doing this research now for quite some time.

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah. So, the truth is, the foundation for this work actually goes back about 20 years. As we’re having this conversation it’s right around the 20th anniversary of 9/11. You and I were both in New York, and that day, that experience, changed me in a lot of ways. It exists in my DNA, and it will for my entire life. And the experience of knowing somebody who went to work one day and never came home who was young. He was the youngest partner in the firm, at the top of one of the towers with a 2-and-a-half-year-old and a six-month-old kid, married with a new home, and never came home.

That moment really brought home to me the fact that we have one pass through and it really … I believe it planted the seed for me to go deeper into my exploration of not just what it means to live a good life, but how do you invest yourself in a way that makes you come alive? What are the components of that? And I’ve been dancing around it, I’ve been researching and I’ve been asking questions, running experiments, ever since, and the ideas did begin to coalesce in my last book.

But then they took on an entirely different life when I started to ask a slightly different question, which is, “are there a set of identifiable, mappable impulses for effort or for work that give you that feeling of coming alive or of being sparked?” Because if there were, and we could identify them, and then we could build tools to help people figure out what theirs are, maybe it would help people. Maybe it would help get them to that place of understanding faster, and that became my consuming passion over the last five years or so, is to first see if I could identify if these imprints even existed. And then if so, can I build a tool that would both help me research them and at the same time be helpful to other people?

That led to the identification of these 10 impulses. And once I figured out what the impulses were, then I started to realize, wrapped around each one of them were a set of really common patterns of tendencies, and preferences, and behaviors that formed archetypes. And the reason I call them Sparketypes is just a fun way of saying it’s the archetype for work that sparks you. I honestly didn’t know if I would be able to see these if they existed. So it was as much a surprise for me as it was for anyone else. And as I started sharing them with other people, and then we ended up building a tool, an assessment for basically the entire year of 2018 that’s now been validated by more than 500,000 people and 25 million data points. We’re at a point where it’s like, “Huh, OK, there actually is something here.”

Debbie Millman:
You decided to create this framework when other personality type descriptors already exist. What’s different about this methodology?

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, so I looked at the universe of all these different indexes. And there’s some great ones out there like Myers Briggs, and strength, and DISC, and all these different things. And they all add little pieces to the self-discovery puzzle. What I didn’t see was a tool that was hyper focused on this one question: What is the fundamental nature of work that will give me the feeling of coming alive? So, it’s not about there are two different types of strengths assessment on the market right now. There’s Strengths Finder, which is largely about skills and talents. And there’s the VIA Strengths, which is largely about character. Great tools, but they don’t speak specifically to this one question.

There’s Myers Briggs, there’s the Big Five—really interesting, valuable tools that are much more generalized personality and relational style tests. And I think, again, they add to the puzzle of asking the question, who am I? But this is a very, very, very narrow focus. The focus of the Sparketypes is around work. Whether that’s the thing you get paid for or not is a different question. It’s about what is the thing that wakes you up in the morning and says, “I will work really, really hard for nothing other than the feeling that it gives me. And if I get compensated well for it, awesome. But even if I didn’t, I’m still going to do it because it gives me that feeling. And that feeling is what gets me through life. It’s what lights me up.”

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned that the understanding of these imprints is based on more than 25 million data points from your research. How did you take that data and develop the Sparketypes from what you amassed, the data that you amassed?

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, so the Sparketypes started out as a hunch, as everything does. And then I started basically looking at lists of jobs and industries and titles and deconstructing all of them and saying, “What’s underneath that? What’s underneath that? What’s underneath that?” So, the early part of it, the early identification that goes from thousands of possibilities down to 10, was really my own internal work, and then showing it to different people, and talking to a lot of citizen-grounded theory research, basically talking to tons and tons of people and trying to code their feedback to me about what was valid and what wasn’t.

The reason we developed the assessment was because we had this core idea, and we had a lot of just early anecdotal validation. But I wanted to know if these are real on a much larger scale. So we built the assessment for two reasons. One, so that we could actually expose large numbers of people to the ideas, and have that help us understand if it’s really valid or not, and then how useful it is. I was open to the fact that it might actually show us that it wasn’t. I had to be. And the other part of it was if in fact this is helpful, then I wanted to know that we were creating something that could then be available to anybody, so that they could have a tool to get these insights pretty quickly. And that was the reason we developed the assessment and released it out into the world.

We’ve done a follow-on survey; it’s still preliminary. We’re actually looking to build a much bigger data set around it, but I’ll share with you in response to asking people how valid and how useful this was. We have 93% of folks telling us that it’s anywhere from very to extremely accurate. And then we wanted to know, what is the relationship between doing the work of your Sparketype, and markers for meaningfulness, for flow, for engagement, for expressed potential, and for purpose. And we’ve got actually really strong statistical correlation with all five of those states, which are the places that we all aspire to be. The sweet spot between those five states is how I define that feeling of coming alive or being sparked.

Debbie Millman:
How did you develop the questions in the first place? And how did you determine how specific answers would lead you to a specific Sparketype?

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, so the questions were actually the prompts based on those five different markers. And this goes back to my obsession with language, this goes back to the understanding of psychology. What is the thought line in somebody’s head when they’re doing something that makes them feel this way? And then developing prompts around that, and there are ways to do it in a very dry way. The marketer in me, the citizen-human psychologist in me, was always taught to do everything you can to understand the conversation that’s happening in somebody’s head, understand the language that they’re using. And then enter that conversation rather than trying to pose your language, and ask them if it fits.

So a lot of it was tapping this deep obsession with language and psychology to try and figure out, what are those? What are those statements? What are those thoughts? And then link them back to the five different states. So the prompts in the assessment are all related to those different states. And then we’re trying to make them as longitudinal as possible, so that we have people reflecting on throughlines that have been with them for over a long window of time, rather than how they might be feeling just at the moment that they answer the question because we want some level of stability in the answers, we want them to be robust.

Debbie Millman:
How did you originally come up with the 10 Sparketypes, and why 10?

Jonathan Fields:
I honestly wish it wasn’t 10. It feels so slick. It feels so packaged to me. And so, I wish it was 13 or eight or something like that. But literally starting with giant lists of jobs and titles, and then making a list of when you keep asking the question, “what’s underneath that? What are the fundamental ways that you exert effort as part of this?” Making list, list, and list, and list, and list, and then seeing where the overlap was. And then conflating and conflating. “Is this just another way of saying this? Is this another way of saying this?” And then getting to a point where I’m asking the question, “is this a verb? Is this an adjective or an adverb?” Because I’m looking for the verb. “Is this just a way of doing things or is this actually a fundamental expression of an impulse for effort?” So, a lot of trial and error, and a lot of me just trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not, and then eventually exposing it to people, which is always a nerve-wracking experience.

Debbie Millman:
The 10 Sparketypes are, in no particular order, the Maker, the Scientist, the Maven, the Essentialist, the Performer, the Warrior, the Sage, the Advocate, the Advisor, and the Nurturer. So, I’m going to leave it up to you to tell us about a few of those archetypes and give us a little bit more juicy detail on what it means to be one of these Sparketypes.

Jonathan Fields:
So, I could just go down the list, but I’m actually curious about something. Do you know what your profile is?

Debbie Millman:
Yes, I do.

Jonathan Fields:
Were you planning on weaving that in after—

Debbie Millman:
I’m very happy to share. I am … Well, we also need to explain to folks that not only do people have a Sparketype, they also have a Shadow Sparketype. And so, that’s a secondary archetype that is woven into the personality profile, and then also an Anti-Sparketype. So, I will absolutely share all three, but I want to hear what you have to say first.

Jonathan Fields:
So, I’ll share mine. And then I’m curious about yours because that’ll talk about three of them. I have a feeling we may not be too dissimilar. My primary archetype is the Maker.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Jonathan Fields:
My fundamental impulse and the impulse for a Maker is to make ideas manifest. It is all about the process of creation. It is a deep, deep impulse to be generative, as much as you possibly can. You have the something from nothing, or a little bit of something to a lot of bit of something impulse has woken me up and driven me to exert effort from as young as I can possibly remember. As a little kid cobbling together bikes from a junkyard, painting jean jackets, building houses, renovating in college, it evolved eventually to building companies, building brands, writing books, building media, building experiences. There are a lot of different things that go into each one of those things. But the impulse for me that allowed me to come alive was the maker impulse behind all of that. Eventually, you bring together teams because you need people to assume all sorts of different roles and have different impulses to really make it work. But for me, that’s the thing that wakes me up in the morning.

My Shadow Sparketype, which you can think of as one of two ways … it’s either your next strongest impulse forever, or it’s kind of like your runner-up, or there tends to be a more nuanced relationship, which is that many people do the work of their Shadow in order to be able to do the work of their primary better. So, my shadow Sparketype is the Scientist. The impulse for the Scientist is all about figuring things out. I look at something and I’m like, “How does that work?”

But what I’ve learned over the years is for me, the fascination is less just about going deep into the burning question or the puzzle or the quandary. I tend to go there when I am in a making process and I hit a wall. And rather than just feeling like “I hit a wall, this is the end of it,” the Maker impulse kicks in and says, “OK, no big deal. It’s still kind of cool. Let me solve this problem. Let me create a whole new thing that lets me get through this moment in time.” And the minute I figure out the answer, I go back to the process of being just hyper generative, and building and making. So, it’s in service of my maker. I like doing it, I’m good at it. But at the end of the day, I don’t do it just for the fun of doing it. I do it because it makes me a better maker.

And then the last part of my profile, the Anti-Sparketype … you can think of the Anti-Sparketype as either your least strong impulse for work, or the thing that takes the most energy, the most effort, the most external motivation if you’re on a team, and tends to empty you out the most and require the greatest amount of recovery. So for me, that is what I call the Essentialist. Now, the Essentialist is all about creating order from chaos. It’s clarity, it is utility, it’s taking big datasets, it’s taking a huge amount of objects and things like this, and somehow organizing them and creating, making them usable and clean and streamlined. That is amazing work, it’s necessary work.

I love the fact that it’s done because that lets me function as a human being, and as an entrepreneur, and as a maker. But when I actually have to do that work, I just want to cry. And, of course, I’ve gotten good at it because when you have to do it, especially in the early stage, for example, of a company, you’re doing everything. So over time, you just learn to become skilled or competent at it. And that makes the experience a little bit better. But at the end of the day, making it a little bit better, and getting it over with faster and getting a little bit of the hit of competence, it still doesn’t make up for the fact that there’s something inside of me where that impulse is the most foreign, it’s the weakest for me, and it just doesn’t come close, and it never will, to the feeling that I get when I’m operating on the other side of my spectrum.

Debbie Millman:
OK, so I will tell you mine now because we’re very, very similar, Jonathan. Not exactly similar, but very. So, my primary Sparketype is the Maker, which I’m not surprised at all. What was really surprising to me was how accurately you described me being a Maker. Just without knowing me, you just describe a Maker, and I’m like, “Wow, that’s really me.” The Shadow Sparketype is the Maven, which is somebody who likes to learn, and I’d love you to talk more about that. And my Shadow Sparketype is also the Essentialist. I hate details. So, talk a little bit if you can a little bit more about the Maven.

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah. And that doesn’t surprise me at all. So, the fundamental impulse for the Maven is learning, it’s knowledge acquisition. You look around and you’re just like, “What can I learn?” So maybe what you learn has great application in all sorts of different ways. And that’s nice, you like that, that’s cool. But if that is your primary impulse, you’re not doing it because it’s going to let you do something else. You’re doing it solely for the feeling that pursuing learning, pursuing knowledge, gives you. So for you, because your Maven is your Shadow Sparketype, it’s something that you probably love doing, you’re really good at. And we know this from 16 years of ridiculous research of every person that you have ever talked to, and the stunning career that you built where you were encyclopedic about literally anything that you devote yourself to.

At the same time, I’ve also seen with you it makes a lot of sense. That knowledge acquisition to you, it really gets harnessed, and it comes out in the context of informing the way that you make, and allowing you to create at an entirely different level rather than just creating in the void based out of your own intuitive feel. Not that that’s a bad thing. But the Maker impulse is really often beautifully informed by the Maven’s quest for knowledge. There is a bit of an interesting dynamic there that can go a touch dark side, which is the Maven’s impulse to know can sometimes be so fierce that it overinforms the Maker. And then you end up getting a little too far down the road of replication instead of creation. Because you know so much about what everyone else is doing, what’s come before you, the paradigms, the histories, and everything, that it can sometimes be a little bit hard to get that out of your head and allow yourself to step out into the abyss of a place that you really don’t know and is genuinely new and uncomfortable. I’m wondering if that resonates.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I was wondering if you were reading my diaries. That’s really spooky. One thing that I was really struck by was your caution about the quirks of any of the archetypes. So, the three quirks of the Maker are boredom with systems and scale, disconnection from output, disconnection from impact. And so for our listeners, I’m going to be very vulnerable here and say that I am … well, this part isn’t so much the vulnerable part, I am very much a Maker. I am happiest in my life when I’m making something. It could be a podcast, a lesson plan, a meal. I just love making things. Particularly, making things from scratch.

However, I tend not to like to replicate or repeat the experience of making something. So, for example, one thing that is always surprising to people, and this is the vulnerable part, is that I don’t like to listen to my podcasts once they’re up and out. I don’t like the sound of my own voice. I don’t like to revisit. I don’t like to then be in a position where I’m critiquing what I’ve already done and made and put out there and then feeling really self-conscious about it. So I’ve found that I am much better off not listening, and just hoping and praying that Curtis, my producer, is putting out the best possible podcast he can from what we’ve made together. So, there’s that. And then in terms of the disconnection from our impact, and this is something I think a lot of people really suffer from—and that is feeling like what you make doesn’t matter. And no matter how hard you try, or no matter how much you work at getting better, you don’t really feel it. So there you have it, Jonathan. Help me.

Jonathan Fields:
So, a lot of that. So the one really interesting thing, and probably the single biggest thing that can make people feel OK if they’re feeling that and they have this Maker impulse, is the understanding that actually there’s nothing wrong with you. These are just quirks of the way that you’re wired. You’re not a sociopath. You’re not disconnected from other people. It’s not that you don’t care about them, or what the work does. It’s that for you, the Maker is an incredibly process-satisfied impulse. Whereas all of these 10 lie on a spectrum between being process-satisfied and service-satisfied.

The Maker happens to be very far over on the process-satisfied part, meaning it is the very act of creation that is the most satisfying for you. Now, the thing that you make could go out into the world and make a huge difference for a lot of people. You could get a ton of feedback, saying it’s incredible, and you like that. It makes you feel good. You love the fact that something that you’ve made is going out and making a difference in people’s lives. And at the end of the day, it’s also not the reason you do it. Society tells you that that’s actually not OK. Society tells you that the only valid way to have purpose in your life is if you devote yourself to a life where the preeminent driver is service to others.

And for Makers, and for a couple of others that are much more heavily process-satisfied impulses, that very often causes this underlying fabric of shame. Because you’re not measuring up to that proclamation even though you actually are completely satisfied and you love what you do. And you know that work you’re doing actually is making a difference in people’s lives. So, we’re getting comfortable with the fact that this is just really the way that I’m wired. The work that I’m doing is in fact probably making a difference, it’s moving others. And I would still do it even if it wasn’t because I loved the process. That doesn’t make you a bad person. You’re just wired in this way where that’s the thing that gets you up in the morning.

Debbie Millman:
One thing that really struck me about one of the aspects of the Maker is that you write that it tends to reveal itself early in life and without much effort. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how and why that is. I suspect quite a lot of people that listen to Design Matters are also Makers. So, I think it’d be really helpful for them to know more.

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, I imagine you’re right. So, the Maker does tend to reveal itself. People often ask me, “is this a nature or nurture thing? Is it ordained by some spiritual being? Is it genetic? Is it environmental?” My answer is, I have no idea. But my experience, anecdotally, through a lot, a lot of people now in a pretty big data set, is that we all tend to have these impulses very, very, very, very early in life, but they reveal themselves at different rates. So the Maker tends to show up really early in life because we’re given opportunities to express it from the earliest age, and then we’re rewarded when we express an interest in it and then proficiency at it.

So, think about when you’re a little kid—how is a parent going to keep you occupied? They’re going to give you a set of finger paints or crayons, or they’re going to give you blocks so you can build something. Part of the way that you’re taught to actually teach a kid to learn manual dexterity, and also just keep them occupied, is through the process of making, through the process of creation. Then when you go to school, part of the learning process of almost any subject—it doesn’t matter what it is—many teachers will weave in making experiences. So, you’re in second grade and you’re studying science. And the teacher is going to say, “OK, the homework today is to make a diorama.” Right?

So we get exposed to this process. And then if we do it, parents love to see us doing it. And as a parent, it keeps you busy, too, which is always good. And then when you show up and you’re actually creating something, and people say, “Oh, that’s awesome, that’s great, you should keep doing more of that,” we get rewarded at a very early age. So it tends to be not just socially acceptable, but socially encouraged, and we’re given the opportunity to express it at the earliest days in life. Whereas other impulses, it’s actually the exact opposite. You may have that impulse. But you may socially feel like it’s being repressed until later in life because people may think it’s not an appropriate thing to be doing at a young age.

One of the Sparketypes that we haven’t talked about is the Advisor. And the impulse for the Advisor is to guide through a process of growth. This is the advisor, the mentor, the coach, the people who play that role. You’re creating a container of safety and trust, and then moving people through your knowledge of ideas and frameworks, through a process of discovery, growth and evolution. You may have that impulse from the earliest days. But you also may not have the wisdom, the frameworks and the insights to do it in a healthy way. And if 7-year-old you shows up and tries to play that role for other people, you’re probably going to get rejected both by the adults around you, and potentially by the other 7-year-olds, who think that you’re just trying to take over and be bossy. So it’s really interesting how they tend to reveal themselves based on cultural expectations at different rates.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about a few of the other Sparketypes, because I’ve read them all, and I’m so fascinated by them, but some of them feel really foreign to me—the Warrior, the person who is driven to organize and lead people. The Performer, who is a person who enlivens any interaction. Talk about some of those.

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, so the Warrior, as you said, the fundamental impulse there is to gather, organize and lead. There’s something inside of you that says, “OK, I want to bring people together, and we’re going to go from Point A to Point B.” Very often that impulse comes from you being one of those people. So very often, you’re among the group that you want to actually then help navigate from Point A to Point B. That shows up very often early in life as well. So you’re the kid on the playground who’s bringing all the kids together and saying, “Hey, let’s go on an adventure or let’s go do this thing.”

As you grow up, very often it shows up as you being a captain of a team or leading a club or being student president. But it may not show up in those roles, but it may show up in all sorts of other ways in your family. I talked to one woman who is now a member of the executive leadership team at a giant global consulting firm, and even as a young a kid she was the one who was organizing all the family members. She was the youngest of all of her siblings, yet she would bring everyone together, figure out the trips they were going to go on, figure out the adventures they were going to go on. Whatever it was, she was the one where she just had this impulse to gather, organize and lead for no other reason than the fact that there was something in her that said, “I love doing this, it gives me the feeling of being alive.” So, that’s the Warrior.

The Performer, which it appears from the early data now that that may be the single-most prevalent Anti-Sparketype, is all about the impulse to energize, enliven or animate an experience, interaction or a moment. That tends to show up early in life in a lot of kids. But if the parents see it, they’ll usually channel it into performing arts, which is wonderful when you’re younger. But then at some point, a lot of times, a parent will then say, “Huh, the kid is latching onto that a little bit too much, and I’m freaked out about them wanting to make that their career. So let’s just pretend it’s not actually the central thing that matters to them.” And they’ll start to shun it. And they’ll recommend stifling it and push them in a different direction. So the performer is very often a very repressed impulse in a lot of people. It’s unfortunate because that very impulse shows up and can be expressed in so many different ways in a sales conversation, as a parent, in a group leader, at a board meeting, behind a bar. There are so many different ways to channel that to do incredibly good, and fun, and exciting work.

Debbie Millman:
Well, let’s hope that anybody listening that has children that are blooming in that archetype, Sparketype, encourages it, and helps it bloom. You mentioned a woman that you were referring to that you had written about in the book—how did you choose which people and case studies to focus on in the book? They’re so fascinating.

Jonathan Fields:
Part of it was trying to source really compelling stories that showed clearly these impulses. But part of it also was it was important to me in selecting the stories to tell a very diverse set of stories. So, it was important to me to tell a set of stories that represented all ages, all races, all gender identifications, all sexual orientations. And so when we looked at the stories that we were telling, I wanted this to be a book where when people read what’s in any given chapter, that they’re able to feel seen. And if we’re really homogenous in the way that we’re actually selecting the stories and the case studies, not only is that going to exclude people from it, it’s just not right. It was never the right way to be in the world as a writer. It’s something that I’m probably guilty of being way too ignorant of the need to really be expensive in understanding, how are we telling the different stories and showing broad representation in the work that I’ve been doing in the past? And for me I think I’m becoming much more aware of my responsibility to make sure that I really invest in that, because as a human being, it’s just the right thing to do. So that was a big part of the way that we did it as well.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, thank you for that. It is clear that you’ve done that, and that work is really important. Jonathan, I have one last thing I want to ask you about. And it’s something that you write about in the last chapter of your book. You state that reimagining and realigning your current work in a way that makes you come alive lets you get more of what you need without feeling the need to blow anything up. You also caution at the beginning of the book for readers to be aware of behaving in an overly disruptive way. I think this book has the ability to get people really excited, and then want to just make the change from that moment on. How do you recommend people approach change in their lives?

Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, I love this question, and you’re right there. When we figure out something or learn something really new that is deeply resonant, and we’re like, “Oh, this is right,” very often the next thing that we do is we look out at what we’re doing—in this case, the work that we’re doing—and if it feels horribly aligned with this thing that we now know is really important to us, we just say to ourselves, “Oh, well, I just need to extract myself from the situation immediately.” If you’re 18 years old and the stakes are really, really low and you don’t have a lot invested in it, it’s probably not a big deal.

I’m 55, I’ve got a family, I want to live a certain life. I want to be able to devote myself in certain ways, and financial security is a value that I hold dear. I want to make sure that I’m providing as much as I can a lot of ways for my family. So for me, if I decide, “oh, I’m just going to blow it all up,” that causes a huge amount of disruption and pain. And we tend to underestimate the pain of that disruption that will cause both on us and also those that look to us for some sense of security. And we overestimate how giddy we’ll feel when we blow it all up and then get the chance to move to the next thing. And we tend to be a little bit delusional about how long the process might take to figure out that next thing.

So, one of my big concerns right now, actually—we’re having this conversation where a lot of people are kicking around this phrase, “the great resignation.” We’re in a moment where, society-wide, people are asking the big existential questions, and they’re realizing the bargain that they made to get them to this place is not the bargain that they want to continue to make moving forward. So, there’s a lot of people resigning from jobs, many of them without knowing what the next step is. My big concern with that is that if you do that before actually doing the inner work to understand “what is the impulse for work that makes me come alive?” And then look at the work that you’re doing and say, “How can I make this as good as it possibly can be now? What are all the different ways that I may be able to reimagine or reorient the work that I’m doing maybe even outside of my job description, but there are opportunities within the place that I’m at to actually express this thing, to just really make it as good as it can be? How can I do that first, and maybe that actually gets me a lot closer there.”

If we’re not doing that work first, and then we just jettison ourselves from the place we are and we look for something else that just feels different enough without understanding why we’re actually saying “yes” to that new thing … there’s a really good chance we’re going to find ourselves, 18 months from now, sitting in an office with different paint on the walls, and new boss, a new team, a new product, a new brand, a new service, feeling the exact same way. And that’s a huge concern for me.

So I really strongly recommend, first do the inner work, then do the work of optimizing the thing that you’re doing now to allow that to come out as much as humanly possible. Very often, that gets you so much closer to the feeling that you want, that you’re actually pretty cool staying, and then you don’t have to go through the disruption and the pain of the big change. And even if it doesn’t, then look for all sorts of opportunities to do it on the side. Whether it’s a hobby, or devotion, or a passion, or an activity that you do because that can then blend with a much more Spark-optimized job to give you what you need.

If you get all the way there and you’re still not getting it, then at that point you start to do the exploration of, “OK, so maybe I have to do something more disruptive.” But if you do, you’re leaving that current thing not from a place of dejection and ignorance, but from a place of information and agency. And also, chances are, psychologically you will be in a much more emboldened and alive place.

Debbie Millman:
Jonathan Fields, thank you so much for putting so much good work into the world, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Jonathan Fields:
Thanks so much for having me. It’s been great.

Debbie Millman:
To find out more about Spark and about Jonathan Fields, go to his website, jonathanfields.com, or take the free Sparketype test free—free—at sparketype.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Jonathan Fields appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
You may have your dream job, but does your job let you dream? Is keeping up with its day-to-day demands distracting you from actually doing what you love? This is the problem addressed in Dorie Clark’s new book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. Dorie Clark is an executive education professor at Duke University School of Business. The New York Times described her as, “An expert at self-reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives.” She started as a journalist, so she’s no stranger herself to self-reinvention. Dorie Clark, welcome to Design Matters.

Dorie Clark:
Debbie, I’m so glad to be here. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you, Dorie. Dorie, is it true that during the pandemic you started taking weekly ping-pong lessons?

Dorie Clark:
I most definitely did. Yes. I was taking these incredibly long four-hour walks around Manhattan because all of my friends had fled the city and all the gyms were closed. And I was just wandering around in a new neighborhood one day and I came across this oasis, and it was a two-story ping-pong studio and they had signs that they were open 24 hours and they had lessons. And I thought, “OK, it’s God speaking to me, I must do this.”

Debbie Millman:
Did you get any good?

Dorie Clark:
I’m actually decent right now. I’m not ready to be a world champion. They actually do employ literal Olympic champions as coaches. But I would say I have transcended basement player level status.

Debbie Millman:
Nice. I’d like to see that. I understand that you grew up in a self-described “little golf resort” called Pinehurst, NC, population 3,000. So did you grow up playing golf? Are you a sort of natural athlete that only comes out when playing?

Dorie Clark:
No, I really hated my hometown. I thought it was kind of boring and stultifying. And so my adolescent rebellion was refusing to play golf.

Debbie Millman:
Is it true that when you were a little girl, you wanted to be a spy?

Dorie Clark:
Yeah. You’ve been digging. It’s all true. I was really into James Bond when I was growing up, which was saying something, because that was the Roger Moore years, but I just thought it was so sophisticated and so wonderful. So I did want to be a spy. And in fact, my adult catharsis version of that is writing a lesbian spy musical. So that’s one of my COVID projects, as well as the ping-pong.

Debbie Millman:
So [inaudible] sort of meets Daniel Craig’s James Bond.

Dorie Clark:
Something like that. Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned as you were growing up, you felt incredibly frustrated. I know that you felt somewhat curtailed by the opportunities around you, [and] and at some point you wanted to be a lawyer. Then you considered becoming a gay activist, but I also understand you were in a band, and I believe it was called The Unlimited Powers. So let’s talk about your early days as a rock and roller. What instrument did you play? Where did you play? Give us all the details.

Dorie Clark:
Yes. The Unlimited Powers was a very short-lived band. The title was inspired by … I guess, appropriately, by Anthony Robbins’ book Unlimited Power. So I was a little bit of a self-development geek even as a teenager. And I played the guitar kind of badly. I managed to take a couple of years of lessons as a teenager, mostly so that I could sound decently impressive strumming the Indigo Girls by a proverbial fire. We cut our singles by singing into cassette recorders, and that was about it.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I’m going to spare our listeners from doing our own rendition of an Indigo Girls duet, but I think we have to set up a date to do that.

Dorie Clark:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Did you become a Tony Robbins fan or go to any of his seminars?

Dorie Clark:
So the reason that we named the band that is that the girl who was in it with me, her mother … actually, I was over at her house, my friend Rosalind, and I was over at her house and her mom was reading Tony Robbins as, I guess, most people were back in that moment in time. And I saw it lying around the house and I picked it up and I was flipping through it. And she, the mother, was just obviously very excited by this development because I think Rosalind was not a wit interested. And she said, “Oh, do you like that book?” And I was like, “I don’t know, what is it?” And so she explained to me the basic outline of what it was. And she said, “If you read this when you’re 13, you will be invincible.” And I thought that was actually a pretty good sales pitch. So she’s like, “Do you want to take it home and borrow it?” I was like, “All right.” So yes, that got me on the Anthony Robbins bandwagon.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t know if it’s a coincidence then, but at 14, so one year later, you went to the Mary Baldwin College Program for the Exceptionally Gifted. So you went to college at 14, one year after reading Anthony Robbins’ Unlimited Power. I think he needs to know that.

Dorie Clark:
It was all the neuro-linguistic programming. Let’s give credit where credit is due.

Debbie Millman:
So you attended Mary Baldwin for two years. Then you transferred to Smith College, where you graduated Phi Beta Kappa, where you majored in philosophy. I love that—you majored in philosophy. Two years later at a mere 20 years old, you received a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School. So you had a master’s degree at 20.

Dorie Clark:
I did. I did, in theology. I’m not sure how far that gets ya, but yes I did.

Debbie Millman:
So why theology?

Dorie Clark:
I was interested in div school for a couple of reasons.

Debbie Millman:
I love that there’s a little acronym … not an acronym, but a nickname, “div school.”

Dorie Clark:
Yes. So the first reason was that as I was studying philosophy, what I was really interested in was understanding life, was understanding what motivates people and what drives them. And interestingly, if we really want to geek out here, at Mary Baldwin, they taught a form of philosophy that it turns out is very uncommon in American academia, which was continental philosophy. It’s just a different approach to the discipline.

Debbie Millman:
What is continental philosophy?

Dorie Clark:
Continental philosophy is largely focused on, as the name implies, European philosophers, but it’s focused on … you could see these sort of broader issues of metaphysics of, “What is life? What’s life about? What are we doing here?” And I got to Smith and it turned out I did not know this, and I did not know enough to even be asking the question. They didn’t teach philosophy that way. They taught philosophy in a really different way that is much more prevalent in American academia, which is known as Anglo-American, or the Analytic Tradition in Philosophy. And that is much less concerned with European philosophers, much more concerned with … I will say in my deliberately loaded way, trying to turn philosophy into a science. And so they’re focused on logic, they’re focused on math, they’re focused on almost neurobiology, the neurobiology of experience.

And I just was like, “Oh my God, is this what I signed up for? This isn’t what I was wanting to do.” And so I kind of muddled through it to finish my major, but I felt a little dissatisfied. I felt like I was sort of robbed. And so I switched over into religion and theology because I thought, “OK, this is a little bit more where my interests lie.” So I ended up going into theology as a result of that. That was one reason. The other reason was actually because of activist reasons. I was very interested in understanding the psychology of the religious right, and wanted to stop the Christian Coalition, which at the time was agitating very strongly against gay rights and other things that are important to me. And so I wanted to have a better sense of the theological underpinnings of where they were coming from so that I could be more effective.

Debbie Millman:
At that point in your life, you also assumed that your career was going to be in academia, but you ended up getting turned down by every doctoral program you applied to. And what I really didn’t understand was how do you get turned down for doctoral programs after graduating from Harvard at 20?

Dorie Clark:
Well, I appreciate your indignation on my behalf, Debbie, thank you. I wish you were on the admissions committee, but what actually did me in … I kind of have a sense of it. I didn’t really understand that when you were an undergrad, being a Renaissance person is the best thing ever. If you’re applying to undergrad, that’s what they’re looking for. They want diverse interests. When you are applying to a doctoral program, that is actually the last thing they want. They do not want diverse interests, they want one person who will do one extraordinarily narrow thing. And I was not telegraphing that. And I think they saw through me and realized, “Oh, this person might be a liability.” And where I really knew I was in trouble, you have to take the GREs. And I did well in the GREs.

I did quite well, but I was interested in switching over from religion into English literature. I wanted to do the intersection of religion and literature, which was probably not a popular choice. And so I had to take the English subject GRE and I did not do well on that. And I knew, I tried to study for it, but in the middle of the test, I’m like, “Oh God, this isn’t going well.” When I see the question, “Translate this from this passage of Beowulf, from the Old English.” I thought, “Oh yeah, that’s not my area of expertise, now is it?”

Debbie Millman:
Wow. Well, I do know from Roxane, who has a Ph.D., that you do need to be fluent in, I think two other languages when you get a Ph.D., in some sort of English of sorts. But I didn’t know you needed one before. Oh my God.

Dorie Clark:
It’s true. And I even had taken a course and passed an exam in [inaudible], but unfortunately, theological French, not so helpful with the whole Beowulf situation.

Debbie Millman:
And you didn’t think there was a niche there. Dorie, how did you manage the disappointment at that time? When I was thinking about going to get a master’s, I applied to one school—I applied to the Columbia School of Journalism. I didn’t get in and I was just inconsolable. You applied to several doctoral programs, got rejected by all. How did you manage that?

Dorie Clark:
Mostly I panicked because I didn’t have another plan. I was 100% sure, it had literally never occurred to me that I would not get into any of them. I had steeled myself to the fact that I probably wouldn’t get into all of them, but to get into none was literally a possibility that I had not considered. And so I just thought, “Oh my God, what am I going to do?” And so I had to scramble to try to figure things out. So I set up an internship for myself, working at the State House in Massachusetts. And there had been a politician whose campaign I had volunteered on. And I set it up to be an unpaid intern in his basement office in the Massachusetts State House for a semester, which kind of bought me some time and bought me a little experience on my résumé that I figured I could leverage into something afterwards.

Debbie Millman:
During that time, you decided to try a career as a print journalist, and you got a job as a political reporter at The Boston Phoenix, and despite winning two awards from the New England Press Association, you were laid off with four days severance on Sept. 10, 2001, which made it nearly impossible to get a job. And I thought that the layoff story was an interesting one to share with our listeners.

Dorie Clark:
The interesting thing for me is, nowadays, if you say, “I was a reporter and I was laid off,” people are like, “Well, duh, what did you expect?” But the truth was the year 2000 was literally the most lucrative year in history for print journalism. And we forget that sometimes, history can change so fast, but The Boston Phoenix was an alternative newsweekly, it was part of the genre—like The Village Voice, it was a cool kid paper. I had loved it so much, I had loved it for years. And to be able to write there was just so exciting for me. It was like I was in the action. I was in this place that I really admired. And unfortunately it was a free paper which was largely subsidized by its classified ads … let’s be honest, its porn ads, but nonetheless, it supported some great journalism. But those were the papers that were the first victims of Craigslist.

And so I was laid off in 2001. And at that time, it was just such a shock that you would be laid off from a journalism job, I absolutely didn’t predict it, I didn’t see it coming. I had an hour to get my desk packed up and out the door and I was unbowed. I was very upset, but I thought, “OK, OK, I’m going to go out and I’m going to find another job.” What I really wanted was a job at the Globe, The Boston Globe, which was the sort of prestigious regional daily in that area. And I thought, “OK, the next morning, I’ll start pounding the pavement.” And of course, the very next morning was not the time to be looking for a job.

Debbie Millman:
You ended up freelancing for The Boston Globe, and I thought it was interesting, especially given the topic of your most recent book. The folks there had a very different response to your work—whereas your previous editor at The Phoenix would tear your work apart, the Globe often published your articles as-is with very little editing. How did you make sense of this, and what has that taught you over the years?

Dorie Clark:
It was enormously satisfying for me. One of the things that I do talk about actually a lot in my work these days is so often we … I say a collective “we,” just professionals, people in general, tend to give, I think, far too much credence to the gatekeepers around us, to the people who are by luck or by title, or what have you, in a position to be able to say, “Well, this is good,” or “this isn’t good,” or “you get in,” or, “no, you don’t get in.” And it was very demoralizing to me when I was working at The Phoenix because I had an editor who just … I really felt like I couldn’t do anything right. I mean, I would get this sea of red ink and I’d try to understand what she wanted, and she just gets so frustrated. She’d just be like, “Well, just make it better.”

I’m like, “That’s really not helpful here.” So it just felt like the Sisyphean task of trying to intuit what she wanted. And it was just so gratifying for me when I sent my first piece in to The Globe, which was considered the more prestigious paper, they didn’t change anything. And it was kind of a light bulb moment for me, because I think what I got out of it was just really understanding one person’s opinion should not matter. I mean, fine, don’t be an idiot, listen to 100 people’s opinion, but one person’s opinion could be wrong. And we’re doing ourselves a disservice to give too much credence to that view, even if that person is in power.

Debbie Millman:
I want to get back to that. It’s a really juicy topic, but continuing on with your origin story—so freelance writing really wasn’t enough to support yourself, and so you pivoted again and made your first big professional reinvention and turned to political campaigning. And I think this is a different experience than what you were referring to about working in the basement for free. Here, you started working with Robert Reich, the former U.S. Labor Secretary who had decided to run for Governor of Massachusetts. Given your sort of bouncing around, shall we say, at the time, what made him decide you could be an effective press secretary?

Dorie Clark:
I think it was largely desperation. There’s nothing like a low bar, Debbie. Bob had entered the governor’s race late and it was a crowded field in the Democratic primary. He was the fifth candidate who was running. And so the honest truth is that the other candidates who had been in the race longer had snapped up all of the usual suspects who were political campaign staff. And Bob was scrambling to try to assemble a team. And unlike some of the other people who were running, there was the Senate president and people who had pre-existing staffs and pre-existing relationships they could tap. Bob hadn’t been back that long from D.C.

And then he was in this academic career. So he didn’t have his “people.” So he turned to a political consultant that he had hired named Michael Goldman. And Michael was someone that I frequently talked to and had quoted as a source when I was a reporter. So we had a nice rapport. I mean, I’d call him all the time. And so when I got laid off, he knew it—I wasn’t calling anymore. And he thought I might be looking for a job. So he reached out to me around that possibility. And because I had worked in media and because I had done a little bit of politics before, they thought I was a decent enough vet, so they brought me on.

Debbie Millman:
Reich lost in the Democratic primary, but you were bitten by politics and began thinking about working on a presidential campaign. The thing that I really love about your career, Dorie, is how sort of undaunted you are and how willing you are to just throw yourself into the biggest possible challenges. Rather than work on another governor or Senator or mayoral campaign, you’re like, “OK, I want to work for somebody who’s running for president.” And you did; you got a job working for Howard Dean in his quest to become president in 2004, but at the same time, you also became the executive director of an organization called The Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition. And you worked with legislature and state agencies to improve transportation planning. So, talk about these sort of different pathways that you were taking at that time and ultimately what made you decide to stop both and start your own company.

Dorie Clark:
So I was full-time on the Dean campaign for close to a year. I worked first in Vermont for him, and then as New Hampshire communications director around the New Hampshire primary. And it was a really exciting ride. I mean, Dean was someone who went from almost total obscurity and being at 2% in the polls to, within a few months, essentially emerging as the frontrunner in the race and a prohibitive favorite. And then of course rather tragically, he finished third in Iowa, second in New Hampshire and then quietly dribbled out of the race. But we got to see the entire ride, but I was all-in on that campaign. I thought he would have been a terrific president, but after that ended, I decided it was time for me to go back to Boston where I had put a lot of roots down. And I thought I would either run communications at a large nonprofit or perhaps head up a smaller nonprofit, which is how I ended up getting the job at MassBike, the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition.

And it was a really good education for me because when you’re running this tiny nonprofit, you sort of have to do everything, you have to be a jack of all trades. And also it was a nice humbling experience for me because what I quickly discovered if you’re running a bicycling advocacy organization … I was a commuter cyclist. I’m like, “Yes, I support the transportation benefits of bicycles; we need fewer cars on the road.” The people who were my board, they were the biggest bicycle zealots you could ever have.

Our board president lived 30 miles outside of Boston and she didn’t own a car and she would bicycle in and out, 60 miles each way, for meetings. We would have a board meeting in the morning and then a group ride in the afternoon. And I was the youngest person and I was also always bringing up the rear. It was just really humiliating when our septuagenarian members would be clocking me. But you dive in and make it happen.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to go for broke, start your own company, Clark Strategic Communications, in 2006 with the title CEO?

Dorie Clark:
Well, I think the title is just self-aggrandizement, the CEO of the one-person company. But what I realized in the course of running this nonprofit was it was a three-person tiny, tiny organization, so we were pretty much doing everything. I’d be in charge of marketing and event planning and fundraising and database management and keeping up the website and reconciling the QuickBooks. I mean, literally all the things. And I realized that I had managed to acquire this kind of comprehensive knowledge of how to run a nonprofit. And just at some certain point, I guess it had never really fully occurred to me before, but I thought, “Oh my God, this is the same thing as running a business. This is literally running a business.”

And then it took me one or two beats, and I was like, “Wait a minute, I could run my own business.” And I just had so much stress running this little nonprofit where the board was wonderful, but they were not a super fundraising board. I was really responsible for raising all of the money and keeping this organization and our employees solvent. And I realized it would actually ironically be … for a lot of people that I coach or that I work with now, they might want to work for themselves one day, but they’re like, “Oh, but I’d have to take this salary cut.”

And they’ve got the sort of proverbial golden handcuffs because they’re so successful now, they’re making so much money. I had the opposite problem. I was making 36 grand my first year, then I was making 45. They gave me the raise. I was actually not happy about the raise because I had to raise my raise. It was just misery. And I thought, “You know what? I can for sure figure out somehow how to make that much money. And I could get rid of the stress of running this organization.” And so I actually thought, “Wow, the safe choice for me, the easy choice, is having my own business.” So I dove into it.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a stress-free path to take, running your own business as a way to relax into your life.

Dorie Clark:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
Now, you focused initially on public relations and consulting as the centerpiece of your business, but very quickly shifted to marketing strategy. Tell me how that happened.

Dorie Clark:
That was me responding to market conditions, essentially, because at the time that I was doing this—I was starting my business in 2006—in many ways I would say that was the inflection point of two phenomena. One was that social media was starting to take off, and YouTube was founded right around then, Facebook was just starting to become publicly available outside of college campuses, Twitter was hot. So everybody was very interested in social media. And the second issue was that newspapers, as evidenced by my own story, were really starting to go into a freefall. And as a result, their newshole was shrinking. Meaning the newshole is literally the amount of print space that they have available. So there would be situations where I was doing PR for clients and they would do something that the year before, two years before, they had done, they were like, “We’re going to have a press conference.”

And they would expect 10 reporters at their press conference because, “Hey, we’re having a press conference.” And what they didn’t really get is that a quarter of the staff had been laid off and the newspaper had cut dozens of pages. And so there was a higher bar in terms of what would constitute something that the papers would cover. So they’d organize an event. I would kill myself trying to pitch the press, get them out and they wouldn’t come to cover the press conference. And my clients, not all of them, some of them understood, but some of them thought I was an idiot, being like, “Hey, loser, Joe, two years ago, got The Globe here, why can’t you get The Globe?”

And it’s like, “It’s because everyone’s fired, that’s why.” But I just hated having to always be on the defensive and explaining that to people who are dissatisfied. So eventually I thought, “OK, I am going to leave the dying industry and go toward what is actually prospering.” So I stopped pitching myself to do PR and instead switched essentially into marketing strategy, which involved social media strategy in a kind of more holistic way of marketing, to take the heat off, in many ways. But also because I realized that was going to be the future if organizations were going to actually be able to get known in the marketplace.

Debbie Millman:
In 2009, you decided that you wanted to write a book. You made it your New Year’s resolution. And in the first six months of the year, you wrote three book proposals, hoping that at least one would resonate with a publisher. And none of them did—not one of the pitches, the proposals, resonated with anyone. And you said you were rejected by publishers because you didn’t have a big enough platform. And so once again, you had to pivot and you had to go back to what you referred to as the proverbial drawing board and create a fan base from nothing. So you started out with zero audience. What gave you the sense that this was worth pursuing, and how did you go about doing this?

Dorie Clark:
I had always wanted to write a book, and I knew intellectually that it would also be a good thing for me in terms of my business and marketing and making people aware of what I did, but at a fundamental level, it just was kind of a bucket list goal that I had admired authors from the time I was a little kid and wanted to do it. And so even though it was extraordinarily frustrating to have to realize, “OK, this is going to take longer than I wanted. This is going to actually literally take years longer than I wanted it to,” I just decided, “OK, well, that’s what it’s going to be.” And so I did start blogging and start the process that turned out to be necessary in order to get published.

Debbie Millman:
In 2011, you wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review titled “How to Invent Your Personal Brand.” And the piece went viral. You were approached, at that point, by several literary agents who finally thought you had a topic for a book, and your first book, Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future, was published in 2013 to great fanfare. As I mentioned in the introduction, The New York Times went as far as designating you as an expert at self-reinvention and helping others make change in their lives. So congratulations for that, Dorie. I think that the amount of resilience you’ve shown in sort of facing the unknown or facing rejection is stunning. It really is. A lot of people talk about resilience, a lot of people talk about perseverance, but you walk it. And I think that in a day and age when there’s so many guru books and so much out there that will give you a prescriptive path to success, I think you really show tangibly how to make these kinds of things happen.

Dorie Clark:
Thank you. I appreciate it, it means a lot coming from you, Debbie. Back at you.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, thank you. So now I have a little bit of a bone to pick, maybe. Just a tiny one, just a tiny one, because—

Dorie Clark:
Let’s do it. Bring it.

Debbie Millman:
I think you know that I have issues with the idea of a person being a brand, and as somebody who’s worked in branding for so long, I believe that brands are sort of manufactured entities that people can draw and create with imagination and innovation. They’re not really real in the truest sense of the word real—they don’t have a consciousness, they don’t breathe air. As much as people would like to think that, they really, truly, scientifically, don’t. Brands don’t have living, beating hearts, they don’t bleed, they don’t cry. They don’t have souls or feel pain and pleasure. So I’d like to think that people should develop their reputation or their character as opposed to aspiring to be a brand. And I just wanted to get your sort of perspective on that.

Dorie Clark:
I’m with you, I’m completely with you, you win. I really treat personal brand as an almost interchangeable term. I am terminology agnostic, right? As you know, the term “personal brand” really was coined and came to popular use by Tom Peters in a famous 1997 Fast Company cover story.

Debbie Millman:
I still have that issue, by the way.

Dorie Clark:
Oh my goodness. Oh gee. I like it.

Debbie Millman:
I do. I do.

Dorie Clark:
So the term is 20, 25 years old, but fundamentally, all he’s talking about is something that’s millennial, which is, in fact, your reputation. “What do people think about you? Is it what you want them to be thinking about you? And if not, is there something you can do about it?” Those are really the only three questions that matter. And I don’t really care what people call it. I’m happy to use “personal brand” because it’s a commonly used term of art these days. But fundamentally what I’m interested in is making sure that for people whose talents may have been misunderstood or may have been underestimated, I would like to equip them with a way of fighting back so that they actually can be properly understood and valued and respected the way they should.

Debbie Millman:
I fundamentally agree. And that’s really so much of what I like about your work. I think there is a big difference between aspiring to be a brand and having a brand. I think it’s possible for people to create brands, but to aspire to be a brand I think actually limits our potential and our possibility because it doesn’t give us this opportunity to pivot or reinvent, which I think is so important. Anyway, you’ve since written three other books, the latest of which is my favorite. It is titled The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term thinker in a Short-Term World, which has already received terrific reviews, so congratulations, Dorie.

Dorie Clark:
Thank you, Debbie. I appreciate it.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I love so much about the book is how it reinforces something I’ve been really thinking a lot about. And it allowed me to think about it in brand new ways. For a long time, I’ve been saying that we’re living in a 140-character culture. I changed that when Twitter changed their character count to 280, but fundamentally what I mean by that is that we expect things instantly, and I believe—and I think you do too now after reading your book—that most people should expect anything worthwhile to take a long time. And in your new book, you posit that personal goals need a long-term strategy. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what that means.

Dorie Clark:
Absolutely. And to your point, it makes me think about the famous quote from Peter Thiel, “They promised us flying cars and what we got was 140 characters.” And I think, in many ways, what I would like to see is to find a way back to that. It doesn’t, of course, literally have to be flying cars, but I like the sentiment that … where are the big dreams? Where are the aspirations that are worth fighting for and working toward? One of the folks that I quote in the book is Jeff Bezos. He had a conversation in 2011 with Wired magazine. And even back then, when Amazon was literally a fraction of the size that it is now, it was still very successful. And he was talking about the reasons behind their success. And one of the things he said is that “most of our competitors are only willing to plan on a three-year timeframe.”

And the planning is really because of budgeting. It’s because they’re afraid to take longer-term risks because the longer-term risks … it takes a while to pay off. But he said that Amazon’s secret to their success is that they were willing to plan on a seven-year timeframe, more than double. And because of that, they were able to pursue more ambitious goals than other people. And therefore, as we now see with things like Amazon Prime, with things like Amazon Web Services, it might take a while to build up and to percolate, but it can create a huge competitive advantage. And I think the same thing is true for all of us with our own lives and our own careers. We’re often thinking too small, thinking too short term.

We often imagine, if we’re going to create some grand goal, “Oh, well, I don’t know how I’d do that, so I won’t go there.” But the actually really empowering thing is if you have a long enough term goal, you don’t have to know how you’re going to do it. It would be ridiculous to plan a 10-year strategy because so many things can change between here and there, but it is not at all ridiculous to have a 10-year ambition or vision and to just start taking one step at a time toward it, to move in that direction. And that’s what I’d love to see more of.

Debbie Millman:
One of the centerpieces of your book is the notion of strategic patience. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and how you might use it?

Dorie Clark:
So I have never been a fan of patience.

Debbie Millman:
It’s one of your two least favorite things, I understand, from the book.

Dorie Clark:
That is true. Even as a kid, I would just get so frustrated. I would be watching the news of my parents and hear about elections and I’d be like, “Well, I want to vote.” And my mom’s like, “Well, actually you need to wait another 16 years to vote.” I’m like, “What?” It was so offensive. So I’ve never liked patience, but as I have grown up, I have come to realize that we sort of have to make our peace with it because it is objectively true that many things you have to wait for. And you’re either going to suffer and shake your fist at the sky, or you have to reconcile yourself somehow. But I’ve created my own flavor of patience, I guess you could say, because I still have problems with the way that patience is so often talked about, which I think is a really passive enterprise.

A lot of people, honestly, I think just to shut you up, will be like, “Well, just be patient, just wait, just do your thing, Debbie, just work hard. It’ll all work out, sit back.” And I find that to be glib and really unhelpful. I don’t want to sit back and wait. Now I understand I can’t control the universe, I can’t make it happen faster, even if I want to, but what I have taken up and I hope might be helpful to others is what I call strategic patience, because it is simultaneously understanding that things may take a while, but also creating hypothesis, doing things, taking action, taking note of what is happening and tracking it so that you can pivot if necessary or keep going if things seem to be progressing. And actually just taking a more muscular approach to the fact that, yes, we have to wait, but no, we don’t have to be suckers with vision boards, wishing and hoping.

Debbie Millman:
You write how when you’re in the moment, when you’re trying for something, it’s almost impossible to tell if something isn’t working or it isn’t working yet. How do you know when to fight or when to fold?

Dorie Clark:
That is the ultimate question, and it’s plagued so many people. I mean, I know from people who are my colleagues, people who are my coaching clients, I see this. And even going back in history, there’s a really interesting researcher named David Galenson at the University of Chicago who has studied artists. He’s an economist and so he studies the lens of economics and art. And he talked about how somebody like Picasso, pretty much from day one, everyone’s like, “This guy’s a genius.” And fantastic, yay for Picasso, his work sold for a lot of money. He got tons of positive affirmation. It’s easy to be a Picasso in the world, but there are other artists, Cezanne was one example, where it was not like that. And he had been literally working for decades. He was in his late 40s before he pretty much got any acclamation at all.

And during those times, it’s not just other people saying, “That’s not very good.” If you are that person, if you are Cezanne, even though we know from history that TLDR, he was good, you wonder about yourself, and it’s so dispiriting at times. And so ultimately, what I’ve come to realize is I think there are three key components to being able to help make the judgment about whether it’s not working or whether it’s not working yet. So No. 1 is actually taking the time … and a lot of us, a surprising number of us, don’t do this, but taking the time to scope out in advance what it actually is likely to take to get where you want to go. Many of us make assumptions. We don’t even realize we’re making assumptions, but we do about what to expect or how long it should take.

We think, “Oh, a couple of years.” Well, have you studied it? Have you talked to, have you researched, have you examined people who have done this thing or something quite similar to it before to see how long it took them? Because if it took this person 10 years, you’re probably not going to do it in a year. I mean, God bless if you can, but it’s probably going to be more eight or nine or 11. So grounding ourselves, so we know what to expect, so we don’t somehow get discouraged midway through because we didn’t realize the scope. That’s No. 1. No. 2 is having a group of trusted advisors around you who are both supportive of you and knowledgeable about your field so that they can give you detailed guidance in those moments when you can’t trust yourself, when you’re too emotional, and they can tell you, “Oh, this is really good, keep going.”

Or, “Maybe let’s move on and let’s try something else.” And then the third piece is what I call looking for raindrops. And what I mean by this is that so often a problem that a lot of us have as humans is we are looking for the big score. We’re looking for the big success, the thunder and lightning and the downpour. And we say, “Oh, now, now it’s happening.” But it takes a while before that happens. And so in order to really understand where we are in the process and keep motivated, we need to look for those kind of preliminary raindrops, because usually the way a storm starts is there’s just a few isolated drops coming from the sky.

You might not even know. You might say, “Wait, is that a raindrop? Did you feel that?” But those are the signals, the small kind of weak signals. Maybe more people than usual are starting to friend you on LinkedIn because your name is getting around. Maybe you get a compliment from your boss. Maybe you get invited on a weird random podcast that a person across the world has started and you think, “It’s not a big deal.” But it’s a big deal if you understand that someone you haven’t heard of wants to talk to you. It’s those little signs, and that’s what can help show you you’re moving in the right direction.

Debbie Millman:
One of my favorite topics in your book is the section on learning how to say no. When we’re trying to make it, we tend to think that we have to say yes to everything because we might not ever have this opportunity again or anything is good to get the word out. We’re worried about disappointing people, other things on your list. We’re worried about negative judgments. We don’t want to have hard conversations. It’s easier to avoid them. We like feeling important, that we’re needed. So there’s so many things that really contribute to the sense of no avoidance. First of all, let’s talk a little bit about why it is so hard to say no, aside from those obvious things. What is it about the human condition that kind of keeps us saying yes when we don’t even want to?

Dorie Clark:
It’s a terrible conundrum that most of us find ourselves in, and I think there’s a lot of reasons operating simultaneously. One, we have gotten into, I’ll say in air quotes, “bad habits,” but it’s not really a bad habit. Which is that early in your career when you were first starting out, “yes” actually is the right answer. It’s not like you have this vast queue of people waiting to talk to you, right? “Yes” is actually pretty good because you don’t know who’s going to be important. You don’t know what’s going to be interesting. But the problem is, it’s a great strategy when you’re 22, it’s a terrible strategy when you’re 32 or 42 or 52, because you have grown in stature, you have grown in responsibilities, you have grown in connections. And so if you were literally to continue saying yes to everything, because so many more people want things from you, you would never be able to accomplish what you want.

So I think partly it’s just a failure to understand, “Oh, I’m in a different place now, I need a different strategy.” And the other area, which is sometimes hard to deal with and hard to excavate, is that for many of us, being busy has emotional benefits. And there’s some interesting research by Silvia Bellezza from Columbia Business School and some of her colleagues, about the fact that certainly in the United States and many other Western cultures, being super crazy busy is actually viewed as a mark of status.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s a badge.

Dorie Clark:
Absolutely. And so people wear that. And if we were to take the steps that we need to actually dispatch some of those responsibilities, it actually calls into question some of our self-worth, which is not incredibly healthy, but is often animating some of our decisions.

Debbie Millman:
You have four questions that you pose that people should ask themselves before saying yes to any opportunity. I’d like to share them. No. 1: “What is the total commitment required?” I think we often forget that, right? No. 2: “What is the opportunity cost?” No. 3: “What is the physical and emotional cost?” And No. 4, I love this one: “Would I feel bad in a year if I didn’t do this?” How did you come up with these four? And how do you use them in your own life?

Dorie Clark:
So I came up with these questions the hard way, because I kept making mistakes about my calendar. I kept falling prey to all of these things that we’re talking about, where I would stuff my schedule, I would over-commit. And really the only question that I was asking myself was, “Well, can I literally do it? Am I double-booked or not? OK, if my calendar’s open, then yes, I can do it.” And unless it was an obviously terrible request, I would pretty much say yes. But over time I realized, “Oh no,” I was making choices about flying this place and that and whatever and I would end up sick. I’d have backaches because I had been on a plane for 17 hours. I was just running myself ragged and not enjoying any of it. And I realized, “This is a problem, I need to come up with a better set of criteria for myself so I can actually enjoy my life.”

I think most of us feel that way. So how I’ve applied it in my own life. In The Long Game, I actually tell a story about this heartrending decision, where I got invited to give a speech in the Caribbean by a friend to speak to her conference that she was helping to organize. And I ended up turning it down because I realized it would just have been too much, too hard. And frankly, once I was peeling it back, logically, I realized, “Oh, wait a minute. What I really want is to see my friend. She lives in Brooklyn. I could do that this week if I actually was organized and wanted to.” But I’ve tried to get smarter and to get better about controlling our time. Because when we do that, we have to have white space if we are going to actually be long-term thinkers. It’s not that we need an infinite amount of time or some huge amount of time, but you need a little time, you need a little space, and saying “no,” and creating that white space for yourself, is really an essential first ingredient.

Debbie Millman:
In The Long Game, you write about something that you learned after reading Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’ wonderful book Uncommon Service. And they state, “Choosing to be bad is your only shot at achieving greatness, and resisting it is a recipe for mediocrity.” I loved being reminded of that. You go on to recommend that in order to be great at anything, you must decide what to be bad at. Tell us why you need to decide that.

Dorie Clark:
So the essence of strategy at a really fundamental level is making choices. And the problem that a lot of us fall into is we are fine with the idea of, “OK, I can be great at some things and not great at others.” But when they think “not great at others,” what’s in their head is like, “Oh, I’ll be great at some things, and then just average at the rest.” That is not how it works. We have limited time, limited bandwidth. And so the truth is if we’re really being honest with ourselves, being great at something, over indexing in a big way, means that with a world of finite time and energy, you’re probably going to be bad at other things.

And in refusing to make that choice, everybody gets zeroed out, everything’s average, everything’s meh. And so it’s hard to face the idea that we would be bad at something, but we’ve got to let some of it go. I mean, I don’t cook pretty much, period. I just don’t do it.

Debbie Millman:
I was going to ask you, what are you bad at, Dorie?

Dorie Clark:
I’m bad at that. I’m pretty bad at responding to email. I’ll do it eventually, but it takes a long time, but I’ve made my peace with it because when there’s things that I want to be great at, I really try to emphasize that.

Debbie Millman:
Dorie, my last question for you today is this. You include a great quote by Longfellow in The Long Game. You state, “We measure ourselves by what we feel capable of doing while others measure us based on what we’ve done.” And you go on to write about how this makes sense, but it’s awfully frustrating when there’s a gap between what we know we can accomplish and what we’ve done up to that point. And you go on to state that, “Everything takes longer than we want it to—everything.” And I can also underline that in bold italics, everything. For those of us that are slugging away at something and still have big hopes and dreams that haven’t manifested yet, what is one thing people can do to improve their odds?

Dorie Clark:
As we’re thinking about how to play the long game and how to accomplish our long-term goals, it can feel overwhelming sometimes to look out into the horizon and wonder how we’re going to accomplish something. Especially if it’s a big enough goal that we can’t see through the fog. We don’t know what the steps are. They might even change between here and there, but ultimately the question for all of us—and I think this is the essence of strategic thinking—is, “What is one thing that I can do today that will make tomorrow easier?” Because if we can consistently make those choices about ways to learn more, ways to connect with people, ways to become just slightly better or more informed and move the ball forward, we don’t have to know the answer. We don’t have to have it figured out 10 or 20 years or even a year into the future.

We need to be directionally correct and to recognize that things might not … in fact, they probably won’t work out precisely the way that you’re mapping out, but there are a lot of ways to get to your goals. I got turned down by every doctoral program I applied to, but within a few years, I was actually teaching at a university and I continue now to teach at some of the top business schools in the world because when the door was closed, I climbed in a window. And I think all of us can do that, as long as we keep in mind that it’s not about tackling the whole problem, it’s about taking small, consistent steps. And just like a stock portfolio is able to grow because of compounding, it’s like that in the investments that we make in our own lives, in our own careers.

Debbie Millman:
Dorie, thank you for creating such soul-enriching work. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Dorie Clark:
Thank you, Debbie

Debbie Millman:
Dorie’s latest book is titled The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, and you can see more about all of her many incredible endeavors at dorieclark.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Dorie Clark appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

Seth Godin chose an unusual title for his latest book. It’s called The Practice. The subtitle is even more enigmatic—it is Shipping Creative Work. Seth’s new book is about the practice of creativity and the process of doing creative work. But shipping? How do you ship creative work? Well, lucky for us, Seth Godin is here to tell us about his title and his book, and about unlocking our creative energies by learning to trust ourselves. It’s his 20th book. And for Seth Godin’s many fans in the creative world, myself included, this is something of an event. Seth Godin, welcome back to Design Matters.

Seth Godin:

I have lost the ability to speak, and I have chills. I have chills. It’s good to see you, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, thank you, thank you. Seth, this is our third interview, but this is the first one where I’m not sitting next to you talking side by side. So, I’m going to start my interview with a question I’ve been asking a lot of people via Zoom these days: How are you doing during these strange and surreal times?

Seth Godin:

Compared to most people, I’m doing very well. I’m so lucky, so many breaks, my family’s doing well. One of the challenges so many of us have is that life is always uneven, and usually, when you’re in a slog, there’s someone around you you can look to, who’s not. But this is universal, and it’s been a slog. I don’t think many people are going to miss 2020, but it’s also been a chance to decide what’s important, and to lean harder into that stuff.

Debbie Millman:

How has this changed what you think of as important? Or has it?

Seth Godin:

Well, I’ve slept in the same bed every night since March 7, which is the first time I’ve done that for seven months in a row since I was 7 years old. I’ve really tried hard to focus on the work that only I can do, that I do in an idiosyncratic way, that gives me fuel, as opposed to keeping the plates spinning just cause they were spinning. And I miss being with people a great deal, but that means I treasure the interactions I have with people like you in this moment even more.

Debbie Millman:

Listeners of my show know that I like to take a long journey into a person’s life in a sort of classic Design Matters interview. And we’ve done that twice now in our previous interviews in 2014 and 2017. This time, I get the great, good fortune of a deep dive into your brand-new book. And the book is so good, and I’ve told you this already, but I’m going to say it again for my listeners, that it’s pretty much all I want to talk about. I highlighted and noted so many topics in this book. I, for the first time ever in my life, surpassed the amount the Kindle lets you export. So, it’s the first time in the history of the show and history of my life that I’ve had to do that. I had to buy two Kindle copies from two different accounts so that I could highlight and take notes on everything I needed. I think that I highlighted about 23% of the book.

Seth Godin:

I am so moved by this. You’re a hoot.

Debbie Millman:

I am a hoot. I even talked about this book on another podcast that I did earlier in the week. So, as I mentioned in my introduction, your new book is titled The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. Before we talk about the title and the topics, let’s talk about the number—book No. 20. Wow, that’s a lot of books.

Seth Godin:

If you keep showing up, sooner or later … I mean, I certainly didn’t set out to do it. I used to be in the business of making books. I’m not anymore. I make a book if I have no choice. It is hardly a profession, it is something that we do when we can’t get rid of an idea, and where we think it’s going to be generous. But it takes a year of your life, whereas a blog post takes a couple of days. And it’s a lot of pushing things uphill, so I’m super proud to have done these books, but really grateful for the industry that lets me do it, and for the readers who let me do it. But I don’t know when I’m going to be crazy enough to do it again.

Debbie Millman:

Well, interestingly, in a recent interview with Tim Ferriss, you stated that probably for the last five books, you felt like you didn’t know when the next book after it would be coming. And this is one of those books. And you go on to state that if this had to be your last book, you’d be proud to make this your last book. So, I have two questions about this. First, what gave you the sense after the last five books that they could be your last? And why, if The Practice is indeed your last book, would that be OK?

Seth Godin:

OK. Some of it has to do with the fact that I’ve been on the edge of media for 40 years, and I think hard about how media works. And in the case of book publishing, the book publishing industry has a customer, and its customer is the bookseller. That’s why there’s no phone number in the back of your book, why you can’t call Random House, because Random House doesn’t sell to you, they sell to the bookstore. And the bookstores are all gone. And independent bookstores are wonderful, but they can’t sustain what’s going on here. And as a result, the book publisher, which offers so many things to the author, is clearly threatened because it’s being disintermediated by the fact that if you want to put a book on the Kindle, you can just put a book on the Kindle.

What that means is that if you want to publish a book and do good work on behalf of your publisher, there’s an enormous amount of heavy lifting that goes beyond typing the thing up. And talking to you is a joy, but I’ve done a lot of podcasts and a lot of work to get the word out, to cause people to do something that’s now unnatural, which is to go buy a book. And I’m fortunate, you’re fortunate, lots of people are fortunate that we can reach a lot of people by clicking a few keys on our keyboard. So, I need a really good reason to hoard an idea and put it in book form. So, that’s part of it. And part of it is I turned 60, and I am not entitled to just keep writing books whenever I want. I’m doing it for my readers. And if I don’t have something that’s book-worthy, then I’m not going to put it in a book.

And I don’t view myself as being beholden to the process of, you write another book, write another book, write another book, like I used to be. And so, if it’s not there, it’s not there. And I don’t feel like I’m going to die tomorrow, but I think all of us are aware of our mortality and want to leave behind work that we’re proud of. And when I look at this book … I reread it in the middle of the pandemic, because if it wasn’t, if it was tone deaf, I wasn’t going to publish it. And when I reread it, I said to myself, “I’m OK with this. This is something I think people need to hear.”

Debbie Millman:

You just mentioned that you didn’t think you were entitled. You use the word entitled to necessarily write another book. Why that specific word?

Seth Godin:

Because you’re taking up space on the bookshelf, and you’re taking up space in people’s heads, and you’re taking a spot away from the next voice, maybe somebody who didn’t get the privilege that I got, maybe they didn’t get the platform that I got. And there’s a scarcity in the world, a scarcity of attention, and a scarcity of trust, and I’m aware every day of not abusing the trust that I have, and not overloading people. Because it’s not about me, it’s about what connections can I create and what opportunities can I offer to people? Because the only way we’re going to make things better is peer-to-peer. It’s not going to come from somebody on a white horse, it’s going to come because each one of us figured out how to elevate 10 other people.

Debbie Millman:

The Practice is a book with 230 chapters, but it is also a book that is less than 230 pages long. So, can you talk a little bit about the structure?

Seth Godin:

OK. So, my brain, thanks to ADD, has always—“Oh, look, a puppy”—has always been easily distracted.

Debbie Millman:

I’m like, “I just got a puppy.” I’m like, “Did he come in?”

Seth Godin:

And the internet showed up and made it so that people with that sort of attention span did better for a while, because it rewards this stop-and-start thing. So my writing has always been a little bit choppy in that sense, but what I wanted to do here was lay a foundation, 200 bricks, one after another, and it felt to me like the bite-sized morsels that followed each other in appropriate ways match the way so many of us are thinking in this moment. But I’m also hopeful that it’s more than a collection of posts. It really should weave together.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve also said that the book could be a workshop that lasted 150 days. So, why the difference? Because that’s a long period of time versus the shorter, more concentrated chapters?

Seth Godin:

It actually is a workshop that lasted 150 days.

Debbie Millman:

So, it is. OK.

Seth Godin:

I made the workshop first. It took two years to make the workshop. And the ideas in the book started as … I think there are 50 principle lessons inside the workshop, but then I got to watch 500 people exchange 500 pieces of feedback per month with each other, back and forth, more than a half a million in total over the course of the workshop, back and forth, people doing this work. And the challenge of the workshop is, we say, “Show up for 100 days, 100 days in a row, you don’t have to spend a lot of time, five minutes, we don’t care, write something for 100 days in a row.”

What happened stunned me, because I’ve been running these workshops for a while in other topics, but the community showed up and they did it, and books were published, and businesses were started, and connections were made, because streaks work, and streaks matter. You have built a lifetime of streaks, Debbie, first with your branding business, and then as a dean and a teacher. If you know you’re going to class tomorrow, your brain is working on it tonight. You don’t make a new decision every day, you make the streak decision once. And watching people who had been unprofessional about their creativity turning pro all as a group. So, we ran it again, and it worked even better the second time. So we’re running it again, we … I’m not we anymore, Akimbo is running it again in January, and it’s extraordinary to see what people are capable of once they commit to it.

And so, once there was a workshop, turning it into a book, that was the straightforward part.

Debbie Millman:

Let’s talk about the title and the subtitle.

Seth Godin:

OK.

Debbie Millman:

The entire book title is The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. And I’m wondering if we can deconstruct it a little bit.

Seth Godin:

Yes, please.

Debbie Millman:

So, first, The Practice, you state that the practice is choice, plus skill, plus attitude. So, is that the backstory for the title and use of the word, “the practice”?

Seth Godin:

The backstory of the title is that the title is really trust yourself. And I own trustyourself.com, which wasn’t cheap, and I’m bad at ignoring some costs sometimes, so, I keep referring to it in my head as trust yourself. Why trust yourself? People talk to themselves. I talked to myself, maybe you talk to yourself, but we don’t really freak out about the fact that someone is talking to someone. There are two selves, the one that is talking, and the one that is listening. Which one is which? The one who is talking is a critic, is afraid, is a perfectionist. And the one who is being talked to is soft at heart, and brilliant, and generous, and has something to say. And we can extinguish it. Pressfield calls this resistance.

And if we could learn to trust that other voice and let it speak up, there’s no guarantee it’s going to work. Most of the time, it won’t, but it’s the best path to doing the work we need to do to trust ourselves. And the great Niki Papadopoulos, my editor at Penguin, said, “That’s a really good riff, but it’s not a really good title, because it’s too complicated and it doesn’t evoke what you’re after.” And the reason you work with someone like her is so you can listen to her. Because, as I pointed out in the book, good criticism is really scarce, and she knows what she’s doing. So, I had to take my advice and I listened to her. So, The Practice is simple, The Practice says, “We merely do this work. We make the choice to do the work, and then we do it without commentary, without drama, without reassurance, without needing to be assured of an outcome. We merely do the work.”

And I know a lot of creative people, not as many as you, but a lot, who have become famous, who have won awards, who are successful in every field, and this is what they have in common. It’s not a talent, it’s not something that the muse touched them and not somebody else—they simply do the work. And there are times that they’ll do a hack just to succeed, but most of the time when they’re proud of their work, it’s because they have a practice, and the practice is its own reward. And its output is a thing that might lead to the thing you’re hoping for, but that’s not why you do it, you do it because it’s your practice.

Debbie Millman:

Well, we’re actually going to take a deep dive into many of the words you just used—hack, trust, reassurance, especially reassurance, and so forth. In the book, you write that the practice is agnostic about the outcome, and the practice remains regardless of the outcome. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by agnostic?

Seth Godin:

Let me just use an example that might not sound like it’s a creative’s work, which is being a doctor. If you are a podiatrist, you probably don’t have many patients dying on you, but if you’re an oncologist, unfortunately, you do. Does that mean an oncologist is not as good a doctor as a podiatrist? Of course not. It just means that the oncologist does her work, and her best work often leads to a good outcome, but sometimes it doesn’t. And that’s not about the work, that’s about the outcome. And it’s impossible to become an emergency room doctor or an oncologist and say, “I will only do it as long as everyone lives.” Can’t have it, doesn’t work. And the same thing’s true if you’re a blogger. You can’t say, “I will only blog if every blog I write works on everyone every time.” You simply do the work.

Now, you should learn from what you do, because if you’re busy writing your blog in Italian, and everyone who reads it only speaks English, you need to do a different kind of work. But learning from the work is different than trying to control the outcome as you do the work, because that means you’re not trusting yourself.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, it’s so interesting. I used to say when Twitter was 140 characters that we lived in a 140-character culture, and now that it’s 240, I guess, or whatever it is, 280, I guess I could say we’re in a 280-character culture. I was doing a talk years ago when blogging was really, really big. And a young woman at the end of the talk, when it was the Q&A time, raised her hand and asked me … oh, actually she told me that she had started a blog, and that she was really frustrated because she was not able to catch anybody’s attention, that people weren’t reading, commenting, noticing. She was quite concerned and frustrated. And I asked her how long she had been doing it. And without missing a beat, Seth, she looked at me and said, “Six weeks.”

I have sandwiches in my refrigerator older than six weeks. And so, what kind of longevity do you think that people should anticipate before they can even begin to think of greatness when they’re attempting to do something new?

Seth Godin:

I was with you until the last sentence. You can be great on your second try. You can’t be popular on your second try.

Debbie Millman:

OK. Yep, I get it.

Seth Godin:

This is podcast number 800 for you, or something like that?

Debbie Millman:

That’s what it feels like.

Seth Godin:

It’s a lot.

Debbie Millman:

Something like that.

Seth Godin:

You were the pioneer. How many people listened to the second episode of your podcast? 10?

Debbie Millman:

If that.

Seth Godin:

Right?

Debbie Millman:

And if you take out my family, maybe two.

Seth Godin:

Every single podcast starts with 10 listeners, every one. Every blog starts with 10 readers. So, we first begin by understanding that commercial success or audience size. You could get lucky, you could not get lucky. They’re unrelated to what you did. But No. 2 two is, great has nothing to do with popular. And if you seek to be popular, you’re listening to the wrong two people right now. If you seek to do work that changes a person, five people, nine people, well, then Debbie Millman is a really good person to listen to.

Debbie Millman:

Well, you write that the practice demands that we seek to make an impact on someone, but not everyone. Is there an ideal number of someones that people should?

Seth Godin:

The ideal number is the smallest number you can live with. And so, in my case, that’s 10,000 people. If 10,000 people like my work enough to interact with it and share it, not only do I feel seen, I can make a commercial success with that. And that means that 99.9999% of the people on Earth never need to hear of me. We are not selling ketchup, Debbie, we are not selling Kraft Singles, what we are doing is selling something peculiar and idiosyncratic and specific to just a few people. And if you’re a podcaster on a specific topic, you could easily be successful by any measure with 300 loyal listeners. It’s not about how many people. The social media folks want you to think that because they’re in the business of making you feel uncomfortable, coming back and boosting … and the boost button is your enemy.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. One of the things that I think really confuses and deflates a lot of new podcasters is the way that Apple measures their charts, the way that they construct their charts. Their charts are based on impact, not actual numbers. So, if you have a brand-new podcast and a bunch of your friends are listening, chances are you’re going to hit the charts. But after eight, 10, 12 weeks, because that impact isn’t really necessarily changing with any kind of big delta, you drop off. And people start so excited—“I hit the No. 1 place,” or, “I made the Top 10.” And I want to say, don’t look at the charts, because in three months, you’re going to be crying, and you don’t want that. You need to make 10 or 20 podcasts before you even launch. So, you’re doing it because you want to do it, and then let it happen as it happens.

Seth Godin:

Yeah. And if you’re doing the work for someone, who cares what the chart says? Famously, a few years ago, I fired The New York Times on my blog with detail about how it’s corrupt and corrupted, and how every week, The New York Times intentionally publishes a full page of information that they know is not true. And yet, so many authors talk to me, “I want to be on …” “Why? Why do you want to be in New York … Why?” “Well, I know it’s corrupt, but, yeah.” So, what you’re really looking for is reassurance and validation. That’s not why we do creative work.

Debbie Millman:

Right. We are going to talk about that at length. Before we get to that, I want to talk about one of my favorite things you write about, and that’s the concept of practice relating to sports. And you state, “No one criticizes the home run hitter for taking batting practice. At the same time, no one is surprised that 70% of the time, they don’t even reach first base. If you need a guarantee of critical and market success every time you seek to create, you found a great place to hide. If the need for critical and market success has trapped you into not being bold again, you found another place to hide.” And I talk to my students a lot about these stats. Most people don’t even realize that people like Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, failed more than they succeeded with their respective averages.

Michael Jordan only got the ball in the basket 35% of the time. That means 65% of the time, he failed. And he’s the greatest of all time, or maybe him and LeBron. But people don’t realize how many times you have to do it to actually be able to even predict the possibility that you’re going to get it in the basket.

Seth Godin:

Well, if we think about the infinite game, which is more interesting to me than the finite game, the infinite game, Jim Carse rest in peace, and Simon Sinek’s follow-up, is the game we play because we get to play. If you’re playing catch with your niece who’s 4 years old, you don’t try to win at catch, you try to play catch because that’s the purpose. And the fact that we are lucky enough to be able to play catch is a thrill. We don’t practice our catch so that we can win next time, we practice our catch because the practice is the point. And I’ve been to several of the sessions you’ve run with students and the graduations and stuff, and you can feel the fear in the air, these group projects of people who want to make sure that they fit in all the way, because they’ve been brainwashed for 15 or 20 years to fit in all the way.

And as hard as you are working to help them see that there are no prizes for fitting in, it’s still so hard to stand out, because when we stand out … when I used to travel the world, people would come up to me afterwards and they’d say, “In our country, we have this thing called the tall poppy syndrome, where the tall poppies get cut down. I know you don’t know what that is.” They say that to me in every country I go to. Tall poppy syndrome started in ancient Rome or Greece, and it’s this idea that a despot just beheads the people who speak up the most. And then everybody becomes afraid. So, we’ve now translated that into an excuse to keep us from doing the work that we want to share. But the perversity of it is in the culture we live in now. Those are the only people who get prizes. Those are the only people who come out ahead.

It’s not the ones who say, “This is blameless, I fit in all the way.” It’s the ones who, a lot of people say, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” Those are the surprise bestsellers.

Debbie Millman:

Right. It’s so interesting that you bring up students because I very intentionally set up my program so that it was pass/fail. There’s no grades. And I can’t begin to tell you how many people still want to know how they’re doing. And I always say to them, “You know how you’re doing. Nothing I say is going to change how you think you’re doing deep down.” And that is the whole notion of that reassurance that you’re talking about. Before we get to that, and I keep teasing it—

Seth Godin:

It’s great.

Debbie Millman:

… but I do want to talk about the second half of the title. That’s all we’ve gotten to in this one, is the title.

Seth Godin:

Can you give me a seven-part series?

Debbie Millman:

Yes. The concept of shipping creative work. Why the specific word, ship?

Seth Godin:

If it doesn’t ship, it doesn’t count.

Debbie Millman:

So, could ship be publish, or post, or blog, or share? So, it’s really just—

Seth Godin:

If it’s in your head, it doesn’t count. I can tell you how many internet things I have pioneered in my head years before they were real. Doesn’t count. Why doesn’t it count? Because you’re not doing this work for you, you’re doing this work for those eight people, or those 80 people, or those 800 people. And if they never see the work, it doesn’t count. And the word work is also in the subtitle because work means you’re on the hook, and you don’t get to do it because you feel like it, you do it because you promised you would. And so, you’re a pro. You are shipping your work, even when you don’t feel like it, even when you are afraid, even when you are sure bad things will happen, simply because you said you would.

Debbie Millman:

Right. So, you ship on a schedule without attachment and without reassurance. That brings us to the first topic in the book that I want to talk to you about, Reassurance.

Seth Godin:

Yeah. This really rubs people the wrong way.

Debbie Millman:

Full disclosure, I had an ex that told me that I was a bottomless pit of need, and that I needed reassurance all the time. Now, this was 25 years ago, so I’ve done a lot of work since then. But you state this about reassurance: “Very few three-word mantras are more disturbing than reassurance is futile. But once you embrace the practice, you will realize it’s true. ‘Everything is going to work’ isn’t true, it can’t be.” Tell us why.

Seth Godin:

OK. So, I love reassurance, and reassurance makes people … it’s like showering, bathing. There’s nothing wrong with it, except it’s a trap and it will wreck your creative practice. So, what is reassurance? Reassurance is someone predicting the future on your behalf. Reassurance is someone you trust, saying, “Everything is going to be OK.” They don’t know. So, in the short run, you’re grateful. And then you realize, not only isn’t it true, but someone you trust just told you something to make you feel better, as opposed to something that’s true. What is helpful is for someone to say, “Whatever happens is going to happen, and I’ll have your back either way.” Because knowing someone has our back gives us the opportunity to go forward with honesty, because it might not work. That is what makes it creative—it might not work.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, you’re taking a risk, or you should be taking a risk.

Seth Godin:

So, if Spike Lee called you up and said, “Debbie, loving your podcast, it’s going to be blah, blah, blah.” You feel great. And then tomorrow, you’d need him to call again, because some speed bump occurred, and we can never get enough reassurance. So, if it’s something that we can never get enough of, I’d rather live without it. And I’d rather say, “Let me surround myself with people who know how to give criticism, and who are going to have my back. Because if I have those two things, my practice is intact, and I can do the work, and I don’t need someone to tell me everything’s going to be OK.”

Debbie Millman:

Well, I think we metabolize reassurance in the same way that we metabolize success, or the same way we metabolize love. It changes. It seems as if we could trust ourselves, we wouldn’t need someone else to buoy us up.

Seth Godin:

That’s right. But we can only trust ourselves to do the work, we cannot trust ourselves to guarantee the outcome. And our capitalist industrial system has brainwashed us, indoctrinated us, into believing that all that matters is the outcome. That it’s OK to cheat as long as you win. It’s not. It’s OK to play well, even if you don’t win, because that is the practice, and that is what gets us to the other side.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, we really do shy away from any kind of conflict or criticism. My students, I am very specific with them when talking about how they should show people their portfolios. I tell them, especially the young ones that are just starting, at the end of every time they show their portfolio, they should ask, “If you were me, what would be one thing you would recommend I take out?” Because most people aren’t going to tell you the truth. They’re just going to say, “Oh, that’s nice, oh, that’s nice,” but never really tell you that, “That thing right there, that’s ruining your whole portfolio.” Because they don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. I think that the avoidance of hurting someone’s feelings or offending someone is bigger than pain.

Seth Godin:

Yeah, there’re so many things in that example that are brilliant. Let’s start with this. I can’t imagine being a student to have to show someone my portfolio. And perhaps the first thing that I would do is have them show somebody else’s portfolio, someone successful. Because most people have no clue how to look at a portfolio. And people who love you and care about you, when you show them your creative work that hasn’t come out yet, will often try to dissuade you from doing it. They will often say, “No, no, no, you should hold back.” Because they’re trying to protect you from pain. And that feels like, “I don’t have your back.” That feels like, “You should just fit in, please.”

So be really careful about who you show your portfolio to ever. And I know, the first years that I was in the book business, I got really bad feedback from people who cared about me, because they didn’t understand what I was doing or where I was doing it, and they didn’t know how to give criticism. And I took it to heart, and it paralyzed me. And only when, I don’t know if you know my friend, Michael Cater—

Debbie Millman:

No.

Seth Godin:

But I met Michael Cater, and then I met John Boswell. Two people from the book business who understood, who were enrolled in the journey. Who could look at my work and say, “That. Maybe not that, but that.” And we need to hear that. That’s not reassurance, that’s someone who knows how to give criticism. And your point about “maybe you should take this out of your portfolio” is a great one, but half the time, that’s the one you should put on the front page of your portfolio.

Debbie Millman:

That’s true. I also say, ultimately, it’s up to you if 10 people looking at it all say the same. And you might want to consider how you either present it, or how you talk about what it is that you’re trying to accomplish with it.

Seth Godin:

Yeah. And William Goldman famously said, “Nobody knows anything.” And what he meant was, every blockbuster in Hollywood is a surprise, every one, until Marvel movies came along. It was always a surprise, because nobody knows anything.

Debbie Millman:

A term that you write about quite a lot in The Practice is the word hack. And you don’t use it as, “We’re going to hack the system,” but rather more the way it was used several decades ago, or even several hundred years ago. Tell us why you use that specific word and actually what you mean by being a hack?

Seth Godin:

I use the word because it has a great backstory, and because I couldn’t think of a better, more specific way to talk about this. I need to be clear, it’s OK to be a hack as long as you’re doing it on purpose. So, what does it mean to be a hack? It means figure out what your customer wants and give it to them. Meet their spec and get paid. This year was going to be the 50th reunion anniversary tour of The Doobie Brothers. If you went to see The Doobie Brothers’ 50th reunion tour, if COVID hadn’t happened, you were hoping that they would play covers of Doobie Brothers songs from the 1970s. You’re not hoping to hear their new album, even if they don’t have it, right? No, you want to hear the classic songs.

So, basically, they’re a Doobie Brothers cover band, right? And there’s nothing wrong with that. In that moment, they’re being hacks. They’re not there to break new ground. “We want this,” “Here it is.” That’s different than choosing to go out on a limb and do something that might not work, which is creative work. Just because you’re playing guitar doesn’t mean it’s creative. They’re two different things. So, if I want someone to paint my house, I want a hack. I want someone who’s going to paint my house exactly the way it was painted last time for a little bit less money than last time. Thank you very much. Whereas if I want a painting for my wall, I don’t want a hack to do that, I don’t want it to be from Dolphin, China, where they paint any painting you want for $39. I want it to be something that changes me. And so, we need to pay the bills.

And when I do speaking gigs, I say to the client, “Do you want me to do my best stuff? Or do you want me to do new stuff?” Because if I do new stuff, it might not work, but you can say I did new stuff. If you want me to do my best stuff, it’s definitely going to work. But in that moment, I know I’m being a hack in the sense of, I know it’s going to work, and I am simply the vessel and the microphone to bring my previous idea for it. I’m doing a cover version of me.

Debbie Millman:

What do your clients usually say?

Seth Godin:

99 out of 100 times, they say, “Please do your best stuff.” And so, I have to do my new stuff to non-paying clients. I have to do my new stuff in other settings, because I’m not going to break that promise that I made to the group that just came to see me.

Debbie Millman:

You state that a hack isn’t something you want to be, a hack reverse-engineers all the work barely getting by. The hack has no point of view, it’s simply, “What do you need? How little do I have to do to charge to get this gig?” And back when I was working in corporate branding, one of my clients called that—and I thought you’d like this—being a design waitress. “What can I get for you today? The Italic or bold?”

Seth Godin:

“Make the logo bigger.”

Debbie Millman:

Right, exactly. Or the serifs. You also go on to state that if you go too far to please an audience, you become a hack. You lose your point of view, lose your reason for doing the work, become a hack. Focus only on the results, become a hack. So, is there a conscious way to avoid becoming a hack?

Seth Godin:

Oh, I think there are many conscious choices. Jerry Seinfeld has famously said, “I’m done with this material, I’m going to do new material.” I do that same thing often. We say, “There are some clients that need me to be like this, but I’m also going to work at this teaching hospital.” We say that, “I do two movies for the studio that make box office, but then I get to make my art film.” And all of these are part of, what does it mean to live in a commercial world and still be able to commune with yourself and bring that idea forward? And so, there’s nothing here that I’m trying to say that says it is wrong to give the audience what they need and want; what I’m saying is, we are constantly in a tense balancing act with that versus what change do we seek to make?

But what I am completely leaving out is I don’t think there’s any room for you to simply say, “This is my authentic muse, take it or leave it.” Because that’s a hobby, that is not professional work.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, we’re going to get to muse. One of the great examples in the book reveals how Joni Mitchell avoided being a hack. And it’s so interesting because you wrote about a line that she says in one of her live concerts in Miles of Aisles, that I think about all the time. And I don’t want to give too much away, it’s really your story from the book. So, I’m wondering if you can share that with our listeners.

Seth Godin:

Her stories, so many of her stories, are inspiring, are heartbreaking. The misogyny that she dealt with for all of those years, when we would like to imagine she was in some sort of Woodstock-like garden, her health issues, all of it. So, part of the lessons we can take. In Miles of Aisles, someone calls out a request, and she says, “I wonder if people yelled at Van Gogh, play ‘Starry Starry Night’ again.”

Debbie Millman:

It’s one of the greatest rock and roll lines of all time.

Seth Godin:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

All time.

Seth Godin:

And she says it just perfectly. So, what Joni did was, she figured out how to be Joni Mitchell with a capital ‘J’ and a capital ‘M,’ and she sold more records than almost any solo female artist had ever. Carole King was up there with her, but she was just a hit machine. And she knew deep down how to make a Joni Mitchell record, and didn’t want to. She did not want to become captive to that. Bob Dylan did the same thing; whether or not the motorcycle accident was real or not, he did the same thing, which is, “How do I move past this thing that got me? What was the point of getting this popular? Was it so that now I have to just make this over and over again? And so, she made Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter album that I really admire, and then one after that.

And the two of them, those two albums, pretty much alienated most program directors and a lot of her core audience. And she was like, “Phew, now I can go back to making Joni Mitchell records with a small ‘J’ and a small ‘M,’ because I got into this because I wanted to make art, not because I wanted to be a rockstar.” And at the time, it was easy for the fans to say, “You broke the promise.” But she never made that promise. The promise she made was, “Here I am, this is what I made for you.” And being able to go on that journey, if you’ve gotten lucky enough, to make a living, what a privilege, what a joy. And so not everyone needs to do that. It’s OK to be a hit machine, but you should do either one on purpose.

Debbie Millman:

Joni ultimately didn’t care about a mass audience, she wanted an audience that respected her work and her journey. And I think, it’s not like I know her, but I think, knowing her work and her journey, that she essentially chose her audience. And one of the chapters of your book is titled “Choose Your Clients, Choose Your Future,” and you pose this question—and I’d love for you to answer it for our listeners—you ask, “What is the difference between Chip Kidd, the extraordinarily successful book cover designer, and someone with the same tools and skills that Chip has?”

Seth Godin:

Right. I learned a lot of this from you, and I should have name-checked you in this here.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, not at all.

Seth Godin:

No, but I need to say that out loud because as you’re talking, I’m hearing your voice in my head, I just didn’t realize it was your voice when I was writing.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, OK. Well, it’s funny because I got really excited because Chip is one of my best friends. So, I immediately took a picture of the screen and I’m like, “Look, you’re reading Seth’s book.” So, I have to tell you what he said, because I thought, “You know what? This is just serendipity. Seth is going to love this response.”

Seth Godin:

I can’t wait, because he and I don’t know each other well, but he knows I’m a huge fan of his. His TED talk, if you watch his TED talk, I was on right before him, like 10 minutes before him, and what you’ll notice is, his glasses are missing one of the struts, and I still to this day can’t figure out if he did that on purpose or not, because—

Debbie Millman:

Oh, he didn’t, he didn’t. They broke and he couldn’t fix it, and he had to go on.

Seth Godin:

So, the deal is, Sterling Brands had some really good clients, and Sterling Brands had some not so good clients.

Debbie Millman:

Correct.

Seth Godin:

And when you chose to teach at SVA, you have some students who push you, and you have some students who are just there for the ride. I taught at NYU, and I taught at a community college. When I taught at NYU, the students took. And when I taught at the community college, the students gave because they were there for a different reason. Pick your students, pick your future. And in Chip’s case, he has better clients. Better clients demand innovative work and pay on time. They pay extra. They talk about your work. They challenge you. They say, “That’s not good enough, make it better.” You don’t get better clients by first having a lot of mediocre clients and working your way up, you get better clients by becoming the kind of person that better clients want to hire.

And the thing is, if you go to Chip Kidd and say, “I’d like you to do a book cover for me and it should look like this,” Chip Kidd says, “No thank you, because I’m Chip Kidd. If you want me to make a Chip Kidd cover, you’re going to get what I make. That’s why you should hire me.” And the only people who go to him are good clients. He chose that path. Now, it’s not easy to choose that path, because along the way, people say, “Well, who the hell are you?” And there’s a lot of days when you’re just sitting in your office by yourself because you’re not deciding to hack your way forward, you’re deciding to attract a certain kind of client. So, when I look at his work, I say, “I can’t even copy Chip Kidd’s look and feel. I can’t even parody it, because he is such a unique voice with a point of view, and that unique voice and point of view earned him better clients.”

Debbie Millman:

As I mentioned, as soon as I saw it, I photographed the screen and I sent it to him. And he wrote back. He was thrilled, but he wanted me to tell you that not only did he have better clients, but Chip has never quit his day job. And I think that is so important to understand because he had … that sense of freedom gave him that ability to experiment, and that’s really where his heart sings. So, yeah, I mean, I think it just proved every single thing in your book in that one text back from him. Like, “I can’t wait to tell Seth.” It also reminded me a little bit of something that Michael Bierut said, another great, great graphic designer, and he said this to me about his success.

This is his quote: “I actually think that I’ve compensated for whatever flaws and shortcomings I have as a creative person by being smart, and well-read, and by working really, really hard, and by getting more at-bats. I seem to hit a lot of home runs because I have 10 times as many at-bats as everyone else in the league. Meanwhile, the stands are littered with foul balls and strikeouts, and no one knows about them because I don’t count those. Right?” And it reminded me of your quote about batting practice. And for Michael, that’s true. I mean, he is just a workhorse. And I think that people don’t always see all of the strikeouts and all the foul balls, they just see the home runs, because those are the ones that are reported.

Despite all the talk about failure porn in our culture now, people are still really reluctant to experiment with anything out of their comfort zone. I mean, not everybody, but a lot of people. How did we get to this place where people are so reluctant to get scraped up?

Seth Godin:

Well, part of it goes back to indoctrination—no prizes for getting scraped up in school. And high school is an unforgiving place where people who need to find status through separation will remind us forever of the thing we didn’t do. Right? But I think it’s probably primordial. I think you got kicked out of the village or the tribe 10,000 years ago if you offended the chief even once. What’s different now is, there are so many safe, completely safe ways to fail, that call our bluff. So, writing a blog under an assumed name, why wouldn’t you do that? Why wouldn’t you use a fake name and post a piece of your art every day, or a piece of your writing, or a riff from your keyboard every day? Because if it works, OK, you don’t get credit, but you learn something. And if it doesn’t work, you learn something, and no one can lay a glove on you because they don’t know who made it. Right? And this act of being able to put things into the world.

So, one of the cool things about my blog is, people only share the good ones. So, I don’t even have to do what Michael does, which is get more clients, I just write another blog post tomorrow. And for the people who only get my blog because it’s forwarded from one of my readers, they think I’m hitting a thousand, because those are the only ones that anyone ever forwards. And so, no, I can’t do something on my blog that I would be ashamed of. I can’t do something on my blog that’s selfish or hurtful. But there’s tons of days when I write a blog post in a slightly new form, or in a slightly new topic, that might not work, because I’ve lowered the stakes so low, the same way Chip hasn’t quit his day job. Right?

I don’t have five houses, I don’t have a plane. It’s pretty easy for me to not need tomorrow to work. And you can get there with sleeping on a couch, and brown rice and black beans. I mean, the point is, unless you figure out a practice, there’s never going to be a potter at the end of the rainbow anyway.

Debbie Millman:

How many blog posts have you … what’s your streak now?

Seth Godin:

I think it’s 7,500, give or take.

Debbie Millman:

So, I get your newsletter every day, seven days a week. And it would be interesting the next time we see each other—I should share with you my folder, because then you could see the ones that I like. Because the ones that I want to keep forever, I have a NSF coding folder in my email. And so it’ll be interesting. I wonder if you can tell something about a person by the blog posts they specifically keep. What is the common denominator in those? Because there’s hundreds and hundreds in there now, but it would be interesting to understand the commonality. Sometime we’ll have to do that.

Seth Godin:

But just since we brought up streaks, just a little insert here is, there’s going to be a blog post for me tomorrow. And I happen to be pretty pleased with tomorrows, but there would be a blog post for me tomorrow even if I wasn’t pleased with it, because it’s tomorrow. And that is a key part of my practice—tomorrow. If you wait to have a negotiation with yourself about, “Is this good enough to ship?” you’re going to spend all of your time rationalizing that negotiation. I am not permitted to have that, because it’s tomorrow.

Debbie Millman:

You and Cal Ripken. I meant that as a compliment.

Seth Godin:

I appreciate it.

Debbie Millman:

One of my favorite paragraphs in your book is about skills and what we can learn. And this is a fairly lengthy quote, but I think it’s worthy of being read. You state, “We can learn to be more honest, we can learn to be more diligent, we can learn to be more persistent, and that’s great. Because if you can learn them, then you’re not stuck where you are, you can become who you want to be. If we start by acknowledging that our attitudes are skills, and that our skills are learnable, suddenly talent recedes far into the rearview mirror. We’re going to be rewarded not simply because we can beat someone on a test, but because our whole posture is based on the possibility of better. And the possibility of if your goal is to win, to win. That’s the second piece that goes right next to the other skills, and people overlook it because our industrial system doesn’t really reward us for measuring that stuff.”

So, my question to you here, Seth, is, why not? Why doesn’t our industrial system reward us for measuring that stuff? And then, second part of the question, what are the most important things to measure, if anything?

Seth Godin:

I don’t think we get rewarded because it’s hard, it’s hard to measure, and the system is ultimately lazy. So, it defaults to what’s easy to measure. How many words per minute can you type? How many followers do you have on Instagram? How many pounds can you bench press? These are easy measurements. It’s hard to measure resilience, it’s hard to measure loyalty, it’s hard to measure kindness. And so, since we can’t have an easy agreement about that … a small aside. The SAT was invented by somebody between World War I and World War II when there was a shortage of slots, and they needed to figure out temporarily how to make sure they got the right people to come.

And the inventor of the standardized test ended up becoming a college president in Kansas, a very prestigious job. And when he spoke up against standardized tests when the emergency was over, he was drummed out of the academy that he was persona non grata. How dare he say that standardized tests needed to go away? Because the entire structure of most bureaucratic hierarchies is about standardization. And if we don’t come up with a standardized way to measure resilience or loyalty or kindness, we can’t build a hierarchy around it, we can’t build a bureaucracy around it. So, that’s why it’s a problem. And so, whole countries are built around standardized tests. And what we’re finding is that’s a race to the bottom. And the problem with the race to the bottom is you might win. And the alternative is to figure out how can we be a little softer and a little bit more flexible to do work that’s harder to measure, but that’s more important?

Debbie Millman:

Embedded in all of that measurement is comparison, and then embedded in all of that comparison is feeling that you’re not good enough, feeling that you don’t measure up, and then the whole notion of imposter syndrome, which is also something that you talk about in the book. And I learned from your book that imposter syndrome was named by several researchers—interesting commonality there—30 or 40 years ago, and it afflicts people of every gender and background and so on. And it’s the feeling that we have of being a fraud, when we’re about to lead or do something important. And it’s a feeling of being an imposter. And I think I read this correctly—do you still feel that way sometimes? Do you still suffer from imposter syndrome?

Seth Godin:

Only if I’m doing good work.

Debbie Millman:

Why?

Seth Godin:

Because good work for me is work that I’m not sure is going to work. I am asserting something about the future, and I’m not sure. So, who am I? Who am I to show up and say, “Yeah, I think X or this might work”? Because the world wants a guarantee, particularly now because people think I know what I’m talking about. And so, my imposter is bigger because they’re swayed by the fact that I have a reputation, which actually makes it worse. And there are plenty of times when I will hesitate to do something, and there’re very big projects I haven’t done, because I don’t want the person who I’m engaging with to think I am promising it’s going to work. And they have no way to go forward unless they think I’m promising, and I don’t want to be on that hook.

Debbie Millman:

Right. When you’re experiencing imposter syndrome, is there a part of you that’s excited about it, excited about knowing that you’re feeling that for a specific reason?

Seth Godin:

I’ve trained myself to do that. It is not natural to do so. I am not a runner, but I’m told that runners get tired when they do something like run a marathon. And I think that you finish the marathon because you figure out where to put the tired. And if you’re a competitive runner and you’re not feeling tired, that’s a signal that you’re not trying hard enough. Tired is a good thing. It is a compass. But it would seem to me that your natural systems are telling you, “Please slow down because it hurts.” It’s tired. Well, just like me, my natural systems are saying, “Dial it down a little bit; let’s wait, because you’re feeling like an imposter.” And the part of me that I’ve trained is, “Thanks for letting me know I’m doing good work again.”

Debbie Millman:

That’s so interesting. I have one of those little triggers also. When I hear myself say that I’m too busy, it usually means that something isn’t important enough for me to do. So, I say that busy is a decision, because ultimately, if I’m saying I’m too busy to do it, it’s because I don’t want to do it as much as the thing that I’m actually doing, even if that thing might be sleeping.

Seth Godin:

That’s a great title. Busy is a decision.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written about how you’ve learned that the way we act determines how we feel way more often than the way we feel determines how we act. So, can you elaborate on that a little bit for me?

Seth Godin:

People like you and I are addicted to flow. Being in a state of flow is thrilling, that things are working, we’re in the right place, we’re doing the work, it’s flowing through us. Nobody starts working in a state of flow. The only way to enter a state of flow is to begin working when you’re not in a state of flow. The only way to fall asleep is to lie down in bed when you’re not asleep. We have to do things acting as if to accomplish the feeling that we seek, not the other way around. So, if you want to be a runner, the answer is run every day, then you are a runner. And if you don’t feel like painting an oil painting every day, that doesn’t matter. It is possible to show up and do the work, and then you will discover you’re glad you’re doing the work.

Debbie Millman:

Let’s talk about authenticity. You think it’s a crock, and a trap, and overrated, and talked about too much. So, I have to make you talk about it a little bit more. That’s a word that so many people are using these days; it’s sort of the new strategic. Why do you think it’s a crock and a trap and overrated and talked about too much?

Seth Godin:

Yeah. Well, I mean, you and I have both been around for a while, and I think if we think back to the ’80s or ’90s, no one talked about being authentic, no one. It’s an artifact of influencer culture, social media, bearing of souls. It’s a spectator sport to watch somebody have their authentic meltdown or whatever it is. I think when we say, “Well, I was just being authentic,” what we’re really saying is, “I tried something, don’t blame me that it didn’t work,” because we’re not authentic. Since we’ve been out of diapers, we’ve been very calculated about what to say and how to act to get what we want. And it is not authentic to comb your hair before you leave the house. Your hair didn’t look like that before you left the house—why did you comb it? You’re faking it, because you’re trying to send a message to people that I care about you and my appearance above all.

So, we’ve built all these layers around it. There are a few people who can succeed by throwing their tantrums on Instagram. That’s why we’re watching them. But the rest of the time, what we want from people is for them to be consistent, to be the best version of themselves that is possible in this moment. And if the chef is having a bad night, we don’t want them to authentically serve us bad food, we want them to figure out how to consistently be the chef we thought we were coming to hire. And the same thing is true for almost all the things we engage in. So, yes, there are levels of artifice that we would like to remove, but what we’re trying to come back to is, what’s a brand? A brand is a promise, it is not a logo. It is a promise of what to expect. And so, let’s strip away the artifice and get back to, “What did you want me to expect from you? Did you give me that?” Because that’s why it’s called work.

Debbie Millman:

Right. I think that brand authenticity is actually an oxymoron. And I also think that people that are seeking to be brands are going down a really slippery slope because brands are manufactured. Brands are created by people with a very specific goal, and humans are inconsistent. And we’re messy, and we lie, and those are all things that brands really aren’t aspiring to be. We should be changing our minds. And the idea that a living breathing soul of a person could aspire or should aspire to be a brand feels like you’re really undermining everything it means to be human.

Seth Godin:

Well, can I push back on you a little bit?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, please.

Seth Godin:

So, I adore you, and I don’t know you as well as I want, and I really wish I could get in my car and drive to wherever you are right now.

Debbie Millman:

Me too.

Seth Godin:

But you’re a brand to me. There is a story in my head about who you are, and different facets of that brand are revealed as I get to know you better, as I see—

Debbie Millman:

You don’t think that that’s just reputation?

Seth Godin:

Yeah, they’re the same thing.

Debbie Millman:

That that’s my character? So, I don’t think that reputation and character are the same as brand.

Seth Godin:

Well, they are in my vocabulary, because what they all add up to is, if Debbie says, “Please come on my podcast,” there is zero expectation that we’re going to get in a fight. There is zero expectation that you’re going to phone it in. There is zero expectation that you haven’t read my book. Because your reputation, I’m just using corporate words here, is, in some ways as a human, part of your brand. I don’t expect you to have a tantrum when I’m with you. There are other humans I know who reliably I expect to have a tantrum, because that is their reputation. And so, what I’m saying is, when we entered the world of, “You’re not my cousin, and you’re not my roommate,” every circle that’s bigger than that, we have to be aware of the fact that no one knows us, that no one will ever truly understand us, and that our reputation has layers of magnitude that are hard to overstate.

And so, I have to show up as Seth Godin with a capital ‘S’ and a capital ‘G.’ And I get that that’s part of my job. And that when I am working, part of my reputation is to say, “I have this privilege, this leverage, this trust.” I shouldn’t blow it by saying, “I have a really bad headache,” and swear somebody out, because who cares that I feel that way because of the fear I’m feeling right now? That’s not what I earned, and it’s not what I owe people.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I guess when I’m talking about the notion of brand versus reputation, is the idea that there’s a humanity in how you’re going to show up, which you can decide. And brands, there isn’t.

Seth Godin:

Totally agree with you.

Debbie Millman:

And that for me is the key difference, and why I bristle when people talk about building their personal brand. Build your reputation, build your character.

Seth Godin:

Yeah, I agree with this.

Debbie Millman:

And then everything else follows suit.

Seth Godin:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

OK. I have a few last questions for you, and then a request.

Seth Godin:

OK.

Debbie Millman:

In your book, you state that we would never work for somebody who treats us the way that we treat ourselves.

Seth Godin:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

That was a beauty. I tell people, “Don’t go to work for somebody that doesn’t like you, or that you don’t think likes you, because it’s very rarely going to change.” And I just know that from personal experience. But why do we talk so harshly to ourselves?

Seth Godin:

When in doubt, look for the fear, look for the fear inside yourself, look for the fear in that boss who doesn’t like you, or in that person down the hall. Fear underlies so much of how human beings behave. And so, in the middle of the night, when your boss calls you and wakes you up because they’re worried about something that’s upcoming, and it turns out that boss is you, you’re being mean to yourself because you’re afraid of something. You are looking for reassurance, you’re looking for control.

Debbie Millman:

And approval.

Seth Godin:

And approval. And so, if we go back to the practice and acknowledge that the future is out of our control, that we are all falling, and that the good news is there’s nothing to hold on to, as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche would say. Don’t keep looking for something to hold on to, including berating yourself; instead, do better work, just get back to work, because that is the single best way you have to improve the impact you have on the world.

Debbie Millman:

What about people that believe that they’re suffering from writer’s block?

Seth Godin:

Ah, writer’s block. There’s no such thing as writer’s block.

Debbie Millman:

It’s sort of like my busy is a decision thing. Writers block is a myth.

Seth Godin:

It’s totally a myth. It’s real in the sense that people suffer from it, but … we know it wasn’t used in literature until the 1900s. We know that no one gets plumber’s block, no one gets juggler’s block. Why don’t we get talker’s block? No one gets talker’s block. Why do we get writer’s block? Because we are afraid of bad writing. If you show me your bad writing, page after page after page of it, then you can tell me you have writer’s block. I don’t think you can show me that, because you haven’t done any. And the reason you haven’t done any is because you’re afraid to be on the hook to put it on paper, to put it on canvas, to put it wherever you do your work. Show me the bad stuff, do enough bad stuff, and some good stuff is going to slip through, no matter how hard you try.

Debbie Millman:

One of the things that I was thinking about in relation to my own practice of writing … I’ve been struggling for the last, I want to say two years, to write a book that was due a year ago. And then I got a year extension. But I realized, as my second deadline was approaching, with just about enough time to actually do it, if I could figure out a way how, was that I didn’t want to write the book. That the writer’s block wasn’t writer’s block, it was just writer’s wall, because I was trying to write something that I didn’t want to write. And I think that that is sometimes mistaken for writer’s block. Because suddenly I thought, “You know what? I actually don’t want to write this book. I don’t want to write this book.”

Seth Godin:

Why don’t you want to write the book?

Debbie Millman:

I didn’t want to write the book because I felt that I was repeating … ooh, because I’m being a hack. This is like a therapy session, because now I’m realizing it was because I was being a hack. I don’t want to be a hack. But I didn’t realize it at the time. But now I can say that, because I just this moment, like light bulb, because I was going to be a hack doing it.

Seth Godin:

So, just like busy is a choice, the book is a choice. And you said, “This isn’t rising to the level of something that I want to put my name on.”

Debbie Millman:

Right.

Seth Godin:

That, “I can write this book but I don’t want to write this book.”

Debbie Millman:

Exactly.

Seth Godin:

Very brave.

Debbie Millman:

It’s scary as hell. It’s actually, “OK, I think I’m going to have to give back my advance, and, OK. So, bye bye book deal.” In any case, I have one last question for you, and then the request. Although the question is two-parter. You ask in the book of people to consider, “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” And I’m wondering if you might share that with us. When was the last time you did something for the first time? And how did it go?

Seth Godin:

Often, when I ask people this question, they tear up. And they tear up because if they’re honest with themselves, it’s been too long. That feeling of doing something for the first time is so precious. And we have built a luxurious world where so many of us are not living hand-to-mouth with no other options, and yet, we waste it, because we watched the seventh episode of “Emily in Paris” instead of figuring out how to explore a frontier. The dramatic visual is, I built a canoe in my backyard over the last five months from scratch using hundreds of sticks.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Seth Godin:

But every day, I do something small, engaging with a human in a way that doesn’t feel like rote to me. And that for me is the practice of that first time thing of saying, “I might not know this person very well, or I might not have been in this situation before—how can I engage with them in a way where they are actually seen?” And I had a conversation with a woman this morning that I think helped both of us a lot because I saw the journey that she was on as a creator, and I was on thin ice in how I was talking about it, but I was helpful. And that was thrilling, I think, for both of us, because I don’t want to get into the business of doing rote. So, when I think of that, and then I think of paddling my canoe on sugar pond, I’m trying, I’m trying to do things for the first time.

Debbie Millman:

Seth, I was wondering—this is my request—I was wondering if you could read something that you include in The Practice titled “The 45 Ways,” which is a list of 45 ways we sacrifice our work to our fear.

Seth Godin:

A small preface, these contradict each other on purpose, and this list is not complete. “There are at least 45 ways we sacrifice our work to our fear. Stall, expand the project so it cannot move forward, shrink the project so that it doesn’t matter. Ship crap, don’t ship work that can be improved by others. Refuse to listen to generous critics. Eagerly listen to well-meaning but chicken-hearted critics. Sacrifice the work for the commercial short term. Hide from deadlines. Become a diva. Compromise on the good parts. Compromise on the hard parts. Assume that inspiration lies in a bottle or a pill. Don’t go to work. Work all the time. Wait for the muse. Talk about the work too early, looking for a reason to abandon it. Don’t talk about the work with the right people, crippling it. Define the work as you, and you as the work, making it all personal.

“Work only when inspiration strikes. Fall behind on domain knowledge. Copy everything. Copy nothing. Embrace jealousy. Taunt yourself. Announce that the important work takes longer. Expect applause. Demand cash commensurate with effort or insight, and hold back until it arrives. Avoid sales calls. Read your reviews. Memorize your reviews. Respond to your reviews. Catastrophize. Focus on your impending or eventual death. Assume immortality as a way of stalling. Listen to people who are afraid. Confuse perfectionism with quality. Hold on tighter as the ship date approaches. Let go too soon as the ship date approaches. Miss ship dates on a regular basis. Don’t set ship dates. Redefine your zone of contribution to be smaller than it needs to be, thus letting yourself off the hook.”

Three more. “Surround yourself with people who have small dreams. Polish your excuses.” And the last one, “Pretend you have writer’s block.”

Debbie Millman:

Seth, thank you, thank you, thank you for your extraordinary generosity, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Seth Godin:

What a treat, what a total treat. Thank you, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you.

Seth Godin:

I miss you. I’ll talk to you soon.

Debbie Millman:

I miss you too. Seth Godin’s latest book is titled The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. To learn more about Seth, go to sethgodin.com and sign up for his class starting this January, and please sign up for his daily newsletter. It is the very, very best newsletter out there. This is the 16th year I’ve been doing Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters From the Archive: Seth Godin appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

Do you have a great idea that you think will make a lot of money? Do you need to raise some serious capital to get your idea off the ground? Well, you’ve come to the right place at the right time because my guest today is Suneel Gupta. He’s the co-founder of the healthcare company RISE, and he helped turn Groupon from a pipsqueak to a multi-billion dollar company. More to our purposes here, he’s the author of the new book Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You. He’s here to talk about that surprising truth and about the surprising twists and turns in his own entrepreneurial story. Suneel Gupta, welcome to Design Matters.

Suneel Gupta:

Debbie, it’s so good to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Debbie Millman:

I want to start by asking you a little bit about your mother. While this definitely an interview about you, I’d like to start by talking about her.

Suneel Gupta:

Sure.

Debbie Millman:

She’s really remarkable, are you OK with that?

Suneel Gupta:

Of course. Yeah. I love talking about mom.

Debbie Millman:

OK, so, in 1947, when your mother was 5 years old, her family was forced to move from their small village in India when the country had gained independence from Great Britain, but was divided into two countries—Pakistan and India. Your mom’s parents were well-to-do landowners who lost everything overnight when the rioting and looting broke out. They left on cargo ships in the middle of the night from Mumbai, where they were considered refugees. The family had no money, but your mom hatched a plan to get the family back on its feet. She studied hard in school, she made good grades and then, at 13 years old, the Prime Minister of India visited her city. She went to see him speak and he told the group that India needed engineers. At that moment, your mother decided to become an engineer. Something that was unheard of for women at the time.

Debbie Millman:

She went to college to study Mechanical Engineering at a college that didn’t have a women’s restroom. So like in the movie Hidden Figures, she had to bike one and a half miles just to go to the bathroom. At 19, she read a book about Henry Ford and became obsessed with assembly lines and Ford’s dream of bringing the car to the average person. She started dreaming of coming to the United States and working at Ford. She then left India in 1965 at 22 years old. She travels first to Germany, then to Stillwater, OK, where she studied engineering before getting a job at Ford in 1967. That same year, your mom’s car broke down outside Ann Arbor. So she found a telephone booth and searched the phonebook for the most common Indian name she could think of.

Debbie Millman:

The guy who answered was Subhash Gupta. They were married within a year and had two sons, your brother Sanjay and you. So my first question for you, Suneel, is this: Is it true that the word impossible was not allowed in your house in your upbringing?

Suneel Gupta:

Well, just even hearing you … it’s funny, and I grew up with this story, and just hearing you just say it, Debbie, it gets me emotional. Yeah, the word impossible was not allowed in our house. We were always sort of asked to figure it out. Whatever it is that we wanted to do, figure it out. It’s funny, I always sort of remember these stories about mom, and I have been more as of late, as she’s getting a little bit older, where I’m trying my best to spend as much time as I possibly can with her. And there are these moments that are just … I will all of a sudden think of, and one of them was, I remember in third grade I had a social studies teacher who I loved. Her name was Mrs. Canauer. I will never forget when Mrs. Canauer played some of the footage of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech.

Suneel Gupta:

Then, after she showed us the speech, we learned about John F. Kennedy, but one of the things she said was he didn’t necessarily write that speech himself. He had a team working with him, and I remember thinking to myself, Wow, that would be really cool to do someday. What if I got a chance to write for somebody like a John F. Kennedy. I remember racing home and telling my mom, “Hey, mom, when I grow up, that’s what I want to do. I want to write speeches.” I remember my mom looking at me and saying, like, “Why are you going to wait until you grow up? Well, just go do that now.” So, I did, I started to ride my bike to the offices of local politicians, and I would ask them if I could write speeches for them. Of course, most of the time, they would say, “look, we’d rather have you stuff envelopes or go knock on doors.”

Suneel Gupta:

Every once in a while somebody would be like, “Yeah, sure, once you put some thoughts down on paper,” and it just sort of built from there. There was a congressman passing through my hometown in Novi, MI. His name was Bart Stupak, and I knew he was going to be at a certain hotel giving a speech, and I knew he was going to be talking about healthcare. I was, I think, 16 years old at the time, and I drove my car to the hotel with this speech in hand, waited for him in the lobby. When he walked into the lobby, I cornered him and said, “Hey, I’ve got some remarks prepared for you tonight.” Completely naive about the idea that like, of course, I mean, he’s giving the speech in the next 15 minutes. He’s got his remarks. He doesn’t need my stuff. I’ll never forget the look of the person who was traveling with him as well, just looking at me, like, “Who is this kid?” Stupak, he just stares at me blankly and he says, “What’s your phone number?” I gave it to him. It’s my home number, not to sell or anything like that. A year-and-a-half later, I get a call from the White House. It’s somebody who’s part of the internship program over there. He says, Congressman Stupak recommended you a while ago; you’ve been in our files for a long time, and how would you like to come do some writing with us this summer? So, yeah, it’s weird, Debbie, but getting back to your question about the word impossible, no, just looking at her story, it was difficult to ever sort of go to her and be like, “I can’t do something.”

Suneel Gupta:

Even more than that, there was always … so she pushed back with, “OK, well, why not at this moment, because we had no idea how life is going to unfold and what’s going to come ahead.” I think that’s the refugee mindset in a lot of ways, which is this sense of impermanence but also possibility. So there’s a sense of urgency that I think comes with everything, right? Don’t take anything for granted. If you want it, then find a way to make it happen sooner rather than later.

Debbie Millman:

I’ve only had two instance over the 16 years I’ve been doing this podcast where in researching my guest, I thought, Wow, I really want to interview this guest’s mother. Actually, no, three times. Three times it’s happened. It’s happened now with Julia Turshen, and I did indeed interviewed her mother, Rochelle Udell, who was a major, major force at Conde Nast for a very long time, and really changed the field of art direction. Lucy Wainwright, whose mother is one of the Roche sisters, so absolutely wanted to do that, and hope to still someday, and now, you. I have an open invitation for your mom to come on Design Matters anytime.

Suneel Gupta:

My mom would love that, and she’s so great at telling stories. She will definitely come on this show.

Debbie Millman:

Wonderful, wonderful. Well, one of the things that you’ve said was … the most important thing that she taught you was the relationship between action and courage. I thought that was really fascinating, and I was wondering if you can share that today?

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah, because I always felt like in order for her to do what she had to do … how do you muster up the courage to do that? How do you … where do you get the resolve to say that I am living in a refugee camp, right, we are living on rations. Yet one day, I’m going to move to the United States and I’m going to become an engineer with Ford Motor Company, right, which at that time was the company of its day. Where do you get that, and where do you get the courage to sort of proceed with a plan like that? And I think that the thing that I misunderstood was that courage leads to action, right? You build up enough courage, and once you cross a certain threshold, you can act. If I unpack my mom’s story, it really is the other way around.

Suneel Gupta:

She acted, and because she acted, she built some courage along the way, and with that little bit of courage, it led to more action, which led to more courage, and it became this cycle, this engine that sort of propelled her forward. What I do today is I spend time studying extraordinary people, and what I found is very much the same pattern, which is that it didn’t really start with, “Let me go away for a while, build a bunch of courage and then act.” It was more kind of like, “Let me just act and then figure it out along the way,” which I know we hear so often, but when you see your own parent, when you see their own stories sort of unfold that way, I think it hits you in a different way.

Debbie Millman:

Suneel, you’ve written about how you grew up in an almost boringly safe suburb, never experiencing anything close to the conditions your mom did, but somehow, you and your brother both inherited her refugee mentality, something you’ve described as a strange mix of impermanence and optimism. I’m wondering if you can also share a little bit more about what that means?

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah, there can be a sense of anxiety that comes, I think, with the refugee mentality, because I think in some ways, it’s sort of this feeling that you’re going to lose everything, right? At the same time, I think the positive, which I think was a huge, huge net benefit, was the sense of, “Well, then anything is available.” It’s almost like this sense of, if you have nothing, then everything is on the table. I think in some ways that is … you mentioned in the beginning the speech that my mom heard when Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was basically trying to rebuild the country, right? Trying to figure out, now, the country had gotten its independence from Britain. What do we do now? We’re very, very poor. The economy’s in the shambles. Mahatma Gandhi had just been assassinated and Nehru, always, I think, envisioned that Gandhi would be by his side, and they would sort of be figuring this out together. Now he didn’t have his partner. But I think that the thing that she talks to me about when she heard that speech was a sense of, let’s move in whatever direction we think makes sense. Nothing is anchoring us anymore, and in his case, it was, “Hey, why don’t we really invest in math and science and design and creating things and building things? Let’s go do that, right? Why not?” I think that that’s really that sense of impermanence and optimism that you never lose. She brings it into her own career and, yeah, my brother and I are … we were born and raised in suburban Michigan, the conditions were completely different than anything she had ever experienced before. Yet at the same time, when you’re raised by someone who’s been through that, you can’t help but sort of, I think, pick up a little bit of that grit.

Debbie Millman:

Despite the optimism, you’ve talked about the isolation of growing up as one of very few brown skin kids in your neighborhood, and your dad called your family “raisins inside a tub of vanilla swirl ice cream.” What was that like for you?

Suneel Gupta:

One of the decisions that my parents made that always sort of puzzled me was that there were areas of Michigan where there were lots of Indian folks, and yet my parents decided to move to a place where there were literally none. It was just us when we moved there, and I was always puzzled by that—like, why? Especially, I think, as my brother and I got picked on a lot. You’re bullied a lot for that reason for having brown skin, we would ask her, like, “What was behind that decision?” Her response was very much just, “You have to figure this out. If you think that the answer is to go be amongst people who just look like you and think like you, talk like you, that’s just not the way that life works. And either you’re going to learn that lesson right now or you’re going to learn it later on. I’d much rather be here with you as you learn that lesson.”

So it wasn’t easy all the time, but I feel like we kind of did it together as a family. We would talk about it. I think the hardest part, honestly, for me, was … when I talk to people who I think have gone through sort of being different or feeling like the outsider based on the way that they look, one of the things that I often pick up is that there tends to be an age where that doesn’t matter, and then, all of a sudden, you get to an age where all of a sudden it seems like it does. For me, that was in 1991, because in ’91 we went to war with Iraq. This was Desert Storm, and it was exhilarating for the kids in my class, especially the boys. It was an exhilarating moment because they’d never seen anything like that before, right, and all of a sudden now on television, we’re watching this war sort of unfold, short war. It happens to be that the people who we’re sort of going to war with look a lot like me. I think in some ways, people felt like it was their patriotic duty to sort of give the brown kid a hard time. That’s when it got a little bit rough.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, how did you manage?

Suneel Gupta:

I managed a lot by, I think, learning to just kind of be by myself. I think being more comfortable with that, which I don’t necessarily look at that as a bad thing. I do look back on those experiences and feel like … I wish it would have been a little bit different for that kid, but I also know that because I was able to find, I think, some sort of grounding, some centering by myself, I think that it just served me very well. I’ve been able to come back to that place through other things that have come up. If you look at my sort of bio on LinkedIn, you’re going to see the success, but you’re not going to see all the failures, and there are many of them. It was during those moments where I think there’s a lot of value of being able to come back to yourself, and learning that at an early age was a gift.

Debbie Millman:

I love the way you look at it. It is really quite optimistic. So I see your mother’s influence there for sure. You earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Michigan, and then took an IT job in downtown Detroit, and you’ve written this about the experience: “The pay was decent, but each day was the same as the last, troubleshooting issues, building spreadsheets and maintaining databases. It was simple, mind-numbing work.” Then, you go on to describe how you were waiting for someone to point in your direction and say, “that kid is a star. Let’s find a better way to make use of his talents.” But it didn’t happen, and in the sea of cubicles, you sat at your desk waiting to be discovered. I have to tell you, Suneel, I’ve often heard about people sort of waiting to be discovered. I remember somebody very close to me describing how she was waiting to be discovered because she had ballerina feet, and she was waiting to be discovered as a dancer. Why do so many people do this? Why do they hope and wait and maybe expect that they will be revealed to the world?

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah. Such a good question. When I was in graduate school, I had this marketing professor who said something that I just … I don’t know why, but it just really stuck with me. What she said was … on the first day of class, she said, “I pay attention to the exams, of course, but I also really pay attention to the way that you engage with the class. That really matters to me.” She said, “You know what, you might be brilliant but if you don’t say anything, then I won’t have any idea.” That just stuck with me, because I think it’s true. I think in a lot of ways we’re sort of waiting to be called on before we sort of speak up, and I don’t know why we expect it. I don’t know necessarily why I expected it. I think it is a very privileged position that I try not to take any more, privileged posture.

Suneel Gupta:

This idea that like somebody is going to say, “Hey, you know what, we’ve been underutilizing that person. I bet you that person is very brilliant over there.” The one thing I hear very often from the students that I work with is, “I’m not having the impact that I want to have, right?” In order to have that impact, they’re sort of waiting for somebody to say, “Hey, let’s put you in a position where you can have impact because we think you can do so much more.” So, we get stuck in that position.

Debbie Millman:

When you were in that position, you did what you described as what a lot of people do when they feel directionless: You decided to go to law school.

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

No offense to any lawyers that really love practicing law, and I know a bunch. Were you at all excited about becoming a lawyer at that point, or was it one of the, “I have to be a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer,” kind of moments?

Suneel Gupta:

It definitely was a, “Let me go do something that I feel like might make my parents somewhat proud.” I kind of knew in the back of my mind that, no, I don’t think I want to practice law, because to your point, there are so many people out there, especially I met in law school, who are all about that. That’s what they wanted to do. They had a passion for that. In Hindu terms, that was their Dharma, but it wasn’t mine. So when people started to look for work, I started to look in very unconventional places, and I started to set my eyes on, could I go out to a place like Silicon Valley where people are making things, people are building things, and be a part of that?

Debbie Millman:

You also got an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. So, in looking at your timeline, I know you did like all of your education in six years. Were you doing your MBA and getting your degree in law concurrently?

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah, yeah, so Northwestern had, at that point, recently rolled out a program where you could do an MBA and a JD in three years. So you spend your first year in law school and then your second year is predominantly at the business school, and then your third year is at the law school again. So it’s pretty condensed, but the nice thing is that you do it with a group of people. So I had 15 or so people who were doing the exact same program with me. So even though it was tougher at times, you never felt alone.

Debbie Millman:

You were sworn in by Justice Roberts to practice law in front of the United States Supreme Court. As you were finishing your degree, you received a job offer from what you’ve described as a chest-thumping corporate firm based in midtown Manhattan. The signing bonus itself was twice the salary you were earning in Detroit. You got a sinking feeling that taking that job would send you back to the same headspace you were in before you went to law school. So you turned down the offer and began cold-calling people in Silicon Valley. You just mentioned that that became interesting to you. What about the atmosphere in Silicon Valley, and the work that was happening there, was intriguing you, especially after spending those three years studying law and business administration?

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah, I think it very much was about creating something from scratch, as you’ve talked about on the show a lot, the difference between building something from zero to one versus just optimizing what’s already there. For me, there’s nothing wrong with optimizing, by the way. There are people who do that very, very well. I guess I’ve always kind of been the kind of person who’s sort of has felt like, what’s not out there right now that could be out there? And it’s just not the way that I was finding that, certainly law firms, tend to think, right? We’re working with established companies, we’re working with established clients that need to solve a very specific problem in order to make their business just a little bit better, or to de-risk it just a little bit more.

That just didn’t appeal to me as much as this idea of like, what can we build? What can we do? I had such admiration for people who wrote lines of code, who built things, who were able to do that. I was also just getting a keen awareness … iPhone had just launched right around the time that I was starting to prepare to graduate. I thought to myself, gosh, things are just getting created so quickly now. If I compare sort of what’s happening now to the way that my parents work … my parents were both engineers. They both worked for Ford Motor Company, and I remember, they would work on projects for years, like literally years, before anybody would ever take a look at their work. I still remember driving to the auto show that took place in Detroit every year.

It was like my dad would tell me, “Hey, inside that car is a part that I had been working on now for like three-and-a-half years, and today is going to be the day that we sort of unveil that.” What really fascinated me about what was happening, I think, in tech at the time, was like, people were literally developing things during a lunch break and posting their code and having it be used by the end of the day. That was intoxicating to me.

Debbie Millman:

I believe that your first Silicon Valley job was director of product development for Mozilla, the maker of Firefox—but I believe your first job out of law school was actually as a writer for MTV, for which you worked there, I think, for about a year. Is that correct?

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Tell me how that fits in with this sort of life goal that you had at the time.

Suneel Gupta:

It’s always been a little bit weird, Debbie, and it’s always hard to sort of make sense of it myself, especially if I’m describing it to my family. They’re like, “Wait, what?” I’ve always kind of jumped back and forth between the worlds of writing, which I’ve always loved, and I spent time as a writer before I went to graduate school.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, for the DNC, right?

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah, for the Democratic National Committee. Yeah. Then, when I was working at Mozilla, I wanted to … I still wanted to write, and MTV had this role where they were … where we’re creating something new around content focused on people with brown skin. I was kind of moonlighting that job while I was working at Mozilla. I felt like I was sort of scratching both my itches. I had the technologies, sort of more analytical side of the world during the day, and I got to do more of the sort of creative fresh type of stuff at night. The writing began in 2004; I got a job at the Democratic National Committee as a writer. One of the stories that is stuck with me, I think, in a lot of ways, is probably just the basis of what it is I tried to do each day, was that I’m sitting backstage and there’s a guy that nobody recognizes who’s about to give a speech.

Suneel Gupta:

He’s a state senator from Illinois, and Barack Obama gets up and gives that speech, and I got to watch it from backstage. What I saw was just this … I get the chills even just talking about it. There’s almost this tidal wave of energy that just sort of ripped through the stadium, and I became one of, I think, millions of young people that night, I became really fascinated with Obama’s story. Who is this? Who is this guy? He was running for senate at the time. Whereas I started to unpack his story, which is what I love to do now, unpack people’s stories, understand sort of what was the arc of it. You do this way better than I do. I’m learning from you.

Debbie Millman:

Hardly.

Suneel Gupta:

What I found, though, was really surprising, which was that four years prior to that speech, he had run for Congress, and he lost.

Debbie Millman:

He lost.

Suneel Gupta:

He lost by a huge margin, a two-to-one margin. It wasn’t close. But the thing that surprised me even more than that, was the way that he was received during that campaign. People described him as stilted—

Debbie Millman:

Professorial.

Suneel Gupta:

Professorial. Yeah, there was a reporter named Ted McClelland who followed him around during that campaign, shadowed him, who wrote that Barack Obama is so dry that he sucks up all of the air out of the room.

Debbie Millman:

It’s crazy.

Suneel Gupta:

Then, four years later, he is this bastion of hope and energy and inspiration. That to me was just the most inspiring thing, which is not necessarily that, “Wow, I was seeing this person who clearly was a rising star.” What was most inspiring to me was sort of this moment of … I call it reinvention or turnaround or whatever it was. I wanted to kind of focus more on that, what happened during those four years and really, that’s how I spend my time today. I try to go to these sort of moments where we don’t really pay much attention to, because we kind of assume that the people that we admire have always sort of been that way. If you rewind the clock, I try to find these almost dips in their experience where it’s like, “No, things actually were going very poorly, and here’s what they did. Here are the adjustments that they made to get to where they are today.”

Debbie Millman:

That is what is endlessly fascinating for me. You did that over and over. While you were at Mozilla, you initially were hired to work on legal matters but you found yourself drawn to the engineering and design areas of the business. You talk about how you were finally given a chance to lead and launch a new product feature for Firefox, but you don’t really talk about how you did it. How you actually got that chance. You certainly were hanging around and showed that you were interested, but what was the catalyst to making that happen?

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah, I mean, I asked for it. One of the things I think I’m pretty decent at is sort of just … if I look at somebody’s workflow, how are people working, I tend to sort of kind of be the person who says, “Well, what about … could we do that? Maybe that could be a little bit different or could that improve things?” Which is interesting because that’s, what I just described to you, is the job of an optimizer, and I don’t like to optimize, but in this case, what I was doing is I was watching these brilliant engineers and designers work. What I was finding is that they were sort of putting things into spreadsheets, and sort of tracking their work in pretty disjointed ways because they were focusing on doing what they were doing, which was writing code and creating designs. So, it started out as, “Hey, could I actually just organize this a little bit for you?”

Suneel Gupta:

I think whenever you’re not really asking for something—you’re not asking for a title, you’re not asking for a role—but you’re saying, “Hey, do you mind if I just … could I do this, and if you like it, great, and if you don’t, then throw it out?” That’s kind of what I did. I went to the head of that time of Mozilla Labs, a guy named Chris Beard, who ended up eventually becoming the CEO, and asked him, and he’s like, “Sure, knock yourself out.” I mean, there’s no sort of pressure for him at that point in time to give me anything. I think when I started to organize things, I think that what he saw was, A, I was a pretty collaborative person. I think the other thing he saw was just a curiosity. I was very curious about what they were doing, and then the reason that matters is because I can help other people get interested in it as well. In some ways, the job of a product manager is, how do we take all this cool stuff that we’re building on the inside and make it intriguing to people on the outside? That’s why I ended up getting the shot.

Debbie Millman:

It’s so interesting to compare the instinct to wait for something to happen, to wait to be discovered, versus asking for something. I have to say, there’s maybe been three instances that I can think of off the top of my head where I was just offered something. Two of those three things were from the same person, whereas 99.9% of everything I’ve ever been able to do was because I had to ask for it.

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

It takes a lot of courage to do that. Although, I wouldn’t have thought of that at the time, I think that I’ve come to that conclusion in reading your book sort of that … taking that risk to ask—

Suneel Gupta:

OK, I have to ask this. Was there one moment in particular where you sort of realized that you didn’t want to ask but you realized you had to?

Debbie Millman:

Not until after. Not until after. Now, I give that advice a lot to my students—you have to ask, you have to ask, as you get older and find that the waiting isn’t really working.

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

If you really want something you have to take action. You have to.

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah, yeah. Tell me if this resonates, too. When I talk to people who are sure to kind of … I think waiting, one of the things I also hear is that “I’m not ready. I’m not ready yet.” I’m not ready tend to be sort of the three words. “I’m not ready to step into that role.” “I’m not ready to speak my mind.” “I’m not ready to run with that idea.” “I’m not ready.” I’m often asked with the people that I was studying and interviewing for my book, was there one thing? Was there one common denominator amongst all of these extraordinary people, and I would say that, yeah, the common denominator is that none of them were really ready. I could not find a single situation where it was like, “Yup, that person was completely ready to go do what they did.”

Three friends from design school were not ready to start Airbnb, a mid-level talent manager wasn’t ready to start Soulcycle, a 15-year-old from Stockholm, Sweden, wasn’t ready to build an environmental movement, but today, Greta Thunberg is Time magazine’s youngest ever Person of the Year. There were setbacks and there were failures along the way, of course, but I think the mantra that either consciously or unconsciously, most of the people that I study seem to adopt, is that the opposite of success is not failure, it’s boredom.

Debbie Millman:

I also say that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. I think it’s sort of the same thing. The opposite of success isn’t failure. It’s boredom and mediocrity, I think, when you’re just too afraid to take that risk. But one thing about sort of that notion of being ready, that I think is so important to also acknowledge, is that, that sense of readiness usually comes when you feel like you’re not going to have fear about it anymore. That’s never going to happen.

Suneel Gupta:

Never.

Debbie Millman:

Because anything uncertain really does kick up that reptilian part of the brain, and you can’t ever, ever get rid of that. Uncertainty is just the place where that fear lives, and you just can’t ever get rid of that, in the same way you couldn’t ever expect that if you were confronted by something terrorizing, you would feel the adrenaline rush that just happens instinctually.

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah, yeah. In some ways, it reminds me a lot of what you’ve talked about in the past, which is this idea of competence versus courage. I mean, you can wait to build confidence, and what I’ve kind of realized, at least for myself, is that that doesn’t really happen, especially when it comes to new things. I think you said, the idea of confidence comes from repeating something over and over again.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, the successful repetition of any endeavor.

Suneel Gupta:

That’s how you build confidence, but you can’t necessarily have confidence in that case for anything that’s brand new to you. So, waiting to have confidence, to go tackle something that’s different, that moment may never come, which comes back to sort of like, you can wait to be discovered and that moment will never come.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, if not now, when?

Suneel Gupta:

If not now, what not now, when?

Debbie Millman:

If not now, when? So you said that after years of working inside other startups, whether it be Groupon or Mozilla, you realize that what you really wanted you had been afraid to do, so what was that?

Suneel Gupta:

I wanted to start my own company. I wanted to put myself out there, and I was afraid to do that. I think that especially when you’re part of another organization that’s doing pretty well, you can get a lot of credit that sometimes maybe you don’t deserve. When Groupon was doing well, at that time, I was the first head of product development that was hired there. There were all these articles being written and I was getting thrown in, as like, “Hey, this guy must be a star,” and I remember thinking to myself like, not really. I think I’m pretty capable. I’m learning as I go but I’m certainly getting a lot more credit than I deserve because I feel like I’m part of this rocket ship right now. If I put myself out there, with my own thing, then it’s just me. It’s just me. I don’t have anything to ride off of, and that really scared me.

Debbie Millman:

At that point, you had what you believed was a winning idea for your own business. Can you share what it was?

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah. So the idea was … at that time, Airbnb was starting to hit its stride, Uber was starting to hit its stride, and I thought to myself, why isn’t more of this happening in the field of healthcare? What can we do with the many, many, I think talented healthcare professionals who are out there right now that might be sort of wanting to do more, have more impact? That was kind of the problem space I was thinking about, but more than that, it was really just going back to a story that I continue to think about, about my father, who, when he was in his 40s, had a triple bypass surgery. It was emergency. By the time I got to school that day, my aunt picked me up, took me to the hospital. I remember seeing him and he looked like he aged 20 years overnight.

I remember when we were on our way back to our house, a few days later, they’ve given us some paperwork. Part of the paperwork was how to eat at home, and listed on that sheet was sort of the dos and don’ts. It had things like “eat broccoli,” “eat Brussels sprouts.” I remember thinking to myself, like, we don’t eat broccoli. We don’t eat Brussels sprouts. We eat Indian food. I remember thinking to myself, This isn’t going to really work for my dad, and it didn’t. He had a very difficult time, as many of us do, trying to adopt a different lifestyle, trying to change our own behavior. It was lucky for us, finally, at the hospital, I was like, “Look, we have to find a program that’s going to work for you.” Insurance ended up kicking in and we ended up getting the help of a nutritionist, who really helped customize our lifestyle into something that was going to work.

We could still be Indian. We could eat Indian food, but we could do it in a healthy way. I believe that that nutritionist is a big part of the reason that my dad is alive today. So the idea for my startup RISE was we could match you one on one with a personal nutritionist over your mobile phone, give you the same quality of care, but we could do it at a fraction of the cost because we could just be … we could be a lot more efficient, using mobile. So, that was the idea.

Debbie Millman:

So as much as it was and is a great idea, you were struggling to get other people excited about it. You started to feel at the time the same frustration that you had back when you were sitting in that cubicle in Detroit. In the meantime, you were contacted by the organizer of an event called The Failure Conference, or Fail Con, where you’ve been repeatedly nominated to speak, and you agreed to be the keynote. But moments before your speech, you began to question your life choices. Not a great time to have that epiphany. How did that impact your talk? Because that really, if you look at the arc of your life, it was one of those defining moments.

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah. I mean, it’s a humbling experience when someone calls you and says, “Hey, we’re doing this conference on failure, and we would love for you to be the keynote speaker.” I thought to myself, I’ve been trying to craft, as some of us do, this image of success, and things don’t seem to really be falling into place for me right now. And I’m about to go talk about that pretty openly. I think that today it’s a little bit different, because failure, I think, is talked about a little bit more now than it was before. This is 2012 when I gave that speech. I felt like, All right, well, now I’m going to end up being sort of the failure guy, which totally ended up being the case.

Debbie Millman:

There was a reporter in the audience for that speech. She ended up writing a huge story on failure in The New York Times, prominently featuring you. It went viral and you ultimately had to change your identity from that “fake it until you make it” attitude of success to being honest about what you did and didn’t know. How did that article change your life?

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah. There was a time where you could literally Google “failure,” and my face would have been one of your top search results. A friend of mine that I spoke to around the time kind of reminded me of a lesson that we’ve learned when we were kids. We used to go to temple together, and the priest that we would see would often talk about … he talked about Hinduism, but he talked about Buddhism as well. I remember there was a parable that he shared with us from the Buddha, and it was that when you feel pain of any kind, two arrows are shot. The first arrow is the arrow that punctures your skin, and there’s nothing you can really do about that arrow. You’re going to feel the pain. The second arrow is the arrow where you really ascribe meaning to that pain.

It’s where you decide that you want to do something with it. That arrow is very much up to us. That’s our choice. He motivated me in some ways of like, what could I actually do with this. One of the things I decided to do was I started to email people I admired but had never had a chance to talk to. I would email them and I would actually include the link to the article and I would say, “As you can see, I have no idea what I’m doing right now, but would you be willing to grab coffee with me or jump on the phone with me?” The response rate to that email was extraordinarily high. I think more important than that, was that because it wasn’t an email that was sort of, I think, espoused in success—it wasn’t somebody who was trying to impress, it just opened the gateway to just really honest conversations.

I was surprised that people were, I think, as willing and actually wanted to share their own failure story, because people don’t really ask that. I think that we … again, we craft these images that almost hide that stuff, but there’s some really, really interesting stories there, and I was starting to hear those stories. That ultimately ended up becoming the foundation for, I think, how I spent the next several years.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I mean, they weren’t mercy meetings; people weren’t meeting you because they felt sorry for you. They were really interested, and that provided an epiphany that changed the way you see everything. People who change the world aren’t just brilliant, they’re backable, and ultimately gave you the runway to write this remarkable book. Talk about what being backable actually means.

Suneel Gupta:

Yeah, yeah, I was finding that there are certain people who have this almost mysterious it quality. It seems to be this ability to walk into a room and really just inspire people to take action. The trick of it is, I think the most important thing is, it’s when it’s not necessarily obvious. When you can walk in with the obvious sort of like, “this absolutely we need to do, I have all of the data, I have all of the proof”—that’s not necessarily a backable moment. A backable moment is when we don’t know. We actually have to take a bit of a leap of faith here on you. We have to take a leap of faith on your idea. We still feel inspired to do that. It really kind of cuts to this idea that I just didn’t understand at the time, which is that creativity and persuasion are two different things.

You can have a brilliant idea, and you can still be dismissed. At the same time, by the way, it works the other way. You can have ideas that aren’t necessarily all that great, that don’t necessarily do a lot of good. We’ve seen plenty of documentaries on some of these lately. Yet that person is incredibly backable. They have that it quality. What I thought to myself as I was starting to kind of watch more … what was happening with Theranos, what was happening with the Fyre Festival, and later on what was happening with WeWork—I thought to myself, we need more high-integrity people in the world who know how to sell a good idea, and maybe this book can provide a little bit of a framework. One person that I sort of continued to keep in mind, even though it’s an older story, is a guy named Bob Ebeling. Ebeling was an engineer on the Space Shuttle Challenger.

The day before the Challenger went up, he actually was looking at some of the data and he found that, “Look, this is actually a little bit too dangerous.” Overnight, conditions are going to change. The temperature is going to drop and it’s going to put things at risk. So he does what I think most of us would do. He calls a meeting. He gets his colleagues into a room and he presents sort of his findings, and then he presents a recommendation, which was, let’s just delay this thing. And he was dismissed. The Challenger goes up the next morning, disintegrates within 90 seconds, killing everybody on board. Ebeling ended up spending the rest of his life blaming himself for that. He gave an interview with NPR where he said, “God should not have chosen me for that role, because I had the information, but I didn’t have the persuasive ability to get everybody bought into what I had to say. God should have chosen someone else.”

So I think that we may not have the drama of a Bob Ebeling, but I think we can all, I think, relate to that, where it’s like, we feel inside that we have something to offer, but the people that we’re sharing it with are not nearly as excited about it as we are. There’s something missing there, and that’s where this book really aims to come in.