Debbie Millman on Why Design Matters

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Debbie Millman, and she's one of those guests where I kind of im pulling its strings to cram a bunch of what she's done into a single intro, so I'll say this. She's a writer, designer, educator, artist, brand consultant and host of the podcast Design Matters. Debbie was named one of the most Creative people in Business by Fast Company magazine and one of the most influential

designers working today by Graphic Design USA. She's the author of seven books, and on this episode, we'll discuss her most recent book, Why Design Matters, Conversations with the World's Most Creative People. Hi, Debbie, Welcome to the show. Thank you, Eric. It's just a complete on her to be here. It's

such a pleasure to have you on. You know, years ago I interviewed Krista Tippett and I said to her it was a little bit like cooking for Julia Child's right, And I feel that way a little bit interviewing you, because you are so good at what you do. I respect your work so much. We'll be talking about your long career across a lot of things, will be talking about your latest book, which is called Why Design Matters. But before we get to that, let's start like we

always do with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins?

And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Oh, I knew this question was coming. Well. I feel like my whole life has been a battle between the two wolves in many ways. Not that there's necessarily two wolves active inside me, but I think that

there's two wolves active in everything in the world. And I've had a lot of early experiences with the bad wolf, And I think when you have a lot of early experiences with other people's bad wolves that need to sort of feed on your wolf, good or bad, it sets you up for an expectation that that wolf is always going to be coming after you in some ways, no

matter how old you get. I think if those neural pathways have been set at a very early age to expect to be attacked, you're always living in that fear

and in that sort of heavy duty PTSD. So a lot of my life has been a out trying to deconstruct that wolf, understand how and why that occurred, how to try to find the path to let some of that trauma go, and also try to be continually feeding the good wolf inside me so that my expectations of both myself and others lean towards that arc, towards justice and peace internally and externally. Yeah, it's a beautiful way

to think of it. And it was the first time I actually really thought of that idea of someone else's bad wolf feeding on us, you know, because certainly your background as childhood sexual abuse in it. So I really love that you brought that up, and I wanted to

ask you a question about that. It is that the first time you admitted sort of to any group of people that you had this was on the Tim Ferris podcast and he basically asked you, you know, why is the work that you're doing with the Joyful Heart Foundation, you know, why does that make your life make sense? And you had a moment where you paused and you went, I can either be honest here share my truth, or I can continue to sort of keep this wall up.

And you chose to jump out there. Now, if we were to make a movie of your life, that would be a big, significant moment. But what I'm curious about is what was happening behind the scenes before that that allowed you to get to that moment, Because those moments don't arrive out of nowhere. They arrive as a culmination of other things. And I'm kind of curious if you have any insight into kind of what got you to

that point. You had to make a courageous step, for sure, but there were a lot of other courageous steps you must have made to get to that point. Such an astute question, Eric, and not surprising given your talents as an interviewer. You know, I think it was a slow process of shedding shame. I think that my work with both the Joyful Heart Foundation and prior to that, my work with a New More Movement gave me a bit more clarity in the dynamic that had occurred, as well

as a lot of therapy over the decades. And one of the earlier positionings of the Joyful Heart Foundation was about shedding light on the darkness that creates the conditions for any type of sexual violence to be hidden or perpetrated and or and because I began to understand so much more about that, I began to have less shame about my own experiences. And at that moment in time, when Tim asked me, and Tim didn't prepare me for that, we didn't have a conversation about what I did or

didn't want to talk about. Where long term friends. I completely trust him that. It's also why in that moment I chose to sort of walk into the question as opposed to retreat from it. It's not a live podcast. I could have said, Hey, Tim, you know I don't want to talk about that, or I could have retreated without fear of him being upset with me or any kind of disappointment on his behalf. But in that moment,

I just chose to walk into it. I think because in many ways it was sort of the opposite of a perfect store My had been working so hard on understanding how I'd gotten to that point. I was so proud of the work that I was doing to begin to eradicate sexual violence and the rape kit backlog, which is a lot of the work we were doing and

continue to do with the Joyful Heart Foundation. I had been friends with Michikan at that point for several years and really felt that her work in this area was so important to the world that I wanted to talk about it. I mean, I don't know that I would say that I wanted to talk about it with like big raw ra, like let's let's do this Tim, you know.

But it was definitely something I think I had prepared a long time to be ready for, and that moment was a place where I could do it with trust in Tim, comfort in he would never harm me, we would never do anything too ever create a more opportunistic situation. You know. It just it felt safe there, It is right there. I just got to it. It felt safe and I felt cared for and I just walked into

that moment with him. Yeah, and then that moment has turned into him sharing his experience with that and I mean, he's got such a big audience, the number of people that are helped, you know. And I just think it's so interesting how things sort of can start really small, that they can just ripple out in really beautiful and unexpected ways. And we don't know when we're healing ourselves or when we're trying to do good in the world. We don't know where it's going to go or what

it's going to turn into. It's often very difficult to nict. This story is one where we can see very clearly how it happens. But I think that sort of goodness and healing encourage ripples out all the time. We just don't often get to see it in as clearer ways as we can in this situation. Yeah. Absolutely. I asked him if you'd be willing to write a full word to my book that's out now, not only because he's a dear friend, but also because he's had so much impact on my work and what I try to put

out in the world. And the first line of it is that he's my brother from another mother, and I think that's so true, or my sister from another mr kind of thing. That we are siblings in so many ways, and that's sort of one of the unexpected gifts of my life and this work. So what do the words? Play me, bluff me, beat me, tease me, but please, oh please let me win? Mean So that is wow, you really did your research. I had to do it.

You did it. It's you're known for startling people and making them laugh, and so I had to do it. He just did it. Yeah, I love that. So many many years ago I designed I was invited to design a deck of cards for deck Starter, and I had always wanted to do that and I had a blast doing it. I designed fifty four original cards. The reason it's fifty four and at fifty two is because I did the two jokers, which was the best part. So I did the backsides, the number sides of all the

cards and the jokers. But the other side, the side that always faces people when you're playing, the side that they see, was one piece of art that I had to create across all fifty four cards. And so those are the words that I put on that other side. I created them out of felt letters and felt fabric, and I couldn't repeat them bade him the way you did, because you must have had it in front of you.

I don't have in front of me. But I just thought it would be a play a double or triple on Tendra on all the ways you can engage with any game of cards that's competitive. And I had a lot of fun with that. And thank you for talking about that. I just designed another deck of cards, by the way, just just just just designed another deck of cards.

And this is wonderful because it's sort of taking some of the conversation that we just had about Tim and now taking part of the conversation that we have about cards and a card deck. So I've had so many different opportunities to take what I also talked about on Tim's podcast, the tenuere plan that I had done with

Milton Glazer. I've had a lot of different opportunities to sort of codify it into a book, and I never really wanted to do a self help book in that way, but Chronicle asked me if I'd be interested in doing a deck of cards with prompts that would allow people

to write their own tenure plan. And so I'm just looking at the proofs of it now, and it's thirty cards and a tiny little journal and an instruction deck that all fit beautifully into a box of cards that are thirty prompts to help people write their own tenure plan.

And they're also now instead of fifty two pieces of art or fifty four pieces of art on one side and one on the other, I did thirty pieces of art with prompts, and then another thirty pieces of art that just are inspiring directions for that mentally out in October. So I'm super excited about it because it really is an art project as much as it is anything else. Yeah, I love that you've done a I think a great job combining art and essays in the past and different things.

Your creative spirit is amazing. And one of the things I admire about you, and you talk about this very openly, is you know, there was a certain point early in your life where you thought, well, I'd like to be an artist, but I'm going to choose a safer route. Yes, And there's lots of reasons for that. You talked about your childhood. You know, there was a lot of insecurity, you wanted a little bit more security, you wanted to live in Manhattan. There were reasons you made that choice.

But what I love is how you found your way back to your creativity. And I think that's a really inspiring thing for a lot of people. You know, we've made choices where we ended up in a place where we're like, well, Okay, my life is pretty good, but I abandoned some part of me back there a little ways where it was I used to make music, or I used to make art, or I used to spend lots of time hiking or camping or I mean, and

that you found your way back to those things. What some of the input or advice you would have for people who were sort of finding themselves in that place where they're like, you know what I did leave, pardon me behind in the pursuit for success and security and all that, and I'm not sure I'm ready to just throw all that away and like, you know, become a bohemian artist, which is not the route you went, but

you started to find little ways. And so what would you share with people, Well, Eric, I think it has a lot to do with the name of your podcast. You know, what's the one you feed? What do you ultimately want to make and how do you feed that part of your spirit? And again, all of these decisions about which wolf to feed happened for me much later

in life. I don't want to say that I was feeding the bad wolf by pursuing a corporate career, but I was definitely living trying to protect myself from the bad wolf. Because I was so afraid that the bad wolf would get me. I set my life up to have a lot of walls to keep that wolf out and to be as safe and secure as possible. And that meant self sufficiency, that meant body autonomy, that meant being able to be safe at all costs. And I

mean that literally and figuratively. And you get to a point where you realize that you have a foundation of safety. Any higher foundation isn't going to make you any safer. You know, it's not going to make you penetrable. And I began to realize as I was getting older and older and older, and I'm talking about, you know, really at the age of fifty five, saying well, if not now, when,

and at that point really how to make a decision. No, I'm not going to be the CEO of this branding consultancy that I've been the president for for twenty plus years, because really, how much more security and power do I need? And at that point really made a very difficult decision at the time. Doesn't feel difficult now, but at that time I was like, Okay, you know, I do have enough.

And while it might never ever feel like enough in my heart, in my body, in my head, which is where I tend to live, I was really able to say, okay, if not now went and that was when I had to take that leap over the wall a little bit and let some more light in. Yeah, well, similar to what we just talked about with the way you eventually made what appears to be a big step with talking to Tim, like, Okay, we can see that as the

big move. We can see the big move for you turning down becoming CEO of that organization and stepping out on your own as the big move that had been building for a long time. You had been doing a lot of work while you did that. While you were still working at that organization, you had been building your creative career, your podcast, you know, the work that you did with your brand institute, and so there was a

lot of pre work that was done. And so when you made that jump, it was yeah, sure, of course it's scary, and it was a jump that had a pretty good chance of working out, right, because you had done a lot of work. And that mirrors my story. Right when I saw you in New York, right, I was still working a corporate job and it was on your show, and you know, a couple of years from there, I finally was able to start doing this full time.

And of course there was a moment of stepping away from the steady paycheck, you know, the good, big, steady paycheck. But it was also a move that I've been building

towards in a sane way for quite some time. And I see that sort of in you also, Yeah, I mean, and I think for your listeners this is a really important point, because people talk a lot about wanting to reinvent their lives, wanting to take a different path, and you and I both did something very similar, which I think is a really important thing for people to understand. We didn't just abandon one thing and do another. We created a Venn diagram of our lives in a lot

of ways. We can look back on it and see, you know what, I was doing all of that, and then I started to do something else. But I was still doing that other thing until I could take that middle of the men diagram and then expanded outward and do it on its own. And I think for anybody that's looking to pit it, anybody that's looking to take a different path, it isn't just to go from one to the other process. I don't know anybody that's done that.

It's really a matter of setting yourself up for security first, while you're doing this other thing. And then do it at the same time, and it might mean doing both at the same time and really maybe for a little bit of time, burning the candle at both ends. But then you set yourself up to pivot into a place where then you can run with it. And I think

that's super important for people to know. Yeah, And I think the other advantage of that approach is you can actually focus on the thing you want to do and do it in a I don't like this word, but it's the one that comes to mind a more pure way,

because you don't have to make a living. Like if I had abandoned immediately I want to start a podcast, right, I'm gonna quit my job, right, I would have had to make all kinds of decisions about this show early on in order to have any chance of paying the bills. And I'm glad I didn't have to do that in the beginning. I was able to sort of pursue my vision a little bit more absolutely. And anybody that's looking to start anything new like that, especially with a podcast,

I say, do ten episodes before you launch it. See how that feels. See what it feels to make ten episodes. How much work it is If you really love doing it. Sometimes people love the idea of doing something more than they actually like the doing. You know, It's like when you say your eyes are bigger than your stomach when you're at a buffet. Really understand how much you want to do something before you just huh go into doing it. Yeah.

I've had a bunch of coaching clients that I've worked with where what we're working on is like, let's do that thing you really think you want to do. I want to be a writer, Okay, let's get you right in.

Oftentimes what people find is, no, I don't. I've held onto this idea that I want to be a writer because I thought that when I was twenty and now I'm forty five, and now I'm doing it, and I'm like, I don't even like doing that, And that can feel defeating, But actually I think it's a victory to set aside something that you've been thinking you should do because it's taking all this mental energy and space and you're like, okay, that's not it. Set it aside, Okay, freeze up the

space for what's next. Absolutely and knowing that, and I think there's something really important to experiment with the things you think you want to do, and so do those ten episodes, write the books, see if you really want to. I mean, whether it's a writing career or a podcasting career, requires a lot of solitary work. It's not just turning on a microphone and talking to someone. It's hours and hours and hours and hours of prep and research and

booking and details and producing and editing. I mean, there's so many things that go into it, and that takes time to understand whether or not you are going to like it, especially if you've never done it before. You know, there's no way of really knowing, and so experimenting with that I think is so important. I totally agree. So one of the things that you often ask your students as you say, what is keeping you from trying this

or doing this? And I'm curious if for you, is there anything if you look at your life right now that fear is holding you back from Oh, Eric, with a tough question, you can always pass no, no, no, no, I don't really like doing that. That's a cop out, you know. Roxanne asked me this question yesterday, like what do you want to do that you haven't done yet?

And there's so many things I feel like there's so many things, and I definitely want to work on an illustrated memoir and I'm really ramping up emotionally for that. Like I do feel like all the sort of ways that I think in in my body are sort of gearing up. All the gears are spinning of getting ready and preparing myself to do that in a lot of ways. So I definitely definitely to do that. I want to write a play of sorts, and I'm not exactly sure

what kind of play. I'm thinking maybe a one woman play, not that I want to perform in it. Don't like that at all, But I definitely want to do some type of performance piece for somebody else to perform that I write and maybe illustrate, you know, the sets. So there's there's so many things that I still want to do. There's no lack of ideas that I have. So I want to do a lot more traveling once it becomes I was. I was doing a lot more adventuresome traveling

before COVID. I had gone on a National geographic expedition. Also in my mid fifties, I decided that before I died, I really wanted to see as much of the world as possible, and so I went on a global expedition with National Geographic in and it was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. And I want to do more things like that. I also went on another mini expedition with Roxanne to Egypt, and then another one more recently to Antarctica. But I want to do more

things like that. I'm gonna quote you here. You said, I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

is the definition of hope. I love that. And that's a phrase also that has been very much adopted by the recovery community that's set off and you know, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, like using drugs or alcohol again and expecting it to be different, is insanity. I love that there's another way of framing that as hope, because it strikes me that it could be both. It could be either or sometimes

it could be hopes, sometimes it could be insanity. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts on how we might tell the difference between those two. Oh, that's good. I think that if you are working towards something and practicing, that's really where I think the difference is. I think if you are engaging in destructive behavior and expecting the result of that destructive behavior to be the same, actually I think it is never the same. It just gets worse.

It gets worse. Whereas if you're practicing something in order to enhance who you are, enhance your health, enhance your life, those small steps, those incremental small steps, are really the definition of hope because you are continually getting better and that ultimately, I believe results in mastering. And I think there's a tremendous difference between doing something destructively and hoping for difference and doing something practicing and ultimately achieving better

results over a long period of time. It's like playing the piano. If you play the piano every day and you practice, you're inevitably going to get better. If you are an athlete and you're practicing every day and you're running the same route or you're exercising the same muscles, over time, you are going to get better. And I feel the same way about life. Yeah, I think that's a great way to think about it, and I think some of it too is you know, what do we

mean by expecting results? What is the result that we expect and how much of the result we'reafter can we make at least, you know, I think inter enzic versus extrinsic, you know, because I can't control exterior results, right, but I can more control intrinsic things. So like your example of the piano, for me, it's guitar, right. I practice guitar every day. I made a commitment, like I'm actually going to get better at this, you know, instead of

just sort of fooling around. Now, if I'm expecting that that's going to take me to Carnegie Hall, I'm very likely to be disappointed. As not saying that it's not possible, but it's very unlikely, right, It's not what I'm aiming for. You know what, Eric, though, if you wanted to and did this for the next twenty years, you might That's true, you might be sixty five at Carnegie Hall. But if that was your non negotiable for the rest of your life and that became the focus of everything you did,

you very well could. Knowing your drive, I wouldn't discount it but I do think it takes a tremendous amount of commitment and it really does need to be a non negotiable where it becomes the one thing you want to do more than anything that's right. And I think that speaks to what we don't necessarily always tell ourselves the truth about, which is Okay, I keep saying I want X, I really need to think about what does that mean, like what would it take to get X?

And then look at that and go, am I willing to do that? And if I am, then step up to the plate. But if I'm not. For me, it's always been refreshing to look at that and go, Nope, I'm not willing to work that hard for that thing. So I can stop feeling bad about not having that thing. I can stop feeling like, oh, I'm not good enough because they don't have that thing. It's more a priority

thing I got to prioritize. I can't play Carnegie Hall and play in the NBA, right, If you want to be a master of one thing, you kind of kind of have to double down. And people like you and me to some degree, I think my interests are a little more broad. You know, I'm not necessarily interested in being the best guitar player. I love playing guitar, I want to get better at it, but it's not where I want to devote my life. There's other things I want to do, and so I think that clarity can

be really helpful. Yeah. Absolutely, I think that for people that are solely focused on one thing for most of

their early life achieve mastery at it much earlier. For people, I think, like us, that have a variety of interests, we still have to put in the same amount of time, just are dividing our time between so many more things, and therefore it takes longer to achieve mastery at any one of them, and often it might take well into our sort of seasoned years to achieve mastery at any of them because of that division of time and energy.

My foundation in thinking about almost anything is always you know, from a branding perspective, given my background, when you're positioning a brand, it's really the art of sacrifice. You can only really own one or two or three attributes and only have one mission state, Otherwise it's going to be very confusing for anybody that is engaged with the brand and with people. You know, if you have multiple interests

over multiple disciplines. It's going to take a lot longer to be known for any one of those things because you aren't willing to sacrifice. And sometimes it's willful lack of sacrifice, and other times it's just because you have this many things that you want to do and you're just doing them. I read somewhere you saying that you don't really believe in the idea of the personal brand. Say more about that, Well, I think that a person can own a brand. I think a person can direct

a brand, you can manage a brand. But I think that when we start to aspire to be a brand, we run into difficulties. Brands don't exist unless humans make them, and so over the years, I've come to the realization that brands are really manufactured, meaning we manufacture are meaning around a trope, around a construct that wouldn't exist if we didn't make them otherwise. Brands don't grow on trees unless we determine that they become brands, like an orange

and tropicana or a banana and chiquita. But they don't grow out of the ground unless we determine that that thing is going to be then manufactured as a brand. Brands are created by people. We tend to like when they're consistent. We tend to like when they are predictable. We tend to like when they're easily understandable. Humans are the opposite. Humans are messy and complicated. Brands don't breathe, they don't bleed, they don't have a consciousness, they don't

direct themselves. Humans do all of those things. Why would anybody aspire to be a brand when brands don't direct themselves, don't have a consciousness, and don't have a soul. So I feel like anybody that aspires to be a brand is limiting the possibilities of their lives. Develop your character, develop your reputation, but always aspire to keep your humanity. That's beautiful. So your latest book is a it's gorgeous, which I'm not surprised by. Right, You're who you are.

Design is a is a big part of you. But it is a book where you pulled out a bunch of interviews that you love and excerpt some of them and put it all together. And the title of the book is why design Matters? And this feels like a cheap and easy question, but I'm going to use it anyway. Why does design matter? Well, design is intention and decision making about everything. How do you want to live, how do you want to organize the way that you engage

with the world. That's design. And so I feel that while my original podcast was all about designers talking about design, over the eighteen years now it's evolved to really be about how people create the arcs of their lives, how they consciously create, what they make, how they live, the decisions that allow them to be who they are. And so that arc of life that they create and make for themselves is something that I'm really endlessly fascinated by.

And it's all a process of design. It's a process of decision making, it's a process of determining how and why they want to live the way they do. And that's what I'm interested in understanding, and that's all about design. So let's talk about rejection for a minute. You write very much about rejection. You talk about how early part of your life there was a lot of rejection. Tell me a little bit about what you would say to people as they're dealing with rejection. Well, I think rejection

is only a failure if you accept the defeat. Rejection is one person or one organization or one entity saying thanks but no thanks. That is a mean that everybody else in the world is going to say that too.

And when I was experiencing rejections all through my twenties and into my thirties, I misrepresented that rejection to myself and thought that if this one thing is rejecting me, this one person, this one entity, this one institution, this one organization, whatever it was, that was a determination of my value and my worth, and so I would retreat.

I would apply to one school or one job, or one thing, and when that rejection occurred, would then abandon my hopes of ever being able to do anything in that realm. And I think that a lot of people do that, and they take that rejection as a stamp of unworthiness or not being good enough. And I think it's just one entities decision. It's not the decision of the world. But it's very hard to see that and feel that and experience that is just one dean in

what could be thousands. When you're experiencing it, you know, I always have felt mortally wounded in those rejections, only to find that they were not mortal wounds. They were just profound wounds, but they didn't stop me in the grand scheme of things. But I can say that now, you know, thirty years later, after multiple more tries, and

I think most people stopped trying. From what I've read, they stopped making attempts at things after two or three rejections, and for those of us that do persevere, that just increases the odds of our eventual success. I don't quite know what the cognitive behavioral therapy term or the cognitive bias for this is. I think it's something like generalization, right, which is where I take one specific instance of something

and I apply it out to everything. I mean, I remember early in my life in my my dating career, if if if one woman wasn't interested me, I just assumed that meant they're all not going to be exactly exactly exactly, which is profoundly not true, but it seems so true in the moment. The other thing that you say that I love is what I would say is, don't accept the first rejection ever, give yourself options. The timeliness of those options or the timeliness of those retries,

do it your own pace. And I keep going back to one of the early questions about The conversation you had with tim about where you were finally able to do that was you had your own timing for when you were finally ready to come forth with some of that, and you gave yourself the ability to, as you say, control my own timing on these things and how frequently I redo these things. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that a lot of people wait to do things until they feel

ready to do them. And that's something that I would urge people to try to break away from because it's very rare that we ever feel ready, that we ever feel confident enough to do something. I think that confidence comes after you do it multi couple times, and because it's really unlikely that anytime we try something brand new

we're going to be good at it. I mean, who picks up a guitar, you know, maybe start from Joney Mitchell and Bob Dylan and and could immediately start playing those of us us mere mortals take time to be able to learn how to do something, and then we developed confidence over the years of practice. You're not gonna want to have a concert for your friends after your first guitar lesson, but you might after your one thousand and So the confidence comes from this successful repetition of

getting better at doing something over time. Do you ever get your guitar back out? Your reference in somewhere? I don't where it was that you had put your guitar kind of under the bed or in the closet. I'm curious if it's ever come back out. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually in the little room right next to me. Yeah, there's a little room right there, and that's uh what

I call my craft closet. And so I have all the things that I love to make with things in there, and my guitar is in there, and I have an accordion, and I have all my felt and paint and yeah, all their accordion all right? Not an accordion, I'm sorry, uku lately okay, not an accordion uulately another instrument that starts with a vowel ule okay okay, and it's a little bit closer to a guitar and the way you

approach it exactly exactly. Just had this visual of trying to play the accordion and it's just cracking me out. Maybe that's the next thing, you know, maybe you should add it to the list. Along the same lines with that, you also say I expect things to be hard, and I expect things to take a long time, and I expect things to be messy. And I love that because I don't know where so many of us got the

idea that things should be easy. But you know, if you expect something to be easy and it's not, that's a very easy way to give up. Absolutely, And I've I've just come to discover that very little in my life has ever just been easy from the beginning. The only thing that I can really point to is my relationship with Roxanne, which always there was always an undercurrent of my feeling like this was it, this was meant

to be. Everything else has been just arduous. Well even that though, right you talk about how you emailed her and tried to get her on the podcast and she said no, and you know then you got a serious forgot that series of one syllable responses from her, And so even that, I mean, maybe once you guys finally got in a room together, it was clear and it was easy. But but getting to that point you had some work to do, you had some perseverance. True, yep,

thank you for pointing that out. And how a cow convenient that I've forgotten that. It's so lovely to see you happy in that way. It's so great, Thank you, thank you. I do feel very lucky, very very lucky. But for everybody that might be listening, I didn't meet Roxanne until I was fifty six years old. So there you have it. Yep. I am extraordinarily fortunate with Ginny, and I don't think I met her till I was pretty six. Maybe so a little bit younger than you,

but certainly not. It was the one area of my life that I thought, this is the area I'm not going to figure out me too. I'll figure out career, i'll figure out creativity, I'll figure I'll get all the rest of this stuff, but that area I'm broken eric same same. I felt like it was my achilles heel. I would often say that to people. I'm like, no relationships in my Achilles heel. I'm never going to get

it right, never amazing. Yea somewhere you wrote if all else fails, like, try to obey this message I got in a fortune cookie, which I've sent taped to my laptop avoid compulsively making things worse. Yeah, this is something I actually I didn't think of that specifically but I was thinking about the sort of tenants of that when you were talking about generalization. And I have often had the tendency to what I call catastrophies. So if one

thing is wrong, everything is doomed. And that is what I think that fortune Cookie was warning me of, you know, away compulsively making things worse, because when we think something bad has happened, we then will extend that to our whole lives. I'm doomed. I'm never gonna be happy, I'm never going to get it right, I'm never gonna whatever. And I always have to tell myself in those moments, stop globalizing, stop catastrophizing. And I do that with my friends.

I do that with Roxanne. You know, we're constantly trying to help each other. You know, Roxanne says, Okay, pull this back now, or pull this back, or pull this back se because we recognize that tendency in each other to globalize catastrophize that somehow we're so damaged that any evidence of wrongdoing or bad things mean that we're never going to be able to escape it. And I think

that comes from trauma. I do think that comes from those neural pathways being wired in a certain way, and it takes real effort to push your out of that mindset, but it's well worth trying. I sometimes jokingly say so much of the work that I do with people is about just how to not make things worse, which is about the least exciting marketing phrase you could ever come up with. But when you have the capacity to make things worse that many of us have, that's a pretty

profound thing to stop doing. It is just like, Okay, I can live life as it is without making it worse. It's a very important step I hadn't experienced a couple of years ago. My brother had picked me up from the train station, is visiting the family, and he got a work call, and you know, he's like, I'm sorry, I have to take this. And he took the call and something wasn't going well with one of his clients, and after he finished the call, he went into that catastrophizing.

It's like, oh my god, I do exactly the same thing. You know, maybe this is how we were taught to respond. It was such a profound moment, Eric I can't even really fully articulate what witnessing that observation did, because suddenly I saw how genetically attached we were, and his doing that gave me such a perspective on how I do it too, and wanted to forgive myself for doing it and also share whatever I learned in that process with

him so that he could do the same thing. How personally he took that situation and how compelled he was to see it as a marker of something much bigger, which it wasn't was profound. I don't know your brother, but I have an appreciation for him because you talked somewhere about coming out to him, and you say that he threw his arms up in the air, turned at his wife and was like, I told you so. And there's just something so sweet and lovely about that moment.

To me, it's beautiful. It was a beautiful moment. I have several brothers, so I could be talking about any okay, but but this one, this one actually happens to be the same brother. But yeah, that was a beautiful moment. I was so worried, you know, looking back at our histories, our joint histories, you know, I was worried that he would reject me because I've experienced so much rejection from my family in so many different ways that sharing that

with him was was terrifying. And then you know, he proved me wrong and that was that was a beautiful moment for me. I don't even know if he realizes how beautiful it was for me, but it was. I would love to hear about you pouring through the racks of Leewards in search of a crocodile patch to stick on the front of your shirt to share that younger Debbie so Lee Awards. I don't even know if it still exists, but Leewards was a craft store on Long Island about him, not even a mile away from where

I lived. And when I was in middle school, which at the time was then referred to as junior high school, so that was seventh, eighth, and ninth grade, I didn't have a lot of what would be considered to be cool clothes. My mother was a seamstress and taught me how to sew from a very young age, and so I made a lot of my clothes in an effort

to be fashionable. They weren't particularly fashionable, but nevertheless, the big fashion statement at the time were three things a La cost Polo shirt, a pair of levines, and some type of either Nike, Puma, or Adidas sneakers. The sneakers didn't intrigue me all that much. I've never been a sneakerhead. However, I did up the costume, and so I really wanted

a pair of Levi's and a Lacost shirt. My mother could not understand what the difference was between what were then called dungarees, so sort of a standard pair of dungarees that you could buy at Model's or wherever you were shopping out on Long Island, the walt Women mall, and the pair with the little red tag on the back pocket. She didn't understand, and so she offered to so many a pair of dungarees and so a little red tag on the back, and she didn't understand how

that would actually be worse having a fake pair. So no, that wasn't gonna work for me. And then she suggested, well, all the Lacost shirt is is a standard polo shirt with a little embroidered emblem above the breast boat. And so she suggested that I go to Leewards and look in the embroidery section to see if I could find something similar. And I actually thought you could, so I rode my bike up to lee Wards looking for a embroidered animal of sorts, hoping for a crocodile or an alligator.

Didn't find anything of the sort, so I came home glumly without anything. And then finally, finally, finally, she did buy me a pair of I think had to be in the triple mark down section, a pair of Levies. They were lime green corduroy bill bottoms, but I wore them all the time and felt that I was potentially considered cool by having these. You shared the closest thing you could find. The crocodile was Tony the Tiger, and I just so deeply wished you had a polo shirt

with Tony the Tiger on the chest. I think that would be great. It's so funny, though, we must be, you know, close in age, because when I was in elementary school, it was Levi's you know, polo shirt like that, same shoes, and my mom insisted on buying me Sears

tough skins, which were essentially the same gene. But I mean still to this day, it's like a star, you know, it's not there was the opposite of Levi's, the opposite, you know, by the time I got into my later years of high school and started babysitting and earning some money. I do have a look for it. I have a photograph of me wearing a pair of Levi's and a Lacost shirt, and I just remember feeling like, Okay, this is it. This is like the best moment of my

entire life right now. Somewhere in my teenage years, I crossed over. Well, I know what happened. I listened to the sex pistols and suddenly I was like, I'm going to be a punk rocker and abandoned all that, which was easier because I could just go to the thrift store and buy something awful and cut holes in it and put safety pins in it, and I was suddenly I thought I was cool. So that's how I got around that one. For me, Oh yeah, for me, it was being a deadhead when I got to college and

then just hearing like loose Indian shirts. Yeah. Now, there was a time, I don't think it was that long ago, where you were asked to review a couple of books in a competition against each other for a website. One of them was The Water Dancer by Tana sheet Coats, which I think I pronounced that close to correctly, and you wrote a last well, it may have been for Oprah because Oprah thought it was one of the best books.

You said, this is not one of the best books I've read in my entire life, not by a long shot. The reason I'm bringing that up is has nothing to do with the book or the author. What I'm curious about is was it hard for you to write a review for a book by somebody who's a cultural figure of that prominence, who's endorsed by Oprah, who everybody loves that book, and you to come out and say I really didn't like this. Was that hard for you or were you just sort of naturally like I don't like it.

I'll just say I don't like it. It was very hard for me. Tona has Coats is a cultural icon, writing a national treasure. But I also knew that I was being asked to review two books and pick one in a competition to move forward, and felt like I owed it to the readers to be honest. So that's sort of why I cloaked the review with all of

that fear of what I was doing. I didn't just review it and say I don't like it because of this, this, this, and this reason, as if that's enough, I had to sugarcoat the review with the trepidation that I felt in doing that. So it's funny thinking back on it and looking back on it now, that was the really weak thing to do, because I didn't have enough confidence in my own opinion to be able to just state what

I felt emphatically. I had to say, well, you know, this is a book that overloved and Tangas Coats is a cultural treasure and I but I didn't like it. So I think that that was, maybe, in looking back on it, kind of disingenuous, interesting because I thought it was very straightforward and I was like, wow, she's really just sort of saying what she thinks here, very honestly

and in a very straightforward way. And I was just struck by it because I was thinking, like that, that's a gutsy thing to do kind of in some way, given like you said that he's considered by people that you and I would both like and respect to be a national treasure, and for you to say this isn't my thing, do you trust yourself with artistic judgment like that? Like, I just don't like this or do you always feel like, well, do I just have bad taste? Do I not understand?

Do I need to learn something kind of curious? Oh yeah, I don't have a lot of confidence in certain areas. I have a lot of confidence in what I think about design. I have a lot of confidence in what I think about art. I have a decent amount of confidence in what I think about core. But I don't have a lot of confidence when it comes to more

intellectual hidie pursuits. But you know, in the case of the competition that you were just referring to, it's interesting because I was very tentative and nervous about my opinion of Tanahussey Coates his book versus the book that I was reviewing that and and decided was better, which was Maria Gains this book called Optic Nerve. And as the

competition continued, because I had judged the first round. So if if anybody's thinking about this competition, it's sort of like a fantasy football kind of competition where you are putting one book against another, and then it seeds and it goes to the next round. It goes to the next round. So I had that choice in the very first round Maria Gains his book versus Tanahassi Coats his book picked Maria Gains his book. Her book went all the way to the final round. So it went through

it would it almost did. And and then this is why I think it's so interesting, because I'm very opinionated about what happened in this final round. It was reviewed against Sally Rooney's Normal People, which is a book I hated, and I'm saying that with a tremendous amount of confidence.

And had I been given Maria Gains's book and Sally Rooney's book in that first round, I would have eliminated Sally Rooney's book at the outside and Maria Gains and I wouldn't have written I don't have the capacity to judge da da da da da. Whereas with Tanahasi Coachs his book, I absolutely felt like I had to be very clear about how we made the decisions. Whereas if I had been reviewing Optic Nerve against Normal People, I would have been liked, no question. Interesting, very interesting. There's

another book that lots of people love. I have not read it, but I mean it has loved buy so many people. I liked the first half and then it lost me. I find that ability to sort of have

our own opinion about things interesting. The other thing that I find just looking at myself with things like that is that, particularly with music, I will often listen to something in a time or two and be like, I don't think I like it, But if I listen to it a few more times, I start to like it, and I'm like, well, is that that I'm starting to

discover it and understand it. Particularly with an artist that I love something new of theirs, I'm almost always like, well, I don't like it as much as the last thing, and then I'll listen to it enough and I'll be like, oh,

it's amazing. Yeah, you know what. I have a tendency that I hate, and I try every time i'm in this mindset to remind myself that this is what I hate about myself, and that is if I don't know about something and then begin to learn about it, whether it be an author, artist, whatever, my tendency is initially to not want to like it. If I don't know it, I don't want to like it. And I know that enough about myself now to say, wait a minute, but I don't know why that is the case. I don't

know if it's because of my not knowing it. It's sort of ignite something in my reptilian brain which makes me feel less secure or inferior or I don't know what it is, but it's a tendency that I have that I really loathe. It's probably the thing I loathe about myself the most, aside from my thighs. It's interesting because I think so much of our reaction to art of any sort has to do with where we are at the time. So, like, you know, there was a long time I did not like Bob Dylan. I just

couldn't understand it. It made no sense to me. And then something clicked and I was like, oh, this guy is an absolute genius. And there's been so many things like that. I'll listen to something, i'd be like, I don't really like it, but then there'll be another time where it will be the right time, or something will have happened in my life the lyrics will be about

that thing in it. And so it causes me to always take all my judgments about art fairly lightly, because I'm like, I don't know if this is good or not good. I just know it doesn't resonate with me today, and that's extraordinarily subjective. Absolutely, I think that certain things are an acquired taste. That's sort of the way I feel about egg plant. I would agree with you about that. Yeah, a taste I've tried, and I haven't tried that hard to acquire those. I don't like mushrooms, and that seems

to be among many people a crime. It does. Yeah, I only like Mataki mushrooms or hand of the Woods mushrooms. I would urge you to try those. They're the most un mushroomed like mushroom there is, and it's just absolutely extraordinary. Anything called hand of the Woods too, has got something going for it. I think that's true. I think that's true. On a Creative Mornings article a few years ago, you said, there's some things you'd like to do less of, and

I'm just curious how you're doing. This is your check up on things? Remember what I said, So tell me what they were, and I will review my process. The first is worry trending in the right direction. Yeah, trending in the right direction, but still not completely absolved. And you know what, I was looking at some journals that I had written when I was in the middle school back in the day when I was a pining for

my lacost T shirt. Um, I was a constant warrior, and I was so much a worrier that I actually worried about how much I worried. And I do think that it is definitely better than it was when I was that age, you know. But I also noticed a tendency. One of my nephews was was really worried about a grade that he'd gone and he was waiting for the grades to be posted, and he's like, Oh, I might

be up all night worrying about this. And I was like, I wonder if that's also something that was a learned behavior from an early age that we then genetically pass on because I was so concerned about him worrying. Yeah,

I still worry, just not quite as much. Well, worry does seem to sort of fall under the personality trait of neuroticism, which the research on personality trait seems to be that you know somewhere around of that is inherited, right, but then you have to assume since it's inherited, your parents have it. So not only did you inherit it genetically, you probably inherited behaviorally, environmentally, right, it's it's a double dose of it, right, and so absolutely okay, feel insecure

and or doubt myself is number two? Constantly, constantly still going on. I would say, it's it's it's it's plateaued and that plateau continues, and do you suffer from it less? Or let me ask that question slightly differently, not does it occur less? Are you able to take it a little less seriously as it happens at any point? Yes, I would absolutely say, yes, absolutely, Okay, so you can't turn it off, but you've learned to relate to it differently. Yes,

that's an improvement. That is an improvement I will I will give you that one sit on the tarmac and airplanes. This is probably a yes. Given where we've been pandemic wise, I would imagine, yeah, definitely improved, without a doubt. I would assume maybe we were traveling a lot for work at that point. Absolutely, I was a business traveler. I was traveling every week, and yes, that just came with the territory being sitting on tarmax and smelling other people's smells. Yeah, yeah,

I don't miss the business travel. It it sounds romantic, and in the beginning maybe it is, but by that wears off pretty quickly. And the last one is to feel afraid of what I want. You know, I don't want to backtrack what I said at the time, but I think in thinking about that wasn't so much about being afraid of what I want. I think it was about being afraid to admit what I want. And I do think that that has improved. All right, Well across

the board, then things are looking up definitely. All right, Debbie, Well, we are at the end of our time. I love talking with you any time I get the opportunity. I love your podcast, I love your writing. Your new book is amazing. So thank you so much for coming on. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post show conversation about therapy. I'd like to talk about your experiences with therapy, how often you go to therapy, and maybe some things that people can

do to get the most out of it. And so we'll do that in the post show conversation. Listeners. If you'd like access to that and add free episodes and all kinds of other great goodies, go to one you feed dot net, slash joint. So Debbie, thank you so much. It's always such a pleasure. Eric, your Prince, thank you so much. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One

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