You don't control nature, not in the slightest. Nature is much bigger and stronger and more capable, and that is a very liberating realization. You can do your best, you can try your best, you can try to provide the best possible conditions, and you have to just leave it at the door.
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, 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.
It's not every day that someone you think you know, someone urbane, accomplished, cerebral shows up with mud on their boots and tears in their eyes from.
Doing a pull up.
Debbie Milman, longtime host of Design Matters and acclaimed designer, returns to the show with a quiet.
Surprise, a book about gardening.
But the Garden isn't about tips or tools. It's about what happens when we let ourselves be bad at something, especially later in life. In this conversation, Debbie opens up about learning to grow and why failure might be the richest soil we have. Whether you've ever felt stuck, afraid to try, or unsure, if it's too late to start, this episode is for you. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed.
Hi Debbie, Welcome to the show.
Hi Eric, Thank you for having me.
I am excited to have you back on. We are going to be discussing your latest book, which is surprising to me, about gardening, and we'll talk about that in a second, but before we do, we'll start in the way that we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are 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's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, And the grandchild stops think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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 well.
As a designer, I think that we're constantly in a mode of me making very deliberate decisions about our work, solving problems, making choices about which direction to take, and I think that extends to every aspect of one's life. I think that we don't just design things. We design our choices and we design our paths. So the parable really dovetails quite seamlessly into I think, what it means to be a designer.
I've had you on the show before, and you very kindly had me on your show a number of years ago, and that day is carved into my memory as one of my favorite memories. Tell me why I was in New York City and you interviewed me. No, you're a big part of it. You're a big part of why I came to New York City. So I came to New York City and you interviewed me, and I believe
I might have also appeared on Jonathan Field's show. But it was a whole day where I did things related to this podcast in its work, and at the time I was still working a full time job in the software business. But it awakened this thing in me that was like, maybe someday this could be what I do, and now it is. But anyway, I just think back to that day. I remember coming to your studio and everything about it was wonderful. So I want to thank you for that day because I have a terrible memory,
but that day really stands out to me. That day also introduced me to you in person, at which time I thought, and this is similar to what you say in the book The Garden about what your wife Roxanne thought about you, which was I was like, she is such a New Yorker, sophisticated and design oriented and all of these like New York type things. So I when I saw you had a book about a garden, had
a little bit of a double take. I was like, I hang on a second, Like I've got you as this very urbane, sophisticated person, not that gardeners aren't sophisticated, but it just sort of surprised me. So when I was reading your book and you mentioned that your wife Roxanne, had the same reaction when you talked about gardening, it sort of tied all these memories together for me. So talk to me about why a gardening book now, Well.
It wasn't something that I was seeking. But first, let me just say thank you, thank you for having me on the show again, thank you for caring about my work, and thank you for sharing that memory because it's really wonderful and I'm so glad that we have this connection me too. As far as why a gardening book, now, it's primarily because I was asked to write.
One that'll do it.
I was not in any way seeking about gardening, how to garden, anything about gardening. Honestly, I've always, as an adult, try to cultivate some sort of greenery around me in the various apartments that I've lived in over the four decades i've been in Manhattan. But writing a book on gardening was not in my wheelhouse. Was it on my
bucket list. I had these various somewhat dubious attempts and results in the previous spaces that I tried to cultivate as some outdoor space slash gardening and as I mentioned, various apartments since the nineties, but it wasn't really until I came to Los Angeles during COVID that no pun
intended that my efforts blossomed. Roxanne had gotten this house that I'm sitting in right now two weeks before we started dating, and I had been living in Manhattan for all of my adult life, and so when we first met and started dating, we were long distance commuting to each other. And she has a beautiful house. The backyard when she first moved in was a very typical sort of suburban backyard, beautiful, beautiful tree, a lot of grass, boxwoods, boxwoods.
And because I had always tried to cultivate some outdoor space in the various places that I've been living, when I first got here, I asked her if she would mind if I judged it up a little bit, you know, with some potted plants and various herbs and things like that. There was a beautiful garden center a couple of blocks away, so it was super easy, very convenient, and so that's what I started doing. And it was very rudimentary because
it was during COVID. Let me backtrack. Then, when COVID hit the world, we decided that I would come to California because I had a lot more time, we had sky, we had a car. It made more sense for us to be somewhere where we could get out a little bit. And so that's what I did at the time. You know, we had no idea that the world was going to shut down for as long as it did. I remember the then president at the time saying, Oh, we'll be
all back together for Easter. And that was in March, and so Roxay was like, oh, pack for two weeks and I'm sure everything will come back to normal after that. Well we all know what happened after that. And so I need a lot more I need a lot more underwear. And so we were here. I had a lot more time. I was working on a book at the time, but also had a lot of other time to do things, and decided to expand my efforts in the garden as a way of trying to feel closer to the world.
And I was having some luck because of the weather, and so I started with the herbs, and then I went to lettuces, and then I got more ambitious and started to plant tomatoes and cucumbers and things that I really loved, and I was documenting that on Instagram, and I was making these little ten panel stories about what I was doing, but it was also very much about what was happening through the eyes of somebody that was also as the rest of the world was living through COVID,
and how gardening made me feel more hopeful and a bit more optimistic, and seeing how we could grow and evolve.
And the TED folks, who I have good relationship with through my podcast and through speaking there and so forth, reached out when the TED conference went completely online that year and asked if I could create some interstitials between the online talks to break up the talking, and I made some stories about gardening masks mad if I would make some visual essays that I would narry and that would be shown throughout the conference, and so I made
one about gardening. Fast forward to twenty twenty one, and for my sixtieth birthday, I had decided to take an expedition to Antarctica for two reasons, one to see Antarctica and then also to try and witness the total eclipse of the Sun that was happening over Antarctica at the end of twenty twenty one, and it was a magnificent expedition and it was everything I hoped it would be, except for the eclipse, which I didn't see because of
cloud cover. And so I wrote all about that and also put it up on my Instagram and somebody from a wonderful art director and editor saw it on Instagram and she worked at a farm magazine and reached out and asked if I'd be interested in doing a piece
for the magazine, which I did. Fast forward another year as things happen, and I get an email unsolicited from an editor at Timber Press, which is part of one of the big five Hashet, and she asked me if I'd be interested in doing a book on gardening, having seen all of these visual stories that I had done, and I thought she was pranking me, like I'm like
a New Yorker, I write, not a gardener. If you're interested in my talking about my journey to try to be a gardener and the myriad failures along the way, and what I've learned and how I've grown and evolved and so forth, then I'm all in. But if you're expecting me to be the next Martha Stewart. You have the wrong girl. And so she wrote back and said that sounds great. A quest to become better at gardening through the lens of visual storytelling would be welcome, and so that's what I did.
Yeah, And to say that it's a book about gardening is to sort of describe it and also sort of not right, because there's no real gardening advice in there unless you take, like, move to California, because it's easier than New York to grow things as advice which you don't even directly give. And like you, it's a beautifully designed book that, with very few words and not a
whole lot of pictures, really conveys some beautiful things. And I think it's a lot like your design work in your podcast, which on the surface, it's sort of about the surface, right, and yet there's a deep reservoir right underneath it of lots of depth and wisdom. And you kind of start off early on by saying that seeds are tiny and densely packed with their entire.
Existence, what does it mean to exist?
And you also sort of talk about how the universe itself sort of came out of this seed idea, and I think that's a off a place to sort of start with, this idea of something coming from not quite nothing but almost nothing. Yeah, talk to me about how that as an overall idea has been important to you throughout your life.
Well. As I was beginning to become more adept at gardening and was not just planting container plants and things that I bought already born, so to speak, from nursery, I was also planting seeds. And to think that any plant, any vegetable, any tree, starts from this sort of tiny compact enclosure that then opens to create an entire universe of sorts is endlessly fascinating to me. And I'm somewhat obsessed, endlessly fascinated at another right words here about how we
all got here? And I think about it all the time, Eric, I think about it all the time, And in some ways it's sort of depressing because I'm never going to know. We're so far away as a species from understanding the mysteries of how we got here and why we're here and how it all started. And you know, how did the helium and the hydrogen get here in the first place?
You know, where's the carbon come? From I had so many questions that I have, and I'm on this quest of trying to understand my purpose here and what my contribution can be and how I could potentially, if at all, make a difference, and so it all ties together the universe and if we did get here from this big bang, this tiny, tiny, densely packed point then expanded to create
what we are in such vastness that it's inconceivable. It's incomprehensible for us to even be able to envision, yep, what we're part of, and to think that, you know, trees have this grand underlying root system that communicates, and it's all so beautiful and so abstract and so mysterious, and it all feels so mystical and magical in so many ways that for me it became the ultimate way of trying to express the questions that I have and the tiny little answers that I attempt to tell myself.
One of the things that I really thought about a lot as I was read the book is that you describe your early attempts at just buying plants and putting them outside and them dying and failing, And there's two narratives. I think that we sometimes tend to separate about what doing anything successfully looks like. And one narrative is you just have to keep trying, you know, failure is just a chance to move on. If you just keep trying,
you'll succeed. And there's truth in that, absolutely, right. I mean, you've talked about it a lot. There's a lot of truth in it. And then at the same time, there's another element that sometimes the story is well, yeah, except it's all about circumstance. And what I think is interesting about the gardening example is that you actually need to bring those two together. You can't grow anything anywhere. You could keep trying and it's not going to grow, right,
So it's not all about just keep trying effort. And yet at the same time, it is about iteration, it's about learning, and it's about saying, Okay, if I want this thing to grow, whatever it is, whether it's this plant, whether it's my career, whether it's my relationship, that there are circumstances conditions that are more conducive to things growing. And I think that's one of the big challenges that
a lot of people wrestle with. It's one of the I think the core tension is like, do I just keep going in this direction or have I learned something that tells me, yes, keep going, but go in that direction. And I feel like your book somehow to me, just brought that whole question into really clear focus. And I don't know what my question is. Now that's my reflection. I'll let you go where you like with it.
Well, I write about how as I've gotten older, it's a lot more difficult for me, or it had been more difficult for me to attend things that I'm not good at. And it's a bit narcissistic in a way, in a lot of ways to think that if you try anything you're going to be good at it. Why should you be if you haven't been taught, if you haven't practiced, if you haven't extended yourself into a realm
that is further than what you're currently aware of. And so asking for help has never been particularly easy for me. Asking for favors has not been particularly easy, And so the idea of trying to learn something new out of a school environment where that's sort of the accepted norm. And it's been a long time since I was in
a desk as opposed to behind a podium teaching. It took a while for me to realize that in order to no pun intended he or grow, that I had to ask for some guidance and that watching HGTV wasn't going to be enough, and so I really needed more deeper learning about the conditions that I was in. And this is a good metaphor for life, I think, and how to how to grow from there, how to get
better at what I was attempting to do. And this experience actually helped me find the courage to begin to do other things that I've said for as long as I can remember, that I really wanted to do, but for some reason had this obstacle path in front of me that felt too daunting to attempt. And it's opened up that obstacle a little bit to make more attempts at doing things that I never really felt like I had the ability to do, and that's been liberating in a lot of ways.
Can you share what any of these new attempts have been, Well, you don't have to if you don't want to, but no, I'm.
Fine with it. I'm on day four hundred and eighty one of learning French on due lingo.
Nice.
You know it comes a time where you're like, I can't keep saying, oh, I wish I knew how to speak another language. I mean, you either do it and you don't do it. I just was tired of hearing myself wishing for this magical ability and thinking that somehow I'd learn it in my sleep. And so I've done this now for a year and a half and I'm not very good, and I'm not a great learner, but I know a lot of words. That's been also revelatory.
And then the other is getting into shape. And so I've been working with a trainer for two years and so you know, got a little bit of message, all right. And so those two things are things that I never really envisioned that I'd be able to begin to do in the way that I'm doing it now with consistency.
I think that ability to do something and not be good at it and still do it is so sort of fundamental, and for some reason for me, I think that it's an ability that has gotten better in me as I've gotten older, where I think when I was young, I thought that how good I was at various individual things with some reflection on how good I was overall, And now I've realized, like, whether I can roller skate or not says nothing at all about who I am
as a person or my value. So if I go out and make a complete fool myself skating, which I assure you is what happens. I mean the last time I went roller skating, they now have designed these things. They look like walkers on wheels, and I'm out there tottering around with one of them, which was I mean, my younger self would never have got like, no way. My older self is like, well, this is kind of mildly humiliating, but I'm just going to keep doing it.
But I think that maybe it's certain things like I decided early on I was going to be a musician, and I'm not musically talented.
Really, no, I'm not.
I'm surprised.
Yeah, I don't know why I am. I am deeply not natural at it, but I love it deeply. But I've just stuck with.
It for I don't know, thirty five years now, and I'm I'm okay, you know, Like my friend Chris is a natural, Like I'll spend three months figuring out and learning how to play something that he will then turn around and play in like an hour of time, which is mildly like eating, yeah, infuriating, and I'm like, you know what, that just doesn't matter, Yeah, because I'm doing
this thing because I love doing it. And I think that with your gardening is such a great example of you just embracing learning how to do something because you simply wanted to do it, same way with French or with getting in shape.
Gating in shape has been the hardest one for me, even harder than French, I think because I'm much more comfortable doing anything cerebral, and I'm also more comfortable learning anything on my own in that I can go at my own pace. I don't have to worry about judgment for lots and lots of reasons that we've talked about
on your podcast before. I for all of my life have been very cut off from the physicality of living and always approach things from a much more cerebral point of view, where I can think through things and not necessarily engage physically through things as much. And so I was forced to start working with my trainer when I had surgery and needed to do PT and that's how I started my relationship with my trainer. He's also a physical therapist. He's a PhD in physical therapy, and I
was very compliant with what I needed to do. The one physical activity that I did engage in on the daily was walking. I'm a native New Yorker and was always walking through the city and always walking wherever I could go because I enjoy it so much, and I didn't want to give that up because that was at the time my only physical activity besides pacing. And so I started to feel better about myself physically and then decided that I should continue working with him in weight
training and so forth. And so that's what I've done, and I've even started running. People I tell they're like, did aliens take over your body? And I'm like, yes, they did a long time ago. Now I'm shooing them away. Right right when I first started with him, because of all the trauma, if I couldn't do something eric, I would start crying involuntarily. Like it wasn't like, oh boohoo, poor me. This was involuntary projectile tears because I was facing so much of my own I don't even know
what the word is, bad wolf. And so the first time I did a pull up, actually cried, but it was not because of my trauma. It was because of my joy that I could actually do something like that, and again it was involuntar and that's been one of the most surprising things in my life. Actually, I have to say, to be able to be conscious in that way, or even allow my subconscious to bubble up in the way that it has, has done a lot to help me.
It's hard to separate natural affinity from avoidance responses sometimes, right, So I think I do have a natural affinity towards the brain. I think that's part of who I am, and I think I was very disembodied for a lot of my life. And so, yeah, physicality is something that I've sort of learned, and I also paradoxically have figured out that it is, for me the most important mental
emotional health tool I have. If you forced me to only have one the rest of my life, which I'm glad I don't because I need like twenty seven of them, But if you force me to have one, I would probably say it's exercise, really, because there's something about what it does for me, the way it connects me up inside, the way it releases anxiety, the way that it increases energy. It's just it is for me, maybe my most important one. Again, I'm glad I don't have to choose, but it's been
a really important one for me. And the thing about exercise that I always find fascinating, and listeners have heard me talk about this a lot, but I do find it really interesting is how if something we come to see as so valuable for me every time I've ever done it, when I'm done, I'm like, I'm glad I did that, like literally every time. Why does it remain hard? You'd think basic reward learning would have me running to
the treadmill every day, but I don't. And I think it's just because it's it's such a significant output of energy that as organisms, we are designed to evaluate that amount of output very closely.
You just don't.
You know, you just don't go running around for no good reason as an organism trying to survive. But I still remain kind of fascinated by that dynamic of how.
I've faced it.
Today, I was like, I know, I really the best thing for me to do would be to get on the peloton and ride.
That's really hard.
So what I've learned to do is I just went like, well, okay, you're preparing for Debbie instead of sitting in front of a screen reading, put in your headphones and just at least go walk outside in the sun while you prepare, you know.
So those little sort of hacks.
Yeah help. That's why I have to keep working with the trainer Eric, because I'm too weak and lazy to do it on my own, you know. David Foster Wallace talks about what a real leader is in Considered Lobster, his collection of essays, and he talks about how a real leader is somebody who helps people who are weak and lazy to do things that they would not consider doing on their own. I'm paraphrasing, yep. But weak and lazy we're in that. I'm not paraphrasing those words. And
that's what my trainer does for me. He helps me get over my weakness and my laziness to do better things that I can do on my own. And if I don't have an appointment with him, I don't do it. And I'm hoping that I can get to a point where I can. The one area where I think I might is actually with running now, and I don't know that I'll ever be a runner. Maybe I'll be able to do a five k one day. But I experienced that runners high one time once and that was like wow,
I never felt something like that before. But I totally hear you. It's not like I'm going rod time to run. I mean, I haven't run since the last time I had a training session, and I've been on a book tour, so you can only imagine what that's been like. And I do find it's super interesting this whole idea that you just brought up, because I don't have any issue starting to make a drawing. I have no issue engaging in anything I really love on my own. I don't
need a trainer to draw. I don't need a trainer to read. I don't need a train to ride, I need an editor, but I don't need anybody to motivate me. So I do find that I have to think about that a lot. That's a really really interesting observation that I need to mull. And if you do find this to that, please let me know.
Well, for me, the solution has been accepting that like that that's normal, right, that it's just okay that like making myself do something very physical is always going to take a certain degree of coercion. Right, I told you before the call. I just got done writing this book. I turned it into the publisher about a month ago, and a bunch of the book is about how we
actually change. And one of the things that I'd picked up three years of doing the show, but also really got driven home as I did a lot more research.
For this book is that if you gathered all.
The behavior change scientists together in the world and you put them in a room, right, I think the thing they would all agree on is that relying on our own internal engine, what we would commonly call willpower, is generally a bad idea for anything that is, for whatever reason for.
Us, difficult to do.
Why is that because our environments matter so much, and willpower is a very finicky thing because it's tied somewhat to mood. Right, Because if we think about motivation or willpower in the sense that most of us know it, it has to do with how much we feel like doing something. And if you've got a mood system like mine, it is just up and it's down and it's up. There are some people who are a whole lot probably like
you know, steadier up at like eighty percent. I feel good eighty percent of the time and for them might be a little bit different. But for people whose mood system is as variable as most people, you can't rely on just that. So it becomes all about what are the strategies that you, as an individual need to figure out that will get you across the start line for
whatever that thing is. So there may be people listening to this or like, I don't have a problem going running, get up and I just go running, But when I think about sitting down to do something creative, oh my god, it's like a total block comes up. Okay, and I would say they're not lazy. You're not lazy. It's difference in what we find easy to do. So for you, you need to set up a structure, and a trainer
is a very wise structure. That's why fitness classes exist because people are like, oh, if I sign up to go to the class, I'm more likely to go, and if I actually go, then I'm aren't likely.
To work hard.
It's just it's wisdom to know like, oh, I need support, I need help, I need these structures, whereas for somebody different, they might need to sign up for an art class to do it because they just won't do it because for them, the friction is high related to previous failure or doubts that they're good at it, and so for all of us, I think that change. To me, I always think of just as like a puzzle, like what are the puzzle pieces that I need to put together
that make this thing work? And for you, with exercise, you finally got the puzzle piece is lined up, and they'll probably get unlined again at some point and you'll need to go, oh, let me think, Okay, what pieces do I need to put in here?
I think it also has a lot to do with who's teaching you. Yes, And I think that part of what has made me feel capable or emotionally available to do this is my trainer. You know, he's so lovely, he's so patient. He really I was very clear with him when I started. I'm like, look, I have all these issues and so I hope that you can be respectful of them. And I have a lot of limitations
and blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah, and he was like, Okay, he's been super respectful always, but he's also unwilling to let my own limitations, my own self perceived limitations yep, impact my actual abilities.
Yep.
And I'm not talking about abilities to do any physical activity. I'm talking about my mental life.
Your mental Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major saboteurs of self control, things like autopilot behavior, self doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions.
But here's the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. My partner, Jinny, who you met when I came to New York. She's similar to you in physical things. When we met, you know, I guess it's been almost eleven years ago.
At this point.
Probably she just hated everything that had to do with exercise and movement. It was something she was like I know I need to do it and I hate it, you know, And she could find periods where she made herself do it, and over time she has learned, I think, just to appreciate it more. But I remember we took I was like, I really want to learn to play tennis, Like why don't we go take tennis lessons together? And the first two tennis lessons, similar to you, ended in
tears with her. There was just something about a ball flying at her that just brought up like being scared as a child and like I hate this, yeah, you know, and just the inability to know what to do, and just so I think some of that stuff is really real for us. And again I think that people face
this in different ways. I mean, I know people all the time were like, I really wish I could learn to play guitar, and I'm like, well, of course you can, you know, but you have to be really really uncomfortable for a while in doing it right, because you're going to be terrible at it for a little while. I mean, everybody's terrible at guitar to start, just because you can't make those shapes with your fingers. Your fingers just aren't
strong enough. But any learning to do anything, and so I think when we look at that and we're like, Okay, there's this thing that I want to do and I'm having a really hard time doing it, to me, is just about okay, what you know, what's the strategy that we can come up with? And you sort of snuck in the back door of it by having to have a trainer for your back that also then managed to shepherd you through another door, right, yeah, which is amazing.
I love how you're helping me better understand myself on this podcast. It's fantastic.
So, speaking of podcasts, when I was getting into and preparing for this interview, something happened that as I was doing it, I was like, that is amazing, and it is this you have been doing your podcast. You're at the point I am now I've been doing this podcast a decade. So when I started this podcast, you had already been doing it for a decade before that. And everybody's always to me like, well, you're one of the
early founders. I'm like, no, not exactly, but holy mackerel, twenty years does that fill.
You with pride?
How do you feel when you think about twenty years of having these conversations.
It makes me very humbled about the nature of time because that went by flash. Yeah, And I remember my first podcast. I was interviewing John Fulbrook, who was then the art director at Simon and Schuster, and I was super nervous. I had my notes in front of me, but I also had because he's a book designer, a book jacket designer, I had covers of his books all pasted over my office wall so that I could easily
refer to something. I chose John not only because he's a fantastic designer and a good friend, but because he's extremely gregarious, and I felt like if I choked, which was a really good possibility, he could carry on. Thankfully. I think I've grown in the twenty years, but it's surreal, Eric, It's surreal, and it's also surreal to see how both I and the show have evolved and what it means to again, coming back to this pun that I don't
really intend but to really grow as anything. I didn't grow up thinking well, I want to be a podcaster when I grow up. There was no such thing, and that this very unusual path that my life took based on a cold call from an internet radio network. Please edit that out, Like what if I hadn't picked up that call?
Isn't that fascinating? I interviewed a guy recently. His name is Brian I think you say it class, and he wrote a book called Fluke and it is a on many levels.
Do you know the book or I'm going to read it at great title?
Yeah, it's all about how life is like you just described, like, yeah, you don't answer that phone, your whole life is different, you know. He talks about how the city of Kyoto was originally on the slate to be bombed by the US, and it turned out that the war director of the US had gone to Kyoto about twenty years before on a vacation and loved it. So he said, no, let's not do that one. Like it's crazy, Like that is
life when you look at it. There's just all these things that I could have just decided not to do X, and my whole life would look different. And his point is ultimately that if you embrace that how we actually control and how little actually happens, like you know, for a reason, that it can be freeing and liberating. It's also deeply disconcerting on on some level too.
I think, yeah, I mean, it takes both the good and the bad things and puts them in a completely different you see them through a different lens, and I think that's also something to honor.
Yep.
It goes a little bit back to what we were talking about earlier with gardening, right, like there's both what you do which matters. What you do matters, and there's all the elements that you can't control about growing anything. You can be more strategic, like you cannot plant roses like you once tried to do in a fully shady patio.
That's plant a fern there. Right, there's strategy and ultimately, though you control what you can, but there's a certain element of it that is just out of your control. You can't make something grow.
That's for sure. You don't control nature, not in the slightest Nature is much bigger and stronger and more capable, and that is a very liberating realization. You can do your best, you can try your best, you can try to provide the best possible conditions, and you have to just leave it at the door.
Another point of intersection with you and I a little bit is that your wife Roxanne, and I both did a project with a company called rebuind dot Ai where you pair a person like Roxanne with a book. She did Age of Innocence. I did the dowd Aching and mine is about to come out. I think hers has probably been out for a little while. The Doo is all about that idea of you just have to work with the way nature is. If you try and go against it, you're going to lose.
Every time, I had a plant that had died and it had been really established, and then it over the years in a previous home that I lived in, and I talked a little bit about this in the book The Rhododendrons in my previous home, and I was devastated to watch them die and wanted to pull them out of the ground after they had died, and it was really hard. I felt like I was fighting with nature, you know. It didn't want to come out of the ground.
And if pulling a plant out of the ground is fierce, you know, so was everything else.
Yeah.
I don't know if you said this in a book itself or elsewhere, but I put it under the notes I have for the book, which is failure is fertilizer. It feeds the next attempt. The deeper insight the unexpected path. And I love that idea because it doesn't just say just again, this idea that we mostly talk about with failures, try try, try again. But I think that the wisdom there is yes, try again, but as you point like, maybe there needs to be a deeper insight before you
try again. Maybe there needs to be a different path you actually have to be learning. It's not just keep trying.
Right, And I think that it's really important to be conscious about your failures and not just keep trying, because if you keep trying to do something the same way without understanding what led to the failure and what you can do to improve the odds of success, I don't know why would be different if you just keep trying in the same way.
Yeah, I think it's one of those really difficult things about people who are trying to build anything. I'm thinking of it in a business sense, having been in the startup world for a lot of my life, but it's really hard to know. It's like, do I just need to keep going in this direction because it just takes time and people are slowly coming on or is this the wrong idea, the wrong direction? When do I pivot?
How have you thought about that in your life, Like, do you have any way of sort of thinking through that, whether it's a designer or in any way.
I think it depends on who you're doing things for, okay, and the bar that you need to be able to reach in order to do something. If you're doing something for someone else and you're getting paid to do it, there's much less tolerance for failure. And that could include your shareholders, it could include a board, it could include clients. If you're doing something for yourself, I think you have a bit more leeway. For example, when I started the podcast,
I was working a full time job. I was working as a corporate executive, and I was making a good salary, So I wasn't dependent on this other effort that was really started as a labor of love. I didn't need to monetize it, and I didn't need to do anything other than really fulfill my own creative dreams and hopes and aspirations. And to a large degree it's still the case for me. I'm lucky that I can monetize it in some ways, but I've never been dependent on it.
And when you take out the dependency equation, it gives you a lot more freedom to experiment or evolve in ways that don't impact others. If you're being hired to make something for something else or for the public or for profit, it does change the way in which I think you approach anything, And ever so slowly, you know, now that I'm in my six decade, I've tried to eliminate the need to fulfill any obligation to the outcome
for others' purposes. And It's taken a long time. And I'm very lucky, in privileged that I'm in a place right now where I can do that more frequently. But that's also a choice. You know. I'm not as comfortable anymore fulfilling financial obligations. I don't want to live a life anymore where I'm working to increase the market share of products that I don't feel proud of doing. And I did that for a very long time now that I wasn't proud of them. I mean, I am very
proud of the work that I've done. I just don't feel the need to redesign any more fast food restaurants or over the counter pharmaceuticals or soft drinks or salty snacks. And again, I'm very lucky that I was very successful doing that, but there comes a time where you have to decide how much more of this work do I
want to do in service of that work? And so I feel extremely privileged to be able to take the talents that I manifested and grew and developed over my corporate career and now applied them to movements and efforts that I feel are helping the world be a little bit safer or a little bit kinder. And that's the work that I'm trying to dedicate myself to doing. Now.
Yeah, it's a really tricky thing. I mean, we started this conversation with me sharing this magical day in New York City, come into your studio, and me being like, I wish I could do this full time, And now I get to do it full time. And that comes with a shadow side to it, which is that this thing that started just because I wanted to do it and loved doing it now provides a living for me and for a couple other people, And so it's different.
And I think for me, the thing that I have to sort of continually sort of do is like, yes, I have to hold that there.
It's real, It's true, it needs to.
Be And I also need to turn as much of my attention as I can to what about this matters to me most deeply, and that actually is then what ends up creating the best work. But it's always a mixed thing. I wanted to ask you about your career. You talk a lot about and you've advised a lot of young people about their careers. And it's easy to look at your career, maybe many people's careers, but I
can look at your career and I can see it. Okay, it started, you know, down over here to the left, and today it's up over here to the right, in that all the things you just described are true, like you are better able to do the work that you want to do, You've had some degree of financial success. So if I look at it, I go, okay, look started down here to the left, ends up here to the right, straight line up.
That's not it, right. So I was wondering if you would.
Share a little bit about some of the times that you might have felt like, Okay, my career was going well, and how all of a sudden it feels like uh, oh, you know, or any sort of bumps in the road or different things that sort of give us a little bit more of the nature of the up and down that happens in that chart if we zoom in on it.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know anything that is just a straight line up. I can't even imagine what that would be like. I've graduated college in nineteen eighty three and moved to Manhattan. I'm a native New Yorker, so I wasn't that big a jump, and the first thirteen years of my career there was some success there in some highlights, but for the most part, it was a lot of despair as I was trying to figure out
who I was and what I wanted to be. I graduated with a degree in English literature, so I wasn't really prepared for the big time, and at the time, I wasn't in a place where I either could or wanted to go on for a higher degree. I wanted to live in Manhattan and be a working girl, so to speak, and because I didn't have a lot of training or a lot of guidance or any money, it
was really really hard for me. And I was also grappling with a lot of unresolved trauma and was living on my own for the first time in my life, and I often say that I considered that first decade of my career just experiments and rejection and failure and bit of humiliation, and then quite serendipitously ended up in
the world of branding. You know, I had some skills in design coming out of college because I worked on the student newspaper and the editor of the section also had to put the paper together, and that meant designing it. And that's when I discovered my love of graphic design and began to develop the skills that were required to be a graphic designer. It was still pretty rudimentary. Although I had, I think, a good eye and some good ideas, I didn't at that time have the drafting skills that
were required in the eighties. I developed them, and that was a good thing. Again, it was very serendipitous, a fluke that I ended up in branding. And then, as you were talking about earlier, discovered I had a natural
ability for it. My brain just understood the psychological underpinnings of wanting to engage with products that made people feel either better about who they were, gave them more social confidence, made them feel like they were part of a bigger tribe, were enjoying a moment that they were engaging with that brand and what that did to our psychological makeup, and
though even that entry point was marked with difficulties. I came into an agency that was mostly comprised of young British guys, and I came in as a sort of loudmouth female American that was challenging. For the first couple of years that I was embraced mostly because I was doing well for the company. I was bringing in a lot of business, and so I was then finally embraced. But then, you know, when I was bringing in the business. Part of my original offer to join the company was
that I would begin to earn equity. I knew that the senior partner was interested one day in selling the company, and so I wanted to be part of that. And initially there was some resistance, as there would be for anybody asking for equity, and I had to say that if I didn't get equity, and I don't know where this courage came from, that I'd have to leave the company.
And I didn't want to leave the company because it was the first time in my life that I was really successful and happy doing what I was doing, and at this point I'm in my mid to late thirties. I didn't become a partner at Stirling until I was thirty eight, and was terrified that they'd call my bluff and say, okay, well sorry, you know, we don't want to give you shares. And then I did get on an equity path which became really important to my life.
But I remember that night going home and thinking, oh my god, what have I done. You know, I made this threat that I would leave this job that I love, that I'm finally good at something, you know, from a professional point of view, and then thankfully that worked out, but there were a couple of moments in there where I wasn't sure it would And working in new business the way I did is a constant street fight because you're competing with other agencies. You're at the whim of
what a client might or might not want. I was the chief rain maker for a long time in the division at Sterling that I was running. You can only imagine what that pressure was like, especially for somebody that is not only competitive but using their success to be their self worth. And that is really challenging because if you aren't successful, it's something. If you don't win a piece of business that can just decimate whatever little self esteem you've built. And so I had to get off
that hamster wheel. But that's a really long time and I still grapple with that, not necessarily in rain making, but just in any area where I have to prove myself.
Yeah, I think that that is something that many of us wrestle with it. I think we can better at, but I don't know if it ever completely goes away.
Yeah, I'll let you know. I'm still searching for that. That's my holy grail, Eric, that's my holy grail. Just to feel good as is.
Well, that is sort of the ultimate way to be because as we've said, you sort of can't necessarily make what is aligned with the way you want it to be. A certain ability to be like, okay, this is I'm going to be okay with what is is the thing many of us are striving for. I suspect that there's a creature, though, who may be good at this is Maximus Touretto Blueberry adept in this skill.
Well, Maximus Toretto Blueberry, the little multipoo we adopted during COVID, is really an example of what it means to live in the moment to have utterly no self consciousness about any of our bodily requirements and is proof that unconditional love exists. So Max is not my first dog. Max is Roxanne's first dog, and so it's wonderful to see all of those realizations birth themselves in her, and the realizations and the relationship she has with Max, which is
just heart bursting. I can't even explain it. But the first dog that did that for me was my dog Duff, and that was twenty five years ago. One of the great loves of my life taught me what it meant to feel loved unconditionally and to love unconditionally, and that is one of the great great gifts to the world that our pets can do for us. And so I love to have my furry my furry family around me. We have two cats and a dog.
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why I created the six Saboteurs of Self control. It's a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to
break through them. If you're ready to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at oneufeed dot net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today one you feed dot net slash ebook. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up with the happy image of Maximus and your wife and your old dog, and I think it ties right back to kind of where we started, which is nature.
Dogs are part of nature, and there's a special type of connection that comes from being in partnership with.
Yeah, and also witnessing what grows and what develops and what evolves with or without our participation.
Well, Debbie, thank you so much.
It's always such a pleasure to talk with you, and I appreciate you joining us.
Eric, thank you, Thank you so much for all of your kindness and generosity to me, and thank you for a really nice interview.
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