How to design a creative life (w/ Debbie Millman)
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. Today's guest, Debbie Millman, is one of the most acclaimed and talented podcasters around. You know her from her fantastic Design Matters podcast, but she's also an incredible artist, an author, an illustrator, an educator, and so much more. We're going to be talking with Debbie about how to stay curious, how to grow as an artist, and how to design the arc of a creative life.

That is a question that Debbie has been investigating for more than 20 years on her show, Design Matters. And it's one that has lessons for people in all phases of their life. I cannot tell you how much I have taken away from listening to Debbie's show and from learning from her.

So to start us off, here is a clip from a Design Matters episode. This was a live event that they did at the Green Space in NYC. And at this event, Debbie is being interviewed by her wife, the writer Roxane Gay, about what inspired Debbie to start Design Matters in the first place.

You've been doing Design Matters for 15 years, which in podcast years is about 100. Why did you decide to do a podcast and how have you sustained the interest in doing one for so many years? Well, I didn't really decide to do one. I was offered an opportunity by Voice America Business Network, which was a fledgling internet radio network at the time.

And I was offered the opportunity to pay them for airtime on their network. And at the time, I was doing very well professionally in a commercial realm. And I had surpassed any possible hope or dream that I'd had professionally in my branding career. But because it was all commercial, I actually felt that I was dying and that I had lost...

all of my creative heart. And I wasn't writing anymore. I wasn't drawing anymore. I wasn't doing anything creative. And I understood why. I mean, my professional success was the first time I'd ever been successful at anything in my life. So of course, at the time, I was like, okay, I'm not going to do anything but this because it feels so good to be successful at something finally in my 40s.

But then that wore off, you know, I'm that metabolized and I needed to do something creative. And this felt like a sneaky way to be creative, but still be able to justify it from a business perspective because I could interview clients or I can interview people in the design business. And so that's really how it started. It was really a Hail Mary to my creativity. And because I have such generous friends, I,

they were willing to come on the show. I mean, they had no reason to come on the show. I mean, Steve Heller is sitting in the front row. Steve is my mentor, my fairy godfather. He's been on the show 13 times. LAUGHTER

Every time he says, okay, he'll still be doing it, because now I want to do it with him every year so we can create this oral history of design together. I'm shocked that he says yes. But why it grew, I think, is just because of the guests that I have and the generosity in their hearts. For me, I'll never, ever get tired of talking to people about who they are and how they've become who they are and how they make things.

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Hi, I'm Debbie Millman. I'm a designer. I'm an author of eight books. My new book is

Love Letter to a Garden will be out shortly. I am the chair of the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the editorial director of print.com, and the host of the long-running podcast Design Matters.

So, Debbie, I once took a workshop from you that was about how to have a great interview. And one of the secrets that you taught all of us was to make sure that your first question revealed deep research about the person, that it was surprising and not something that they get asked often, and that it made them laugh. So my first question to you is, does having taken your class and remembering your lessons count as a good first question?

It's a great first question. It's actually awesome because I don't even know if I remember teaching the class. It was so helpful. Genuinely, it was so fantastic. And, you know, you're so wonderful at interviewing, which I think is actually quite unusual for someone who has...

a really illustrious and big accomplished career of their own that they're also really interested in other people's careers and accomplishments. Oh, well, thank you for saying that. I would like to think that I've improved over the years. I have been doing this now for 20 years and I

feel that it is an acquired skill. The more you do it, the more you begin to understand how people respond to different kinds of questions, how humor is so helpful in creating rapport, and how showing deep respect with deep research is so appreciated and then in many ways rewarded because people become so aware

engaged in sharing such meaningful conversation. And it's not opportunistic at all. It's really genuine. I am genuinely curious about people and I'm endlessly fascinated by how they become who they are. I think that something that I've learned from you in listening to your podcast and in reading your books and hearing you talk is how

Everything is design in a way. Everything has a design to it. And I think it's fascinating to think about how there's the visual design, there's branding, there's all of that, but there's also the design of an interaction. A lot of what you've just described is putting thought into how can I design an interview or a conversation so that it goes better? And these are often places where we don't think about design at all. Do you think you landed on that naturally or is that an outgrowth of your professional work? I've discovered over the decades now that it's,

that it's not really random in as much as it's been serendipitous how I've gotten to certain things. But I do think that the common denominator in everything that I do is a search for identity. In the branding work that I do, it's about the identity of a product or an organization or an institution or a movement.

In my writing, it's trying to understand human behavior and motivation. And same with my illustration work. And in the podcast, it's a search for a person's identity through their origin story and their beliefs and the work that they make and create. That idea of finding the through line in your own work, I think that's something that people

people really struggle with, especially young people starting out in their careers. But what advice do you give people when they're trying to figure out what their thing is, what their brand or their self is? Okay, well, that's going in a very different direction because I don't believe...

that people should be working on their personal brand. I actually find that to be somewhat reprehensible and really the opposite of what I'm talking about. I'm talking about discovering soul. And brands, by their very nature, are created by humans. Brands are not self-directed. We, as humans, have to direct them.

and they don't have a soul, and they don't bleed and breathe and have a heartbeat. Whatever we project onto them is our own construct. When people ask me about personal branding, because I do so much work in branding, that's inevitably a question. And I've thought about it long and hard. And brands are manufactured. It's meaning manufactured.

Humans are living, breathing entities. We're a species. And we're messy. And we change and evolve, or at least one would hope that we do. We grow. And brands are not self-directed. They're only directed by humans. Some humans are better than others in that direction and in their intention. But

What I suggest that humans work on is building their character and building their reputation and building their body of work. And doing those three things will help create or communicate, really, your persona and your intentions and who you are. But once we start to position ourselves as a brand, first of all, it is about positioning. It is about creating a manufactured meaning.

then we begin to lose all the wonderful things that make us human. Now, we can own brands. We can direct brands. We can manage brands. We can design brands. But the minute we begin to see ourselves as brands, we become a commodity. And I find that really unfortunate and a little bit sad.

I love that distinction. I've actually, I've never heard anyone else make it. And I've also never thought about it that way. But it really rings so true. Yeah. I mean, if I thought of myself as a brand, I would, and as a brand consultant, I would say to myself, well, doing so many different things actually dilutes your brand because it's going to take a lot longer to master those different things and to create a reputation and a body of work. But that's

Yeah.

Given my expertise, I've sort of re-engineered the meaning to be more about how the world's most creative people design the arc of their lives. But if I was starting out now, knowing what I'm doing and the kinds of interviews that I undertake, I would never have used that name. But I also know as a branding person that there's a lot of equity in it and

So I'm just hoping my audience goes along for the ride. I want to go deeper on the three things that you talked about. How can someone build their character in your mind? By working really hard to be as transparent about who they are as possible, by telling the truth, by showing up, by living up to your word. I think that those are very personal inner directives that shouldn't be done directly

either opportunistically or for any other reason than just being, no pun intended here, a better human. And then what about reputation?

I think that's also such an important piece of this too. See, a lot of these things are about consistency, about doing things in the way that you feel is true to what you believe in consistently. And if you do that over time, then the reputation building and the character building happens organically. It's not something that's positioned or done for a specific reaction or for a specific reward.

It's just who you are and standing up for those beliefs, whether or not they're popular. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. But if you start to shift in the wind with popularity contests, then that's the opposite of building a character or a reputation. Now, all of this takes time. I would tell young people to have some patience.

to have some patience on building their reputation and their character. Because if they work too hard at coming out of the gate all fully formed, they're not going to have the opportunity to evolve and to be able to move into different pathways. All the time I tell my students, don't get so caught up in what your portfolio looks like now. Because there is absolutely no question in my mind that if you are a good designer, if

In five or ten years, you're going to look back on that portfolio with horror and nostalgia and somewhat amusement.

because you want to be growing. You want to be better than you were 10 years ago. And to be able to see the growth is actually a great thing. It's a great accomplishment. That also ties into the third piece that you mentioned, which is having a body of work. It's really easy to not build a body of work or to not put work out there or create it because you're so worried about it being perfect or it being good enough that in 10 years it will stand up. Whereas in

I think everyone who I really respect as a creative person or an artist in any way, they get better by making things. They're not worried about each thing being perfect. It's the iterative process. That's not like the one golden statue that they've created. That's another thing my students often say is, well, I'll do this when I have more confidence. And I'm like, well, when do you think that's going to happen if you never actually try? Because the only way to get confidence is to do it successfully first.

And if you don't start, you're never going to have the opportunity to get to that success. So what are you waiting for? Speaking of waiting, we are actually going to have to wait just a moment to get even more brilliance from Debbie because we're going to take a quick ad break and then we will be right back. Don't go anywhere.

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Remember to head to zbiotics.com slash human and use the code human at checkout for 15% off. And we are back. Debbie, when you're thinking about your own work, how do you think about art that is making money, that's paying your bills, that kind of functional art, art that's healing, that's solving something or wrestling with something inside of yourself, and then art that is inspiring or building a community? How do you think about the lines between those different kinds of goals in your work?

Well, in many ways they're created for different purposes. Art that is in exchange for money. And I'm not talking about art that's hanging in a gallery that's offered for sale. I'm talking about commissioned art, design, illustration. That generally is done for a client with a creative brief or very specific directions on what is required.

And I think that's great, and I love illustration. I think that especially satire right now is some of the most important creative work happening in our culture. Work for self-healing tends to be more self-directed, and as long as somebody is able to create something on their own terms, it's worthy and important and necessary as well.

And then lastly, I think fine art is different in that your audience could be anyone. Anyone. And it's about creating some type of visual language that's never existed before. I mean, the great artists. Examining the world through a new lens. And that's what I would imagine...

is the highest aspiration for any artist to examine the world through a new lens and share information about who we are or why we do the things that we do, really trying to understand in its purest form human motivation and expression and communication. And I think poetry does that too, actually, the best poetry. As for what I make, I just have a hard time

Seeing what I do as, you know, offering a new perspective on the world or a new way of thinking about something. In my interviews, I'm trying to give my guests an opportunity to do that, I guess, but I'm not the one doing it.

So it's different. I completely disagree. I so see you as doing that, as bringing a completely new perspective and a way to see the world. I think of that in everything that you do. I mean, I just think there is such a clear...

Debbie Millman vision for what art and what conversation looks like. And to me, that is such a work of art and it's so inspiring. So I really, I have to disagree and say there is a way that you look at the world that's different than other people. Well, thank you. Thank you. That means everything to me coming from you. And I really, really thank you for that. Both of your TED Talks, they start with this big history in science, right? Like we go back

hundreds of thousands of years to when something is created. There is this thread in a lot of your work that is thinking about the specific and the personal in placement in relative scale, right? Like in the scale of the universe or in scale of nature. So I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about why understanding our relative place in the world matters so much to you. Thank you for noticing that about my work. In another lifetime,

I would have loved to have been an astrophysicist, a theoretical astrophysicist to be specific.

But I have, and I'm very willing to admit this and recognize this at a very early age, absolutely no mind for math. Same. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how the universe was created, where did the hydrogen and the helium come from, do black holes come out the other side and create other universes? I mean, I can't even begin to tell you. I have...

subscriptions to so many science podcasts and science sites and I just spend a lot of time wondering. And so in the same way that I sort of go back to the very beginning of a person's life in my podcast, I am just obsessed with origin stories and understanding how we all got here as well as understanding how an individual got here.

That's a really interesting thread that you've been pulling on for many, many years. And to connect it to your latest work, this book that's coming out, I'm wondering what are some of the ways in which a garden has...

made you think differently about origins or endings? Because when I work with plants, sometimes it's like, it seems like it's dead and then it comes back, or it seems like it hasn't started and it actually has. So how have you thought about origins in your own garden? Well, I have always had a relationship with nature ever since I can remember. I was always happier when I was around trees and meadows and

lots of different greenery. My family had a house in the Catskills for a very long time. I went to summer camps all through my childhood in the Catskills as well. And as I became an adult and started living in more urban places,

Always tried to have a little tiny piece of outdoors, whether it be a deck or a terrace or an actual backyard. And spent from my 20s to my 50s trying to have some sort of garden without really having any.

Any success, truly any success. I was just ill-equipped to manage soil and sun and pH and all sorts of things that, you know, you have to think about. I just wanted a garden. So I planted things and hoped they'd grow. And, you know, when you plant roses in a shady environment, they're not going to thrive. Then during COVID, I, at that point, I had gotten engaged to my now wife,

And she had a house in Los Angeles and I had a place in New York City. And we decided during COVID that we would stay at her house because we'd have a car and an ability to be able to travel more and get out of just sort of the house. And I started to turn her backyard into a garden. And suddenly, because I was there every day,

and it's a beautiful environment to have a garden, it's nice and warm and very consistent in the weather, that I was able to actually have success for the first time and was able to grow vegetables and flowers and shrubs and even a lemon tree. And so I began to think quite a lot about

the way in which plants grow and then go into hibernation and then come back, you know, perennials, annuals. And I became really fascinated by how a seed can turn into everything, into a life system. And I started posting some of my

and gardening on Instagram. And I think G. Pearlman saw what I was doing and

my dear friend Chi, and because she does a lot of work with Ted and is a chief curator, she asked me if I'd be interested in doing some interstitials the year that Ted went completely online. And I decided that one of those would be about gardening. And between that and seeing a piece that I did for a farm magazine on my expedition to Antarctica in search of a total eclipse of the sun,

Timber Press, which is an arm of Hachette, reached out and asked me if I'd be interested in writing this book about gardening. And I said, well, if I wrote a book about gardening, gardeners would roll their eyes and kind of laugh like Snoopy. Uh-huh.

Because I am by no means an accomplished gardener. I am at the very beginning of my journey with a teeny weeny bit of success. And by success, I mean like a salad. Like I grew everything that went into a salad. And they actually were interested in that angle. And so that's what I did. But it's very much about learning how to do something for the first time, overcoming many, many obstacles, whether self-imposed or real obstacles.

And then having a modicum of success that I could celebrate. Uh-huh. Yeah.

So many of the topics that have come up in this conversation already are also reflected in nature and in plants and in gardening, right? The idea of patience, the idea that when you're working like with a tree, you have to prune away excess. This idea of avoiding extremes, right? It has to be not too sunny, but not too shady. This idea that there's this impossibility of perfection. These are all things that you find in gardening as well as in all the other places we've been talking about it. Right.

about it. Absolutely. And then the rebirth. I walked outside of my apartment today, and my neighbor has a hydrangea, large hydrangea in front of their house, and the buds are out. The buds are out. And I find that to be miraculous, that this plant grows these gorgeous flowers, and they last for a really long time, and then they fall off and go to sleep,

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Six-time Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee, Jean Smart, returns to Broadway for 12 weeks only in a world premiere play about a writer whose words are her only way out. Call me Izzy. Get tickets at callmeizzyplay.com. And we are back. We're talking with Debbie Millman about how to design the arc of your life and how to find your own way to make art.

I know that I have been really inspired by and I know that many people when I talk to them about you and your work are really inspired by the ways in which you have taken things that are awful and painful and painful.

bad, and found beauty and joy and love and connection despite those things. I do a lot of work and I'm on the board of the Joyful Heart Foundation, which is Mariska Hargitay's foundation. She started after starring in Law & SVU over 20 years ago. Now the show is 26 years old, but she started Joyful Heart about a little over 20 years ago.

And just for people who aren't already familiar, the Joyful Heart Foundation, the mission is to heal, educate and empower survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse and to shed light into the darkness that surrounds these issues. And you are on the board. Being on the board helped me make my life make sense. I had been severely abused as a young girl by my stepfather and my

spent a lot of years in shame and pain and secrecy. And then when I had the opportunity through a friend to work on developing the No More Movement, I had the opportunity then to be introduced to Mariska. And then Mariska asked me if I'd be interested in being on the board. And then if I'd ultimately become chair of the board, which I did for five years. I'll be on the board for the rest of my life, but I was chair for five years.

Given my background in branding and positioning, it felt very much like these two disparate experiences and knowledge of could come together in a way to try to help eradicate sexual violence in our culture, eradicate the rape kit backlog, which is what we were spending a lot of time and effort doing at that time, and really try to

provide a way for people to feel safer about disclosing their own abuse, mistreatment, and so forth. The amount of people that have reached out that I've been able to point in different directions for their own either disclosure or help or support has been remarkable and once again helps me feel like something really terrible that happened. I've been able to

Use that as a way to help others and then work on my own healing in the process. Something that I always feel like is a really important distinction to make, too, is, you know, there's this really.

Very common, but also kind of awful idea of like, oh, there's a silver lining in every cloud. I completely disagree. Like some stuff is just bad. Just shitty. Yeah. But there is this this different separate. And I see why sometimes people get confused idea, which is that terrible things can happen and there can still be beauty. It's not like it required the terrible thing, but that doesn't mean that like there can't be beauty and joy right there. It's not now you're forever. Your life is forever one way.

You know, I thought a lot about what my life would have been like if these terrible things hadn't happened, because there were several sort of cumulative things in addition to the sexual abuse. And it's very hard for me to know what that would have been like.

Maybe I wouldn't have had as much drive as I do. Maybe I would feel okay as is. Maybe I'd have an ordinary life. Maybe... It's hard to say. It's really hard to say. And Seth Godin and I have talked about this quite a bit. You know, people like to ask the question, you know, what would you tell your 30-year-old self? And Seth once said to me, nothing. Because if I told them anything that changed where I am right now, then I...

I wouldn't want to risk it. And I kind of feel the same way now. I mean, yes, I'd love to have, I'd love to be exactly who I am now with a little bit less self-loathing and shame, which I'm still working on every day. But other than that, you know, I'm married to the greatest person in the world. I do some of the most interesting things that I could imagine. And I'm still not done. I kind of just have to be grateful for that.

There's a frequent myth in creativity that you have to be a tortured artist, that like suffering... The more you suffer, the more your creativity will blossom. And it seems like from what you're saying and from this conversation that your most creative...

Your most flourishing periods have come when you've actually done more healing, that you've gotten rid of some of that suffering and been able to be more creative. Is that true or is there a connection between your well-being and your living a creative life? I do think there is. I do think that one of the best pieces I've ever made from an art perspective came at a moment when I felt very, very down. Hmm.

It's hard because I'm like, should I get that energy back? I don't want that energy, but I really love that piece. It had a lot of energy in it. On the other hand, I think about what Elizabeth Gilbert says in, I believe, her TED Talk about...

feeling like your best creativity comes from when you're fully relaxed into that creativity, where you're doing the work every day and you sort of let the muse come through you and you're open to it. And there is, I think, a bit of both. I do know that when I'm drawing...

I have to go through a period of torture with what I'm doing before I get to ease. And I know when my work is tortured and it's dreadful, it's gruesome.

And then if I get to a point of ease, there's a certain, I guess for lack of a better term, flow state, almost effortlessness that comes into doing the work. And that's my holy grail now. It's not a matter of being happy or unhappy because that flow state could actually come back.

You know, I guess it's like endorphins when you're doing, when you're working out. You have to get to a certain point for that to happen. You don't start doing something and then the endorphins come. It takes quite a while. For me, it's only happened a few times in my life, so I have to, I can only rely on those experiences to know they even actually exist. But they come after a lot of struggle. And

And I would say the same thing happens for me with art. And I can tell. I'm like, that's tortured and that's free. That's easy. What was the piece that you said that was like one of the best things you've ever made? Part of it is on the cover of my book, Self-Portrait as Your Traitor. And so it was about my feeling at the time that I was being...

utterly duplicitous and how angry and sad and down and depressed I was inwardly and then trying to be cool girl to use a Gillian Flynn term from Gone Girl, you know, being the cool girl

and pretending that nothing mattered. And I was in my studio and just created this piece called Self-Portrait as Your Traitor, Self-Portrait as a Liar, Debbie Milliman once again being duplicitous. That was the text all through it. And I just love that piece. I mean, it's one of the most honest pieces I've ever done, but I also did it like 30 years ago. I did it in the 90s. Well, it's also interesting to talk about that piece and...

the process because I've kind of used the word art, like lowercase a in, in a broader way. And you've really thought about art as like capital a art. Like it's not just like a broad category for you. It is a thing that, that is worth being respected and taken quite seriously. I agree a hundred percent. And Roxanne and I, my wife, Roxanne Gay has, we have, we have like

quabbles over this. Is that a word? Quabbles? Squabbles. I like quabbles. Quabbles feels right. That's a love-in. She thinks that I'm an artist. I think I'm an illustrator and a designer. So yes, I do feel like there is a big difference. And I mean, I said I'm an artist, but I said it in a lowercase way. I did not say it as in an uppercase way. And that's a very important distinction in the way I consider my own work, my own body of work.

What would it mean to be a capital A artist? What would it take for you to become a capital A artist in your own mind? To be much better at what I do, to have something to say through the work, to start a quest to create something original. I tend to love conceptual work, so I'd need to find a conceptual idea that I would want to explore and investigate. And I'd have to learn a lot more, I think.

Which doesn't mean it's not possible. It's just quite a big commitment and an agreement with myself on what I would need to do to do it. I don't know that I could become an artist, capital A artist, and still do all the other things that I do. I'm lucky that I've fallen into that.

the work that I have as a podcaster, as an educator, as a brand consultant, mostly because I've just done them for so damn long. I'm lucky I actually got better at all of them. I think capital A art is different. Is that a standard that that standard that you've just described some really high bar? Do you hold other creative people in your life to that bar? Do you think? Well, I know a number of other people at that bar.

Like they are considered some of the best in the world. I mean, you can tell when somebody is just at the very, very top of their talent. And I mean, I just interviewed John Batiste. I mean, he is a genius. He is a genius. He is a genius. And there's no one else like him. No one. That is genius.

Capital A-R-T-I-S-T artists. And when you are beholding that, you know it. You know it. They are the best. That's what I'm really talking about. When you have a completely original imaginative mind. That to me is also fascinating.

the trait that I see in all of the really, all of the people that I admire the most is that ideally you would have this without the, and I'm not saying you specifically, you generally, ideally you would have that desire to raise the bar without the critiquing yourself overly harshly. But I think the idea that like,

I'm not just going to coast. I'm always striving for something more. Those are the people that I respect the most who that, you know, they're in their 80s and 90s and they're still making new work and they're still looking for something different in themselves and in their community. I think the quest is really the I'm so much more inspired by people who are trying than by having accomplished.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And to bring it all the way back to my gardening effort, that's part of why I also love it so much. You know, you can see, I mean, this is going to be very corny, but you see growth. You see there's evidence of growth. It's amazing. Yeah.

Well, Debbie Millman, thank you so much for being on the show. It truly has been an absolute honor talking to you and I couldn't admire you more. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Chris. Now we have to do part two on my podcast. Oh, okay. The bar is really high.

That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Debbie Millman. Her latest book is called Love Letter to a Garden, and she's the host of the fantastic Design Matters podcast. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com.

How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team of audio gardeners helping us to all grow and flourish. On the TED side, we've got the thoughtful pruning of Daniela Balarezo, Banban Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohannini, Laini Lott, Tansika Sungbanivong, Antonia Le, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who know that a good podcast can only grow in accurate soil.

On the PRX side, they are a team of audio design mavens with a killer fashion sense. Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again to you for listening. We would not have a show if it wasn't for you. Please help us spread the word. Please share this episode with a person who you want to keep in the creative arc of your life, whatever that means to you. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and thanks again for listening.

Six-time Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee Jean Smart returns to Broadway for 12 weeks only in a world premiere play about a writer whose words are her greatest gift, her deepest secret, and her only way out. Call me Izzy. Don't miss this moving tour de force performance now on Broadway. Get tickets at callmeizzyplay.com.

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